Egypt’s Belly Dancing Barometer. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, February 19, 2013.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Friedman:
The
Daily News of Egypt reported that the national administrative court ruled last
week that the popular Al-Tet “belly dancing channel” be taken off the air for
broadcasting without a license. Who knew that Egypt had a belly dancing
channel? (Does Comcast know about this?) It is evidently quite popular but
apparently offensive to some of the rising Islamist forces in Egypt. It is not
clear how much the Muslim Brotherhood’s party had to do with the belly ban, but
what is clear is that no one in Egypt is having much fun these days.
The
country is more divided than ever between Islamist and less religious and
liberal parties, and the Egyptian currency has lost 8 percent of its value
against the dollar in the last two months. Even more disturbing, there has been
a sharp increase lately in cases of police brutality and rape directed at
opposition protesters. It is all adding up to the first impression that
President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are blowing their first
chance at power.
Sometime
in the next few months, Morsi is to visit the White House. He has only one
chance to make a second impression if he wants to continue to receive U.S. aid
from Congress. But the more I see of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, the more
I wonder if it has any second impression to offer.
Since
the start of the 2011 revolution in Tahrir Square, every time the Muslim
Brotherhood faced a choice of whether to behave in an inclusive way or grab
more power, true to its Bolshevik tendencies it grabbed more power and sacrificed
inclusion. This was true whether it was about how quickly to hold elections
(before the opposition could organize) or how quickly to draw up and vote on a
new constitution (before opposition complaints could be addressed) or how
broadly to include opposition figures in the government (as little as
possible). The opposition is not blameless — it has taken too long to get its
act together — but Morsi’s power grab will haunt him.
Egypt
is in dire economic condition. Youth unemployment is rampant, everything is in
decay, tourism and foreign investment and reserves are down sharply. As a
result, Egypt needs an I.M.F. bailout. Any bailout, though, will involve
economic pain — including cuts in food and fuel subsidies to shrink Egypt’s
steadily widening budget deficit. This will hurt.
In
order to get Egyptians to sign on to that pain, a big majority needs to feel
invested in the government and its success. And that is not the case today.
Morsi desperately needs a national unity government, made up of a broad
cross-section of Egyptian parties, but, so far, the Muslim Brotherhood has
failed to reach any understanding with the National Salvation Front, the
opposition coalition.
Egypt
also desperately needs foreign investment to create jobs. There are billions of
dollars of Egyptian capital sitting outside the country today, because Egyptian
investors, particularly Christians, are fearful of having money confiscated or
themselves arrested on specious charges, as happened to some after President
Hosni Mubarak’s fall. One of the best things Morsi could do for himself and for
Egypt would be to announce an amnesty of everyone from the Mubarak era who does
not have blood on his hands or can be proved in short order to have stolen
government money. Egypt needs every ounce of its own talent and capital it can
mobilize back home. This is no time for revenge.
The
Brotherhood, though, doesn’t just need a new governing strategy. It needs to understand
that its version of political Islam — which is resistant to women’s empowerment
and religious and political pluralism — might be sustainable if you are Iran or
Saudi Arabia, and you have huge reserves of oil and gas to buy off all the
contradictions between your ideology and economic growth. But if you are Egypt
and basically your only natural resource is your people — men and women — you
need to be as open to the world and modernity as possible to unleash all of
their potential for growth.
Bottom
line: Either the Muslim Brotherhood changes or it fails — and the sooner it
realizes that the better. I understand why President Obama’s team prefers to
convey this message privately: so the political forces in Egypt don’t start
focusing on us instead of on each other. That’s wise. But I don’t think we are
conveying this message forcefully enough. And Egyptian democracy advocates
certainly don’t. In an open letter to President Obama last week in Al-Ahram
Weekly, the Egyptian human rights activist Bahieddin Hassan wrote Obama that
the muted “stances of your administration have given political cover to the
current authoritarian regime in Egypt and allowed it to fearlessly implement
undemocratic policies and commit numerous acts of repression.”
It
would not be healthy for us to re-create with the Muslim Brotherhood the
bargain we had with Mubarak. That is, just be nice to Israel and nasty to the
jihadists and you can do whatever you want to your own people out back. It also
won’t be possible. The Egyptian people tolerated that under Mubarak for years.
But now they are mobilized, and they have lost their fear. Both we and Morsi
need to understand that this old bargain is not sustainable any longer.
