The military-regime appointed President Adly Mansour said in his inaugural speech that the removal of Mohamed Morsi as president of Egypt by the army has “corrected the path of glorious revolution that took place on 25 January, 2011,” and that revolution must continue until “we stop producing tyrants.” This is at best an Orwellian statement and echoes what old Major, a white boar, said in the Animal Farm: “Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.” In today’s Egypt, this ‘Man’ is Morsi, who, in view of millions of Egyptians, is a religious bigot, who attempted to impose religious dictatorship in the country, and whose ouster from power might establish a pluralistic polity.
It leads to a question: what is the definition of a tyrant? For millions of Egyptians who gathered in the Tahrir Square and chanted inexhaustibly for many days, ‘Erhar,’ or ‘leave, depart,’ Morsi was an incarnation of a centuries old ‘tyrant’ who concentrated power in his hands by immunising presidential decisions from judicial review, who presided over the drafting of the constitution that incorporated Islamic laws, who opted for political exclusion and filled major government positions with Brotherhood leaders, and who failed to reduce economic misery of people. His measures resulted in institutional clash between the executive and the judiciary and the eruption of sectarian clashes.
In view of his grave excesses, the intervention of the army to remove Morsi from power is not being termed as military coup by his opponents in Egypt. Adam Clark Miller, an American-born Egyptian said in an interview that “33 million Egyptians protested and Morsi refused to address the issues, instead calling them terrorists. He was a blind, arrogant and ultimately stupid puppet for an extremist Islamic agenda. It wasn’t a coup. The military acted on the will of the people.”
However, it raises other question: can military mediate political conflict as a just arbiter? Can armed forces remove authoritarianism from the body politic of a country, struggling to learn nitty-gritty of inclusive democracy? To analyse these questions, we need to understand the institutional interests, politico-strategic role and ideological orientation of the Egyptian armed forces.
Egypt has the largest standing army in the Arab world, which is estimated to be around 450,000 troops. The ideological orientation of army is secular-nationalist and not liberal-democratic. The army is also highly politicised, and in the past has propped up authoritarian regimes. When demonstrations erupted against Hosni Mubarak in 2011, military withdrew its support, and after his ouster ran an interim government, leading to Morsi’s victory as a president in elections generally perceived to be free and fair. Morsi established a tense but working relationship with the armed forces; his party had been hounded and intimidated by the security forces for more than four decades. To appease restive army, defence budget was exempted from the parliamentary scrutiny by the government of Morsi. This has been a significant concession, as the armed forces have entrenched corporate interests; officer corps has enriched themselves through successful commercial ventures. Finally, the armed forces also play a vital strategic role in the region by maintaining a peace treaty with Israel and by keeping the Suez Canal open. Its strategic importance in the Middle East explains the US grant of 1.3 billion dollars military aid to the Egyptian military; in fact, it is the largest recipient of the US military aid after Israel.
Notwithstanding the authoritarian tendencies of the Morsi regime, the intervention of the armed forces as a final arbiter is fraught with serious consequences for the process of democratisation in Egypt. The reason is simple: if the politico-strategic role of the armed forces is combined with their organisational strength, they can attempt to keep out Muslim Brotherhood — the ideological foes of the armed forces — from the political process and so continue the trend of exclusionary politics in Egypt. And divisive political forces, grappling to learn the norms of consensual politics, might also give way to demands of vendetta against Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists.
That said, millions of Egyptians who have valiantly strove for democratic polity must learn to recognise the real tyrant: it is a force, be it elected or non-elected, which disregards fundamental rights of people and fails to build board-based political process, reflecting aspirations of diverse groups of people. Thus, Egyptians must not lull themselves into the belief that the armed forces have intervened on their behalf, and continue to make an effort to take the revolution to its logical conclusion: building of inclusive democracy in Egypt. Thumbing through George Orwell’s Animal Farm might provide some useful guidelines.
The writer is a public policy practitioner based in Lahore and can be reached at [email protected]