Egypt To President Morsi: No Dictators Allowed

Newsweek International (click here for original link)

by Vivian Salama

December 3, 2012

Amr Darrag is on a call when a second phone in his Cairo office begins to ring. He’s been awake since 6 a.m., and the stack of papers on his desk swells with every passing minute. A leader in Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, Darrag is also part of the 100-member committee scrambling to draft the country’s new constitution—a pending document that has hit every possible bump in the road since Egyptians toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year.

“We have a couple more days until we finish our mission,” says Darrag, secretary-general of the Constituent Assembly. “Those who are not interested in stability in Egypt or want to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of the scene are trying to stop us from issuing the constitution. The courts want to dismantle the assembly. The president had to stop these tricks or the country would fall into chaos.”

On Nov. 22, as Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Egypt’s first post-revolution president, Mohamed Morsi, issued a decree exempting all of his decisions from legal challenge. The move was a stunning power grab that quickly earned him the nickname “Egypt’s new pharaoh”—a title once bestowed upon his defunct predecessor. Hundreds of thousands of disbelieving Egyptians flooded city streets from Alexandria to Aswan with a familiar cry: “The people want the fall of the regime!” Tahrir Square came alive once again with tents and bullhorns and a howl so loud—so impassioned—that it was dubbed the “19th Day” of last year’s revolution. Angry female protesters returned in masses to Tahrir, resilient after months of deteriorating security that included repeated incidents of harassment and sexual assault.

Morsi also declared that the courts cannot dissolve the Assembly, which many say is unfairly dominated by his fellow Islamists. As tensions built nationwide, the Assembly slammed together the first finalized draft of the constitution last week—a text that could set the course for Egypt’s future and that few have been privy to see.

“He shot himself in the foot,” says Steven A. Cook, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Perhaps ‘new pharaoh’ is an overstatement, even though Morsi is no democrat. Somewhere within the councils of the Muslim Brotherhood, someone thought this decree would play well in Tahrir.”

Play well it didn’t. As antagonized protesters violently clashed with pro-Morsi demonstrators, the president defended his decision, insisting it is temporary and geared toward eliminating the bureaucratic hurdles obstructing Egypt’s unraveling transition. The comment inspired the snarky headline in independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm: “Morsi is a ‘temporary’ dictator.” The Brotherhood brushed off the protests as merely “politics,” distinguishing it from the 2011 revolution, when “united Egyptians revolted against autocracy.” The organization warned, via Twitter, that a revolution without the Muslim Brotherhood is no revolution.

But that was a tough sell to make to those who descended on Tahrir, driven by lingering memories from 30 years of Hosni Mubarak’s chokehold. Less than two years after Egyptians earned their first taste of democracy, the country once again has a president with near-absolute power and no constitution to dictate otherwise (the decree was ironically introduced as a “constitutional declaration”). There is no Parliament, since the military generals dissolved it in June. Then the generals were replaced by Brotherhood loyalists—as were the heads of most state-run media organizations.

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Libya’s Economy to Shrink More Than 50% After Conflict, IMF Says

By Vivian Salama

Oct. 26, 2011

Bloomberg — Libya’s economy will contract more than 50 percent in 2011 as eight months of fighting paralyzed its oil industry, the International Monetary Fund said.

“The conflict has had a severe impact on economic activity heavily dependent on hydrocarbons,” which account for more than 70 percent of output and 95 percent of exports, the fund said today in its Regional Outlook for the Middle East and Central Asia. “International sanctions and consequent denial of access to foreign exchange have limited the ability to finance imports of goods and services, resulting in severe disruptions in the non-hydrocarbon sectors.”

The death last week of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s president of four decades, may end fighting between loyalists and the one- time rebels who now run the country after seizing the capital, Tripoli, in August. Libya has used up about 62 percent of its oil reserves and urgently needs to find alternative sources of income to rebuild its war-torn economy, interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said last week.

Qaddafi’s defeat follows uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year that ousted long-time autocratic rulers. Tunisia’s economy will remain flat this year while Egypt’s will grow by 1.2 percent, the IMF forecasts.

Libya’s conflict has had “significant spillovers globally and into neighboring countries,” including a shortfall in oil exports and a decrease in remittances sent home by workers from Libya, especially to Tunisia and Egypt, the IMF said. The conflict also played a role in driving tourists and foreign investors away from the region, it said. (click here to read more…)