What role for the army in Egypt's next constitution?
Issandr El AmraniBassem Sabry has gotten hold of the text of the "constitutional principles document" that is supposed to inform the drafting of the new Egyptian constitution next year. From his notes and my reading of it, we are heading towards a real political, constitutional and legal disaster.
The document has been midwifed by Deputy Prime Minister for Political Affairs Ali al-Selmi, a member of the Wafd Party, although there has been much controversy as to whether such a document is needed at all. Islamists have generally refused to take part in recent meetings, arguing that the whole thing is moot since parliament must write the new text, while secularists (who backed the principles idea as a way of guaranteeing a focus on human rights and ensuring that, in terms of Islam's role, the next constitution is not worse that the last one.
Some secularists walked out of recent meetings after it was unveiled that the SCAF was pushing to put the military budget outside the scope of parliamentary oversight, as was reported several days ago. But the text is apparently even worse than I thought, according to Bassem:
A few interesting notes on the army. Only SCAF will be allowed to analyse and debate any matters pertaining the army or the details of the military budget, and the military budget as a whole would be submitted as one single figure to the parliament for the annual State budget debate & voting. Also, war can only be declared by the President after the approval of both Parliament & SCAF. Oddly, this ignores the fact that the Parliament may choose a Parliamentary System without a strong President to begin with.
Under Mubarak, one of the reasons the regime had an interest in maintaining a two-thirds majority was that this was the quorum needed to give the president waiver power to approve military sales deals without asking parliament. That power was systematically given, meaning there was little MPs could know about what amounts of money were spent on arms sales, to which countries, etc. Of course this also meant independent investigation of these transactions (i.e. whether they added up, how much was paid to consultants and so on). The principle that SCAF is trying to maintain here is that the military should be above civilian oversight.
What I was not prepared for is the second part of that paragraph, which states that "war can only be approved after the approval of both parliament and SCAF. What's significant here to me is that this wording would suggest that SCAF would continue to exist even after a president is elected. It's hugely telling of how the military seems to conceive the transfer of power back to civilian rule: they're not going to disband themselves, but are turning themselves into a fourth power alongside, not beneath, the executive branch.
Now, SCAF seems to argue that the constitutional principles will be binding, but there is nothing legal about that (unless they make them so by decree, which could be challenged.) The idea of such principles was that they would represent a political consensus between Islamists and secularists over the basic outline of the new constitution. It is now being turned into a document the SCAF will try to impose. Bassem also notes the following:
5- If the proposed constitution is seen by SCAF to contain articles that defy the basic rights and principles as stated in the Constitutional Principles Document & "All [Previous] successive Egyptian Constitutions", SCAF will ask the Constitutional Assembly to revise the texts within 15 days. If the Assembly fails to adjust the texts or refuses to comply with the initial request itself, the Supreme Constitutional Court would then revise the proposed texts & issue a binding judgement that even SCAF cannot refuse.
6- If no draft for a constitution is prepared within 6 months, SCAF may dissolve this committee and create a new one that has to draft a constitution within 3 months, which would then be subjected to a referendum.
Point five is a legal and constitutional mess — if the constituent assembly is tasked with writing the constitution, the Supreme Constitutional Court should have nothing to do with defining its texts. Its job is to defend the text no matter what it is.
Point six is truly worrying: it basically suggests that in case of political deadlock (possibly one created by SCAF by invoking point five) the SCAF will have the power to dissolve the constituent assembly and impose its own one, and then ram the whole thing through a referendum.
Things have kept getting worse in Egypt for the last several months, but this promises an even more severe downturn next year. That this is being unveiled as parties are preparing to compete in elections will of course make a cross-partisan reaction more difficult. But Egypt's democratically-minded political parties (a label I would only applies to some, both Islamist and secular) should realize that they should not be chiefly running against each other, they need to be running against the SCAF.
Update: There have been some minor changes made to the composition of the constituent assembly and the body with oversight of the military's budget. Bassem updated his post.
Reader Comments (5)
In fact the Bids and Tenders Law, as well as one other, explicitly authorize the Ministry of Defense to conduct procurement in secrecy.
No surprises here. What did we have in Egypt? A Mubarak regime? Or a military regime, the officer on top who only after twenty years in power started to bring in his family (and their business friends, to an extent that he had to eye his son as successor for protection of those interests after his death), just because he was lucky enough to be around so much longer than his less fortunate predecessors?
I think the February events showed the latter, not the former. When the army realized they would actually have to get their hands dirty to put down the uprising, they were quick to drop Mubarak in order not to compromise their institution. But at absolutely no point thereafter was the army prepared to give up its many privileges, including the secrecy around its arms deals, the generals' land deals on Sinai, the many companies it owns. All these would be challenged by a constitution that subordinates the army, both its military and its economic aspects, under civilian oversight.
I'm shocked again and again how the majority of Egyptians still seems to think there was a Mubarak regime, and how the army is still above Egyptian politics working for the benefits of the nation against external threats. Well, the only thing the army is working for is their own bank accounts.
After Camp David, the army defended the build-up of its own corporations arguing it wanted to be self-sufficient not to be a burden on public finances in times of peace. What a perversion of logic! In times of peace and with zero external threat, you wind up your army. But the generals were in power then and they are in power today. Egypt can only move towards democracy if the population better understands the role of the army in the corrupt bureaucracy that has f****ked foreign and local investors over and over again to protect their own interests and those of politically allied business men (ironically those close to Gamal over the past ten years), thereby creating the economic and environmental misery Egyptians live in.
To push back the army from business and politics in Egypt will be the task for a generation or two, of activists, journalists and occasionally the masses descending onto Tahrir Square or Maspero. See Turkey or some cases in South-East Asia that are undergoing the same transformation. In this sense, the February revolt was only the beginning, and we haven't gotten anywhere since.
As I said all along the army is in the taqiyya league.
I witnessed first hand how the army side with the muslim brotherhood. bloody liars all of them including the corrupt Sheikh Mohamed El-Tyeb. brother of Egypt’s Sheikh al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayeb, http://www.myegypt.co.uk/index.php?f=data_home&a=1
there is a photo of the General ahmed sitting in the conference room in luxor supreme council office with the brothers this meeting was supposed to be about giving the land or money back to the people that had land stolen from them by the then Guvorner of Luxor Samir Faraq but no mention of the corrupt Mohamed El-tyeb. cant realy can they must not say bad about the Imam.
This is tragic for Egypt - no country is democratic where the army is not accountable to the people. Will Egypt have to have another revolution in 2 years' time - and not a bloodless one? You can't show a nation the promise of freedom and then deny it to them.
I agree this is unacceptable. But I propose you are never going to go from a dictator to a democracy without many attempts by the ruling powers to maintain their powers. Keep fighting them and in time you will win.