Egypt: the Postmodern Coup

On July 16th, 2013, the new interim government of Egypt was sworn in. Former President Mohamed Morsi and many leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are under arrest and awaiting trial. What mistakes have Morsi and his supporters made? In a special interview a RIAC member, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation Pyotr Stegny shares his insights on the protests in Egypt and the role of the military in governing the country.

On July 16th, 2013, the new interim government of Egypt was sworn in. Former President Mohamed Morsi and many leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are under arrest and awaiting trial. What mistakes have Morsi and his supporters made? In a special interview a RIAC member, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation Pyotr Stegny shares his insights on the protests in Egypt and the role of the military in governing the country.

Mr. Stegny, what happened in Egypt on July 3rd, 2013? Was it a revolution or a military coup?

The opinions on this issue vary. On the one hand, on June 30th, about 17 million Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and other cities of the country, demanding the resignation of President Mohammed Morsi. On the other hand, he was deposed by the military, who actually have wielded supreme power during the transition period in the country, in spite of having declared their intention to stay neutral and away from politics. Technically, it is certainly a coup and the deposition of the duly elected president. I think that it could be compared with the “soft” removal from power of Necmettin Erbakan, who is considered one of the founders of political Islam. In 1997, he was pressured by the military to step down as prime minister in Turkey. This was done in a specific way. In February 1997, the Turkish military, just as the military in Egypt, issued a manifesto of 18 points, and by June of that year Erbakan was forced to resign as head of the government, because he could not and would not agree to the demands of the military. The 1997 coup in Turkey was called “postmodern.”

In Egypt, the pattern of military action was not stereotyped either. Some believe that by supporting opponents of the Islamists, who at the time were in power, they have prevented the country's slide into civil war. The military arrested Morsi and a number of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, suspended the Constitution, dissolved the legislature, and banned the broadcast of Qatari Al-Jazeera in Egypt, which backed the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, the military's actions were supported by the heads of the Muslim and Christian denominations, as well as by representatives of various opposition groups, including the second largest Islamist party An-Nur (the Salafis).

Much of the population has accepted the transition period road map promulgated by the military. In accordance with the road map, the former head of the Constitutional Court and the interim President of Egypt Adly Mahmud Mansour approved the appointment of the former head of the IAEA and the Nobel Prize Laureate Mohammed ElBaradei as interim Vice-President for foreign relations as well as 74-year-old economist Hazem El-Beblawi as the Prime Minister of the government of national unity. The first fifteen ministers were sworn in; they are all technocrats representing the secular opposition. The Constituent Assembly is to be convened in two weeks. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for February next year, to be followed by presidential elections. It is assumed that the transition period will take about a year.

Pyotr Stegny

You can see that the elements of the “soft” transition to the modernized management system are shaped to a large extent by the military, which is controlling the process. Therefore, for the time being it is hard to say what exactly is happening in Egypt now. What is not is under question is that the country is split. Moreover, on July 9th peaceful manifestations, as Muslim Brothers claim, (according to the official version, they were an effort to release M. Morsi from prison) resulted in bloodshed. 51 people were killed and hundreds were wounded and injured during this and other demonstrations sweeping over Egypt. Opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, aware that Islamists in Egypt and the Arab world as a whole represent a great force, have tried to reassure that they do not intend to oust them from the political arena. However, clashes in different cities of Egypt continue.

The military isolated part of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, including one of their most charismatic leaders Khairat al-Shater, who had been the initial candidate of movement's Freedom and Justice Party during the 2012 Egyptian presidential election. However, the military Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces barred him from the presidential race. Mohammed Badie – the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood – remains at large. The Brothers still declare that they disavow violence in their efforts to get power back. But there are many radicals in their ranks who are calling for unleashing guerrilla war in the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula.

It should be noted that the second-largest Islamist party of Egypt An-Nur is collaborating with the new regime and the military. Its representatives do not make up part of the Cabinet (as during the rule of Morsi) but participated in protracted and tough negotiations on the head of the interim government, during which they prevented the appointment of two secular opposition candidates, namely a prominent economist and technocrat Bahaeddin and Baradaoui, whose candidacies were also considered. Experts believe that in doing so the Salafis were trying to preserve the Islamic character of the constitution, pushed through by Morsi in 2012.

In your opinion, what was the main cause of discontent of millions of Egyptians? Has the fact that Mohammed Morsi is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood played any role in this process?

As president, Morsi formally left the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood. He ran for president as Chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party, created by the Brothers in April 2011. However, many believe that the party was the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who played a serious if not the major role in shaping the policy pursued by Morsi’s government. It appeared that the political system in Egypt was developing into a symbiosis of the Turkish and the Iranian models. The practice of shadow Islamist leadership, orchestrating political decision-making behind the scenes, was borrowed from Iran.

