Under the Umbrella

The images of protesters claiming the public streets and fending off tear gas in the so-called “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong invites comparison to the Arab Spring and the crowds of young Egyptians that filled Tahrir Square in the winter of 2011.  The crowds are expected to balloon over the next hours as workers have the day off for the Chinese National Day and protesters are bracing for an impending government crackdown in response.  The sight of these hoards of young people with their home-made gas masks, and charging stations, and trash collection is so familiar, as are the riot police poised to crush another infant revolt, that we might take a moment to look back today and review how Egypt’s fledgling democracy has fared since that night on February 11, 2011, when the news blazed through the square that the president of 30 years had fled the city.

When I first moved to Egypt on September 4, 2009, all anybody wanted to talk to me about when they found out I was American was Obama.  Usually, they would just shout the name at me and give a thumbs up or maybe follow up with “good” in English or Arabic.  If there was one thing I knew for sure about Cairenes in my first weeks there is that they were bigtime Obama fans.  I had arrived on the heels of the president’s big “A New Beginning” speech to the Muslim World four months earlier, on June 4, 2014.  It still resonated with average Egyptians that the president of the United States had come to them, to their city, to try to mend some of the damage done to American-Muslim relations during the Bush presidency.  

One of the topics of President Obama’s speech that summer was democracy.  He said:

America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

As if predicting the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise again of military rule in Egypt, President Obama went on to say:

There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.

This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

All of the iterations of government since the 2011 revolution have been hostile to human rights activism, to freedom of speech, and to criticism.  Since that brief moment of exaltation in the square on the night of 2/11/11, Egypt has been trending away from democracy.  The Muslim Brotherhood, to be sure, failed to live up to the vision of an Arab democracy President Obama sketched out in his speech.  They were a New Beginning, but in many ways, they were the same old, same old government Egyptian human rights defenders and religious minorities have always known.  The MB government was noninclusive, dictatorial, discriminatory, undemocratic.  But they were elected to power.  One could argue, and I have, that the June 30^th “Tamarod” protests that led to President Morsi’s removal from power were not necessarily a coup. 

When 14 million people take to the streets to demand a change in government, you have a popular uprising, not a coup.  When secular academics, minority religious authorities, and military generals agree to safeguard power on behalf of the people until elections can be held, it is not a coup (yet).  When the military generals then trample on every other voice and seize control and the academics and religious minorities sound the warning bells, at that point, okay, probably a coup.  When the reigning military general who swore he had no interest in the presidency resigns his military role so he can “run” for president and elections are held in such a way that no other political parties have the time or funding to build a competing structure and the general becomes the president…ahem…coup.  That said, the ability to dupe a huge percentage of a population exhausted by change and a crashing economy into voting for a candidate that promises security for the racial/religious majority is not necessarily the antithesis of free elections.  It was Mitt Romney’s strategy and will likely be the Republican strategy in 2016 as well. 

If the al Sisi government had gone on to build a stern, overbearing, paternalistic, but relatively benign stumbling democracy (that later handed off power to the next elected president) perhaps we could have looked back on the military seizure of power in July 2013 as a second revolution. Instead, the current regime seems to have taken the examples of those that came before as an instruction manual for suppression and anti-democratic rule.

Since the opposition of the present regime includes not only the deposed Muslim Brotherhood, but also human rights activists and anyone attempting to shed a light on the current rulers’ abuses of power, the al-Sisi government has had to act quickly to crush dissent on all fronts.  In the fashion of the Mubarak justice system, lengthy prison sentences are regularly handed out to political opponents for relatively minor crimes.  For example, five MB members were recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for allegedly breaking the curfew last fall.  Egyptian courts have also been tossing death sentences out to the crowds like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, sentencing 545 defendants to death in April for the killing of a single police officer, and sentencing 643 defendants, including MB Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, to death in May for the killing of another police officer.

In addition to MB members, and those the government alleges are allied with the MB (more on that in a minute), hundreds of human rights defenders and journalists have also been jailed, beaten, and disappeared.  The leaders of the April 6^th Youth Movement, well-known as the social media organizers of the 2011 revolution are on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment and the detention of other activists.  Three Al Jazeera journalists, Mohamed Fahmy, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed have been in jail 277 days according to the site the news outlet dedicates to their detention.  The three men were sentenced to seven years for allegedly “spreading false news” and “aiding or joining the banned Muslim Brotherhood.”  Baher Mohamed was sentenced to an additional three years for having a used bullet casing on him when he was arrested. 

Aside from “real” journalists who are actually working in the field to bring interviews and photographic evidence of human rights violations to light, the government is even persecuting fake journalists now.  Multiple complaints have been filed against Bassam Youssef, “the Egyptian Jon Stewart,” a cardiac surgeon turned Internet celebrity turned TV satirist who has appeared on The Daily Show a number of times, for allegedly saying insulting things about the president to a third party in a Cairo Airport lounge.  Youssef’s satirical show, Al Bernameg, had been banned during the presidential election and he decided not to continue it for safety reasons.

