No Kings in the workplace

Egypt: Why I cannot rejoice in Morsi’s downfall

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

On Thursday night, I was at an event organised by Islamic Relief, which raises millions of pounds from Muslims to fight global hunger.

Ramadhan starts tomorrow, a month of fasting and giving, a good time for such charities and to reaffirm the best aspects of our faith. But events intervened as always, and instead of tranquillity and goodwill in the room, at many tables people were arguing heatedly about the crisis in Egypt, some supporting the military takeover, others lamenting the quick, callous demolition of a freely elected government.

Three men and a woman were so agitated they almost came to blows. In the toilet one Arab lady was sobbed and said her heart was in pieces. She supported the Muslim Brotherhood because, she told me, her old mother-in-law had been given free medical care by a doctor from the movement. “And now again, the army will torture and kill these good people.” Her fears have been brutally confirmed. By the time I write this, about 50 Morsi supporters have been killed by the army and the leaders of the Brotherhood are in prison or house arrest.

I myself have mixed feelings about the rapid deposal of the Islamic government after only a year in power. The political and moral lines dart about in my head, making crazy patterns, and ethical imperatives seem to be crashing into each other. I unconditionally abhor the deeply conservative, Islamic ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Cairo, after the fall of Mubarak, I saw almost no female hair and met some very aggressive men who asked me why I didn’t wear a headscarf. Though most Caireans were still warm and hospitable, they clearly felt under social pressure to conform to and display conspicuous religiosity. This was not the Cairo I had previously visited. Several dejected intellectuals told me the country would soon be like Iran. Morsi’s victory was a blow to them.

His rule, as we know, was pushing the Muslim Brotherhood ideology on to the citizenry; he grabbed control of the courts, manipulated the nascent political reform and rewrote the constitution. Torture, corruption and state thuggery were back and the economy was slowly collapsing. He used democracy but was no democrat. And yet, and yet, I cannot rejoice in Morsi’s downfall, the way his party is now hounded and this abrupt and swift abdication of fundamental democratic principles and practice. Democratic elections won’t always produce the results that true democrats want. That is the price humans pay for this imperfect but most inclusive political arrangement. To expel and exclude a popular Egyptian segment from power is wrong, as wrong as punishing Palestinians for voting in Hamas. The Brotherhood will turn away from the ballot box and Egypt will never be at peace again.

Good Egyptian friends, who have fought long to rid their nation of despotism, are euphoric and support the military coup, which is what it is, though they say it is not. They know their own nation better than I do, of course, and their opinions and feelings matter a good deal more than mine. But still, from a distance, Egypt’s spring seems to be turning dark, losing sight of its ideals, and I am nonplussed and fearful.

I reckon the UK, the US and rest of the world are finding it just as bewildering, though Western leaders preposterously posture and pronounce on the crisis, which they don’t and can’t possibly really understand or interpret. The colonial mindset never really receded; it is alert and ready, routinely invoked in Europe and North America. It may impertinent of me to question the great powers, being, as I am always reminded, an unwanted Muslim immigrant. So read this by Sir Simon Jenkins on our nation’s neo-colonial mentality: “The British craving to set the Muslim world to right is as old as history. It lurks in the genes of British politicians and diplomats, as if the ghost of Lawrence of Arabia still stalked Whitehall.” Only even Lawrence, multilingual, devious and culturally a white Arab, would not presume to summarise or politically interfere with the volatile situation in Egypt today.

How naive we all were when this Spring started with the first amazing fall of an Arab dictator in Tunisia in 2011, followed by uprisings in almost all Middle Eastern and North African Muslim nations. It was a new dawn for those millions who had only ever known oppression. For us spectators, it was the most thrilling show in town, better than any movie. Now Libya, our great “victory”, is divided and bloody; Syria is purgatory with no release in sight as Assad holds on to power, while sectarianism and fanaticism divide the opposition and make them into monsters, some as bad as the regime.

Elsewhere, as in Bahrain, the autocrats who have held on are more ruthless than ever. They are buying bigger and more brutal arms – from us. And the people are cowed, wishing none of this had ever happened, saying better the devils you know than chaos. All the West can and should now do is watch and hope Egypt returns to civilian rule. No other intervention, overt or covert, will help. It’s a mess. Only Egyptians can sort it and make theirs a nation for all its diverse citizens. I trust they will, or how will the world ever believe in progress again?

