When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned in February, most of the world cheered for what looked like another victory for the Arab Spring uprisings. But although the resignation felt like closure and seemed to herald a new beginning, Egypt is still struggling with much the same problems as before. Some commentators even suggest that the worst is yet to come.
“Lots of chaos is going on. No one is satisfied with the current situation at all,” said Ahmed Zidan, Egyptian activist and editor-in-chief of Mideast Youth, summing up the situation on the ground in Cairo in an email to The Epoch Times.
In the eight months since Mubarak’s resignation, not much has changed, except that world media interest has moved elsewhere. The military council still rules Egypt, although elections have been announced for November and January. Emergency laws are still in effect and crackdowns against protesters, bloggers, and activists continue, with some 10,000 civilians behind bars following military trials, according to Zidan.
Mere days ago, the military carried out a large-scale crackdown against some activist/blogger cafes in downtown Cairo. Meanwhile, the case of blogger Maikel Nabil, who was sentenced to three years in prison for a long and critical blog post about the military in March, is up for review on Oct. 4.
Nabil has been on a hunger strike for 32 days, Zidan says. He called the military trials against civilians the “boiling point” in Egypt today, along with the emergency laws.
This development is hardly a surprise to commentators. Just days after Mubarak’s resignation, analyst George Friedman of STRATFOR wrote a sobering report titled “Egypt: The Distance Between Enthusiasm and Reality,” in which he named the military, rather than the people, the real force behind the Egyptian “revolution.”
“The crowd in Cairo, as telegenic as it was, was the backdrop to the drama, not the main feature,” Friedman says, going on to describe how the military was already at loggerheads with Mubarak over the aging president’s plan to let his son Gamal take over after him.
Gamal Mubarak had no military experience, and making him the leader would have signaled a shift in the Egyptian regime. Ever since Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser founded the current regime in a military coup, Egyptian leaders have come from a military background, ensuring the military’s continued influence.
With Mubarak’s plan to simply put his son in charge via another highly dubious election, despite his not even having served in the military, Egypt would in effect have become a hereditary monarchy, Friedman argues.
“What happened was not a revolution. The demonstrators never brought down Mubarak, let alone the regime. What happened was a military coup that used the cover of protests to force Mubarak out of office in order to preserve the regime,” Friedman wrote in February, and today’s situation seems to indicate that he may have been right.
Litany of Problems
Meanwhile, regardless of the leadership situation, Egypt is struggling with huge domestic problems. Public employees such as teachers, doctors, and transport workers are on strike, and unemployment has in fact risen since Mubarak’s resignation. According to government figures quoted by Al-Jazeera, the unemployment rate among the young population is 20 percent, and for women with university degrees a staggering 55 percent.
In his Sept. 13 article on PajamasMedia titled “Endgame for Egypt,” David P. Goldman paints an extremely bleak picture of Egypt’s future, predicting that the whole Egyptian state will collapse, not due to political instability, but because it is essentially bankrupt in all ways that matter. He calls the Arab Spring a misnomer, arguing that it is in fact “a convulsion of a dying society.”
“Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45 percent of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing,” Goldman says.
Increased world market prices of staple foods and the ongoing fiscal crisis in parts of Europe are further exacerbating the situation, according to Friedman.
Egypt today is the result of decades of dictatorship and mismanagement, keeping the people ignorant and letting public education deteriorate, and it has left the country, which lacks the big natural resources of Libya, for example, in a hopeless cul-de-sac.
“The result, I predict, will be a humanitarian catastrophe that makes Somalia look like a picnic,” Friedman writes.
Ahmed Zidan says he is “[not] pessimistic, but rather realistic” about Egypt’s future, and predicts that the military will hold the elections, but choose to make some kind of deal with the popular political Islamists and thereby remain in power behind the scenes. Such a development would mean the last straw for many better-educated Egyptians, who would then choose to leave the country, draining its intellectual resources.
“I hope I’m wrong, because if that happened, it means we’ve progressed backward,” Zidan said.
