Before We Turn Into Extras

by Alaa El Aswany

A religious Jew went to his rabbi one day and said, “I can’t bear my life any longer. I’m on a low income and I live squeezed into a small house with my wife and four children. Might G-d have a solution for my wretchedness?”

    The rabbi asked the man to give him 24 hours, and when the man came back the next day he found a pig next to the rabbi. Before he had a chance to ask, the rabbi said, “ G-d has asked you to take this pig  to live in your house with your wife and your children.”

    The idea seemed strange but the religious Jew trusted the rabbi, so he took the pig home. A week later he went back to complain to the rabbi. “The pig smells unbearable,” he said. “It’s always moving around the house and it shits everywhere. Please, rabbi, spare me from the pig.”

    The rabbi smiled and said, “You have to keep the pig until G-d gives you permission to get rid of it.”

    The next week the religious Jew came back looking completely exhausted. When the rabbi asked him how it was going he broke down in tears and said, “Have mercy on me, rabbi, I’m about to go mad because of this pig. It’s filled the house with shit, broken the furniture and now we can’t sleep at night. Please save me.”

    The rabbi looked at him and smiled. “Now go and get rid of the pig,” he said.

    The next week, when the rabbi asked the man how things were going, he said, “Thank G-d, rabbi. It’s true that we’re poor and live crammed in a small house, but we’re now as happy as can be because we’ve got rid of that damned pig.”

    This old traditional story carries an important message. If someone is disgruntled, then forcing him to live in worse circumstances will in the end reduce his resistance and drive him to accept hardship. That’s the method the military council has taken with us. After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the military council took power and promised to prepare the country for a period of democracy, but we now understand clearly what the military council has done with us. It has preserved the Mubarak system while at the same time Egyptians have faced a successive of awful crises, all of them artificial: the breakdown in law and order, complete anarchy and shortages of food and fuel. The military council has done all that deliberately in order to prepare Egyptians for what is happening now. Now that the sufferings of Egyptians have peaked, the Mubarak regime is being offered to us again in the form of the presidential candidature of Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief and the man responsible for all the crimes he committed. The military council expects Egyptians to behave like the Jew in the story: to welcome Omar Suleiman with joy as the only person able to solve all the problems that the military council itself has created. Security will then be restored, and they can forget their revolution against the Mubarak regime and follow Omar Suleiman and the army generals like obedient sheep. The military council is pushing Omar Suleiman into power through undemocratic and unfair presidential elections. The elections are invalid before they even begin for the following reasons:

    Firstly, the lack of transparency. In any real democracy presidential candidates have to reveal how they finance their elections campaigns but the military council has completely ignored this principle. There are candidates who are spending millions of pounds a  month without anyone asking where they obtained all this money. Who is paying to rent the hundreds of air-conditioned coaches that are carrying the candidates’ followers everywhere? I have discovered that a single fixed electoral billboard costs between 10,000 pounds a month for small ones and 200,000 pounds a month for big ones in prime locations. Some of the candidates have thousands of electoral posters in cities across the country. Egyptians have a right to know who is financing these candidates. What’s the truth about the reports that certain Arab countries have undertaken to support certain candidates financially? Is it acceptable that another country, even an Arab country, should decide who becomes president of Egypt? Omar Suleiman is a close friend of Israel and Israeli officials have long expressed openly their wish that Suleiman would rule Egypt in place of Mubarak, Israel’s loyal friend. At the same time Omar Suleiman is also supported by the king of Saudi Arabia, who sent him his private plane and invited him to have talks with him although he no longer holds any official position.

    Secondly, selective application of the law. The law is enforced against some presidential candidates         while others are exempt from any legal measures whatever they do. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made exhaustive efforts to obtain the American passport of the mother of presidential candidate Hazim Abu Ismail, which legally will disqualify him as a candidate. At the same time apparently no one in Egypt dares to go near Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s last prime minister, against whom 35 complaints of illegal enrichment and abuse of public funds have been filed. What has happened to the complaints against Shafik sets a legal precedent in Egypt. The complaints were submitted to the public prosecutor a whole year ago but Shafik has still not been questioned. The strange thing is that the prosecutor’s office asserts that the complaints have been transferred to the military judiciary, while the head of the military judiciary claims that he doesn’t have any complaints against Shafik. In other words, the complaints may have gone astray on their way from the public prosecutor’s office to the headquarters of the military judiciary. As for Omar Suleiman, he is responsible with Hosni Mubarak for all the crimes Mubarak is being tried for, as well as being fully responsible for exporting gas to Israel at reduced prices that squandered Egypt’s right to billions of dollars. He also bears primary responsibility for the blockade of Gaza in which dozens of Palestinians have been killed. He is responsible for the crime of torturing detainees who, according to Western newspapers, were sent from the United States to Egypt in order to be tortured to have confessions extracted from them and who were then send back to the United States. It was Omar Suleiman who tried to abort the Egyptian revolution, who wept as he announced that Mubarak his master was stepping down and who announced that Egyptians were a retarded people that did not deserve democracy. Omar Suleiman ought to have been tried under a lustration law and disqualified from political activity, but the military council has protected him in order to push him back into power at the right moment, to restore the Mubarak regime and bury the revolution.      

    Thirdly, state intervention on behalf of the military council’s candidate. During the process of endorsing presidential candidates, civil servants were mobilized in several government agencies to endorse Ahmed Shafik and Omar Suleiman. At the registry office, civil servants had instructions to facilitate endorsements for Ahmed Shafik and creates obstacles to endorsements for candidates who supported the revolution. The corrupt Egyptian civil service maintained by the military council will intervene with all its weight to help Omar Suleiman win by old methods such as mass voting by civil servants and vote-buying in rural and low-income areas. One only has to watch the scene of Omar Suleiman submitting his nomination papers, protected on all sides by a group of senior civilian and military police officers: police officers who left Egypt prey to a breakdown in law and order for more than a year and military police officers who killed demonstrators, dragged Egyptian women along the ground and abused them. These officers are now gathered to provide protection for Omar Suleiman, Hosni Mubarak’s vice president, out of respect and reverence for Mubarak and his deputy.

    Fourthly, the use of houses of worship for political propaganda. In violation of the law mosque preachers across Egypt have turned to political propaganda. That happened in the referendum on constitutional amendments and in the elections for the People’s Assembly and the Shoura Council, and it will happen for sure in the presidential elections. On top of that, the Mubarak regime still survives in its old form, so most mosque preachers defer to State Security officers, so this time the mosques will not be used in favour of Islamist candidates but rather in favour of Omar Suleiman, and the military council will use all the means at its disposal to make sure he wins.

    Fifthly, a supreme electoral committee whose decisions are incontestable. In the manner of Hosni Mubarak, a supreme committee has been set up to supervise the elections and its decisions will be immune from appeal. If the committee doesn’t recognize an incident of fraud, however blatant and well-documented it might be, then the incident will be ignored. Article 28 of the constitutional declaration, which gives immunity to the rulings of the electoral committee, is incompatible with logic and the law, and even with the constitutional declaration itself, since Article 21 states that no administrative ruling can be immune from appeal. This article was carried over from the old constitution at the wishes of the military council and the approval of the Muslim Brotherhood so that the military council could put Omar Suleiman into the presidency and prevent any challenges to electoral fraud.

    All these outrageous legal defects put us face to face with the truth: the presidential elections will not be free and fair. They are a farce prepared by the military and the Muslim Brotherhood to reach a specific result. And just like any play, in which there are principal actors and secondary actors or extras, the generals of the military council and the Muslim Brotherhood are the main actors because they are allies who have made a secret deal  and arrangements we observers know nothing about. The extras are the independent candidates, whether Islamists, liberals or leftists – all fine patriotic figures who belong to the revolution and most of whom are fit to be president. But so far they haven’t realized that they are playing secondary roles in a play whose ending is fixed in advance. Unfortunately they are more like extras who appear on stage to light a cigarette for the hero or tell him that the heroine is waiting for him, and then disappear forever. The revolutionary candidates must understand that they are not fighting an election, but a vicious battle in which the military council is trying to restore Hosni Mubarak to power  through his deputy, Omar Suleiman. I wish the revolutionary candidates would unite around one name we could all stand behind to go into a battle that I trust, God willing, will launch a second wave of revolution to free Egypt from the Mubarak regime and start the future.       

    Democracy is the solution.                                    

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