An Egyptian man walks by a mural depicting ousted president Hosni Mubarak, right, and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, left, with Arabic that reads 'before the revolution, let them be amused, after the revolution, let them be paralyzed,' on a wall in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Tuesday. (Nasser Nasser/AP)
Egypt's political elites and their estrangement from the poor
Egypt's political elite continue to fail their people. They are failing to empathize, they are failing to speak to the public in a way that makes them feel they're being listened to, and they're failing to craft approaches to turn around a dangerously listing economy.
Egypt's current economic and social problems have no easy fixes, and would confound an all-star team of political leaders. But compounding those problems is the fact that President Mohamed Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood, and the security forces – who are seen by the public as dangers to be avoided rather than keepers of the peace – are out of touch with the struggles of the nation's poor.
Their attitude veers between amusement, disgust, and contempt, and all of them were on display when, while answering questions in parliament earlier this month, Prime Minister Hisham Qandil was asked about Hamada Saber, a middle-aged laborer who was caught on film being stripped naked, beaten, and dragged through the street by police in front of the presidential palace on Feb. 1. Mr. Qandil managed, in very few words, to unintentionally outline how estranged Egypt's leadership is from the working classes when he launched into a set of unfocused comments that seemed to place responsibility for poverty squarely on the backs of the poor while sidestepping the issue of police mistreatment of Mr. Saber.
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The poor, who may not be well-educated but aren't stupid, are well-aware of this contempt among the political elite – one reason so many average Egyptians say that what they wanted out of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak was more "dignity." So far they're not getting it.
The police abuse, broadcast live and replayed dozens of times in the coming days, electrified the country as a clear symbol of a thuggish government whose behavior, in its interactions with average folk, remains unchanged since the revolution. Saber was originally threatened and warned to lie about this assault (seeking to pin the blame on protesters) – something straight out of the Mubarak era.
A few days later, Qandil, a President Mohamed Morsi appointee, was asked by a reporter in a televised meeting about the attack. First he said that while he doesn't know Saber, that "I'm 90 percent sure he doesn't pay his electricity bill." Whether Saber is too poor to pay his electric bills or not, it hardly seems relevant to his own treatment.
Qandil then quickly shifts to breast-feeding and sanitation (Qandil is a former minister of water resources, which means he bears some responsibility for the lack of clean drinking water and effective sewage systems in many parts of the country) and blamed the frequency of diarrhea among infants in Beni Suef, a city south of Cairo, on the poor hygiene of their mothers.
Below is a videotape of Qandil's original comments with English subtitles. He says, "In my work, I used to go to the countryside, so I've seen in the villages of Beni Suef families. I mean, there are villages in Egypt, villages in Egypt, you're disturbed that he has a power bill he doesn't even pay to start with but he, I'm certain.. there are villages in Egypt, in the 21st century, the children get diarrhea... you know, an infant because his mother out of ignorance breast feeds him... she is so ignorant that she is not capable of maintaining the cleanliness of her breasts, so the child gets diarrhea."
At the end of last week Qandil issued a classic non-apology apology, saying he regretted that his videotaped comments were "falsely portrayed" by the press.
Every country has politicians who make cloddish, tone-deaf statements. But in Egypt it seems to be more the norm than the exception. On Feb. 3, the government issued a report on rampant food inflation in which it urged citizens not to overeat. On Feb. 10, Minister of Supply and Internal Trade Bassem Auda held a press conference announcing plans to ration subsidized bread to three loaves per person (an Egyptian loaf is a flatbread, much like a pita).
The country is the largest importer of wheat in the world, and the cost of those imports have soared as the value of the Egyptian pound has fallen (a poor harvest due to drought in much of the world last year also isn't helping matters). The poor, defined as those with an average household income of less than $200 a month, rely on that subsidized bread.
And when I met in January with a member of Egypt's Shura Council, the upper house of parliament, he said they were considering a law to cap the salaries of government workers at 50,000 pounds a month ($7,600) and that he was seeking an amendment to increase the upper limit to 200,000 pounds ($30,400). Then he stunned me: "You have to understand that Egypt isn't an inexpensive country like the US. That is a great salary in the US, but for us, the costs are so much higher."
And it isn't just within Egypt that elites don't seem to get it. David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a piece on Feb. 15 comparing Egypt's ultras – the soccer hooligans who take their names from Italian supporters organizations – to the thugs in A Clockwork Orange. He describes Anthony Burgess grim, violent novel as "an eerily prescient guide to the youth gangs that are wild in the streets of Egypt and other countries. What are these hooligans telling us about the future – not just in Egypt but also in other nations where authoritarian leaders have lost their power to repress dissent by angry young men? The teenage marauders seem to have lost respect for the world of their fathers – and for the forces of social control that were woven through traditional societies such as Egypt."
Well, yes, they have lost respect for a world that's never respected them. That there is an edge of nihilism to much of the protest in Cairo these days can't be denied. But it's hard not to be sympathetic to angry, jobless young men who have been failed by their political system and their leaders for their entire lives. Go to any poor Cairo neighborhood or Egyptian town and you'll see cops soliciting bribes and unmaintained sewage systems with filth running out into the vacant lots the children play in. Wouldn't you be angry?
Ignatius warns that Egypt's "social fabric" has ripped and complains that "the kids who made the revolution refuse to settle down and take their seats."
He seems to miss the point, as do Egypt's leaders, who are the ones failing Egypt far more than dissatisfied youths. When young angry people get pushed far enough, they end up breaking things. Giving them a reason to "take their seats" is up to the government. So far, it is failing them. Again.
So, this is the office that will investigate Afghanistan's Kam Air?
Yesterday, I wrote about Afghan airline Kam Air, which was removed from a US military contracting blacklist for alleged involvement in drug smuggling after complaints from the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai.
The US military in Afghanistan says that the blacklisting has simply been "suspended" pending an Afghan government investigation. That investigation will likely be carried out by the attorney general's office. Who will ultimately decide? Since Afghanistan's politics is only slightly less convoluted and conspiratorial than Florence under the Medici family, I can't really say.
But in doing some reading for the story, I scanned the latest quarterly report from the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which contains an amusing – or horrifying, depending on your perspective – anecdote on political maneuvering and dysfunction at the Afghan attorney general's office.
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The Jan. 30 document dryly notes that the "Afghan Attorney General Office (AGO) made no significant anti-corruption indictments or prosecutions this quarter. Afghan prosecutors continued to complain that they lack supervisors’ support for prosecutions," and then launches into the story of how the director general of the attorney general's anticorruption unit (ACU) lost his job last year, according to the US Embassy in Kabul.
