The fresh turmoil in Egypt has illustrated that a new dynamic is at play throughout the Middle East and that the army must step down from power immediately after the parliamentary elections this Monday. They won’t of course but that’s because they have become greedy for power. Let’s call the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces what it really is – a junta.
Making vague promises to step down in 2013, hoping popular anger will have dampened down by then and so they won’t need to is cynical. Fanning sectarian division by trying to isolate the Copts and cracking down on them is both cynical and dangerous – it could lead to another Iraq situation. Locking up 12,000 civilians since February via the medium of military courts is just plan nasty. Stating bluntly through their civilian proxies that they will have a veto on any military budgetary issues and on the new constitution makes a lot of Egyptians wonder what their revolution was in the first place.
Maybe the army hoped to have a regime such as previously in Turkey and still current in Thailand, when they could step in at a moment’s notice from behind the façade of democratic trappings. The iron fist in the velvet glove, a praetorian government. I remember one demonstrator in February praising the soldiery after they had protected the protestors and removed Hosni Mubarak, effusive in rose-tinted history, as he said the Egyptian army had never attacked its own people. If this was true, then it is no longer.
Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi was rumoured back in February to be even more dismissive of the idea of democracy than Mubarak. While the latter feared the rise of religious extremism with the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the ruling of the country, Tantawi, a career apparatchik, was just contemptuous of free and fair elections. In his role as interim head of state, Tantawi is unapproachable and hopes to mould public opinion through rigid control of state-run television stations and newspapers. He seems an unlikely convert to representative government, as much as Tsar Nicholas II was reconciled to governing Russia with a duma parliament. Russia had two revolutions – a popular one and a zealously authoritarian one. Tantawi (and the jailed Mubarak) should not forget that it was the second revolution that claimed the life of Nicholas Romanov and his family.