Is Egypt Heading For Civil War?
Updated: 3:40pm UK, Monday 07 October 2013
Fifty dead overnight. Eight soldiers killed in two separate attacks. Foreign jihadis captured with their weapons. Civil war in Egypt?
No.
Not yet.
General Abdel Fattah al Sisi, the military leader who deposed Mohamed Morsi in a coup in July, could, conceivably contain the explosive formula of thwarted democratic hopes, violent Islamist ideology and extreme government brutality.
One method, which appears to be the one that General al Sisi is currently applying, is to throw a blanket of oppression and force over the cauldron of discontent.
He has banned the (so far non-violent) Muslim Brotherhood and frozen its assets. He has gunned down supporters of the president he deposed, Mohamed Morsi, with profligate intent.
He has launched a spectacular military campaign in the Sinai, the scene of a six-month-old insurrection by criminals, bandits, Hamas agents and al Qaeda supporters.
His intent is clear. To drive the Brotherhood, and by extension the violent Salafist movements that exist to its fringes, underground.
This would turn the clock back to the decades before the Arab Spring when a combination of liberals and Brotherhood supporters combined to drive the military regime out of Hosni Mubarak from power after decades of rule.
General al Sisi may succeed in this.
He has significant support from both religious and non-religious Egyptians who were dismayed, and fearful, of Mr Morsi's year in power when he rushed to Islamise Egypt's constitution and appointed a former terrorist as a regional governor.
Many Egyptians may now believe that their country is not ready for democracy – or they are not ready to accept a democratic outcome that could yield another Islamist government.
Many others, though, believed that the democratic choice they made during last year's elections, which yielded a Brotherhood presidency, should stand. Why, after all, did they take part in the revolution if not to have their say in Egypt's future?
Those elements include formerly violent groups like Jamaa Islamiya, which was behind the murder of 62 people, mostly tourists, in Luxor in 1997.
The massacre of hundreds of pro-Morsi supporters on August 14 by the military at Rabbah Square will, inevitably, have swelled the ranks of Islamists who now believe that the only way forward can be found by staring over the sights of a rifle.
These groups have not, yet, linked up with insurgents in the Sinai. These are a mixed bag of bandits, Islamist fanatics, and Hamas militants from Gaza.
If they blend in with groups deeper into Egypt, civil war or a spectacular crackdown by the military looks inevitable.
Al Sisi could take a different route. It would be hard to navigate – but it could, conceivably, draw the poison from the Egyptian body politic.
To do this he would need to open a dialogue with the Brotherhood and convince the biggest and best organised political movement in Egypt that they have a future as part of the mainstream.
Doing so would mean releasing its leadership from detention and acknowledging the fact that the movement does have some popular support.
So far there have been no signs that the general will take that route. Rather his supporters have been building a personality cult around him that bodes ill for Egypt's future.
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