US pursues two-track policy to suppress protests in Egypt and Tunisia

[Stalin]

The United States is working intensively to suppress mass protests in both Tunisia and Egypt and prop up the local ruling elites that are entirely subordinate to American imperialism. It is using different tactics in the two countries, dictated in large part by their relative strategic importance to US ruling class interests in the Middle East.

In Tunisia, Washington backed its long-time asset Zine El Abidine Ben Ali until it concluded that his position could not be salvaged despite weeks of violent repression against anti-government demonstrators. Just days before Ben Ali was driven from the country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States was “not taking sides” between the dictator and protesting workers and youth.

It has been widely reported that the US instructed the Tunisian military to refuse Ben Ali's orders to fire live rounds into mass demonstrations in Tunis and other cities, effectively pulling the rug out from under Ben Ali and making the military leader, Gen. Rachid Ammar, the political arbiter within the country.

The US undoubtedly engineered the formation of a so-called interim unity government following Ben Ali’s January 14 flight to Saudi Arabia. This government, dominated entirely by political henchmen of the ousted dictator, has since been the target of popular demonstrations demanding a government free of former members of the ruling party.

The Obama administration has sent its assistant secretary of state for the Near East, Jeffrey D. Feltman, to Tunis to “confer with the interim government.” With the promise of elections in six months, Washington is backing in all essentials the old regime minus Ben Ali, and calling this cynical fraud “democracy.”

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Tuesday’s momentous events in Egypt have complicated Washington’s efforts to contain the upsurge of popular opposition in Tunisia and other Arab countries, including Algeria, Yemen and Jordan. An estimated 50,000 people, predominantly young unemployed workers and students, defied the police dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak, routinely described as a “staunch ally of the US,” to demand his resignation and the lifting of emergency rule.

It was the biggest popular movement in Egypt since food riots swept the country in 1977, four years before the military installed Mubarak as president. In the midst of the regime’s savage police repression—using tear gas, water cannon, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and truncheons—US Secretary of State Clinton Tuesday afternoon declared her government’s support for Mubarak.

It had already been reported that two protesters in Suez had been killed by the police and countless more arrested when Clinton told reporters at the State Department: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

This was an unmistakable signal that the United States was drawing the line in Egypt and would not withdraw its support for Mubarak. It was tantamount to a green light to the regime to employ any degree of force necessary to crush the popular uprising.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/egyp-j27.shtml

Comrade El Stalin

 

[Stalin]

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Egypt is America’s most important Arab state ally in the region and receives the most funding from the US after Israel. The US government has provided an estimated $1.3 billion in military aid per year since Mubarak took power in 1981 and has delivered more than $28 billion in other forms of funding since 1975. Documents recently released by WikiLeaks make clear that the Egyptian government slavishly backs US imperialism on all major policy issues—including oppression of the Palestinians, co-operation with Israel, and preparation for aggression against Iran.

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The dramatic implications for US foreign policy should Egypt follow the path of Tunisia were spelled out this week to the Financial Times by Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East diplomat now at the Woodrow Wilson Centre: “It’s one thing when this happens in Tunisia, a marginal Arab state,” he said, “but you’re now talking about one of the two or three pillars of American security in the region being confronted with the ripple effects of the wave.”

Washington has given the green light for the Mubarak government to proceed with the brutal suppression of the current protests, but there is growing concern in western circles that the tens of thousands of demonstrators, including many students, could be joined in the next days by the millions of poor workers from the suburbs of Egypt’s main cities.

Should the police military tactics of the Mubarak regime fail, a second front is being prepared in order to preserve bourgeois rule in Egypt.

El-Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood have both announced they will take part in today’s protest. Their aim is to bring the mass demonstrations—which they initially opposed—under control.

El-Baradei, founder of the National Alliance for Change, returned to Egypt on Thursday from his home in Austria, declaring that he had “no other choice” than to take part in the mobilizations. He told reporters that he was returning to “make sure that things will be managed in a peaceful way.”

El-Baradei is positioning himself to play a leading role in a so-called “Alternative Parliament”, bringing together all of the main bourgeois opposition movements in Egypt. The explicit aim of this parliament, contained in its founding declaration, is to prevent independent mass protests. The group’s document warned of “an explosion of the masses” should the government fail to carry out reforms.

In an interview with the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm at the end of last year, El-Baradei expressed his support for an alliance of all the supposedly opposition parties in Egypt: “I hope in the next phase we will have a united opposition, the NAC, the Al-Wafd party, the [Muslim] Brotherhood, the Gabha [The Democratic Front party]—we need everyone. And of course we need to link the young people with the labor unions and the elite with the young people.”

Prior to returning to Egypt, El-Baradei, who has very limited support inside Egypt but is feted by the Western press, re-emphasized his readiness to work alongside the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Baradei stressed that he and the Brotherhood shared many of the same political aims. “They are a religiously conservative group, no question about it, but they also represent about 20 percent of the Egyptian people,” he said. “And how can you exclude 20 percent of the Egyptian people?”

For their part, the Muslim Brotherhood have made clear they are quite ready to work with El-Baradei. Noting the absence of the organization’s banners or slogans on Tuesday’s demonstrations, Gamal Nassar, a media adviser for the Brotherhood, denied government claims that the organization had anything to do with the violent clashes that took place. “People took part in the protests in a spontaneous way, and there is no way to tell who belonged to what,” Nassar said, adding that the Brotherhood was only one part of El-Baradei’s umbrella group.

Another spokesman for the Brotherhood revealed the fears of the organization that the protests could escalate and constitute a genuine threat to the Mubarak government. “We hope that the government meets the demands of the demonstrators,” Essam al-Erian declared.

Al Sayed Al Badawy, chairman of Al-Wafd, held a press conference on Wednesday to call for political reforms to “meet the demands of the Egyptian population.” Al-Wafd has proposed a “national salvation government,” the aim of which would be to reestablish order and prevent the realization of the demands of the protesters.

Another component of the attempt to smother any independent movement of the masses is the country’s state-controlled trade union movement. The chairman of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), Hussein Mogawer, has called on all trade union presidents “to prevent workers from participating in all demonstrations at this time.”

On Wednesday the ETUF, which is in the pocket of the ruling NDP, went so far as to issue a statement congratulating the Egyptian Ministry of Interior on the occasion of the national holiday for the police on Tuesday.

According to Al Masry Al Youm, Mogawer has instructed his officials to inform him round the clock of any moves or attempts by workers to join the protests.

A trap is being prepared for the Egyptian masses. Workers and youth should adopt a stance of uncompromising hostility towards the belated intervention by El-Baradei, the Muslim Brotherhood and other bourgeois organizations in Friday’s demonstration. These forces are intent on strangling a genuinely independent movement in order to defend capitalism and the subordination of the country to the dictates of American imperialism, which has presided over so much misery.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/egyp-j28.shtml

Comrade Stalin