The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group. This has become the conviction of the majority of the Egyptian people, supporters of the 30 June Revolution and grieving relatives of victims of terrorist crimes. To them, the prime minister's controversial remarks last week concerning the possibility of classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group underscored their belief that this group has deliberately spread the culture of violence and divided society with its extremist and destructive ideas and practices. True, many still believe in or sympathise with this group. They hold that its means and methods are both legitimate and necessary in order to build the “Islamic model” of government, even if that has to come at the expense of the Egyptian nation state, its moderateness, its identity, and its historical and civilisational legacy. To the Muslim Brothers, their sympathisers and their tactical supporters, the religious project — the resurrection of the caliphate and the theocratic state — takes precedence, even over the lives and welfare of hundreds, thousands and even millions of Egyptians. So why is the government, which came into power following the 30 June Revolution that overthrew a Muslim Brotherhood project fed by the hatred of the Egyptian state, wavering over whether to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist group? Surely there exists ample proof that it is linked to groups and organisations that are on international terrorist blacklists and that it has actively supported groups that practice violence, murder and intimidation? Certainly, during its period of rule, it created an ideal environment for such groups to thrive and spread throughout the country. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that this group has transcended the phase of random violence and incitement to violence, to deliberate and planned acts of violence, targeting innocent people, in order to accomplish political aims. It thus presents a clear threat to the peace and security of the state and society. There are three reasons why the current government is reluctant to go with the evidence. Firstly, it is not a revolutionary government and counts among its members persons who believe that clashing with the Muslim Brotherhood and likeminded groups will not serve the democratisation process laid out by the post-30 June roadmap. The advocates of this belief overlook the fact that non-democratic forces do not and will not accept democratic rules. The period of Muslim Brotherhood rule drove this reality home, palpably. Every action of theirs made it clear that they were interested exclusively in power, and in their exclusive power, and every action of theirs now is solely to return to power, to which testifies the revival of covert tactics for which they had acquired a repute in the past and that included assassinations of political adversaries. The advocates of lenience and indulgence with this trend appear to have forgotten that the destruction of the Egyptian state has been a central Muslim Brotherhood aim from the very outset of the organisation. When the first opportunity in the group's history presented itself, its leaders proceeded to implement their scheme for the “empowerment” of their theocratic project by imposing and consolidating their hegemony over every branch and agency of government. They will never be satisfied until they bring down the government in order to clear the way for their return to power. This is why they have turned to violence, dissemination of chaos, wreaking economic havoc, and assassinations of adversaries while dispatching messages abroad intended to secure ongoing regional and international support for their return to the political process. The second reason is related precisely to this dimension of the situation. Confronted with a three-pronged front of international pressure, due to the actions and positions of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad — the International Muslim Brotherhood — and major powers, the current political leadership in Egypt feels compelled to give priority to that front over domestic opinion in the hope of alleviating international pressure. Whether acting on this motive or on a spirit of magnanimity, the government has gone to considerable lengths to demonstrate its tolerance and its openness to the Muslim Brotherhood, extending to it numerous opportunities to realign itself with patriotic national forces that believe in the values of the Egyptian state and that reject all international designs to undermine or harm it. This is also why the government has pursued only the litigation approach against the Muslim Brotherhood. However, in so doing, it gave the group more time to work to escalate domestic, regional and international pressures, and it gave it a larger margin of manoeuvrability, which the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of to promote a discourse that portrays the current situation as a conflict between two equally weighted political outlooks and peoples, while it pretends to seek a compromise between the “two sides”. Unfortunately, the government was gravely mistaken in pursuing this strategy, which only contributed to perpetuating the chaos, violence and political assassinations, and to expanding the front of international pressure, from the US and the EU in particular. In addition, it broadened the scope for factional disputes that do little to promote progress or to further efforts on the part of political and revolutionary forces to build effective channels of communication with the various strata of society and the large segments of the poor and underprivileged, in particular, who once again find themselves having to pay the economic and social price for protracted instability as they stare at the spectre of a repeat of many of the ills of the first interim period