Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and all hell's breaking loose in Cairo right now, maybe.
Adam Morrow's on the phone, from Cairo, from Interpress Service, IPSNews.net.
Welcome back, Adam, how are you?
Good, good, good to be back, Scott.
Alright, what's going on in Tahrir Square?
Okay, right now things have calmed down a little bit, it looks like, after the last two and a half days of sort of running street battles in downtown Cairo, in and around Tahrir Square.
It began on, if you shall I sort of give you just a sort of brief history of what happened since Friday?
Sure, please.
Well, Friday we had calls by most of the post-revolutionary political forces in each for another million-man demonstration to reiterate long-standing revolutionary demands.
And that happened.
And this one was endorsed by the big Islamist parties and movements.
So you had a massive, massive turnout.
Unlike the previous, the last couple of months, the several demonstrations that have been held in the last couple of months, which weren't endorsed by the Islamists, and which therefore didn't garner a lot of big turnout, the one on Friday was really, really massive, including large contingents from the Muslim Brotherhood and others.
People say that it broke the million-man mark, which hadn't been done in several months.
We hadn't seen anything of that size in several months.
But the other Friday night, people pretty much packed up and left the square on Friday night's protest.
People sort of, when the day was over, people sort of packed up and went home.
With the exception of a couple hundred of stragglers sort of stayed in the square to continue a sit-in.
None of them were really affiliated with any big parties, but you just had sort of these individuals and independent activists stayed.
There was a group of people who had been injured in the January Revolution, in the January uprising, who stayed.
And they stayed overnight until Saturday morning.
Now, at some point early Saturday morning, the military just moved in and cleared the square with its usual heavy-handed tactics, similar to what we've seen on a couple of occasions before, where they just came in and just brook no dissent and just cleared the square out and used force in several cases in order to do it.
And now when word of that got out to the rest of the activist community and the other political forces, all of a sudden hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of people poured down onto the streets, went out to the square basically to defend the people who were staging the sit-in.
And before you knew it, on Saturday, by Saturday noontime and then into the afternoon and late afternoon, you had running skirmishes going on.
You had things burning.
Things were burning in the streets.
You had the whole of downtown Cairo smelt of tear gas.
I think the rubber bullets were definitely used, possibly some live ammunition, but I'm not sure about that.
But by the end of Saturday night, you had three people killed.
That continued yesterday and then into today.
And as it currently stands, the latest reports I'm hearing are more than 30 people have been killed until now.
But it's never a dull moment in Cairo these days.
And I think that's the latest number I saw, too, was a couple of dozen or 30 people, something like that, have been killed already.
Which makes it sort of the bloodiest incident since the revolution, because I know the Christian demonstration that got attacked about a month and a half ago, I think the numbers there were 25, 26 were killed in that.
So now we're talking about the most violent episode since January.
Well, and now the emergency law is still on.
Are people just being rounded up at this point or what?
I couldn't tell you too much about arrests.
I haven't heard too much about arrests.
That's a very good question.
I mean, the military right now is sounding very contrite because the move was so incredibly unpopular.
I mean, they're taking so much flak for their heavy-handed response right now that I don't think they're doing much arresting.
But they've issued statements sort of saying that they were fired upon first and trying to clear themselves of responsibility for what happened.
But it's defied belief, you know, why they felt the need to suddenly come in and clean house so forcefully on Saturday when they could have been much more diplomatic about it.
They could have even left a couple of dozen people in Papua Square.
It wouldn't have been the end of the world.
Well, it sounds like they were trying to nip it in the bud, and all they did was create a big counter-reaction.
Exactly, exactly.
And one is tempted to sort of chalk it up to incompetence or just stupidity or whatever, but, you know, you've got to wonder at the same time, because we have elections, literally parliamentary elections.
The first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections in Egypt are going to kick off next week.
Right, a week from today, right?
So one has to wonder.
Well, it's on the 25th, or the 28th, I'm sorry, 28th of November.
So one has to wonder, is this heavy-handed response on purpose so that they can then turn around and say, you know, with all of this instability that we've got now, we're going to have to postpone elections.
You know, some people are sort of mooting that possibility.
Well, and they're very worried about the possibility, or maybe the likelihood, that the Muslim Brotherhood is the most organized force besides the military, and that they're going to win in some kind of landslide.
Am I right?
Yep, yep.
No, that's totally possible.
It's not the young, you know, Hillary Clinton model Twitterers that they're worried about.
It's the Brotherhood.
Exactly, exactly.
Although there have been some interesting divisions recently in the Islamist camp, where you had one single, monolithic electoral coalition to which all the Islamist parties and groups had joined.
And then about two weeks ago, you suddenly had some of the groups pulling out.
And so now you have a little bit of internecine fighting going on amongst the different Islamist groups.
So it's really uncertain just how big their electoral prospect.
I mean, they'll be vast, but it's not really sure exactly how vast.
If elections are even held at all.
