Activists called for protest Friday in front of the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Moqattam to demand President Mohamed Morsy step down.
The campaign, known as Ikhwan Kazeboun or The Lying Brothers, made an open call to supporters on Thursday in a Facebook post. […]
“There is an administration that runs the country and a Cabinet that are responsible for the country’s situation,” he said.
“We are not objecting to anyone’s right to protest peacefully, on the condition they do not vandalize public and private facilities,” Aref said. “We will not ask youth members to secure our headquarters in order to avoid clashes with opponents. The Interior Ministry is the body responsible for securing public and private facilities,” he added. […]
In related news, six other political movements called for a protest outside the prosecutor general’s office in downtown Cairo on Friday.
In a joint statement, they demanded the interior minister be dismissed due to his Brotherhood sympathies and for allowing citzens arrests, saying, “The Brotherhood seeks repressive rule through militias that substitute the Interior Ministry.”
Meanwhile, several popular coalitions in Damietta prepared for what they dubbed the “Friday to support the army” demonstration as calls for a return to military rule continue to rise.
For details on how the Ikhwan are preparing themselves for these upcoming protests, read the rest here.
It’s a smart rhetorical move for the Ikhwan to separate themselves from the sympathetic government, but anybody who’s already mistrustful of them isn’t going to buy it. Meanwhile, as I noted recently, we seem to be seeing a replay of the dynamics of the original 18 days: the Interior Ministry and security forces as the enemy of the people, and the army as their savior. I don’t know whether the military actually wants back in power, but their behavior certainly suggests that they do.
I’ve been saying for a long time now that I wouldn’t be surprised if Egypt’s near-term future looked a lot like Turkey’s old pattern. Until quite recently, Turkey’s army acted as a custodian of the state. The democratic, parliamentary government wasn’t a military regime, but when a given government started going off the reservation—usually by getting too religious—the army would step in, depose them (in a fairly neat and orderly fashion), and run things for a short period until a new one could be formed. Then they would voluntarily return to the barracks. If the Egyptian army comes back into power for another temporary stint, and if people’s trust in the army as their custodian were to stabilize a little (there was plenty of anti-SCAF sentiment when it was still in power), it doesn’t seem like too great of a leap from where Egypt is now to where Turkey used to be.
Whether that’s a good or better scenario is a whole other question, and to be honest I don’t think I know enough detail on the Turkish case to try to evaluate it. But I do know that Turkey emerged from that pattern with a fairly functional democracy (the hype about Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister, being a DANGEROUS ISLAMIST is way overblown), so perhaps the common reflex to fear and hate all military political power is not as universally appropriate as we might think.
This is not me advocating for the Turkish model, I swear. I’m just aware that a lot of things about it are notions that the average Western-educated person is trained to reject almost instantly, and I want to emphasize that in at least one case, it ended all right (even though I don’t know enough about what it was like while it was happening to give an opinion on it as a state of affairs). Egypt may or may not go that way, and if it did so that might be a good or bad thing; I don’t know. But I think it’s a possibility worth examining.
