By Salama A Salama The brief honeymoon that followed the 25 January Revolution, when the army and the people were said to be "one hand," has ended in mistrust and misunderstanding that the recent reshuffle of the Essam Sharaf government failed to address. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) thought that Sharaf's popularity and refined manners were enough to assuage the simmering discontent among the revolutionary youth. As it turned out, Sharaf is now catching flak from all sides, with people blaming him for slowing down the revolution, failing to address security, or failing to speed up the trials of former officials. The revolutionaries blame Sharaf for the absence of social justice, for the ineptness of economic policies, and a host of other things. As the expectations of the revolutionaries rise, the limitations of Sharaf's government become clearer, and the fact that the country lacks a clear vision for the future -- one to which everyone, including SCAF, is committed -- is coming back to haunt us. The SCAF should have been giving clear instructions to Sharaf's government. It should have been helping it to act as a proper transitional government by removing the obstacles in its path. Instead, it is taking its own sweet time and the young revolutionaries are running out of patience. The SCAF, which has acted so far in small doses and only under pressure from Tahrir Square, needs to start doing things differently. It needs, for starters, to provide the Sharaf cabinet with a roadmap for action. Forget about the cabinet deriving its legitimacy from Tahrir Square. Now we all know that the Sharaf government gets legitimacy, and orders, directly from the SCAF. Turning to the revolutionaries, we have to admit that they are still a motley crew of well intentioned but disunited groups and alliances, hard to enumerate or figure out. They have no leadership to negotiate on their behalf or a set of suggested policies to follow. But what this country needs right now is policies that take domestic as well as external considerations into account. We need a government that knows how to tend to economic and social demands while keeping at bay those powers, Arab and non-Arab, that do not wish to see democracy take root in Egypt. The SCAF, to be fair, is our best bet so far. It has acted as a safety valve when things got rough, but now it has to stop being overly cautious and start paying attention to the stuff that matters. For example, we need to know what to do with the former president. We cannot just keep postponing the question of his trial in the hope that he may not live that long. Also, what are we going to do with the men of the old regime, Gamal and Alaa Mubarak included? And what are we going to do with former National Democratic Party members? Our problem is not only the SCAF. It is also the lack of mandate for Sharaf's government and the fact that the revolutionaries have no unified front or clear programme. As disputes emerge on the political scene, we have to devise a way of handling them, with the SCAF, the government, and the opposition each accepting part of the responsibility and offering part of the solution. We need a roadmap for the future, one to which the SCAF is committed, the government has a mandate to implement, and the revolutionaries endorse and support. For this to happen, the revolutionary alliances have to come up with a unified voice, and the SCAF and the government have to meet them halfway.
