Tag Archives: Egypt

Have Palestinians lost faith in rising up?

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In my analysis for Foreign Policy yesterday, I argued that the PA currently has no viable way of regaining full legitimacy with its own people, and could face some sort of popular protest against it. Today On January 31 Amira Hass had an essay in Haaretz arguing that after two intifadas in as many decades, Palestinians might not ready for another massive upheaval.

I think this assessment is mostly correct, so I am quoting it here as a way of augmenting my own assessment of how Egypt will impact Palestine. But I also think we’re also seeing some new activism by young Palestinians demanding accountability from both the PA and Hamas. These groups couching their demands in terms of unity, not democracy, which is probably a smart decision. In a conversation earlier this week, a young activist in Gaza pointed out to me that Hamas would simply not allow a democracy rally, but is allowing a unity rally to go forward.

Here’s Hass. The meat is at the end of the article:

Both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian authorities have already proven their excellent ability to suppress demonstrations. Is this what is preventing Palestinians from expressing solidarity with their Arab brethren, who for years were inspired by the scenes of the Palestinian intifada?

The fear that the protests will be suppressed is not the central reason, said a friend who is older than the young people who sought to demonstrate in Ramallah and Gaza.

“We instigated two intifadas and look what came of them – the situation only got worse,” he told me. “The first brought us the Palestinian Authority and then the expansion of the settlements; the second – destruction, Israeli repression that is worse than before, and the Hamas regime. People are depressed. They don’t see any point in protests. The hope that the dictatorship of occupation would fall if we took to the streets – like in Tunisia and Egypt – has evaporated.”

Mubarak’s speech: Deepening crisis

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Rumors that President Hosni Mubarak would announce his resignation in a televised address to the nation on Thursday evening sent jubilant protesters streaming into Cairo’s Tahrir square. After hours of anticipation, Mubarak took to the airwaves, declaring that he was clinging to office while “delegating” certain powers.

The immediate reaction of the protesters in Tahrir—holding shoes in the air, chanting “He must go!”—demonstrated that, whatever Mubarak intended to do with his speech, it backfired. As AlJazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin said of the speech: “One thing it will definitely do is mobilize protesters tomorrow, that’s for sure.”

Mubarak threw down the gauntlet tonight. The January 25th movement has proven surprisingly resilient so far, and it shows no signs of quitting.

Aside from that, there are many question marks here. One, obviously, is the role of the military—”Communique Number One” from the Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces—in creating the confusion ahead of Mubarak’s speech, and determining events going forward.  As analyst Tony Karon tweeted, “Never mind Mubarak’s valedictory, I’m waiting for Communique #2.”

Cairo-based analyst Issandr El-Amrani, who I had the pleasure of meeting in December, points out that the military has already been playing a role in countering the revolution, and has also probably already carried out a sort of coup:

Word of this is going to spread and will begin to counter the dominant narrative in Egyptian media about the people and the army being one. The longer this crisis persists, the more difficult for the army to continue either playing a double game or sitting on the fence. With Omar Suleiman’s threats of coups and the protests spreading to work stoppages across the country, decision time will be coming for the protestors to make up their minds about the army (or launch a more pronounced campaign to persuade commanders), for the army’s leadership to decide how it will proceed in a context where it is losing control, and for rank-and-file in the military to decide where they stand in all this.

‘We are not leaving until Mubarak leaves’

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Egyptian activist and blogger Mona Seif (@monasosh on Twitter) provided some of the most dramatic eyewitness testimony yet  from  Tahrir Square in Cairo live on Al-Jazeera English early on Thursday morning.

It could become an iconic moment of the Egyptian uprising (although there have been many). Speaking over the sound of gunfire, she describes how she and her fellow demonstrators refuse to leave the square. Weeping, she describes one of her comrades being shot in the head by pro-Mubarak gangs. (Thanks, Mondoweiss, for finding the video):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBJwsjakcg&feature=player_embedded]

Blogger and net activist Jillian York transcribed parts of the interview:

If everyone is so concerned, why is Mubarak still there and we’re losing people every minute?

