06/18/12 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am pleased to have our first guest of the show, Adam Morrow.
Adam is a journalist for IPS News, and he works out of Cairo, Egypt.
I'm looking right now at your IPS article entitled Brotherhood vs.
Former Regime in Egypt Runoff, and I've been enjoying your journalism and following it for the past few weeks, but I've got to admit, even so, I'm a little confused as to what's going on in Egypt.
Now, the High Court dissolved Parliament, declaring the elections were irregular, and then they arbitrarily decided that two candidates were going to stand, and now they've had their election, but the military has done something in the meantime to cast a shadow of illegitimacy on the elections.
Can you please fill us in?
I'm just wondering, what's going on, Adam?
Yeah, sure, exactly.
You've got three or four sort of, like, incredibly serious things going on right now, and just how they sort of all interrelate with each other is, people are, even people here, even Egyptian political analysts are still struggling to try to figure out what the implications are for all of this stuff.
The biggest thing that's happened recently, just to sort of clarify, is presidential elections were just wrapped up.
You just had a presidential runoff that comes about two or three weeks after a first-round vote, which basically, the vote two or three weeks ago basically returned the two winners of that, were basically the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and a figure that was closely associated with Mubarak, who was actually Mubarak's last prime minister, and who served as Mubarak's last prime minister during the Tahrir Square uprising last year.
Now, the results of those, according to preliminary results of the runoff that we're just getting in now, the Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, appears to have won by a quite small margin.
It looks like something like 48% versus 52%.
So that's the first thing, is that you've got these election results coming in now that basically put the Muslim Brotherhood candidate as the next president of the country.
This is one thing.
Now, the second thing that's happened recently, sorry, are you with me?
Yes, I'm with you.
I'm listening and taking notes with rapt attention.
Please continue.
Okay, sure.
The second thing that just happened was that this was yesterday or the day before the ruling military council here, which had promised to basically hand over executive power to the incoming president, suddenly announced that parliament would be dissolved, basically because Egypt's high constitutional court, which, by the way, is run by Mubarak appointees, suddenly abruptly announced that the law that governed last year's parliamentary elections, and those were Egypt's first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, that those laws were unconstitutional, basically invalidating the current Islamist-led national assembly.
Now, the Brotherhood had managed to win almost half of the assembly, and then their Salafist allies had taken about another 25% of it.
So that was an Islamist-run parliament, and that's just been ruled unconstitutional.
So we're looking at probably fresh parliamentary elections.
Okay, Adam, I mean, so many other questions I have.
I guess one big concern people have is, you know, the military has promised to hand over power for real to whoever the legitimately elected president is.
Are people still believing that that's going to happen?
No, no, and people were sort of, you know, people were very skeptical about those promises from the very beginning, but now, with the latest development, it looks like they are digging in to sort of hold on to power.
What they did just, I think it was today or yesterday, I apologize because events are moving here so quickly that it's hard to keep track of everything, but they basically released a constitutional, what they're calling a constitutional addendum, which looks like it, from what I can tell, and again, analysts are sort of looking over this thing and trying to figure out exactly what, are still in the process of trying to figure out what it means, but it looks like it will vastly curtail the powers of the president and will give renewed powers or will bolster the powers of the military council.
Wow, it sounds to me like the revolutionaries might be finding themselves right back at square one.
Yeah, exactly.
Still, we don't exactly know, let's see, the parliament, which has been, or the lower house of the parliament, the people's assembly, is basically saying that they are going to hold their sessions in Tahrir Square from now on.
I just saw that right now.
They're basically threatening to continue parliamentary activity in Tahrir Square because they have been legally banned from entering the building.
In fact, two MPs were just, I think, were just prevented by military forces from entering the parliamentary building today.
We're also in the midst of a huge constitutional crisis, which is another aspect of this whole thing, where a 100 member constitutional assembly that had recently been selected by parliament has now also been declared null and void because parliament itself has been declared null and void.
So what the military council has just done today, apparently, it says it is going to nominate or select its own 100 members to decide who will write the Egypt's next constitution.
So politically speaking, things are in a state of incredible confusion and uncertainty about the future right now.
People are a little freaked out here.
