I think the last decade (2000-2010) is the key to understanding nowadays Middle East and the events of the second decade of the millennium. In September 2000, Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon made an unnecessary visit to the temple mount. Many Palestinians perceived it as an act of provocation which led to a violent uprising that lasted until 2005. In 2003 the US launched a full scale war on Iraq based on false intelligence. In April 2004 CBS news uncovered the scandalous misconduct in Abou Gharib prison in Iraq. In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza which shortly fell in the hands of Hamas Islamic Militia Group. In 2006 AL-Qaeda in Levant (Lebanon) fired rockets at the north of Israel which led to the second Lebanese war. The war resulted in the death of 1360 Lebanese, 156 Israelis and the displacement of about a million Lebanese citizens.
In 2006 Al-Jazeera broadcast an investigative film about America’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ practices since September 11, 2001. The film would be called “Triangle of Anger”. After the tragic events of 9-11 the CIA carried out a program to hunt, interrogate and deliver potential terrorists to their home countries for further interrogations. Only too many of the detained “terrorists” were normal people leading a normal life who were wrongly flagged. Yousry Fouda, the producer of the film, managed to interview some of the victims. Their testimonies were bone chilling and the amount of injustice made to those people was simply outrageous. The US did not want to be blamed for human rights violations so they gave the dirty job to someone else. Fouda concludes his documentary saying: “Arab regimes, the west and the Islamists: A Triangle of Anger”.
In February 2004 the US air forces captured Ibrahim Awwad al-Samarrai and sent him to the infamous Abou Gharib prison. On December of the same year he would be released as “low threat” only to be sent to another prison called Camp Bucca. In 2009 he is released from Camp Bucca where he was radicalized. He then joins AL-Qaeda in Iraq. One year later he announces himself the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq. In Syria and Lebanon Al-Qaeda was spreading its wings. The events of the 2006 war were extremely polarizing and an influx of volunteers joined AL-Qaeda in the Levant. Later in 2011 the Islamic State in Iraq and Al Qaeda in Levant would join forced to be what is now known as The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS).
If the 1st decade of the millennium witnessed the creation of a monster, the 2nd decade of the millennium witnessed the collapse of a whole region. 2011 will signal the beginning of the Arab spring. It started with Tunisia then Egypt then Libya then Syria and ended in Yemen. The common factor between all of them was: Anger. If the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were relatively restrained the Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni revolutions led to ongoing civil wars.
I, here, would like to focus on Egypt and why Egypt had to succeed if a different future was to be created in the Middle East. I also want to show how the world failed Egypt. When the revolution toppled the Mubarak oppressive regime the whole world congratulated the Egyptians for their peaceful revolution. In the first ever democratic elections in 2012 the people chose, unwisely, the Muslim Brotherhood. A mistake they would pay for direly in the very near future. When the people, after just one year, got fed up with the MB policies they took to the streets again. Only this time the Armed Egyptian Forces were ready to seize the country by fire and blood. Here is when the world failed Egypt. Under US law, the government must suspend foreign aid to any nation whose elected leader is ousted in a coup d’etat. The dovish Obama administration did nothing and the catastrophic Trump foreign policy empowered the military dictator. In France Mr Holland called in the Egyptian ambassador and expressed “deep concerns”. A few months later France would agree to sell Egypt a huge quantity of tactical weapons for riot control. The Renault armored vehicles would be seen in August 2013 dispersing the protesters in what is now called “Rabaa Massacre”. In 2015 Mr Holland signed a $6 billion arms deal making Egypt the first foreign country to purchase the French-made Rafale multipurpose jet fighter. The Egyptian money was more important than the French values for the French administration. The stability of an oppressive military dictatorship was more important than a democracy that was promising yet unstable to the American administration. Here is when the international values collapsed out of shame. This is when the whole world sent a clear message to the Middle East: Democracy is not for you. I am not blaming the failure of the Egyptian revolution on the west, I am just saying they are also responsible for the oppression and dissipation of the young and immature liberal movement.
To put things into context I will leave you here with some numbers to show you the effect of just the French support to dictatorship. The record of Egyptian security services is devastating: demonstrations dispersed by military means (the dispersal of the Rabaa Al Adawiya sit-in on 14 August 2013 in Cairo alone left over 1,000 dead); the incarceration of at least 60,000 political prisoners since 2013; thousands of extra-judicial executions and enforced disappearances (including 2,811 cases of enforced disappearance at the hands of the security services between July 2013 and June 2016). The European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council declared on 21 August 2013 that “the Member States have decided to suspend export licenses to Egypt for any equipment that could be used for domestic repression”, at least eight French companies – encouraged by one government after another – have nevertheless profited from this repression to reap record profits. Between 2010 and 2016 French arms deliveries to Egypt increased from EUR 39.6 million to EUR 1.3 billion. Finally, some companies have sold to the security services technologies for individual surveillance (AMESYS/NEXA/AM Systems); mass interception (SUNERIS/ERCOM); personal data collection (IDEMIA); and crowd control (Safran drones, an AIRBUS/THALES satellite, and Arquus (formerly RTD) light armored vehicles adapted to the urban environment). In so doing, they have all participated in the construction of a widespread surveillance and crowd control architecture aimed at preventing all dissent and social movement and leading to the arrest of tens of thousands of opponents and activists.
The rhetoric now in the Middle East is: It is either military dictatorship that is religiously moderate or another ISIS. The world chose to see that but they did not see us. They did not see that there was a third option. There was civil society movement, there was a liberal movement, there was a feminist movement. Yes, they were weak and immature and they do not represent a critical mass for change but they all were there. Small as they were they were loud and influential and they shook an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood to the core. Egypt could have been a regional power that is also a beacon of hope and a model for democracy for the rest of the Arabic speaking region. An Egyptian democracy could have broken that cycle of anger, it could have given us all hope. We failed because big portion of the public is uneducated and did not know better than electing what they thought “god fearing people”. We failed because our liberal and secular movement was too young and too immature. We failed because of all the realities the world saw in the Middle East they did not see us. Unseen, irrelevant and persecuted we left and the triangle of anger remained.
Reference:
https://www.scribd.com/document/382873255/Egypt-a-repression-Made-in-France#download&from_embed
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/egypt-obama-us-mohamed-morsi-crisis
http:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBOPvb_tT5U
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