'Sheik al-Torture' is now a democrat
By Pepe Escobar
The Egyptian revolution
is being dissolved right in front of the world's eyes
by an optical illusion.
The protesters who have
been on the streets for two weeks still want President
Hosni Mubarak out. Now.
Yet United States President Barack Obama is firmly in
not-so-fast mode, glad
that "Egypt is making progress". Obama has not mentioned
even once the capital
words "free elections".
Washington's "orderly
transition" road map - fully supported by Tel Aviv and
European capitals - is
a facelift. Mubarak stepping down has become an
afterthought; the
already anointed successor is
Vice President Omar
Suleiman, the former head of the Mukhabarat, whom the
protesters call "Sheik
al-Torture".
Sheik al-Torture
already behaves as a president - while the actual president is
still inhabiting his
palace, but as a ghost. The regime, a brutal military
dictatorship, remains
an immovable subject - even while being denounced by the
protesters as
illegitimate from A to Z, from the executive to the legislative.
The key point is that
acting president Suleiman is the regime. If French
philosopher Jean
Baudrillard was alive, he would say this revolution never took
place - except on the
world's television screens.
Some among the
fragmented opposition want the head of the constitutional court
to be appointed as
interim president, and then preside over the election of a
constituent assembly.
Others - including the youth movement - want a national
committee to supervise
the Washington-sanctioned "orderly transition".
Gilbert Achcar,
professor of international relations at the School of Oriental
and African Studies in
London, goes straight to the point, "In order to impose
such a thorough change,
the mass movement would need to break or destabilize
the regime's backbone,
that is, the Egyptian army."
Meet the new boss ...
Egypt is a hardcore
military dictatorship. The army, essentially paid for by US
taxpayer money, is no
"honest broker". The Mubarak regime's repression against
the protests has not
been even more vicious because soldiers in this conscript
army would certainly
have refused to shoot their own people; thus plan B, the
regime's goons and the
hated baltagia - state-sponsored thugs in
plainclothes -
unleashed last week.
Still, the regime was
never shaken to the core - because the army remains in
charge. Graphic
example; the state-owned newspaper al-Gomhuria had a monster
headline this Monday
reading "New Era" above a photo of Suleiman meeting some
of the opposition under
a picture of Mubarak.
The protesters insist
on the end of the state of emergency - enforced for the
past 25 years. The
regime says this would depend on "security conditions"; they
could keep repeating
this ad nauseam for months. The regime won't accept
dissolving parliament;
it refuses to hold a really free, fair election to
replace the current,
kangaroo, pro-Mubarak parliament.
"Divide and rule" is
the regime's modus operandi - and it's working
wonders. The tactics
are predictable; minimal concessions; accusing the
protesters of being a
tool of "foreign powers"; and also accusing them of being
a threat to Egypt's
"stability".
Crucial: the "foreign
powers" slander came from the lion's (Suleiman's) mouth
last Thursday, in a
long interview to state television - exactly the same day
that foreign
journalists were being hunted, beaten, arrested or humiliated all
across Cairo. Suleiman
explicitly blamed "certain friendly nations who have
television channels,
they're not friendly at all, who have intensified the
youth against the
nation and the state". How about that as a democrat's
credentials?
Some already see right
through it. The left-wing Nasserists (three seats in the
2000 election), who
insist the revolution represents all Egyptians, won't talk
to Suleiman again
unless Mubarak is gone. Suleiman has explicitly said Mubarak
- ghost, illusion or
both - stays.
Writing on Ahram
online, columnist Nabil Shawkat says about Mubarak that "the
spirit of his rule, the
essence of his regime, and the methods of his era are
far from over". He also
notes that "in his first television interview, he
[Suleiman] gave the
impression that he was running the country, that - if he
wanted - he could tell
Mubarak to go to his room and stay there." Talk about
the ghost in the room.
