How Can We Save the Revolution?

 

How Can We Save the Revolution?

 

 

 

 

by Alaa El Aswany

 

Imagine you're a student living with some colleagues in a furnished apartment. You live together and share the rent but you are different. Each one of you has his characteristics and his own needs. For example one studies all night, while someone else wakes up early and goes to bed early, and someone else studies to the sound of loud music. There are also communal duties that have to be shared out among you fairly: who cooks and who washes the dishes and how to divide up the electricity and telephone bills. You have to arrive at a system that reconciles your rights and your duties so that you all stick to it. Would it make sense for one of you to draw up a roster unilaterally and impose it on the rest of you? Of course not. The only right way to set up the system is for you all to sit down, agree on a system and promise to put it into practice. This simple example illustrates the meaning and value of the constitution. We, individual members of society, just like the students renting the apartment, have to sit down together to write the constitution ourselves. 'Dustour', the Arabic word for constitution, is a word of Persian origin meaning foundation. It's a set of legal principles that define the nature of the state and regulate the various estates in terms of their composition, their jurisdiction and their relationship with the other estates, as well as establishing the rights and duties of individuals.

    Throughout the world, when the people want to write a constitution, they do exactly what the students who are living together do. Every sector or group in society elects representatives who form a constituent assembly that proposes articles for the constitution, which are discussed in public and then submitted to the people through a referendum. We cannot give the party that wins elections the exclusive right to write the constitution, firstly because a constituent assembly has specifications different from those of a parliamentary or legislative assembly. We might elect a member of the constituent assembly because they reflect a certain sector of society or because they have the legal expertise to write a constitution, but that same person might not be suitable as a member of parliament, perhaps because of advanced age or an inability to connect with the public; and secondly because, when we give parliament the task of  writing the constitution, we set up a conflict of interests. It's the constitution that defines the powers of parliament, and we cannot ask members of parliament to define their own powers. If half the members of parliament are either workers or peasants, it's hard to imagine them agreeing on a new constitution that abolishes the requirement that half the members should be workers or peasants. When one group wins a majority in elections, it has the right to impose its political agenda on the minority. If the parliamentary majority are socialists, for example, the government they form has the right to impose a socialist agenda. But this same majority does not have the right to write the constitution as it chooses, in isolation from the interests of others, because the constitution must reflect all sectors of society, even those who lost the elections  and even those who didn't take part in the elections in the first place. Egyptian society has many diverse sectors: professionals, workers, farmers, Upper Egyptians, Nubians and Copts. The constitution must reflect the interests of all these. If there were four or five Egyptians who were Hindus or Buddhists, the constitution would have to respect their rights and needs. This is the established and conventional concept of a constitution, and after the Egyptian revolution succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak experts in constitutional law agreed that the old constitution had lapsed with the fall of Mubarak and advocated electing a constituent assembly, but the military council rejected the will of the revolution and decided to implement constitutional amendments that Mubarak announced in his last moments and that the revolution rejected. The military council formed a committee for constitutional amendments that strangely included only one professor of constitutional law, Dr Atef el-Banna. With full respect for them, the other members were lawyers who did not have the slightest experience in constitutional law, and the committee members were of only two political persuasions. Half of them were protégés of the Mubarak regime and the other half were members or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood. The amendments were made and the referendum took place and it was clear the military council wanted the people to approve them. The Muslim Brotherhood helped the military council in this: after demanding, like all the revolutionaries, a new constitution, they changed their minds, accepted the amendments and put all their weight behind carrying out the will of the military council. The Brotherhood resorted to morally prohibited election tactics such as spreading rumours among simple people that rejecting the amendments and demanding a new constitution would eliminate Article 2, which stipulates that Islam is the state religion, even though this article was not part of the amendments in the first place. The result was that the constitution was approved and despite the irregularities by the religious forces in the referendum everyone was under a moral and national obligation to respect the result. The surprise was that it was the military council that did not respect the result, in fact quite the contrary. While the referendum was on only nine specified articles in the 1971 constitution, the military council took everyone by surprise by promulgating an interim constitution of 63 articles, on which Egyptians had not been consulted.  