Egypt

In one of the bloodiest days in Egypt in decades, security forces attacked two sprawling sit-ins of supporters of the deposed president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, shooting dead scores of people and igniting a wave of violence across the country. Hours after the raids began, Egypt’s military-backed interim president declared a month-long state of emergency, allowing security forces to detain civilians indefinitely and without charge, and imposed a nighttime curfew in Cairo and ten other governorates. The health ministry said 235 people were killed across the country, although the death toll is expected to rise. The Muslim Brotherhood put the toll at over 2,000, calling the crackdown a “massacre.”

The bloody dispersal of the sit-ins in al-Nahda Square and Rabaa al-Adawiya is nothing but a massacre, prepared in advance. It aims to liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood. But it is also part of a plan to liquidate the Egyptian Revolution and restore the military-police state of the Mubarak regime. But we have to put the events of today in their context, which is the use of the military to smash up workers' strikes. We also see the appointment of new provincial governors, largely drawn from the ranks of the remnants of the old regime, the police and generals. Then there are the policies of General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi's government. It has adopted a road map clearly hostile to the goals and demands of the Egyptian Revolution, which are for freedom, dignity and social justice. This is the context for the brutal massacre that the army and police are committing. It is a bloody dress rehearsal for the liquidation of the Egyptian Revolution. It aims to break the revolutionary will of all Egyptians who are claiming their rights, whether workers, poor or revolutionary youth, by creating a state of terror.

Our revolution in Egypt is very much alive. It has been battered, and left for dead too many times to count, but it's still very much alive. Our revolution did not call for either military rule or for an Islamist Egypt. It called for bread, liberty, social justice and dignity. I’m writing this in Cairo where along with 13 other provinces we’re under curfew and a nationwide state of emergency has been announced just one day after a day drenched in blood - the bloodiest since our revolution - a day that included at least 20 churches getting torched. Our revolution isn’t dead, it is bringing Egypt back to life, painfully and messily. Egypt is like a house that’s been under lock and key, every door and window trapped shut for more than 60 years. The revolution kicked them all open and the stench is unbearable. But we are persevering. My proof? Egypt has changed, forever.

Tawakkul Karman, who shared a Nobel peace prize for her pro-democracy campaigning in Yemen, has said she views the Egyptian army's overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi as a death knell for Arab democratic movements. The removal of Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected leader, on 3 July "reset the clock" on the gains made since a popular uprising ended 30 years of Hosni Mubarak's one-man rule in 2011, she said on Monday. "The first emerging democracy in Egypt's history and the first in the region since the Arab spring is quickly being dismantled," said the 34-year-old Yemeni mother of three.

Egypt's interim government was accused of attempting to return the country to the Mubarak era on Monday, after the country's interior ministry announced the resurrection of several controversial police units that were nominally shut down following the country's 2011 uprising and the interim prime minister was given the power to place the country in a state of emergency. Egypt's state security investigations service, Mabahith Amn ad-Dawla, a wing of the police force under President Mubarak, and a symbol of police oppression, was supposedly closed in March 2011 – along with several units within it that investigated Islamist groups and opposition activists. The new national security service (NSS) was established in its place. But following Saturday's massacre of at least 83 Islamists, interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim announced the reinstatement of the units, and referred to the NSS by its old name. He added that experienced police officers sidelined in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution would be brought back into the fold.

Amid all the contending forces of July 2013 in Egypt — revolutionaries, liberals, Islamists, Mubarak supporters, and the military — one thing is clear. Cynical talk by Western liberals and leftists of the Arab revolutions as dead, of an “Arab winter,” of the triumph everywhere of fundamentalism, etc., etc., has been called into question by events. Given Egypt’s centrality to the Arab world, the decisive repudiation of the Muslim Brotherhood there could have regional implications. Once again, the Arab masses have shown the world, here in the most populous and important Arab country, that the 2011 revolutions are ongoing. As the Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar concluded in his just-published book, The People Want, “The Arab uprising is just beginning.”

This Saturday, Egypt’s authoritarian neoliberal state — sustained by the military and the old security apparatus of the Mubarak regime, with crucial support from the US government — once again displayed its violent nature. As tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters marched in Cairo to demonstrate against the ouster of President Morsi, security forces opened fire on protesters for the second time in just three weeks, killing over one hundred and injuring hundreds more.

At a press conference for revolutionary forces Thursday, Tamarod, a grassroots campaign that gathered 22 million signatures demanding that Mohamed Morsi resign, said that it supports the military in its "war against terrorism." The campaign also called for protests aimed at expelling US Ambassador Anne Patterson from Egypt, to signal rejection of the policies of the United States towards Egypt after 30 June and the ouster of Morsi. El-Sisi's call for Friday mass demonstrations has been turned down by some revolutionary anti-Morsi groups, such as the April 6 Youth Movement and the Revolutionary Socialists.

“Please, shoulder your responsibility with me, your army, and the police and show your size and steadfastness in the face of what is going on,” al-Sisi. What the American trained (and financially backed) al Sisi is doing is overtly telling the Mubarak supporting thug squads it’s open season on the pro-Morsi (pro-democracy) Egyptians all across the country. His statement “stand with me, your army and the police” is painfully clear: do what you like, we will not get in your way. Even though the pro-Mosri demonstrators won’t be the perpetrators of the violence (they will and have been the victims of it) it will be them who are attacked by the military in it’s wake. What he wants, what his backers in D.C. and London want, is violence, unmitigated, ugly violence, which will create the pretext they need to use the army to crack down on the protesters in a brutal and unrestrained way.

“We are not alone. The whole world is going through a revolutionary phase that will take us to a new era. Brazil. Egypt. Turkey. Chile. Greece. Spain. It is obvious that people now understand that ballot boxes are just a means for the elite to monopolize power. People express their real opinions in the street. All of this is threatening the hegemony of powerful states. Regimes are trying to contain revolutionary moments everywhere. June 30 in Egypt is just one example… It is our responsibility not to let our revolution be stolen from us again. Glory to the people! The revolution continues!”