Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Mubarak's rigged victory shows that right-wing predictions of an "Arab spring" were wishful thinking.
Sep 19, 2005 | The groundhog did not see its shadow in Egypt last week.
Hosni Mubarak's victory in the Egyptian presidential election of Sept. 7 was about as surprising as a Las Vegas casino fleecing its customers at the roulette tables. Egyptians joked that the only requirement for winning the presidency was 24 years of prior experience. What was surprising was that only 23 percent of the eligible voters bothered to come out for the country's first multiparty elections for the executive since 1952. Despite the conviction of supporters of the Bush administration that Bush's invasion and bloody occupation of Iraq would somehow suddenly make Middle Easterners yearn to join the American Republican Party, the "Arab spring" of political liberalization discerned by the Wall Street Journal has yet to materialize.
In the seven months running up to the presidential elections on Sept. 7, the burly old general Mubarak suppressed popular demonstrations by the Kifayah ("Enough!") reform movement, which demanded an end to emergency powers that the government uses to suppress civil liberties. He also ordered the police to bust up protests by the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned hundreds of its members and leaders. By May 2005, he had thrown 754 members in prison for participating in peaceful protests. He excluded the party, among the more popular in the country, from running for office.
Mubarak tossed Ayman Nour, the popular leader of a major new recognized political party, al-Ghad ("Tomorrow") into prison for 45 days on trumped-up charges. In part because of the intervention of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he released Nour but kept the indictment hanging over Nour's head. Al-Ghad is devoted to secularism, free markets and improving the lot of the poor, according to its platform. Mubarak finally relented and allowed other candidates to run against him in the presidential elections, but only those from parties approved by his own party. His landslide victory in a lackluster election that allowed only 18 days for campaigning was produced by less than a quarter of the eligible voters.
The bottom line: The outcome of the Sept. 7 elections was never in doubt, a fact recognized by Kifayah, which called for a boycott. The boycott received far more support than did Nour.
How did the Bush administration reply to this litany of authoritarian actions and sad parodies of "democracy"? Bush called Mubarak to congratulate him on his "victory"! Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan was trotted out to say, "This election represents an important step toward holding fully free and fair competitive multiparty elections, and both supporters and opponents of the government have told us that it has occasioned a vigorous national debate in Egypt on important issues." Contrast these reactions to the Bush administration's dismissal of Iran's June presidential election as "illegitimate." In Iran, the ideological difference among the candidates was if anything greater than among the Egyptian candidates. The turnout was more than twice what it was in Egypt, and the president won by a smaller margin. It is true that the Iranian elections were marred by dirty tricks, exclusion of liberal reformists from running, and very possibly fraud. But it is not entirely clear that the Egyptian elections, marred by voting abuses, were any better. To most people in the world, Bush's selective outrage about elections is so egregiously hypocritical that it appears he is intentionally flaunting it.
Western powers have been pushing Egypt on the issue of democracy for centuries, but "democracy" has usually been a cover for Western dominance. In response, Egyptian elites have insisted on doing things their own way. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the country in 1798 on the pretext of "liberating" it from tyranny. (Egypt was at that time a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.) Bonaparte set up a National Assembly of Egyptian clerics, though he made the important decisions, including the imposition of crushing tax increases. The ungrateful Egyptians revolted against the French several times and intrigued with the British and the Ottoman sultan to get them out of the country, with success coming in 1801.
In 1866 the Ottoman viceroy of the time instituted a harmless national assembly, which he appointed. But in the late 1870s the delegates began agitating for genuine elections and parliamentary control over the budget, and they succeeded in forcing relatively open elections for the National Assembly in 1881. The British and French, afraid that a sovereign parliament might default on the massive high-interest loans that the modernizing viceroys had contracted for, agitated against the new order. The British also coveted Egypt for its lucrative cotton production and for the Suez Canal, which from its opening in 1869 became the primary means for Great Britain to access its colonial Indian possessions.
In 1882 the British invaded to overthrow the parliamentary reform movement, and the Europeans ruled the country directly until 1922, careful to ensure that the London bondholders got paid by the sweat of Egyptian peasant labor. Needless to say, they did not allow anything like genuine elections during those decades. Present-day complaints by Western intellectuals that the Middle East has resisted democracy are the height of hypocrisy, given how many times Western powers intervened to stamp out any incipient signs of parliamentary sovereignty that might challenge European economic and political dominance.
After experiments with constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary life mainly dominated by the big landlord class from the 1920s on, Egypt underwent a military coup in 1952. The military-dominated republic -- which sent the playboy King Farouk into exile, challenged continued British hegemony over the country, and pursued land reform and socialist industrialization -- is with us to this day. The rural middle class created by the land reforms has been a backbone of the state. Hosni Mubarak is an air force general trained in Moscow when Egypt was allied with the old Soviet Union. Despite the camouflage of business suits and the window-dressing of a national Parliament, Egypt remains a military dictatorship 53 years after Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser and other young officers overthrew the corrupt big landlords of the old Wafd Party.
At some 77 million, Egypt is the most populous Arab country, making up an estimated third of the Arab world. It was the most formidable of the military enemies that Israel faced, and in both the Suez War of 1956 and the October War of 1973 its military acquitted itself better than its enemies had expected. In 1978 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat concluded the Camp David peace accords with Israel and the United States. Israel thus achieved the neutralization of its most important Arab antagonist. In return, Egypt got back all the territory Israel had conquered from it in the Sinai in 1967 and received a pledge of $2 billion in aid every year from the United States. Half of that aid was military, but had to be spent on American weaponry. Even the half dedicated to civilian purposes had to employ American companies, contractors and materiel.
