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Egypt: Repressing the Muslim Brotherhood
The ruling Egyptian military decided to shut down the weeks long Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo. This morning it started to clear the places and Mosques the Brotherhood occupied. As expected the Brotherhood supporters resisted and the situation quickly escalated.
The police used lots of tear gas, bird shots and bulldozers to clear the barricades and tents. Snipers were seen on roofs. Some hundred of Muslim Brotherhood followers died. Many more were wounded. Some were burned when the tents they were in caught fire. Others were killed in stampedes. An unknown number were shot. The protesters used Molotov cocktails and stones against the police. Some of the protesters were seen with firearms fighting against police units. Various pictures from the riots can be seen here.
While the clearing of the sit-ins in Cairo was ongoing supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in upper Egypt set fire to at least seven Coptic churches and ransacked several police stations. Brotherhood leaders were overheard by journalists advising outside supporters to not come to the sit-ins but to “burn down police stations”. Police stations and police cars in Cairo were attacked, several policemen were killed.
A daughter of billionaire and Muslim Brotherhood big wig Khiret El-Shater and her husband were reportedly killed. A daughter of Muslim Brotherhood leader El Beltagy was killed at the Rabaa sit-in. The conflict will now be a very personal issue for them.
Journalists and TV staff were attacked by police as well as by protesters. Two were killed and several reported that their equipment was confiscated and/or stolen.
Later today the military will likely impose a curfew in Cairo and elsewhere around the country.
Earlier Secretary of State Kerry had said that the Egyptian military was “restoring democracy”. There will come little condemnation from Washington today and what will come will be ignored by the new rulers in Egypt. In seldom unity Iran, Qatar and Turkey condemned the violence (insert pot kettle joke here). The iman of Al Aznahr, the center of Muslim teaching in Egypt, called on both sides to end the violence.
All attempts to find a political solution in recent weeks had failed. After today it is even less likely that that one will be found. The military will suppress any new Muslim Brotherhood activity and parts of the MB may consider to go underground and fight a guerrilla or terror war. That will only increase the pressure coming from the state. The political winner of the MB-military conflict will be the Salafi Nour party which had kept its followers away from the altercations. It has support from the Gulf states and the Egyptian economy currently depends on money from the Gulf. It is difficult to see how in the long term some balance between the transnational Islamic movements in Egypt and the nationalist, more secular forces can be found.
History is a brutal teacher. What the army is doing now in Cairo would have been impossible a few months ago.
The Brotherhood, from the beginning of this revolution has attempted to distance itself from the popular movement, to surf on the waves of revolution rather than to join with the crowds. During the electoral process this tactic appeared to have been fruitful, but now its dangers are starkly revealed. Disdaining the popular forces of the street, eschewing the intimately related causes of redistribution and solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians, attempting to finesse the cardinal questions of imperialist hegemony in the form of neo-liberalism and zionist triumphalism, the Brotherhood neatly positioned itself between the two stools of the Empire and the People.
But this is not to justify in the slightest degree the infamous behaviour of the Army which, after sixty years is now back to where it was, an auxiliary to the Empire; once the creature of the British High Commissioner now subservient to the US Ambassador. The Egyptian Army now occupies the same place in society that the Argentinian, Brazilian, Guatemalan and, most notoriously, the Chilean army has filled during the past few decades. It is the enemy of the people, wholly dependent on foreign support and firmly opposed to the interests of the population, including the masses from whom it conscripts its recruits.
The revolution has not ended.
The sad truth of the massacres of Brotherhood supporters and, no doubt, the best elements of the people showing solidarity with the victims of imperialism, is that the electoral process was as hollow and meaningless as, at the time, it appeared to be. Had the Brotherhood the support that it claimed to have had and interpreted as its mandate to govern as it did, these massacres could never have happened. Clearly the people who chased Mubarak into prison have watched, not without emotion but without any conviction that the passing of Morsi’s government represents any real loss to them.
Now the die is cast: the army, as did Morsi and his party, has taken the side of the ruling class and the imperialists. Its next task will be to reclaim the few scraps of food and property that have fallen into the hands of the poor, for their masters. The needy millions must be starved again to stuff the bellies of the usurers, the landowners, the capitalists, the military oligarchs, the corrupt intelligentsia and, above all, the foreigners.
It will be doing so, attacking the population, at the least propitious of times, the economy, globally is contracting. The cost of food grains is rising, the market for Egyptian exports is declining. There are no short term fixes, no easy ways out, except social revolution.
We are back where we started when Mubarak’s rule was being challenged, except that both sides have drawn conclusions from experience.
Posted by: bevin | Aug 14 2013 14:57 utc | 3
Meet the old boss, same as the new boss.
Apologies, I genuinely typed that out backwards.
Morsi was too autocratic, too Islamist, over-stepped his powers (as seen by a W sorta democrat like me), possibly stupid and so on as well, and at the same time he tried to compose with the powers in place.
The army, the Mubarakists, the old regime, the vaguely hallowed State Apparatus, the Authorities. He tried to insert himself in it, or at least to leave its legitimacy and core structure more or less intact, like the new boy on the block who suddenly gets status thru some unexpected means.
In this case, a popular vote. (Assuming he did ‘win’ the elections for whatever that is worth.)
Following one’s squinty slant, he was in an impossible position and bound to fail / a fool who fell in a trap / a completely ridiculous politician / and Islamic despot in the making / just an MB stooge which is not acceptable / an elected leader scandalously treated / other…
Who knows. Nevertheless, the crux is the taking-on and parcelling out of authority.
Central here imho is that whatever moves towards people’s or democratic control of the State and Associated Apparatus, which in Egypt is massive, tentacular, and entrenched: Army, Police, State – education for ex. – business interests, wealth, rich families, control of territory, agriculture, transport, foreign contracts and deals, etc. has reacted with the military coup of July 2013 to show that they will brook no interference of any kind.
Their one experiment into religious-dominated control has failed and they will never allow anything like that to happen again.
The MB will be branded ‘terrorists’ (as before if under different labels or none), the PTB have played the cards of divide-to-rule masterfully, riling up -quotes around all -: liberals, democrats, secularists, women’s lib, modernists, unionists, old style pan-Arab socialists, students, young educated unemployed, etc. *against* the MB.
Simultaneously, the MB against other factions, generally defined as tribal > thus religious (as that is how the MB define themselves), they are prompt to lash out against anyone if sent into their policed trenches, possibly manipulated to do so.
Posted by: Noirette | Aug 14 2013 15:56 utc | 9
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