a thread about the civil unrest in egypt (& elsewhere in 'the region' if necessary)

this seems stupid. of course it's chaotic, they're remaking their country after 50 years.

it's the NYT not GG dooing the reporting.... All that's being illustrated is you don't get to go "yay, victory, democracy via bombs and an execution, cue Star Wars medal theme."

so, Rumsfeld-style "messiness"

pretty sure 99% of democracies started with bombs/executions tbh

generally speaking peaceful transitions from one form of government to another don't happen

Around 1/3 of Americans were loyalists during the Revolution and many were tarred and feathered (usually fatally) and forcibly disposssed of their property. Also, the Whiskey Rebellion....

I want Libya's Thomas Jefferson and "yay democracy" now(we'll ignore some of TJ's faults)

Perhaps someone who know Libya's people, and who saw the mistakes in Iraq, can make a case that the US and the West could have avoided some (but not all) of this Rumsfeld style messyiness and aided in a transition by doing x, y and z, and getting a, b, and c involved.

http://www.afriquejet.com/libya-nears-key-moment-in-democratic-transition-2012051138274.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0927/Lessons-for-US-in-Libya-s-transition-Avoid-mistakes-of-Iraq-Afghanistan

Election in Egypt today. Runoff likely

DJ Rupture on Egyptian radio in below link

http://www.negrophonic.com/2012/radio-cairo/

"It is a shock. I don't want either one, so I am not going to vote."
AHMED KABANY, an engineer, on the upcoming Egyptian election for president, in which a hardline Islamist is facing off against an authoritarian former general.

from NY Times

and there's this bit of sad, horrible news too

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/bombardment-of-syrian-village-leaves-more-than-90-dead-activists-say/2012/05/26/gJQAQcwBsU_story.html

32 children under the age of 10 killed

WTF WTF WTF

no kidding!

I don't really understand the ruling - on what basis were all the parliamentary election rules "illegal"? the way the US press reports on these things (with absolutely zero understanding of Egyptian jurisprudence) just makes it sound like a naked power grab.

• Egypt's political transition has been thrown into chaos by a court ruling which invalidates the recent parliamentary election where Islamists won a majority. The court ruled that the system for electing a third of the MPs was unconstitutional and its decision is being seen as a "soft coup" for the military.

• Former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq has been cleared to contest this weekend's presidential run off against the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi. The court ruled that banning Shafiq as member of the former regime was unconstitutional. There was a heavy police presence outside the court as activists gathered to protest against the verdict. The Muslim Brotherhood said it accepted the verdict on Shafiq.

from gaurdian, today

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2012/jun/14/syria-crisis-war-crimes-evidence-live

The court ruled that the system for electing a third of the MPs was unconstitutional

I thought they didn't even have a constitution! they're getting a new one on Friday...?

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/14/cairo_s_judicial_coup

ah okay, this is the answer I was looking for

The parliamentary election law also ran against past SCC rulings requiring independents to have the same chances to get elected as party members. Of course, since the two-thirds of seats assigned to party lists were written into the constitutional declaration (as amended in September 2011), so that could not be challenged easily. But for the remaining one-third the case of unconstitutionality was easier to make. (Past rulings rested in part on constitutional rights in the 1971 constitution that had been removed from the March 2011 constitutional declaration, as Harvard's Tarek Masoud has pointed out. But there was still strong jurisprudence suggesting that the court regarded the system as discriminatory against Egyptians who were not members of any party.)

Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel-Prize winning diplomat who withdrew from the presidential election in January because of the military's continued hold on power, warned that electing a president with no Parliament and no constitution was a recipe for dictatorship.

As the state-owned Ahram Online reports, Mr. ElBaradei "proposed two solutions to the current crisis: the first would be the formation of a 'presidential council' tasked with choosing members of the Constituent Assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution, along with the appointment of a 'national salvation' government to preside over fresh parliamentary and presidential elections once a new constitution is written. The second solution proposed by ElBaradei would be to elect an interim president who would then appoint a national salvation government and preside over a consensual committee tasked with choosing Constituent Assembly members, with presidential and parliamentary polls to be held once a new constitution has been drafted."

Mr. ElBaradei's was been calling for such an arrangement for months, and warning that the conditions in Egypt are still not right for a presidential election.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/latest-updates-on-electoral-turmoil-in-egypt/

alas, looks like the "cynics" were right.

There's a documentary film making the rounds in which the Tahrir demonstrators voice skepticism (in Feb 2011) about all this "support" from the army.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/tahrir-liberation-square/6336

What a mess.

Then there's this

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/egypt-muslim-brotherhood-islamic-banking-.html

the Brotherhood’s economic policies may run counter to demands for social justice and better living conditions for Egypt’s poor.

