The
rule of the MB lasted only a bit more than one year, why the collapse came so
soon?
The fall of Morsi and of the rule of Muslim
Brothers came as expected. Firstly, the government of the Muslim Brothers has
been pursuing the same neoliberal policies as that of Mubarak, and even worse. It
could not solve any problem faced by the Egyptian people.
Secondly, Morsi was elected through a
gigantic fraud. Millions were given to by the votes. The Muslim Brothers were
mobilized to occupy the voting places and made impossible for the others to
vote, to the extent that the Egyptian judges who usually followed the election
were disgusted and moved out and gave the election. Despite that, the US Embassy
and the Europe declared the election was perfect. This is how Morsi was
elected.
Shortly
after the fall of Morsi, you released a short statement and claimed it an important
victory of Egyptian people, however, Morsi was ousted by the army, not directly
by the demonstrations of the people. To what degree can we say it’s the victory
of the people?
After a few months, it has been proven that
Morsi was continuing the same policies rejected by the people. The movement of
Tamarod started a campaign of signature, asking for the removal of Morsi and a
new, real election. 26 million signatures were collected, which is the true
figure. Morsi did not take an account of this campaign. So it was decided on 30rd
of June, which is exactly one year after his inauguration, there would be a
demonstration. And the demonstration has been gigantic, the widest in the whole
history of Egypt. 33 million people moved into the streets of Cairo and all
Egyptian towns, including small towns. When you say 33 million people out of
the total population of 85 million people, it means everybody. Just compare,
imagine there (for China) are 500 million people demonstrating on the
same day in all towns.
But Morsi replied to the demonstration by
saying, oh, we are not accepting the civil war. There is no danger of civil
war, because you have 90% of the people who are anti-Morsi and Morsi was not
able to mobilize, even distributing a lot of money, more than a few hundred
thousand people, which means an imbalance against him. The western media are
continuously repeating the words of Morsi ‘we are moving to a civil war’, but this
is ridiculous.
Facing the situation, the army operated in
a very wise, intelligent way, they simply deposited Morsi and controlled him;
the presidency was transferred to the President of the Constitutional Court,
which is the normal way to replace a president which is removed. We shall see what
the new government will do, if moving out of the policies of Morsi or not, but
the movement is completely mobilized to respond.
The
fact that Morsi was removed by the military force has been received in very
different ways, some welcomed the change, some condemned it’s a pure military
coup. What do think of that?
Such an action of the army is not a coup d’état.
The western press said it was a coup d’état, but it is not, it is a wise action
to answer the demands of the Egyptian people. I don’t want to go into details
that I don’t know. The top leadership of the army has been, during the 30 years
after the death of Nasser, controlled by the US and corrupted by the money of
the US and the Gulf countries; and they accepted the polices of submission of
Mubarak and Morsi. But everybody should know that the Egyptian army is not only
the top leaders, also thousands of officers who remain patriotic; they are not
necessarily progressive, nor socialist, but they understand that the people don’t
want Morsi.
The new prime minister, Hazem Al Beblawi, I
knew him personally. He was a brilliant student of economics. I don’t know what
his mind is today; but he’s a clever man, able to understand the continuing of neoliberal
policy is a disaster. We shall see.
As you said, the Egyptian army has been corrupt and
has close connections with the US, but this time they stand together with the
people. Can we say the army has changed in nature?
It’s the question we are all asking
ourselves. We suspect the top leaders of the army are pro US, I don’t want to
go into the secrets that I don’t know. Who is Sisi? Sisi is not necessarily the
worst among them, I don’t know. Anyway, we judge the people by actions, not by
this or that we don’t know. But I can assure you that many officers have shown their sympathy by moving among the people quite
spontaneously. When the soldiers moved out onto the streets, standing with the
people, it was also quite spontaneous. We should not consider the army as a
whole is simply the instrument of the US.
Please
tell us something about the movement. It seems very wide, who are joining the
movement and how much in common do they have?
