Re-engaging with Egypt

A development in Malta’s relationship with Libya announced some days ago after the divorce referendum seemed to push the Arab Awakening out of our minds. What are your latest reflections on this ‘spring’ that seems to be as uncertain as the weather last week?

Plausible sounding accounts of what is happening in Libya keep filtering through to us in Malta. Not so much, of course, through mainstream media as through a special sort of grapevine: So many of us have friends of friends with business in Libya that word reaches us of the evolution of their predicament. Less comes across from Tunisia. But I, at least, get quite well informed about Egypt.

Before going on to that, however, it may be worth reflecting on the apparent oddity of the difference in the Western responses to Syria compared with Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

More than 800 protesters have been killed, more than 8,000 have been imprisoned, whole towns have been cut off from electricity and water supplies, yet only words of comfort are being doled out to the demonstrators whose determination still shows no sign of flagging.

Three neighbours of Syria, each powerful in its own way, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia are reluctant to see Bashar el-Assad kicked out. This is probably the main reason for the failure of the Western powers, including the European Union, of which we are an integral part, to act more favourably to the insurgents. Their task is much harder than that of either Tunisia or Egypt because the army is controlled by the same clique as the civil government yet they show no sign of flinching.

Some readers may remember from my Żebbuġ band club story that my grandfather was from Alexandria, and from my remarks on the Copts that I love Egypt. I have connections even with Sharm-el-Sheikh, where Hosni Mubarak went into his luxury hide-out. The picture I keep getting often surprises me.

To begin with it does not seem at all likely that the liberal movers of the insurgency will end up governing the country. I am reliably told that were a free election to be held now, the most probable result would be a more or less equally tripartite sharing of the seats.

The NDP, Mubarak’s Party, or whatever grouping of independence took its place even if it were to be banned, would still get at least a third of the seats in parliament, mainly because of its extensive and enduring clientalistic networks.

Another third would almost certainly go to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its prestige as the only organisation that managed to survive underground for so long will count less in an open democracy.

Its young members may break away from the old guard leadership and form a party modelled on the AKP in Turkey. But the brotherhood still runs a system of welfare services not provided by the state which guarantees that it will get the votes of a substantial part of the electorate.

Only the remaining third is calculated by my optimistic informers as likely to be collected by the liberal demonstrators. At present these are not a party but just a lot of heterogeneous group.

Some of my friends would like them to join the Democratic Front, with whom Mohammed el-Baradai has been linked, but they are being rebuffed as hijackers by the founders of the front a decade ago. Others of my friends would like them to form a new party but it seems difficult for all the varieties of leftists and liberals to squeeze themselves together under a single umbrella.

Are religion and conflicting ideas of social justice the factors that make unity between leftists and liberals so elusive?

It was clear from viewing on television the demonstrations in Tahrir Square that the push for political freedom was not integrated with an allied commitment to social justice.

Notably absent from the demonstrations were the destitute dwellers in the slums of Cairo who amount to between a fifth and a quarter of its population. It is said that the demonstrators deliberately kept the shanty town dwellers away out of fear that they would not have resisted the temptation to loot and indulge in petty criminality.

That would have provided the pretext for the dictatorship to clamp down upon the uprising. Nevertheless, it is sad that the exclusion of the sub-proletariat from the rest of society should have been so tragically visible at the very moment which purported to be that of the re-birth of democracy in Egypt. Surely the drive for political freedom has to be joined to that for social equality if there is to be true democracy.

From the first day of the uprising, I was very impressed to see Christians forming protective cordons around Muslims praying in Tahrir Square and Muslims doing the same for Christians celebrating Mass.

The most prominent debater with Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq on March 2 on television which resulted in the Military Council removing him from office, was the millionaire Patron of the Arts, Naguib Sawiris, who has been called the Egyptian George Soros and is a Coptic Christian.

However, the Constitutional Referendum has shown that most ordinary Egyptians reject the idea of a completely secularised state or even that Islam not retain its privileged position.

Do you have any further ideas to those you have already expressed on what Malta through its European presence could be doing in this context?

The European Popular Party could strive to do more intensively what the Conrad Adenauer Foundation had sought to do – help in the self-organisation of Muslim democracy and concrete realisation of a Euro-Mediterranean-Middle Eastern sustainable development network.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.