Foreign ministers of the European Union were scheduled to meet in Brussels yesterday to discuss the situation in Egypt. The meeting was expected to reflect on what Brussels-based sources said was the concern – some said very deep concern – of member states over developments in Egypt in the wake of the dispersal of the two-month sit-ins by supporters of ousted former president Mohamed Morsi a week ago. “It was too bloody to overlook. For sure it was coercive, and we fear that Egypt is going back to dictatorial times,” said one European official. Speaking from his office at the Foreign Ministry of a key European capital with traditionally good ties with Cairo, the official spoke of his shock when the initial death toll suggested that some 300 people could have died in the operation. “We cannot say that this is a small number, and we have verified it with many sources,” the official said, speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on Friday. On Saturday, the same official was even more disturbed by the news of renewed violence following the march by Muslim Brotherhood supporters towards the Al-Fateh Mosque in Cairo that also left over 70 dead amongst supporters of the ousted president. The phrase “collective punishment” was reiterated over and over again, as were warnings of “possible civil war”. For this and other Western diplomats, whether those based in Cairo or in their respective capitals, the news of the killing of police officers at the sit-ins or in police stations was sad news, but there was a discrepancy in the numbers of victims. Fears that Egypt could be “slipping back towards autocracy” dominated. Between Wednesday and Friday last week, several European capitals summoned their Egyptian ambassadors to express their “dismay”, “shock” and “rejection of violence”. Calls were made for an “end of the coercion of the Islamist opposition” and the “quick resumption of the democratic process” in an “inclusive way that allows the Islamists an opportunity to participate in it”. This line of argument was based on collective Western, especially European, interests. A democratically elected president, Islamist or not, offered a real chance for Egypt to walk the long and never easy path of democratisation. When Egypt finds democracy, in whichever format, the argument in the West was and is that the entire southern Mediterranean will gradually follow and stability and development will then reign, reducing unwanted south-to-north Mediterranean migration. “There was also the hope, which originally emanated in Washington, that by giving moderate political Islam groups a chance, they would be able to contain the radical groups sooner or later,” said one Egyptian official. He added that this “scheme seemed to be quite plausible when the Muslim Brotherhood regime [in Egypt] managed to contain the headache that Hamas was giving to Israel throughout the year of Morsi's rule” from 30 June 2012, when he was inaugurated as president, to 3 July 2013, when he was ousted following massive demonstrations that demanded early elections in the wake of declining services and living conditions. Egyptian diplomats argue that securing stability and containing extremism were the purposes of a series of partnership agreements that the EU has been signing with the southern Mediterranean states during the last decade, after it acted upon the so-called Barcelona Process in the 1990s. Egypt signed an agreement with the EU in 2001. “Acting upon the basis of human rights and democracy are the keys to this agreement. We agreed that if we violated the basic rules of democracy and human rights, we could face political and economic consequences,” said one Egyptian official. Following last week's drama, EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton said that EU countries should consider “appropriate measures” in reaction to the violence and bloodshed in Egypt. Yesterday's meeting, which effectively interrupts the summer holidays of European officials, came in the wake of another meeting on Monday at ambassadorial level where some of these measures were discussed pending consultations with top diplomats of the EU. Suspending a five billion euro aid package usually made available in instalments would be one measure that the meeting might adopt, according to Cairo and Brussels sources. Another possible measure would be to threaten to suspend arms exports to Egypt, pending the resumption of the democratic process and an investigation into the killings of last Wednesday and Friday. On Sunday evening, with the announcement of the killing of close to 40 Brotherhood members while being transferred from interrogation to prison, the mood was bad in Brussels despite keen outreach diplomacy and a public-relations campaign that Cairo launched on Saturday following what the authorities had qualified as “biased and negative reporting of the facts of the dispersals of the sit-ins”. Speaking from Brussels on Monday afternoon, an Egyptian source reported a clear shift in the reading of the situation following the slaying of some 25 army conscripts in Sinai, supposedly at the hands of an Islamist militant group. “Obviously, we have been telling them that the problems of terror we face in Sinai are largely due to the Muslim Brotherhood's mismanagement of the area during Morsi's rule, when he allowed extremist elements to come in from all over the world and settle there. We have also been bringing their attention to the threats made by [Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Al-Beltagui, in which he said that if Morsi was reinstated as president the havoc in Sinai would stop immediately,” he said. “We hope that they will see the picture as it really is and stop being hijacked by the one-sided view of the Western media. We hope that by Wednesday they will back down from taking exaggerated measures, even if we expect some and even if we know that the next few weeks and maybe months will be tough. However, we will be working to help clarify things,” the Brussels-based Egyptian source said. “Helping the world see things as they really are” from the perspective of the Egyptian authorities is a task that was defined on Wednesday evening by state bodies in the wake of the waves of criticism that have been coming in following the tragic images from the dispersal of the sit-ins. It has been a week of intensive outreach diplomacy and a sustained media offensive. The success of Turkey, a close ally of Egypt under Morsi and a vehement opponent today, in convincing France to take the Egyptian situation to the UN Security Council, even if only for a private discussion of developments, prompted wide concern among the authorities in Cairo. Egyptian officials had excluded the possibility of the success of Ankara's efforts, but they were disturbed when the meeting was abruptly scheduled. The Egyptian delegation to the UN worked around the clock to try to block it, then shifting gear to block a statement coming out of the meeting. “It is bad that the Security Council should be discussing Egypt's internal affairs. This is a bad precedent, and we have no guarantees that there will not be another meeting in the near future,” said a New York-based Egyptian source. The Security Council meeting was coupled with the EU's show of anger and tough language coming from Washington by the US president himself over the violence in Egypt. There were also furious sounds coming from Latin America and continued apprehension at the African Union, which had already suspended Egypt's participation in its activities following the ouster of Morsi, still qualified in several African capitals as a coup d'état. From 3 July onwards, Egyptian diplomacy had to work on convincing the world