Two massacres committed by the Egyptian army in one week. At least 130 people killed in Cairo for protesting against the military coup. It is worse than a crime (as the French diplomat Talleyrand remarked when Napoleon ordered a particularly counter-productive execution). It is a mistake.
It is also a crime, of course. Only trained snipers could produce so many victims who have been shot in the head or the heart. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Adly Mansour, the tame president he has installed, tell the kind of lies that generals and politicians always tell when this sort of thing is going on, but the reports of foreign journalists on the scene leave no room for doubt: this is murder.
But it is, above all, a mistake. When the army overthrew the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, on July 3, it must have known that his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood would take to the streets. And it must have had a plan for dealing with those protests.
The simplest plan would be just to wait the protesters out. At least in Cairo, even larger number of people would go to Tahrir Square and support the coup — so use minimum force, contain the demonstrations by both sides and wait for people to get bored and go home.
In the meanwhile, push on with the process of rewriting the constitution to remove the Islamic bits inserted last year by Morsi’s party and hold a new election as soon as possible.
Was this really Gen. Sisi’s scenario for the future when he overthrew Morsi’s government? Maybe — but it wouldn’t have taken long for the soldiers to understand it wasn’t going to work.
The turning point would have come when Sisi or his advisers finally realized the Muslim Brotherhood could wait it out too. If the Brotherhood was really free to run again in the promised election next year, it might win again. That would be catastrophic for the army’s privileged position in Egypt — so the Brotherhood had to be excluded from politics.
This is a charitable take on Sisi’s motives. The likelier explanation, alas, is he planned to ban the Brotherhood from the start. The “deep state,” permanent collusion between well-fed Egyptian soldiers and bureaucrats and the foreign military and commercial interests who feed them, is making a comeback. And the political idiots on Tahrir Square are cheering it on.
Either way, the army’s political project now requires the massive use of force: the supporters of the Brotherhood must be driven from the streets, by murder if necessary, and its leaders must be criminalized and banned. And other political idiots in the West are going along with that too.
President Barack Obama is uncomfortable with what is happening but he won’t call it a coup. Instead, he calls it a “post-revolution transition,” and promises the United States will be a “strong partner to the Egyptian people as they shape their path to the future.” It’s hard to see how the Egyptians can find their way back to democracy from where they are now.
Even worse, the Egyptian coup is stark proof political Islam cannot succeed by taking the democratic path. The message it conveys to devout Islamists all over the Arab world is Osama bin Laden was right: only by violence can their political project succeed.
Thanks a bunch, Gen. Sisi.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.