"A group of prosecutors in the AGO’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) set up the Unit’s Director General by supplying him with alcohol and encouraging him to denigrate the Attorney General while videotaping the incident, according to State. This led to his arrest and subsequent removal from his post. State noted that although the replacement is a reputable prosecutor, it will be difficult for the ACU to function effectively if it continues to be full of internal rivalry and intrigue."
Afghanistan's Attorney General Mohammed Ishaq Aloko has been on the job since 2008, a period when political meddling in prosecutions has been rife. For years, US officials in Afghanistan have privately complained that he's intervened to quash investigations into friends or allies of Karzai. The US has also alleged that Aloko and Karzai have been involved in the pre-trial release of insurgents.
For instance, in a 2009 embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, then-Ambassador Karl Eibenberry writes that:
On numerous occasions we have emphasized with Attorney General Aloko the need to end interventions by him and President Karzai, who both authorize the release of detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court. On July 29th, Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh and Deputy Ambassador Frances Ricciardone demarched Attorney General Muhammad Ishaq Aloko about our concern over pre-trial releases and presidential pardons of narco-traffickers (Reftel Kabul 02245)... Despite our complaints and expressions of concern to the (government of Afghanistan), pre-trial releases continue.
Also in 2009, Mr. Aloko bristled at a US complaint about the specific release of the nephew of a powerful Afghan warlord and insurgent.
When Ricciardone explained to ALOKO about the crucial link between rule of law and sovereignty, ALOKO challenged the Ambassador to define sovereignty, and declared that decisions about releases were Afghan problems, 8 implying that the U.S. should stay out of them. Ambassador Ricciardone pressed ALOKO on why, contrary to explicit agreement, the GIRoA allowed 150 pre-trial releases from the (Afghanistan National Detention Facility), including the recent release without trial of Abdullah Shahab, nephew of anti-American Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Shahab had admitted to video-taping attacks against U.S. forces for use as Taliban propaganda. ALOKO responded that a familial relationship to Hekmatyar had nothing to do with Shahab's case and that his camera activities were not illegal. ALOKO argued that when the U.S. transfers detainees to the GIRoA, the U.S.-provided evidence against some detainees is insufficient for prosecution, so he is sometimes left with no other choice than to release the detainee rather than let their cases take up time in already overburdened court.
That cable makes it clear that the US has had little faith or trust in Aloko for some time. Aloko told the US diplomats in his meeting that he had no involvement in the pre-trial releases of a number of drug traffickers that US forces had handed over to the Afghan government. The US diplomat who wrote the cable adds in a short parenthetical aside after recording Aloko's position: "(Note: ALOKO's claimed lack of involvement in the narcotics cases is not credible.)"
So, this is the office that will investigate Kam Air. In a statement on the matter earlier this week, US Forces – Afghanistan wrote: "The Afghan Government and USFOR-A remain mutually committed to transparency and combating corruption."
We'll see.
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A US Army Blackhawk helicopter flies above Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, Tuesday. The US military blacklisted Kam Air, an airline owned by a politically-connected Afghan businessman, for opium smuggling. (Andrew Burton/Reuters)
Afghan corruption, opium, and the strange case of Kam Air
In late January, the US military blacklisted Afghanistan's Kam Air from winning contracts with the US in Afghanistan, with the head of a US military anticorruption unit asserting that the airline was involved in bulk opium smuggling on commercial flights to Tajikistan.
The decision touched off a flurry of backroom lobbying, given the political connections of Kam Air's owner and the shadow it cast over efforts to merge the private airline carrier with the struggling Afghan government-owned airline Ariana.
The result? A few weeks later, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) issued a terse statement announcing that Kam Air would be removed from the blacklist pending the results of an Afghan government investigation into the drug smuggling charges.
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The release outlines a Feb. 2 meeting between senior officials in the Afghan government and the US military in Kabul. There, "US military officials explained why they had recommended the [blacklist] designation to the commander of CENTCOM," or the US Central Command based in Tampa, which is in operational control of the Afghanistan mission. The brief statement makes no explanation as to why the Afghan government's arguments were convincing, though it implies that questions of Afghan sovereignty were crucial.
"The CENTCOM commander made the decision to suspend the 841 designation because he believes it is an appropriate, logical course of action at this time for the sovereign Afghan Government to conduct a full investigation of Kam Air."
Perhaps. But why Afghan sovereignty should determine who the US military does business with isn't entirely clear. Nor is it clear why the position of Maj. Gen. Richard Longo, who commands a task force to combat contracting corruption in Afghanistan, has been ignored. He told The Wall Street Journal in January that "the U.S. will not do business with those who fund and support illicit activities. Kam Air is too large of a company not to know what has been going on within its organization.”
Making this story stranger still were the comments of ISAF and US Forces-Afghanistan spokesman Col. Thomas Collins to Stars and Stripes yesterday. He said, in the words of the Stars and Stripes reporter, that "the decision to rescind the blacklist decision did not call into question the evidence uncovered by the original US investigation."
An Afghan contact of mine, and a former senior adviser to the Afghan government, has an explanation. He alerted me to the ISAF press release with an e-mail headed "the fix is in!"
He asserted that essentially the US is doing a favor for President Hamid Karzai by protecting the business interests of Zamari Kamgar, the owner of Kam Air (Mr. Kamgar rejected allegations of any wrongdoing at the airline in an interview with The Wall Street Journal after the original designation was made, and the next day he told AFP he might seek "compensation" for the US military's "baseless, unbelievable and insulting allegation"). As with many operational decisions in Afghanistan, the press release exudes a strong odor of political calculations being made and acted on.
The 'designation'
What is a Section 841 designation? The section is in the National Defense Authorization Act, and is designed to prevent US contract money from ending up in the hands of the Taliban or any other person or group "actively supporting an insurgency or otherwise actively opposing United States or coalition forces in a contingency operation in the United States Central Command theater of operations."
One of the bitter truths of the Afghan war is that huge amounts of American and European money have flowed via contractors into the hands of the insurgency, leaving the US and its coalition partners in the position of helping to pay for the bombs and bullets used to kill Afghan and foreign soldiers. The issue is not a new one, with trucking contractors paying protection money to groups connected to the insurgency in order to buy safe passage for US fuel, ammunition, and food deliveries to US bases.
The US also believes the drug business to be one of the principal money makers for the Taliban. The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which investigates corruption in US spending in Afghanistan, said in his latest report out this month that Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world's opium and that "the illicit drug trade also supports the insurgency."
The report also found persistent and high levels of corruption in the Afghan police, judiciary, and among its elected leaders. The Attorney General's office, which presumably would lead an investigation into Kam Air, is not spared.
