TAHRIR RELOADED

TAHRIR RELOADED: AWAY WITH THE ARMY, TOWARDS AN INTERIM GOVERNMENT

-- Saroj Giri

The moment of Mubarak’s departure is a great victory. While this is not what they wanted, even Suleiman, the US and Israel must also be thinking of this departure as their victory too, for ensuring ‘an orderly transition’ in Egypt. Why? Since Mubarak stepped down and the protests were contained precisely when they were intensifying. The protests were changing its nature from the festive celebration of freedom in open city squares to strategizing, targeting specific locations. Suleiman the spy knew this, so did his master.On Friday Feb 11, before news of Mubarak’s removal, al-Jazeera reported, many protestors were seen to be moving away from Tahrir square (!) towards the Presidential palace, the state television building and other key installations. Further, trade-specific struggles were reported: labour struggles in factories and companies, film-makers calling for the resignation of those who supported the Mubarak regime, peasant and slum-dweller movements and so on. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday Feb 9, two days before Suleiman’s Friday announcement: “People were always asking why [laborers] don’t join our protests, said Ayman Nour, the head of Egypt’s opposition Al Ghad Party in an interview on Wednesday night. ‘Today, it was the right timing that both parties will become one. We’re organizing with them from now on’”.Another report said: Bus drivers and other public transportation employees in Egypt have gone on strike as spreading labor unrest adds momentum to mass protests calling for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster (http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/09/2057643/egyp...). Then you had film-makers who joined the Tahrir protests with their own specific demands: “One of the main demands was for the head of the syndicate, Mossad Fouda to resign for not supporting the filmmakers’ stance towards the 25 January revolution and for refusing to sign the statement issued by the cinema makers.” (Ahram Online, 10 Feb, 2011).In other words, the movement was radicalizing, taking deeper roots and identifying the Mubarak regime in its widespread roots and branches, in the power networks it had spawned. This move from the general demand for freedom and removal of Mubarak to working out its implications across the entire power ladder running through society – such unmistakeable signs of radicalization of the Tahrir protests were sure to frighten the wielders of power. Clearly, one way to contain these protests was to announce that Mubarak is gone, bring in army rule, so that the rest of those in the regime can carry on. It is no wonder then that both Suleiman and the head of the army council Tantawi are emphasising on restoring normalcy, creating conditions for the consolidation of their power. And this has immediate implications for the remaining protestors in Tahrir square who are in a dilemma about whether to continue with the protests. al-Jazeera again: “while people are celebrating Mubarak's departure, there are growing calls for him to be brought to justice. "People say it's just not good enough that he's gone to his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh ... And I can't think of any case in the past where an ousted leader has been able to live peacefully in his country."The question is: should the beautiful and sublime Tahrir square protests now end up by putting in place the army with some of the most die-hard reactionaries and conservatives in power? Maybe temporarily, for now, there is no other option and yet the situation is not all that bad since the Tahrir sequence is not over: the process of a longer political struggle, the intensification and wider dispersal of the struggle is already underway. This process means that eventually the present situation of existing centres of power, particularly the army being the end-limit of any political process, might not last till eternity. Can the movement of the people ever emerge as not just carrying the spirit of change and freedom but also emerge as a centre of political power?

The gapBut to understand this we must keep in mind the key feature of the Egypt situation: and that is the gap between power and legitimacy. No, this gap is not just to be seen in Mubarak/Suleiman and the army who do not have the moral legitimacy which is possessed by the movement of the people, by the Tahrir protests. Rather, this gap is more seriously in the movement of the people, in this fount of moral legitimacy and revolutionary spirit never itself emerging as the centre of power and only as the biggest and most dynamic pressure group, the conscience keeper of the nation. The gap is between the true and the virtuous, and ‘power’.Consider the contrasting case of ANC and Mandela in South Africa – they carried tremendous moral high ground, the dreams of a future society and were at the same time a contender for political power. Or, Castro and Che in Cuba, raising the banner of truth, love, beauty and revolution, who were soldiers as well as souljas (soldiers of the soul). Even better, consider Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. The movement of the people there not only carried the moral legitimacy hailing freedom and equality, marching against the repressive regime, but also, in the figure of Hugo Chavez the military man, formed a centre of power.The Tahrir protestors however in this sense belong to a different register – so far, one would say. The poet Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm told the youth who had led the Tahrir revolt: “Egypt is cleansing herself through you”. But it seems that such a moral, cleansing force might remain hostage to the basic matrix of power given ultimately by Mubarak-Suleiman regime and the army – with perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood as another contender. After the initial euphoria about the spirit of freedom and revolution of the protests, will we have to settle down to reconciling to hard reality, to ‘power’, to realpolitik, to army rule now? Is virtue, beauty, revolution doomed to be tragic, marginal and a failure?After the outburst of freedom, poetry and communal solidarity the protestors are indeed expected to pack off and allow the wielders of power to work out the rest, the actual details of what will follow. A White House diplomat, while speaking on the Muslim Brotherhood, is quoted as saying that ‘academic types’ do not understand realpolitik and are full of shit. One response to this is to say yea, we want to remain in our shit: we are not going to take power since we are against power as such, we are anti-power. This is how perhaps Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas in Mexico might have responded. Yet today those assembled in Tahrir are going beyond being merely anti-power and not willing to let go.

