When Will the Mubarak Regime Fall?

 

When Will the Mubarak Regime Fall?

 

 

 

by Alaa El Aswany

 

Last Saturday renowned broadcaster Dina Abdel Rahman went to present her daily programme on the Tahrir channel and was surprised to find that the management of the channel had decided to prevent her appearing. She discovered they had lined up another anchor to host an alternative programme in place of her own. Dina Abdel Rahman is one of the most successful broadcasters in Egypt, thanks to her competence, her courage and her commitment to present the facts without submitting to political pressures from whatever source. In her programme Dina has exposed the heinous crimes that security and army personnel have committed against demonstrators. Dina was working at the Dream channel last summer and when the owner tried to put pressure on her to moderate her criticism of the military council, Dina resigned from Dream and moved to the Tahrir channel. Now, only a few months after she moved, she's been prevented from working by Suleiman Amer, the owner of the Tahrir channel. Amer is a businessman accused of taking over large amounts of land at Suleimaniya and using it for purposes other than those for which the project was intended. According to the al-Badil website, Amer and the military council have reached an agreement by which Amer gets rid of programmes that allow criticism of the military council and in return the military council will close the file for good on the Suleimaniya land issue. Indeed, within weeks all the people who criticise the policies of the military council pulled out of the Tahrir channel:  Hamdi Kandil, Ibrahim Eissa and Duaa Sultan, and now Dina Abdel Rahman joins them. The management at the channel is now arguing that the dispute with Dina Abdel Rahman was over financial matters but what they say is unconvincing and it cannot justify their inappropriate behaviour. Dina Abdel Rahman will not be affected by this triviality, because she has decided not to bargain with her principles, and even if she has lost her programme she has gained the respect of millions of Egyptians. On the same day the newspapers reported that Mamdouh Hamza will be questioned by State Security prosecutors on suspicion of sabotage and working to overthrow the state. Hamza is one of the most important civil engineers in the world and has won prestigious international prizes that are an honour to every Egyptian, and at the same time he is one of the leading lights of the Egyptian revolution, one of those who have worked hard to support it and bring about its objectives. The investigation by the State Security prosecutors will be based on a tape in which Hamza allegedly promises to completely destroy and burn Egypt and in which he himself reveals his hellish and dreadful plan. Any child in Egypt would easily understand that the recording is fabricated in a way that is both unprofessional and unintelligent. This is not the first time Mamdouh Hamza has been punished for criticising the policies of the military council. On a previous occasion he was questioned on suspicion of charges including that of "giving public opinion the false impression that corruption still exists". This is the latest fashion in vague charges of the kind with which the Mubarak regime used to punish its opponents, such as "disturbing social peace, creating confusion among the public and inciting hatred of the system of government". Once again, with his learning, his high status and his devotion to his country, Mamdouh Hamza is way above such trivia. But it is part of a large campaign to make an example of inflict exemplary punishment on all those who object to the military council's policies. The campaign is not confined to trumped-up charges and harassing people at work. A number of assaults by hired hands have also been arranged, the latest of which was the assault on member of parliament Mohamed Abu Hamid to punish him for advocating an immediate transfer of power from the military council to a civilian authority. We are now discovering clearly that rule by the military council is a carbon copy of Mubarak's regime. Mubarak's aim was to stay in power and ensure that his son succeeded him. The military council was happy to end the succession plan and declared that it was protecting the revolution, but in fact everything it has done in the past year has been to contain and abort the revolution and change it into a mere coup, in which the person of the ruler is changed but the system remains as it was. The military council made an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to benefit from the movement's popularity and organizing abilities, and in return it helped them win a majority in parliament. The military council set the rules for the elections in a way that helped the Brotherhood win. The supreme electoral commission that was set up observed abuses and did nothing to stop them, so the Brotherhood and the salafists committed all kinds of electoral abuses – buying votes, giving away sugar, cooking oil and meat to voters, using civil servants who belong to the Brotherhood to influence voters inside and outside the polling stations, using religious slogans and electioneering inside mosques. In the end the Brotherhood and the salafists got the result the military council wanted for them. These elections may not have been rigged but they were definitely unfair. The Egyptian revolution has fallen between the hammer of the military and the anvil of the Brotherhood. The military want to abort the revolution and stay in power behind the scenes, while the Brotherhood wants to obtain power at any price. The Brotherhood have been paid for the agreement by obtaining a parliamentary majority, and now it's their turn to pay their share. The question is: can the current People's Assembly question General Hamdi Badeen, the commander of the military police, about the crimes his troops have committed, all of which have been photographed and recorded? Can the People's Assembly withdraw confidence