Who is escalating the US-Egypt NGO crisis?
Issandr El Amrani | Egypt ngos To me, the answer has been clear for two weeks or so and more so in the last week, when Tantawy's reassuring words in a cabinet meeting were followed by the launching of an extremely aggressive state media campaign led by al-Ahram. And guess what is supposed to have happened today: the editor of al-Ahram was replaced.
The state media in Egypt has been fragmented, but state television and major organs like al-Ahram have long been the province of General Intelligence. Their men ran these places, and perhaps they still do.
The only logical alternative explanation would be that SCAF is consciously playing a good cop-bad cop routine where they set themselves up as the nice guys but point to bad guys (and public opinion, and the Brothers) who can be much more trouble than just dealing with the military.
The other interesting point here is that senior US officials have discreetly made the rounds in Washington in the last week saying that SCAF was not responsible for the crisis (which may be to protect SCAF from Congress, but is still telling.) More likely in my opinion is that this is partly true, and we are dealing with a fragmented regime today much as we were in the last years of the Mubarak era. Or a mixture of both good cop/bad cop and inner-regime intrigues.
The FT puts it well here:
Some analysts, however, argue that there is more to the argument than distraction, suggesting that forces in the unreformed security services that underpinned the Mubarak regime could be laying the ground for an attempt to torpedo the country’s political transition.
“I am hearing assertions that the military council does not want this fierce [anti-American] campaign,” said Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat and an analyst. “This is something that is organised but within a more general situation of chaos ... The army and the council care about the military aid, but not so the security services.”
Especially if the security services are worried that SCAF will sell them out to the incoming civilians to win their own immunity.
Games, and games within games. If this goes on Egypt's politics will start to resemble Algeria's.
Reader Comments (9)
ALL THE PLAYERS IN THIS GAME WERE STANDING BEHIND MUBARAK. HOW MUCH HAVE THEY CHANGED. TWO-STEP, THREE-STEP OR THE LAST WALTZ, BUT THE PARTNERS ARE THE SAME.
This could explain the Omar Soliman, maybe he is the candidate for Mubarak's-Intelligence-gone-wild?
There seems to be only bad options in Egypt's presidential elections. Either SCAF-ass-kissers or sadistic intelligence smoochers.
By General Intelligence, do you mean mukhabarat? I thought they were organized under the military, as opposed to amn el-dawla, which was under the Interior Ministry.
Would this statement, then, "The army and the council care about the military aid, but not so the security services" imply that there is a division growing between the armed forces and the security forces organized under them? Or is the argument that the division cleaves along the more familiar lines of military-vs-Interior?
I was hearing similar arguments in Cairo in the last couple of weeks: that the intelligence services and unreformed Ministry of Interior have every reason to fear a transition to real democracy, particularly one where the Islamists they abused for so many years would be in power. So they are working through Abul Naga and their media proxies to torpedo a managed transition, in which SCAF and the Brotherhood would inevitably have to cut some kind of deal. They don't want to be on the outside of any such deal.
No mention of Washingtons dirty hands in all this?
Is it so unreasonable how to believe that the land of the free might actually be supporting the generals and spinning the NGO debacle to ensure that Egyptians don't move their MOI and Tahrir protests to outside US embassy.
There is no crisis, there is no rift.
" Islamists they abused" You have to understand that even though it was publicized that they abused Islamists - and named them as "banned", they really only abused the small fries that got out of control, but never the leaders!
Most the Islamist leaders are connected to the Military as well as the former regime, Selim El Awa maried into a Military family, and most of the Salafis in the "Al Asala" party are former Police Officers in Amn el Dawla, and they have emerged all of a sudden as defenders of Military rule, which surprised just about everyone, except for the revolutionaries who called it pretty early in the game.
Also, I notice that no one is talking about the Liberals that got abused under Mubarak, like EL Ghad party, and most of the smaller Liberal parties! They are the ones still being abused until this day, while the Islamists gained a sort of immunity after 25 Jan for obvious reasons!
My theory: If I'm an Egyptian looking at Washington, I see an array of actors calling for aid conditionality over a growing number of issues: democracy, human rights, Israel. Conditionality seems to be gathering steam.
I might calculate that sooner or later conditionality is going to happen, and if so, then it makes sense to bring the situation to a head with an engineered crisis.
The crisis can then be resolved with a re-affirmation of aid flows in exchange for dropping charges or otherwise ending the incident.
Here is a take on how a certain strand of Islamist sentiment takes it, from the perspective of the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman camp. Many leading Islamists spoke at their press conference: http://asenseofbelonging.org/2012/02/19/the-blind-sheikh-and-the-ngo-crisis-rally-at-the-us-embassy/