The cover of the current issue of Time Magazine
labels Egyptians as ‘the world’s best protestors’ and ‘the world’s worst
democrats’. The startling ignorance of this cover highlights a fundamental
question that is not – in the current climate of frenzied analyses of Egypt – being
asked:
Is it more democratic to elect a fascist ruler or
to topple one?
‘Democracy’ alone was never a fundamental demand
of the Egyptian Revolution. Bread, freedom and social justice: these are the demands
of the revolution. Freedom. Not representative democracy. Freedom. People were
killed in their hundreds for freedom, not for a ballot slip. Morsi was elected
because he was the lesser of two evils. He stood in Tahrir and promised he
could deliver the goals of the revolution. And he imprisoned and raped and tortured and killed his citizens
like every government before him. And now he has fallen.
Democracy – which at the very least would mean an
independent judiciary, citizen rights, freedom of the press and transparent
elections - will not be won in Egypt through elections because there is a
historical and geographical context that determines what is and isn’t possible
through the ballot box alone.
The current state structure within which Egypt operates
is based on layers of colonial and military history, each layer building on the
last to obscure the state and place it above – and separate from - the people.
Mehmed Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1841, introducing private land ownership,
dividing up agricultural territory into private estates. He created Egypt’s
bureaucracy and the first modern army in the region. This became the
cornerstone of Egyptian nationalism[1],
the expression of which reached its visual apex last week when army helicopters
showered Tahrir with Egyptian flags. The French destroyed, redesigned and
rebuilt villages to create, codify and entrench class strata[2].
The British centralized gubernatorial and mayoral appointments under the
Ministry of the Interior[3].
Nasser and the Free Officers created a massive security apparatus to watch over
their “revolution from above” and placed generals in key state positions.
Sadat’s rapid and unregulated infitah opened up the country to outside
investment, creating a new class of business elites who matured comfortably
into the crony capitalists of the Mubarak years. Mubarak massively expanded the
police state, removing direct power from the Army but pacified ranking generals
with a system of “loyalty allowances”, offering them retirement possibilities
in lucrative state positions – such as gubernatorial appointments - in return
for their allegiance[4].
And so the circle closes. By 2011, 200 years of successive policies designed to
centralize and concentrate power and suppress political possibility had evolved
into an impenetrable, unaccountable and unchallengeable cycle of money and
influence that circulated between a handful of key institutions, soldiers and
businessmen closest to the ruling family.
How could democracy – when proposed by this
ancient totalitarian machine of the deep state - arrive neatly with the ballot
boxes nine months later?
Beyond the deep state stands the international
regime. Just as Egypt’s economic, military and social structures were forged by
colonial schema of oppression, so its position within the “international
community” of wealthy countries and corporations is confined to one of
neo-colonial subjugation and collusion.
Three brief examples:
One: as a reward for signing a peace treaty with
Israel in 1978, Egypt became the second largest beneficiary of US military aid
in the world. Vast sums poured into the Egyptian military’s budget in exchange
for peace with Israel, the repression of the Palestinians and keeping the Suez
Canal open for business. In 2005, the Mubarak government began selling natural
gas to Israel, supplying it with 30% of its total fuel needs at below market
rates. This continued until last year, when the deal was suspended under
intense popular pressure. Also in 2012, Egypt began importing natural gas for
the first time to meet a domestic demand that is rising. That demand is so
heavily subsidized that it consumes 25% of the national budget. But 93%
of it is consumed by the richest fifth of the population. So the state is
currently spending more than it does on health and education combined on
subsidizing the rich’s fuel. And has racked up $5bn of debt to at least 42 different oil and gas companies and up to $15bn to
banks and other ministries in the process. So Egypt is now out of cash for
imports and domestic alternatives are needed. Enter Dana Gas, a UAE company now
fracking in the Nile Valley, a possible side-effect of which could be the
poisoning of the river. 98% of Egyptians live alongside the Nile and depend on its
water, which is already so polluted that the rich now drink bottled water
produced by Coca Cola (Dasani) or Pepsi (Aquafina) or the Army (Safi), allowing
the government to ignore the issue. Meanwhile Ethiopia presses ahead with its
Renaissance Dam project whose as yet unknown effects on her upstream neighbours
have been the source of such a hysterical public outcry that Ethiopia became
Egypt’s main security concern in Morsi’s final, US-approved months in office. Instead
of Israel.
Two: Sinai. A mountainous peninsula that lies
between the two key US-Egyptian ‘security concerns’: the Suez Canal and the
Gaza Strip. Its coastline was developed for tourism by the Israelis when they
occupied it in 1967. In 1982 the military occupation was handed over to the Egyptians,
who opened the door to international investment but marginalized the indigenous
Bedouins; denying them land rights even as they watched foreign companies build
towns and luxury hotel complexes for European tourists. The southern coastline
and historical sites are now key drivers of tourism, but only a fraction of the
money they bring in goes back into either the community or the state, with
everything up to and including airport licenses dominated by foreign companies.
