The minister of interior in his presser on the Manasa incident, mentioned in passing that several officers involved in monitoring and evaluating the activities of religious groups will be restored to National Security. Activists collectively gasped. But we need to pause here. The current minister of interior is in my opinion professionally incompetent, but this decision doesn't seem to stem from him. And it doesn't seem to be so bad after all.
State security is the internal intelligence service in Egypt, akin to the FBI. But because this is Egypt, state security of course had its fair share of violations. There are claims of torture, kidnappings, rapes, and all kinds of horrors. All the first hand accounts I've heard though, is of someone being asked to an office and asked questions by an officer. Evidence exists also that there was torture, although the extent is very difficult to judge. The extent and reach of state security in the Mubarak era is often portrayed by Islamists and activists alike to be spectacular. But this is probably a colossal exaggeration similar to the ones made about SAVAK in Shah-time Iran where activists once claimed a third of males in Iran to be SAVAK operatives (the truth turned out to be around 40,000 people!)
After the January 25th revolution, the country was essentially undone. Sectarian violence broke out in several locations, chaotic scenes spread, and attacks on police stations increased. Eager to preserve the pristine, though patently fake, image of the 18 days in Tahrir, activists and media alike scrambled to blame state security for everything. Highly respected talk show hosts made wild claims that state security officers were seen around sites of sectarian violence leading the crowds. Islamists fanned the flame of ire on state security.
The apparatus was dissolved a few months after the revolution. But this only happened after secular and Islamist activists stormed state security HQ's and extracted thousands of documents. In a ridiculous case known as "document shredding", state security officers were prosecuted (and found not guilty) for destroying printouts of classified documents before the public got their hands on it. In a Kafkaesque scene, dozens of Salafists stormed state security buildings insisting that they were tortured in subterranean cells (which never managed to materialize).
At the end of the day, the state security apparatus was essentially paralyzed. Activists claim state security never stopped functioning, but that is due to the necessity of a scapegoat upon which to hang every failing. Officers stopped working, many stopped caring, many were fired first by SCAF then by Morsi. Dozens of terrorists that the apparatus had helped capture were given presidential pardon by Morsi, any attempt to gather intelligence on Islamists was actively thwarted, and parts of the memory of the organization was lost as officers left it and documents lost their classification.
The result was a meteoric rise in weaponization and organization of terrorist groups in Northern Sinai, reaching a point where they are a veritable mini-army. Not to mention the now virtually unkown armory of Jamaa Islamiya in upper Egypt. But we also now have armed and active militia serving the MB and Hazemoon publicly in Cairo and Giza. We must recall that security attempts to warn about violence from Hazemoon was met with scorn and further calls for "reforming the MoI". People paid the price for this in neighborhoods around Nahda.
We are paying the price for the idealism and utter stupidity and inexperience of young activists today in blood. What the January 25th revolution knew was what it did not want. Everyone all of a sudden seemed to figure out that state security must go. What to replace it with, what state security actually does and how essential it is, are irrelevant questions. After all, some activists might have informed us, the principality of Monaco managed just fine without a state security officer. This whole debacle represents the nihilist, deconstructionist nature of January 25th that created the vacuum that the MB gladly stepped in to fill.
So now we are in a country where local groups openly call for civil war, carry weapons, kill people, call for foreign intervention, call for dissolution of the army, and essentially openly call for destruction of the state. All these groups without one single exception have religious overtones. When the MoI as an organization makes the decision to return a small number of officers with experience in monitoring religious groups, I think that's the least it could do. Are you afraid of illegal wiretapping or illegal detentions? If they happen and you make sure they happen point them out, in a month or so start pushing for legislation that puts legal (but reasonable) restrictions on state security, demand that the media be vigilant. But whatever you do, don't try to convince me that now and here we don't need a division in the internal intelligence service that monitors religious groups for signs of militancy!!!
State security is the internal intelligence service in Egypt, akin to the FBI. But because this is Egypt, state security of course had its fair share of violations. There are claims of torture, kidnappings, rapes, and all kinds of horrors. All the first hand accounts I've heard though, is of someone being asked to an office and asked questions by an officer. Evidence exists also that there was torture, although the extent is very difficult to judge. The extent and reach of state security in the Mubarak era is often portrayed by Islamists and activists alike to be spectacular. But this is probably a colossal exaggeration similar to the ones made about SAVAK in Shah-time Iran where activists once claimed a third of males in Iran to be SAVAK operatives (the truth turned out to be around 40,000 people!)
After the January 25th revolution, the country was essentially undone. Sectarian violence broke out in several locations, chaotic scenes spread, and attacks on police stations increased. Eager to preserve the pristine, though patently fake, image of the 18 days in Tahrir, activists and media alike scrambled to blame state security for everything. Highly respected talk show hosts made wild claims that state security officers were seen around sites of sectarian violence leading the crowds. Islamists fanned the flame of ire on state security.
The apparatus was dissolved a few months after the revolution. But this only happened after secular and Islamist activists stormed state security HQ's and extracted thousands of documents. In a ridiculous case known as "document shredding", state security officers were prosecuted (and found not guilty) for destroying printouts of classified documents before the public got their hands on it. In a Kafkaesque scene, dozens of Salafists stormed state security buildings insisting that they were tortured in subterranean cells (which never managed to materialize).
At the end of the day, the state security apparatus was essentially paralyzed. Activists claim state security never stopped functioning, but that is due to the necessity of a scapegoat upon which to hang every failing. Officers stopped working, many stopped caring, many were fired first by SCAF then by Morsi. Dozens of terrorists that the apparatus had helped capture were given presidential pardon by Morsi, any attempt to gather intelligence on Islamists was actively thwarted, and parts of the memory of the organization was lost as officers left it and documents lost their classification.
The result was a meteoric rise in weaponization and organization of terrorist groups in Northern Sinai, reaching a point where they are a veritable mini-army. Not to mention the now virtually unkown armory of Jamaa Islamiya in upper Egypt. But we also now have armed and active militia serving the MB and Hazemoon publicly in Cairo and Giza. We must recall that security attempts to warn about violence from Hazemoon was met with scorn and further calls for "reforming the MoI". People paid the price for this in neighborhoods around Nahda.
We are paying the price for the idealism and utter stupidity and inexperience of young activists today in blood. What the January 25th revolution knew was what it did not want. Everyone all of a sudden seemed to figure out that state security must go. What to replace it with, what state security actually does and how essential it is, are irrelevant questions. After all, some activists might have informed us, the principality of Monaco managed just fine without a state security officer. This whole debacle represents the nihilist, deconstructionist nature of January 25th that created the vacuum that the MB gladly stepped in to fill.
So now we are in a country where local groups openly call for civil war, carry weapons, kill people, call for foreign intervention, call for dissolution of the army, and essentially openly call for destruction of the state. All these groups without one single exception have religious overtones. When the MoI as an organization makes the decision to return a small number of officers with experience in monitoring religious groups, I think that's the least it could do. Are you afraid of illegal wiretapping or illegal detentions? If they happen and you make sure they happen point them out, in a month or so start pushing for legislation that puts legal (but reasonable) restrictions on state security, demand that the media be vigilant. But whatever you do, don't try to convince me that now and here we don't need a division in the internal intelligence service that monitors religious groups for signs of militancy!!!
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