Back to Tahrir Square
July 5, 2013, 8:51 pm
Egypt, which prided itself on a successful Arab Spring revolt that ousted a longstanding dictator, is now in for a winter of despair. The military has overthrown the first-ever freely elected Egyptian leader.
Strangely, the US has not called the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi’s government a military coup. Perhaps, it has chosen to tread cautiously for legal and moral reasons. While claiming to protect and promote democracy in the world, it may not be able to justify funding the Egyptian army accused of having staged a coup, to the tune of USD 1.3 billion per annum. But, what else would it call the ouster of Morsi?
The Egyptian military has already installed the chief of the constitutional court as the interim head of state and his government has started communicating with Washington. It pretends to have acted on its own in deference to ‘the will of the people’. But, obviously, being dependent on the US for aid, it could not have overthrown a democratically elected government, unbeknownst to the White House. There is reason to believe that it has worked according to the agenda of the West averse to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood which became the unintended beneficiary of the Arab Spring uprisings which helped get rid of President Hosni Mubarak. It may be that the West wanted Morsi out and with him the Brotherhood, but was wary of engineering another uprising, having learnt a bitter lesson from Syria, where the western backed rebels have come up against a brick wall, and, therefore, opted for a bloodless shortcut with the help of the Egyptian generals.
The US and its allies prefer a secular administration in Cairo amenable to their pro-Israeli agenda and, in their book, the end justifies the means where the protection of their interests is concerned. But, it will be unbecoming of the self-appointed defenders of global democracy to countenance the king maker role played by a military. If the task of changing governments is to be left to generals, what are elections there for? On the other hand, though the ouster of Morsi has so far been relatively bloodless, all signs are that there will be bloody clashes in time to come with the pro-Brotherhood forces taking to the streets and their rivals attacking them. Such incidents have the potential to send Egypt hurtling down a spiral of violence again and pave the way for the military to intervene in a far bigger way claiming to bring order out of chaos.
Morsi was no angel; he was hell bent on self-aggrandizement, tried to keep all state institutions including the judiciary under his thumb and asked for trouble in the process. And the Brotherhood has its own hidden agenda. But, it is too dangerous to assign the task of dislodging democratically elected governments to the military.
The US is reported to have confronted the new military-backed transitional regime on the question of human rights violations. Secretary of State John Kerry himself has taken this up with his hurriedly appointed counterpart in Cairo and been assured that human rights will be respected with the freedom of expression guaranteed. But, according to a Reuters dispatch an army officer has said the military will use troops and even jets to prevent clashes between pro-Morsi groups and their rivals. This is an indication that the king maker military will use even airpower to quell a possible uprising as in Syria. The transition regime has already taken all TV channels considered sympathetic to the Brotherhood and Morsi off the air. So much for its respect for the freedom of expression!
The least America and its western allies could do to prevent Egypt from running red with civilian blood once again is to keep the Egyptian generals on a tight leash and ensure that early polls will be held to elect a new government with everybody’s right to engage in political work, contest and vote fully guaranteed.
COLOMBO
