Page 1 of
2 Mummies
and models in the new Middle East By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's
articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.
Three mummies were recently found in an
underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated
hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of
Civilizations, the End of History, and
Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into
the second decade of the 21st century before dying
and being embalmed.
That much is settled.
Without them, the Middle East is already a new
world that must be understood in a new way. For
one thing, Egypt, that previously moribund land of
"stability" and bosom buddy of whoever was in
power in Washington, has been hurled into the
Middle East's New Great Game. The question is: What
will be its fate - and that
of the millions of Egyptians who took to the
streets in a staggering show of aggressive
nonviolence in January and February?
It is
impossible to say, especially since shadow play is
the norm and the realities of rule are hard to
discern. In a country where "politics" has for
decades meant the army, it's notable that the key
actor supposedly coordinating the "transition to
democracy" remains an appointee of Pharaoh Hosni
Mubarak, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi
from the Supreme Army Council. At least, popular
pressure has forced Tantawi's military junta to
appoint a new transitional prime minister, the
Tahrir-Square-friendly former transport minister
Essam Sharaf.
Keep in mind that the hated
emergency laws from the Mubarak era, part of what
provoked the Egyptian uprising to begin with, are
still in place and that the country's
intellectuals, its political parties, labor
unions, and the media all fear a silent
counterrevolution. At the same time, they almost
uniformly insist that the Tahrir Square revolution
will neither be hijacked nor rebranded by
opportunists.
As the ideological divide
between liberalism, secularism, and Islamism
disintegrated when the country's psychological
Wall of Fear came down, lawyers, doctors, textile
workers - a range of the country's civil society -
remain clear on one thing: they will never settle
for a theocracy or a military dictatorship. They
want full democracy.
No wonder what that
implies makes Western diplomatic circles tremble.
An Egyptian army even remotely accountable to an
elected civilian government will not, for
instance, collaborate in the Israeli siege of
Gaza's Palestinians, or in US Central Intelligence
Agency renditions of terror suspects to the
country's prisons, or blindly in that monstrous
farce, the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process".
Meanwhile, there are more pedestrian
matters to deal with: How, for example, will the
army-directed transition towards September
elections make the economic numbers add up? In
2009, Egypt's import bill was $56 billion, while
the country's exports only added up to $29
billion. Tourism, foreign aid, and borrowing
helped fill the gap. The uprising sent tourism
into a tailspin and who knows what kinds of aid
and loans anyone will fork over in the months to
come.
Meanwhile, the country will have to
import no less than 10 million tons of wheat in
2011 at about $3.3 billion (if grain prices don't
continue to rise) to keep people at least
half-fed. This is but a small part of Mubarak's
tawdry legacy, which includes 40 million
Egyptians, almost half the population, living on
less than $2 a day, and it's not going to
disappear overnight, if at all.
Hit by a
rolling, largely peaceful revolution all across
MENA (the newly popular acronym for the Middle
East and Northern Africa), Washington and an aging
Fortress Europe, filled with fear, wallow in a
mire of perplexity. Even after the dust from those
rebellious Northern African winds settles, it's
hardly a given that they will grasp just how all
the cultural stereotypes used to explain the
Middle East for decades also managed to vanish.
My favorite line of the great Arab revolt
of 2011 is still Tunisian scholar Sarhan Dhouib's:
"These revolts are an answer to [George W] Bush's
intent to democratize the Arab world with
violence." If "shock and awe" is now also an
artifact of an ancient world, what's next?
Models for rent or sale On
February 3, the Turkish Economic and Social
Studies Foundation published a poll conducted in
seven Arab countries and Iran. No less than 66% of
respondents considered Turkey, not Iran, the ideal
model for the Middle East. A media scrum from Le
Monde to the Financial Times now evidently
concurs. After all, Turkey is a functional
democracy in a Muslim-majority country where the
separation of mosque and state prevails.
That stellar Islamic scholar at Oxford,
Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood
founder Hassan al-Banna, also recently labeled the
"Turkish way" as "a source of inspiration". In
late February, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu agreed, with a surfeit of modesty that
barely covered the ambitions of the new Turkey,
insisting that his country does not want to be a
model for the region, "but we can be a source of
inspiration".
