Egyptian military wins in rigged referendum

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VOL. 32, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2014 WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG U.S. / CANADA $1 Egypt’s Supreme Electoral Committee hailed the two-day, Jan. 14-15, vote on the military’s proposed new constitu­ tion. They were not embarrassed to re­ port that the vote was 98 percent in fa­ vor, with some 39 percent of the elector­ ate participating. This was as compared to, they stressed, the 33 percent who participated in the 2011 vote that had approved the proposed constitution of the now deposed Muslim Brotherhood (MB) President Mohammed Morsi.

In Egypt today, numbers are impor­ tant, as when the leader of the July 3, 2013, coup, General Abdel Fattah alSisi, the expected candidate and winner in the upcoming presidential elections, insisted that some 17 million people had rallied in Cairo to demand Morsi’s resignation. The “people’s general” and Minister of Defense, Sisi, readily com­ plied with the demand, repeatedly em­ phasizing that there were more people in the streets on June 30 calling for Mor­ si’s resignation than had voted to elect Morsi a year earlier.

The fact that Sisi’s numbers were in­ flated at least 17-fold mattered little to this self-declared democrat, who proceeded in the weeks following his coup to slaughter in Tahrir Square and in house-to-house searches, some 6000 members of Egypt’s largest political/re­ ligious grouping, the 10-million-mem­ ber Muslim Brotherhood (MB). His ob­ jective was to justify his bloody coup to the world in mathematical terms while no one was allowed to confirm the pre­ cise number of his victims.

Having outlawed and demonized the Muslim Brotherhood—seizing its prop­ erty, banning its meetings, and arrest­ ing virtually all its leaders—Sisi, to the tragic cheers of perhaps a majority of Egypt’s “democratic” and pro-capitalist “liberal left,” not to mention elements of the “anti-capitalist left,” extended the ban to all would-be oppositionists. Trade unionists, student youth, intellec­ tuals, and small socialist currents who dared to issue the most mild of state­ ments protesting Sisi’s decrees were similarly hounded, beaten, arrested, and jailed.

“The near unanimity of the vote,” said the Jan. 18 New York Times, “was plausi­ ble because the government thoroughly suppressed any opposition to the new charter [constitution]. A campaign of arrests and mass shootings has crippled the Brotherhood, the main opposition group, which was formally outlawed SOCIALIST (Above) Cairo plain-clothes police officer detains a supporter of exPresident Morsi during Jan. 26 celebration of 2011 revolt.

three weeks ago, and it had called for a boycott of the plebiscite. Almost no crit­ ics of the charter were able to express their views in the news media or on the streets. And several activists were ar­ rested just for hanging signs urging a ‘no’ vote.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. Congress has proceeded with plans to grant Egypt’s military dictatorship its usual annual military aid package to the tune of $1.3 billion, but not before Secretary of State John Kerry issued yet another pronouncement encouraging the dicta­ torship, after first electing Sisi, to later include members of the MB. Sisi’s antic­ ipated two-round election system is de­ signed to allow him to first consolidate power by decree and then to organize elections with an essentially pre-deter­ mined result.

Kerry gently chided the bloody July 3 coup-makers when they arrested Morsi, “the elected president,” and urged that Sisi’s bloodbath be restrained a bit. Pressing the new dictators to open ne­ gotiations with the deposed president to find a formula wherein a hopefully compliant MB would exchange their prison cells for token posts in a U.S.-fa­ cilitated new regime was then a priority U.S. objective. Snowden See page 2 .