In the days since the historic ousting of Mubarak from his seat of power, the buzzword in mass media discourse has been “transition.” Experts speculate about what type of process Egypt will face, and what it means for international relations, democracy, and the future of the country and the region. With the military now in charge, it is still premature to put a label on the events in Egypt. The wave of energy that enabled this change hasn’t subsided yet; nor should it. The coming months and years will hopefully witness major constitutional as well as institutional changes. Only then will we able to make an accurate assessment of the situation. Dictatorship is like a cancer: it spreads fast and deep everywhere and becomes difficult to uproot without thorough and comprehensive treatment. Since all Egyptians, with their diverse religious, political, social, and ideological agendas, have come to one accord that Mubarak is be dethroned, it is not far-fetched that the external symptoms of dictatorship would give in under the pressure of this unanimity, but the deeply seated disease of autocracy could still be there. It goes without saying that Mubarak did not work alone or amass his obscene fortune without the support and facilitation of many a red-handed politician or army official. The Egyptian infrastructure reeks of corruption and negligence of the worst kind, from the legal system to emergency response systems, from the school system to welfare, from the police to the transportation systems, from mass media to healthcare. All have worked (or not worked, depending on your vantage point) to ensure that the rich stay rich in the closed network of Mubarak, and the overwhelming majority of Egyptians live in neglect and poverty. The latter distinction was formalized and codified with the introduction of the classification of “Random Areas,” a term that the government’s Housing Department used in the 1990s in order to justify the neglect of all non-elite or presidentially connected neighborhoods in terms of basic human services.
It should not escape our memory that the military has been the principal beneficiary of the $1.3 billion US aid to Egypt; much of this funding has profited the upper ranks of the military itself, an institution that has been just as immersed in autocratic, corrupt practices as other parts of the government. The military should not be entrusted with the carrying out of reforms, and it should not be left to decide when such changes will occur. The military’s job should be to set up free and fair presidential elections, and to keep the peace in the meantime. In terms of the content of the elections, its importance is subordinate to the form the government will take: democracy. If the Army wants to help Egypt transition from autocratic rule to constitutional order, it must be the very example of this transition. Radical reform operations need to take place immediately. Public media sources like national TV and newspapers should become forums for public dialogue and political transparency. All airwaves in Egypt must immediately be made available for rigorous constructive debates on the country’s political future. The Emergency Law must be banned immediately, and its banning should not be made contingent upon the dispersion of protestors. Citizens’ rights and the banning of torture and detention of innocent civilians are non-negotiable human rights, and no condition should be put on them.
As time passes, such healthy debate will nurture and allow for a free political climate that has long been suppressed by the country’s iron-fist dictatorship since the 1952 coup. Whether the result is a diluted form of political Islam or a nationalist socialism, or even liberal capitalism, in the end this revolution will have succeeded only if it manages to create a system of political accountability and party pluralism with healthy and activist opposition indispensable for an operative democratic society. After more than half a century of oligarchic rule, with no tolerance for civil dialogue and no freedom of expression, my fellow Egyptians are now expressing their yearning for bottom-up reform so that the Revolution achieves its aims and becomes an example to other countries. We have inspired the world and made it possible to see idealism and hope triumph over cynicism and the inherited status-quo. We should not stop now.
The pressing question now is: what next? What future awaits Egypt, and how will the various parties organize the transition? The almost suspended Egyptian Constitution, which Mubarak has broken down, is still the most viable document for Egypt’s transition to democracy. According to the constitution, it is the Speaker of the People’s Assembly who must fill the vacancy in the office of the President until elections are held. But now that the Armed Forces is in charge of the transition, it behooves us all Egyptians to return to the main functional tenets of our constitution as we expeditiously work on amending its loopholes and annulling its dictatorship-nurturing articles. In the eyes of an Egyptian who works and lives in the United States, this is the most agreeable scenario. During the coming months, Egypt will have to undergo a trying and challenging electoral process where members of representative parties will run for presidential elections. I envision a competition between two nominees who are already beginning to assert their presence and gain popular support: the independent world-renowned and democracy adamant Nobel laureate ElBaradei and the politically seasoned Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa.
But whoever ends up winning the presidential bid, this is not a question of who is in charge anymore, but it is rather a matter of what democratic system and what shared governance rules us all. As the coming few weeks and months remain crucial as to which direction the wind of political change in Egypt will blow, immediate Constitutional amendments must take place in order for our Revolution to have succeeded. These include the following: amending articles 76 (method of election), 77 (length and number of presidential terms), 88 (rules of election), 93 (electoral internal regulation), and the annulment of article 179 (the Emergency Law), in the most expedient manner. Article 148 must also be curtailed by a system of checks and balances that does not allow for any abuse or undue prolongation of an Emergency Law.
Whether we choose to call it a Revolution, an uprising, or a popular protest, it is surely a historic moment of political transformation for Egypt, one that has effectively broken down the chains of autocratic control, a lesson quickly learned from Tunisia. Both cases now provide resources of hope for the entire Arab region, especially for current pushes for democracy in Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, and beyond. What happened in Egypt is not a typical, textbook revolution, not that there is such a prescriptive definition for revolutions and how they ought to be or behave. History books’ plentiful examples of past revolutions -- the French revolution of 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the theatrical establishment of public guillotines, or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the end of Tsar rule, not to mention the movements that took place in Eastern Central Europe – can now be viewed as belonging to a bygone era. The forces that enabled this contemporary Egyptian event include new technologies that allow for the multiple voices of “people power” to spread far and wide. These digital-age instruments for voicing democracy must be seen as part of the essential spirit of this event, taking place in an irreducibly globalized world.
However, it is still important to heed lessons learned from these past revolutions. For instance, what happened in Ukraine should provide a clarion call to all Egyptians that complacency after the ousting of an unpopular president is not going to guarantee our transition into democracy. Egyptians should continue to protest until the Army honors the Egyptian constitution, surrenders the affairs of the country to the People’s Assembly and makes its Speaker the Interim President, in anticipation of fair and free presidential election in September. Egyptians should not lose their momentum yet or accept the status quo of an Army takeover. Instead, they should look at the bigger picture and only celebrate when a functional democratic system has been put in place; otherwise this revolution would have failed to achieve its fundamental material goals.