The al Sisi government is even taking a few plays out of the American playbook, as revealed by Edward Snowden.  They seem to have looked to the massive NSA internet warrantless spying apparatus and thought “hey, we can do that!”  Internet surveillance and censorship is nothing new in Egypt.  I complained ad nauseam about the Great Internet Blackout of the 2011 revolution and it was pretty well known at the time that expat bloggers would be questioned at the airport and maybe taken out of their homes for interviews at police stations.  One participated in expat list serves and Facebook pages with the knowledge that there were likely secret police among your number reporting back to the State on what you said online, just like those guys in the grandpa sweaters hanging out in your street were reporting on your comings and goings from your building.  But this plan to take tenders to build a spy system on this scale would be new, and if Egypt’s record on content censorship so far is terrifying, I can’t imagine how they would wield such comprehensive power to monitor and intervene in online activity.  With the help of what is ironically reported to be the affiliate of an American tech company, Egypt is essentially turning itself into China.

Which brings us back to Hong Kong and the Umbrella Revolution.  We are poised on the precipice of another popular uprising (fueled by youth and social media) in another area of the world where revolutions are few and far between and government crackdowns are quick and ruthless and thorough.  Whereas in 2009, US foreign policy was aimed at reaching out to repair our image in the Middle East, we have just come off the President’s Asia Tour this spring, his fifth trip there during his time in office, aimed at cementing our relationships in the region.  Just as in 2009, shortly after shaking hands, making speeches, and making promises, these relationships stand to be tested.

We need to take a look at our own responsibility for the petering out of the promise of Tahrir and ask ourselves if we have done enough to urge Egypt's leaders along the path toward democracy.  Now one might stop here to demand why the birth of democracy anywhere, much less in Egypt or Hong Kong, is our responsibility at all.  I would say if we are going to take responsibility for combating global terrorism, to the extent that we are willing to engage in some form of warlike activities simultaneously in at least Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen (alphabetically), we should show the same commitment to putting our muscle (and our money and our manpower) behind our peaceful principles as well. 

And yet, we don’t, at least, we haven’t, when it comes to Egypt.  Our core principles have taken a back seat to…well, I’d say “pragmatism” if Egypt were actually practically effective in preventing violence between Israel and Hamas, but since the violence occurs regardless, I will say “politics.”  When the military seized power in July 2013, and secular leaders like Mohamed ElBaradei and Coptic leaders began to withdraw their support for those who had taken charge of the government, it became clear that what began as arguably a popular uprising had become a coup. Amid high rhetoric, the United States ostensibly, very publicly, put a hold on sending aid to Egypt (which means funding to Egypt's military) until after democratic elections could be held.  However, this hold was not the pro-democratic statement it appeared to be.  Since the July 2013 coup occurred after the aid funds for that year had been dispensed in May and the US unlocked the 2014 funds two weeks after General al Sisi won the presidential elections held the following May, Egypt's military never actually suffered any loss of American funds as a sanction for overthrowing the elected government. 

Sure, there are practical reasons for this.  Egypt was integral in the peace talks between Israel and Gaza during the conflict this summer and it is for this role, as a stabilizer in the region, that the US government prefers to overlook Egypt's human rights record and maintain the status quo.  There are plenty of practical reasons for the US to overlook what China will do next, not the least of which is that we have nowhere near the influence over China that we have over Egypt, a country whose military (and by extension government) we pay for.  But as we owed it, and yet still owe it to Egypt’s human rights defenders to bring what influence we do have to bear on their behalf, so do we owe it to those young protesters being pepper sprayed in the streets of Hong Kong to fight for their rights to step out from under their umbrellas and stand safely in the sun (and vote for the candidates they choose!)

Certainly, the US lacks moral authority as a model of transparent and free democracy these days.  Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on that particular Great and Powerful Oz.  We cannot seriously clutch our chests in horror that Egypt wants to build a mass internet surveillance system or hands out extreme sentences to its young internet activists while Mr. Snowden remains under threat potential sentences of up to thirty years in prison.  We cannot reasonably gasp and moan about a lack of accountability for the mistreatment of human rights defenders in Egypt when prosecutors in Ferguson are leaving the grand jury to its own devices rather than doing their job and playing a role in recommending appropriate charges, and when police in Ferguson are covering their name badges as they engage with protesters. 


But neither can our leaders parade around Cairo, as President Obama did in 2009 and Hillary Clinton did in 2011, paying lip service to democratic ideals, and yet continue to fund a government that jails young human rights leaders and journalists, monitors social media organizing (and jails Facebook page administrators), brings lawsuits against comedians for off-hand comments made in airport lounges, and generally casts itself in the image of the very autocracy the revolution strove to overthrow.  If we are going to condescend to Egypt as our little brother in democracy, we cannot keep giving him cookies even as he smashes every dish in the kitchen.  Our little brother needs a spanking.  Surely, we could use a bit of a time-out ourselves.