Memo to United States President Barack
Obama: Given the absence of intelligent
intelligence and the inadequacy of your advisers'
advice, it's not surprising that your handling of
the Egyptian uprising has set new standards for
foreign policy incoherence and incompetence.
Perhaps a primer on how to judge the power that
can be wielded by mass protest will prepare you
better for the next round of political upheavals.
Remember the uprising in Beijing's
Tiananmen Square in 1989? That was also a huge,
peaceful protest for democracy, but it was crushed
with savage violence. Maybe the memory of that
event convinced you and your team that, as
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced when
the protests began, that the Mubarak
regime was "stable" and
in "no danger of falling". Or maybe your
confidence rested on the fact that it featured a
disciplined modern army trained and supplied by
the US.
But it fell, and you should have
known that it was in grave danger. You should have
known that the prognosis for this uprising was far
better than the one that ended in a massacre in
Tiananmen Square; that it was more likely to
follow the pattern of people power in Tunisia,
where only weeks before another autocrat had been
driven from power, or Iran in 1979 and Poland in
1989.
Since your intelligence people,
including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
obviously didn't tell you, let me offer you an
explanation for why the Egyptian protesters proved
so much more successful in fighting off the threat
and reality of violence than their Chinese
compatriots, and why they were so much better
equipped to deter an attack by a standing army.
Most importantly, let me fill you in on
why, by simply staying in the streets and adhering
to their commitment to nonviolence, they were able
to topple a tyrant with 30 years seniority and US
backing from the pinnacle of power, sweeping him
into the dustbin of history.
When does
an army choose to be non-violent? One
possible answer - a subtext of mainstream media
coverage - is that the Egyptian military, unlike
its Chinese counterpart, decided not to crush the
rebellion, and that this forbearance enabled the
protest to succeed. However, this apparently
reasonable argument actually explains nothing
unless we can answer two intertwined questions
that flow from it.
The first is: Why was
the military so restrained this time around, when
for 50 years, "it has stood at the core of a
repressive police state"? The second is: Why
couldn't the government, even without a military
ready to turn its guns on the demonstrators,
endure a few more days, weeks, or months of
protest, while waiting for the uprising to exhaust
itself, and - as the BBC put it - "have the whole
thing fizzle out"?
The answer to both
questions lies in the remarkable impact that the
protest had on the Egyptian economy. President
Hosni Mubarak and his cohort (as well as the
military, which is the country's economic
powerhouse) were alarmed that the business
"paralysis induced by the protests" was "having a
huge impact on the creaking economy" of Egypt. As
finance minister Samir Radwin said two weeks into
the uprising, the economic situation was "very
serious" and that "the longer the stalemate
continues, the more damaging it is".
From
their inception, the huge protests threatened the
billions of dollars that the leaders and chief
beneficiaries of the Mubarak regime had acquired
during their 30-year reign of terror, corruption,
and accumulation. To the generals in particular,
it was surely apparent that the massive acts of
brutality necessary to suppress the uprising would
have caused perhaps irreparable harm, threatening
its vast economic interests. In other words,
either trying to outwait the revolutionaries or
imposing the Tiananmen solution risked the
downfall of the economic empires of Egypt's ruling
groups.
But why would either of those
responses destroy the economy?
Squeezing the life out of the Mubarak
regime Put simply, from the beginning, the
Egyptian uprising had the effect of a general
strike. Starting on January 25, the first day of
the protest, tourism - the largest industry in the
country, which had just begun its high season -
went into free fall. After two weeks, the industry
had simply "ground to a halt", leaving a
significant portion of the 2 million workers it
supported with reduced wages or none at all, and
the few remaining tourists rattling around empty
hotels, catching the pyramids, if at all, on
television.
Since pyramids and other
Egyptian sites attract more than 1 million
visitors a month and account for at least 5% of
the Egyptian economy, tourism alone (given the
standard multiplier effect) may account for over
15% of the country's cash flow.