Even with a monster
ghost in a closet inside his room, the regime's targets
remain clear.
Activists, such as independent filmmaker Samir Eshra and blogger
Abdel-Karim Nabil
Suleiman, keep being arrested. Human Rights Watch's Daniel
Williams was kept by
the army for no less than 36 hours. It's easy for a
well-oiled repression
machine to intimidate the overwhelming majority in the
streets, who have no
political affiliation.
There are no
independent workers' unions. The April 6 Youth Movement as well as Kefaya
(Enough!) are
campaigners, not established political parties. Legendary
Egyptian economist
Samir Amin, professor at the universities of Paris and
Cairo, insists things
might change if the working class and peasant movements
started to act as
forcefully as the current actors - the urban, educated,
unemployed youth and
the middle classes. What they all should do is to pierce
the contradictions of
the regime with concerted action.
... same as the old
boss
Washington could live
with an Egypt like a new Pakistan; a heady mix of
unstable comprador
elites, some political Islam (via the Muslim Brotherhood),
military intelligence
and why not, another military dictator. It's not exactly
"democracy".
Yet the notion that
protesters from all walks of life, from students to
lawyers, not to mention
Egyptian human-rights groups, would gladly accept the
face-lifted Sheik
al-Torture as a dialogue-driven democrat speaks Luxor temples
about how Washington
really despises nationalist, popular movements.
Before the Pharaoh
anointed him as vice president last week, Omar Suleiman, aka
"Sheik al-Torture"
(everyone in Egypt knows he supervised US Central
Intelligence Agency
(CIA) renditions as well as torture of al-Qaeda suspects),
born July 2, 1936, in
Qena, southern Egypt, was a minister without portfolio
and director of the
Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, the national
intelligence agency,
from 1993 to 2011.
In the 1980s, he got
training at the John F Kennedy Special Warfare School and
Center at Fort Bragg in
North Carolina. Foreign Policy magazine ranked him the
Middle East's most
powerful intelligence chief in 2009, even ahead of Israel's
Mossad head at the
time, Meir Dagan.
It doesn't matter that
the Egyptian street abhors him; for the top echelons of
the army he is the new
rais [president]. Al-Jazeera describes him as "the point man"
for Egypt's secret
relations with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu loves him.
Former bouncer and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel Avigdor
Lieberman has expressed
"his respect and appreciation for Egypt's leading role
in the region and his
personal respect for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and
Minister Suleiman".
According to a 2006
diplomatic cable on WikiLeaks, the CIA - what else? - also
loves him; "Our
intelligence collaboration with Oman Soliman [sic] is now
probably the most
successful element of the relationship" with Egypt. Suleiman
always negotiated
directly with top CIA officials.
On the other side of
the spectrum, Human Rights Watch stresses, "Egyptians ...
see Suleiman as Mubarak
II, especially after the lengthy interview he gave to
state television Feb 3
in which he accused the demonstrators in Tahrir Square
of implementing foreign
agendas. He did not even bother to veil his threats of
retaliation against
protesters." Human Rights Watch notes at least 75 Egyptian
activists and
demonstrators and about 30 foreign journalists have been arrested
since the protests
began, and at least 297 people have been killed.
The street is under no
illusions. They know the army - the strongest player in
the Egyptian political
equation - might even invest in a massive crackdown if
it feels threatened.
The spark could be anything from an imaginary threat from
"foreign powers" to a
feeling that they will never be ready to cede power to
civilians for the first
time since 1956.
Minister of Defense
Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, for instance, is
impervious to "economic
and political reforms that he perceives as eroding
central government
power", according to a WikiLeaks cable. But for the moment
the army is more than
comfortable with Sheik al-Torture running the show. And
so are the democrats in
Washington.
Pepe Escobar is the
author of
Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble
Books, 2007) and
Red Zone Blues:
a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book,
just out, is
Obama does
Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at
pepea...@yahoo.com.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MB09Ak01.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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