Days of Rage (Egypt)

[n2doc]

BY DAVID REMNICK


From the start of the Arab Spring, it has always been worth remembering that the ecstasies of uprising are rarely followed by immediate pacific and democratic resolution. The Terror and Bonapartism shadowed the storming of the Bastille. The American Revolution did not emancipate the slaves; a gulf of nearly two centuries lay between Washington’s march and the March on Washington. The hopes of the Prague Spring, in 1968, crushed by Moscow’s tanks, did not revive until 1989. And, in the former Soviet imperium, democratic Prague is a happy exception. What is Vladimir Putin if not the scowling visage of history, a secret policeman who mocks the earnest ambitions of liberty?

And yet, after the bloody events in Egypt last week, it strains decency to ask historical patience of the bereaved. Nearly seven hundred people were killed and four thousand wounded—a slaughter initiated by the military commander, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a man no longer willing to countenance protests against the coup that brought him to power. The spectacle of defiance—of thousands of supporters of the deposed President, Mohamed Morsi, staging sit-ins in Cairo, Giza, and elsewhere—had to end, General Sisi declared. Municipal traffic could no longer be rerouted. “We bent over backwards to bring in the Brotherhood,” an official in Cairo airily informed the Wall Street Journal. “No responsible government could take any more of this.”

So it began. On August 14th, Sisi and his allies, claiming unconvincingly that the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators were “terrorists” responsible for hoarding huge quantities of arms, acted as a junta is apt to. The Interior Ministry promised that security forces would clear the streets with the gentleness of lambs, in order “not to shed any Egyptian blood.” Instead, they set out, at around 7 a.m., armed with tear gas and bulldozers, and moved quickly to live fire. They aimed, according to witnesses, at the head, neck, and chest.

You can mistrust the politics and the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can point out that, during its year at the head of an elected government, it exploited its victory to embed its religious ideology and its goals as deeply as possible in the new constitution. Its views on women’s rights, its efforts to intimidate journalists, and attacks by its supporters on Coptic churches and Christian believers are just a few of its deplorable features. The history of the Brotherhood and of its impact in the Middle East inspires no admiration. But how does a military coup, along with the kidnapping of an elected President, and widespread, indiscriminate arrests, announce the resumption of democratic practice? Islamists make up roughly a third of the Egyptian population. The slaughter on the streets will surely radicalize many of them, and set back democratic development throughout the region.


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