Not
surprisingly, then, news reports soon began
mentioning revenue losses of up to $310 million
per day. In an economy with an annual gross
domestic product (GDP) of well over $200 billion,
each day that Mubarak clung to office produced a
tangible and growing decline in it. After two
weeks of this ticking time bomb, Credit Agricole,
the largest banking group in France, lowered its
growth estimate for the economy by 32%.
The initial devastating losses in the
tourist, hotel, and travel sectors of the Egyptian
economy hit industries dominated by huge
multinational corporations and major Egyptian
business groups dependent on a constant flow of
revenues. When cash flow dies, loan payments must
still be made, hotels heated, airline schedules
kept, and many employees, especially executives,
paid.
In such a situation, losses start
mounting fast, and even the largest companies can
face a crisis quickly. The situation was
especially ominous because it was known that
skittish travelers would be unlikely to return
until they were confident that no further
disruptions would occur.
The largest of
businesses, local and multinational, are not
normally prone to inactivity. They are the ones
likely to move most quickly to stem a tide of red
ink by agitating the government to suppress such a
protest, hopefully yesterday. But the staggering
size of even the early demonstrations, the face of
a mobilizing civil society visibly shedding 30
years of passivity, proved stunning.
The
fiercely brave response to police attacks, in
which repression was met by masses of new
demonstrators pouring into the streets, made it
clear that brutal suppression would not quickly
silence these protests. Such acts were more likely
to prolong the disruptions and possibly amplify
the uprising.
Even if Washington was slow
on the uptake, it didn't take long for the
relentlessly repressive Egyptian ruling clique to
grasp the fact that large-scale, violent
suppression was an impossible-to-implement
strategy. Once the demonstrations involved
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
Egyptians, a huge and bloody suppression
guaranteed long-term economic paralysis and
ensured that the tourist trade wasn't going to
rebound for months or longer.
The
paralysis of the tourism industry was, in itself,
an economic time bomb that threatened the
viability of the core of the Egyptian capitalist
class, as long as the demonstrations continued.
Recovery could only begin after a "return to
normal life", a phrase that became synonymous with
the end of the protests in the rhetoric of the
government, the military, and the mainstream
media. With so many fortunes at stake, the
business classes, foreign and domestic, soon
enough began entertaining the most obvious and
least disruptive solution: Mubarak's departure.
Strangling the regime The
attack on tourism, however, was just the first
blow in what rapidly became the protestors' true
weapon of mass disruption, its increasing
stranglehold on the economy. The crucial
communications and transportation industries were
quickly engulfed in chaos and disrupted by the
demonstrations.
The government at first
shut down the Internet and mobile phone service in
an effort to deny the protestors their means of
communication and organization, including Facebook
and Twitter. When they were reopened, these
services operated imperfectly, in part because of
the increasingly rebellious behavior of their own
employees.
Similar effects were seen in
transportation, which became unreliable and
sporadic, either because of government shutdowns
aimed at crippling the protests or because the
protests interfered with normal operations. And
such disruptions quickly rippled outward to the
many sectors of the economy, from banking to
foreign trade, for which communication and/or
transportation was crucial.
As the
demonstrations grew, employees, customers, and
suppliers of various businesses were ever more
consumed with preparations for, participation in,
or recovery from the latest protest, or protecting
homes from looters and criminals after the
government called the police force off the
streets.
On Fridays especially, many
people left work to join the protest during noon
prayers, abandoning their offices as the country
immersed itself in the next big demonstration -
and then the one after.
As long as the
protests were sustained, as long as each new
crescendo matched or exceeded the last, the
economy continued to die while business and
political elites became ever more desperate for a
solution to the crisis.
The rats leave
the sinking ship of state After each
upsurge in protest, Mubarak and his cronies
offered new concessions aimed at quieting the
crowds. These, in turn, were taken as signs of
weakness by the protestors, only convincing them
of their strength, amplifying the movement, and
driving it into the heart of the Egyptian working
class and the various professional guilds. By the
start of the third week of demonstrations,
protests began to hit critical institutions
directly.
On February 9, reports of a
widening wave of strikes in major industries
around the country began pouring in, as lawyers,
medical workers, and other professionals also took
to the streets with their grievances. In a single
day, tens of thousands of employees in textile
factories, newspapers and other media companies,
government agencies (including the post office),
sanitation workers and bus drivers, and - most
significant of all - workers at the Suez Canal
began demanding economic concessions as well as
the departure of Mubarak.
