While it is a fact that Egypt has to fight Islamic State terrorism, it is also true that the al-Sisi regime there has been less than democratic in its functioning
The Islamic State franchise in libya, which is emerging as the main winner in that country's chaotic civil war, published a video on Sunday showing 21 Egyptian men in orange overalls being forced to the ground and beheaded. The video made it clear that they were being killed for being Christian, “people of the Cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church”.
Within hours, the Egyptian Air Force responded with raids on IS camps and training sites in Derna, the group's headquarters in eastern libya. Announcing the safe return of all the aircraft, the Egyptian military authorities declared: “let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them.” But it didn't really protect them, did itIJ
Okay, that's not fair. Everybody knows that you can't protect people once they fall into the hands of the jihadi head-choppers. An Air Force is a particularly unsuitable tool for that job, nor can anyone stop unemployed Egyptian labourers, including members of the Christian minority, from seeking work even in war-torn libya. Most of the victims came from a dirt-poor Christian village in Upper Egypt, and they had to feed their families somehow.
So the Islamic State fanatics murdered them because killing Christians attracts recruits from a certain demographic. Then the Egyptian Air Force flailed out aimlessly, and the public relations boys wrote the usual guff about the air force being a shield for the people. So far, so tediously normal — but the whole event also serves the narrative of the Egyptian military regime.
We're not supposed to call it a military regime. The military coup (with substantial popular support) that overthrew the elected President, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013, was allegedly just a brief detour from democracy. But the commander of the Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ended up as President, and the promised parliamentary election has still not happened.
Why notIJ The main excuse Egyptians are offered is that the Government is too busy fighting a huge terrorist threat. And don't mention that the terrorism is largely the regime's own fault, or that the threat is not so big that normal political life must be suspended. People who say that have featured prominently among the 40,000 who have been arrested since July 2013. (16,000 are still in prison.)
What happened in Egypt 20 months ago was a betrayal of the democratic revolution of February 2011, when peaceful demonstrators forced former General Hosni Mubarak out after he had served 30 years as the President. Few of the urban, relatively well-educated revolutionaries on Tahrir Square, supported the Muslim Brotherhood, but they should not have been surprised when it won the first free election.
Ninety per cent of Egyptians are Muslims, and most of them are deeply conservative rural people. They remembered that the Muslim Brotherhood had been Egypt's main opposition party during the decades of dictatorship. They shared many of its values, and many of them had benefitted from its social programmes for the poor.
They reckoned the Brothers deserved the first go in power, and gave it their votes. More secular people were appalled when the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated constituent assembly amended the constitution to give it more religious content, although the changes were not actually all that extreme. And they forgot that in a democracy, you can change the government by voting it out. You just have to wait for the next election.
Human Rights Watch has documented at least 817 deaths, and suspects there were more than a thousand. It was, said an HRW report last August, a premeditated assault equal to or worse than the massacre of Chinese protesters on Tienanmen Square in Beijing in 1989. The purpose, as in 1989, was to cow the population into submission, and it is working in Egypt as well as it did in China.
Terrorism, real and imaginary, helps to distract attention at home and abroad from what actually happened in Egypt. Even before the ghastly slaughter of innocent Egyptians in libya on Sunday, the US Congress had put military aid to Egypt back into this year's budget proposal.