Wow, I gotta say I'm recoiling here behind my microphone, shuddering at the possible implications of how ugly this thing could possibly get.
I mean, you're right there in the middle of it, Adam.
As you say, things are flying so fast and furious, it's hard to know what's really going on.
I'm all the way in Austin, Texas.
I'm so far away.
All I know is what the various media is reporting.
Can you guess as to what you think might happen?
Is it just too crazy to even hazard a guess like that?
Well, no, no.
I don't think it is.
I have a theory.
I'm kind of going out on a limb here a little bit.
It might sound a little bit alarmist, but my fears are sort of judging on the way things have happened in other countries that voted in Islamists.
I sort of fear that we might see, and I'm sure Scott would probably agree with me on this, because I know we're sort of like-minded when it comes to this sort of thing.
I fear that you might have bombs starting to go off that will be attributed to Islamists.
They won't actually be by Islamists, but I fear that there'll be possibly these sort of false flag operations where you're going to have people say like, oh, well, the Islamists, they tried to get elected and they won, and then that victory was denied to them, so now they're going back several decades and starting to resort to violence again, when in fact this might be their political rivals that are doing this to discredit them.
I sort of think a similar thing happened in Algeria.
I was about to ask you, what about Algeria in the 1990s, because that's the other famous example, right?
Exactly, exactly, and my fear is of a sort of Algeria-like scenario here, although that being said, the Egyptians are a very, very peaceful people, and you don't really have a culture of violence here, so I'm hoping that that will be enough to sort of save Egypt from an Algeria-type scenario, but that being said, it looks like the military council, or whoever controls them, is willing to really do anything to prevent the country from going Islamist.
Wow.
Okay, I'm talking with Adam Morrow, IPS news reporter reporting from Cairo, Egypt, about what's going on in Egypt, and just a fair warning, Adam, we're coming up on a break here in a minute or two, so I don't want to ask a real complicated question yet.
We're going to have to pick this up on the other side pretty soon.
I just want to make sure I understand these basics.
This man named Morsi, this Muslim Brotherhood guy, has been elected president, or has won the election, and yet the military has passed this constitutional addendum.
I thought there was no constitution, so how can it have an addendum?
But this addendum strongly limits the president's powers and strengthens the military powers.
There's the music interrupting us.
Sorry about that, Adam.
We'll have to pick it up on the other side.
I'm pleased to be talking with Adam Morrow, IPS news.
We're talking about Egypt, the most important story over the weekend, and Adam's in Egypt, and he's saying it's hard to keep track of what's going on.
We'll try to find out more on the other side.
Antiwar Radio.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I've got, on the other line, I've got Adam Morrow, writer with IPS News Service.
We're writing out of Cairo, Egypt, and I'm learning so much about Egypt.
Now, Adam, before the break interrupted us, I was trying to summarize, and I don't think I got it all in there.
Was there any part of the developing story, you know, leading up to events this weekend and today that we missed or that you want to go back over or emphasize?
Oh, well, like I said earlier, I apologize for, you know, it's quite difficult to sort of present the story as it stands right now, only because there are some developments are breaking so quickly, and there are so many different things going on simultaneously.
One of the things that marked political discourse over the last several months is the battle over the Constitution and who would write up the Constitution.
And that's why this latest decree by the Military Council to basically dissolving the Constituent Assembly that was elected by Parliament and replacing it with one that's drawn up entirely by military appointees is such a coup.
In fact, that's how people here are describing it.
People are calling this a soft coup.
So it's really, really, really quite, it's really difficult to, you know, to sort of predict what's going to happen next.
Oh, I imagine.
Well, let me ask you this.
How powerful is the Egyptian army?
I always thought that they had just enough ammunition to never be able to fight it with Israel effectively, but has that changed?
Is that still true?
I don't, it's not powerful.
And I think because of it, I think it's a long standing relationship with the United States, with which Egypt has had a very close military to military relationship for the past 20 years, has kept it in a state of weakness.
I think that was intentional.
The idea of being to sort of keep it in a, you know, to keep it in a weak state so as it would never be able to threaten Israel.
But it's not really a question of their ability to fight wars right now.