“Their economic doctrine is not really attentive to social justice; it is very right-wing capitalist,” Sherif said. “They aren’t interested in any social restructuring that can be disruptive to this, especially in Egypt, because there are liberals who are widely represented in the economy.”

from what i know it's hard to place the economics of the country or its parties' proposals. the generals/military/ruling party own everything worth owning. a "right wing capitalist" position could mean making them divest everything. or nationalizing it and then selling off, or whatever.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/15/egypt-mohamed-elbaradei-warning

At times ElBaradei has been viewed as an opposition figurehead who occupied the rare position of being able to command respect from revolutionaries, secular liberals and political Islamists. On Friday, though, he spoke out against a catalogue of revolutionary mismanagement on all sides, with his harshest words reserved for the Muslim Brotherhood – whose role in the past year's "transition process" has led many pro-change activists to blame political Islamists for empowering the military and being sucked into an electoral game designed to give the old regime a facade of democratic legitimacy.

I wish Nahguib Mahfouz had lived to see this and write about it

He also argued that revolutionary momentum had been stalled by the failure of young protesters to embrace institutional leadership – wading into a thorny debate over the relative merits of horizontal and "leaderless" political change about which many activists feel strongly.

"The mortal mistake was that from day one the youth never agreed on a unified demand and never agreed to delegate authority to a group of people to speak on their behalf," said ElBaradei.

heh

i miss mahfouz too.

ElBaradei drinking too much tea w/ US Democrats

How about that military

large and in charge

this is why countries shouldn't have large, standing, professional armies

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/02/80/05/3b/dascoot-tours-malta.jpg

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Their expansion plans to Egypt are surely doomed.

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/18/155134677/and-now-for-the-lighter-side-of-egypts-revolution?ft=1&f=1004

The growing presence of religious conservatives has prompted the owners of this bar to nail boards over the windows so that devout passers-by won't have to see the beer.

...

Zohny recalls a journalist who recently wrote, "The political situation in Egypt has rendered parody news obsolete."

Zohny sees the truth in this. "It is getting really hard to come up with parody news because the news has become a parody," he says.

wrong thread :-(

CAIRO, June 19 (Reuters) - Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years until overthrown by a revolution in the "Arab Spring" last year, was declared clinically dead by his doctors on Tuesday, the state news agency MENA said in a report confirmed by a hospital source.

the body is dead but the legend lives on

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/13/lamborghini_morsi

After long weeks of political gridlock and stagnation, Egypt's elected President Mohammed el-Morsi suddenly hit the gas over the weekend. Over the span of a few days, Morsi removed the head of General Intelligence, the head of the Military Police, the top two senior leaders of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and the heads of all the military services. In addition to this SCAF-Quake, Morsi also canceled the controversial Constitutional amendments promulgated by the SCAF just before he took office and issued a new, equally controversial amendment and roadmap of his own. What's more, this all came after he replaced the editors of major state-owned newspapers with people viewed as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and cracked down on several other critical papers. Zero to 180 in three days -- even Usain Bolt would be impressed by that acceleration. Swirv.

not really sure what 'swirv' means in that context tbh

oh ha i just figure it out. carry on...

The fundamental problem remains one of trust and the absence of legitimate institutions. The political polarization of the last year and a half, fueled by all too many political and rhetorical mistakes on all sides, has left profound scars. The Shafiq voters in the Presidential election have hardly reconciled themselves to Morsi, and most activists and revolutionaries remain as alienated as ever from a political struggle dominated by the military and the Brotherhood. On top of the polarization comes the legal Calvinball, where rules and legal institutions are fundamentally contested and no arbiter has uncontested judicial authority. And then there's the regrettable absence of a Parliament, another casualty of the pre-election institutional warfare. With so much in flux and so much distrust, every move, no matter how minor, becomes deeply laden with potential treachery and disaster. And this was no minor move.

In most cases, I would think that the removal of the SCAF's senior leadership and the assertion of civilian control by an elected government would be celebrated as a major triumph in the push for a transition to a civil, democratic state. But the deeply rooted fears of the Muslim Brotherhood, fueled by recognition of their popular strength and doubts about their democratic convictions, prevents any easy acceptance of that reading in many quarters. That's why the next few weeks will be crucial, as Morsi makes clear what kind of constitutional process he really intends and as the military and the anti-Islamist trends in Egyptian politics weigh their next moves.

go morsi!!!

sudan now?

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/28/sudans_protests

i thought sudan barely has govt as it is??

omar bashir is still around, that's all i know tbh

exactly how eager for war w/Syria is Turkey...? this whole thing seems to be spiralling into worst-case-scenario territory

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324399404578583932317286550.html wow at the WSJ :

"Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy."

rolling middle east 2013 thread

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/egypt-sentences-3-al-jazeera-reporters

US keeps giving Egypt military aid so that it can have an influence there, says the US gov. This latest "trial" again shows the lack of influence

Oops, already discussed over in this other thread:

Rolling MENA 2014