As for the reasons for discontent inside the country, Morsi gave plenty. Being initially nominated as a backup candidate, Morsi emerged as the new Muslim Brotherhood candidate and became President rather by chance, and he made a lot of personal mistakes too. But this, perhaps, is not so significant. In my opinion, Morsi failed to understand that democracy was something more than just elections, and this omission played the decisive role. He believed that 51% of the votes gave him the support of all the Egyptians. He failed to realize that his main task in the polarized, divided society was to find a national consensus and rally the forces that could contribute to solving the problems facing the country.

Morsi, apparently, misjudged the logic that brought him to power. His success was largely due to the fact that his main opponent in the second round of the presidential elections was the last Prime Minister of Mubarak's administration Ahmed Shafiq. Morsi’s victory by a narrow margin was provided in the first place by the high mobilization abilities of the Muslim Brothers with their network of charity institutions established over the decades, when they were in hiding or semi-legal. The protest vote made its contribution too.

But the mandate of trust had to be substantiated, and in this case, Morsi failed. He focused not so much on economic issues, the problems of the national character, as on the issues that served the best interests of the Islamists. The common people called the course “ikhwanization of state” (Ikhwan is Arabic for brothers). He pushed through a constitution that actually enshrined sharia, causing an acute conflict with the judiciary and the secular opposition as a whole, who decided that the Brothers had “stolen the revolution from the people.” Morsi issued a constitutional declaration which widened his powers and provoked charges of usurpation of power. And then on the tide of euphoria from what he deceptively saw as victories, Morsi began to designate his people to key positions in the executive branch. The appointment of a representative of the Islamist “Gama'a Islamiya,” which had been involved in armed clashes in Upper Egypt 15 years ago, to governor of Luxor – Egypt's tourism gem - caused particular outrage.

Morsi has seriously underestimated the military, failing to realize that they needed Islamists as a kind of “immunity to democracy” to protect their corporate privileges. He did not take into account the fact that the secular opposition began to fear the Islamists’ collusion with the army behind its back. Morsi apparently relaxed after the new constitution declared the army a “professional and neutral institution,” and especially after dismissing in August Minister of Defense Hussein Tantawi and Chief of Staff Sami Anan. It seemed that Morsi ruled out the possibility of military meddling in politics. This, probably, was his crucial mistake. Morsi overlooked the changed attitude of the secular opposition to the army as the guarantor of the irreversibility of democratic changes which became the major requisite for the events on July 3rd. And judging by the coming reports, the secular opposition and the army were already coordinating their effort at the early stage of developments.

The focus point of Morsi’s electoral program was Egypt’s revival or “Egyptian renaissance.” But of the 64 election pledges he mеt only 4. In fact, the country lived on the resources that had been accumulated during the years of its previous development. During two and a half years the foreign exchange reserves fell from 36 to 14.9 billion dollars. Egypt’s major sponsor under Morsi was Qatar, which provided about $8 billion in aid. As to the promising negotiations on $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, Morsi and the people who stood behind him were reluctant to speed them up, fearing systemic reforms that are generally associated with getting credits and loans from the IMF. Morsi pursued what seemed to him a socially-oriented policy and increased subsidies, but it only exhausted the country financially. He did nothing to stimulate market initiative and remove obstacles in its way. As a result, his carefully created electoral image of a traditionalist in politics, but a liberal, and even neoliberal in economics, turned out to be a bitter disappointment for the electorate.

Photo: al-monitor.com
The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
al-Thani
Egypt’s major sponsor under Morsi was
Qatar

Morsi's relations with the countries of the Persian Gulf were not unclouded either. As a representative of the Muslim Brothers, Morsi spoke from the position of pan-Islamism, trying to strengthen the unity of the Arab world. This reflected the philosophy and political program of the Muslim Brotherhood, widely represented throughout the Arab countries. Morsi, especially at the beginning of his its activity, attempted to soften or stand above the Sunni-Shiite differences. His first official foreign visit was to Saudi Arabia, the second – to Iran. On Syria, he proposed the creation of a quadripartite commission composed of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran to discuss the problems of the country. The inclusion of Iran could not but annoy Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Historically, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are very wary of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a number of other Arab states its activities were banned after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the Brothers strongly condemned “the invitation by the Gulf states” of foreign troops to change the regime in a brotherly Arab country.

