Both the Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood are locked in a confrontation that can only claim more lives on the streets and elsewhere. While the two are busy justifying their hardened positions, they are equally responsible for the present crisis
The general commentary post the Egyptian coup seems to be almost squarely divided — some supporting the victory of the ‘secular’ Army, while others expressing indignation at the overthrow of an elected Government. More uniform though is the criticism aimed at American hypocrisy. There are, however, too many generalisations floating around that need some myth-busting.
The first is the notion of a secular Army versus a rabidly bigoted Muslim Brotherhood. This narrative goes that only the Army can protect the Coptic minorities and maintain ‘progressive’ values. The marginalisation of the Copts started almost immediately after Abdel Gamal Nasser’s coup in 1952. There were restrictions placed on even minor repairs to churches (which did not apply to mosques) in laws that harked back to the days of dhimmitude. While we hear regularly about the abduction of girls and their forced conversion to Islam and forced marriages in Pakistan, the exact same applies to the Copts in Egypt. There was across the board a persistent low-level harassment of the Copts which resulted in a large diaspora migrating abroad.
Yet, undeniably, the scale of violence directed against them has gone up disproportionately since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the Copts genuinely fear Islamic radicalism, and despite the Army’s atrocious record in protecting their rights, see the military as the lesser of the two evils. The second is that the Army itself has to a significant extent allowed these attacks on Copts to increase as part of its strategy of permanent tension against Mr Morsi and his Brotherhood.
The Army has been deliberately allowing for some time now violence to spiral out of control, be it cross-border attacks on Israel, the storming of the Israeli embassy, attacks on minorities or the bombing of gas and oil pipelines. This modus operandi is almost textbook Pakistani Army, which uses internal destabilisation through sectarian or constitutional crises to topple Governments, but also ameliorates the effect of the sanctions that follow, as the Army, despite being the villain of the piece is seen as the lesser of two evils.
In a sense, therefore, the dilemma facing the international community on sanctions against Egypt is the very same that faces the Copts there. Both know that the Army was responsible — by its acts of commission and deliberate omission — for the increase in violence, but the choice the Army has given them is simple: let us control things and face low(er) levels of violence or allow the Islamists to take over and wipe out the minorities.
In such circumstances, accusing the West of hypocrisy is blatantly unfair. Different situations demand different responses, and comparisons with Syria and libya are ridiculous. Syria is ruled by minorities — effectively an Alawite-Christian alliance ruling over a Sunni population. The minority’s dilemma in Syria, therefore, was very different as was the international community’s responsibility to protect. The countries that have exacerbated the situation there have been Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, while the West has largely avoided any significant entanglement there. libya again was a different ball game. The extremely unwise intervention there was the result as much of French domestic politics and Mr Nicolas Sarkozy’s acute Napoleon complex that in a sense trapped America into a fight it did not want.
Of course, America-bashing is the easiest thing in the world: ‘Anything goes wrong let’s blame it on the Americans’. What we in India need to realise is that the exercise of power is a thankless job and more often than not it is messy business. But one cannot have power unless one is willing to get one’s hands dirty. That fact that despite our claims to being an emerging superpower, we cannot grasp this one simple fact, says a lot for our ambitions. Power is not a popularity contest and, sadly enough, spinning wheels, giving sermons of ahimsa, peddling spirituality and other assorted mumbo-jumbo are no substitutes for an aircraft carrier. As we can see in India’s case, owning an aircraft carrier is very different from having the guts, determination and gumption to use an aircraft carrier. It’s the difference between talking and acting that separates the big boys from the wannabes. The first step in acting requires the realisation that there are such things as intractable problems, and at some point one has to act even if it is only a stop-gap measure.
Take Syria for example. Had the West sat back and allowed Bashar al-Assad to win, it would have been damned by its own people, and would have allowed a Government with secret nuclear ambitions to perpetuate. Besides, the West would have been accused by every rabid Sunni mullah as being anti-Islamic. On the other hand, if the Western powers had intervened in favour of the rebels, every Shia Ayatollah would be baying for American blood. The intervention would have been seen as proof of the West’s ‘anti-Islamic’ designs and every left-liberal-secular type would have howled about Western imperialism.
It’s a classic case of ‘do and you’re damned and don’t do and you’re damned’. Almost every international problem carries these hopeless dilemmas, and yet finding a way to act instead of becoming paralysed, is the key to power — the sooner we in India realise this the better it will be for us.
Back to Egypt, the Army’s actions in no way excuse the Muslim Brotherhood from culpability in the violence. let us not forget that to merely be in the Brotherhood alone carried severe risks in republican Egypt, and only toughened, battle hardened fanatics and lumpen thugs could stick it out. Consequently, while the Army may very well have goaded and cajoled them into doing ‘their thing’, the Brotherhood has no one but itself to blame for falling into the trap and allowing things to spiral out of control.
One must also blame the academia here for conferring respectability on these Islamist identity movements and acting as apologists for them. It is curious that the same liberals who attack saffronisation and decry it as Nazism and worse, also hail the Muslim Brotherhood thugs as democrats and confer respectability on their toxic ideology by giving it tame labels like ‘political Islam’. Hypocrisy as we can see is hardly unique to the West.