Egypt's national tragedy took a turn
towards farce April 27, when Saudi Arabia closed
its embassy and several consulates after
demonstrations that "threaten the security and
safety of Saudi and Egyptian employees, raising
hostile slogans and violating the inviolability
and sovereignty", according to a Saudi statement.
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States were supposed
to anchor an international aid package that will
forestall a disorderly financial crisis.
With a critical fuel shortage cutting into
food supplies and essential services, Egyptians
already have a foretaste of chaos. The
two-for-a-penny pita, the subsidized flat bread
that provides much of the caloric intake for the
half of Egypt's population living on less than $2
a day, is at risk.
A battle over the
Muslim Brotherhood's international ambitions
may push Egypt over the
edge into a Somali level of horror. I warned in
this space on April 11 [1] that the Muslim
Brotherhood thinks that it can thrive on chaos.
The anti-Saudi demonstrations support this
interpretation of the Brotherhood's actions.
The anti-Saudi demonstrations began after
a Saudi court sentenced an Egyptian lawyer, Ahmed
el-Gezawi, to a year in prison and 20 lashes for
offending the Saudi monarch King Abdullah. It's
not clear who started them, but Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood apparently encouraged them.
The Saudis claim that Gezawi was smuggling
Xanax into the kingdom. Just who started the
demonstrations against Saudi embassies and
consulates is unclear, but the Muslim Brotherhood
is holding a net to catch the fallout. As Reuters
reported April 28,
The Muslim Brotherhood's political
party said the protests at the Saudi embassy
showed "the desire of Egyptians to preserve the
dignity of their citizens in Arab states".
Analysts point to the rise of the Brotherhood as
a cause of Saudi concern about the direction of
the post-Mubarak Egypt.
As I reported
April 11, [2] the Brotherhood prefers an early
economic crisis to a later one, so that it can
blame the disaster on the present military
government. The Muslim Brotherhood's then
presidential candidate Khairat al-Shater"said he
realized the country's finances were precarious
and a severe crunch could come by early to mid-May
as the end of the fiscal year approached, but that
this was the government's problem to resolve."
Since then, the military-controlled elections
commission has excluded al-Shater as a candidate,
and the Brotherhood replaced him with Mohammed
Morsi.
Meanwhile, Egypt's Salafist party,
the extreme Islamists, withdrew support from
Mohammed Morsi and backed instead the more liberal
Islamist candidate, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh,
often described as a "defector" from the
Brotherhood.
Although the Salafists
propose an even more extreme version of the Muslim
Brotherhood's program, oil is thicker than blood
in the region; the Salafists get a reported $50
million annual subsidy from the Saudis, and
presumably are acting under Saudi orders.
As the situation on the ground
deteriorates, Egypt's military government is
becoming a bystander to events. Egypt is in a
classic pre-revolutionary situation, like Russia
in October 1917 or German in March 1933, with a
vanguard party ready to dislodge a disintegrating
civil society, and replace it with totalitarian
party rule at street level. The Muslim
Brotherhood, Egypt's largest political party, is
poised to ride to power on the back of this
crisis.
The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) is negotiating a US$3 billion loan with the
Egyptian government, with the understanding that
all the major parties will support severe
belt-tightening, and that the Saudis and other
Gulf states will fund the loan as well as
additional aid. Saudi Arabia had promised to lend
Egypt $3.75 billion, but paid in only $500 million
of its pledge. Last week the Saudis said that they
would pay in another $1 billion. But that was
before the demonstrations against their embassy.
As the main opposition body to military
misrule during the past six decades, the
Brotherhood harbors parliamentarians as well as
firebrands. But the revolutionary dynamic in Egypt
favors the firebrands. As critical shortages
spread through Egypt's fragile economy, Islamist
street justice already is replacing the corrupt
and crumbling institutions of the military regime.
There is a second analogy to revolutionary
Leninism, in the form of the Brotherhood's
international ambitions.
In effect, the
Muslim Brotherhood has chosen to push the country
towards chaos. "North Africa's biggest economy has
imploded since a democratic uprising last year and
the country will run out of money to meet basic
subsidies including wheat and oil by the summer,"
the Daily Telegraph reported April 16. The
proposed $3 billion loan from the International
Monetary Fund, the newspaper added, was part of a
$12 billion emergency financing package from the
IMF and European Union to save the Egyptian
economy from collapse. "Brussels is most worried
about the popular backlash that would result from
deep cuts in public spending," the Telegraph
reported.
The backlash, though, has been
in progress for more than a year. Islamist
organizations began to take control of food and
fuel distribution as shortages appeared after the
overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The
first Islamist equivalent of workers' soviets, or
"revolutionary committees," were formed to
discipline bakeries and propane sellers who
"charge more than the price prescribed by law,"
the Federation of Egyptian Radio and Television
reported on May 3, 2011.
