Serious unrest in US ally, Egypt

Ever since the Washington managed to broker the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt has played a huge role in American military planning in the Middle East. This is the case not just because, with 73 million citizens and a long and proud history, it is in many respects the weightiest of all the Arab countries. And not just because it sits astride the Suez Canal, a key artery in the shipping lanes that support the US war effort in Iraq. And not just because the Egyptian regime’s torture chambers have been subcontracted on numerous occasions to perform torture on demand (aka “renditioned torture”) as part of the Bushists’ “Global War on Terror.”
No, Egypt is important for all these reasons, and many more. And now, the increasingly sclerotic, 27-year-long regime of President Husni Mubarak is in deep trouble. It faces challenges on three crucial fronts:

— from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a very broad and generally well-organized Islamist movement that now has a long track record of nonviolent social and political engagement;
— from a population growing increasingly angry about massive recent rises in food prices; and
— from a wide smorgasbord of social and political movements that are individually much smaller than the MB, but that look increasingly capable of uniting around a clear anti-Mubarak platform, in parallel with the MB.

Yesterday was one test for the regime’s ability to control the streets. Many of the non-MB movements, including the liberal party Kefaya, the allied Karama Party, and some labor organizations had called a “strike” to protest price hikes. With harsh, bullying rhetoric and a massive show of force (that in at least one place left two strike supporters reportedly dead from police bullets), the regime managed to keep the lid on those protests– for a while.
Today, though,further serious confrontations were reported from the labor-activism epicenter in Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo. That Reuters report says that demonstrators,

set ablaze a primary school, a preparatory school and a travel agency, among other shops in the working-class town, and stopped an incoming train by putting blazing tires on the railway tracks, witnesses said.
Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the protests. Some 40 people were injured and hundreds of others had breathing problems from gas inhalation, security sources said.
Protesters threw stones at police, attacked police vehicles and tore down the posters of the ruling party’s candidates in Tuesday’s local elections, witnesses said.

Which brings us to tomorrow, which is the date scheduled for local “elections” throughout the the country.
The MB had sought to run some 6,000 candidates in the elections slated to fill some 52,000 posts in local administration throughout the country. The regime placed many kinds of obstacles in their way– including deploying security forces to forbid entry to the places where candidates needed to register, and widespread campaigns of arrest without trial and other forms of intimidation. (As denounced by Human Rights Watch, here.) In the end, only 20 of the MB’s 6,000 chosen candidates were able to make it onto the electoral list, at all.
Today, the MB announced that it will boycott tomorrow’s elections completely, “and call on the Egyptian people to do the same.”
So let’s check back and see what happens tomorrow.
The Arabist has two excellent recent roundup and analysis posts on his blog:

— this one, on the complex makeup of yesterday’s strike effort; and
— this one on the MB decision to boycott tomorrow’s polls.

I will just close by recalling that my first visit to Egypt as a reporter was when the London Sunday Times sent me to cover the massive bread riots that broke out there in January 1977. By all accounts, the severity of the crisis revealed by those riots helped push President Anwar Sadat into the idea of doing something “dramatic” to speed along the process of integration into US regional planning that he had started in 1972-73, but that had only sputtered along in the intervening years.
That something “dramatic” turned out to be his landmark visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, an action that jumpstarted the diplomacy that led to the Camp David Accords of the following year, and thence to the conclusion of a final-status peace agreement with Israel in 1979.
It was at that point that Egypt, which in the 1960s had been a key ally of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, became firmly integrated into Washington’s strategic planning.
In 1981, Sadat paid with his life for those choices and for the extremely paranoid series of decisions he made in the middle of that year, that included clamping down very tightly indeed on– and indeed, arresting– all members of the Egyptian body politic whom he felt he had any reason at all to disagree with. An Islamist extremist (not an MB person) shot Sadat dead during a military parade in October that year; and his deputy, Husni Mubarak, immediately stepped into his shoes.
Mubarak has developed such a paranoid political style that he has never even dared to name a Vice President. In recent years, though, he has made some evident moves to groom his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
…. So now, 31 years after 1977, might we be seeing a re-eruption of bread riots in Egypt that could, over the years ahead, lead to a shift in Egypt’s strategic leanings as significant as the one sparked by the 1977 bread riots? Who knows?
I just wrote over at the Arabist’s blog that my main two recollections from 1977 are the sight of all the burned-out night-clubs along the Pyramids Road, and Mohammed Hassanein Heikal telling me– as he sat in his lovely Nile-side office there at the Al-Ahram Center, that “the Egyptian people are like the Nile: they run deep and apparently quietly– until the point where suddenly they burst their banks.”
Actually, I have a third recollection. I arrived one or two days into the riot. And already the Sadat regime had started to deploy trucks full of security people along the main arteries. Those scared country boys sat in their trucks, armed only with clubs and looking very warily about them.
Cairo still has thousands of trucks-full of those security men– probably the sons or grandsons of the ones I saw.
The regime’s dilemma is how to build a force that is large enough to intimidate or quell all possible signs of public disquiet– while preventing this force from becoming large enough and well-armed enough that its leaders might think to come and topple the regime, instead. Oh, it’s such a hard job being a dictator– especially one who has fashioned his policies so evidently to be in line with the whims of a blundering, arrogant, and unpopular external power like the United States.
Egypt. As I’ve written before: watch that story as it develops.