Dispatches From Cairo: Ms. Clinton, Kindly Butt Out

TruthDig
Lauren Unger-Geoffroy

A protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in May displays
a shoe sole covered with pictures of Egyptian and Israeli
and other foreign officials or former officials, including
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

CAIRO—Since Tuesday, Egypt has suffered a hot spell that produced a record number of heatstroke victims, including me and two friends. But the weather has not stopped supporters of the two presidential election “winners” from holding victory celebrations. Nor has it stopped Egyptians from wondering whether the ousted President Hosni Mubarak is clinically dead, fully dead, alive and conscious, or alive but unconscious, and whether he had a heart attack or a stroke or had fallen in a bathtub. The volleys of bullshit have been heavy as journalists rush back and forth in pursuit of the stories.

Lots of jokes have hit the social networks. A couple of examples:

—“Egypt has two living presidents, no parliament, one dictator, one invalid constitution, and one president both dead and alive.”

—“All Egyptians are happy today. Those who are for [presidential candidate Mohamed] Morsi are happy because he has won. Those who are for [presidential candidate Ahmed] Shafiq are happy because he won. Those who hated Mubarak are happy because he is dead. Those who loved Mubarak are happy because he is alive.”

Music blared and cars victory-honked Friday night as huge numbers flocked again to Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and to celebrate hints that the SCAF might agree to allow the presidency to go to the opposition candidate, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi.

Good, Alhamdulillah, if that happens, for such a decision by the SCAF would probably avoid a military massacre of thousands stemming from massive public protests. The people will not accept Shafiq as president, nor will they believe any vote count that has him as winner of last weekend’s election.

A pro-Morsi chant heard in Tahrir Square since last Tuesday night: “If [the SCAF] want to be Syria, we’ll give them Libya!” The ominous meaning is that civil war will sweep Egypt if the SCAF’s candidate is awarded the presidency in the face of a challenged vote and that the regime will be swept away.

Khairat el-Shater, the leading strategist of the Muslim Brotherhood, warned before the final round of the presidential election: “Egypt can make its transition to a new order the easy way, or the hard way.” Despite the regime-run national media’s relentless psychological warfare against the Muslim Brotherhood, it is now nearly impossible for the military to take the presidency.

In a statement issued Friday, the SCAF warned against failure to implement court decisions and confirmed the constitutional declaration that it issued earlier in a bid to restrict presidential power. Key words in the new statement were “legitimacy,” “law,” “legal” and “constitutional.” Well played, very well played.

I took in all this information through a haze of dizziness caused by 105-degree heat. I tried not to faint, which was difficult after I read about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seeming to assert a right to insinuate the United States into the Egyptian election and its outcome. The military must transfer power to the true winner of the election, Clinton said Wednesday. “We think that it is imperative that the military fulfill its promise to the Egyptian people to turn power over to the legitimate winner,” she said in Washington, D.C. She went on to call the developments in Egypt “clearly troubling.”

“The military has to assume an appropriate role which is not to interfere with, dominate or try to subvert the constitutional authority,” Clinton said. It was a warning.

The obvious wrongdoings of the SCAF notwithstanding, the U.S. must not tell Egypt how it should conduct its affairs. Whatever became of the notion of national sovereignty?

Egyptians stage mass rally against army

Al Jazeera

Egyptian activists have gathered in Cairo for a mass protest against the ruling military and its handling of a series of clashes between security forces and demonstrators that killed 17 people and drew international criticism, even as thousands of others demonstrated their support for the army.

Tens of thousands protested in the capital's Tahrir Square, the focal point of protests against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) after Friday prayers.

Students called for Egyptians to join Friday's protest with a march from Ain Shams University to Tahrir Square. Two students were among those killed in the latest clashes.

"The current predicament we have reached is a result of the army council's reluctance to play its role, its intentional foot-dragging, breaking its obligations and failing over the economy and security, putting the whole country on the edge of a huge crisis," said a statement signed by two dozen parties, youth movements and others calling for Friday's protest.