While the ISAF press release said that US Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) and the Afghan Government "remain mutually committed to transparency and combating corruption" that isn't the impression you'd get from reading the SIGAR report, which wrote the following about the Attorney General's office:
"Despite the importance the United States and the international community place on progress in punishing high-level officials guilty of corruption, the Afghan Attorney General Office (AGO) made no significant anti-corruption indictments or prosecutions this quarter... The AGO has claimed progress in his compliance with President Karzai’s anti-corruption and governance decree (PD45), but that claim does not reflect (the State Department's) understanding of events and omits important facts. For example, the Attorney General is responsible for issuing indictments on corruption, but two of the major stakeholders in the Kabul Bank scandal, President Karzai’s brother and Vice President Fahim’s brother, were not on the list of those indicted for crimes related to the bank’s collapse. The Attorney General also fired a reportedly reputable government whistleblower in the AGO because of the whistleblower’s determination to build corruption cases against government officials, according to State. The Attorney General brought charges against the whistleblower for libeling ministries by accusing them of corruption in front of the Parliament."
The Afghan government's own track record at rooting out official corruption under President Karzai is probably best summed up as "awful." As the US winds down its military operations in Afghanistan, spending still remains very high. The US is expected to spend $10 billion on Afghan reconstruction and far more in directly supporting military operations. It's a fair bet that a chunk of the money will go into the hands of Afghan politicians, warlords, and the Taliban alike.
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Egyptian protesters run from tear gas fired by riot police during clashes next to the presidential palace in Cairo, Friday. When Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt, torture of suspects and citizens was commonplace among Egypt's police. Under President Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's institutions are pretty much identical to what they were in the Mubarak years. (Khalil Hamra/AP)
In the new Egypt, the police still hew to their old torturing ways
Over the weekend, the Egyptian state posed a question to the nation about a vicious beating that cops delivered to a man, captured on camera: "Who are you going to believe – us, or your own lying eyes?"
The police beating of Hamada Saber on Friday was carried live on Egyptian television and has since been rebroadcast dozens of times on the country's lively talk shows. But the sustained attack by a group of about eight cops on Mr. Saber, a middle-aged construction worker, was only unusual for Egypt in one respect: That it was captured on film.
This is a crucial point to keep in mind about Egypt. While the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi is now the president, Egypt's institutions are pretty much identical to what they were in the Mubarak years. Egypt's elites seem comfortable with a police force that often treats average people as cattle, rather than citizens they're sworn to protect. While there is tut-tutting when the occasionally spectacular case like Saber's hits the press, no one in power is fighting for an overhaul of the rotten police service.
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The Saber case has followed the standard playbook. The first response of Egypt's Interior Ministry and the government of President Morsi was to suggest that the police had in fact been helping Saber escape from protesters, who the police alleged had attacked him, in front of the presidential palace. Astonishingly cynical? Yes. And completely typical.
The unresisting Saber was stripped of his pants (likely an attempt at sexual humiliation), beaten with fists and batons, dragged roughly off the pavement, and eventually thrown into an armored vehicle, under arrest. Nothing unusual there. That was standard operating procedure for Egyptian cops before the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak and has remained so since.
Light punishments for police
Sexual torture is not uncommonly used in police stations, and punishments are light. In 2007, cops in Cairo filmed themselves beating and sodomizing a bus driver with a stick, to use as leverage to humiliate the driver, who they also had sentenced to three months in jail for "resisting arrest." When the footage leaked onto the Internet, public outrage forced a trial of the police. The two assailants received just three years in jail.
In January 2011, just as the Mubarak regime was entering it's final days, Human Rights Watch detailed Egypt's police torture program in a 100-page report titled "Work on Him Until He Confesses': Impunity for Torture in Egypt".
"Criminal Investigations officers and State Security Investigations (SSI) officers, under the authority of the minister of the interior, are most often responsible for such abuse. This includes beatings, electric shocks, suspension in painful positions, forced standing for long periods, water-boarding, as well as rape and threatening rape to victims and their families," the group wrote.
That Saber was held in a military hospital, and while there appears to have been successfully leaned on to insist it was protesters, not the police, who attacked him, is also pretty standard. A horror of police stations and crossing the police is inculcated in most working class Egyptians, since the intersection of the police and their lives frequently involves paying a bribe or getting abused. He must have been terrified. There is generally impunity for police abuses, and sentences are light when there are convictions.
For instance just two of the police involved in the brutal murder of Khaled Said in 2010 were sentenced for his death. Their prison terms? Seven years. Mr. Said's murder was a key rallying point for the protesters who launched the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in Jan. 2011, with a powerful new set of activists drawn into politics through the "We Are All Khaled Said" Facebook page, which used Said as a symbol for the systematic abuses of the state.
His family believes he was murdered because he was involved in leaking a video taken inside Sidi Gaber that showed policemen dividing up marijuana they'd seized from drug dealers for resale. The beating, on the street in full view of witnesses, left Said's features unrecognizable and his head looking like a caved in melon. Yet just as with the beating of Saber last Friday, the cops tried to claim something else had happened. They said Said had choked to death on drugs he'd tried to swallow to hide from the police.
Saber, has since reversed course, and said that it was in fact the police who attacked and beat him. His fear was perfectly understandable.
In 2007, I wrote about Nasser Seddit Gadallah, an Egyptian plumber who made the mistake of complaining when he was beaten and robbed by a group of cops on the western outskirts of Cairo. Warned at the police station not to complain again, he persisted. A few days later, a group of about 10 cops showed up at his family's third-story apartment, and threw him headfirst to his death off the balcony, while his wife and 9-year-old son watched in horror. There were never any convictions.
Morsi quiet
President Morsi's relative silence on a crime that has infuriated millions of Egyptians is also right out of the past, as have been suggestions from the presidential office that the attack was an isolated incident. Predatory and brutal police behavior is one constant in Egypt, whether at protests, in police stations, or out on the beat.
Dealing with abuses in a piecemeal fashion, and only when they erupt into the headlines, is the old way of doing things. So far, the Muslim Brotherhood seems just fine with that.
One case to follow will be the apparent murder of Mohamed al-Gendy, a young member of the left-leaning Popular Current, who was abducted from Tahrir Square on Jan. 25. He turned up, unconscious and suffering from heavy internal bleeding, at a hospital in Cairo on Jan. 28 after being hurt in what the Health Ministry claimed was a car accident. Egyptian human rights activists and members of his party say his body showed signs of a serious beating and electric shock torture.
Mr. Gendy passed away on Feb. 4. Unfortunately, his case is far more typical than Saber's: no film.
