Israel ties expose Egypt gov't hypocrisy

Question: Saturday, saw the adjournment of the trial of 1,200 supporters of the ousted president. 16 more university students were given jail terms for protesting. Where is the democracy that the military swore to uphold?
 
Al-Shayyal: There is no such thing. It is a very strange contradiction. The military rule and the army being in power are in itself against any democracy.
 
The suspension of the constitution, which has been agreed by 64 percent of the population, or the electorates and the creation of a new one, which is a copy of the old one with the exception of putting too much power and special status to the army, making it in a position that cannot be controlled financially or is not accountable to any of the state supervision devices.
 
    As a matter of fact, it has banned also the opposition parties and banning the channels and the newspapers, which represent the anti-coup opposition, tells us that the democracy does not exist anymore.
 
    So, the trials are completing the circle by denying the thousands of ‘detainees’ they call them, the people under arrest who make up to 25,000 people – denying them the right to have lawyers or to be examined properly before directing any charges against them.
 
The summary trials, which are producing a wonderful mixture of verdicts - penalizing students who demonstrated for 17 or 12 years and fining them thousands and thousands of pounds while allowing the officers who killed 37 detainees in cold blood in the premises of the prison, allowed them to go free.
 
    It is a farce, a big farce.
 
Q: The ousting of former president Mohammad Morsi was not a coup d’état. What is your response to that?
 
Al-Shayyal: All the claims that were brought by the respected guest from Cairo are baseless because there is no evidence whatsoever that Dr. Morsi had resigned or handed one square inch of Egyptian territory to anyone. There is no evidence of that at all.
 
Otherwise, we would have seen Sinai occupied by Palestinians and they are not there at all; or we would have seen Shalatin and Halaib as he mentioned in Sudanese hands and there is not a single Sudanese there; or we would Qatar having its own investments and its own projects established on parts of northern Egypt.
 
So, these words are merely .. lies and repeated lies that have been put forward by the anti-Morsi propaganda and unfortunately it sold very well to the people because they had spent - the anti-democratic elements and the pro-Hosni Mubarak regime and the anti-revolution - spent billions of dollars on channels, which have propagated such lies day and night for one full year until the ordinary Egyptian started to believe that this is true.
 
But the days have proved that nothing of that happened. On the contrary what we have seen yesterday and the day before is the visits by the official military delegation to Tel Aviv where they had established very good relations with the Israeli army.
 
    And in the meantime Israel came with all its papers and in the open to say that they are working very hard to convince the United States to be more cooperative with the regime in Egypt now because the regime has got so much in common with the Israelis. This is the situation.
 
I think the regime – the coup regime led by Field Marshall al-Sisi should be tried because they are collaborating with an enemy. At this time they are not, but they are accusing Dr. Morsi that he was having contacts with Hamas.
 
    Contacting with Hamas became high treason after the coup d’état in Egypt while having fundamental links with the Israeli army is considered to be a natural thing. 
 
Then it is for the Egyptians to judge now who is going and who already sold Egypt whether it was Morsi or the present coup.         
 
Q: Is the Muslim Brotherhood dividing the Egyptian society?
 
Al-Shayyal: Never. On the contrary, Dr. Morsi was the first president ever to go to places such as Sinai, Upper Egypt and started real development projects there and allocated in the budget of 2012 and 2013 huge amounts of money to keep these projects of development to cure some of the illness of the 30 years of Mubarak.
 
On the contrary, the coup had stopped the traffic and the trains for Upper Egypt for 120 days killing the economy of Upper Egypt. They, under the pretext of fighting terrorism in Sinai, they blockaded Sinai. From the west there is no movement going to more than Sinai; and from the east by blocking the trade between the Sinai population and the Gaza Strip, which amounted during the time of Morsi to one billion Egyptian pounds a year and this was a main source of income of the people of Sinai.      
 
So, now the people there are revolting because they have been threatened in their livelihoods. Meanwhile the army is killing the people every day, and the police as well, in the demonstrations he referred to. So, the murderer is known which are the security forces, while those who are killed are merely the peaceful protesters.
 
And they say this we cannot tolerate and that’s why they issue their own draconian legislations.
 
So unfortunately there is a false image presented, which tries to distort the facts on the ground, but the real facts that Egypt has become now a huge concentration camp and the Egyptian people from all backgrounds and all spectrums are deprived of their human rights and the military coup authorities are bringing back the worst as in the earlier periods in modern Egyptian history.       
 
Q: Analysts have pointed out that Egypt is at an impasse. The protests continue against the army-installed government and the coup; and the army continues on with its agenda for Egypt. Who will give in at the end? 
 
Al-Shayyal: I think the coup is numbering its final days and the will of the Egyptian people to recover their freedoms and to go back to the democratic path, which they have chosen and which they have seen one full year under the leadership of Dr. Morsi.
 
They are longing for it again and they will achieve their victory and their goals ultimately and the coup will be a black page in our history, which will be torn and throw in the nearest dust bin.