after the 25 January Revolution. The third reason relates to the ability to impose post-30 June realities on those who reject this reality and to sustain the heavy costs of fighting a project that puts the Egyptian nation state at risk. Members of the government stress the urgency of pressing forward with the roadmap against the backdrop of complex and interwoven domestic and regional challenges. They point to regional developments with regards to Syria and Iran in particular, the anxieties of many Arab governments regarding the threat of internal strife, the complex overlap between numerous issues and the results of the 30 June revolution, and the shifting tactics of international powers, especially the US. All of these must be taken into account when dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood, regardless of how persistent, devious and violent it is in its campaign to force itself on the domestic and regional scene. Nevertheless, it is clear that international pressures to re-empower the Muslim Brotherhood will not ease up as long as openings remain. The US, taken by surprise by the collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood project in Egypt, will not readily accept this and alter its plan for reordering the regional map. The Muslim Brothers were the lynchpin in this design to forge a “Sunni crescent” to counter “Shia influence”. In exchange for being empowered along the geographical arc of this crescent, the Muslim Brotherhood would help rid Europe of the bane of radical and extremist Islamist groups by encouraging them to settle in certain areas, such as the Sinai, which could later be surrounded and brought under control. In addition, it would assist in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Gaza problem through a land-exchange deal that would hand over a large portion of the Sinai. Such aims, which rested heavily on the Muslim Brotherhood, were part of a greater project for a “new Middle East” that sought to reorder the region in ways that would enable Turkey and Israel, with Muslim Brotherhood support, to control the patterns of conflict in a manner conducive to the preservation of US interests in the region, thereby helping the US to reduce the costs of intervention in this turbulent region and to concentrate on its conflicts with China and Russia. Such goals and projects help explain the reactions and mounting pressures against Egypt on the part of the US, its European allies and certain Arab and regional powers following the 30 June Revolution against Muslim Brotherhood rule and their theocratic project. There is no reason to presume that those goals and projects have changed. Therefore, in spite of the US and Europe's apparent willingness to acknowledge the post-30 June reality in Egypt, recent regional and international developments point to a renewed drive to reorder the Middle East. It is therefore important to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood from the equations of regional change. Accordingly, Egyptian foreign policy should work to augment opportunities for coordinating with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait to counter international pressure and designs to partition Arab countries. It should simultaneously support steps to minimise or neutralise the Qatari role, while engaging positively in Arab-Iranian negotiations over the Iranian nuclear programme and Arab efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis. Yet, while such regional issues may offer as many opportunities as they present challenges, Egypt's most critical needs at this juncture are to conclude the interim period by laying the foundations for a strong modern state, as well as to resolve other pending issues, foremost among which is the terrorist threat presented by jihadist takfiri groups and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore, while the three points above, which are cited by various quarters of the current political elite as justification for certain actions and positions, have considerable validity, when taken in the context of the conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood they underscore the extent of discord or lack of resolve within government circles when it comes to addressing this challenge. Perhaps the time factor, as determined by the current roadmap, accounts in part for the reluctance to sustain the costs of undertaking this challenge. At the same time, the heterogeneous nature of the interim government, which is under pressure to complete its assigned tasks within the given timeframe, helps explain the government's flexible and inconsistent discourse with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, it should be stressed that this government is responsible for confronting the Muslim Brotherhood as an organisation. Prosecution of leading members can only yield limited results, especially in view of the inclination of some to sustain dialogue with the group for fear that it will revert to its earlier legacy and reactivate its secret apparatus, or because they believe that the government does not have the power to confront the group. Whatever the case, such arguments are weak. International experience in dealing with terrorist groups or groups that espouse violence and incite hatred has demonstrated that this phenomenon needs to be addressed at many levels simultaneously, not just one, as is the case in Egypt at present. In addition to bringing the full force of existing law against all who commit crimes against society and the state, extremist groups must be explicitly banned in the constitution and the law, and their political activities should be curtailed so as to enable the transition from the social ban on such groups to the isolation and elimination of their pernicious ideas and practices.
The writer is a researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