French soldiers patrol the area outside the Sankore Mosque, a world heritage site, in Timbuktu, Thursday. (Benoit Tessier/Reuters)
The French are winning handily in Mali
Some frankly silly thoughts and ideas have been punctured in the past few days about France's invasion of Mali. Most importantly, that the French military effort to roll back the advance of salafy jihadis who had captured much of the north of the country, bringing a reign of amputations and torture to locals for what they deemed violations of Islamic law, would turn into a repeat of Dien Bien Phu, where French forces were defeated by a 45,000 man Viet Minh army backed by both China and the Soviet Union.
Or that it could come to resemble the American experience in the Vietnam War after the US had taken the lead from the French. Or, mon dieu! -- it was going to be just like Afghanistan.
No, it was never going to be like any of these places and historical contingencies. The simple fact that the United States' recent experience of war is of the long, grinding, expensive and inconclusive messes of Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't mean that other nations won't step more nimbly and carefully in their own wars. And while I don't know terribly much about Mali, I do know that the jihadis had nothing anywhere near either the number of fighters nor the powerful outside backers that the Viet Minh had at Dien Bien Phu and the Taliban, thanks to Pakistan's assistance, have today.
RECOMMENDED: 5 big losers in press freedom: Mali and ... Japan?
So here's one lesson we've learned so far: When the conditions are right, it's easier for professional, well-armed soldiers to defeat jihadi insurgents. France's war in Mali began on Jan. 11 and by Jan. 26 it was all but wrapped up.
Of course, a lot of the jihadis simply cut and ran, giving up the towns they'd held for months and in which, as they commonly do wherever they take control of the world, they'd alienated and antagonized the residents.
Could they come back? Sure. Mali's Tuareg's have had a bad relationship with the central government since the state was founded and while both the central government's troops and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) are now eager to see the back of Al Qaeda-inspired groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Ansar al-Dine, they may find it hard to get along with each other for long.
Laura Seay, a political scientist who focuses on central Africa at Morehouse College, explained in Foreign Policy yesterday some of the specifics of Mali and why France has done relatively well so far.
How is Mali different from Afghanistan? First, Mali is not where empires go to die. Afghanistan is well-known as a place that has always been difficult for any outsiders to invade and sustain military engagement, much less establish governing institutions. What governing institutions are established have long been weak and largely decentralized structures that allow local and tribal leaders maximum autonomy. Mali, by contrast, has a longer history of at least some centralized rule. The Mali Empire, which governed a huge swath of West Africa from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, included the renowned city of scholarship in Timbuktu. Mali's colonization by France in 1892 was largely peaceful, and the country has never engaged in a serious war until now, with the exception of a brief and violent border dispute with Burkina Faso in the mid-1980s. France's exit from Mali at the end of colonization was accomplished peacefully as well.
France's engagement in Mali is also unlike U.S. engagement in Afghanistan in that, because of their colonial history, the French know what they are getting into. There are decades of outstanding French scholarship on Mali; France is practically drowning in Mali experts in government, academia, and the private sector. This is more important than many realize; having deep cultural and historical knowledge and a shared language (most educated Malians still speak French) makes it much easier for French forces to relate to average Malians and build friendships with key local leaders whose support will be necessary for long-term success.
As long as we're learning about history, it's also time to put to rest the foolish trope so popular in some American circles that France is a wimpy has-been power that doesn't dare get its feet wet, even in good causes. This month, they've beat back jihadis in Mali, at least giving the country a chance to work out its own internal problems (which of course, it may well fumble again.)
RECOMMENDED: 5 big losers in press freedom: Mali and ... Japan?
(Below, video of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys from the Foreign Legion's 2nd Parachute Regiment arriving in Timbuktu overnight on Monday.)
Egypt shudders, with leadership nowhere in sight
“The continuation of this struggle between the different political forces ... could lead to the collapse of the state."
Those were the words of Egyptian Army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to military academy students, in a speech posted online today.
When the Egyptian military warns of state collapse, it's time to start worrying. Though a coup is unlikely, that's always a subtext when senior officers start talking about those incompetent civilian politicians failing to safeguard the very state itself. And it's worrying enough that he might even believe it.
But the fact is that Egypt is now at yet another dangerously chaotic, polarized point, with at least 50 people dead from four days of clashes in Cairo and the main cities of the economically vital Canal Zone under a state of emergency, with soldiers on the streets. The formation of a national consensus about the future from the elections of the past two years? It never happened. Instead, Egypt today has a Muslim Brotherhood president and a Constitution bitterly opposed by the opposition.
A parliament? The results of that election, which the Muslim Brothers and their Islamist allies won, were annulled by the courts, with a fresh parliamentary election promised by the end of April. The political opposition? In as much disarray as ever. The street protesters? An amalgamation of soccer hooligans, political activists, self-styled anarchists in black balaclavas, and secular political parties with little uniting them beyond their anger at the state of Egypt and the leadership of President Mohamed Morsi.
While the outpouring of popular outrage has sent a message to Morsi, he's shown no signs of flexibility or creativity in responding to it. Secular politicians have brushed off his calls for dialogue, with Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, saying the offered talks are a matter of "form and not content." That is, he expects any such talks to lead nowhere.
Little sensitivity
State television and Brotherhood leaders have denounced "thugs" and cried "anarchy," with little sensitivity to the various grievances fueling both violent mobs and peaceful protests. This week, Egyptians were treated to the irony of the Gama'a Islamiyah, a former terrorist group that helped inspire Al Qaeda (that group's current leader, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a former GI leader), praising Morsi's decision to declare a state of emergency and calling the violence "unacceptable." The GI spent much of the 1990s trying to destroy the Egyptian state with a campaign of assassinations and indiscriminate killings, culminating in the murder of 62 people, most foreign tourists, in the Luxor massacre of 1997.
Amid all this, events are trundling on in a way that says little good about how Morsi and the state security institutions that (nominally at least) answer to him are handling the situation. Egypt's economy has been delivered yet another blow after two years of them – recent events are only going to deter investors and tourists further – and it's hard to see how an International Monetary Fund loan seen as crucial to shoring up the plummeting Egyptian pound (down about 7 percent against the dollar in the past few weeks) could be approved amid all the chaos.
