Analysis: Egypt prepares leap in the dark. Again
By
Alastair Macdonald and Yasmine Saleh CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt is heading
for a "dark tunnel", says the head of its armed forces. How he and his
generals respond to a political showdown in the streets may determine
whether its new democracy survives to see the light. The warning at the
start of…
Analysis: Egypt prepares leap in the dark. Again
Alastair Macdonald and Yasmine Saleh
33 minutes ago
Protesters light a poster of President Mohamed Mursi on fire in Tahrir square as they listen to Mursi's …
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt is heading for a "dark tunnel", says the head of its armed forces. How he and his generals respond to a political showdown in the streets may determine whether its new democracy survives to see the light.
The warning at the start of the week from General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was presented as a wake-up call to the rival factions, President Mohamed Mursi and his Islamist allies on one side, a disparate coalition of liberals and a mass of Egyptians simply frustrated by economic stagnation on the other.
But the velvet glove of Sisi's language, urging politicians to find consensus and avert bloodshed, could not conceal an iron-fist of possible intervention, even if he was widely believed when he said the generals, secure and prosperous in their new role, have no wish to go back to running the country.
One thing is clear. The "consensus" Sisi urged politicians to reach this week is absent. A vague offer from Mursi of collaboration was met with disdain from the opposition.
So whether the generals step in, with their half million men, U.S.-funded hardware and a 60-year-old sense of entitlement, now depends on how the next few days play out at flashpoints like Tahrir Square and Mursi's palace in Cairo and on the streets of a dozen other major cities across the country.
The numbers on the street will matter. So too will violence.
Both sides say they take heart from Sisi's promise to defend the "will of the people". For the Islamists, that means the president and government freely chosen in a series of elections at which they defeated a rudderless opposition.
But Mursi's rivals believe they can bring millions more out to demonstrate, especially on Sunday, the anniversary of Mursi's inauguration, to show that the popular will lies elsewhere - much as they did when the Arab Spring uprising of early 2011 persuaded the army that Hosni Mubarak's days in power were over.
Few believe Sisi and a new generation of leaders elevated by Mursi want to grab long-term control in a full coup by a military that is held in high regard by almost all Egyptians.
But many of the Islamists' adversaries, from hardline Mubarak nostalgists to liberal idealists, seem ready to welcome a short-term shove by the army to abort the direction the revolution has taken and give a second chance to efforts to agree an institutional framework to end the polarized deadlock.
TRIGGERS
Whether the army will do so, and how far it might push Mursi, probably depends on two potential triggers:
The first, Sisi spelled out explicitly, is violence. If there is blood on the tarmac, perhaps gunplay, the generals who already have troops deployed in the background, could invoke "national security" and a government failure to keep order.
"The army has made its position clear: it will not allow violence and won't stand by if things seem to be getting out of control," one military source told Reuters on Thursday after the opposition rejected Mursi's overtures. Leaders on neither side seemed fully capable of controlling their supporters, he added.
The second, less explicit trigger, is how the military may interpret the popular will. While their financial sponsors in Washington have angered the opposition by urging them not to overturn the result of Mursi's election, the army listened to the voice of the street before, in ousting Mubarak.
A number of protest movements since the uprising have fizzled out quickly. That cannot be ruled out again. Although a petition against Mursi claiming to have 15 million signatures lends weight to anecdotal evidence that many will show up.
The military source who spoke to Reuters said a turnout at opposition protests on the scale of 2011 - many millions drawn from across society and prepared to stay on the streets for days or weeks - could see Mursi obliged to relent: "If the protesters' numbers exceed those seen during the revolution, then everybody's position will have to change," he said.
"No one will be able to oppose the will of the people," he added. "At least, not for long."
Veteran commentator Mohamed Hassenein Heikal, who has close ties to the military, told a television interviewer the army was concerned at a lack of vision for the future among politicians: "The army will always side with the people," he said. "Whether their will is expressed at the ballot box or in some other way."
CONFRONTATION
Few independent observers can assess with much certainty how the showdown between the factions will play out.
Both seem unwilling to flinch: Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood insist on their electoral legitimacy and tell opponents just to fight another election in due course; the opposition coalition demands Mursi resign and make way for an interim authority to reset all the rules before new elections.
"The two sides' demands are pretty maximal so I see possibilities for real confrontation," said Nathan Brown, an expert on Egypt's transition at George Washington University who was in Cairo this month. "Significant violence is a possibility.
