12/29/13 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, December 29th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Our guest today is Adam Morrow, reporter for Interpress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
And he lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us.
And so here we are.
It's almost three years since the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia and then in Egypt.
And the overthrow of the military dictatorship there.
And yet here we are about six months out from the cancellation of that revolution.
Or the beginnings of the restoration of democracy, depending on whether you want to go along with what the U.S. Secretary of State claims or not.
And it looks like the people who, the group, the Muslim Brotherhood that won out in the revolution, and then lost out last summer, they now have gone from being declared outlawed to being declared a terrorist group.
And the mass roundups have begun.
Can you give us the latest details?
Sure, sure.
Well, the last couple of days, there's definitely been a transformation in terms of the demonstrations, in terms of the protest, the pro-Morsi protest activity that's been going on.
Like you said, it's been almost six months now since the July 3rd military coup, which saw the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, being ousted by the military.
And just over the course of the last couple of days, as we've said in the past, we've been watching these daily demonstrations, daily protests in Cairo and all of the provinces.
But just over the course of the last day, from yesterday in particular, they seem to have stepped up their activity a little bit, and we're seeing a much harder, almost intifada-like activity now, where we're seeing several police vehicles are generally burnt every day.
We're seeing regular casualties, at least one or two.
Unfortunately, one or two or three, or I think yesterday was four or five or six fatalities.
These are protesters that are being killed by either birdshot being fired in shotguns or by live fire, by, you know, by hard ammunition.
And a lot of the activity seems to have sort of come to a head on university campuses, especially the Al-Azhar University campus in Cairo, which is also famous for being, it's a big religious establishment, a big major seat of learning for Sunnis in the Sunni Muslim world.
And that seems to have become an epicenter of protest activity, but as well as several other campuses and universities around the country, including in Upper Egypt, in Alexandria, several in Cairo.
But Al-Azhar seems to be the focal point of it right now, and they're actually running battles going on as we speak.
I think one protester was killed early this morning.
And it just seems like the harder the authorities come down on the protest activity, the greater, you know, as usual, as we've seen so many times in the past, it just sort of elicits the opposite, you know, the exact opposite of what they want.
And instead of cowing people and keeping people off the streets and frightening them into their homes, you know, with threats of five-year jail sentences or even life in prison or even execution now for belonging to a so-called terrorist organization, it's had actually just the opposite effect.
And you're seeing protests getting larger.
You're seeing the protest base expanding as well.
The pro-army media here is trying desperately to portray all of the protest activity as purely Muslim Brotherhood, that these are just Muslim Brotherhood members, that all of these, you know, that these demonstrations are entirely peopled by hardcore Muslim Brotherhood members, and everybody else has sort of abandoned them.
And that's not the case.
You actually see broad grassroots, you know, opposition to the military coup.
So you're seeing, you know, thousands of people in some cases, tens of thousands of people.
I heard even CNN reported apparently that something like 22 different major marches were recorded in Cairo yesterday, protest marches were recorded in yesterday.
And that, you know, you've also had, you know, there have been several recent catalysts as well for this.
You've had the Muslim Brotherhood being listed as a terrorist organization, which is, you know, even critics of the Brotherhood here, even their harshest, some of their harshest critics here are saying that this was just a, that was a ridiculous move because they've never, you know, you can't sort of claim that without an investigation or some kind of judicial, you know, inquiry.
Or, you know, they just said it off the cuff after in the wake of, if you remember, I think it was Thursday or Wednesday, there was a bombing in the Nile Delta.
There was a major bombing in the Nile Delta, a car bombing in which at least 11 police officers were killed and a handful of other people were killed as well.
And another group claimed responsibility for that.
Another, you know, this shadowy Sinai-based militant group called Ansar Bayt al-Muqtas claimed responsibility for that.
But that didn't stop the government from listing, you know, from suddenly declaring, abruptly declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
And that actually brought people out on the street even more.
Well, there's plenty of places to follow up there.
First of all, it sounds like, I guess maybe just with the advent of satellite TV and that kind of thing, access to outside sources, the military's friends in the media are not able to get away with, as they may have been able to get away with in the past.
That's a really good point.
Some of these things.
The anti-Brotherhood rhetoric in the media at this point, and again, I have to stress that it's the state media as well as the privately owned media, which is unanimously owned by good friends of the Mubarak regime.