Violence 'unacceptable'

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from Tahrir Square, said the crowd had been swelling since after the Friday prayers.

“There are also protests in other cities, in Suez and Alexanderia. Lots of different demonstrations, but one clear message: that the SCAF needs to hand over power to civilians," she said.

"They are also saying the recent violent crackdown, specially the violence soldiers used against women, is unacceptable."

The now iconic pictures and videos of a woman protester being dragged and stripped by military forces during bloody clashes that erupted last Friday dominated the media and heightened criticism against the SCAF.

"The women of Egypt are a red line," the protesters in Tahrir chanted. "We either die like them or we get them their rights," followed.

A similar protests was held in Alexandria, Egypt's second city, where several thousand people marched towards an army base chanting slogans against the military. Smaller rallies took place in Suez, Ismailiya and Port Said, witnesses said.

Competing rally

A competing rally of several thousand people gathered in support of the military in another part of Cairo on Friday.

US Condemned for Arming Egyptian Regime

Global Research
Bill Van Auken

Documents made public by Amnesty International show that Washington repeatedly shipped additional arms and munitions to the regime in Egypt even as it hypocritically deplored “excessive force” by police and troops and called for an end to “violence.” The human rights group condemned the US State Department for issuing successive arms export licenses for the purpose of shipping crowd control munitions to Egypt. These shipments were approved in the middle of violent repression of demonstrators fighting for the ouster of US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak and, subsequently, during protests calling for an end to rule by his successors in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). The latest of these shipments arrived at the port of Adabiya, near Suez, on November 26, just a day after millions of Egyptian workers and youth took to the streets demanding an end to the SCAF military junta. Over the course of the previous week, security forces had carried out a bloody crackdown, killing at least 40 people and wounding thousands. In a number of cases demonstrators were killed with live ammunition, while in others, so-called “less-lethal” weapons were used in such a way, such as firing tear gas canisters at head level and close range, as to take lives. The November 26 shipment, according to Amnesty, included at least seven tons of “ammunition smoke,” which includes tear gas and other riot control munitions. The repressive materials came from Combined Systems, Inc. (CSI) in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, which, in addition to CS tear gas grenades, markets numerous other “less-lethal” munitions ranging from rubber baton rounds to flash-bang grenades and pepper spray. The human rights group reported that the shipment was organized by the defense logistics company Nico Shipping, with the munitions loaded onto a Danish ship, the Marianne Danica, at the US Military Ocean Terminal in Sunny Point, North Carolina on October 13.

Egypt legislative polls under fire

Egyptian Gazette
Ashraf Madbouly

CAIRO - A new law setting rules for the forthcoming legislative polls has come under fire from most political groups and revolutionaries for mixing two electoral systems, keeping half the seats for workers and ignoring the opinions of political powers while issuing the bill.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) issued the Parliament Law on Wednesday. It reserves 50 per cent of the seats for individuals, while the other half will be contested by closed party lists.

"The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still behaves as if we were still living before the January 25 revolution. It takes individual decisions, without consulting with any of political parties. The nature of the Parliament Law makes this obvious," said Ahmed Ramzi.

Ramzi, a senior member of the Free Front for Peaceful Change, added that his group, as well as most political parties, did not welcome the law for four reasons.

"Our four reservations are: the reserving of half of the seats for workers and farmers; mixing the individual system and the closed party lists; Parliament having the right to keep or fire MPs; and the fact that the issue of religious slogans has been ignored," Ramzi told the Gazette by phone.

He added that lowering the age of potential candidates to 25 years is beneficial. "However, the law in general is disappointing.”

The mix of two election systems goes against the will of the majority of political parties, headed by the liberal-oriented Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

Both insist that the individual candidacies be scrapped and the party-list system adopted in its entirety.

"The individual electoral system opens the way for thuggery and money to play a role in the process. This will serve the interests of businessmen and the remnants of the dissolved National [Democratic] Party," said Bahaa Abou Shoqa, a senior member of the Wafd Party.