Egypt – Other Aspect

Egypt facing terrorism

Dear comrades all over the world:

After patience of the Egyptian people on Police & Armed Forces since their authorization to face terrorism urgently & after feeling of the people the slowing down in facing terrorism by letting armed sets at war zones ( Rabaa el Adaweya & Nahda ) squares with passiveness at arresting criminal leaders of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) also permitting the new liberal power to mess the national security with calling a foreign power ( which is an enemy for the Egyptians) to interfere at the interior situation without any respect to the people’s well that was clear at 30 / 6 & after that date .

The security forces moved after long waiting to evacuate terroristic sets with an evident lax & unjustified graduation in facing armed groups at sets that containing criminals wanted to justice after their encouragement for violence & planning for chaos with ordering to destroy the country establishments not only that but also calling in public for imperial power help ( bullying abroad ) , crying on the victims that killed by MB militia ( friendly fire ) at their clashes before in a very clear betrayal which get them out from Egyptian national current .

We saw torture, killing inside their sets which became sure after finding the bodies of tortured victims that was thrown under the stages in addition to using children in a nasty view against all international norms & humanity.

Their telling lie about peace became obvious after facing security with gun machines & R B G s also after finding of great amount of weapons & gun machines at the two squares. The security forces surprised us by calling the criminal to go out without any punishment under the slogans of safe going out how come!! How come the criminals had no punishment for their crimes ?!

Although all that the MB criminals didn’t bow only after killing, burning, & destroying. The governmental systems were as if they were going for picnic as they were focusing on the two war zones without any doing their role at securing the governmental building, police stations, hospitals, ministries & people’s property even at Cairo or other governorates which gave a chance to Islamist terroristic militia to burn churches with people inside, killing by identity & commission crimes of ethnic cleansing at some villages at upper Egypt trying to ignite sectarian strife also they burned the mosque that they were staying in at rabaa square before leaving for propitiation of general opinion & international community. They regain their regressive culture at hating the Egyptian civilized history by burning & museums.

We are blaming the government for all this losses & victims from innocent people wanted their country not to fall inside a terrorism grasp. All those losses could be avoided if the government has a complete security plan to secure the hall country before beginning at evacuation specially we all knew about the threating of Islamists with spreading the chaos .

What we said before became obvious as the betrayal is clear on the situation of those power who called themselves national power as they leave responsibilities at a moment that the people need their support under slogan of they don’t want to interfere in violence ( with forgetting the blood of Iraqi people before which didn’t lead to the same situations!!) & as usual some power who are calling themselves leftist but they are actually the right of the rightist by defending the terrorists indirectly by refusing facing terrorism & evacuating of armed sets, under slogans of getting the military role down as they considered what happened a military coup to cover the truth of their supporting the right regressive fascist religious power. They stood in the same columns with capitalists, regressive & rightist power that are all against the poor people demands.

We are demanding the Egyptian people to not to responding to the fake calls of reconciliation with terrorists & they should form a popular committees to face terrorism without waiting for slow security forces.

We are insisting that our struggle is continuous against this government that is away from poor people demands as it continue to execute the conditions of the international bank & I.M.F. also they are still in the way of depending on private investments at achieving development without any thoughts for beginning at national projects to regain the state role at development to face the crisis of poverty, hunger, unemployment & medical problems.

We ensure that the solution is in the hands of people only by struggling for real socialist project providing social justice & ending of exploitations.

Finally we say that we are against dependency & supporting the independency of the Egyptian people well.

Revolutionist Communist Party – Egypt

Central committee

A year of democratic farce : Samir Amin

Samir Amin, Egyptian philosopher and economist, director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, talks about the last year in Egypt with the Brotherhood in power, interviewed by Giuseppe Acconcia.

On 30 June 2012, Mohammed Morsi took over as the Mubarak successor. However, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Muslim Brothers’ victory when this interview took plave, bloody clashes broke out in the country.

Acconcia: What do you think about the Tamarod’s campaign?

Samir Amin: The Tamarod’s campaign for the Morsi dismissal is magnificent. Millions of people signed their names after giving deep political consideration to what they were doing: something totally ignored by the international mainstream media. They represent the majority of all the electoral constituencies, but they do not have any voice. The Muslim Brothers wield political power and like to think they can control 100% of the votes. Thus, they ensured members of the movement in every public sector. Their way of managing the country is informed by a type of crony capitalism which simply does not leave any room for the opposition figures and technocrats who had some power even in the Mubarak era.

