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Ghost of Mubarak haunts Egypt's
electioneering
It's only
the third day of campaigning in Egypt, and already
20 people are dead. But death tolls have a
horrible habit of rising, as Egypt well knows
after over a year of revolutionary and
post-revolutionary turbulence.It's an ominous sign
that, though Hosni Mubarak is gone, his tactics
have not been forgotten. The revolution still has
some way to go. By SIMON ALLISON.
The
victims were all claimed by the same incident.
Some were shot in the head, some were stabbed, and
one had his throat slit.
In Egypt, such
violence used to happen behind the closed doors of
police stations and intelligence torture chambers.
Now it
happens in the street,
in broad daylight, with the cameras rolling.
The victims were part of a group of
demonstrators camped outside the defence ministry
in a busy Cairo suburb. They'd been there for
days, along with hundreds of others, engaging in
Egypt's new favourite pastime: protesting. Their
ire was directed towards Egypt's military
government.
This, despite the euphoria
that greeted Hosni Mubarak's toppling and the
joyous cries of "The people and the military, one
hand!" If the army played a pivotal role in his
eventual resignation, the generals in charge have
proved disappointingly unable to move with the
democratic times, using all the old tricks from
Mubarak's playbook to shape the political
landscape in their favour.
One of those
tricks was to simply prevent potentially dangerous
candidates from running in Egypt's presidential
elections - scheduled for later this month - on
spurious technicalities. This is why the Muslim
Brotherhood's preferred candidate, Khader
El-Shater, isn't on the ballot. Nor is long-time
opposition leader Ayman Nour or the
ultra-religious favourite Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.
Abu Ismail's mother owns an American
passport, which is apparently grounds enough to
disqualify him from this particular democratic
process. Not that the US will mind too much: the
prospect of an Islamic fundamentalist in charge of
Egypt is too terrifying to contemplate. But the
crowd outside the defence ministry - comprising
mostly Abu Ismail's supporters from the religious
conservative Salafist movement - weren't buying
this pretext for a second, and had gathered to
make sure the generals knew they weren't happy.
By Wednesday, the Salafists had been
joined by others eager to show their
disappointment with the military government,
including the Al Ahly Ultras - hardcore fans of
Africa's biggest football club who are never
afraid of a scrap and have no love for the
military. A small protest was beginning to morph
into something bigger.
That's when the
thugs struck. Early Wednesday morning an
unspecified number of unidentified men swept into
the protest camp and wreaked havoc. Armed with
guns and knives they launched into the protestors,
who fought back as best they could, unafraid to
dish out a few beatings of their own. This is the
melee that claimed the 20 victims mentioned above.
It also wounded nearly 200 people.
This is
another of those Mubarak tricks. Before he
resigned, Mubarak also sent in his thugs -
policemen in plainclothes, prisoners he'd released
and paid to participate, and perhaps even some
genuine supporters - to deal with the tens of
thousands of people calling for his downfall in
Tahrir Square. The tactic failed, but for any
government looking to quell unrest and maintain
legitimacy it has one thing to recommend it:
deniability.
So we don't know whether the
"unidentified assailants" outside the defence
ministry on Wednesday were sent by the military.
All the surviving protestors have are their
suspicions, heightened by reports that army units
stood by, watching the fighting rather than
intervene.
They aren't the only ones with
suspicions. Former Nobel peace prize laureate
Mohamed ElBaradei attacked the military on
Twitter: "Massacre in front of the Ministry of
Defence and government unable to protect civilians
or in cahoots with thugs. Egypt is going down the
drain," he wrote. It is a sentiment shared by
other Egyptian political figures - although not,
naturally, by the military government.
In
response to Wednesday's violence, two of the
leading presidential candidates suspended their
campaigns, which had only begun in earnest on
Monday. The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi
(the Brotherhood's second choice after Shater's
dubious disqualification) won't be giving speeches
or attending rallies for two days. Neither will
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, an independent Islamist
candidate who is way ahead of other religious
candidates in the polls.
However, his team
didn't comment on when he might resume his
campaign.
As yet, there's been no comment
from the man ahead of everyone in the polls,
former Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa.
In a strange and uncomfortable irony, the
charismatic Moussa had the strongest links with
Mubarak's regime of all the presidential
candidates, serving as his foreign minister for 10
years.
Mousa is often derided as a feluul,
an insult for people with connections to the
previous regime. Yet this hasn't hindered his
popularity. In fact, it may even have contributed
to it, as people hanker for the stability and
relative prosperity of the Mubarak days. So much
for the revolution.
Still, a lot can
happen in three weeks of campaigning. This race is
far from complete - neither, one suspects, is that
death toll. DM
This
article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
visit their site, please click here.
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