Industrial development plans fail because they gloss over the Bedouin’s
grievances and continue to pursue the state’s preferred military-capitalist
model.[5]
‘Security’ will never be achievable as long as the siege of Gaza continues, the
tunnel economy flourishes and the gas pipeline to Israel exists. But to address
any of these issues would mean the end of American military aid. And from this Catch-22
a new idea has emerged, whose idiocy is only matched by its $4bn price tag: to
build a bridge to Saudi Arabia. To make an environmentally disastrous
land-crossing between the most volatile region of the most populous country in
the Arab world and the petroleum-fuelled evangelical heartland of extremist Wahhabi
ideology.
Three: wheat. Egypt is blessed with fertile land,
regular irrigation water and limitless sun. Until the end of the Ottoman era
Egypt was a net exporter of food and textiles. Mehmed Ali divided the territory
into private landholdings before the British colonists shifted crop production
towards cotton to feed the Manchester mills driving their industrial revolution.
By 1914 cotton accounted for 92% of the total value of Egyptian exports.
Nasser’s attempts at land reform were curtailed by Sadat, and with the
capitalist boom of the 1970s the wealthier classes began eating more meat,
domestic crops were diverted to feed livestock and an import-dependency on
USAID began to “feed the poor” whose bread was now being eaten by the rich’s
cows.[6]
And so, today, Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat and lives
permanently on the edge of a food crisis. To try and stave off a repeat of the
1977 Bread Riots the state underwrites a vast, inefficient and corrupt subsidy
system while continuing to divert domestic production away from staple foods
towards export crops to produce hard currency to service interest payments on
international loans taken out to buy grain in the first place. And if Egypt’s $38.8bn debt wasn’t
burdensome enough, successive post-revolution governments continue to hold
talks with the IMF in the hope of securing a $4.8bn loan, whose approval would
require further “structural adjustments” towards export crops, such as cut
flowers, for European markets. And so the circle closes.
The elite domestic and international regimes have
created a matrix of corruption, control and inequality that cuts through every
aspect of Egyptian life. The ballot box would not have given any new president the
authority or the power to seriously tackle any one of these issues.
Egypt had elections, but nothing else. Elections
can be a tool - one of the tools through which social change can be attempted.
They can also be a very strong sedative. The decrease in voter turnout in Egypt
from 53% for the parliamentary elections in November 2011 to 33% for the
constitutional referendum in November 2012 shows that the form of democracy required
is much more radical than what’s on offer.
The spreading of democracy by the USA and her
allies has always been inextricably bound up with the liberalization of
markets. Democracy, for recipients of US attention in the global south, means
free market capitalism. The concepts are interchangeable, as they were when the
British were blessing the world with ‘civilization’. Egyptians have spent the
last ten years watching democracy gloriously spreading over the mountains of
Afghanistan and into the oil wells of Iraq. And when the Obama administration
had ensured that the Muslim Brotherhood would keep the country open for
business and not make any moves against Israel, the ballot box acquired its
sanctimonious glow here too.
So, Time Magazine, and all you other fading giants
of yesterday’s media, being a “democrat” was never a choice for Egyptians. You
don’t just wake up and choose whether or not you live in a democracy.
Morsi’s winning of the presidential elections gave
him a degree of legitimacy. But legitimacy without consent is meaningless and
the Muslim Brotherhood did such a disastrous job of governing that consent was
lost within a year. Morsi made specific electoral promises - not just to the
electorate but to most formal revolutionary and secular groups - to build a coalition
government led by a non-partisan figure, to write a consensus-based
constitution and to make legislative reforms of the state. Then his cabinet of
choice (mostly made up of weak, Mubarak-era bureaucrats and Brotherhood
members) refused to cooperate with civil society on labour issues, police
reform, anti-torture work, the economy or energy – all issues on which human
rights groups, activists and development NGOs offered their services and
expertise - and were shunned. So when, after a year, people felt that their
lives were continuing to worsen, Egyptians took to the streets in their
millions – a revolutionary act that also, since it keeps coming up, happened to
be profoundly democratic. The Tamarrod movement was, in essence, a recall vote
– something that might have been worked into the new constitution if Egyptians had
been truly involved in the writing of it.
As the great Howard Zinn wrote: “protest beyond
the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
The whole world is lecturing Egypt about democracy; but commentators should
realise that by narrowing the idea to fit their preferred analysis they are
undermining their own future freedoms.
Bread, freedom, social justice. It is possible. The
solution, though, is not simply representative democracy. Egypt requires, at
the very least, a radical overhaul of the state, the dismantling of the
military’s supra-state, the democratization and decentralization of local
politics, extensive land reforms, cooperative partnerships with neighboring
countries, a progressive policy on Israel and a completely new set of
international political and business relationships that begins with cancelling the
debt accrued dishonestly by dictators. These goals will never be achieved by
any of the corrupt and compromised elite currently playing politics at the
national level. These goals cannot be achieved in isolation – the domestic and
international regime are so intertwined that everything has to be fought at
once. The Egyptian revolution will must couple with the revolutions that began
across the world in 2011 and are still kicking and fighting today. The road
ahead is long and hard. The revolution continues.
An edited, shorter, version of this piece first appeared in the Guardian on
Wednesday July 17th
This version appeared on Mada Masr on Thursday July 18th
[5] Ministry of Planning &
International Cooperation, The Prospects and Challenges of Sinai’s Development,
January 2013
