Fayyad, came for it. At the plenary, Aijaz Ahmad lit into Fayyad regarding Hezbollah’s position on women’s rights. It is just what should be done. The parties of God have virulence at their fingertips, particularly as it relates to matters of social equity and economic policy. That has to be scorched. Clara Zetkin warned that the emergence of fascism could be laid partly on the failure of the workers, their intellectual allies and their revolutionary parties to form tactical alliances that are also founded on honest and serious criticism of those alliances. That is how one moves effectively toward the future, particularly when the context is such that the left pole is weak and the national-popular domain is largely in the hands of the parties of God.
Most indications point to the fact that the parties of God are unable to fully take on board the grievances and needs of the people. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt hastily came to an accommodation with the neoliberal agenda and suggested that it would not be averse to the Camp David treaty with Egypt. The United States reached out to the Brotherhood, and in the interests of expediency and in their lust for power, the Brotherhood reached back and made these concessions. Such departures from the popular agenda will turn the Brotherhood into a more socially cruel force (to shore up its base) and so might make it marginal to the political process. If the Brotherhood goes fully in this direction, suggests the University of Tehran’s Seyed Mohammad Marandi, it “will probably at some point split into two or more separate parties, which will then provide competing interpretations of how society should be run.” Or, if the parties of God entirely fail to make their mark on the world of today, this might provide an opening to more authentic working-class and peasant parties that are yet to make themselves manifest.
The clerics do not command the total field. In Egypt, hope vested for a while in the emergence of a secular bloc. But here the catapult would not shoot hopes too far out of the fortress of the military and neoliberal consumerism. Mohamed ElBaradei flew into Tahrir Square from his diplomatic exile in Geneva. In 2010, he returned to his native Egypt to declare his intention to bring “good governance” with him. If this meant the removal of Mubarak and the opening of political space, it was welcome. ElBaradei sounded like one of many World Bank advisors, who had come to terms with the fact that neoliberal consumerism had failed to bring positive change, and had now articulated Structural Adjustment, part 2, with “good governance” as the leading edge. No sense in opening up the economy if the politics is not also opened up was the new mantra. But when Tahrir filled up, ElBaradei seemed enthused. With Ayman Nour in poor health, he took up the mantle of the liberals. The fact that he spent the better part of his career and the worst years of Mubarak’s rule outside Cairo gave him credibility. A man of his class would have been co-opted into the Mubarak web. Only an outsider like him could be both of the ruling bloc (in terms of class position and instinct) and outside the ruling apparatus (that is, of Mubarak’s cabinet circle). It was a point of great privilege.
People like ElBaradei cannot be reduced to being more sophisticated puppets for the Atlantic world. Early in his career, in the 1960s, he served in the Nasserite Ministry of External Affairs. He then moved to the Foreign Ministry under Ismail Fahmi, one of the most impressive of the Nasser-era bureaucrats. When Sadat went to Jerusalem and then to Camp David, Fahmi resigned from his cabinet. For one year, ElBaradei served with Boutros Boutros Ghali at the Foreign Ministry. Unwilling to bend to the wiles of Sadat, both ElBaradei and Boutros Ghali fled into the UN bureaucracy. It was this Nasserite training that schooled both of them, and forged them as strong pillars of international law and the rights of all nations. No wonder that ElBaradei would not wither before US pressure as the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the lead-up to the war on Iraq (2002–2003). It is the reason why the IAEA and ElBaradei as its head won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei’s residual Nasserism shows us that the threats to the US pillars of stability (pliancy to US will, protection of Israel) are real whether the Brotherhood wins the democratic process of not. In this regard, the gap between ElBaradei’s liberal bloc and the Islamist bloc is narrower than one might expect. ElBaradei’s 2012 suggestion that he would not enter the presidential election because the military has yet to fully open space for civilian politics is welcomed, but it also suggests that ElBaradei recognizes that the liberals would at this time only have a shallow support base compared to the far more popular Islamists.
The Tunisian trade unions (the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail or UGTT) and the Egyptian labor and peasant movement played essential roles in the uprisings of 2011. Millions of people participate in these platforms, and millions more are loyal to them. Yet, these organizations have not asserted themselves into the electoral domain, even though they were major political actors during the uprisings. There are rumbles of discontent amongst the unions of the dangers of letting political Islam command the electoral field, and therefore government. The danger is not only social. Most of the forces of political Islam are quite comfortable with neoliberal economic policies, and with making adjustments of various kinds (brokered through Qatar) with the capitals of Atlantic imperialism. The recognition of the political limitations of political Islam are not unknown to the labor leadership of North Africa. Habib Jerjir, a leader of the Regional Workers’ Union of Tunis, told the AP, “I’m against political Islam. We must block their path.” Whether this sentiment will translate into the creation of a mass working-class political party is to be seen. It would provide the only alternative to neoliberalism and social suffocation in the region.
IV. Ben Ali and Mubarak Go to the Seaside
On January 14, 2011, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali fled with his family to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was welcomed by King Abdullah, and told he could stay as long as he kept out of politics. Uganda’s Idi Amin lived on the top two floors of the Novotel Hotel in Jeddah and then in a luxurious villa, but these are no longer available. Ben Ali was provided with a vast palace, surrounded by high walls and tall palm trees, accessed by seven gates guarded by armed guards. It is a sumptuous prison.
On February 11, after thirty years at the helm of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and his family departed for the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. Sixteen days of resolute protest by a cross-section of the Egyptian public put enormous pressure on the Egyptian military. It is the institution that held the keys to Mubarak’s future. Most autocratic societies hollow out political institutions that might balance power in the State. That is why the legislature is weak, and that is why there are no legal political parties apart from Mubarak’s façade of a party (when its headquarters were burnt down, the party effectively ceased). Absent of other political challenges, the tussle came down to a test of wills between the protestors and the military.
The rank and file and the divisional commanders had the closest ties to the protestors, and they signaled their willingness to see Mubarak leave. The top generals, who served alongside Mubarak in the armed forces and then in the government, were less happy to send him off. It was this internal struggle in the army that delayed matters. Fear that the Tunisian contagion would spread even more rapidly if Egypt fell to it made the Royal Families of the Gulf burst into shivers. They pledged to back Mubarak to the hilt. The Saudi offer in particular gave Mubarak the confidence for his bizarre television address on February 10, where even his translator seemed hesitant, embarrassed to have to render the clichés into English.
Eventually, the Saudi money and the loyalty of the Generals were not sufficient. The tide from below prevailed. Mubarak and his family boarded a helicopter and went off.
History is filled with bizarre analogies. February 11, Mubarak’s day of departure, is also the day when the Shah of Iran’s regime fell in 1979. The emergence of an Ayatollah Khomeini in Egypt had given pause to some outside the country; would the Muslim Brotherhood take over, they suggested? Iran has a well-organized clergy who had taken a defiant position against the Shah. These clergy also had a charismatic leader, exiled in Paris, whose return to Tehran was greeted by millions of people. No such clergy exists in Egypt, and nor is there a person such as Khomeini. Iran is a bad analogy for Egypt.
Better yet is South Africa. On February 11, Nelson Mandela was finally released after twenty-seven years in jail. I remember watching television in