The anti-Brotherhood rhetoric that we're hearing has gotten so out of control, has gotten so, has lost so, you know, basis in fact so extraordinarily.
But I think at this point, I mean, vast swaths of the public who might have bought into it earlier are now really starting to see, are starting to see through it now.
And it's having less and less effect.
And, you know, these new military-backed rulers really, they never imagined the degree of opposition they were going to get to this move, to this, to ousting Morsi.
They never, they thought they were going to, you know, they thought there were going to be protests.
You know, it was predicted, oh, we'll see, you know, scattered protests for about a month and then everything's just going to go back to normal.
And that has been completely put to the lie at this point.
And I think they're really, really stuck now.
They really don't know what to do because they're getting plenty, lots of opposition from abroad as well.
Other countries are very reticent about recognizing the new government because it was the result of an unconstitutional, you know, military ouster.
So they've got problems abroad.
They're constantly sending out these teams, dispatching people to explain what's happening in Egypt.
That's the mantra they keep repeating.
Oh, well, the foreigners don't understand the situation in Egypt, so we have to explain it to them.
And that's just falling on deaf ears because, you know, what they're doing right now coming, the crackdowns.
Even mainstream human rights organizations, which traditionally, I've noticed, don't like to say good things about Islamists, I've noticed, are coming out very strongly against what's happening, including Human Rights Watch and other ones are coming out and saying, you know, saying, for example, the charges that are being leveled against Morsi, who remains in detention at an undisclosed location right now, until now, six months later.
The charges that are being brought against him, that Human Rights Watch described him as insane.
So they're just not, things aren't going well for them.
And I think they probably at this point, they're at the point where now they wish they hadn't done it.
But they can't, they sort of can't get out of it at this point.
And they've become also, another thing is they've gotten all of their moderate elements have left, like Baradai was the big one, Mohammed Baradai was the big, you know, was the big liberal pillar of their sort of coalition.
The former director of the IAEA.
The former director of the IAEA, widely considered a, you know, a liberal voice for moderation and that sort of thing.
And he bailed very early on after the big massacre in August.
And they're just, and they, and was as a result of that, because he left, was condemned by the pro-army media.
And they, there were even people who raised cases against him for, that he committed treason, that he committed, that this was treason to leaving the government like this at such a sensitive time.
So I think people in the government, you know, they wish they hadn't sort of embarked on this venture, but they know that they can't leave at this point because they'll suffer the same fate Baradai will.
And they'll, they'll be accused by their own.
You know, you've got the situation, you know, where you've got, when you've got situations like this, where they, it starts to, the movement starts to devour its own, you know, you've got, you've sort of got that sort of thing going on.
And it just, it just may end up making it, making the moral heart more and more extreme, falling deeper and deeper and deeper into their own extremism.
And now they're just, they're stuck, you know, because they've rejected, they've rejected a political solution, especially, you know, especially by naming the brotherhood, a terrorist organization.
The April 6th movement actually came out and said this.
They said, by doing this, you're, you're effectively ending any possibility of, you know, a political solution, a negotiated solution to what's going on right now.
You know, and they, they basically, that was the final nail in the coffin of any kind of, you know, political resolution to this.
The April 6th movement being the young and liberal, the ones that the Americans preferred.
Yeah, well, they were the ones who spearheaded the January 25th, the January 25th revolution in 2011.
And what's interesting now is even though those guys, April 6th in particular, even those guys supported the June 30th demonstrations against Morsi, they have now come out and said, look, this was a military coup.
And in fact, three big liberal, liberal activists, I'm sure you know this, this was pretty widely covered abroad, three big liberal activists, including the main guy in April 6th have been now, have all been sentenced to jail.
They're all in prison for three years now for participating in unlicensed protests.
So it's come full circle.
The January 25th thing has come full circle.
When after January 25th, you had Egyptians celebrating their newfound freedom and their ability to, you know, to go on the streets and express themselves whenever they wanted to and, you know, voice dissent in any way they wanted to.
You've gone from that to basically this hardcore fascist dictatorship where, you know, public gatherings have become outlawed and dah, dah, dah.
But, but fortunately the people aren't accepting it.
Vast swathes of the public aren't, aren't going to let it pass.
They're not sitting down.
