Egypt’s Dystopia Is a Lesson for the World
▻https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7v9pd/egypts-dystopia-is-a-lesson-for-the-world
Protesters fill Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011. Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
“The narrative that what happened in Egypt was a total failure, that things just returned back to exactly where they started, is pushed by those who are unable to understand or accept the challenge posed by those 18 days,” says Professor Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian now based at the University of Cambridge, referring to the period of revolutionary protest in Tahrir that brought Mubarak’s reign to a close. “It was an effort to imagine an alternative form of society, one that had implications not just for Egypt, but for societies everywhere. It tried to make a space where those conversations could happen, and in that it succeeded. It was possible. And precisely because it was possible, it was dangerous.”
https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1611574669241-gettyimages-1230340728.jpeg?resize=1600:* Tahrir Square, the beating heart of the revolution, pictured in November last year. Photo: Khaled DESOUKI / AFP
A decade later, with a brief flurry of pro-revolution platitudes now long forgotten – “We should teach the Egyptian revolution in our schools,” remarked then-prime minister David Cameron in February of 2011, shortly before he made an “inspiring” visit to Tahrir Square as part of an arms-sales tour across the region – western leaders have reprised their role as staunch defenders of Egypt’s dictatorship, whose interests are increasingly entwined with their own.
Sisi, Egypt’s current president and the man who oversaw the massacre of nearly 1,000 protesters during a single day in 2013 (shortly after he deposed Mohamed Morsi, who later died in jail), is a regular presence on the red carpet in European capitals. Considered a bulwark against both violent extremism and mass migration from the region, despite there being scant evidence of his effectiveness on either front, Sisi’s security forces are equipped with French fighter jets, Italian frigates, German submarines and British assault rifles,. Last month, President Emmanuel Macron awarded him France’s highest order of merit, the Légion d’honneur.
“That year came with so much – so much promise, and so much trauma.”
But for Sisi, even more vital than cutting-edge weaponry and prestigious photo-calls is the growing entrenchment of his regime in a globalised financial system, which helps ensure that his own stability – and, consequently, the suppression of any future revolutionary challenge – is aligned with the economic concerns of western states and some of the world’s biggest multinational forces. A huge surge in both international loans (Egypt’s external debt has doubled as a proportion of GDP since Sisi assumed power) and foreign direct investment, particularly in the oil and gas sector (BP, Britain’s biggest company, pours more money into Egypt than any other country), has helped drive rising inequality, as ordinary Egyptian taxpayers shoulder a disproportionate strain when it comes to paying back the interest-heavy loans and the related government cuts to social spending. Ten million Egyptians have been newly dragged down into poverty over the past half-decade; meanwhile, the number of “ultra high net worth individuals” in Cairo is rising faster than anywhere else on the planet.
“The Egyptian government’s fiscal and economic policies are accelerating the transfer of wealth from lower and middle classes to itself and business elites, with likely devastating consequences,” warned Maged Mandour, an analyst for the Carnegie Endowment, in a report last year entitled “Sisi’s war on the poor”. He went on to note that higher levels of deprivation could be detected most clearly in areas like healthcare – where spending as a proportion of GDP has plummeted, leaving less money for doctors, nurses, hospital beds, COVID tests and oxygen tanks. None of this appears to trouble Egypt’s enthusiastic foreign backers; business media giant Bloomberg recently lauded the country as an “emerging market darling”.
“At best,” says Fahmy, the historian, “we — the Egyptian people — are a nuisance to the regime. At worst, we are a danger. In either case, we are a burden.
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