Thursday, July 18, 2013

Totalitarian Democracy


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




[1] Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men (AUC Press, 2002)
[2] Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (University of California Press, 1991)
[3] Aaron Jakes, The Severed Branches of Local Government (Cairobserver, 2012)
[4] Yazid Sayegh, Above the State (Carnegie Middle East Centre, 2012)
[5] Ministry of Planning & International Cooperation, The Prospects and Challenges of Sinai’s Development, January 2013
[6] See Timothy Mitchell, America’s Egypt (MERIP 169, 1991)

Monday, July 15, 2013

Upcoming Screenings: Though I Know the River is Dry



A quick update on upcoming screenings of Though I Know the River is Dry. 

We will be featured in three major international festivals this summer, starting in competition in Melbourne in August. We will be able to announce the other two shortly. 

We will also have screenings in two art spaces in London this summer: the Mosaic Rooms and Bold Tendencies at the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park. Both these screenings will be presented alongside a selection of films from Mosireen



Thursday, July 11, 2013

Selective Memories



This piece was originally published in Mada Masr.

I am neither a supporter of Mohammed Morsi nor of the Egyptian Army. To place oneself in either camp is to assert an allegiance to hierarchy, patriarchy, capitalism, secrecy and violence. The Army and the Brotherhood are not two poles that encompass Egyptian society, they are two elitist organisations with vast domestic networks, international connections, opaque business interests and legions of footsoldiers. And yet, in the international press, readers are being repeatedly presented with this false binary.

A vast swathe of the Egyptian populace has recently succumbed to national amnesia, cheering the APCs that crushed protestors at Maspero just twenty months ago. Others are being inflamed with the language of legitimacy and martyrdom pouring from the Brotherhood’s stages. State media has never been more sectarian or the independents more keen to please the ascendant military. And previously reliable foreign news outlets seem also to have lost perspective.

The Guardian, for example, proudly boasted of its role as a reliable news source during the initial 18 days of the revolution, and truly did excellent work. But since the election of the Muslim Brotherhood it has taken a perplexing editorial line that regularly mixes veneration for our Brotherhood ex-rulers with hectoring lectures on the necessary difficulties of democracy and the ultimate sanctity of the ballot box.

I was surprised to see space given in yesterday’s Comment is Free to Yahia Hamed, Morsi’s Minister for Investment, who wrote that Morsi had a “single mission: to establish stable sustainable mechanisms for the peaceful democratic exchange of power.” The article repeatedly speaks of Morsi’s fanatic devotion to democracy but fails to give a single concrete example of any action that Morsi took in the pursuit of his supposed democratic faith. Not one.

That’s because there were none. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood have been ousted from power they repeat the words ‘democracy’ and ‘legitimacy’ incessantly – but this abuse of history and of language must be challenged. Morsi’s legitimacy was lost the moment Brotherhood militias were unleashed on a protest sit-in last November, the moment the activist Mohammed al Guindy gasped for his last breath in a police torture cell, the moment four Shias were lynched without drawing a word of criticism from the government. Democracy under the Brotherhood was no different than under Mubarak or under SCAF – by opposing them, by thinking differently to them, you risked your life.

And if we want to consider Morsi’s commitment to the democratic process let’s remember how a post-revolutionary Constitution was forced on a population with the approval of just 64% of a 33% turnout.

In an editorial on July 9th, the Guardian wrote “According to our body count, more Egyptians have been killed and injured in two weeks of protests than in one year under Mohamed Morsi.” What the editorial doesn’t say is that at least nine people were killed by a gunman inside the Brotherhood’s headquarters, eight were killed by Brotherhood protestors and there is a wave of sectarian violence sweeping the countryside – the worst episode so far seeing at least four Christians killed in Luxor. The body count is higher and it is rising, not only because the Army are back on the streets, but because the Brotherhood is armed and angry and will not back down.

The Army and the Brotherhood both have blood on their hands and both seem determined to escalate. And let there be no doubt – we recognize that the ultimate and gravest threat to the revolution is the Army, that the most brutal and well-equipped organization is the Army, that the institution that is most to blame for the country’s vast problems is the Army. But that does not mean that liberal news outlets should canonize the Brotherhood because they’re in the habit of defending persecuted Muslims at home. Neither the Army nor the Brotherhood have any interest in delivering the people’s demands of ‘bread, freedom and social justice.’ We know this. What we don’t know is what the people can do next.

The people are the great unknown. The people have spent two and half years talking about nothing other than politics. So is it too much to ask for commentators, writing in English, to stop telling us “how democracy works”? Because, from where we’re standing, the firesale of Greece, the bailouts of the banks, the titanic advertising budgets of electoral candidates, the Tory Old Boy’s Club government and the invisible muscle of the lobbies are just a few hints that no-one’s democracy is working properly.