When asked, “What would you like to say to the world?”

We are not leaving this place. There are only two options for the world: Either they stick to mubarak and his regime and we lose thousands of people in this square and it goes from Liberation Square to Massacre Square. Or, they say no to mubarak’s regime and give people here a chance at a real life.

She was then asked who was in the crowds. Her response:

A lot of them are teenage kids, very few of them are older than 25. It’s astonishing but it really is sad because we know this can be avoided and they don’t have to waste their lives.

The presenter then asked if she was reassured by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s earlier words that the violence from the pro-Mubarak side was shocking. Mona responded:

Not really, this is the same hilary clinton who a week ago said mubarak’s country is stable. What would be assuring is for me to hear that Mubarak is about to give an urgent speech and say he is leaving.

Egypt’s curious elections

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I am in Cairo at the moment, where there is talk of the upcoming parliamentary elections. The Arabist’s Issandr El-Amrani steers us to this interesting  article in MERIP by Mona El-Ghoshashy, who explains why opposition parties participate in these elections (defying, for example, Mohamed ElBaradei’s call for a boycott), even though the overall outcome is a foregone conclusion:

Opposition groups enter elections not to win a majority, and certainly not to govern, but rather to build political standing. They cultivate new and old constituencies, lambaste the government and advertise their own integrity, and seek places in Parliament to counteract their exclusion from other national power structures. Given the default exclusion, to boycott Parliament would be tantamount to accepting political invisibility. Official status as MPs gives opposition members access to the state bureaucracy overseeing services to their districts and the standing to meet with foreign delegations. Most Egyptians avoid elections altogether because they can be physically dangerous or because there is nothing in it for them. But citizens’ stance toward elections is not fixed and depends on the nature of their ties to the political contestants in a given cycle: Some voters seek basic goods and services that they do not get otherwise, while others support particular candidates for ideological or kinship reasons.

Is the Israel lobby blocking Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Turkey?

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My interview with the Ambassador Charles Freeman (whose nomination to chair the National Intelligence Council was stymied by Israel lobbyists) was published on Friday. Freeman said a lot of compelling and thoughtful things in our talk about US myopia in the Middle East, but the one really newsy nugget was the following:

I asked Freeman if the right-wing elements of the pro-Israel lobby have been successful in blocking nominations since his. He told me that the lobby is holding up the confirmation of Frank Ricciardone (pictured to the right), an imminently qualified diplomat, as ambassador to Turkey:

CF: Oh I think they’ve had a major impact in blocking people and you can see this. They’re not always successful. They’re not omnipotent by any means and the fact that they came out of the closet, as it were, and into the light in my case I think hurt them considerably, because basically they don’t like to leave fingerprints when they do things because it leads to accusations of people skeptical about them that they’re too powerful, that they’ve abused their positions. There’s always at least one or two campaigns going on, and there are a couple going on at the moment.

JM: What are those campaigns?

CF: Well, one is against the nomination of Frank Ricciardone as ambassador to Turkey. He’s served previously as ambassador to the Philippines, Egypt, and most recently as deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, so he’s certainly put in his time in tough places, speaks Turkish, is I think is much better qualified than anyone else put forward as a candidate, and yet is alleged [during his time in] Egypt to have been insufficiently supportive of this particular agenda.

It has emerged over the past several weeks that Sen. Sam Brownback placed a hold on Ricciardone’s confirmation based on a range of ideological concerns. Spencer Ackerman summed up Brownback’s objections: Ricciardone is not a neocon.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy has apparently been one of the only reporters out there following this story. He initially reported that Republican opposition to Ricciardone was related to his reluctance to push Bush’s “democracy agenda,” during his time as ambassador to Egypt. He also apparently pissed off Elliot Abrams.