I mean, now people are starting to worry that elections aren't going to be held.
You have some of the parties that are coming out saying, are freezing their electoral campaigning, are suspending temporarily their electoral campaigning until the violence subsides.
I mean, when we actually only have another five or six days to go before elections.
So, yeah, things are extremely choppy right now.
Well, now, do the young Democrats have their own party and their act together when it comes to that, or they're just all divided on the other side?
Well, liberals here have been traditionally, these liberal parties have been, have had a traditional problem with presenting a unified front, as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, which for decades has been famous for, even though it was banned and had to work largely underground, have been extremely good at maintaining a single monolithic front.
The liberals have not been as successful in that regard.
And, yeah, they are fractured.
Although they too see the, you know, fear and Islamist victory, which has in a sense sort of forced them all together into sort of closed ranks.
And there have been, I think there are one or two big electoral coalitions that consist entirely of more secular, liberal, leftist oriented groups.
All right.
Now, as far as the structure of the government has gone, elections aside, since the revolution, has the military been spinning off any of their power, or are they really just, you know, worriedly consolidating it?
Yeah, no, I haven't seen any devolution of power of any kind.
They've been entirely monolithic.
They don't appear particularly hasty or, you know, particularly keen on giving up power.
No, I can't say I've seen anything like that.
Well, and as we've talked about on the show in the past, virtually the entire economy is run by the military there.
It was set up that way during all those years of American-backed military dictatorship under Mubarak.
Yeah, the army definitely accounts for a large, a very large chunk of the economy.
And not much of it is really sort of known about.
In fact, it's been illegal to even write about army or military-related activities in the press here.
It's been considered, you know, a threat to national security or whatever.
So, yeah, just how much of the economy is controlled by the military, I certainly don't know.
And I don't think it's particularly well known.
Although the government, just two or three weeks ago, the government unveiled or proposed this raft of what they're calling supraconstitutional principles, which they're hoping to sort of endorse, to have the country endorse, maybe through a national referendum, that would basically supersede anything that a subsequent parliament could come up with.
We're going to have to go out and take this break, but we'll be right back on the other side with more from Adam Morrow at Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
He's on the phone live from Cairo, Egypt.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
We got Adam Morrow on the line from Cairo, reporting about the attempted revolution still in progress there.
Now, I was wondering, Adam, if you could tell us a bit about the current state of the career of Omar Suleiman.
Of course, the Obama administration or Clinton administration, whichever you prefer, announced on the front page of the New York Times back, what, six months ago or so, If we can't have our best friend in the whole wide world, a personal family friend of mine, President Clinton said, then we want, number two, Mubarak, then we want our second choice to be Omar Suleiman, the guy who oversaw the torture to death of so many CIA abductees in the last decade.
We know we can count on him.
So I wonder whether they're counting on him or whether he's been marginalized, and whether the revolutionaries in that country have had any luck, any real results in marginalizing their at least former torturers, even if they've been replaced with new ones.
Right, right.
Well, after taking center stage very briefly during the revolution, towards the tail end of the revolution, when he was suddenly made vice president, nothing has been heard about Omar Suleiman.
I mean, he virtually disappeared off the radar.
Until, it's funny you should mention it, until a couple of days ago, I saw him for the very first time, he sort of stuck his head over the parapet to make a comment on something, which escapes me right now, because there's just been so many things that have been going on the last couple of days.
I can't remember what it was exactly.
I think it was some kind of comment on these proposed super constitutional principles that I mentioned before the break.
But now, he's currently the vice president?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh.
Not at all.
Okay, that was just for a few days.
He wouldn't be accepted under any circumstances.
I mean, he's very much a burnt card in terms of public acceptance.
He would absolutely never fly.
I mean, he's been touted as a possible presidential contender, but the very notion is that he's just met with scorn by nine out of ten Egyptians that you talk to.
Any chance of him ever being elected to high office, I think, are extremely slim.
Even though Mubarak's now defunct National Democratic Party is fielding some of its former members, many hundreds of its former members have managed to or will be running in upcoming parliamentary polls.
And, in fact, a couple of parties have been formed largely by consisting mainly of former NDP officials.
And now the party itself has been banned, but they get to run under the auspices of new parties, basically.
That's right.
That's another one of the huge controversies that's been raging for the last two months or so about whether or not legislation will be passed officially barring them from running in the elections.
The military has sort of gone back and forth, and it issued a decree banning them and then sort of came out with another decree saying, well, they can only be banned if they've been proven by a court to have been corrupt or to have participated in illegal activities.
But the latest thing is I think there simply isn't enough time to hold trials or investigations of these guys before elections.
So I think several hundred of them have been allowed to register their candidacies for the upcoming elections.
And, in fact, in Upper Egypt, in Southern Egypt, there are very strong tribal and familial affiliations where there are these centers of local power that were deeply, deeply entrenched or were deeply affiliated with the former regime.
