[Marxism] The rotten state of Egypt

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-rotten-state-of-egypt-is-too-powerless-and-corrupt-to-act-1220048.html

Robert Fisk: The rotten state of Egypt is too powerless and corrupt to act
Thursday, 1 January 2009

There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the 
millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, 
Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle 
East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – 
after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui 
Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his 
people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and 
Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals 
– but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of 
thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the 
princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.

Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into 
Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons 
to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the 
response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three 
gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah 
crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that 
produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why 
blame Mubarak?

To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without 
permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the 
powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.

Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and 
Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that 
kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support 
is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it 
works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make 
emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am 
tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid 
the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one 
of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.

The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the 
slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in 
an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, 
genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. 
It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the 
regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where 
young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be 
passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are 
sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the 
Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.

There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the 
meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. 
Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often 
scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and 
connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison 
torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a 
Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs 
to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper 
Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to 
attend prayers during Ramadan.

And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by 
their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in 
the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all 
the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway 
accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, 
cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of 
the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing 
for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed 
back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids 
have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the 
midden in which Egyptians themselves live.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, 
felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open 
the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the 
feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah 
leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to 
the one they created in their own country."

But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.

Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. 
Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own 
political sickness.