They're not going to stand for it.
And they continue to hit the streets.
It's, it is, like I said, it is mostly Islamist and is definitely driven by the Islamist current, but, but the popular support against the, the military coup is definitely growing with the, with the, with the blunders that the these, these, these blunders, that the, that the coup authorities keep committing every day.
Like another big thing, just, just I'll let you publish if you have a question, but just before that, one of the things they did just two or three days ago was they, they basically froze the funds of something like more than a thousand Islamist, you know, Islamist leaning charity organizations, but really they're really, these are apolitical organizations, but they do provide charity for something like the numbers I'm hearing is something like 3 million Egyptian families depend on these, on these charitable organizations, these Islamist charitable organizations.
So they close, when they close them down, basically they cut off millions and millions of people off from, you know, badly needed humanitarian supply.
You know, like these, these people, Ramsey Baroud wrote a thing like that just the other day.
In fact, I think it's on the blog at antiwar.com about how the Muslim brotherhood itself is a gigantic charitable organization and, and sort of fulfills like Hezbollah in a sense, sort of fulfills the role of the social services state at the very lowest level providing education, food, clothing to those in the most dire need.
And you call them all a terrorist organization.
You're leaving a lot of innocent people in the lurch and with no, no, exactly at all, literally millions of people.
And it seems, I mean, I just can't think of a stupider move.
It sort of betrays the desperation.
It betrays the desperation of the coup authorities, that they would take such a step.
I mean, people are saying they, they took the state, they're freezing the funds because they want to seize the funds because they're that broke that they need to get their hands on money.
Which if, if that's true, I mean, that's just, I mean, that's just unbelievable if it's really reached that extent that they're, that they're so desperate.
Well, they're trying to, you know, they're trying to, they're trying to get support, you know, just weeks before this highly contested, extremely controversial, um, contra, um, constitutional referendum that's coming up in just two, two or three weeks.
Uh, and to alienate, literally alienate millions of, of, of, of registered voters by cutting off, you know, supplies of the most needy ports, segments of society, uh, just seems, um, they, they actually realized they realized what they did.
And actually one of the major, uh, one of the, one of these major charities, uh, they actually reversed the decision and said, no, no, no, we're not going to freeze their funds because they, they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds because they're not going to freeze their funds." months.
And again, the designation, the terrorism designation on the Muslim Brotherhood that we just saw in the last couple of days is definitely the final step towards that.
You know, this is like, this has become existential now.
It's like there's only room, you know, for one of us, you know, in this country.
And that's scary.
Well, and as you're saying, too, it's driving more and more people who were never members to becoming supporters and or members and then maybe worse, right?
I mean, I was thinking actually that, you know, people were afraid.
People were talking after Morsi's ouster.
People were saying this is the end of the Muslim Brotherhood.
What we're witnessing now is the end of political Islam in Egypt and possibly the region because of things that were going on elsewhere in Tunisia and stuff like that.
But I've actually thought that I've actually been thinking recently the way things are going now in the big in the big picture and sort of the grand scheme of things as crazy and messed up as everything is right now in the grand scheme of things.
I think I think they're going to end up coming out of this whole thing stronger than ever.
I think the Brotherhood is going to end up coming out of this thing stronger than ever, because they end up, they look like such the victims, you know, they've they've, you know, they've been such the victims in all of this.
They've sustained far heavier casualties than any other, you know, political, you know, political camp.
You know, the revolutionaries and the so-called liberals and that sort of thing never faced down barrages of live fire, like, you know, heavy, you know, heavy ammunition, which is what's going on now.
The people of Egypt proved three years ago that if they all agree and put their mind to it, that they can overthrow a military dictatorship, that if it's, you know, enough different factions combined anyway, and the junior officers will not go to war against them.
Exactly.
They have that precedent that they got in on January 25th, 2011, and they know that it can be done.
So it's sort of like I sort of see it as like on January 25th, the genie got out of the bottle, you know, that the state has been trying to suppress for so many decades that, you know, the cork popped, the genie got out of the bottle.
And now what you have now is the last six months is you now have them trying desperately to get it back inside the bottle.
And they can't.
All right.
Just they can't.
Hey, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Adam Morrow.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service at IPSnews.net, living in Cairo.
And we're talking about the Arab Spring turned winter and what it all means here.
