People power in Egypt

Last updated on: August 4, 2013 at 1:12 am by Fred Clark

People power in Egypt 2013-08-04T01:12:52-04:00 Fred Clark

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I know almost as little about Egypt as I do about Tunisia, so I'm still not sure what we're watching unfold, or if it makes sense for me to feel somewhat like I'm watching 1989 all over again.

Heather Hurlbert suggests "Five Things to Understand About the Egyptian Riots," and I suspect she's right about them, even though I'm not really sure about the use of that word "riots."

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave a televised statement yesterday in which he took pains to characterize the protests as "riots." My initial reaction to that is that if an autocrat who has held power for three decades insists on calling something "rioting," then we probably should avoid calling it that.

The vocabulary and taxonomy of press coverage is interesting here. Protests, demonstrations, uprising, rioting, chaos, anarchy, lawlessness — which words are chosen suggests something about the speaker's perspective on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the event. The Associated Press story we had yesterday managed to get "chaos," "anarchy" and "rioting" in the lead graf. I haven't gone back to check, but I don't recall the AP using those terms to describe similar events in East Berlin.

"I know it might not be safe, yet it's either we live together, or we die together, we are all Egyptians."

Egyptian protesters have explicitly cited the recent revolution in Tunisia as an inspiration and catalyst for their own mass demonstrations. I'm sure that's true. But I also think a contributing factor may have been the earlier event that the quote above comes from.

Those words were from "Cherine Mohamed, a 50-year-old Egyptian housewife." She wasn't describing the current protests, she was describing a beautiful demonstration of unity and people power that took place on Coptic Christmas. I read about this story thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who linked to these three accounts:

"Egyptian Muslims act as 'human shields' for Coptic Christmas mass," by Ashley Samuelson McGuire
"Thousands of Egyptian Muslims show up as 'human shields' to defend Coptic Christians from terrorism," by Zaid Jilani
"Egyptian Muslims throng in thousands to protect Christians," by Juan Cole

From Juan Cole:

Thousands of Muslims honored a promise made by their leaders and showed up at Christmas Mass or at candlelight vigils outside Egyptian churches on Friday, offering their bodies as human shields against any acts of terrorists. The observances were tense, in view of the New Year’s Day bombing of a cathedral in Alexandria, which killed 21. The Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 7. Among those Muslims making this statement was beloved comedian Adil Imam. Since the 1990s Imam has been active in combating radicalism, memorably in his film “Kebab and Terrorism” (Kebab wa Irhab).

Father Marqus, the Bishop of Alexandria, said that in his entire life he had never seen the degree of solidarity of Muslims with Coptic Christians that he has witnessed in recent days. He said that Muslims attending the funeral of the Christian victims of the New Year’s Day bombing had treated them like Muslim martyrs, pronouncing ‘God is Great!’ in mourning, and had erupted in applause at the condemnation of the terrorists. He said that the bombing was like an aqua regia solution that would assay the metal of the Egyptian people and reveal their golden nature. The act of terror, he said, will have the opposite effect of the one intended, and will instead increase the love of Christians and Muslims for one another.

That story gives me hope. I suspect that it gave the Egyptians hope too — that it gave them a taste of the empowerment that comes from courageous mass efforts of unity and mutual support.

It also suggests to me that democracy could take root in Egypt more easily than it has struggled to do in Iraq or Afghanistan. Much of the difficulty in those countries where we have tried to impose democracy comes from America's elections-first approach to promoting democracy.

We've been "promoting democracy" as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn't determined as much by the things the public is able to decide by majority vote as by those things that cannot be voted away.

Democracy doesn't start with elections. It starts with a bill of rights. Unless and until the rights of minorities are guaranteed and protected by law, elections can be a threat to the safety, property and freedom of the losers. This is the dynamic that makes the Afghan and Iraqi elections too high-stakes not to be marred by corruption, intimidation and violence. It's no good electing a parliament or a congress unless it is firmly established that "Congress shall make no law" abridging the fundamental rights of minorities as well as of the majority. (I realize that American democracy began and survived for 13 years before our own bill of rights was adopted, but America under the Articles of Confederation was a fragile and tenuous thing. If we're interested in "promoting democracy" where it does not now firmly exist, then 1789 and 1865 are more important dates than 1776.)

Starting with a call for a bill of rights is far more likely to succeed as an approach to "promoting democracy." It avoids the fundamental antagonism of an initial call for "regime change" that, explicitly or implicitly, is the implication of any elections-first approach. And thus it also avoids the need for the sort of emphatic "Mubarak must go" kind of statement that President Barack Obama has been criticized for not making in his speech yesterday. I too wish that Obama had been more emphatic in his prudently cautious remarks, but not in calling for Mubarak's ouster or for immediate elections.

By emphasizing the legal guarantee of rights for minorities — the right to worship or not worship freely, the right to free speech, the right to a free press, the right to assembly and to form associations, the right to petition the government for grievances — he could have simultaneously supported the protesters while affording our old ally a face-saving option, the opportunity to seize the moment and become F.W. de Klerk rather than Ferdinand Marcos.

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