Then Rogin obtained and published a letter from Brownback to Hilary Clinton laying out the case against the ambassador. In the letter, Brownback lays out a variety of concerns, all of them ideological (that he didn’t support neocon policies toward Iraq, and reiterating the charge that he didn’t do enough to promote human rights in Egypt) and not relating to Ricciardone’s qualifications as a diplomat.

And then, at the end of the letter, Brownback comes out with this: “I am also concerned that we have not fully considered the ramifications of a Turkish tilt toward Iran and away from Israel, and I will give those issues some attention before the Senate reconvenes in September.”

And this narrow concern for Israel, Charles Freeman’s remarks suggest, is Brownback’s real motivation.

Sam Brownback, don’t forget, is a Christian Zionist (one of the founders of Christians United for Israel) who is on the record opposing the creation of a Palestinian state and supporting the forceful expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. His record on this issue, to me, makes his stated concern for human rights in Egypt sound disingenuous at best. His complaints about Ricciardone’s stances on Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey are all avatars for one of the defining disputes in the Middle East: the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Egypt cracks down on anti-police brutality protests

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A big shout-out to Tabula Gaza and 3arabawy.

New York – Two Egyptian police agents beat a teenager to death in Alexandria on Tuesday, setting off a wave of protests by human rights advocates.

According to bloggers and journalists in the crowd in Cairo, Egypt’s security forces responded to those demonstrations on Sunday with a new round of arrests an beatings.

Police arrested 11 people as stopped protesters from reaching the Ministry of the Interior in central Cairo, witnesses told the German news agency DPA. Police blocked all streets leading to the building. Bloggers reporting from Cairo said the number of arrests could be as high as 60.

Egyptian blogger 3arabawy posted this video online showing a scene of chaos as police encircled demonstrators. He also reported demonstrators chanting calls for revolution and for beheading President Hosni Mubarak.

“We thought they would just interrogate him or ask him questions. But they took him as he struggled with his hands behind his back and banged his head against the marble table inside here,” Mosbah said in an interview conducted by a journalist from the liberal opposition al-Ghad newspaper.

Mosbah said he told the police to take it outside and they hauled Said into the doorway of a nearby building. He did not emerge alive, said the cafe owner.

A fact-finding mission by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, confirmed the cafe owner’s account.

“They dragged him to the adjacent building and banged his head against an iron door, the steps of the staircase and walls of the building,” the Cairo-based organization said in a statement Sunday.

“Two doctors happened to be there and tried in vain to revive him but (the police) continued beating him,” the statement said, adding that Said was well regarded by his friends.

The Cairo protest also comes a day after the Egyptian government barred hundreds of activists from entering the Gaza Strip. Egypt’s complicity in the Israeli-led blockade of Gaza has also been a source of anger for the Egyptian public, who overwhelmingly sympathize with Palestinians.

An earlier video of the Cairo demonstration showed a lively crowd facing off with riot police.

ElBaradei calls for Egypt election boycott

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IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who reportedly won the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood last week, called for a boycott of Egypt’s elections in an interview with Al-Quds Al-Arabi that appeared on Sunday.

ElBaradei said the upcoming presidential election is nothing more than “democratic window-dressing” (my translation).

Also last week the Brotherhood failed to win any seats in the upper house of the Egyptian parliament, proof, they said, that the vote was rigged.

Mystery rockets in Jordan

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One of the weirder stories in a while. Jordan’s government says Grad rockets fired from outside the country landed near Aqaba today. Of course Israel says the rockets were really intended for Eilat. The speculation now is that the missiles were somehow fired from Egypt.

Israel has been complaining about “militant activity” in the Sinai for some time now. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. Driving across the Sinai on the way to Gaza last September, I remember being surprised at how militarized the area is, mukhabarat checkpoints everywhere.

Of course there is plenty of smuggling and trafficking going on there. One gets the sense that while the Egyptian government tolerates some smuggling (into Gaza for example), they won’t, for example, allow heavy weapons into Gaza.