This is a wide movement which includes all the
society. It brings together different people with different projects, different
political minds. There is left, there is centre, there is right in the
movement. They are unequally organized; some sectors are better organized than
others.
The left is represented by Communist and socialist
Parties
There is also left independent trade unions
of the working class. About 4 to 5 million workers are organized by the trade
unions which are traditionally on the left, with precise demands with respect
to wages, conditions of labor, pensions, etc. On the left also there is the
movement of small peasants who are resisting the process of dispossession to
the benefit of the rich peasants, accelerated by the neoliberal policies. They
are a very important component of the movement.
There are gigantic organizations, 4 or 5,
of young people, basically from urban lower middle class and popular class. Hundreds
of thousand organized. They are those who started Tamarod. These young people
are politicized, they discuss politics continuously. They do not accept
following parties; they have no confidence in bourgeois parties, democratic
parties or even socialist parties. They want to continue to be independent.
There are movements of women, two sorts of
movements. One is the movement of urban educated women – doctors, teachers,
lawyers, also lower middle class women employees, who are asking for changes of
the law. (I mean the Islamic law called the sharia ). There are also movements
of poor women who are very strong fighters and supporting the workers ,for
instance during the strikes. There are many strikes, 5000 strikes in one year
in Egypt. They organize to provide food to the strikers and protect them from
police attacks and so on.
There are also important organizations of
middle classes – engineers, lawyers, judges, employees of the state, etc. They
have trade unions of their own. These trade unions are not on the left, not
socialist, but they are democratic, against Muslim Brothers and against
submission to the US. There are also some personalities like Mohamed ElBaradei,
who are more or less democratic but pro-US, pro-capitalism, pro-neoliberalism,
they don’t understand the link between economic liberalism and the social
disaster leading to the loss of legitimacy of lack of democracy.
There are also some people of the old
regime who joined movement. They felt the movement was so strong and had to
move in. They are not really influential in the movement.
There are also the salafists. The salafists
are as bad as Muslim Brothers, they were eliminated by the Muslim
Brothers because Muslim Brothers wanted to have all the positions only to them.
This is why the salafists also moved into the movement. They have some
influence among some sections of the middle classes and among those very poor
who have very little understanding of politics, particularly in the rural area.
Not more than that.
To have the movement getting together with minimum
common program, there are discussions among various partners, particularly with
the organizations of the youth. There is a real need for a common program able to
meet the immediate challenges; it is not a program for socialism, but a program
to start moving out of the trap of neoliberalization by restoring the power of
the state, and starting to move out of the stuck of the US, Israel, and Gulf
countries and opening new relations with other partners, particularly with
China, with Russia, with India, with South Africa, so that we can start having independent
policies and therefore reducing the influence of the US, of Israel, and of the
Gulf countries.
We can say the movement faces three tasks.
One is social justice; it is not socialism. It is a set of important
reforms in the management of enterprises, ending privatizations, recapturing
the enterprises which have been “sold out” at very low prices to private
companies, establishing a new rule of minimum wages, a new rule of working
conditions, a new rule of labor rights – strikes and so on, a new rule of
participation of the working people with the management of the enterprises that
they would have a say. These reforms are
not socialism, but they are on the long road to socialism, they are
socialist-minded. For the farmers, it includes the protection of the ownership
of the land by small peasants. These demands
are also very strongly supported by small and medium enterprise, the profit of
which was pumped out by monopoly capital of foreign companies.
The second direction is the national
question, the dignity. They want a government which represents Egypt with
dignity. It means a government which is independent, not accepting the US orders,
not standing with Israel’s repression of Palestinians, and independent from the
Gulf countries who are allies of the US, they can’t be anything else. On that
ground China has a big responsibility, It would be great if some people in
China say frankly : we are with you and we are prepared if you ask it to help you solve your economic problems. Such
a declaration would have a tremendous echo in Egypt. There are slogans on the
streets of Cairo saying : we don’t need
US aid, we can also get it from other countries. We don’t need US aid which is
associated with corruption and political submission. This is called a national
independent policy, in order to be able to develop a sovereign Egyptian
project.