A new round of controversy was related to the Arab spring. The reason was, to put it succinctly, Saudi Arabia's rejection of the very idea of combining Islam with democracy, since the latter is a movement coming from “below” and, consequently, posing a potential threat to the monarchy. The Muslim Brotherhood appears dangerous for the Gulf traditionalists due, primarily, to its ability to appeal directly to the masses. It is mostly for this reason that the movement was banned at one time. The peculiarity of the situation only emphasized the fact that the concept of the Brotherhood who are quite comfortable with the broad masses of people appears to be more compatible with the Western standards of democracy in contrast to the Salafis and Wahhabis, supported in the Gulf, because they do not encroach upon the authority and power of the absolute monarch.

It seems that Morsi overlooked this potential conflict. On July 4th, the second day after the coup, a Jerusalem-based DEBKAfile website reported that during the preparation of the coup the Egyptian military had been coordinating their activities with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

This information was then confirmed by a number of Arab sources. It was mentioned, in particular, that the head of the Egyptian military General Abdel Fatah Said El Sissy was at one time a military attache in Riyadh. The fact that in the first week after the coup, the Gulf countries rendered significant aid to the new regime indirectly confirms their possible involvement of in the events in Egypt. Saudi Arabia provided $5 billion, the Emirates – $3 billion, Kuwait – $4 billion. It’s quite revealing that the coup in Qatar, which occurred on the eve of the events in Egypt, led to bringing the dissident emirate in line with the collective position of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, shaped under the absolute leadership of Saudi Arabia.

As to relations of Morsi’s regime with the United States and the West, they developed more or less normally in compliance with the American policy of cooperating with “moderate Islamists.” In this respect it is interesting to note that on the eve of the coup Saudi Arabia allegedly assured El Sissi, that if the United States lifted its annual $1.5 billion military aid to Egypt, the Saudis would make up for it.

What is the reaction in the region and the world to the events in Egypt?

The reaction varies. The United States is hesitating, occupying a wait-and-see position and making restrained statements on the Egyptian military. It is not clear if this coup came as a surprise to them. Experts are of different views on this matter. However, it is no secret that the Obama administration faces a difficult situation – the overthrow of the legally elected president poses complex problems not only in terms of the image but of legal nature too, since the U.S. legislation restricts cooperation with dictatorships. The position of the United States as well as most other countries depends on further developments. On July 16th Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met in Egypt with the Prime Minister and the new Vice-President. According to reports, his contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood were not scheduled.

In this respect, the New York Times assessment of the events in Egypt is quite noteworthy. The title of the article In Egypt, Democrats vs. Liberals speaks for itself. It reveals that the Americans realize pretty well that the model of democracy they are promoting in the Middle East is causing controversy not only in terms of deciding on the secular or religious character of the state, but in terms of neoliberal values too, which are associated with personal freedoms, the rights of women, and attitudes towards sexual minorities. In my view, this is an interesting observation since we have to closely watch the stratification of traditional societies along these lines in the process of democratic transformations. I believe there will be many more unexpected developments. Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Kuwait immediately, with Qatar a bit later, congratulated the military warmly, and even heartily.

One gets the impression that in doing so the Gulf countries are trying to seize an opportunity to modify the course, and perhaps the content of the Arab Spring. The Saudis, safeguarding themselves from its impact on their own people, strive to direct the ongoing processes in the Arab world into its Wahhabi (Salafi) official ideology, and refocus the Arab Spring slogans from Islam politicization to fighting extremism (terrorism). We are witnessing the creation of basic contradictions, because in real-life situation in the Middle East the kindred to the Saudis Wahhabis and Salafis are actively involved in the armed struggle against the “dictatorships,” particularly in Syria. How the facts on the ground can be combined with what the Saudis want to instill in the minds of their own Islamists, is still an open question.

The biggest concern that the events in Egypt have caused has taken place in Turkey. Immediately after the manifesto of the military, Prime Minister Erdogan called an emergency meeting of the leadership. The matter is that the Turks developed a special relationship with Egypt when Morsi was in power. Egyptian Muslim Brothers had a positive attitude to many elements of the Turkish model, and even the name of their Freedom and Justice Party is very similar to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. However, after the September 2011 visit of Erdogan to Egypt, when he called on Egyptians to adopt a secular, and not Islamic constitution, relations suffered some cooling. The events in Taksim Square, showing if not Morsi, than the secular opposition for sure, that the Islamists in Turkey were not omnipotent, did not go unnoticed in Egypt either. Generally speaking, in view of the hopes pinned on the Turkish model in the course of the Arab spring, the events in Egypt were a meaningful sign for the countries with state-political systems based on stabilizing, balancing role of the military.

In your opinion, what will happen next?

