[D66] Fwd: Revolt in Egypt

[Antid Oto]

New Left Review 68, March-April 2011

Hazem Kandil
REVOLT IN EGYPT
Interview


Q: After a reign of thirty years, Mubarak was overthrown by a popular
movement in less than three weeks. How did the uprising originate?

A: Over the last few years, a rebellion had been brewing under the
surface. There was a general sense that the status quo could not be
sustained. Movies, novels, songs were permeated by the theme of revolt:
it was everywhere in people’s imagination. Two developments were
responsible for making ordinary, apolitical Egyptians feel they could no
longer carry on with their normal lives. The first was the dissolution
of the social contract governing state–society relations since Nasser’s
coup in the fifties. The contract involved a div0it exchange: the regime
offered free education, employment in an expanding public sector,
affordable healthcare, cheap housing and other forms of social
protection, in return for obedience. You could have—or at any rate hope
for—these benefits, so long as domestic or foreign policies were not
questioned and political power was not contested. In other words, people
understood that they were trading their political rights for social
welfare. From the eighties onwards, this contract was eroded, but it was
not until the new millennium that it was fully abrogated. By this time
the regime felt that it had eliminated organized resistance so
thoroughly that it no longer needed to pay the traditional social bribes
to guarantee political acquiescence. Viewing a population that appeared
utterly passive, fragmented and demoralized, the regime believed it was
time for plunder, on a grand scale. In the ruling National Democratic
Party (ndp), a faction clustered around the President’s son Gamal
Mubarak increasingly took charge through a new body called the Policy
Committee. It had two components. One consisted of corrupt,
state-nurtured capitalists with monopoly control over profitable sectors
of the economy. The other was composed of neo-liberal intellectuals,
typically economists with links to international financial institutions.

In 2004, the businessmen’s cabinet of Ahmed Nazif marked the first time
this group actually took over government. Monopoly capitalists assumed
cabinet positions relevant to their fields of activity. For example,
Mohamed Mansour, one of the biggest car dealers in Egypt, became
Minister of Transport. A tycoon in the tourist industry, Zoheir
Garraneh, became Minister of Tourism. Neo-liberal intellectuals were no
less prominent. The Minister of Investment, Mahmoud Mohieddin, went on
to become Managing Director of the World Bank in 2010. The Minister of
Finance, Youssef Boutros-Ghaly, was a senior imf executive, and remained
linked to the Fund, for example, by chairing the International Monetary
and Financial Committee, the main policy-planning body advising its
Board of Governors. The result was a combination of outrageous looting
by these insider capitalists, and blatant neo-liberal exactions on the
population. The budgetary process was reorganized, services were
privatized and a new fiscal regime introduced. In 2005, corporate tax
rates were cut in half, from 40 to 20 per cent of earnings, though even
this was rarely paid, while taxes falling on the mass of the population
were sharply raised—most notoriously on housing. In 2010, many Egyptians
with no property other than the roof over their heads, living on
pensions of less than $50 a month, were suddenly faced with steep tax
bills for their homes. The result was such a level of protest, with
pleas and appeals to the President to intervene, that Mubarak suspended
implementation of the new tax two months before it was due to come into
force. By 2010, however, the belief was widespread that Mubarak was not
going to run for the Presidency again in September of this year, but
pass it on to his son. The prospect of Gamal, no longer heir apparent,
but exercising absolute power with his cronies, scared many people. Life
was already extremely difficult economically for most Egyptians. What
would it be like if there was no appeal against him, and everything he
had come to represent?

Parallel with this social change, and related to it, was an alteration
in the forms of political repression by the regime. Back in the fifties
and sixties, it was understood that you would suffer arrest or torture
only if you were politically organized. The military took care of
domestic repression, which was brutal but highly targeted. In the
seventies and early eighties, this function was transferred from the
army to the police. Repression now became more indiscriminate, but it
was still carried out within a discernible structure and certain limits.
Calling the shots were colonels or captains, people with names and ranks
and faces, who bore some kind of responsibility for the decisions they
took, and you still had to have some kind of political involvement—not
necessarily organized, now, but saying something that crossed a red line
or upset some official—to fall into their hands. By the nineties,
however, the regime had become so confident it faced no challenges that
it treated criticism in the press, or on satellite television or later
the internet, as harmless banalities. This was also the attitude taken
by the police: day-to-day repression of citizens was too mundane to be
carried out by uniformed officers. Why would police officers waste their
time and energy on intimidating a few students, cracking down on the
occasional hot-headed labour organizer or molesting some female
human-rights activists to keep them off the streets?

So, more and more, plain-clothes assistants were used for these tasks.
Sadat had started to use low-level thugs of this kind in the seventies,
but on a very small scale. In order not to implicate the police, raids
were passed off as manifestations of popular support for the regime.
Mubarak employed them in parliamentary elections in the eighties. From
the nineties onwards, however, deployment of these seasonally hired
thugs, on the pay-roll but not in the ranks of the police, became the
norm, and with it repression became far more random. They would often
harass or manhandle ordinary people for no political reason, simply for
purposes of extortion. It was a dramatic case of this widespread
phenomenon which eventually triggered the uprising. Khaled Said was an
educated youth in his twenties, from a good family in Alexandria. In the
summer of 2010, he exchanged words with a couple of these police
assistants in an internet cafe, so they simply smashed his face on the
pavement. Later they claimed he was suspected of carrying drugs, and
that, before they could search him, he committed suicide. Pictures of
him were soon everywhere on the internet. In Dubai, a Google executive
named Wael Ghonim created a group on Facebook called ‘We are all Khaled
Said’, and asked everyone who had faced this kind of barbarism to join
it. In a couple of months, over a hundred thousand people had done so.
This was the contingency that started the whole movement. Behind it was
this double deterioration—in the scale of economic exploitation and
plunder, and in the extent of arbitrary molestation and repression—that
made the lives of ordinary Egyptians who had nothing to do with politics
increasingly unbearable.


full: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2884