Last night, the Semiramis InterContinental Hotel on the Nile corniche in downtown Cairo was attacked for hours by armed thugs, one of whom was wielding a semi-automatic weapon. The staff's panicked calls to the police and the Army were ignored for hours. The hotel is within a mile of Tahrir Square, the US and other foreign embassies, and a slew of other five-star hotels and multinational offices. Here's how Ahram Online described the scene:
Ahmed Ibrahim, another InterContinental guard described 40 men armed with birdshot guns, knives and a semi-automatic weapon, approach the hotel around 2.30am. They succeeded in breaking through the hotel's fortified shutters. Ahram Online reporter saw electrical wire tied to the metal gates, clearly used to force the doors open. "One had a semi-automatic gun and started shooting inside the building, I was inside trying to hide and call the police, it was terrifying," Abdel-Wahab continues.
Some guests trapped in the hotel, locked themselves in their rooms to avoid the tear gas and bullets, as employees desperately struggled to evacuate the building. After the police failed to appear, Abdel-Wahab says, hotel staff phoned the army. "However they didn't arrive, they left us."
"It was terrible - I was scared to death," recalls Nabila Samak, Director of Marketing and Communications, who made the desperate calls for help from the hotel Twitter account. Samak added that Semiramis staff had even resorted to calling Egyptian TV talk shows to draw attention to their plight.
Yes, the hotel's director of marketing was reduced to issuing panicked calls for help via Twitter (for instance: "PLEASE SEND HELP! SOS"). Soldiers eventually arrived and no one was injured. But the hotel is now closed, and a message has been sent to potential tourists and investors alike that even in the heart of Cairo, the state is not up to the task of providing basic security at the moment.
Meanwhile, state TV has been creating a new bogeyman – the "Black Bloc," a shadowy new protest group that seems inspired in equal measures by the online antics and fashions of hacker collectives like Anonymous and Egypt's hardline soccer supporters groups known as "Ultras." The young men in black balaclava's have participated in some of the unrest of the past few days, but the public prosecutors order for the police and the military to arrest all members of the group today for their "terrorist activities" has more than a hint of scapegoating about it.
To be sure, the emergence of the group, defined entirely by anger at all forms of state authority, does say something powerful about the failure of Egypt's young revolutionaries to create a coherent political movement in the two years since Mubarak was driven from power. Ursula Lindsey writes: "The whole Black Bloc phenomenon is pretty silly. It's a symptom of the immaturity, lack of foresight and drift from peaceful (and seemingly fruitless) protesting to glamorized, indiscriminate, anti-authoritarian violence that has characterized a wing of the protest movement."
Not all protests are created equal. In the gritty canal city of Port Said, where resentment of state authority stretches back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the area suffered the brunt of Egypt's wars with Israel, the violence has largely been about a soccer riot last year that left more than 70 people dead. On Saturday, a court sentenced 21 people to death, most supporters of local club Al Masry, for their participation in the riot, touching off an attempt to storm the prison that left dozens dead. Kristen Chick wrote of the general sense of dispossession and fury among protesters there for us today.
One man pulled out an Egyptian flag and attempted to set it on fire. Some in the crowd tried to stop him, but soon, smoke was rising from the strips of red, white, and black. The crowd broke into cheers at a sight that would be unthinkable in protests in almost any other Egyptian city, where antigovernment protesters raise the flag as they battle with police.
Meanwhile, there was a little-noticed piece of evidence today of the changes the Brothers have wrought in the Egyptian legal system. Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Al Azhar who's been given a legal advisory role in the new Muslim Brotherhood Constitution, formally approved the death sentences of seven people, all tried in absentia, handed down by an Egyptian court last year. Their crime? Involvement in producing an online film clip that insulted the prophet Muhammad and Islam more generally. Most of those sentenced to death are Egyptian Coptic Christians resident in the US.
Though there's still a chance that the sentences will be overturned on appeal, the use of the death penalty to silence expression, however distasteful, sends another message about the direction Morsi is seeking to take Egypt.
This video is part of a series about the Egyptian revolution produced by Samar Media.
Antigovernment banners are reflected in water at Tahrir Square in Cairo January 16. (Suhaib Salem/Reuters)
Tahrir, the saddest square in the world?
Tahrir Square at dusk can be a lonely and forbidding place. When the wind kicks up, trash swirls past the smiling faces of young men killed in clashes against the government that are painted on the walls along Mohamed Mahmoud Street.
And into the filthy stairwells of the local metro station, reeking of urine and abandonment.
And past the small cluster of young toughs who man the homemade barricade they use to keep the vast majority of traffic out of the square.
The ability to cross Tahrir, which used to route traffic through the center of this teeming city, is like the parting of the Red Sea in Cairo today – a rare (and in this case minor) miracle.
A squat young tough is controlling access on this evening. A car rolls up to the barricade – a friend! – and the metal barriers are pulled aside as he is waved through towards the Nile and home with a smile and a high-five. An aging Peugeot sedan with a mother and three young children crammed in, her husband at the wheel, tries to nudge through behind him, but the tough roughly slams the gates shut and begins banging on the hood.
The mother pops out, fuming, and starts screaming abuse at the self-styled revolutionary blocking the way. He laughs and a few of his friends, some holding metal bars, start to drift over. The family gives up and sets off for what promises to be a one-hour trip to navigate the mile or so around the square.
Next up is a furious cab driver, who jumps out of his car yelling that he's trying to make a living, and tries to yank open the barricade. The young man whistles for support and more of his pals run over. An older man, with gray hair and a drooping mustache, comes over, gets in the cab driver's face, and tells him, "Unless you want to walk home, I suggest you leave now." The cabbie gives up and putters away, leaving a stream of curses in his wake, the bedraggled community of Tahrir unruffled by his passage.
Vendors, drifters, football fans
Almost two years after the joyous uprising that drove Mubarak from power, this is the day-to-day depressing reality at Tahrir. The young revolutionaries who filled the square in 2011 are mostly gone now, with the tents now occupied equal parts by vendors, people with seemingly no place else to go, and young members of the Ultras, Cairo's hard-core football supporters clubs.
Are they making a difference at the square? On most days, it doesn't feel like it. The energy and passion are gone. Some enterprising tour guides have started leading foreign tourists through the square to teach them about the "revolution." The real revolution? It's everywhere, in the graffiti and evidence of past battles. But a living revolution? It's hard to feel it here.
Some Egyptian friends disagree, arguing that the square can be galvanized to action at a moment's notice, and that it will play a role in Egypt's transition again. But no matter how many people might be here, there's an emptiness, because Egypt has moved well past the point where being against something was enough. Now is the time for being for something, and that's the sort of political problem that doesn't get fixed with mass protests.
