The Muslim Brotherhood blew its chance at democratic leadership. But Egypt won't allow the army's brutal rule for ever
If a population seems overwhelmingly to support a deadly, vicious military takeover, it probably doesn't add much to label them as backward, bloodthirsty, or somehow incapable of democracy. And yet these have all been applied to Egypt's people, as the country has lurched from euphoric revolution in 2011 to a counter-revolutionary police state, enforced by the army.
Its first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, has been removed and detained; upwards of 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were brutally killed by security forces in one week; similar numbers, including three top leaders, have been arrested; and Egypt's media has either been shut down or taken over and the nation is living under emergency law.
But what makes such large swaths of Egypt seemingly cheer the army to this state? It doesn't work to suggest, as some have done, that the majority was always awaiting an opportunity to let the old regime back in. If that was the case, why didn't they vote in ex-regime man Ahmed Shafiq as president in 2012? Voters beyond the Brotherhood's support base told us at the time they backed Morsi as the better option. Certainly there were concerns, but Egyptians gave the Brotherhood a chance and the benefit of the doubt.
The organisation blew both. It failed to govern by consensus or work towards unifying the country. Its power-grabbing and the unrepresentative constitution it imposed (approved by a revealingly low-turnout referendum) sparked protests, which the Brotherhood sent the security services to crush – measures that, post-revolution, were seen as a terrible betrayal. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented that police use of torture and violence continued under Morsi as it had under the loathed Mubarak regime.
Meanwhile, strikes doubled under Morsi, as factory and public workers alike concluded that the Brotherhood was no better than Mubarak when it came to labour rights: the protests, aggressively dispersed, were over the targeting of trade unionists, mismanagement and corruption, as well as the lack of a minimum wage amid spiralling energy and food prices.
The sum of all these component parts was that the Brotherhood was tearing at the threads that bound Egyptian society – and at every turn, analysts warned about the potential consequences of being so recklessly divisive.
With that kind of simmering build-up, things fall apart with rampaging, nihilistic speed. Opponents are quickly vilified as terrorists in an environment where the state – in this case, the army – controls the message. But is Egypt really any different to other countries in this regard; is it more nationalistic, more susceptible to swallowing a manufactured story about an invented enemy? What about its neighbour, Israel? And how long did it take the US and the UK to buy the dehumanising lies needed to invade Iraq?
Analysts have noted that many Egyptians view the coup and clampdown as the right response to a real threat of terrorism. "They believe that this is a fight that transcends politics, and is a battle for Egypt's survival," says British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr, who notes that anyone attempting to counter this narrative is "accused of treachery". With Islamist channels forcibly closed and foreign stations denounced as hostile, the remaining private and state-controlled media in Egypt are rallying around the military's crude nationalistic flag. Perhaps the private media outlets are getting their own back at the Brotherhood – which, after all, harassed opposition media while in power. Perhaps they are simply doing what the media anywhere has a tendency to do at times of war or crisis, which is to let nationalism trump professionalism. Maybe General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a welcome media personality, with his hip shades, neo-Nasserist talk and useful distance from the hated, Mubarak-era military.
In any case, commentators in Egypt say that the country's media landscape is now a non-stop barrage of nationalistic songs set against images of Sisi the hero and cheering Egyptian crowds, while co-ordinated messages proclaim a nation at war with Brotherhood "terrorists", cast as a kind of subhuman species that must be dealt with.
Of course, none of this is to justify the sickening attacks on pro-Morsi sit-ins, which Human Rights Watch described as "the most serious incident of mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history". None of it is to excuse the apparent paucity of outrage within Egypt itself over the horrifying bloodshed, or that the violence could have been averted.
But the context of how this all happened will matter when Egyptians rise up again, against the brutal army – as they inevitably will, because it is unimaginable that the country has come so far, sacrificed so much, only to then give up on the revolutionary demands of "bread, freedom, justice".
The Brotherhood and the opposition, both essential political forces, must somehow find a way to co-operate if Egypt is to finally rid itself of military rule and reform its security services. And if that time comes, supporters of the deadly coup will have to look Brotherhood members in the eye and explain how they ever let this terrible period in Egypt's history take place.