You know what I mean?
This is more about its ability to keep the people down.
You know, I mean, I think they're looking at their biggest threat was on the domestic front.
I don't think it's not particularly geared, the military here isn't particularly geared to fight wars.
And like I said before, this is a result of the very long relationship with the United States, which is, which I think has kept it in a state of weakness.
But so what I guess I there's so many questions I have my mind is swirling.
What do you think is the biggest reason why the exact same way?
Yeah, still, people here are still trying to make sense of it.
Even Egyptians themselves.
I've spoken to a lot of Egyptians who are who's who are just sort of given up on on on trying to make sense of the political process.
They are now saying that politics is a fool's game.
I sort of sympathize with these days, just because it's becoming so very complicated.
Everything is becoming incredibly complex.
But I mean, in a very generally, we can look at it basically as a battle over the presidency, over Parliament, and over basically the, the body that will be mandated with writing with drafting a new constitution.
And it sounds like the Egyptian military has seized the reins of power with regard to doing all those things.
Is that not correct?
That appears to be the case now.
Whether they were just biding their time to see what would happen in elections.
I mean, the timing is incredible.
But a lot of these things are happening right smack in the middle of presidential runoffs, which makes me think that maybe they sort of waited for this until they saw that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate was going to win.
And then they sort of decided to do this stuff.
Whereas if they're if they're a candidate, Ahmed Shafi, the last prime minister, if he had actually won, which he almost did, then maybe they wouldn't have had to resort to these to these most recent steps.
Speaking of which, any credible allegations of vote, for vote fraud or vote rigging?
I don't I just don't know how elections work in that part of the world at all.
Any word on that?
Yeah, no, that's a very good question.
A lot of a lot of people were expecting widespread rigging only because that was the case under all Mubarak era elections, which were marked with, you know, these will be blatantly fixed.
But But actually, no, in the in the parliamentary elections late last year, along with the first round presidential election that happened late last month, and then this runoff that just happened this weekend, there were some sort of scattered reports of electoral fraud, but really, really very slight, really very mild to the point that it didn't really affect the final outcome.
I know that the former US President Jimmy Carter was here with his with his outfit, signed off on the on the election, saying that they were held freely and fairly.
Well, and it kind of makes sense when you consider, you know, the the businessmen and the shopkeepers and the Christian minority who probably never ever cared for the Assad.
I'm sorry, never cared for the Mubarak regime, excuse me, I'm getting confused now.
But but they just wanted stability.
They don't care who's, you know, sitting on the throne as long as they can do business and there's not rioting in the streets.
And so it seems like they would vote for the, you know, quote unquote, Richard Nixon, you know, law and order guy, so to speak.
And so, yeah, it makes sense that the elections would be really close.
You know, a lot of people would want the brotherhood to take things in a new direction.
And a lot of people would just want stability and they don't care.
And the results played out that way, didn't they?
Exactly.
The stability and law and order vote definitely played.
And that was the reason why Shafi made it to the runoff round.
There's been a lot of it's been 16 months since the revolution.
There's been very little improvement on the ground for most Egyptians.
Most Egyptians are seeing very little improvement in terms of economic issues, in terms of skyrocketing inflation.
There's been a very long standing security vacuum ever ever since police were withdrawn a year and a half ago at the height of the revolution.
So the silent majority here, much of the silent majority here does actually sort of pine for security over above anything else.
And that was the reason why Mubarak's former PM got did as well as he did, because a lot of people said, you know, a lot much of the public was alienated by ended up becoming alienated from this revolution, having not seen any sort of any improvement, any tangible improvement in the last year and a half.
So that the whole law and order thing definitely was a part of it.
Well, let me ask you this.
Obviously, no one can predict the future.
And this is just nutty in the middle of a maelstrom of what's going on.
But what could I sitting in my home in Austin, Texas, look for as key signs of either something good going to happen or something bad going to happen with regard to all these political tensions in Egypt?
Can you think of any sort of, you know, warning signs or positive signs of things?
That's a good question.