And, if the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy is the ballot box, perhaps US citizens could be allowed vote on whether to continue military aid to Egypt? Or UK citizens could choose where David Cameron next flies to peddle his weapons? There is not a fair and functional system anywhere in the world. At least Egypt’s is in flux and her governments are trembling. And as long as the people believe they don’t have to accept their reality, as long as they believe that their future has not been decided for them, then something new is possible.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Ramallah Premiere


Our Ramallah premiere will be this week at the Sakakini Centre.

Entry is free.

This is the Facebook event.

See you there.


Monday, April 1, 2013

Jews of Egypt - Cinema Release

I have no idea if it's going to be any good or not, but if you're in Egypt you should go and see Jews of Egypt tonight or tomorrow.

It's an independent film that has fought against both the Ministry of the Interior and the monopolists of the domestic film industry to get a slot in the cinemas. It is very very rare for an independent film to get on a cinema screen in Egypt - for reasons that have been discussed in old old posts - so it would be good if this one makes a little cash.



It's showing at the Renaissance Nile City and Sun City in Cairo and San Stefano in Alexandria.

I know we are supposed to be boycotting Renaissance Nile City but I think, in this case, the positive impact of each ticket bought for this film will be more felt than the negative impact of bringing business to Nile City. Just don't buy any snacks there.

This is why we're (mostly) boycotting Nile City

Friday, March 29, 2013

Festivals & Screenings

So Though I Know the River is Dry is finished and is out there beginning it's life on the festival circuit.


It opened in competition in Rotterdam and won that festival's nomination for Best Short Film at the 2013 European Film Awards. Which was a very good start. 

We then spent about three days going through lists and lists of all the film festivals in the world and trying to come up with a chronological strategy of where we would submit to. 

The whole slog of film festival applications is incredibly dull if you don't have a distributor, but - unless you can be sure of getting 100,000 hits online, you've got to do it. So, in case this makes anyone's life any easier, this is the spreadsheet we produced.

Everyone will have their own preferences about which festivals sound attractive, but there is also a clear hierarchy - with festivals with markets, competitions and AMPAS qualification at the top of the pile. And main thing you have that is of value is your regional premieres, so you need to have a global strategy. 

Hopefully the spreadsheet can help with that. 

Monday, October 15, 2012

Beyond Tahrir


This piece was written for the magazine, The Middle East in London, about two weeks before the government erased the graffiti on Muhammad Mahmoud st. 


Muhammad Mahmoud Street is one of the ten roads that feed into Tahrir Square.  It is home to the beautiful old campus of the American University in Cairo and, therefore, to the all the most expensive cafes in Downtown Cairo.  It was also the theatre for the biggest street battle in Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.  Over five freezing nights in November the police killed more than 70 people and Tahrir transformed itself into an enormous field hospital.  Now, Egypt’s newly emerged graffiti artists have converged to make the long unbroken walls of the street sing with beautiful, heartbreaking, ever-changing murals.  Pharaonic figures spelling out timeless lessons for good governance make way for a fallen sheikh’s guiding hands and Christian angel’s wings, while huge Islamic calligraphy curls up and around the faces of the overwhelmingly young, smiling martyrs and down again to angrily sprayed stencils calling for freedom for the imprisoned and justice for the dead.

This is where I come when I need reminding that our strength comes from the combination of countless small, individual contributions to the collective cause.  Here is where I know that the revolution is more than street protests, more than battles with the police, more than the presidency, more than American foreign policy.  Here I know that the revolution is, in the end, about the pent-up beauty that’s been released into this country.

It is both an obvious and a very difficult lesson to learn.  But, to be successful, the revolution has to constantly remember it, has to be both mass street protests and smaller, personal acts of protest.  The unionizing nurse, the striking worker. The two nourish each other, push each other forward.

We forced the removal of Mubarak by taking and holding Tahrir for 18 days.  But Tahrir then was a mortally contested space.  The entire police force was defeated in the winning of it.  Now it has become a space ‘allowed’ to the revolution.  Much like a protest march in London has its route and territory marked out by the police, Tahrir has – to a lesser extent – become an accepted area for congregation.  It is when venturing outside it that the inevitable confrontations with the police and the military flare up; it is outside that the boundaries that need testing now lie.  The Ministry of the Interior, the State Radio and Television Building, the Ministry of Defence. These are the black sites of recent and future bloodshed.  These are the houses of power, the new challenges that the young unarmed men and women of the revolution are drawn towards now.

Can you take the State TV building without a hundred thousand people pushing at the barbed wire that surrounds it?  Will the machine-gunners on the first floor open fire on women and children chanting selmeyya (peaceful)?  Maybe we won’t have to find out.  Maybe, with our elected civilian president, words will no longer be met with bullets.  We have entered the third stage of our Revolution.  And it is true that we have won many victories.  We still can’t believe this history that we’re living through, that we’re making.  But we’re also still living in a police state whose land and major assets are controlled by the military and a neo-liberal business elite who are subservient to American and Israeli interests.  The police just shot and paralyzed a seventeen-year old boy in a train station for singing an Ultras song.  We have a long way to go.  At times it feels impossible.  And at those times I go down to Muhammad Mahmoud Street.