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Part III: Obstacle
Article 4 If Everyone Votes Yes, Is It Democracy? Janurary 17th, 2014 | Posted by Peter Hessler
[Paraphrase 7]
"Egypt is the gift of the Nile for Egyptians and the gift of Egyptians to humanity." Thus begins the new Egyptian constitution, which, according to preliminary results, was approved by 97.7 per cent of voters this week. The percentage of voters who didn’t read the full document probably also ranges well above ninety—in conversations with many Cairenes, I met only one person who said he had read the whole thing. It’s hard to blame the others. The constitution opens with a strange, rambling preamble that in translation stretches for more than thirteen hundred words, mentioning, in the following order, Allah, Moses, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Refaa the Azharian, Ahmed Orabi, Mostafa Kamel, Mohamed Farid, Saad Zaghloul, Mostafa el-Nahhas, Talaat Harb, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Nile inundates three of the first six sentences. It’s a preamble to everything—not just the constitution but human civilization itself:
In the outset of history, the dawn of human consciousness arose and shone forth in the hearts of our great ancestors, whose goodwill banded together to found the first central State that regulated and organized the life of Egyptians on the banks of the Nile.
The new document replaces the previous constitution, which was prepared under the government of Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who became Egypt’s first democratically elected President, in the summer of 2012. Last year, after massive demonstrations across the nation on June 30th, Morsi was deposed by the military, and his constitution was suspended. But there are many similarities between these two constitutions. Under Morsi, the preamble struck a similar lofty tone; it referred to “the timeless Nile” and ran on for almost nine hundred words. It described itself as the product of “the same civilization that gave humanity the first alphabet, that opened the way to monotheism and the knowledge of the Creator.” Nowadays, it reads like a preamble to hubris—long-winded references to history and culture in a document that died within six months. In a single century, Egypt has had nine or ten constitutions, depending on how you count them. It has held three constitutional referendums since the Egyptian Arab Spring began, on January 25, 2011.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the 97.7-per-cent approval rate is that there is no overt evidence of widespread fraud. But this is why voting is only a small part of what constitutes a democracy; since the revolution, Egypt has held seven fraud-free national votes, and yet the country still doesn’t have a single government official who was elected to his position democratically. (Everybody voted into national office has been subsequently removed by coup or court decision, and local governments have yet to hold elections.) Since Morsi’s ouster, his supporters have been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Army and the police, leaving more than a thousand civilians dead. The courts have ruled the Muslim Brotherhood to be an illegal organization, and the Brothers and many of their supporters have boycotted the referendum. Last month, after a bombing killed sixteen people in the city of Mansoura, the government declared the Brotherhood to be a terrorist group, even though there was no evidence of its involvement. (The Brotherhood publicly denounced the attack.)
In this climate, a number of international monitoring organizations declined to help monitor the vote on the constitution. Alessandro Parziale, the director of the Cairo field office for the Carter Center, told me that the referendum had been so rushed, and the Carter Center received its accreditations so late, that it was unable to make the necessary preparations for a responsible monitoring of the polls. Instead, it is focussing on writing a report about the new constitution and the national situation. “The broader picture is more important than these two days,” Parziale told me. “We don’t think the process has been inclusive. And we think that democracy is all about inclusiveness.”
He noted that the Carter Center didn’t send monitors for last year’s constitutional referendum, either. Under Morsi, too, the climate was deeply undemocratic. But at least there had been a vigorous and public campaign against the Morsi constitution. This year, I didn’t see a single sign in Cairo advocating a “no” vote, and a half-dozen people were arrested after they were caught trying to organize such a campaign. The day before the referendum, the High Election Commission held a press conference, and I asked if it was legal for an Egyptian citizen to post a sign calling for people to vote no. Hisham Mokhtar, the commission’s spokesman, refused to answer directly. “If some person has been arrested right now,” he said, “then the investigating authority has evidence of their involvement in certain crimes.”
