Suppression of dissent, Middle-East revolutions

M M Zuhair

The rapidly unfolding events across Egypt will turn out to be a crippling challenge for the strategic interests the US had invested, in the Middle-East in general and Egypt in particular, most observers in the region believe.

Egypt remains the second largest recipient of US foreign aid, next only to Israel, receiving annually US $ 1.5 billion on an average since 1979, when Egypt signed a treaty with Israel, brokered by then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

But 86 percent of this aid earmarked for security, went back to the US as the Egyptian Government of President Hosni Mubarack purchased F-16 jet fighters from Lockheed, Apache Long bow choppers from Boeing and co-produced with US, Abrams Battle Tanks, some components of which began to be manufactured in Egypt.

As the revolution unfolds across the streets of Egypt, the Mubarak Government will leave a nation indebted to the US even as the media revealed that nearly 40 percent of the population lived below the poverty line of US $ two-a-day.

According to David Bender, a Middle East specialist of Eurasia Group in the US, ‘there is a sense among many Egyptians that much American aid goes direct to the security services, used to suppress dissent within the country over the years’. According to Bender, the Suez Canal is of strategic interest since US nuclear warships regularly pass through the canal receiving priority clearance from Mubarak.

The question uppermost in the minds of the US strategic planners, who coincidentally sat with top Egyptian military officials in Washington as the chaos in Cairo engulfed the entire Egypt, must have been, the likelihood of the fire of freedom now raging through Egypt, burning US strategic interests in the entire Middle-East.

According to Said Zulficar, a political analyst in Cairo, top Army officers in Egypt have close links with the US and they are well taken care off, while the entire state apparatus toes the strategic interest of US and Israel!

“Get out, Mubarak! Saudi is waiting for you!”, was the universal cry of the demonstrators who surfaced in their thousands in city centres in Cairo and along the Nile across Shubra, Alexandria, Kubra, Suez, Mansoura for the sixth day in succession, even as Time magazine quoted Sidney Tarrow of Cornell University, an expert on social uprisings saying, “if the Egyptian regime responds with ruthless repression and ( the regime) is effective at it, then I think they will put a stopper in the movement”.

President Hosni Mubarak’s son Jamal Mubarak was reported by ‘Akhbar al-Arab’, as having fled to Britain with his family on January 26, amidst the widespread Arab revolt which began engulfing the region.

Rising unemployment, burning cost of living and repressive governments were seen by many in the streets as only the tip of the iceberg.

Even as most households struggled for a respectable living in crumbling neighbourhoods, leaders of the region were seen sinning in corruption, leading inexplicably extravagant lifestyles, stories of which spread mischievously through social networks.

But the greater fury amongst the growing percentage of educated youth, centred around the Saudi purchase of US weapons for a shocking sum of US $ 60 billion plus and the purchase by the other Gulf countries of another US $ 68 billion worth of American arms even though a tiny percentage of the US $ 128 billion could have helped the poorer regional countries to tackle with greater dignity their home front economic woes!

Widespread exchanges via SMS, Twitter, Facebook continued to incense the Arab world that the repressive regimes were being kept alive from collapse by world powers who talked of democracy and freedom of expression worldwide, while as disclosed by French TV, the Foreign Minister of Tunisia was encouraged by the country’s colonial masters’ counterpart to deal with the revolution as firmly, effectively and promptly (meaning repressively) even after the then 23 year dictator of Tunisia President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia, having been refused entry into France. Meanwhile US Assistant Secretary of State for Middle-East Jeffrey Feltman had also reportedly arrived in Tunis, ignoring the widespread disenchantment in the country and the region against the US in particular. Israel too added its voice, by calling for a repressive suppression of Friday’s nationwide protests in Egypt.

The US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the manoeuverings in Pakistan had unbelievable impact in the minds of the people across the entire Arab World, as social network exchanges showed.

A million Iraqis - all Arabs - died in the invasion under the pretext of the search for weapons of Mass Destruction.

The country was in shambles with widows and orphans struggling for a living, while precious oil was being sold out by US Companies in collusion with Iraqi businesses. These were stories that spread in the Arab streets, filling hatred against the regimes at home and equally against the US, France, Britain and Germany.

Misjudging the widespread feelings for the Palestinians, deprived of a state in 1948 by the UN itself, the Middle-East came into the stark reality, that the UN together with the US were acting in questionable collusion against the Palestinians. This became apparent not only when former US President Bush tried to make a humour out of a devastating slip, that the US was committed to a Palestinian State, “even if it takes another 60 years,” but also when the then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saw no problem in moving the Palestinians, half - way across the globe to be settled permanently in South America.

The UN sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon targetting ‘Hisbullah’, the movement for resistance against Israeli occupation of Arab lands, which was seen across the Middle-East as a Kangaroo Court, sponsored by UN with the US and Israeli support, added fuel to fire. Stories that did the rounds in the Arab Streets were of betrayals after betrayals, by the world’s powers with whom the Kings and the Dictators of the Arab World - seen at home as puppets of the West-were wont to move cheek by jowl.

The wealthy Arabs escaped the dictatorial regimes to find safe havens in the West. But that was not for long. Recent repressive measures by Western regimes against Muslim women wearing the ‘niqab’ and against the Muslims as a whole, treated as a suspect community, had according to analysts, left the Arabs with hardly any option except to revolt against their oppressors at home! Perhaps an unwitting result of the orchestrated ‘Islamophobia’ in the West.

People on the street do know, that some of the Kings in the region became kings having served as British agents during the pre-second world war era, switching to the Americans as the US emerged as a world super power and that the alliances benefitted only themselves, while people suffered without any space, economically, socially and politically.

They see little doubt, the fire of freedom spreading across the entire Middle-East, country after country, sooner than later. That would certainly change substantially the face of the world, in the decades to come. [email protected]