Egypt’s military moved forcefully to seize power from President Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday, deploying tanks and troops in Cairo and other cities, restricting his travel and convening an emergency meeting of top civilian and religious leaders to devise an interim government and lay the groundwork for new elections.
Mr. Morsi’s senior foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, issued an
open letter Wednesday afternoon on his official Web page lamenting what
he called the imminent takeover of Egypt’s first freely elected
government.
“As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last
lines I get to post on this page,” he wrote. “For the sake of Egypt and
for historical accuracy, let’s call what is happening by its real name:
Military coup.”
It remains to be seen whether Egypt is capable of transitioning to an interim government or the military, to avert the prospect of civil war, will have to govern.
It remains to be seen whether Egypt is capable of transitioning to an interim government or the military, to avert the prospect of civil war, will have to govern.
5 comments:
They seem to know how to do it don't they? Now if we Canadians only had half the gumption to deal with our dictator.
Maybe we'll get around to protesting once So You Think You Can Dance is over.
Anon #1 - careful what you say, Terrorist!
Anon #2 - do I respond or just open a vein?
While the unrest seems to be fueled by very real, very understandable discontent, it doesn't seem to be a very coherent movement. It's not marked by a single ideology or philosophy, and the desires of the unrest all seem to relate to a change of government, beyond that there are a lot of contradictory demands. It's also, more significantly, not linked with a single movement or coherent sphere of grassroots organization.
The old elites from the previous regime are still at all the levers of power, so even if we get a regime change, I think any change will be extremely superficial, and unrest will likely continue (the current regime has its supporters as well).
This seems to be a feature of modern resistance movements-- there is so much factionalization at the moment (even in Canada you see these currents of extreme or hyper-partisan identification with specific ideologies/institutions which was never the case before), and people wonder why power continues to become increasingly centralized.
I quite agree, Anon. What we in the West labelled the Arab Spring was never the altruistic, pro-democracy movement as we chose to see it. It had as much a food price protest as a democracy movement. It was as much a youth-driven inequality protest as anything else. Sure part of it was an uprising against privilege and authoritarian rule but only part.
Yet Morsi was democratically elected and rather than let him suffer the fate of an unpopular government in a stable democracy the military, rightly or otherwise, hit the "reset" button.
Then again, look at Pakistan. That country just had its first civilian government to serve a full term in office (without a coup).
Democracy doesn't come easily or naturally to places where it has been unknown. Look how many centuries our own struggle lasted from Magna Carta to universal suffrage. Look at all the turmoil over that interval, all the progress and all the setbacks, and here we are today with some of our most fundamental democratic rights very much damaged or in peril.
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