Change: bridging the gap?Egypt is no doubt in the grip of this gap between power and legitimacy but things are changing. There are two movements that one can see, two opposing trends involving key actors.One is where existing power blocs, both Mubarak earlier and the army now, are trying to enter into a warmer relationship with the protests – power is seeking, craving for legitimacy. Mubarak welcomed the protests and saluted the martyrs, but he had no chance of winning the hearts of the protestors. The army of course is much closer to the protests but it is tricky as it tries to balance between Mubarak/Suleiman and the protestors. The army has strong ties with the US which pumps millions of dollars into it. It simply cannot carry the revolutionary spirit of the protests that have reached a great height. There are reports that the ‘young officers’ close to the protests might not accept the hegemony of the older generals. Any fissure here would be good but it does not look imminent. The protests have precipitated another realignment within the ruling circles. ‘National capitalists’ like Sawiris who joined the protests are asserting themselves over the long dominant crony capitalists like Mubarak’s son. Sawiris is very active in the ‘Council of the Wise Men’ who held the negotiations with the Mubarak regime and protestors.

The first movement then is a realignment, albeit progressive, within existing power blocs, trying to deck it up in the colours of the revolution. The second movement is the one we pointed out above, of radicalization of the Tahrir protests with signs that it might go beyond the mere question of the removal of Mubarak. Perhaps we are here witnessing what might be called, the revolution becoming power and not getting mired in anti-power. The revolution is becoming, not seeking power, in the sense that the protests are maturing, becoming more broad-based, gaining a longer life, involving labour and other association. The protests evolved in the course of almost 20 days: from its initial high it kind of leveled out and then again rose up even bigger and this time more organised and strategic: from the Day of Rage, to the Week of Resilience, to the Week of Steadfastness…The lull in between after the first negotiations (Week of Resilience) meant that people again touched base with themselves, with each other and things around – and came back even more organised, sorted out and prepared. This is of crucial importance in seeing the evolution of the protests, in its maturing where now the virtuous inspires the strategic. The protests showed signs that it is not just targeting the top, Mubarak and his cohorts. It is getting a more direct, concrete manifestation – less spectacular, not involving directly global power-mongers like the US and Israel but a solid maturing and grounding of the movement. The movement is getting more political and strategic in that sense. This however does not run counter to the euphoria, the poetry and the music and the solidarity and love the protests have come to embody – in fact these ‘values’ fundamentally structure the ‘being strategic’. As someone like Che would say, love and revolution go hand in hand…

Interim governmentSadly however it is quite likely that today we might overlook this intensification of the Tahrir protests, the nation-wide protests, the struggle triggered off at different levels of society, in the workplace and in unions. It is not just Suleiman and Tantawi’s calls for return to normalcy and calling upon people to trust the army to deliver, which might undermine the process. In a strange twist, the immediate focus of sections of the left to emerging protests in other Arab countries, might also distract from the half-done work in Egypt – it is when attention is shifted that the ruling classes tend to quickly push changes that then take decades to undo. The protests in other countries must instead lead to reinforcing the process already underway in Egypt.The question now: how in the face of the Damocles sword of the fully constituted power of the Egyptian army, might the intensification of the struggle be possible? Here the formation of an interim government might favour the forces of change and transformation. The army is today legitimizing its hold over power by promising to deliver on a democratic order, to put up a constitution, ensure free and fair elections and so on. Instead it should only oversee the formation of an interim government. It is the interim government which will take charge so that it will not be the army but this government which should oversee the democratic political process of a new constitutional order.This interim government must be preceded by a round table conference including the most diverse sections of Egyptian society, particularly the forces that have emerged from the protests: the Tahrir coordinating groups like the Youth Coalition, the April 6 movement, independent trade unions, human rights organizations, perhaps also the Muslim Brother Youth and so on. Through this conference, an interim government can emerge to oversee the process of setting up a constitution, elections and formation of a government. The army’s role must be restricted to only overseeing the conference till the formation of the interim government. It goes without saying that the emergency laws and the present Constitution, including the present Parliament skewed towards Mubarak’s party, must be scrapped. From all accounts, playing around with the present Constitution, reforming and amending it, might not be of much use, so that it must be set aside.A round table conference with an interim government will keep the army out and allow the political process to work itself out. Both emergency and martial laws must of course be withdrawn. This will allow the momentum of the Tahrir square protests and its intensification to take root and lead to radical outcomes. In this way, the subjects of the Tahrir square protests will prove that their dreams are not just child’s play or the idle imaginings of ‘academic types’. The revolutionary spirit of Tahrir square is not doomed to play the tragic tune of being eternally anti-power: it is already challenging ‘realpolitik’ and with some strategy might soon have ‘a world to win’, in more than a metaphoric sense. The gap between power and moral legitimacy, between revolutionary spirit and strategic thinking, between anti-power and power must be done away with if we are not to fall prey to reducing Tahrir to another spectacle and image in the global counter-cultural scene, yet another ‘pro-democracy movement’ proving the ‘end of history’.

Email: saroj_giri@yahoo.com