A: This is happening during the worst economic crisis of recent decades

Samir Amin: There is more than an economic crisis. Islamists have only ultraliberal answers to give to the crisis: they have replaced the capitalists’ bourgeois clique that were Mubarak’s friends with reactionary businessmen. Moreover, their goal is quite simply to sell off public goods. The Brotherhood is hated by Egyptians because it continues with the same policies as its predecessor.

A: Maybe worse in the case of the Islamic Finance Bill?

Samir Amin: It is theft to attach derisory prices to goods that are worth billions of dollars. These are not the usual privatizations that reactionary regimes indulge in, selling off goods at their economic value. This is pure fraud more than a privatization.

A: Recalling the stages of this year with the Brotherhood in power – Morsi won after eight days of uncertainty and finally the elimination of the Nasserist, Hamdin Sabbahi, in the first round. Were the 2012 presidential elections manipulated?

Samir Amin: There was massive electoral fraud. Hamdin Sabbahi could have passed into the second round, but the US Embassy did not want it. European observers listened to their American diplomatic counterparts and turned a blind eye to the fraud involved. Moreover, the five million votes for Sabbahi were squeaky clean and highly motivated. On the other hand, the five million votes for Morsi came from the most wretched part of the population, devoid of political conscience: the votes of people willing to be bought off for a piece of bread and a glass of milk.

A: But would you agree that the sharpest clashes between the presidency and demonstrators broke out last November as a consequence of the presidential decree that extended Morsi’s powers?

Samir Amin: Morsi got going with a few weeks of demagogic speechifying, promising to listen to the other political contestants. After that, it soon became clear the extent to which the President was a puppet with the Gulf countries pulling the strings out of sight. He became a mere instrument of the murshid’s will – that of Mohammed Badie, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.

A: The historic support to the Palestinians had been shelved as well?

Samir Amin: The Egyptian Muslim Brothers support Israel, like the Gulf countries and Qatar do. They have always adopted an anti-Zionist discourse, but this was just an ongoing deception. The Qatari Emir, for example, is quite used to saying one thing and then doing the opposite, given the complete absence of public opinion. Now Egypt is supporting the worst type of opposition in Syria, as do the most reactionary western powers. The end result is that the majority of the western weapons furnished to the rebels are being used to finance the very worst outcome in Syria.

A: Is this why Morsi supported the creation of a Free Trade Area in the Sinai, favouring an economic relationship with Israel?

Samir Amin: This is a huge loss to Egypt. The effects of the new Free Trade Area will not be the imagined industrialization of the region, but the perpetration of a huge fiscal fraud. This will strengthen small mafias and the dismantling of public assets. In the end, the Brotherhood would accept all the conditions of the International Monetary Fund and the expected loan will accordingly come to fruition despite the fact that corruption and financial scandal have spread all over the country.

A: So how do you see the acceptance of the Constitution written by the Muslim Brotherhood, last December?

Samir Amin: This is a dictatorship of the majority. However, judges put up the strongest and indeed an unprecedented fight against the ratification of the constitutional referendum results. But it is clear that the ultimate goal of Freedom and Justice (the political party of the Brotherhood) is to build-up a theocracy on the Iranian model.

A: To conclude, is there anything left to preserve in this year of Morsi’s presidency?

Samir Amin: The lumpen proletariat is easily manipulated, and a fortiori would not obtain anything by the upheaval Morsi’s overthrow will bring. Moreover, the division of power the Brotherhood has with the army who is behind the scenes, ready to intervene, is full of ambiguity. The military personnel, as a class, are corrupt – a corruption guaranteed by American help, and carefully composed of segments of different classes, divided into political currents, many of them close to the Brotherhood and the Salafists.

However, with normal elections, with a period of democratic preparation, the Brotherhood will be beaten. But if this is not going to happen, next October there will be a more repressive climate and the vote will be manipulated by widespread falsification as happened on the previous occasion.

Source

The Electoral Victory of Political Islam in Egypt by Samir Amin

Muslim Brotherhood Logo

The electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the Salafists in Egypt (January 2012) is hardly surprising. The decline brought about by the current globalization of capitalism has produced an extraordinary increase in the so-called “informal” activities that provide the livelihoods of more than half of the Egyptian population (statistics give a figure of 60%).

And the Muslim Brotherhood is very well placed to take advantage of this decline and perpetuate its reproduction. Their simplistic ideology confers legitimacy on a miserable market/bazaar economy that is completely antithetical to the requirements of any development worthy of the name. The fabulous financial means provided to the Muslim Brotherhood (by the Gulf states) allows them to translate this ideology into efficient action: financial aid to the informal economy, charitable services (medical dispensaries etc.).