The Egyptian Marxist
economist Samir Amin - widely respected across the
developing world - suspects that, whatever the
hopes of the Turks and others, including so many
Egyptians, Washington has quite different ideas
about Egypt's destiny. It wants, he believes, not
a Turkish model but a Pakistani one for that
country: that is, the mix of an "Islamic power"
with a military dictatorship. It won't fly, Amin
is convinced, because "the Egyptian people are now
highly politicized".
The process of true
democratization that began back in the distant
1950s in Turkey proved to be a long road.
Nonetheless, despite periodic military coups and
the continuing political power of the Turkish
army, elections were, and remain, free. The
Justice and Development Party, or AKP, now at the
Turkish helm, was founded in August 2001 by former
members of the Refah Party, a much more
conservative Islamic group with an ideology
similar to that of today's Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt.
As the AKP mellowed out, however,
the pro-business, pro-European Union wing of the
country's Islamists mixed with various
center-right politicians and, in 2002, the AKP
finally took power in Ankara. Only then could they
begin to slowly undermine the stranglehold of the
traditional Istanbul-based secular Turkish elite
and the military that had held power since the
1920s.
Yet the AKP did not dream of
dismantling the secular system first installed by
Turkey's founding father Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in
1924. The Turkish civil code he instituted was
inspired by Switzerland with citizenship based on
secular law. While the country is predominantly
Muslim, of course, its people simply would not
welcome a system, as in Khomeinist Iran, that is
guided by religion.
The AKP should be
viewed as the equivalent of the Christian
Democrats in Europe after the 1950s - dynamic,
business-oriented conservatives with religious
roots. In Egypt, the moderate wing of the Muslim
Brotherhood has many similarities to the AKP and
looks to it for inspiration. In the new Egypt, it
will finally be a legitimate political party and
most experts believe that it could garner 25% to
30% of the vote in the first election of the new
era.
All roads lead to Tahrir Turkish critics - usually from the
Western-oriented technical and managerial caste -
regularly accuse the democracy-meets-Islam Turkish
model of being little more than a successful
marketing ploy, or worse, a Middle Eastern version
of Russia. After all, the army still wields
disproportionate behind-the-scenes power as
guarantor of the state's secular framework. And
the country's Kurdish minority is not really
integrated into the system (although in September
2010 Turkish voters approved constitutional
changes that give greater rights to Christians and
Kurds).
With its glorious Ottoman past,
notes Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature, Turkey was never colonized
by a world power, and thus "veneration of Europe
or imitation of the West never had the humiliating
connotations" described by Frantz Fanon or Edward
Said for much of the rest of the Middle East and
North Africa.
There are stark differences
between Turkey's road to a military-free democracy
in 2002 and the littered path ahead for Egypt's
young demonstrators and nascent political parties.
In Turkey the key actors were pro-business
Islamists, conservatives, neo-liberals, and
right-wing nationalists. In Egypt they are
pro-labor Islamists, leftists, liberals, and
left-wing nationalists.
The Tahrir Square
revolution was essentially unleashed by two youth
groups: the April 6 Youth Movement (which was
geared towards solidarity with workers on strike),
and We Are All Khaled Said (which mobilized
against police brutality). Later, they would be
joined by Muslim Brotherhood activists and -
crucially organized labor, the masses of workers
(and the unemployed) who had suffered from years
of the International Monetary Fund's "structural
adjustment" poison. (As late as April 2010, an
International Monetary Fund delegation visited
Cairo and praised Mubarak's "progress".)
The revolution in Tahrir Square made the
necessary connections in a deeply comprehensible
way. It managed to go to the heart of the matter,
linking miserable wages, mass unemployment, and
increasing poverty to the ways in which Mubarak's
cronies (and also the military establishment)
enriched themselves.
Sooner or later, in
any showdown to come, the way the military
controls so much of the economy will be an
unavoidable topic - the way, for instance,
army-owned companies continue to make a killing in
the water, olive oil, cement, construction, hotel,
and oil industries, or the way the military has
come to own significant tracts of land in the Nile
Delta and on the Red Sea, "gifts" for guaranteeing
regime stability.
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