that the intervention of the military on 3 July to support the will of the people in ousting Morsi was not a coup. In his rounds of talks with counterparts all over the world, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi stressed that “what happened was an extraordinary measure because it did not pass through the ballot box. But it was not a coup because it took place as a result of indisputable public demand.” Fahmi said that “while Morsi was democratically elected, he did not rule democratically.” The world showed some will to accept the new political reality on the condition that it would not lead to the exclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood, which some Western embassies in Cairo have been saying has the support of some 20 per cent of the Egyptian population. To win over a still-sceptical international community, Egyptian officials went the extra mile in soliciting local and international mediation to convince the Muslim Brotherhood to bow to the new political reality and join the political process. However, diplomatic efforts broke down, and Cairo made it clear that it would eventually have to bring the sit-ins to an end, especially with the reported acquisition of arms by elements within them. According to Cairo-based Western diplomats, the right of a state to impose law and order does not come at the expense of the commitment of that state to human rights. “We cannot be expected to agree to the excessive use of force or to the slaying of demonstrators en masse, as we have seen in Cairo,” said one European ambassador. During a press conference at the presidential palace on Saturday, Mustafa Hegazi, an adviser to the interim president, denied that there had been an excessive use of force or the deliberate slaying of demonstrators. Hegazi stressed that the Egyptian people had wanted to remove Morsi, that the Muslim Brotherhood had not accepted the will of the people, that the Muslim Brotherhood had been inciting violence and acts of terror, and that the state would “act firmly within the rule of law and the framework of human rights to protect the people”, just as any other state would do. The press conference was designed to share the facts with the world and to gain the attention of the international media to “the deliberately or non-deliberately missed” stories of the attacks on churches and on Copts, the looting of museums and libraries, and the sporadic violence that Hegazi accused the Muslim Brotherhood of using. There was an implicit suggestion that the organisation might be disbanded over its involvement in acts of terror. However, Hegazi was careful to say that Brotherhood members who had not been involved in acts of violence were welcome to join the efforts of the rest of Egyptians in building a democratic state. Hegazi's statements were made at a late hour on Saturday afternoon following a press conference by the spokesman for the cabinet. They were followed by an interview on Egyptian television and a further press conference on Sunday morning, during which Hegazi argued for the roadmap that Egyptians had adopted to build a democratic state and that would offer a place for all Egyptians, Islamist or not, providing that they had not broken the law. This offensive was a part of a wider campaign to win over the West to Egypt's point of view in a way that will not just stop plans to suspend EU or US aid, but will also prompt the return of recently suspended tourism and investments. Other pillars of the campaign include intensive diplomatic engagements. The resignation of Mohamed Al-Baradei, the former vice-president for external relations, one day after the dispersal of the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in damaged these engagements and in fact “accentuated” international anger against Egypt, according to some Egyptian diplomats. Al-Baradei had made it clear that his resignation was in protest against the bloodshed that had come with the dispersal of the sit-ins. However, help was offered by other Arab countries, and the intervention of the king of oil-rich Saudi Arabia was welcomed in Cairo this week by Minister of Defence Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. King Abdullah had made an unusual public statement in support of the Egyptian war on terror, and Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal made a visit to Paris to echo the king's statements and to intervene with French President François Hollande, who had been instrumental in taking Egypt to the UN Security Council. Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries would rush to the aid of Egypt if the West turned its back on it, Al-Faisal said. “The Saudis were instrumental in containing the tide against us. Everything comes at a price, but traditionally this has been essentially to what we have been doing for the last 30 years: containing Iran and supporting Sunni Islam against Shia Islam. There was a much worse price that we had to pay [under Morsi] to the Qataris for the financial help they provided us with. We had to withdraw from the regional front and allow the Qataris to take our place, for example,” said one Egyptian diplomat who spoke under condition of anonymity. “At any event, Al-Faisal's trip has already softened the relatively tough line that was expected to come out of the EU meeting on Wednesday,” he said. The containment of the tension with regional and international capitals that have been dismayed by the ouster of Morsi has also been a pillar of winning over the international community and especially the US and EU. “We only summoned our ambassador to Ankara after things had gone very far. We tried to avoid it, but it became impossible, and we are certainly trying to avoid summoning our ambassador to Doha. This is the last thing we want to do to any Arab capital,” said the same diplomat. A crucial part of the Egyptian strategy is to try to win over the solid friendship of the US and Europe by acting to pursue the roadmap promptly. At his press conference, Hegazi said that prompt steps would be taken to offer a revamped constitution to a referendum and that this would be followed by a process towards legislative and presidential elections. Egyptian political sources said that some ideas are being considered to speed up this process. Meanwhile, in his first public statement since the dispersal of the sit-ins, Al-Sisi suggested yesterday that he was not planning to run for president after quitting his military post, as had been suggested by some. “The honour of executing the will of the Egyptian people is a much bigger honour than ruling Egypt,” Al-Sisi said on Sunday to a joint military and police gathering. It is not yet clear whether the Egyptian authorities will decide to complement this strategy with another pillar, being to reopen negotiations with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. In a series of statements issued throughout the week, several international officials, including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have called on “all Egyptian parties to pursue a peaceful resolution to their differences”. Egyptian officials do not hide their unease at the use of the word “parties” in such statements, insisting that there is the state, there is the people, and then there is a group of militants aiming to force its political will on the nation. An all-inclusive political process for the future is what Cairo officials agree to, and it is what they will want to found a deal upon. However, official and non-official sources argue that it has become unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood will now be party to any arrangements in the short run, especially with the arrests of many of its leaders.