And based on my earlier prediction, I think people should just be very aware if if things do start to turn ugly here, and you do start to see explosions, because if you think about it, Egypt really remains sort of an island of stability in the Middle East at this point, certainly over what's happened over the last year and a half, two years, with the with the implosion of Syria, with the invasion of Libya, and the possible partition of that country into three pieces, the ongoing, you know, the open wound that that Palestine continues to be in the Israeli occupation and all that stuff, with Sudan appearing to be on the verge of civil war, since it's been partitioned into north and south.
A year ago, Egypt has really remarkably remained, as I said, this sort of island of stability in the middle of all this sort of stuff we have, we have had some clashes, we've seen some, some, some unprecedented violence in the last year since the revolution.
However, there's no violence has yet to become a daily phenomenon here.
You know, it's still very much an exception here.
Well, I certainly hope it stays that way.
But man, the whole risk of a quote, unquote, wider regional conflict.
My point is, if things do start to get ugly, I think it's very, it's very important for people to look very closely at the details of things occur in order to see because I, like I said earlier, I'm afraid that you might have bombs going off and an attempt to basically smear the Islamists with this, with this sort of return to violence when in fact, these might be false flag operations.
What might tip that off?
Do you think possibly?
Well, you'll have this, you know, just this basic idea that, oh, look, the Islamists, they, they, they entered politics, they did, you know, they did the whole democratic thing, and they won and they were, they were the people's choice in free and fair elections.
And then those elections were stolen from them.
So their natural reaction would basically be to revert to these, you know, these older methods of violence and targeting government property.
And maybe you have like, attacks on, you know, on places that sell alcohol or places that might be known for gambling or something like that.
You might even have attacks on Christian targets, all of this being attributed to disgruntled Islamists.
When in fact, there are actually darker forces, possibly covert forces that are that are perpetrating it in order to discredit the Islamists.
Isn't it true that the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence and actually meant it like decades ago hasn't done violence?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that sounds like it wouldn't be very credible to 1950s.
That wouldn't be credible to blame the Muslim Brotherhood for this.
Are you talking about other groups?
Or are you saying people blame the Muslim Brotherhood anyway?
There are splinter groups that have done violent stuff more recently.
If you remember the 1997 massacre in Luxor, in which several dozen tourists were killed.
But even that, even those circumstances were very strange.
Even those circumstances were never, never entirely explained as to responsibility.
Also, you had a couple of explosions going on in Sinai in 2004, 2005, 2006, all featured attacks on hotels there.
But again, there was never any evidence.
The Western press is always very quick to attribute these incidents to shadowy Islamist groups, the names of which we've never heard before.
Whereas if you actually look at it, if you actually research it, and if you actually do your homework, you'll find that there's never any actual evidence that these things were perpetrated by Islamists.
So this affords their enemy a great, great opportunity.
We know whenever they want to be discredited, whenever they want to discredit them, they can just blow something up somewhere, say it was Islamist, and the Western media just seems to roll with that because it's easier.
And I bet the military and their backers are better at it than anybody else.
Exactly, exactly.
And one very interesting thing, one very interesting result of the revolution is that, I don't know if you remember this, but just only weeks before the revolution happened, there was a church was blown up in Alexandria.
It was on New Year's Day.
And that was widely attributed to, you know, some fundamentalists.
One of the interesting things, proof or evidence did seem to emerge in the wake of the revolution.
Certain documents came out, I think there were a couple of guys that actually sought refuge at a foreign embassy, at foreign embassies, basically saying like, look, you know, my point is information started to come out, evidence started to come out that there might have been elements of the former regime that were doing some of these anti-Christian operations, these operations against Christian targets, just to keep their Islamist opposition down, just to use as a card against their political rivals.
Wow, yeah, it is cynical like that.
It's not much fun to hear, but it's very informative.
We're all out of time.
Adam Morrow, thank you so much for yours.
Sure, I hope I can break things down for you a little better next time we talk.
Oh, you did a lot to help me.
Next time we talk, things will have developed and we'll have plenty more to talk about.
I hope some of them at least are good.
Anyway, thanks again, Adam.
Have a great day.
Hey, my pleasure.
Talk to you soon.
Okay, bye bye.
That's Adam Morrow.
I'm Zoe Greif.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're over time.
Have a good day.
More tomorrow.