At the polls, few Egyptians seemed bothered by the unfair political climate. The turnout was relatively strong—more than forty-two per cent, significantly higher than during the last referendum. In Ard al Liwa, a poor Cairo neighborhood that previously generated significant support for the Brotherhood, I spent time at three polling stations and failed to meet anybody who told me he had voted no. The most common remark I heard was “Il beled lazem timshi“—“The country needs to move forward.” Egyptians are famous for their optimism, which has been a source of social stability during the past three years. But that frame of mind can also lead to bad political instincts. They want to say yes; they want to believe; they want to be convinced that the next leader will be better. “Egypt will be fine,” Faris Hassan, a middle-aged contractor, told me. “Egypt is mentioned five times in the Koran.”
Hassan was smoking a shisha pipe at a coffee shop near the polling station, and he told me that he planned to vote yes. He had voted for Morsi in 2012. “He was a good man, but there was so much corruption around him,” Hassan said. I asked him if the Brothers are really terrorists.
“Yes,” he said, without hesitating. “I see what is happening on television, the things in Sinai, and I can see that they are terrorists.”
I had heard similar comments from many others. But Hassan surprised me when I asked about Sisi. “I’m telling you, if Sisi runs and wins, then the people will hate him,” he said. “Right now everybody loves him. But, once he gets the chair, then it will all change.”
This is hard to recognize in the 97.7 per cent: beneath the surface, there’s an incredible volatility to the Egyptian majority. Outsiders tend to see two entrenched sides, the security forces and the Islamists, but in fact most Egyptians occupy a much less partisan and less predictable political space. And they still have power, whether it comes through the vote or through public protests.
Thus far, everybody who has tried to run the country in the post-Tahrir era has failed to understand how quickly things can change. Until the bitter end, Morsi and the other Brotherhood leaders truly believed that they remained popular, simply because they had won elections in the past. But, at the polls this week, I met many people who had voted yes on both constitutions, and it was common to talk to a former Morsi supporter who was now an enthusiastic fan of Sisi.
As an outsider, it’s hard to be optimistic about near-term prospects in Egypt, but there are a few reasons to temper the pessimism. Despite the disastrous political climate, most experts believe that the new constitution is an improvement on the previous version. It gives far too much power to the military and the judiciary, two institutions that have always been wary of Islamists, and the preamble and other details are off-putting. (Article 44: “Every citizen is guaranteed the right to enjoy the River Nile.”) But there’s more attention to basic human rights, especially for women. And it establishes that within five years there will be democratic elections for councils at the village and other local levels, which were never part of the Egyptian system in the past.
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[The rest]
The most heartening thing about the referendum, though, was the relative lack of violence. Egypt won’t go the way of Syria—there’s too much power in the Army and the police, and too little support for the Brotherhood. And Egyptians have a social cohesiveness that allows them to survive despite a deeply dysfunctional government. Throughout the chaos of the past three years, even a big city like Cairo has remained remarkably safe and functional. There are signs that terrorist activity is expanding, but, thus far, the attacks have been focussed on the police, the Army, and other government institutions, rather than on the public. At five o’clock in the morning of the first day of the referendum, a bomb exploded in front of a Cairo court; the façade was damaged, but there were no injuries. The attack was clearly a statement—but a very different statement than would have been made by a midday bomb at a crowded polling station.
The question, though, is whether people will be pushed to more extreme acts. The most frustrating aspect of the political climate is that even after the game has been won the oppression is relentless; if the authorities had allowed opposition groups to campaign against the new constitution, it still would have passed easily. But the lack of any democratic tradition in Egypt means that anybody in power can’t seem to tolerate dissent. The Brotherhood behaved in similar ways when Morsi was President.
For three years, this has been the pattern of Egyptian politics, and there’s a risk that citizens internalize it as simply being part of democracy—after all, they’ve had fair votes throughout these fights. While I was visiting one polling station in Ard al Liwa, I noticed campaign signs posted by a new political group called the Confrontation Party. Its symbol consisted of two heads in silhouette, facing off; one was black, and the other had the colors of the Egyptian flag. The sign said, “Yes to the Constitution.” The Confrontation Party’s Facebook page explains that its mission is “social justice for all classes,” and there’s a photograph of Mohammad Zakaria, the founder, wearing a gray suit and tie. He’s standing between a soldier and a cop, and all three men are smiling.
[400 words]
Source: New yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/if-everyone-votes-yes-is-it-democracy.html#entry-more
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发表于 2014-1-19 03:21:42
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