These committees
formed under the aegis of the Ministry of
Solidarity and Social Justice. What has already
emerged in Egypt, to use Leninist terminology, is
a situation of dual power. The military government
remains in command, but critical economic
functions already are in the hands of Islamist
parties.
The Ministry of Solidarity and
Social Justice began forming "revolutionary
committees" to mete out street justice to
bakeries, propane dealers and street vendors who
"charge more than the price prescribed by law",
the Federation of Egyptian Radio and Television
reported on May 3, 2011. The Solidarity ministry
declared that "Gangsters are in control of bread
and butane prices" and "people's committees" would
be formed to combat them.
Fuel shortages
have become critical in many parts of Egypt. UN
observers report that the supply of diesel is down
by 35%, and is so scarce that food supplies are
threatened. According to the UN news service IRIN
in an April 2 report from Cairo, "It has been
three months since a fuel shortage hit Egypt, and
people's patience is wearing thin amid fears the
crisis could disrupt the production of subsidized
bread. The government blames hoarding for the
crisis. Thousands of cars queue outside petrol
stations from early morning, while long queues
form outside gas cylinder centers."
More
than a hundred Egyptian bakeries shut down in
mid-April to protest the fuel shortage, the
Egyptian news site Youm7.com reported April 12
[3]. In Beni Suef, dozens of bakery owners
gathered in front of a government flour warehouse
to complain that they could obtain fuel only at
black market prices, which required them to sell
bread at black market prices.
Hoarding
explains part of the problem. Egypt is running out
of cash - its liquid foreign exchange reserves
have fallen from $25 billion when Mubarak fell to
only US$9 billion in March - and a devaluation of
the Egyptian pound is widely expected, followed by
a sharp rise in the price of imported commodities.
But outright theft of exportable commodities also
contributes to the shortages. Daily demand for
gasoline jumped to 23 million liters from 14
million liters last September, the Egyptian
General Petroleum Corporation reported, and
Egyptian press reports alleged that the additional
demand reflected illegal sales of gasoline to
overseas buyers.
It is not clear whether
the government is trying to make its dwindling
reserves last longer by cutting fuel imports,
whether hoarding of fuel is in anticipation of a
devaluation, or whether fuel supplies simply are
being loaded onto tankers and sold to foreign
buyers. Judging from Arab-language press reports
and blogs, though, the public's perception is that
corruption and incompetence have brought about an
economic disaster. The military government has
created a vacuum, and the Muslim Brotherhood must
fill this vacuum or lose its chance to accede to
power. Judging from al-Shater's opposition to an
IMF loan, the Brotherhood has decided that worse
is better.
The military government appears
to have responded to the threat from the Muslim
Brotherhood indirectly, through the Electoral
Commission's April 14 announcement that it had
disqualified al-Shater along with nine other
presidential candidates. The pretext for banning
al-Shater has to do with a jail term he served
under the Mubarak regime.
Another Islamist
candidate, Hazem Salah Aboul Ismail, was
disqualified on the grounds that his mother was
naturalized an American citizen. Ismail has
threatened to retaliate to reveal secrets about
corruption in the military government. A day
before the Electoral Commission's announcement,
the Muslim Brotherhood in alliance with the
Salafist Front had filled Tahrir Square with
demonstrators. Now the Salafists and the
Brotherhood are fighting.
The Saudi Crown
Prince, Interior Minister Prince Nayif bin Abd
al-Aziz, is a bitter enemy of the Brotherhood. "In
the past Nayif has castigated the Muslim
Brotherhood for their influence in Saudi Arabia,
so he can be expected to look on with suspicion as
the Brotherhood moves towards power in Egypt and
perhaps in Syria and Tunisia," Joshua Teitelbaum
wrote in a paper for the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies [4].
And on April 16,
Jordan's parliament passed a draft political law
that would disqualify the country's branch of the
Muslim Brotherhood from participation elections,
effectively banning the largest opposition party
to the Hashemite monarchy.
The Arab
monarchies fear that the ascent of the Muslim
Brotherhood to power in Egypt by revolutionary
means portends a further revolutionary assault on
their own regimes. And the result of American
failure to take decisive action to interdict the
Brotherhood's march to power is likely to be
greater instability and a decline of American
influence in the region.
Interdicting the
Brotherhood, in turn, requires an uncharacteristic
harshness on the part of American policy. War
correspondent Peter Arnett might have concocted
the notorious statement, "It became necessary to
destroy the town to save it," supposedly said by
an American officer of the Vietnamese provincial
capital Ben Tre in 1968. Something like that might
be the outcome for Egypt.
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