Egypt: from bad to worse

Try as he might, General Sisi cannot contain the continued protest against his takeover

Editorial

The Guardian, Wednesday 9 October 2013

"News that Washington has suspended most of its aid to Egypt, a land in the grip of a dictatorship as brutal as anything the country has experienced in recent history, is welcome and long overdue. Up to 2,000 people have been killed since President Mohamed Morsi was overthrown in July, and the death toll grows by the week. Last Sunday alone, 57 people were killed. The violence is not one-way. Coptic churches as well as mosques have been burned, and there are now drive-by shootings of soldiers.

Barack Obama's reluctance to call the coup what it really was revolved around the funding for the Camp David agreement. Israel has opposed cutting off aid, fearing that the Egyptian army would scale back its operations in the Sinai. Even though the 1967 agreement largely demilitarised the peninsula, it is now shorthand for close military co-operation between Egypt and Israel.
With the announcement, the Obama administration thinks it has found a way around this elephant trap: cutting a large part of aid to the military, including tanks, fighter jets and Apache helicopters, but keeping counter-intelligence aid in the Sinai. This means that Egypt will no longer be among the largest recipients of US aid for as long this military crackdown continues.
And it surely will continue. Far from heeding calls to release the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood from prison, on Wednesday the Orwellian-named minister of social solidarity officially disbanded Egypt's largest NGO. It was also announced that Mr Morsi will stand trial with 14 others for inciting the killing of protesters outside his presidential palace in December last year. This is turning what happened outside the palace on its head. The Brotherhood claimed that most of the dead were its supporters, and the names it released were confirmed by the Ministry of Health.
As significant as the killings, the numbers of Egyptians leaving the country, and the recognition by many of those who opposed Mr Morsi – including Mohamed ElBaradei – that the country is heading towards fascism, is the language of hatred that has become official currency. The country is being split into loyalists and traitors. Opponents are branded as non-Egyptians. In a video, the former mufti of Egypt, Ali Gom'ah, said to an audience comprising General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and assembled police chiefs: "Shoot [with live bullets] in full [power]. We must cleanse our city and our Egypt from these hooligans. They do not deserve our Egyptian [identity]."
Try as he might, General Sisi cannot contain the continued protest against his takeover. Egypt is locked down and its economy is haemorrhaging. The US, and the EU, must speak out, because the situation is untenable."