from Prime Minister Ganzoury or even from the minister of the interior? After the Port Said massacre, which was despicably planned to take revenge on the young revolutionaries who are members of the Ultras, the military council merely sent a fact-finding committee that wrote a report pinning the blame on the security forces, the football federation and the spectators, but without mentioning that the military police were present during the massacre and did nothing to save the victims. All the signs are (and I hope I am wrong) that the People's Assembly cannot step over the line set by the military council. There are some members of parliament (liberals and Islamists) who are trying hard to take the right positions but the majority belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, who are sworn to obey their leader, who is carrying out his agreement with the military council. The military council has kept on all the officials affiliated with the Mubarak regime: from the judges who supervised rigged elections, the public prosecutor, the head of the government's audit bureau and the governor of the central bank to the senior police officers who killed and dehumanized Egyptians. Newspapers have reported that former Interior Minister Mansour Eissawi gave a secret order to pay large sums of money regularly to all the officers accused of killing demonstrators, in order to raise their morale. So while the families of the victims were demanding revenge the interior minister was paying monthly rewards to the killers. The breakdown in law and order, the spread of anarchy and thuggery, the price rises and the shortages of basic foodstuffs are all the sole responsibility of the military council, because it took on  the powers of the president during the transitional period. We cannot forgive the military council on the grounds of political inexperience because it was the council itself that rejected the idea of a civilian presidential council and insisted on monopolizing power and treating ministers as secretarial staff. Roads have been blocked, trains stopped and churches set ablaze before the eyes of the military police, who have looked on without intervening, except when it's a case of saving a Mubarak regime official besieged by demonstrators or of suppressing demonstrators opposed to the military council, in which case they have committed brutal crimes, from shooting people dead and blinding them with shotgun fire to molesting women and dragging them through the streets. The military council has not only left Egyptians to struggle through these ordeals but, to intimidate people further, it keeps repeating at every opportunity that there are major conspiracies to bring down the state, without ever offering the slightest proof of this. It was only to be expected that Egyptians, worn out by crises and alarmed at the lack of security, would in the end turn against the revolution and agree to everything the military wants, but the massive rallies across the country on the first anniversary of the revolution proved that Egyptians are still committed to carry out the objectives of the revolution. As for the young revolutionaries, the finest and bravest Egypt has ever produced, the military council has tried to break their will through successive campaigns that have turned into tragic massacres and, although dozens have been killed and hundreds injured, the young revolutionaries have emerged victorious, with their will unbroken. At this stage the media has begun an organized and large-scale campaign to discredit the revolutionaries, whom the media initially treated as national heroes but then started to accuse of being traitors financed from abroad. When they failed to prove their empty accusations, they didn't bother to apologize. Now the military council has taken us by surprise with a vicious campaign against certain NGOs, accusing them of receiving illegal funds and seeking to divide Egypt into three small states (they later increased that to five). This campaign is weird and raises many questions: why did the military council say nothing about these organizations for a whole year when they were operating under its nose? Why didn't the military council respond with the same violence when  Israel forces violated our border and killed six officers and men of the Egyptian army? Has some undeclared dispute arisen between the military council and the U.S. Administration, and the council has decided to punish the Americans through this campaign? If the military council rejects foreign funding and insists that all NGOs and political parties should have transparent budgets, then of course we are fully supportive, but it's noticeable that the supervision of foreign funding seems to be limited to civilian organizations rather than religious ones. Why doesn't the military council inspect the funding of the Brotherhood and the salafists to find out where they obtained the millions of pounds they spent during the elections? Is the Brotherhood allied to the military council, and does the council therefore turn a blind eye to where its money comes from? Is the military council punishing the civilian NGOs, on the other hand, because they have played an important role in exposing brutal crimes against demonstrators? If the military council remains in power, with all the hardships that this causes Egyptians, it will lead to a flawed constitution being drafted under the auspices of the military council and necessarily to the election of a president whom the military council will determine and will control from behind the scenes, just as it now controls the prime minister. The time has come for the military control to hand power to an elected civilian body so that the army can go back to barracks and perform its basic role defending the country. The revolution will continue until it triumphs and achieves its goals.                          

    Democracy is the solution.                                    

 

    

 

 

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