[D66] Fwd: [Marxism] The great Arab awakening

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Counterpunch April 20, 2011
The Great Arab Awakening
Revolution and Confusion

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Cairo

Egypt is filled with signs of an unfinished revolution. Politics and
everyday life are in a state of flux. Even the skylight high in the
ceiling of the Cairo Museum, through which thieves entered at the height
of the uprising, has not been mended. The robbers lowered themselves by
rope and stole items discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun, including a
gold military trumpet. They might have taken more treasures had they not
been diverted by the museum gift shop, where they looted cheap but gaudy
copies of ancient Egyptian artefacts which they found more attractive
than the shabbier originals.

The robbers' confusion about what to do when they found the museum
unguarded and at their disposal, is mirrored by that of government and
protesters after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. All are conscious that a
political earthquake has taken place, but somehow those who have
misruled Egypt for decades are mostly still in place. Mubarak may have
gone, but Egypt is now run by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,
consisting of 18 generals led by Field Marshal Mohamad Hussein Tantawi,
Mubarak's defense minister for 20 years.

Some in Cairo gloomily mutter "plus ça change", or knowingly quote the
famous lines from The Leopard, Lampedusa's tale of revolution in Sicily:
"everything must change so that everything can remain the same". It is
easy to see why this is cited when Egyptians see the torture of suspects
continuing, along with military courts that have tried 5,000 people
since the revolution, sentences often handed down after 10-minute
trials. Maikel Nabil, a 26-year-old blogger, received three years for
criticizing the army.

But the past week has shown how difficult it is for the army to retain
political credibility in a newly politicized country unless it meets
protesters' demands. Mubarak was arrested on  April 13 with his two
sons, Alaa and Gamal. The army council says that sentences passed on
young protesters will be reconsidered. Every time it resists change, its
members equivocate and make concessions.

So far, the generals have not felt strong enough to behave otherwise, so
long as they are pretending there has always been a big divide between
Mubarak's corrupt dictatorship and state institutions such as the armed
forces. Of course the two were indissolubly linked and the slogan "the
army and people are one", shouted by protesters in Tahrir Square, was
primarily a plea for soldiers not to shoot. The military are keen to
disclaim responsibility for recent events, though many Egyptians see
that it is the army that has ruled them, mostly badly, for 60 years.

The army's convenient fiction about its role is not entirely false. It
is important to grasp one significant feature of the governments now
reeling under the impact of the Arab Awakening. The regimes under threat
mostly started off as military dictatorships brought to power by army
coups. But by the mid-1970s military regimes throughout the Arab world
had evolved into police states in order to coup-proof themselves. Rulers
kicked away the military ladders they had climbed to power. In Egypt,
army officers retained privileges such as clubs, luxurious housing, a
cut of profitable business, and effective legal immunity. But in terms
of real power they lost out to the mukhabarat, as the security and
intelligence services are generally called.

The pattern was the same throughout the Arab world. In Iraq, Saddam
Hussein was determined that nobody else was going to ride to power on
the top of an army tank. After becoming president in 1979, power was
concentrated in his extended family, the ferocious security services,
and the Ba'ath party. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi went a step further,
after his unsuccessful war in Chad in the 1980s, when he largely
dissolved the Libyan army.

I have spent the past 10 days in Libya and before that I was in Egypt.
The differing course of the Arab Awakening in each country is
significant. In Egypt, as in Tunisia, the establishment felt it could
stay in business if it let the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes go. In Cairo,
there is talk of what "began as a revolution ending up in a military
coup", since it was the army that finally forced out Mubarak. In Libya,
as in Syria, the regime and the state could not be divided. Disaffected
members of the establishment, such as the head of Special Forces Abdul
Fattah Younis and foreign minister Moussa Koussa, had to defect rather
than try to replace Gaddafi from within.

Absence of a professional army in Libya means that the rebels have to
rely on long-retired soldiers to train new recruits. At the 17 February
Camp in Benghazi last week a grizzled former sergeant, Nuri Tawi, who
had retired 22 years ago after service in Lebanon, Chad and Rwanda, was
trying without much success to show several dozen young men how to load
a machine gun. Gaddafi has more trained troops but not enough to take
and hold cities such as Ajdabiya and Misrata.

Over the past 20 years the Arab police states became quasi-monarchies
with elderly rulers seeking to hand on power to their sons. Benghazi is
littered with the abandoned projects of Gaddafi's sons, such as the
palatial, almost completed Regency Hotel. Gaddafi's regal pretensions
did not prevent him insisting on study of his Green Book's radical
adages. Not surprisingly, the centre where it was studied, an attractive
white crown-like structure, is burnt out. One Benghazi resident
complained: "My cousin had to re-do a whole three-month term of his
computer engineering course because he failed the section on the Green
Book."

The political landscape is changing in North Africa and the Middle East
both within states and in their relations with the outside world. In
Egypt, any new government is likely to be less close to the US and
Israel. In Libya, the opposition is weak militarily, but Gaddafi is
likely to go down because of the strength of Nato backing for the
rebels. It is dubious if foreign domination of an oil state such as
Libya will ebb away after Gaddafi and his family have gone.

The strength of the rebels in east Libya is their skill in marrying mass
protest to the requirements of the media. Demonstrations in front of the
town hall and elsewhere in Benghazi are much better organized than their
military manoeuvers.

But there is something deeply hypocritical about the concern shown by
Nato and the Arab monarchies of the Gulf over the fate of Libyan rebels,
when they ignore or promote savage repression in Bahrain. The majority
Shia community is being systematically disenfranchised, deprived of
jobs, its parties dissolved, and its leaders arrested and tortured. In
response, there is hardly a bleat out of the US or Nato whose leaders
are so eager to bring democracy to Libyans. It is reasonable to regard
cynically the humanitarian pretensions of foreign leaders and the
reformist zeal of Egyptian generals, but radical change is already with
us because tens of millions of previously apathetic people have been
politicized and some of the world's nastiest police states turned out to
be more fragile than anybody expected.