Photo: REUTERS / Amr Dalsh
Georgy Mirsky:
Dialogue with Muslim Brotherhood Should Be
Continued

It’s difficult to make a forecast, but going back to what we talked about at the beginning of our conversation – the postmodern nature of the coup – let us not forget that five years after the removal of Erbakan in Turkey Erdogan’s party came to power and managed to combine principles of democracy with the traditions of Islam.

Of course, drawing direct analogies makes no sense. The main question now is what line of conduct the Muslim Brothers of Egypt will choose. Incorporating them into a transition period dialogue is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future. But Islamists still make up half the population; they are removed from power, but still represent a very powerful actor. In this regard, the accusations put forward in recent days against Morsi (particularly, of espionage) may add fuel to the fire of internal strife.

The problem of Salafis as the second largest in size and influence party has also come to light. The main thing for them, at least for the moment, is to preserve the Islamic character of the constitution. Can there be a compromise in this regard? It is an open question, but I think that the social and political confrontation will develop along this line.

The role of the military during the transition period is very difficult. So far they have managed to escape serious mistakes, but the national consensus will be tested more than once in the near future. Much will depend on whether its strength withstands the test of time.

As to the secular opposition, its informal leader ElBaradei is now engaged in international affairs but remains the most viable candidate for presidency. His party Al-Dustour as well as the National Salvation Front is cooperating with the movement Tamarrud, which headed protest actions on June 30th at the Tahrir square. But the leadership of Tamarrud is noticeably younger, more active, and represents somewhat different social strata than the traditional opposition, led by ElBaradei. So differences resulting from the generation gap and change of generations in Egypt may also add to possible controversies. In the meantime, the problem is aggravated by the fact that apart from ElBaradei and a couple of other people the opposition has no prominent leaders. It is no secret that supporters of Mubarak have noticeably cheered up. According to the latest public opinion polls, 70% of Egyptians think that life was better under Mubarak.

The solution of urgent social and economic problems depends on whether the new government will be able to work out and start realizing systemic reforms. This appears to be the key challenge. If approaches to their implementation are found, there is a hope for the best. In this sense, the technocratic government is a big plus.

Egypt for at least a year of the transition period has become a country conducting a “managed democracy” experiment. There will be inevitable conflicts with the “experts” on democracy from the European Union and Washington, particularly so because this is a sore point for Obama, who is building his policy in contrast to his Republican predecessor.

On region-wide issues, including the Middle East settlement and Syria, Egypt is likely to return to the mainstream of Arab politics. The current dependence on financial aid from the Gulf monarchies and problems with Islamists in the country deprive Egypt of the possibility of pursuing an independent policy. But in the long run Egypt will remain an independent power center of the Arab world. Moreover, the fate of the Arab Spring will be decided exactly in Egypt.

Some comments should be made about the relations of Egypt with Israel. Having come to power, Morsi kept himself aloof from the relationship with Israel, turning it over to the military. At one time, before Morsi’s victory in the election, El Sissy was responsible for contacts with the Israelis in Sinai and found common ground with them, which was manifested during the completion of the Israeli military operation “Pillar of Cloud” in Gaza. However, during Morsi’s presidency relations between Egypt and Hamas in Gaza, which historically emerged as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, seriously improved. Now Hamas has lost sponsors: the Egyptian military closed the border with Gaza and passages from the Egyptian side. Israelis with good reason fear the increased number of extremist manifestations.

What effect, in your opinion, will the change of government in Egypt have on the latter’s positions in the region and the world? How will affect relations with Russia?

The attitude of the world towards Egypt will be determined by the pace and content of realized initiatives during the transition period. Of course, the sooner the army returns to its barracks, the better. The problems are many and they overlap each other. The country is divided, as well as the region, though. But Egypt is a country which during sharp turns of history has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to rise above the differences splitting society and display common sense. Let's hope that it will follow the same pattern this time as well.

The situation in the region is far more complicated. One gets the feeling that the first chapter of the Arab Spring is over or close to completion. Is it possible to consolidate its results? It seems that this will be the main issue of conflict of interests. And the Gulf countries – the main financial sponsors of the young Arab democracies – are likely to come to the fore. As is known, he who pays the piper calls the tune. But what kind of music will that be? At this stage it is difficult to say, especially as recent developments testify to the intensive political stratification of the Islamic environment. I would like to hope that the democratic gains will be irreversible, but temporary setbacks and new rounds of the civil war cannot be ruled out.

As for Russia, the tradition and accumulated potential of our relationship with Egypt – under any legitimate regime - allows to look into the future with confidence.

Interviewer: RIAC Program Coordinator Alexander Eliseev