Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
While Qatar welcomes Uncle Sam, Egyptian police torture antiwar protesters. If the war lasts long, some say, the scales may tip toward rage.
Apr 4, 2003 | Just hours after U.S. bombs began falling on Baghdad, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saw his worst political fears play out on the streets of Cairo, where tens of thousands of angry protesters embodied the Arab reaction to the invasion of Iraq. But the crowd, made up of students, leftists and Muslim Brothers, also turned their anger and frustration toward Mubarak, a longtime ally of the West who maintains power in the impoverished country by repressing political dissent. In a public statement just before the war, Mubarak blamed Saddam Hussein for bringing the invasion upon himself. But the crowds seemed to disagree: Chanting "Mubarak! Leave! Leave!" and "Alaa [Mubarak's son], tell your dad that millions hate him!" the surging crowd broke through riot-police lines and seized control of the central Tahrir Square.
Demonstrations without formal approval have essentially been banned there since 1967. And so the uprising last month, with illegal protesters controlling the streets and publicly denouncing the Egyptian government, was like nothing Cairo had seen since the 1970s.
As hopes for a quick war and a decisive peace in Iraq largely fade, governments in the Arab region face a challenge that they've come to dread: With vivid pictures of Iraqi destruction and death on every television, they are under pressure to do something about it -- and sometimes, the anger expands beyond the British, beyond the Americans, to scald their own home governments.
Thanks in many cases to repressive methods for controlling dissent, none of the governments are likely to fall. Some, in fact, have little at all to fear. But how the war plays out outside Iraq in the coming weeks could say a lot about the future stability of governments in the region, and that, in turn, could directly affect how those regimes deal with the United States.
Mubarak's reaction to the Egyptian dissent was predictable, violent, and very effective, at least for the short term. The day after protesters captured the central square, a crowd assembled at Cairo's al-Azhar mosque for Friday afternoon prayers and prepared to march again. This time, thousands of police officers surrounded the building and trapped the crowd inside. Protesters broke windows in order to escape into the streets, only to be met by cannons, tear gas and attack dogs.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian police forces fanned out across the city, arresting approximately 1,500 people, some of whom had been part of the first protest and some who were simply well-known political activists, including two members of the Egyptian Parliament. According to Human Right Watch, many of those arrested were beaten, tortured and threatened with rape.
How effective was the crackdown? The next week in Cairo, a much smaller, properly sanctioned demonstration occurred after the Friday prayers, as policemen escorted a well-behaved crowd away from downtown as they chanted anti-American and anti-British (but not anti-Mubarak) slogans and then peacefully dispersed. Days later, Mubarak changed his rhetoric about the war, suggesting the U.S.-led battle for Iraq would likely produce more terrorist threats: "If there is one [Osama] bin Laden now," he warned, "there will be 100 bin Ladens afterward."
Mubarak's momentary flip-flop illustrated what has long been a difficult balancing act not only for Egypt but also for Arab regimes such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. On the one hand they depend on the United States for economic and security aid, but on the other they have to at least pay lip service to the passions of their people. Arabs see the hypocrisy, and the bowing to the West, and they seethe.
"All the Arab governments have been so emasculated and discredited and humiliated by this war," says Sheila Carapico, who teaches Middle Eastern politics at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "Nobody there expects their governments to do anything about it. People are just mad."
Granted, the passions of the masses can be, and usually are, ignored by the autocratic Arab administrations. But when the issue is of war and peace, and when that war involves a nearby Arab nation being invaded by U.S.-led troops, the pressure from the street is dismissed at leaders' peril.
Even for Arab governments without a strategic alliance with the United States, such as Iran, Syria, and Yemen, there are fears that a protracted war could bring instability at home. At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, are the anomalies of the region, such as Kuwait and Qatar, which have openly welcomed American troops without the slightest concern about a backlash.
For now, most eyes are on the major Arab players who have to walk a tightrope between the Middle East and the West. "It's still too early in the game to say any of these Arab governments are in danger," says Chris Toesning, editor of the Middle East Report, a scholarly monthly. Indeed, considering the nonstop images Arabs are seeing on television of bombed-out Iraqi marketplaces and news accounts about an Iraqi maternity hospital being hit by coalition forces, the political mood on the streets remains calm, relatively speaking. "Demonstrations are to be expected," says Judith Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. "But for now it's a wait-and-see attitude."
"The key is how long the war lasts," says P.S. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, a foreign policy think tank. "How deep is the sentiment? What other domestic issues could get fed into the protests, and are there groups that can mobilizes that anger? The reverse is, what tools do the governments have for clamping down? A good security force? Do they have state-run media to help people blow off steam" by printing angry anti-American editorials?
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