Egypt’s Military Council: Between a rock and a hard place

Syn­op­sis
The Egypt­ian armed forces, revered before the pop­u­lar revolt that oust­ed Pres­i­dent Hos­ni Mubarak, took pow­er in Feb­ru­ary with a pledge to lead the coun­try to free and fair elec­tions with­in six months. It has since stum­bled from cri­sis to cri­sis and extend­ed the peri­od for a han­dover of pow­er to 2013. 

Com­men­tary

RECENT ELECTIONS in Tunisia have moved the coun­try clos­er to ful­fill­ing the goals of the pop­u­lar revolt sweep­ing the Mid­dle East and North Africa. How­ev­er the con­trast between the calm in Tunisia and the con­vul­sions of the post-Mubarak tran­si­ti­tion in Egypt could not be more stark.Following the first elec­tion since mass protests forced Pres­i­dent Zine El Abdine Ben Ali to resign in Jan­u­ary after 23 years in pow­er, erst­while foes – mod­er­ate Islamists and lib­er­al sec­u­lar­ists – are form­ing a coali­tion gov­ern­ment that promis­es to shelve dis­putes over reli­gion and focus on cre­at­ing jobs, writ­ing a new con­sti­tu­tion and reform­ing state insti­tu­tions shaped by decades of autocracy. 

In stark con­trast, the tran­si­tion in Egypt is marked by con­tin­ued protests; civil­ians being tried by mil­i­tary tri­bunals; arrests of dis­si­dent voic­es, most recent­ly includ­ing pop­u­lar blog­ger Alaa Abdel Fat­tah; a crack­down by sol­diers that killed 24 Cop­tic Chris­t­ian demon­stra­tors last month; and mount­ing sus­pi­cion that the rul­ing mil­i­tary is reluc­tant to relin­quish power. 

Between a rock and a hard place

No doubt, the com­plex­i­ties of gov­ern­ment in tran­si­tion have over­whelmed the 24 Mubarak-era gen­er­als that form the rul­ing Supreme Coun­cil of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been in office since Mubarak’s oust­ing. They have gov­erned the coun­try by tri­al and error, try­ing to sat­is­fy every­one and suc­ceed­ing in pleas­ing no one in the process. 

The military’s fum­bling has put it between a rock and a hard place. It wants to return to the bar­racks but only once it has secured its sta­tus and priv­i­leges as well as immu­ni­ty from future pros­e­cu­tion for alleged crimes com­mit­ted dur­ing the Mubarak era and the post-Mubarak tran­si­tion period. 

Sus­pi­cion of the military’s inten­tions were fuelled in ear­ly Novem­ber when it sought to per­suade polit­i­cal lead­ers to sign off on a set of con­sti­tu­tion­al guide­lines that would have put the armed forces beyond civil­ian scruti­ny, grant­ed it a right to veto drafts of a new con­sti­tu­tion and dis­miss and reap­point an elect­ed con­stituent assem­bly. The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the country’s fore­most organ­ised polit­i­cal group, has called for mass protests on Novem­ber 18. 

The rea­son for the con­trast between Egypt and Tunisia lies in dif­fer­ences in how Mubarak and Ben Ali sought to curb poten­tial mil­i­tary threats to their rule. In one of his first moves after com­ing to pow­er, Ben Ali dec­i­mat­ed the mil­i­tary and ensured that unlike the Egypt­ian armed forces, it had no stake in the sys­tem he built. As a result, the Tunisian mil­i­tary had no rea­son to obstruct real change; indeed if any­thing, it was like­ly to ben­e­fit from reform that leads to a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem, in which it would have a legit­i­mate role under civil­ian supervision. 

For his part, Mubarak secured the military’s loy­al­ty by giv­ing it con­trol of nation­al as opposed to home­land secu­ri­ty and allow­ing it to build an inde­pen­dent rela­tion­ship with its US coun­ter­parts that enabled it to cre­ate a mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex as well as a com­mer­cial empire in oth­er sec­tors. It is those pre­rog­a­tives and perks that the mil­i­tary is now try­ing to preserve. 

Rever­sal of roles

As a result, the Egypt­ian mil­i­tary is caught in a vicious cir­cle in its effort to realise its goals and sta­bilise Egypt. Increas­ing­ly, it is resort­ing to the only thing it real­ly knows- by reviv­ing the very emer­gency laws the anti-Mubarak pro­test­ers want­ed to see abolished. 

The military’s efforts have been com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that it was forced to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for polic­ing the coun­try as the police and state secu­ri­ty forces, wide­ly seen as Mubarak’s repres­sive, hench­men, seek to come to grips with the post-Mubarak real­i­ty. Defeat­ed by anti-Mubarak pro­test­ers in bat­tles on Tahrir Square led by mil­i­tant soc­cer fans, the police has since become a demor­alised force too con­cerned about pol­ish­ing its tar­nished image to enforce law and order that would risk con­fronta­tion with the public. 

In its bid to restore order, the mil­i­tary has tried some 12,000 peo­ple since Mubarak’s down­fall in mil­i­tary courts whose pro­ceed­ings have been denounced by inter­na­tion­al human rights organ­i­sa­tions and Egyp­tians because of lack of due process and repeat­ed alle­ga­tions of tor­ture and forced vir­gin­i­ty tests. 

As a result, roles have been reversed in post-Mubarak Egypt with the mil­i­tary emerg­ing as a per­ceived force of repres­sion and the rank-and-file of the police back­ing demands for an end to mil­i­tary tri­als and stag­ing protests for salary hikes and improved work­ing con­di­tions. Nonethe­less, many ordi­nary Egypt­ian still see the armed forces as the only force that can guar­an­tee order and fix a sink­ing econ­o­my, plum­met­ing tourism and ris­ing crime. 

Look­ing at the wrong mod­el

Even so, the mil­i­tary has so far unsuc­cess­ful­ly sought to defend its record. Mil­i­tary spokes­men say they are doing their best to com­bat spi­ralling crime and street vio­lence. How­ev­er, many Egyp­tians find it hard to believe that one of the world’s larg­er mil­i­taries is inca­pable of curb­ing vio­lence on its own streets. “How can it be that an army and its lead­ers are unable to round up the thugs who have been on the streets for eight months?” is a typ­i­cal ques­tion asked. 

Increas­ing­ly, the Egypt­ian mil­i­tary is look­ing at the Turk­ish mil­i­tary as a mod­el. The prob­lem is the mod­el they are look­ing at is a decade old. Under Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayy­ib Erdo­gan, Turkey’s mil­i­tary has evolved from being the country’s polit­i­cal guardian to one in which it is respon­si­ble under civil­ian super­vi­sion for Turkey’s ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty and the fight against terrorism. 

In doing so, the Egypt­ian mil­i­tary is fuelling con­cern that it will take anoth­er con­fronta­tion to dis­en­tan­gle it from pol­i­tics. Hav­ing shown its inep­ti­tude at solv­ing the country’s prob­lems, the mil­i­tary would be best advised to avoid any such confrontation. 

About The Author:
James M. Dorsey is a senior fel­low at the S. Rajarat­nam School of Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Nanyang Tech­no­log­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty in Sin­ga­pore and the author of the blog, The Tur­bu­lent World of Mid­dle East Soc­cer.

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →