Rebels Beware of the Bears that Hug Your Generals

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Jul 13, 2013 Egypt
[1 June 2012, graffiti during the presidential elections showing Shafiq and Morsi as poppets controlled by a general (the joker). Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim] [1 June 2012, graffiti during the presidential elections showing Shafiq and Morsi as poppets controlled by a general (the joker). Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim]

Rebels Beware of the Bears that Hug Your Generals

By : Sharif S. Elmusa

The young people of Egypt led the January 25 revolution, and the army inherited it first, then the army jointly with the Muslim Brothers. And now under the rubric of Tamarod (Rebel), they have spearheaded again the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, which they could only — or opted to — do through the army and with the blessing of religious political forces and symbols that did not get along with the Muslim Brothers. The Brotherhood squandered the fortunes it had achieved at the ballot box, and helped itself in its ouster from power. The army did not pay a like price because there is no countervailing power to make it pay; it remains a wild card.

Will the Rebels, broadly speaking — leftists, Nasserists, and idealistic youth and non-youth — be able to produce a better translation of their feat than in the previous two drafts? Will they transform the numbers they mobilized into an inclusive political system that seeks to achieve social justice and the dignity of the mass of the Egyptian people, goals the Rebels proclaim as their own?  Or will they be stung from the same scorpion hole a third time, to paraphrase an Arabic proverb?

For many non-Egyptians, the trust — summarized in the popular slogan, “The army and the people are one hand” — that Egyptians seem to place in the army as a captain of political change is not readily comprehensible.

Citizens everywhere are taught to admire their armies as protectors of national security against external enemies, except that in countries with representative democracy the army is supposed to be apolitical, under the command of a civilian government sanctioned by periodic elections.  This explains the skeptical reception by many liberal commentators in the Western media, who have no truck with the Islamists, of what they consider a military coup engineered against an elected president.

Semantics aside, many analysts think the Egyptian Armed Forces as an institution is not eager to assume direct political power or go the Syrian route; it aims, however, at protecting two sets of interest: National security and its own vast economic network and accumulated privileges.  For that it was ready to sacrifice its ailing and unpopular leader, Hosni Mubarak, whose legitimacy was founded on his leadership of the air force during the 1973 October war that eventually wrested the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli occupation. The military was — or appeared to be — willing also to make a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it looked at as the most organized political group, and cooperated with it in dispatching its two top septuagenarian generals into honorable retirement. In return, the army maintained its special status (appointing its leadership and keeping its budget out of public scrutiny) in the 2012 Constitution authored by the Islamists.

One does not have to go outside Egypt for what may sound like a jaundiced view of the army. Last August, just a day before Morsi declared the retirement of the two top generals, Hani Shukrallah, a prominent Egyptian leftist journalist wrote a scathing piece in the flagship English Ahramonline — a state-run news site — about the interests and mindset of the army, in which he said: 

… the ruling clique at the very summit of the Egyptian state—civil, military, `deep state` and business elite—is a very tightly knit network constituted of familial relations (they invariably married their kids off to one another) close friendships (adjacent north coast villas, and summer party guest lists), and above all a most intricate web of business interests, which extended well beyond the nation`s borders.

The military, according to Shukrallah, saw the call for the overthrow of the Mubarak regime as a threat to this network and to its advantages.  Further, Shukrallah said, the military had a deep-rooted mindset that “simply cannot imagine a non-authoritarian state, at least in this country.”

Has the army’s links to the former ruling elite been severed during the past year? Has its mindset metamorphosed? Has the constituency of Mubarak’s regime become feloul (remnants), as they were earlier called by the Rebels only to have the sobriquet disappear in the heat of the campaign to unseat Morsi? The answers to these questions are crucial for envisioning the future course of the third translation of the January 25 revolution.

It has been said during the “Arab Spring” that the interest and focus of the revolutionaries is domestic, not regional or international. Be that as it may, the regional and outside forces have sought to shape these domestic affairs to their own liking, as epitomized by the Libyan and Syrian experiences.  In Yemen also, the Arab Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, intervened to make then-President Ali Saleh resign, fearful that the winds of the Yemeni uprisings would blow in their direction.  These same countries, with the approval of Western powers, have stalled the uprising in Bahrain, fearful that that small state would come under the sway of Shia (the second main branch of Islam) and ally itself with their rival Iran.

Interestingly, the support for the toppling of Morsi in the Western media has come from the conservatives and even right wingers, like Fox News — often Islamophobes, who do not think in any case the Arabs are capable of building democratic societies. In the Arab world, the first to rush in with billions of dollars were the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, joined shortly afterward by Kuwait, replacing and surpassing Qatar’s assistance. Unfortunately, the “Arab Spring” has not until this moment produced a regime that governs by the ideals of the Rebels.

The UAE has been the asylum of top officials of the Mubarak era, especially Ahmad Shafiq who, during his brief stint as prime minister in the waning days of Mubark’s presidency, dismissed the young men and women carrying the banners of the revolution as mere high school kids. Saudi Arabia is the guardian of repression, misogyny and obscurantism — “the heart of darkness” — of the Arab region, the country where I would have first burst forth if I were the Arab Spring.

The United States government refrained from calling the ouster of Morsi a military coup in order to maintain the 1.3 billion US dollars or so in annual aid to the army, as a way to bolster its interests in Egypt and the Middle East. I will leave Israel out of the picture, because the Palestinians lose irrespective of what happens in the region: Witness the defamation campaign against the Palestinians that goes unanswered in Egypt, the opportunistic use of Hamas as a proxy to further discredit the Muslim Brothers, and the closure of the border and destruction of tunnels, the lifelines of the people of Gaza. 

The Gulf governments — in addition to their feuds with the Muslim Brotherhood, whom they see as rivals — must be betting that the networks of the old regime together with the military and security forces will be the real drivers of the Egyptian state. Surely, if we go by the dictum that there is no free lunch, the new Egyptian government will have to reciprocate the American largesse and reactionary Arab munificence. Rebels, beware of the bear that hugs your generals!

The first steps of the military since the ouster of Morsi should be taken as a cautionary tale. The appointees for the top three positions so far all lack a strong political base. Interim President Adly Mansour is the former head of Egypt’s equivalent of the Supreme Court, and a Mubarak regime appointee. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the fledgling Dostour Party, is vice president for foreign affairs.  In such a position, he has to sell the new order to the outside world and cease to be a critic. Hazem al-Beblawi, the prime minister, is an economist, an independent without a following. He says he will form a government of technocrats, exactly what the former Prime Minister Hesham Qandil had promised. Although highly misleading, the idea of a technocratic cabinet has a long pedigree in Egypt and remains popular today even among the Rebels. Core issues, such as equality, or whether to shift away from neoliberal economics, have technical aspects, yet are at heart political and ideological and need political muscle. Who will make decisions on such issues, and on what grounds?

In another move, the military has violated the human rights of the Islamists, shut down their TV stations, imprisoned the leadership of the Muslim Brothers and others, and has yet to issue an independent report about the killing of more than fifty people and the injuring of hundreds in front of the Republican Guards headquarters. These actions have been condemned by international human rights organizations, but not by the very people and journalists who were vociferous against like violations of rights under the Mubarak and Morsi presidencies. Freedom of expression and assembly cannot be selective.

Subsequently, Mansour has issued a Constitutional Declaration without — oops! — consulting the Rebels, or anybody else other than the generals.  Much of the declaration reads like the constitution that the opponents of the Islamists objected to and was one of the reasons for their revolt. Article 1 upholds Islam in its Sunni version as the official religion of the state and source of laws. It is perhaps meant to appease the ultra-conservative Salafi Nour Party, which supported Morsi`s ouster, or to perhaps avoid a backlash among the Muslim population at large, the great majority of whom are followers of the Sunni doctrine. Other articles give the president the upper hand in the formulation of legislation and policy over the cabinet, and enable the army to exercise emergency powers and court-martial civilians. The Rebels have expressed serious reservations about this potboiler declaration, with some reportedly describing it as laying the foundations of dictatorship. Will there be a second draft, and how will it read?

The Rebels possess energy and creativity and, above all, popular demands. This has enabled them to twice mobilize large segments of Egyptian society and to overthrow regimes that they saw as detrimental to development and democracy in the country. Through mass mobilization they have succeeded already in creating, or at least in planting the seeds for, a new political culture among many Egyptians, a culture that does not accept passivity and silence in the face of tyranny and injustice.  

They still lack organized power with deep roots in social interests and beliefs on a par with those of the Islamists or with the wealth and power of the military and the old regime’s networks. Their ability in this third round to translate their remarkable mobilization campaigns into institutions and policy is replete with imponderables.

[This article originally appeared on Mada Masr.] 
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]