Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood is empowering radicals at the expense of more moderate voices, write Myriam Benraad and Mohamed Abdelbaky. President Hosni Mubarak’s regime has detained dozens of mid- and high-level officials, including, Abd al-Muanem Abu al-Fatouh, the leader of the movement’s guidance council who is widely considered a voice for reform and modernization within the Islamist movement.
The regime’s strategy has long been to deny political space to pro-democratic forces, thereby polarizing political options to the ruling National Democratic Party and the Islamist opposition, they note.
The government also recently denied a license to operate to Al-Wasat, a moderate Islamist group which split from the Brotherhood.
But “with this latest crackdown, what little space there is to legitimately influence domestic politics through nonviolent means has been closed off for the Islamists.”
The Obama administration should “reprioritize human rights and find ways to empower democrats and civil society organizations as the best long-term mechanism to counter re-radicalization in Egypt,” they conclude.
That would certainly beat channeling US democracy assistance to tame officially-controlled GONGOs.
Mubarak’s NDP has “all but crushed the nation’s fractured opposition movement,” writes Sudarsan Raghavan, noting that its “pervasive security forces routinely monitor, intimidate and arrest scores of activists.”
But there remains an underlying social turmoil and discontent with the regime, reflected in an “unprecedented wave of labor unrest [which] has become the primary means of venting frustration.”
Labor activists have forged links with young cyber-activists, while others are challenging the moribund, official unions. Government employees recently formed the General Union for Property Tax Employees, the nation’s only independent trade union.
“There is real social anger in Egypt,” said Ayman Nour, an opposition liberal recently jailed on spurious fraud allegations. “It’s erupting for economic reasons, but in the womb of this social anger, there is political anger.”
Egypt consistently violates labor rights by denying workers the rights of freedom of association, according to the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services [a group previously targeted by the authorities], thus effectively ending the prospect of meaningful collective bargaining.
The Solidarity Center, a core institute of the National Endowment for Democracy, has detailed further instances of harassment of independent labor activists.
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