And now, so let me ask you this, because the so-called liberals, and who knows exactly what all that means, but the April 6th movement and their friends, for them to decide last summer that they would prefer to join up with the military dictatorship against the Muslim Brotherhood, they must have had some real grievances against the Muslim Brotherhood, other than just, well, we wish we had won the elections instead of you.
Yeah, sure, sure.
But I mean, that's like saying, I mean, the Republicans have serious grievances with Obama as well, but they don't, they don't.
Well, see, I wouldn't say that.
I would say they have trivial grievances with him.
And we live in a one party state here where it's mostly a dime's worth of difference kind of thing.
But you don't see, for example, Democrats or Republicans, except on the very most fringe world net daily margins, saying that we want the military to oust this guy for us, nevermind the next election.
You just don't see that.
So what is it about the Muslim Brotherhood?
I mean, obviously, I wouldn't want them to be my elected government or unelected government, either.
There's a lot of people in Egypt who put a lot on the line to really reverse their own revolution.
Go ahead, invite the military back in to just save us from these guys.
So they must be pretty bad in some ways, right, Adam?
What are we missing here?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think a part of it, a large part of it can be chalked up to political inexperience.
You know, they had just come out of the January 25th experience and they sort of figured, you know, there's an element of impatience as well.
You know, why let this guy complete another three years?
You know, when we can just do what we did on January 25th and we can hit a reset button and we can make it all go and we can have fresh elections and everything like that.
And that's just political inexperience.
And that's not, you know, that's breaking the rules of the game.
And once you break the rules of the game, you're back in the jungle.
And that's the mistake they made.
They should have stayed on the Democratic path.
And if they had beef with such incredible, you know, such, such, if they had these grievances, and it's not like Morsi committed any crimes.
It's not like any of the Brotherhood people committed any crimes.
All of the grievances were of a political nature.
So what they should have done is instead of joining forces with the, you know, the same forces that had controlled the country for the last 30 plus years, instead of throwing in their lot with them and taking their chances of seeing exactly what happened happen.
Instead of taking that chance, why didn't they organize?
Why didn't they get their acts together?
Why didn't they, you know, why weren't they able to form respectable, you know, political parties with, you know, with intelligent political platforms and, you know, and go out to the public and campaign and campaign and try to build support.
And when Morsi was ousted, they could have just waited another six or eight months and they had, they would have had fresh parliamentary elections.
And if everybody was so angry with Morsi, then why not punish them at the ballot box?
I mean, isn't that what, isn't that what sort of mature nations do, you know, democratic nations do?
That's how they get back at their political opponents if they aren't happy.
That's how the people express their dissent.
They punish them at the ballot boxes.
And they had that opportunity.
They could have done that, but instead they were impatient.
Instead they weren't, some of them were impatient.
And I think some of them actually, some of these so-called liberal forces were actually, are actually secretly aligned with the establishment, with the pre-January 25th establishment.
I think there was a lot of that going on.
I think there were a lot of people who had long, who had traditionally called themselves liberals and posited themselves as opponents of the regime and critics of the regime.
But at the end of the day, when push came to shove, they ended up showing their hands and showing that they were actually, they're not liberals.
And they were actually, at the end of the day, they're actually a last line of defense for the pre-January.
In the short term, it's working out for them though, right?
Because they're having this referendum in, and what's the referendum about exactly?
This isn't parliament.
The referendum, okay, the referendum is on an amended version of Morsi's constitution.
Morsi's constitution passed with a 64% margin.
It was accepted in elections that were widely regarded to have been fair late last year.
It passed with 64%.
What they did is they took it, I think they made 20 or so amendments to it, and now they're going to put it before another public referendum in mid-January.
And this referendum is widely seen as a test of their, you know, it's widely seen as a referendum on them.
It's widely seen as a referendum on the coup or the revolution, however you want to see it.
Just as the last year's referendum, I'd like to add, was widely seen as a referendum on Morsi's performance.
And it's no mean feat that despite the incredible, incredible media campaign against the constitution last year, they still managed to get a 64% margin, which I think is relevant.
I think that shows that Morsi still, by late last year, he still had enough popularity to command a significant win at the ballot box, which is important.
So anyway, you've got this new amended version of the constitution is coming up for a vote in two weeks.
And the pro-Morsi camp is saying boycott.
