Egypt: Democrats and tyrants

The response to the revolt in Egypt has made it clear that, for the West, democracy  and freedom are not the absolutes they have been cracked up to be. They are partial, conditional and highly circumscribed.

Jeremy Seabrook

THE ever-fainter clarion-calls of democracy and freedom issuing from Western capitals dismayed those who remained on the streets of Cairo until Hosni Mubarak actually departed for his palace in Sharm el Sheik, a residence sometimes occupied by his friend Tony Blair. The euphoria and elation of this event, accomplished without violence on the part of the people, are their own reward, as the rejoicing all over the country testified.

The West, however, recently supportive of regime change in Iraq, showed far greater reluctance to dethrone the tyrant of Cairo. It declared Egypt to be a 'sovereign nation' it was powerless to control, despite having supported and underpinned its violence for three decades.

Western leaders, when compelled to address tyrants, 'call upon' them to eschew violence. They 'urge' dictators to avoid bloodshed. They demand 'assurances' or 'pledges' of juntas and strongmen, and occasionally offer 'stern warnings'. When these mild admonitions are perceived as a betrayal of all the fine words with which they ornament conferences, meetings and press conferences across the globe, they then entreat the butchers and bloodsuckers upon whom they have relied, sometimes for decades, to assure 'stability', to ensure an 'orderly transition'. They entrust to the bringers of disorder the restoration of an order that has never existed. 

Hypocrisy

So it has been with the evolution of the 'thinking' of world leaders (if that word does not ennoble their self-seeking calculations) in the presence of the forbearance, altruism and determination of the people of Egypt, young and old, women and men, secular, Muslim and Christian. When Mubarak appeared on TV and declared aprŠs moi le deluge, the paltry sagacity of those same 'leaders' wondered whether in fact, the downfall of their cherished tyrant might not unleash forces of 'extremism' which he threatened, should he - or at least the system he has so carefully put in place, financed by those same Western leaders - be evicted from power.

In November 2010, Hillary Clinton, with the icy grace and spontaneity of a mortuary flower, had hailed the 'partnership' between the US and Egypt as a 'cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond'. On 25 January, her verdict was still that the government of Mubarak was 'stable and responding to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people'. By the following day, she had changed, if not her tune, at least her refrain. 'We support the universal rights of the Egyptian people, including the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly.' No vacillation, no sudden reversal, no about-turn is too crude in the maintenance in power of a safe pair of hands, even if these are the hands of a strangler. Hence Western retreat into an empyrean of abstraction: the 'legitimate grievances' and 'aspirations of the Egyptian people', when these have been tortured, jailed and killed by the champions of stability.

The hypocrisy of the tepid enthusiasm of the 'international community' for the people of Egypt became even more marked after the removal of Mubarak. They were swift to announce they shared the people's 'joy', they celebrated the achievements of the people; and with the peculiar vengefulness reserved for fallen idols, they began a belated vilification of their puppet, his ill-gotten billions, his police state and apparatus of repression - the very elements that had been viewed as indispensable to stability.

It is clear that democracy and freedom are not quite the absolutes they have been cracked up to be. They are partial, conditional and highly circumscribed. On 14 February, Clinton hailed the 'courage' of the protesters in Iran with all the gusto she had suppressed in her initial reaction to their sisters and brothers in Egypt; only retrospectively did their struggle become a shining example; and then only insofar as it could be used to beat a regime to which the US is hostile. Protests in Bahrain, base of the US Fifth Fleet, were also met with a deathly silence Washington maintains to protect its own anointed and appointed. 

Indeed, the US loves democracy so much, it has a preferred (and if not elected, sometimes forcibly installed) candidate in every country in the world. Democratic elections that bring about the 'wrong' result - Hamas in 2006, for example - are simply condemned as illegitimate, or not 'full democracy', a term which indicates the maturity of states that have voluntarily eschewed all choice of significant change.

Synchronised

The responses to events in Egypt were chorally synchronised, so that it was impossible to say out of which vacuous talking head they issued; the pale indictment of their reliable proxy torturer never amounted to an unequivocal insistence on his immediate departure. It seemed that the Egyptian people were to pay the price for Western loyalty to its own tyrant. Nothing could be more revealing of their sense of the obligations of kinship; and if they have so little regard for the self-determination of the people of Egypt, should this be viewed as simply a remnant of imperial racism, or does it suggest they entertain, in private, a similar opinion of their own people?

In the equivocations of these world leaders-without-followers, you could actually feel them making enemies of those Egyptians who, naively, idealistically, had taken at face value their commitment to freedom. It might have been thought that the US had alienated enough people in the world. Apparently not. There seems to be no limit to its capacity for inciting revulsion, not only against its mendacity, but against the values it claims to stand for but fails to defend.

Of course, this does not tell the whole story; indeed, whole stories are, by their nature, elusive. But a crucial element in the desire to perpetuate 'stability' is the protection of Israeli impunity. Israel proclaims it is 'the only democracy' in the region; a distinction it will clearly do anything to retain, since its government was one of the few to have insisted that Mubarak should not relinquish his 30-year tenure of power.

At the time of writing, nothing is concluded. The military remains, vigilant, powerful. The army has not only been the principal support of governance in Egypt, it also has great economic power, with interests in water, cement, construction, hotels, gasoline. It even makes TV sets and controls bakery and milk concerns. It hovered over the protesters, now buzzing them with military aircraft, now fraternising with the people, now permitting the onslaught of 'Mubarak supporters' - an ugly mob whose violence against the peaceful demonstrators told its own story.

Then, more than two weeks after the beginning of the protest, stories emerged of beatings, torture, disappearances by the army, backed, no doubt, by the State Security intelligence, led by that shining symbol of renewal, Omar Suleiman. His appointment as Vice-President, when his involvement in the programme of CIA 'renditions' to the benign interrogation facilities of Egypt was no secret, was, like all the other 'concessions', an insult to the people. The 'eventual' departure of Mubarak, the disavowal of his detested son as successor, the dismissal of the old cabinet - all this was trumpeted by the Western media as evidence of radical 'change'; supported by tales of heartbreak from the tourist industry. Western tourists are 'rescued' as though they were war veterans, and while the Egyptian economy was 'suffering' to the tune of $3 billion, no sum was placed on the suffering of the Egyptian people.

Reproach

The endurance, passion and idealism of people who have maintained the vigil in Tahrir Square are a reproach to those who were expected to demonstrate their commitment to values they never cease to urge upon others. It is not the fault of the young that there is a void at the heart of their just cause: that is the vacant space where socialism ought to be, cancelled, as it has been, by the monopolists of the only version of secularism left in the world, one which involves the maintenance of monstrous social injustice and growing inequality.

But it was one thing when the West could support dictators in distant countries about which their people had little knowledge and less information; but for a Facebook generation, everyone is our neighbour, and Western connivance at repression in Egypt, or indeed anywhere else, reveals where the true heart lies of these deceivers and deniers of democracy, whose calls for 'restraint' may yet ensure the survival of the system minus Mubarak.

If Mubarak is the fallen Pharaoh, the army remains the Sphinx, since, upholder of the regime for 30 years, its response has, so far, been ambiguous and indecipherable. It is committed to realising the popular desire for democracy, but will honour existing treaties; and everyone knows what that means. Armies rarely find good reasons voluntarily to set aside power they have held for generations; and behind the public jubilation and the effusiveness of Western leaders, the undismantled skeleton of the police state looms, a continuing spectre at the feast of liberation.                      

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 245/246, January/February 2011, pp 43-44