"Even if you have military intervention it's not clear of what kind or whether it would solve anything."
Opponents accuse the Brotherhood of feigning interest in democracy while aiming to entrench themselves deep in the state as Mubarak's people did. Mursi and his allies in turn accuse many in officialdom, and the media, of sabotaging their efforts.
Anti-Islamist sentiment in the police and other security organs that led Mubarak's fight against them for decades adds an element of doubt to the government's ability to staunch the kind of violence that might trigger an intervention by the army.
One source inside one of the domestic security agencies told Reuters this week that many in his organisation were hoping that a violent confrontation could bring down Islamist rule:
"There's a battle coming between us and the jihadists," he said. "We need to cleanse the country of them.
"More state agencies will join us once they see the violence those terrorists inflict - as they will in the days to come."
Such talk, while impossible to verify how widespread it is, somewhat supports allegations by Mursi's government that agents provocateurs from the old regime are behind recent clashes.
MILITANTS
How easily the army could quell violence is also unclear.
Mursi has relied increasingly on support from more militant Islamists, including al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, a movement that spent years fighting the old regime and had ties with al Qaeda. Its leaders, many freed from jail after the revolution, speak openly of taking up arms again to defend the president. They fear a return to army rule would mean prison again for them, or death.
Nathan Brown said an army move that tried to shut the Islamists back out of the system could prove bloody: "If it came to denying the Islamists political power, the Brotherhood, probably with the support of al-Gamaa, will fight," he said.
"That's what could be very very nasty ... but I don't think a full-scale military takeover is the most likely intervention. There's all kinds of other things they could do short of that."
Yasser El-Shimy, Egypt analyst at the International Crisis Group in Cairo, said he believed that the most the army was likely to do was use its strength to force both sides toward the sort of compromise Sisi spoke about in his warning on Sunday:
"Even if the protests are massive and there is really bad violence," he said, "If the army is to intervene, it will not be to pressure Mursi to resign, or call for presidential elections, but rather to try and make some compromises on the constitution and the government, in order to appease all parties."
Yet those compromises are unlikely to get any easier, especially if more blood is spilt, leaving Egyptian democracy in peril: "It is getting more and more complicated to find a political solution," said a senior Western diplomat in Cairo.
"And the more active the army becomes, the weaker civilian institutions will be. It will be a loss of legitimacy."
(Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Cairo; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)
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Analysis: Egypt prepares leap in the dark. Again
It's difficult to know whether what is coming for Egypt looks more like Libya or looks more like Syria. Actually either type of events or even nothing we have seen before could occur. However, like most of these situations wealthier Egyptians likely might ship their wives and children out of Egypt(if they haven't during the last couple of years already) until things stabilize once again. When will that be? Tomorrow. Next week. Next Year? Never? Who knows? That's the problem. No one knows. There is no stability and there might or might not ever be again. And the primary problem is the economy is no longer self sustaining because there are too many people and not enough resources and the Nile might be cut off as a water source by Ethiopia soon too.
Egyptians up in arms as Ethiopia builds giant hydro dam on Nile River
africaim.com/egyptians-up-in-arms-as-ethiopia-builds-giant-hydro-dam-...
Jun 7, 2013 – Ethiopia started to divert the flow of the Blue Nile river to construct a giant dam on Tuesday, according to its state media, in a move that could ...Egyptians up in arms as Ethiopia builds giant hydro dam on Nile River; minister rules out war
(Elias Asmare/ Associated Press ) – In this photo made Tuesday, April 2, 2013, shows the construction of the dam in Asosa Region Ethiopia. Ethiopia started to divert the flow of the Blue Nile river to construct a giant dam on Tuesday, according to its state media, in a move that could impact the Nile-dependent Egypt. Downstream nations Egypt and Sudan have objected to the construction, saying it violates a colonial-era agreement which reportedly gives Egypt nearly 70 percent of Nile River waters.
- By Associated Press,
Gallery
Ethiopia’s decision challenges a colonial-era agreement that had given downstream Egypt and Sudan rights to the Nile water, with Egypt taking 55.5 billion cubic meters and Sudan 18.5 billion cubic meters of 84 billion cubic meters, with 10 billion lost to evaporation. That agreement, first signed in 1929, took no account of the eight other nations along the 6,700-kilometer (4,160-mile) river and its basin, which have been agitating for a decade for a more equitable accord.
And Ethiopia’s unilateral action seems to ignore the 10-nation Nile Basin Initiative to promote cooperation.
Ethiopia is leading five nations threatening to sign a new cooperation agreement without Egypt and Sudan, effectively taking control from Egypt of the Nile, which serves some 238 million people.
Mohammed Abdel-Qader, governor of Egypt’s Gharbiya province in the Nile Delta, warned the dam spells “disaster” and is a national security issue for the North African nation.
“Taking Egypt’s share of water is totally rejected … The Nile means everything to Egypt,” said Gov. Abdel-Qader.
Baheddin said Egypt already is suffering “water poverty” with an individual’s share of 640 cubic meters well below the international average of 1,000 cubic meters.
Egypt protests that others along the Nile have alternative water sources, while the Nile is the sole water source in the mainly desert country.
Ethiopian officials say the dam is needed to provide much-needed power for development.
At a ceremony marking the diversion of the Nile, Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnin said Ethiopia could export cheap electricity from the dam to energy-short Egypt and Sudan. He insisted the dam would not affect the flow of water to Egypt.
Experts say otherwise.
Alaa el-Zawahri, a dams engineer at Cairo University and an expert on a national committee studying the ramifications of the Ethiopian dam, said Egypt stands to lose about 15 billion cubic meters of water — 27 percent of annual share — each of the five years that Ethiopia has said it will take to fill the dam. The country’s current share already is insufficient.
Egypt also would lose between 30 and 40 percent of its hydropower generation, he said.
“If I was more of an optimist, I would say it will cause significant damage (to Egypt),” he told The Associated Press. “If I was being pessimistic, it is a catastrophe.”
“Potentially catastrophic” is the opinion of Haydar Yousif Hussin, an Italian-based Sudanese hydrologist who has worked on Nile water issues for 35 years. The dam’s reservoir “will hold back nearly one and a half times the average annual flow of the Blue Nile” and “drastically affect the downstream nations’ agriculture, electricity and water supply,” he said in an article published in the South African magazine Infrastructure News.
Given the massive size of the dam, it could lose as much as 3 billion cubic meters of water to evaporation each year, Yousif added.
Mekonnin said the dam construction is at 21 percent and should be complete by 2015. Ethiopia has said the massive dam, located 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Sudan’s border, is being built with a storage capacity for 74 million cubic meters of water and generating power of 6,000 megawatts — 30 percent more than the electricity produced by Egypt’s Aswan Dam, built on the Nile in the 1960s.
But very little other information is available.
“It remains irresponsible for Ethiopia to build Africa’s biggest hydropower project, on its most contentious river, with no public access to critical information about the dam’s impacts,” Yousif wrote. He urged Ethiopian officials to “allow some light to penetrate this secretive development scheme.”
Ethiopia has timed the dam’s construction while Egypt is at its weakest. The government announced the project in March 2011, when Egypt’s government was overwhelmed by the Arab Spring revolution. The Nile diversion came the day after leaders of the two countries met in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on the sidelines of an African Union summit, and days before Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan were due to issue a technical report on the dam.
Information about the funding of the project is also unclear.
The World Bank and other donors have refused involvement, reportedly because of Egyptian lobbying of countries like the United States, which considers Egypt a key ally and pivotal to security in the region.
The contract for the $4.8 billion project was awarded without competitive bidding to the Italian company Salini Construttori, according to Yousif and other experts.
Ethiopia says it is funding the massive project on its own, urging citizens to buy bonds that earn 5 or 6 percent interest. Norway’s Development Today magazine quoted Kjetil Tronvoll of Oslo’s International Law and Policy Institute as saying that government employees are being pressed to donate one month’s salary to the dam and, when people protested, they were arrested.
A journalist who wrote an article criticizing the fund-raising methods, Reeyot Alemu, was arrested, tried for terrorism and sentenced to two years’ jail, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The issue of the dam also highlights traditional differences between Africa’s northern Arabs and the blacks of the south.
That perception must be corrected, Egypt’s assistant for foreign affairs, Essam el-Haddad, wrote on Egypt’s foreign policy blog.
“Egypt’s rejection of the project reinforces a negative stereotype of Egypt that is spreading among the people of Africa … that this country is the reason for the absence of development and economic progress in African countries because it has acquired, unduly, the largest share of (Nile) water for its development,” he wrote. “Egypt seeks to be a real partner in development in Africa.”
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