Vol. 77/No. 31      August 26, 2013

BY SETH GALINSKY  
The Egyptian army and police launched a bloody crackdown against supporters of deposed Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo and other cities in Egypt Aug. 14. Interim President Adly Mansour also declared a state of emergency, imposed a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew and appointed provincial governors loyal to the military brass.

According to state-owned Al Ahram newspaper, as of Aug. 15 there were 525 dead and more than 3,700 wounded. The Interior Ministry said that 43 police and soldiers were also killed.

Mohamed El Baradei — who was appointed vice president after Morsi’s ouster and represents Egypt’s relatively small liberal bourgeois intelligencia — resigned from the government in protest.

Firing tear gas, automatic weapons and birdshot, and sending in bulldozers and tanks in the early morning, the army and police attacked two camps set up six weeks ago by the Muslim Brotherhood to demand the return of the Morsi government, ousted after millions took to the streets throughout Egypt demanding his resignation.

Morsi was elected president in June 2012, taking the place of a military junta that had removed dictator Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 after weeks of popular protest. Working people took advantage of the space opened up with the ouster of Mubarak — and the competition between competing factions of the capitalist class, especially the military and the Muslim Brotherhood — to organize unions, demand higher wages and better work conditions, and push for rights for rural toilers.

Over the next year, workers, farmers and layers of the middle classes experienced rapidly deteriorating economic conditions along with attempts to clamp down on democratic rights. Toilers were pressed to bear the brunt of the economic crisis and confronted relentless efforts to put a lid on labor struggles and union organizing. As part of its broader assault on rights, the Brotherhood sought to use state power to impose its sectarian view of Islam and encouraged attacks by thugs against those who disagreed.

The website of Qatar-based news service al-Jazeera, which supports the Brotherhood, showed government snipers firing at the camps, as well as some Muslim Brotherhood supporters firing semi-automatic weapons. Muslim Brotherhood backers attacked a dozen police stations in response, and burned down more than seven Christian churches.

The military — which owns factories, real estate, and farms and is the single-largest employer in the country — never ceased being the main pillar of bourgeois rule. On the heels of popular pressure to oust Morsi, the military high command is now moving to deal lasting blows to the Muslim Brotherhood, its main capitalist competitor, which not long ago was forced to function underground. With its backing from a section of capitalists in Egypt and throughout the Middle East and its history of organization and discipline, the Brotherhood is the one force capable of being seriously armed in short order and posing a military threat to the army.

On the eve of the crackdown Mansour appointed 20 new heads of provinces —13 of them former or current military and police officials. The appointment of former police official Samy Sedhom as deputy governor of Sharqiya province “caused an outcry by a number of activists,” Al-Ahram reported, because of his “prominent role in political repression during the Mubarak era.”

On August 12, army troops tried to disperse a sit-in by workers demanding higher pay at Suez Steel in Suez and allowed police to arrest two strikers.

“I am against what happened in Rabaa Square [the attack on the Brotherhood camp] and the state of emergency,” Fatma Ramadan, a leader of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, told the Militant by phone from Cairo Aug. 15. At the same time, she said, the attacks on the churches shows that the Brotherhood “is taking revenge against ordinary people. This situation deepens the divisions among workers.”

The crackdown “is the only way to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, although I am opposed to the bloodshed,” Mahmoud Salama, a construction worker in Ismailia, said by phone. “We as workers are not armed, we only have the army to stand between them and us.”

The April 6 Youth Movement, which played an important role in the protests against the Mubarak dictatorship and against the Morsi regime, condemned the attack on the pro-Morsi sit-ins, while noting that the Islamist group had been provocative, deliberately hoping for martyrs.

“Muslim Brotherhood leading figures and the interim government preferred bloody confrontation in order to achieve their goals,” the group said in an April 15 statement. “The regime wanted to enforce its rule and the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to use the blood of the victims to make political gain.”

The administration of Barack Obama issued a statement condemning the military’s moves. He cancelled a joint military exercise scheduled for next month. But no mention was made of trimming back the $1.3 billion in annual aid to Egypt’s military, with which Washington has maintained close relations for decades.

Bashar Abu-Saifan in Beirut, Lebanon, contributed to this article
 
 
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