Second anniversary ahead
There are still plenty of real grievances in Egypt, and some are hoping that the square will be revitalized again on Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the uprising. But for now, Tahrir is a desultory and occasionally dangerous place. Last week, ineffective Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Arab League headquarters on one end of the square. At the end of December, Mohanned Samir, a member of the April 6 Movement, was shot in the head in Tahrir. Some suspect that Mr. Samir, a critic of the new Muslim Brotherhood-led regime and of Egypt's military establishment alike, was targeted because he witnessed the killing of Ramy al-Sharqawi, another activist, not far from the square in 2011 and was prepared to testify about it. When he was shot in the head, he had only recently been released from eight months in prison for participating in the violent protests in December 2011.
An Ultra named Mohamed al-Mesri proudly stretches his shirt to show the scar left by six stitches he received when he was knifed on the right-side of his chest a few weeks ago. Who stabbed him? "A thug with a beard." Why is he still at Tahrir? He wants justice for the more than 70 soccer fans killed in clashes at Port Said in February 2012 that most Ultras believe was backed by the military to punish them for supporting the revolution.
The average Cairo resident's experience of post-revolution Egypt is of the horrendous traffic snarls created by the various barricades – including a government-built wall that blocks off the end of the street housing the parliament – that have upped navigating Cairo by car or bus from "nightmare" to "nightmare+." President Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood has become a target of protesters' ire, must be pleased that the average citizen's daily contact with the "revolution" is a bout of frustration, missed appointments, and delays getting to and from work.
There is, of course, some hope in all this. The revolutionaries interested in political change have moved far beyond the square, organizing in political parties or independent groups to push demands that the new Constitution be amended, or that military trials for civilians stop, or for a bigger voice in how Egypt is governed.
But the Tahrir of "The 18 Days," as many Egyptians refer to the uprising that ended Mubarak's reign, is long gone. Two days after Mubarak stepped down, I had already sensed the inevitable shift.
Last night, as I made my way through "liberated" Tahrir Square in Cairo, I was overcome by sadness.
There were signs of organized political actors muscling in on a popular movement whose unity was thanks in part to the beautiful simplicity of their demands. Give us freedom, rid us of Mubarak, let the Egyptian people tend to their own problems. By 10 last night, the first few cars had appeared in the square. Amid the sweeping up, the hugs and congratulations, It oddly felt like an era is over.
The new era can be a better one, but it's increasingly being fought in the often dirty world of politics – a world in which few of the Tahrir activists had any direct experience before the revolution. "We protested once, and it worked, so we protested again and again," says Mustafa Eid, a young Egyptian who has given up on public protests, at least for now. "We kept going back to the same method, but it stopped working. Average people don't see the point."
One of the 14 Egyptian activists accused of working for unlicensed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and receiving illegal foreign funds, speaks with American Robert Becker (l.) of the National Democratic Institute in a cage during their trial in Cairo March 8. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)
Mostly forgotten, Egyptian trial of US NGO workers drags on
Some days Hafsa Halawa just wants it to be over. For the US and Egypt, an eventual verdict could be just the beginning.
An Egyptian-UK dual citizen, Ms. Halawa was one of 15 people in a filthy cage in an Cairo courtroom last week, on trial for the crime of working with two US democracy promotion groups and a German one in 2011. In all, 43 people are on trial for this "crime." The balance are foreign nationals who fled the country, many of them US citizens, rather than face trial.
While there had been some hope for a verdict within the next month, the trial was adjourned until March 6 and could drag on well beyond it at this point. While the stress of a disrupted life and threat of jail time sometimes gets to her, she says she has few regrets about not fleeing the country.
"I wouldn’t call it a choice" to stay behind, she says. "Because my life and my family is here. But I of course could take the (UK) passport and run off. But I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t want it to look that way, that I have done something wrong, that would not sit well with me."
The proceedings – which began with armed raids on the US government-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and a few other groups in Dec. 2011 – have laid bare the limits of international democracy promotion efforts in Egypt in the post-Mubarak era.
Those original raids, with hints in the Egyptian press that the government would seek treason and espionage charges that could carry the death penalty, alarmed both the US government and the organizations and led to a standoff over their foreign employees.
American who stayed behind
Seven of the Americans charged holed up in the US embassy for weeks in early 2012, until the Egyptian government, then run by a military junta, lifted a travel ban on the foreigners. The Americans scurried from the embassy to a US-government plane and fled the country. Among them was Sam LaHood, the IRI director and son of Obama administration Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Robert Becker, a career campaign organizer for Democrats in the US who has also conducted political training from Indonesia to Rwanda, elected to stay behind in solidarity with his Egyptian colleagues and was fired by NDI for his decision.
Mr. Becker says "he has absolutely no regrets" about his decision to stay and refusal to seek sanctuary in the embassy, saying that he felt he couldn't abandon the local people he'd worked with – or the principle of the case. "How dare we preach human rights and democracy and run at the first time we're facing paper felonies," he says. "To me [his Egyptian colleagues] are the future of this country and they're worth fighting for. They had nowhere to run. There was no way I could morally justify hopping on a plane."
The departure of most of the Americans took the air out of musings in Washington that Egypt's US aid would be cut off in retaliation and in general press coverage of the case. Further easing concerns were the eventual charges, around the question of illegally receiving foreign funding for the NGOs, which carries jail time, but not a death sentence. Press coverage has dwindled to a trickle.
Civil society growth at stake
Yet the stakes of the ongoing trial, which is scheduled to resume on March 6, loom large for the future of the development of civil society in Egypt as much as they do for the 13 Egyptians, American, and German who have remained behind. "The government has successfully stigmatized the NGO world," says Becker."
"It’s very lazy to to class this as an American-Egypt battle, or about the former regime versus the revolution," says Halawa, who joined NDI in Cairo in July of 2011 and worked on training Egyptian political parties on grass-roots organization, poll-watching, and outreach. "It’s about civil society in this country and the ramifications are quite huge. You get the feeling that people are quite scared. We joined up with the revolution, to fight for free elections, most of us were election observes, and most of us weren’t planning to stay on much longer."
Halawa and other defendants complain that Egypt's NGO community has not rallied around them, frightened off by the early claims in the Egyptian press that they were spies or guilty of treason. That tactic was a staple of the Mubarak-era, and the meme was pushed hard by Mubarak holdover Fayza Aboul Naga, minister of international cooperation until earlier this year, who had long been at the sharp end of Mubarak-era efforts to prevent civil society from flourishing here.
Working without formal approval
Most of those who fled, the foreigners in management positions at the NGOs, are charged with illegally operating NGOs, including Mr. Becker, notwithstanding that he had no management role and was here as a political parties trainer and election observer. The Egyptians on trial and dual-nationals like Halawa are charged with illegally receiving foreign funds – their paychecks.