Huge, huge segments of the population are saying boycott.
I don't think they'll be able to, a lot of people are expecting it to be rigged.
A lot of people are saying that they're going to rig it.
They're desperate to get a large turnout, and they're desperate to get a yes vote.
And what's interesting is nobody's ever said, they've never said, the government here has never said what would happen if it gets voted down, you know, which makes people suspicious.
It's just like, they're just assuming that it's going to be, it's going to be approved that the constitution, the amended version of the constitution is going to be approved.
And that has raised eyebrows because people are like, well, I mean.
Well, I mean, if the military's plan is to just put whatever pliable Democrat, Lenin types, you know, as their front men, because Mubarak, he was kind of ugly, right?
So maybe you want to, maybe you want to do something like that, dictatorship.
If they just exclude the right from now on, I mean, the populist right out there, that's not going to work.
That's going to just end up, I mean, it seems like the current violence is going to just keep spreading.
And then of course, for, for every violent attack is a further crackdown and back and forth.
It goes as it's supposed to.
Yeah.
I mean, right.
Is that what people think in Cairo that this could lead to a civil war?
Um, more and more people have been saying that, uh, like, like I said earlier, this out, this Algeria scenario, more and more people are sort of talking about that now.
Um, at the same time, people have traditionally, when I've spoken to a lot of Egyptians in the past about this, there's a general consensus that Egyptian culture and Egyptian society isn't just simply isn't as prone to violence as the sort of more rugged Algerian people.
I don't, you know, I don't know if I, I'm not an Algeria expert.
I've never been to Algeria and I don't want to make vast, you know, broad generalizations like that, that I, that I can't confirm myself, but that is sort of the sense that I've gotten in Egypt.
And what is remarkable is that with everything that's happened over the course of the last six months, um, with all of the, with the, with the death of, of, if you remember the massacre in August, I mean, that was in mid-August, August 14th, you had two big pro-Morsi, uh, sit-ins that were violently dispersed by the Egyptian security forces, uh, and led to the death toll is widely disputed, but you have reputable human rights organizations that are, that are saying at least well deep into the hundreds, 800, 900, something like that.
It was like Tiananmen square, only our military, our pet military doing it.
And so it wasn't a big scandal in the U S the way that was.
Well, I think, I believe it was human white rights watch, but famously described it as the biggest state led massacre or the biggest state led killing in Egypt's modern history.
Uh, and, uh, and the fact that that, this kind of, uh, you know, this kind of stuff didn't elicit a violent response from the Islamist side is, is remarkable.
Um, although that being said, I mean, we have to remember that the peaceful protests that we've seen on a daily basis for the last month, six months have also been accompanied by very, you know, violent attacks on Egyptian, hard targets, including military targets and police targets, um, including the most recent one, um, that was just maybe three or four days ago in the, in Mansoura in the Nile Delta.
I said earlier where a car bomb went off, uh, and killed 16 people, including 11 police, at least 11 police officers.
Right now, Adam, I'm sorry, cause we're real short on time here.
Uh, but it seems like we got to mention how I'm in Al Zawahir.
He's gotta be laughing his head off in whatever basement or attic he's hiding in, in Pakistan right now, uh, looking at the results of all this over the last three years.
Uh, well, yeah, in terms of, if you mean a vindication for the hard, you know, for the hard line view that, you know, democracy and all of that stuff is all, it's all, you know, it's all for a, you know, is a, uh, is a loaded game or whatever.
Uh, then yeah, in terms of vindication for, for, you know, against, uh, against, uh, democracy, then I, I, I suppose that is the case, but that's not everything that they wanted.
It's a power for themselves.
Possibly.
Possibly.
That is true.
But I, it, it, it has to be stressed though, that the pro-Morrissey camp until now is insisting on peaceful means of protest.
And there they continue to say, we will meet our objectives here.
We can meet our objectives.
We can overturn, we can reverse the coup using entirely peaceful methods of protest.
So it's not over yet.
You know, we'll see which way it goes.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time.
It's always great to talk to you, Adam.
Hey, thanks Scott.
Yeah.
I hope to talk to you again soon.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That is Adam Morrow from interpress service, IPS news.net reporting from Cairo, Egypt.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been anti-war radio.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm here every Sunday morning from eight 30 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive more than 3000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.