So people are saying that in some places, certainly not in Cairo and Alexandria, but in some of the more rural voting districts in Upper Egypt and in the Nile Delta, they might be able to secure a couple of seats.
But I think for the most part, in general, they don't stand much of a chance.
And now, is the U.S. continuing to bankroll the Egyptian military there?
I can't imagine they've stopped.
As far as I know, there's been no reduction to U.S. aid.
As far as I know, there's been no talk of reducing...
You know, whenever Egypt talks about doing something that the United States doesn't like, like whenever it talks about abrogating the Camp David Peace Treaty, for example, you'll hear voices in Washington saying, well, we should cut their aid.
You know, this is a sort of democracy that's always hanging over the head of the Egyptian government.
You know, if they get out of line, the U.S. threatens to cut aid.
But I haven't heard anything serious about that.
As far as I know, the military aid and the economic aid is still intact.
And, you know, I'm sorry I don't have it in front of me, but I think I had an article here from last week about continued aid to the Egyptian military.
Anyways, maybe I'll Google it while you're answering my next question, which is, what's going on at the Rafah border crossing?
Oh, wow.
The Rafah border crossing is another thing.
It's an issue that's particularly close to my heart, given the six- or seven-year-old siege on the Gaza Strip.
But unfortunately, after an initial spurt of interest in the immediate wake of the revolution, in the one or two months after the revolution, when you had all of this talk about opening the border, all of that has sort of evaporated, you know, just because Egypt, I think, is dealing with these internal problems that are these critical internal problems and the run-up to elections.
But the focus has really been taken off of most foreign policy issues, and especially the Rafah border crossing, unfortunately.
I know that the restrictions were eased a little bit after the revolution.
There's some individual passenger traffic going in and out of the border, but it has not opened to the full extent that we had hoped for immediately following the revolution, when we thought they were just going to completely open the border to trade, which is the most important thing.
The most important thing for the Gazans right now is to be able simply to buy.
They don't want handouts or contributions.
They want to buy all the stuff that they need to basically rebuild the Strip, which has remained in ruins since the 2009 past-led assault.
And none of that has happened, unfortunately.
One of the things is I think people, certainly maybe Hamas in the Gaza Strip and perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood here, are sort of hoping for elections to go down, so that they can get some sort of, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood here can get some kind of influence in Parliament, if not a majority of some kind, some kind of ability to forge policy, at which point they would then be able to formally open the gate.
But of course, now that the elections are sort of in doubt, this too might not materialize.
All right, real quick, I found my footnote.
It's from November the 7th by Bloomberg News.
Egypt aid shouldn't be curbed by U.S. Congress, officials says.
The only way to handle the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood is to keep bankrolling the military over there, apparently is the State Department's conclusion.
But now, okay, so I could see how in the midst of all these things going on, the State of Egypt's relationship with the, I guess, you know, inmate-run Hamas prison there in Gaza is, you know, on the back burner.
It seems like that's a pretty strong indication, a windsock sort of a thing, about what the state is of the revolution in general.
And I just wonder whether it has much, you know, relations with Gaza, whether that has much of an impact on the mood of the revolutionaries, who did, after all, depose Mubarak and many of whom seem determined to see through the democratic, you know, bottom-up type government change that they were pushing for back a few months ago.
And I just wonder, I guess, really about the optimism of the revolutionary movement in general, and then also, I guess, you know, to what degree does policy toward Gaza, for example, play into that?
Well, right now, policy toward Gaza is not an issue at all.
I mean, everybody's totally focused on domestic issues.
In recent demonstrations, you have had sizable contingents in Tahrir Square holding up banners about, you know, calling for, you know, the free Gaza and this sort of thing.
But right now, it really isn't a factor, just because things are so incredibly critical on the domestic front.
There has been some talk, if you remember, in the months after the revolution, when there was all this talk about Egypt brokering a Palestinian reconciliation agreement, if you remember that, amongst much fanfare.
You had some unprecedented visits by Hamas officials to Cairo, along with their counterparts from Fatah.
And this, you know, this led a lot of people to believe that some kind of, you know, rapprochement with Hamas was in the offing.
Given the events in Syria also, another interesting thing is, given events in Syria, the future of Hamas's political bureau, which is based in Damascus, is also very much up in the air.
And I have heard scattered reports or, you know, scattered talk about Hamas setting up its offices, if Syria completely crumbles to pieces, of Hamas possibly moving its political bureau to Cairo, which would be a very interesting development.
Yeah, indeed it would.
Although I wonder, would it be so hard for them to make a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Syria in the near future?
You know, I'm not a Syria expert.
I've always found Syria very difficult to get a handle on.
Yeah, you're telling me.
Yeah, and I'm finding the current uprising in Syria also to be no less difficult to understand.
All right, I'm sorry we have to leave it there.
We're all out of time today.
But I really appreciate your time on the show, as always, Adam.
Sure, Scott.
My pleasure, as always.
That's great.
Adam Morrow, everybody, IPSnews.net.