The crux of the case is that the NGOs never received formal approval to operate here, despite long-standing working relationships with the foreign ministry and state security. In 2006, the activities of NDI and IRI in Egypt were briefly suspended, though eventually resumed operations after working out an operating relationship with the government. Official registration, though, was never granted.
After the uprising against Mubarak in 2011, the US and other government's increased funding for democracy organizations here. NDI and IRI, which run largely on grants from the US government's National Endowment for Democracy, provided political training to all-comers, from the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party to the April 6 Movement, which played a major role in the democracy protests that swept Mubarak from power.
The case against them appears week, since some arms of the government were openly working with the NGOs at the same time another arm began proceedings against them. "One government agency is doing a commando raid [against NDI, his employer] and another government agency is giving me a laminated bar-coded badge that allowed me to go talk to a judge while voting is going on," says Becker of the situation in late 2011.
Becker, the son of a DC-area firefighter, says he understands why NDI fired him, since he refused their order to leave the country. NDI's working theory was that if all the Americans left, Egypt would drop the case against the Egyptians who stayed behind. His theory was that his departure would make it even easier for the government to prosecute the Egyptians. "I've seen Egyptian activists go to prison for less," he says. "Of course, we'll never know who was right."
For now, all the defendants who remain behind are free to travel under the terms of their bonds. Becker has traveled abroad for work on multiple occasions while he waits for the trial to finish.
That denoument could prove ugly from the perspective of those who fled. Egypt's system doesn't allow the accused to provide a defense if they're not present in court, and almost always hands down convictions in absentia, so it's possible that Becker and the others here in Cairo could be acquitted while Mr. LaHood and the others are convicted, notwithstanding that they're all essentially facing the same charges.
Fighting a battle alone
Though the background to the charges is clearly political, Halawa says "I have complete faith that politics doesn’t have influence on this case. The judge has been very fair, to the letter of the law, which should technically mean innocence for everyone," she says. "The in absentia verdicts for those not here are something else … but that’s not really my problem."
She says she has some bitterness with the way NDI has handled the proceedings since they started. But her real dissapointment is with Egyptian civil society groups that, she says, have failed to rally around their cause.
"It’s not about me or my story being told, but about this idea that no one in this country ... no one is talking about this case and quite simply we’re all fed up with having to fight this battle on our own. We’ve been stung quite hard enough by politics and civil society in this country so that it’s quite unlikely that any of us will go back into this field in Egypt any time soon again."
After saying that, Halawa pauses briefly and reconsiders.
"I accept there’s much more important stuff that’s happening, but you kind of reach the point when you’re like, 'when are you going to start speaking up?'" She continues: "Either you want to work for a transition or not. I will defend to the hilt what we did and I am very proud of what I did. I got to travel Egypt, met people who changed the way I look at this country and the way I view this transition and this revolution and it’s motivated me more to stay somehow in politics or some arm of civil society when it's all over."
(This story was edited after posting to correct the name of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation).
The 'Brotherhoodization' of Egypt and its unions (+video)
Issandr El Amrani, the main writer behind The Arabist, has been posting occasional links and thoughts on the Brotherhoodization of Egyptian institutions, real and imagined, since the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi as president.
A few days ago he pointed to the failure of Egypt's new constitution to devolve powers from Egypt's traditionally strong central state to the provinces and the power that gives to President Morsi and his appointees to control politics at the local level. In Egypt's recent cabinet reshuffle what caught his eye in particular was the appointment of Brotherhood stalwart Mohamed Beshir as minister of local development, since he was given an expanded role in selecting governors, who are appointed, not elected, in Egypt. An article in Al-Masry Al-Youm ("Egypt Today") says Beshir's ministry is currently planning on changing eight Egyptian governors, with the new officials coming from the ranks of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and Salafi Al Nour Party.
"This is probably a more significant move than the cabinet shuffle. Governors have tremendous powers in Egypt, particularly ahead of an election. That all come from politics — the FJP and Nour parties — rather than the senior civil service, police, universities etc. as was the case under Mubarak is a striking change. It will certainly fuel the accusations of "Brotherhoodization" of the state, this time with some merit. Constitutionally, President Morsi has the right to appoint governors or delegate that privilege. It's one of the many shames of the new constitution it does not include mechanisms for direct election of governors and the empowerment of local government."
Today he flags a new piece by Joel Beinin, a historian of Egyptian labor and industrialization at Stanford University, which reinforces the sense that Morsi and the leaders of the Brotherhood are seeking to adapt the institutions and methods of Mubarak's Egypt to their own rule, rather than fundamentally change the top-down way the country has almost always been governed.
Beinin writes that on Nov. 25, Morsi issued a presidential decree on labor unions that received scant attention in the press, coming as it did on the heels of a decree that issued him broad powers designed to help him rush through Egypt's new constitution. That earlier decree sparked clashes and a political stand-off that ended in a Brotherhood victory when the constitution was passed. But Decree 97 of 2012 could have far reaching implications for how Egypt is governed going forward.
The decree governs how the leaders of Egypt's state-controlled Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (ETUF) will be chosen, and could lead to Brotherhood packing the government-sponsored sub-unions with their own men.
"The decree also authorizes Minister of Manpower and Migration Khalid al-Azhari of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party to appoint replacements to vacant trade union offices if no second-place candidate exists. State security officials banned thousands of opposition trade unionists from running in 2006, so hundreds of candidates ran unopposed. Thus, as many as 150 Muslim Brothers could be appointed to posts in ETUF’s 24 national sector unions, while 14 of 24 executive board members will be sacked," Beinin writes.
He continues:
Decree 97 also extends the terms of incumbent union office-holders for six months or until the next ETUF elections (whichever comes first). Muslim Brothers and ETUF old guard figures will supervise those elections and likely confirm their joint control over the organization. This is characteristic of the Muslim Brotherhood’s recent political practice. Rather than reform institutions and power centers of the Mubarak regime, it has sought to extend its control over them. But as in other spheres, they do not have a concrete program or enough trained personnel to manage ETUF. Therefore, they are dividing control of the organization with Mubarak era figures. Their common interest is first and foremost bureaucratic—to maintain their positions. The Brothers also seek to limit the extent of independent trade unionism, as it constitutes a potential opposition to their free market ideology.
That last sentence is worth emphasizing, since it's a point often missed about the Brothers in the West. The movement's economic ideology is largely free market capitalist, and strong independent trade unionism as about the furthest thing from the minds of the movement's leaders.
Beinin points out there were 3,150 strikes and other workers actions in the first eight months of last year, and with Egypt currently negotiating an austerity program in exchange for a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, the chance for more unemployment and labor unrest is high.