In this way the Brotherhood establishes itself at the heart of society and induces its dependency. It has never been the intention of the Gulf countries to support the development of Arab countries, for example through industrial investment. They support a form of “lumpen development” — to use the term originally coined by André Gunder Frank — that imprisons the societies concerned in a spiral of pauperization and exclusion, which in turn reinforces the stranglehold of reactionary political Islam on society.

This would not have succeeded so easily if it had not been in perfect accord with the objectives of the Gulf states, Washington, and Israel. The three close allies share the same concern: to foil the recovery of Egypt. A strong, upright Egypt would mean the end of the triple hegemony of the Gulf (submission to the discourse of Islamization of society), the United States (a vassalized and pauperized Egypt remains under its direct influence), and Israel (a powerless Egypt does not intervene in Palestine).

The rallying of regimes to neo-liberalism and to submission to Washington was sudden and total in Egypt under Sadat, and more gradual and moderate in Algeria and Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood — which is part of the power system — should not be considered merely as an “Islamic party,” but first and foremost as an ultra reactionary party that is, moreover, Islamist. Reactionary not only concerning what are known as “social issues” (the veil, sharia, anti-Coptic discrimination), but also, and to the same degree, reactionary in the fundamental areas of economic and social life: the Brotherhood is against strikes, workers’ demands, independent workers’ unions, the movement of resistance against the expropriation of farmers, etc.

The planned failure of the “Egyptian revolution” would thus guarantee the continuation of the system that has been in place since Sadat, founded on the alliance of the army high command and political Islam. Admittedly, on the strength of its electoral victory the Brotherhood is now able to demand more power than it has thus far been granted by the military. However, revising the distribution of the benefits of this alliance in favor of the Brotherhood may prove difficult.

The first round of the presidential election on 24 May was organized in such a way as to achieve the objective pursued by the system in power and by Washington: to reinforce the alliance of the two pillars of the system — the army high command and the Muslim Brotherhood — and settle their disagreement (which of the two will be in the forefront). The two candidates “acceptable” in this sense were the only ones to receive adequate means to run their campaigns. Morsi (MB: 24%) and Chafiq (Army: 23%). The movement’s real candidate — H. Sabbahi – who did not receive the means normally granted to candidates, allegedly only got 21% of the vote (the figure is questionable).

At the end of protracted negotiations it was agreed that Morsi was the “winner” of the second round. The assembly, like the president, was elected thanks to a massive distribution of parcels (of meat, oil, and sugar) to those who voted for the Islamists. And yet, the “foreign observers” failed to observe a situation that is openly ridiculed in Egypt. The assembly’s dissolution was delayed by the army, which wanted to give the Brotherhood time to bring discredit upon itself by refusing to address social issues (employment, salaries, schools, and health!).

The system in place, “presided” over by Morsi, is the best guarantee that lumpen development and the destruction of the institutions of the state, which are the objectives pursued by Washington, will continue. We will see how the revolutionary movement, which is still firmly committed to the fight for democracy, social progress, and national independence, will carry on after this electoral charade.

Source

Samir Amin is a Marxist economist. Translation by Julia Monod (first published by Pambazuka News under a Creative Commons license).

Oh Revolutionaries of the Squares. They will not Rob us Twice!

Oh Revolutionaries of the Squares. They will not Rob us Twice!

Let us form popular committees in all the revolutionary squares

When the revolutionaries chanted for the continuation of the revolution they believed. They believed when they insisted that it had not been completed. Now it is returning, crashing into the squares. The price of freedom and justice is being paid for with the life and eyes of it youth. Ten months since the spread of the Egyptian revolution’s first spark, the foresight of those has been proven, those who called for not leaving the square, and those who sat-in time after time demanding retribution, the rights of the martyrs, the release of their colleagues who had been tried in military courts, and the departure of a regime that gave the military salute the first day, in order to steal good Egyptian hearts then swoop down and torture, arrest, judge and slaughter us today with its bullets and deadly bombs, revealing its true face. It has always been, since the first day, an extension of Mubarak’s regime.

Continue reading “Oh Revolutionaries of the Squares. They will not Rob us Twice!”

Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution

The revolution has returned to all of Egypt’s squares and streets yet again to complete its course. The masses are once again pouring into the squares to announce that the only legitimacy is that of the revolution and the people in the heart of the squares. They affirm the masses’ distrust and refusal of the Military Council and its government. They refuse a Military Council that intentionally hindered the transitional period and impeded the revolution’s course to change and cleansing. They refuse a government that lacks power and is nothing but a secretary to the Military Council. They refuse a government that does not possess the will or ability to complete the revolution’s course. Continue reading “Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution”