'Arab dictators fear Egypt democracy'

The comments come as reports indicate that at least one protester has been killed in the Egyptian city of Port Said in fresh clashes between riot police and demonstrators. Violence erupted in the northern city once again on Thursday after security forces fired tear gas to disperse outraged demonstrators. On Wednesday, protesters gathered near a government building in the city where they threw stones at security forces and chanted slogans such as “Dirty Government.” Since March 3, at least seven people have been killed and hundreds more have been wounded in the city. The North African country has been grappling with unrest in the past few months. Egyptian protesters want President Mohamed Morsi to pursue the goals of the revolution that brought an end to the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011.
 
 
An interview with Saeed Sadek, political sociologist and commentator from Cairo to shed more light on the issue at hand.
 
Q: Saeed Sadek, we were talking about foreign hands in play. We were talking about Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their role. What do you think?
 
Sadek: It is very natural that any revolution will have enemies because if you are going to build a democratic model of government in a sea of tyranny of course you will not like that at all. And so like any revolution in the world, it will always have enemies, external and internal enemies, this is very, very normal.
 
What makes a revolution succeed or not succeed is how you absorb those shocks and how you build your own society and you unify the people around the revolution.
 
    What is happening in Egypt is that a historical mistake was made by the Muslim Brotherhood. They thought that if President Morsi is elected, this is a clear mandate that the Muslim Brotherhood should dominate and reformulate the new political system with the exclusion of other forces and that is why you began to let the internal situation being handled and assisted by the external forces.
 
 
This also does not exclude the Muslim Brotherhood getting foreign assistance from Qatar and so what you need here is that you try to concentrate on the internal situation, try to unify ranks, try to stick to the objectives of the revolution that unified the Egyptian people to get rid of Mubarak.
 
If you do not unify them you would...
 
Q: But that is not happening, is it? I mean we are looking two years down the road here no matter what goes on here is the latest writ regarding this administrative court decision. I mean just time and again things are undermining the revolution.
 
Let us try to move on, since we are running quickly out of time, about the US role, what about the US role? Sense of Deja-vu when John Kerry visited Egypt recently with mass protests. What do you think the US’ role is in Egypt currently.
 
Sadek:
 
    The United States in the Middle East is interested in securing cheap oil and protecting Israel and visiting Egypt is to make sure that the Egyptian foreign policy is not against Israel and the United States. 
 
 
I do not think that the Arab Spring was about foreign policy. It was basically on the domestic situation, fighting corruption and tyranny.
 
The Egyptian government, because of the economic situation and internal troubles, is not really interested in playing an active foreign policy that would change from what Mubarak used to do.
 
The Egyptian foreign policy today is not going to make Egypt Cuba of the Middle East, it is not going to make Egypt Hezbollah or Hamas of the Middle East.
 
The Egyptian foreign policy is interested only in securing financial and economic aid, building the situation inside; stability inside the country.
 
Nobody has illusion that President Morsi is going to be Hassan Nasrallah or Che Guevara.
 
I do not think that the Muslim Brotherhood has that ambition. It is a conservative rightwing organization and not a radical revolutionary group.
 
I do not see that the Arabs in Egypt, Tunisia or any of the Arab Spring countries interested in ...
 
Sadek: Saeed Sadek go ahead?
 
Sadek:: [in response to Ragab]: Not at all, I agree with you my friend. This what they want. They want to ..., they assume that because the Muslim Brotherhood is ruling the country they want to pour cold water on the street, they want to stabilize the situation but they cannot.
 
The revolution is going on still, there are a lot of strong forces in the society who do not accept the Muslim Brotherhood to abode in this country. Take for example women, the Copts.
 
Q: Like who? Who are those strong forces in society? Tell us who they are!
 
Sadek: First of all you can talk about the revolutionary forces. Those who supported Dr. Morsi like the Sixth of April Movement for example, are against him on the streets today.
 
Look for example at women, Copts. You have a lot of strong forces in the Egyptian society, urban areas that did not vote for Dr. Morsi.
 
    Urban areas did not accept the constitution. If you look at the voting in the referendum on the new constitution that was supposed to create the new political rules for the new political system, it hardly got 16 to 20 percent of the total 51 million registered voters.
 
    So this regime is very weak, it is trying to consolidate itself. It is trying to win anything even support but it is failing miserably. You do not have to work hard to discover that this government is a failure. This is very clear.
 
 
Q: Well, I would like to find out from you Saeed Sadek, the foreign players, who are they funding inside Egypt? If you can be specific for us, who those players are? The External players.
 
Sadek: Of course external, as I mentioned to you, you have reactionary autocratic regimes who do not like to see a successful democratic model in the area, especially an Arab model.
 
Israel has failed to be a democratic model in the area because of obvious reasons, and so if Egypt which has one third of the total Arab population succeeds in establishing a democratic model, it would affect all the monarchies in the area.
 
    As you know, many of the youngsters in Saudi Arabia and in the Persian Gulf are educated abroad, they are exposed to social media and they see what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia and so they say: Why not us also?
 
    But if this fails it will not be an inspiring model and they would be happy and content to live under the system that they live in. 
 
 
The United States does not care about the human rights in the Arab World. I mean if you remember John Kerry’s visit here or their relationship with the Saudis, they do not care about the human rights situation as long as you do the strategic work that they want.
 
They want cheap oil from Saudi Arabia, they do not care if women in Saudi Arabia have the right to drive cars or not or that the minorities are suffering.
 
Q: Saeek Sadek I would like to come to you. What has the Muslim Brotherhood done for its people? I think that the most recent..., what they claimed to be an investment was, they were going to lower the price of bread and not have long queues for and also give below market prices on certain goods and renovate some schools. Did they even follow through on that?
 
Sadek: Of course they could not do it. As you know, after revolution the economy is always weak in any country and the security also.
 
And now because he had failed to get the IMF agreement and the parliament election had been delayed.
 
There will be an economic disaster coming soon and that might lead, of course to wide-scale labor unrest in the country to add to the political unrest.
 
There can be a lot of economic or hunger uprisings, even John Kerry warned against that when he was in Cairo and you can see today also in Washington Post a very gloomy article about the Egyptian economy and the impact on the future of Egypt that the System, the whole country, can be sliding into a lot of chaos even more than what we are seeing today if we do not address the economic situation fast and this cannot be done unless you have political ...