In hindsight, an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes across Egypt that started in the middle of the last decade helped set the stage for the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011. While it looks clear that the new government, just like the old one, will seek to push labor organization into easily controlled government proxies, stuffing the genie back into the bottle may prove difficult.
In 2007, I quoted American University in Cairo Political Science Professor Mohammed Kamel al-Sayyid in a piece on the then-blossoming strike wave, which was being fueled by IMF-urged policies that had sped up economic growth, but left wages stagnant and unemployment high.
Mohammed Kamel al-Sayyid, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, says the country's labor unrest could, over the long term, prove one of the greatest threats to the stability of the system, as a generation of Egyptians brought up to count on government jobs for life confront a new reality.
"This unprecedented wave of worker strikes certainly seems connected to the government's liberalization policies," he says. "I'm not saying there's going to be a revolution, but there's this ongoing process of deterioration in public trust. How many cops do you have to put on the streets to counter all this public frustration?"
Those risks, clearly, remain today. And now it is Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood's problem.
President Mohamed Morsi (c.) meets with his cabinet including 10 new ministers after their swearing in at the presidential palace in Cairo, Sunday. (Egyptian Presidency/AP)
In Egypt a new cabinet, but same old IMF problem
A senior International Monetary Fund official visited Cairo to discuss the type of concessions Egypt would be willing to make in exchange for a $4.8 billion loan that the government hopes will stem the precipitous decline of the Egyptian pound.
The conversation included the new and politically untested Finance Minister al-Mursi al-Sayed Hegazy, a professor of Islamic Finance with no track record in politics until he was sworn in as part of a cabinet reshuffle on Sunday. Minister Hegazy, a career academic, said he was "completely ready" to cut a deal with the IMF, at a time when Egypt's public coffers have been drained.
Egyptian foreign currency reserves now stand at about $15 billion, down from $36 billion at the time former President Hosni Mubarak was pushed from power in Feb. 2011. Much of that money has been spent in the beleaguered defense of the pound, which has lost about 4 percent of its value against the dollar in the past week.
That's why there's so much pressure to secure a deal with the IMF (famous for demanding tax increases and subsidy cuts from clients) at a time when the Egyptian economy is suffering from a collapse in tourism and a withdrawal of investment.
But the economic – and political costs – of an IMF deal could be steep, with the Fund urging Egypt to raise taxes on a raft of basic goods and ultimately cut deeply into the subsidies that millions of Egyptian's rely on to survive.
Talk to an Egyptian cab driver, a housewife, the man that collects the rubbish, or a shop owner, and the refrain is the same: "Prices are rising, and our incomes remain the same."
Mustafa Said, who collects garbage in central Cairo and sells the recyclables such as glass and cardboard, says "the revolution promised a better situation, but it's only gotten harder to simply eat every day."
The last time President Mohamed Morsi's government sought to raise taxes was in December. It quickly reversed course amid violence outside the presidential palace in Cairo sparked by Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood's efforts to drive through a new Egyptian constitution with hardly any input from Egypt's secular-leaning political groups.
While Morsi ultimately won the battle regarding the constitution, Egypt's political turmoil is far from over, with a promised parliamentary election slated for less than two months away.
A deal?
Will a deal with the IMF – which, no matter how well-crafted, is likely to create short-term economic pain – see the Muslim Brothers punished at the polls? And will a new parliament accept an agreement crafted by Morsi and his allies shortly before lawmakers take office? These political questions are being weighed by both Morsi and IMF officials.
For now, all signs point to a deal. In addition to Hegazy's comment, IMF Middle East Director Masood Ahmed told reporters after meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil and ahead of a sit-down with Morsi: "We will attend many meetings with the Egyptian government today. The technical team will come later. All details will be discussed."
The IMF has not been publicly specific about what it wants, and the Egyptian public has been left largely in the dark about what's being agreed to, which could make the deal a tough sell to average people once it's signed. Last November, the IMF did hint at the rough contours of what it wants. The Fund frequently speaks of the things it demands as coming from the desires of the sovereign they're dealing with, to avoid the public impression they're dictating to governments.
"Fiscal reforms are a key pillar under the program," the IMF's division chief for the Middle East and Central Asia Andres Bauer said in a statement last November. “Fiscal reforms" generally mean government spending cuts. That is, austerity. Mr. Bauer continued: "The authorities plan to reduce wasteful expenditures, including by reforming energy subsidies and better targeting them to vulnerable groups. At the same time, the authorities intend to raise revenues through tax reforms, including by increasing the progressivity of income taxation and by broadening the general sales tax (GST) to become a full-fledged value added tax (VAT)."
While the IMF is hoping that subsidies and social welfare programs will be better focused on the neediest, mechanisms to do so are often tricky and such ideas usually prove much easier on paper than in reality. It's clear the IMF is hoping for big changes. In the November statement, the Fund spoke of reducing Egypt's "large budget sector deficit" from 11 percent of gross domestic product in the last fiscal year to 8.5 percent in the fiscal year ending 2014.
What's more, the IMF hopes Egypt's "primary deficit" – essentially the balance of a government's revenue and expenses minus interest costs on existing debt – will plummet from 4 percent in the last fiscal year to almost zero in the fiscal year ending 2014 and to become a surplus by the year ending 2015.
That will require a swift, and drastic restructuring of Egyptian government spending and tax collection in the blink of an eye. Is it the right thing to do for Egypt's economic health long term? Arguably so. But it's hard to imagine avoiding serious pain for average consumers in the short and medium term.
Egypt is heading into dangerous waters. Proposed tax increases will hit the poorest hardest, and the government is focused on cutting fuel subsidies later this year, which will affect the price of everything from fresh fruit to cement. The country has a history of bread riots, and high food inflation in the winter of 2010/2011 contributed to the uprising against the government here and in neighbors like Tunisia.
Back to the cabinet reshuffle
And that comes back to the cabinet reshuffle. Three new ministers loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party were sworn in, as was a new interior minister after his predecessor was blamed for allowing protesters to burn Muslim Brotherhood offices in Cairo and briefly besiege the presidential palace, which forced Morsi to rapidly leave in a convoy by a back exit.
New Interior Minister Gen. Mohamed Ibrahim, now responsible for the police and internal security, vowed upon being sworn in Sunday that the police "will strike with an iron fist whoever compromises the security of the country and its people."
With painful economic concessions and what promises to be a raucous election looming, not to mention the second anniversary of the start of the uprising against Mubarak on Jan. 25, General Ibrahim may well have his work cut out for him.
The IMF, meanwhile, may find it hard to get any deal struck now to stick long term.
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