The third dimension is the democratic one. On
that point, there are various views. There are people in favor of normal
bourgeois pluri party elections. But there are many people who think that fast elections
are not the answer to the challenge, democracy can’t mean just elections.
Democracy implies the changes in attitudes, in changes in common relations of
people in daily life. I think they are right. In Egypt, the young people
consider democracy as the freedom of behaving in daily relations, particularly
between boys and girls, men and women. Maybe, the majority of Egyptian people
are believers in God, but they do not accept that because they are believers they
should obey the orders of Muslim Brothers, forbidding them to have free lives. This
is the way they understand democracy. We should have a popular parliament,
which is not an “elected” parliament. It is a parliament which brings together
people send by the organizations of the movement, by the trade unions, by the
women organizations, by the youth organizations, by the various parties. This
is the true parliament, more than a so-called elected parliament in which the distribution
of representation is so unequal and biased.
You can call that not a socialist program,
but a national, democratic, sovereign, and progressive program.
What
role did the US play in the change?
The US supported Mubarak to the last
minute. They also supported Morsi to the last minute; they continuously
repeated ‘the elected president’. But when the leaders of the army took action
to deposit Morsi, then the US accepted it, they understood. Of course they exercise
strong pressure on the new government to continue neoliberal policy, submitting
to IMF and the World Bank. But the people on the street shout the slogan, we
don’t want IMF, we don’t want the World Bank. But there are pressures; those
working with the management of finance are spontaneously conservative and pro
neoliberalism. So there is a need for a struggle against them.
On one hand, we can say the US accepted and
supported the army and the new government, but on the other hand, they tried to
put pressure to bring back reactionary political Islam, not through the Muslim
Brotherhood but through the salafist. This is the plan of the US, which is not
to help Egypt out of the crisis, but to use the crisis to destroy more. Because
Egypt is considered by them a dangerous country, it has a long past, it has
been the first emerging country since the beginning of the 19th
century, and one of the Third World important emerging country in the time of
Nasser and Bandung, in line with China, the Soviet Union, and other countries
of the third world. It played an important role in the liberation of all
Africa. An independent Egypt with a sovereign, popular, progressive project
would be a danger to the influence of the US, not only in Egypt, but in the Middle
East, in Arab countries, and in all Africa. It will limit the expansion of Israel
to Palestine. It will also put an end to the influence of the Gulf countries.
Egypt
is now in another transition which is not peaceful; the clashes have costed
dozens of lives. What do think of the bloodshed? What will be the future of the
transition?
Of course it is not peaceful, but it’s not
a civil war. The people are highly politicized, everybody is discussing
politics on the street every day. People are active. Therefore different
opinions appear, they discuss in some cases correctly and in other cases less
correctly. But there is no danger of civil war because the common front is very
wide.
The US is using another weapon in addition
to economic and financial pressure. The US are supporting small armed groups
operating as real terrorists. These groups are coming from Libya. Since Libya
has been destroyed by the western military operation, Libya has become the base
for all kinds of Jihadists. There are Jihadists with strong arms including
missiles coming from the desert, this is the real danger. Also in the Egyptian
peninsula of Sinai small Jidahist groups supported by Israel and the Gulf
countries are operating terrorist actions. This is made possible by the so
called “peace agreement” between Egypt and Israel which puts a limit for the
number of Egyptian soldiers stationed in Sinai : 700 to 2000, very small figure
for this wide area.. On the 4th of July after Morsi was removed, I
wrote a paper, the last sentence of which says now the danger is from
imperialist US, Israel and Gulf, using criminal mercenaries, coming from Libya,
and from the province of Sinai. This is what is happening now : terrorism , not
“civil war”..
Interview of Samir
Amin , made by Beifang, China, on July 15, 2013
