Part 2 tension grows in Egypt Lydia Moneir, daily news editor, shares her thoughts and experiences as an Egyptian facing a second revolution. A few weeks before the demonstrations, I pulled into a gas station – there was no gas. A man who worked there said I should try two places nearby; both gas stations were dry. “Morsi is going to make beggars of us all,” he said. Egypt is half a world away from most of the people reading this, and I can’t convince you to care about what happens to it. I can say that the Egyptian youth have proven that they will consistently organize to reject any authoritarian government forced on the nation— showing that movements from the people have power. Maybe this mass of demonstrations came as a surprise to the rest of the world, but it was clear to me that things had gotten significantly worse since I was last in Egypt. Power outages and fuel shortages plagued the country, and everywhere I went people grumbled about Morsi destroying the country. In the year that Mohamed Morsi ruled as president of Egypt, the economy worsened with out of control inflation and skyrocketing prices, people were imprisoned for insulting Morsi, and there were several attempts by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to create an Islamist stranglehold on the government and country. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw posters urging people to protest against Morsi covering almost every flat surface in Cairo at least a month before it all happened, all with the date of June 30th, marking one year of Morsi’s rule. Building Tension. One of Morsi’s most controversial moves came in November 2012, when he issued a decree that fired Egypt’s attorney general and gave the president sweeping powers, including the right to make decisions that were above all levels of judicial review. This decree was rescinded after major street demonstrations and outrage from the Egyptian people, but the balance of power in Egypt continued to tilt towards the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. There are two houses of parliament in Egypt – the House of Representatives, which is meant to play the more important role in drafting legislation, and the Consultative Council, which had limited powers. However, the Supreme Constitutional Council (SCC) ruled that the Islamist-dominated House of Representatives election was invalid due to fraud so it was dissolved. Without the House of Representatives, the majority Islamist Consultative Council had more legislative power by default until new elections could be held. The new constitution was written and rushed through by the Consultative Council, even after secularist and non-Islamist members of the assembly walked out –some leaving the council altogether– in opposition to it because many of the laws were seen as Islamist and oppressive to women, secularists and Christians. A referendum passed the constitution, with a very low voter turnout of 32.89 percent. At the time, many who had supported the Muslim Brotherhood felt betrayed by their actions since taking power, but felt that voting “no” would be siding with the opposition, which they didn’t support either. Many others simply felt disheartened by the clear move away from democracy and felt that voting in itself had no meaning. Opposition members also told people to boycott the vote because those who wrote the constitution did not represent Egyptians as a whole. Now Egypt had a broken government and a flawed constitution that did not represent the people. Two weeks before the looming demonstration date June 30, Morsi gave a speech, surrounded by his supporters. He sat on the podium by men who had previously been tried and imprisoned for terrorism and pardoned by Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mufti – interpreters of Muslim scripture – announced on-stage that protesters against Morsi were not real Muslims, but infidels. Many Egyptian news pundits expressed shock over this, and other things said by their Islamist fellows on stage, which were thinly veiled threats of violence against protesters. The Muslim Brotherhood frequently attacked protesters’ faith, fueling the anger of many moderate Egyptian Muslims who felt as if they were being threatened into silence. With Islamists holding powerful positions they had little or no right to —and opposition either being ignored or met with threats and imprisonment— the Egyptian people were left without a democratic process to stanch the flow of the Brotherhood’s growing power. So they took to the streets. On July 1, I attended a large demonstration at the presidential palace in Cairo. The streets were clogged with people and cars, Egyptian flags waving in so many places it was as though Cairo had been painted red, white and black. As I walked through side streets to get to one of the larger protests at the Presidential Palace, people streamed back and forth from the demonstration, with signs exclaiming, “leave” to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, with their children hoisting flags. Reacting to the Muslim Brotherhood’s elitist and discriminatory mutation of Islam, people chanted that Christians and Muslims were all Egyptians, carrying a popular emblem of the Muslim crescent moon and Christian cross combined. In a speech on live television the next day, Morsi’s reaction to protests was to insist his presidency was democratic and legitimate, and thus indisputable. He offered protesters no concessions and rejected the military’s 48-hour ultimatum to reach a compromise agreement with the opposition. Back in 2012, Morsi won the presidency with only a 3.5 percent margin against a member of the old regime that had just been toppled. That was before Egyptians had any experience of what it was like to be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that had been illegal in Egypt since 1958, when the Brotherhood was convicted of attempting to assassinate the then secular leader of Egypt. Not only was Morsi’s victory a slim one, but it also stank of fraud – pre-marked ballots were discovered, presiding judges were found to be fake, and the Muslim Brotherhood gave money and food to the poor of Egypt’s countryside and then bussed them to voting stations. So much for Morsi’s indisputable legitimacy.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 18:20:42 +0000
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