Mubarak's Basij: Million-Person Marches and the Army Backs Off :: EsinIslam The Muslim World Portal For Islamic News And Opinions

Mubarak's Basij: Million-Person Marches and the Army Backs Off

05 February 2011

By Juan Cole

On Wednesday, the Mubarak regime showed its fangs, mounting a massive and violent repressive attack on the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. People worrying about Egypt becoming like Iran (scroll down) should worry about Egypt already being way too much like Iran as it is. That is, Hillary Clinton and others expressed anxiety in public about increasing militarization of the Iranian regime and use of military and paramilitaries to repress popular protests. But Egypt is far more militarized and now is using exactly the same tactics.

The outlines of Hosni Mubarak's efforts to maintain regime stability and continuity have now become clear. In response to the mass demonstrations of the past week, he has done the following:

1. Late last week, he first tried to use the uniformed police and secret police to repress the crowds, killing perhaps 200-300 and wounding hundreds.

2. This effort failed to quell the protests, and the police were then withdrawn altogether, leaving the country defenseless before gangs of burglars and other criminal elements (some of which may have been composed of secret police or paid informers). The public dealt with this threat of lawlessness by organizing self-defense neighborhood patrols, and continued to refuse to stop demonstrating.

3. Mubarak appointed military intelligence ogre Omar Suleiman vice president. Suleiman had orchestrated the destruction of the Muslim radical movement of the 1990s, but he clearly was being groomed now as a possible successor to Mubarak and his crowd-control expertise would now be used not against al-Qaeda affiliates but against Egyptian civil society.

4. Mubarak mobilized the army to keep a semblance of order, but failed to convince the regular army officers to intervene against the protesters, with army chief of staff Sami Anan announcing late Monday that he would not order the troops to use force against the demonstrators.

5. When the protests continued Tuesday, Mubarak came on television and announced that he would not run for yet another term and would step down in September. His refusal to step down immediately and his other maneuvers indicated his determination, and probably that of a significant section of the officer corps, to maintain the military dictatorship in Egypt, but to attempt to placate the public with an offer to switch out one dictator for a new one (Omar Suleiman, likely).

6. When this pledge of transition to a new military dictator did not, predictably enough, placate the public either, Mubarak on Wednesday sent several thousand secret police and paid enforcers in civilian clothing into Tahrir Square to attack the protesters with stones, knouts, and molotov cocktails, in hopes of transforming a sympathetic peaceful crowd into a menacing violent mob. This strategy is similar to the one used in summer of 2009 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to raise the cost of protesting in the streets of Tehran, when they sent in basij (volunteer pro-regime militias). Used consistently and brutally, this show of force can raise the cost of urban protesting and gradually thin out the crowds.

Note that this step number 6 required that the army agree to remain neutral and not to actively protect the crowds. The secret police goons were allowed through army checkpoints with their staves, and some even rode through on horses and camels. Aljazeera English's correspondent suggests that the military was willing to allow the protests to the point where Mubarak would agree to stand down, but the army wants the crowd to accept that concession and go home now.

Million-Person Marches and the Army Backs Off

Despite efforts of the regime of Hosni Mubarak to forestall it by canceling trains to Cairo and throwing up checkpoints, masses of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, as well into the downtown of Alexandria, on Tuesday morning. At Twitter, courtesy Google/ phone land line (+16504194196 ), we could read from Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!:

Sharifkouddous Sharif Kouddous
Got searched by at 3 army checkpoints and 5 citizen checkpoints. Frisking an looking at IDs to prevent state security forces in…

and

Sharifkouddous Sharif Kouddous: "Wow. It's 10am and already more people in Tahrir than I have ever seen. And there's more flooding in #Egypt

Other twitter reports say that people are walking in to the capital from the outskirts. There are an estimated 20 million people in the Greater Cairo area, so it would be hard to isolate it! The tens of thousands said to be thronging in Egypt's two biggest cities are attempting, by the sheer force of their people power, to impress on Hosni Mubarak that his government simply cannot survive.

The Egyptian army made clear late Monday afternoon Cairo time that it would not repress peaceful demonstrations. A spokesman read out a statement on television: The military said it was fanning out through the streets to prevent looting and acts of sabotage. It said that the military recognized the legitimacy of the demands of the people and of the demonstrators who are asking for vast political and social adjustments. It said it would "never resort to the use of force against this great people."

Meanwhile, the newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman of military intelligence, offered to open negotiations with the demonstrators.

Some analysts are interpreting these statements as a two-pronged strategy. But I wonder if they do not point to a split in the security forces. Suleiman is from military intelligence, not the regular army. The new prime minister, Ahmad Shafiq, is an officer from the relatively elite and pampered air force (like Mubarak himself).

The statement about not using force on the people came from the regular army, which is made up of a combination of staff officers and thousands of conscripts. Army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Sami Anan (Enan) may have decided to preserve the unity of his branch of the armed forces, the closest to the people, by throwing the other three under the bus.

As a smart Pakistani analyst put it:

‘ The Egyptian theatre now has four key players — Lt Gen Sami Annan, Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Army, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, Defence Minister, Air Marshal Ahmed Shafiq, Minister for Civil Aviation [and now Prime Minister], and Lt Gen Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief. Of the four, Lt Gen Annan commands 468,000 troops, Field Marshal Tantawi oversees 60,000 Republican Guards while Lt Gen Suleiman is rumoured to be ailing. ‘

Thus, Suleiman's offer to negotiate is probably a way of trying to keep the newly appointed military cabinet in power, perhaps with an eye to new elections, by reaching out to and perhaps bringing in from the cold at least some of the opposition. Lt. Gen. Anan, in contrast, seems not to care very much whether the Mubarak crew stays in power or not, as long as the institution of the army is safeguarded and law and order can be preserved.

In a mass popular uprising of the sort now ongoing in Egypt, unity of the military and security forces, their backing for the ruler, and willingness to be ruthless, are key to a government remaining in power. This combination of factors was present in Iran in summer-fall, 2009. But the news out of Cairo late Monday and into Tuesday suggests deep divisions and diffidence in the military, which bodes ill for Mubarak.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Mohamed Elbaradei warned Mubarak that he had better flee if he values his life. He said that crowds were no longer simply calling for his resignation, but were beginning to call for him to be put on trial.

I watched some official Egyptian television. It is disgusting, with the same tone and snark of Fox Cable News (which is calling the peaceful demonstrators "rioters.") The anchor actually defended the security police for shooting down dozens of people on Thursday and Friday. "What else could they do?" A call came in from someone ranting that it was all a Muslim Brotherhood plot. Another man insisted that a few people in the street did not represent the whole people. You get a sense of what the salon conversations of Marie Antoinette must have been like in 1789.

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