Did the military council ask us if he wanted to abolish or preserve the Shoura Council? Did they ask us if we wanted to preserve the requirement that fifty percent of members of parliament be either workers or peasants? Did they ask us if we wanted a presidential or parliamentary system? By promulgating the interim constitution the military council practically and legally cancelled the referendum result and imposed a political system on the Egyptian people without referring to the people. The military council's coup against the referendum result was obvious to anyone with two eyes, but nonetheless the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafists behind them ignored the way the military council had turned against the will of the people and decided to back the military council by any means and at any price in order to reach power. What's amazing is that the Muslim Brothers are repeating with the military council the same mistakes they have committed with everyone who has ruled Egypt: King Farouk, Ismail Sedki (known as the butcher of the people), Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Every time the Brotherhood takes part in the national movement and then at a certain moment breaks ranks to make a rapprochement with those in power, who always use them to undermine the national opposition. Then, once they have fulfilled their purpose with the Brotherhood, they throw them aside, or turn against them and crack down on them. So the cart has been put before the horse and all Egypt has been pushed in the wrong direction. The Brotherhood has become what looks like the political wing of the military council, praising the council day and night and taking a strong stand against anyone who criticises its decisions. It has reached the stage of the salafists chanting "Field Marshal, you are our Emir." In fact one leading Muslim Brother described the members of the military council as 'the salt of the earth'  and said Egyptians demanding a constitution before elections were devils in human form.  As extremists have become more evident, with their repeated attacks on Copts and churches and the tombs of holy men, Egyptians, Muslims and Copts, have become more worried about the constitutional  void into which the military council has thrown us, because the constitution, which is supposed to reflect the views of the people as a whole, will probably be written exclusively by extremists who consider that music should be banned and that Egypt's pharaonic antiquities are idols that should be covered  up so that Egyptians do not worship them. The military council then woke up to the gravity of the situation and started calling for what they called guiding principles for the constitution, to spare Egypt the disaster of a constitution that turns it into another Afghanistan or Somalia. The Muslim Brothers and the salafists were angry and rejected the constitutional principles because they simply want to write the constitution by themselves, based on their own ideas and not according to the interests of society.  The military council's latest attempt to sort out the constitutional mess they put us in was the document presented by Dr Ali al-Silmi, the deputy prime minister. This document included guiding principles for a constitution, guaranteeing the civilian nature of the Egyptian state, and it also specified  for the first time the right way to form the committee to draft the constitution, that is by election from the various sectors of society. But the document was nevertheless seriously defective, in that  it put the process of forming the constitutional committee wholly at the mercy of the military council, which would have absolute power over the constitution and those who write it. Yet more seriously, the document would turn the armed forces into a state separate from the Egyptian state, and the people would have no right to hold them to account or even find out what they are up to. So, in return for one step forwards, Silmi's document took us ten steps back. The document leaves the Egyptian people with two options, both of them unpleasant: either we retain the civilian state, while in return giving the army a higher status whereby it would be immune from questions about its actions, or we reject the army as guardian of the state, in which case we face the danger of Egypt falling into the grip of extremists. The choice is clear: a civilian state with the army as guardian, or freedom and the danger of extremists - the same logic Mubarak made when he repeated "It's either me or extremism and chaos." Silmi's document is a new blow to the revolution, which is going through a real crisis. The Egyptian people has been so worn down by nine months of deliberate insecurity, chaos, artificial crises, shortages of foodstuffs and price increases that the spirit of optimism and self-confidence which swept Egyptians after Mubarak stepped down has turned into a saddening state of  frustration and anxiety about the future. So how can we save the revolution?

    Firstly, we have to end the conflict  between the Islamists and the liberals, and immediately unite the ranks of all the revolutionary forces.

    Secondly, a body to represent the revolution must be chosen, covering all Egypt's provinces and including all shades of opinion, with the capacity to mobilize millions in the streets so that it can put pressure on the military council to fulfil the objectives of the revolution.

    Thirdly, the revolutionary forces must submit an alternative to the Silmi document. I hope we can all accept the Azhar document as the basis for a democratic state and at the same time agree on a way to choose the constitutional committee that does not ignore the members of parliament and also guarantees full representation for all sectors of society.

    Fourthly, we have to go back to the streets in millions to prove to the military council that the revolution is still alive in the hearts of the millions of Egyptians who brought it about with their blood and who will never allow it to be aborted. Egypt is now being pulled by two forces: the old regime, which wants to take the country backwards, and the revolution, which wants to take the country into the future. The revolution will definitely triumph, God willing. 

    Democracy is the solution.

 

 

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