By Michael Cooperson
What’s going on in Egypt, and why should we care?
Egypt is one of the largest and most important countries in the Middle East. For the past three decades, it has lived in peace with its neighbors, including Israel. But stability has come at a price. To ensure that it stays in power, the ruling party has imprisoned its critics, outlawed many forms of dissent and held staged elections to keep its supporters in office.
The past weeks, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest conditions in their country.
The protesters called for an end to torture and police brutality. They expressed their frustration with official corruption and asked the government to work harder to find jobs for Egyptians who remain unemployed. They demanded that Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for the last 30 years, give up his plan to install his son as the next president.
In response, police and security forces have broken up the demonstrations using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. But Egyptians came out in greater numbers in major cities all over the country to demand his resignation. Eventually the police withdrew from the streets, to be replaced by the army.
On Tuesday night, men armed with knives, clubs and machetes went into Liberation Square in downtown Cairo to attack unarmed demonstrators, many of whom had brought their children with them. By turning the protest into a riot, government supporters hope to justify an even more brutal crackdown against their opponents.
Many Americans think that our country has no business intervening in Egypt. In a better world, they would be right. But we are already involved.
Every year, we provide $1.3 billion in aid to Mubarak’s government. The tear gas canisters fired at the protesters read “made in USA.” Even with a hundred dead and many injured at the hands of government supporters, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not demanded that Mubarak resign.
Why does our government hesitate to intervene? For three decades, Mubarak has been an ally of the United States. Without his strong hand, Egypt could become a dangerous Islamic state. This is what many of Egypt’s neighbors, including Israel, are afraid of.
But the protesters currently being attacked in Liberation Square are “pro-democracy, open, modern, young, secular ““ everything that the world should be supporting,” according to Egyptian-British novelist Ahdaf Soueif. And, young or not, secular or not, all the protesters are risking their lives for what Obama praised in his 2009 speech in Cairo: “government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.”
The “Islam is the solution” banners so prominent in Egypt in the 1990s are nowhere to be seen. Can anyone promise that Muslim parties will have no role in whatever government comes next? No. But one of the things democracy means is that the will of the people must be respected, whether or not one is entirely comfortable with the result.
If Egyptians who seek basic rights are massacred as the world looks on, the next uprising may well be a good deal more extreme.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” former President John F. Kennedy said.
Does Israel want to pin its hopes for security on a crackdown against peaceful demands for democracy? The suppression of Egyptian dissent seems unlikely to succeed for long. Americans who care about Israel’s future would be unwise to make that bet. And Americans who imagine that their country still deserves a reputation as a defender of democracy and human rights should realize that this may be our last chance to promote those ideas in the Middle East.
In his Cairo speech, Obama went on to say that democracy, the rule of law and basic freedoms are “not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.” Now would be a great time to start.
Cooperson is a professor of Arabic in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.