The UK's Protection racket in the Middle East

The Gulf protection racket is corrupt and dangerous folly

Sooner or later the Arab despots David Cameron is selling arms to will fall, and the states that backed them will pay the price

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 6 November 2012 22.20 GMT

Illustration by Helen Wakefield

On the nauseating political doublespeak scale, David Cameron's claim to "support the Arab spring" on a trip to sell weapons to Gulf dictators this week hit a new low. No stern demands for free elections from the autocrats of Arabia – or calls for respect for human rights routinely dished out even to major powers like Russia and China.

As the kings and emirs crack down on democratic protest, the prime minister assured them of his "respect and friendship". Different countries, he explained soothingly in Abu Dhabi, needed "different paths, different timetables" on the road to reform: countries that were western allies, spent billions on British arms and sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves in particular, he might have added by way of explanation.

Cameron went to the Gulf as a salesman for BAE Systems – the private arms corporation that makes Typhoon jets – drumming up business from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, as well as smoothing ruffled feathers over British and European parliamentary criticism of their human rights records on behalf of BP and other companies.

No wonder the prime minister restricted media coverage of the jaunt. But, following hard on the heels of a similar trip by the French president, the western message to the monarchies was clear enough: Arab revolution or not, it's business as usual with Gulf despots.

The spread of protest across the Arab world has given these visits added urgency. A year ago, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it seemed the Gulf regimes and their western backers had headed off revolt by crushing it in Bahrain, buying it off in Saudi Arabia, and attempting to hijack it in Libya and then Syria – while successfully playing the anti-Shia sectarian card.

But popular unrest has now reached the shores of the Gulf. In Kuwait, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including Islamists, liberals and nationalists, have faced barrages of teargas and stun grenades as they protest against a rigged election law, while all gatherings of more than 20 have been banned.

After 18 months of violent suppression of the opposition in Bahrain, armed by Britain and America, the regime has outlawed all anti-government demonstrations. In western-embraced Saudi Arabia, protests have been brutally repressed, as thousands are held without charge or proper trial.

Meanwhile, scores have been jailed in the UAE for campaigning for democratic reform, and in Britain's favourite Arab police state of Jordan, protests have mushroomed against a Kuwaiti-style electoral stitchup. London, Paris and Washington all express concern – but arm and back the autocrats.

Cameron insists they need weapons to defend themselves. When it comes to the small arms and equipment Britain and the US supply to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf states, he must mean from their own people. But if he's talking about fighter jets, they're not really about defence at all.

This is effectively a mafia-style protection racket, in which Gulf regimes use oil wealth their families have commandeered to buy equipment from western firms they will never use. The companies pay huge kickbacks to the relevant princelings, while a revolving door of political corruption provides lucrative employment for former defence ministers, officials and generals with the arms corporations they secured contracts for in office.

Naturally, western leaders and Arab autocrats claim the Gulf states are threatened by Iran. In reality, that would only be a risk if the US or Israel attacked Iran – and in that case, it would be the US and its allies, not the regimes' forces, that would be defending them. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe this relationship, which has long embedded corruption in a web of political, commercial and intelligence links at the heart of British public life.

But support for the Gulf dictatorships – colonial-era feudal confections built on heavily exploited foreign workforces – is central to western control of the Middle East and its energy resources. That's why the US has major military bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Bahrain.

The danger now is of escalating military buildup against Iran and intervention in the popular upheavals that have been unleashed across the region. Both the US and Britain have sent troops to Jordan in recent months to bolster the tottering regime and increase leverage in the Syrian civil war. Cameron held talks with emirates leaders this week about setting up a permanent British military airbase in the UAE.

The prime minister defended arms sales to dictators on the basis of 300,000 jobs in Britain's "defence industries". Those numbers are inflated and in any case heavily reliant on government subsidy. But there's also no doubt that British manufacturing is over-dependent on the arms industry and some of that support could usefully be diverted to, say, renewable technologies.

But even if morality and corruption are dismissed as side issues, the likelihood is that, sooner or later, these autocrats will fall – as did the Shah's regime in Iran, on which so many British and US arms contracts depended at the time. Without western support, they would have certainly been toppled already. As Rached Ghannouchi, the Tunisian leader whose democratic Islamist movement was swept to power in elections last year, predicted: "Next year it will be the turn of monarchies." When that happens, the western world risks a new backlash from its leaders' corrupt folly.