Since the Suez
Canal is second only to tourism as a source of
income for the country, a sit-in there, involving
up to 6,000 workers, was particularly ominous.
Though the protestors made no effort to close the
canal, the threat to its operation was
self-evident.
A shutdown of the canal
would have been not just an Egyptian but a world
calamity: a significant proportion of the globe's
oil flows through that canal, especially critical
for energy-starved Europe. A substantial shipping
slowdown, no less a shutdown, threatened a
possible renewal of the worldwide recession of
2008-2009, even as it would choke off the Egyptian
government's major source of steady income.
As if this weren't enough, the
demonstrators turned their attention to various
government institutions, attempting to render them
"non-functional". The day after the president's
third refusal to step down, protestors claimed
that many regional capitals, including Suez,
Mahalla, Mansoura, Ismailia, Port Said and even
Alexandria (the country's major Mediterranean
port), were "free of the regime" - purged of
Mubarak officials, state-controlled
communications, and the hated police and security
forces.
In Cairo, the national capital,
demonstrators began to surround the parliament,
the state TV building, and other centers critical
to the national government. Alaa Abd El Fattah, an
activist and well-known political blogger in
Cairo, told Democracy Now that the crowd "could
continue to escalate, either by claiming more
places or by actually moving inside these
buildings, if the need comes". With the economy
choking to death, the demonstrators were now
moving to put a hammerlock on the government
apparatus itself.
At that point, a
rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship-of-state phenomenon
burst into public visibility as "several large
companies took out adverts in local newspapers
putting distance between themselves and the
regime". Guardian reporter Jack Shenker affirmed
this public display by quoting informed sources
describing widespread "nervousness among the
business community" about the viability of the
regime, and that "a lot of people you might think
are in bed with Mubarak have privately lost
patience".
It was this tightening noose
around the neck of the Mubarak regime that made
the remarkable protests of these last weeks so
different from those in Tiananmen Square. In
China, the demonstrators had negligible economic
and political leverage. In Egypt, the option of a
brutal military attack, even if "successful" in
driving them off the streets, seemed to all but
guarantee the deepening of an already dire
economic crisis, subjecting ever widening realms
of the economy - and so the wealth of the military
- to the risk of irreparable calamity.
Perhaps Mubarak would have been willing to
sacrifice all this to stay in power. As it
happened, a growing crew of movers and shakers,
including the military leadership, major
businessmen, foreign investors, and interested
foreign governments saw a far more appealing
alternative solution.
Weil Ziada, head of
research for a major Egyptian financial firm,
spoke for the business and political class when he
told Guardian reporter Jack Shenker on February
11:
Anti-government sentiment is not
calming down, it is gaining momentum ... This
latest wave is putting a lot more pressure on
not just the government but the entire regime;
protesters have made their demands clear and
there's no rowing back now. Everything is going
down one route. There are two or three
scenarios, but all involve the same thing:
Mubarak stepping down - and the business
community is adjusting its expectations
accordingly.
The next day, Mubarak
resigned and left Cairo.
President Obama,
remember this lesson: If you want to avoid future
foreign policy Obaminations, be aware that
non-violent protest has the potential to strangle
even the most brutal regime, if it can
definitively threaten the viability of its core
industries. In these circumstances, a mass
movement equipped with fearsome weapons of mass
disruption can topple a tyrant equipped with
fearsome weapons of mass destruction.
A
professor of sociology at Stony Brook State
University, Michael Schwartz is the author
of War
Without End: The Iraq War in Context
(Haymarket Press). Schwartz's work on protest
movements, contentious politics, and the arc of US
imperialism has appeared in numerous academic and
popular outlets over the past 40 years. He is a
TomDispatch regular. His e-mail address is
ms42@optonline.net. To listen to Timothy MacBain's
latest TomCast audio interview in which Schwartz
discusses the Egyptian revolution and the power of
non-violent disruption, click here,
or download it to your iPod here.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
