Can there be a coup d'etat without "etat"?
Il Giornale, July 07th 2013
So, is it a military coup or not? Obama is silent, prolonging the shocking American absence from the tumultuous international scene. He leaves it to his officials to condemn the Egyptian Army with a virtuous request to restore power to civil society. The widowers of the Arab Spring stress the Egyptian mob’s demand for democracy, ask the Army to back off and discount the notion of a military coup d’ état. They forget that Nasser was a military man, and so was Sadat.
In a world drawn up by the Sykes Picot agreement in 1916 when the Ottoman empire was carved up, the only real Arab country has been governed by the military for 5,000 years.
You can’t have a coup d’ état if there is no état. We wish we had said that, but, in fact, it comes from Roger Boyes, writing in the Times of London. The phrase sounds even more ironic since the 85th ex-president Mubarak, surely in a good mood, appeared in court on saturday to be judged for the homicide of demonstrators. He has pleaded not guilty. He could have pleaded the winner. The tribunal, namely the State, pretended to do its work while Mubarak chuckled into his whiskers and 90 more people died on the street in the fight to oust his enemy president Mursi. Those were his old henchmen standing beside General Sisi during the Army’s solemn assumption of power. Former President Mursi is in custody. His huge crowd, rabid with rage, cries out against the slipping away of power acquired after 85 years of persecution. But this crowd is hated by the motley population that saw Mursi behaving not as a president, but as the envoy of the Muslim Brotherhood, using all his new strenght to bring in Sharia law and put his friends in the key powers roles instead of fighting hunger and ignorance.
Fearing, quite correctly, that, under Mursi, they could be transformed into the Pasdaran, fanatic and religious Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the military unquestionably acted with premeditation and embraced the rebels, chasing out the last pharaoh like they did before with Mubarak. The Army gives and takes away, just like the Nile, and just as it has for 5,000 years. If we did not wrap ourselves in our Western dreams, we coul see reality: Egypt could now fall apart, prey to the gangs that have been after each other’s blood for years. The “restore civilian rule immediately” formula does not apply here. Everybody and nobody is a “civilian” who can manage the institutions of the State, because they do not exist. Disaster looms: yesterday, the Coptic Pope was killed. In the cities, hunger and murder are rampant. Sharia tribunals have replaced the courts in Sinai.
The police are corrupt. Nothing works. The US does not use the expression “military coup” so that US law does not force the Pentagon to slash USD 1.3 billion in military aid, along with USD 250 million slated to relieve social suffering. A large and ancient country is out of control. Part of it is armed with military leftovers from Libya and other agitators. The Sinai is riddled with Al Qaeda gangs. Hamas, irritated, oversteps the boundaries and, in a reversed role, supplies arms to the Muslim Brotherhood. A churning mass with a homicide rate 300 per cent higher than before the Arab Spring and a 12-times higher rate of rape fools around while we sanctimoniously attack the Army that confronts the chaos.
Today, in this situation, democracy matters less than human lives. The Egyptian Army can save many. Is it a military coup? So be it.