While riding a Manhattan bus, a headline of a report by Kareem Fahim in The New York Times of August 12 quickly caught my eyes. It read "Systematic Killings in Egypt are Tied to Leader, Group says." Emanating from Cairo, it meant by "Leader" President El-Sisi; the "Group" was Human Rights Watch.
I am not usually a speed-reader, but quickly became one, till I stopped at a paragraph before suppressing my laughter. The paragraph reads: "The report calls for an investigation of Mr. Sisi who was commander of the armed forces at the time, and several other sitting government officials, including Egypt's interior minister."
So Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization based in New York City, has, by an act of God, made itself an international criminal court!! But there is one ICC which is based in the Hague, which came into being by the Rome Charter of 1998, with Egypt acceding to it, and the U.S. rejecting it, even though it had negotiated it.
To my knowledge, the ICC has no subdivisions, no chambers, no branches anywhere! Nor can the ICC be succeeded by an NGO which, from that report in The New York Times is sitting, without any legal standing, in judgement of a sovereign State -Egypt. The funny thing is that, as reported, Human Rights Watch "had conducted a yearlong investigation into violence that followed the military's ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi." A HA!! So we are back celebrating on August 14, 2014, the first anniversary of the events leading to Egypt's security forces, backed up by the army, breaking up the Muslim Brotherhood's double sieges at Rabaa and Al-Nahda by force.
Now that Human Rights Watch has completed its one-year long investigation into those momentous events, it now wishes to label El-Sisi and the Minister of Interior and other senior officials as defendants "accused" of "wide-spread and systematic killings of protesters...more than 800 people, and possibility more than 1,000!!
A very tall order by an NGO from whom I have seen no similar reports calling for investigations into Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, Helman, Gaza, Yemen, or... These are large geographical areas where dragnets caught thousands of citizens in their webs to throw them away into a forever-legal limbo combined with degrading torture. That is where an American NGO should go, and claim jurisdiction over the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company who still claim that water boarding is not torture!!
OK!! Let us stay with Human Rights Watch's uninvited focus on post-Arab Spring Egypt which has fought off the Islamists attempts to turn it into an Islamic Emirate.
The Muslim Brotherhood was given a historic chance to rule Egypt under a presidency of their own. Morsi became President in June 2012, promising inclusiveness, security and development. Within only 5 months, he proved to be not the president of all Egyptians. Copts, Shias, and secularists were excluded. During a period of one year, he distinguished himself by "I am above the law" through his "Constitutional Declaration" of November 2012!
Let us ignore for a few moments the report of those false pretenders to universal jurisdiction, the Human Rights Watch. Let us focus on the "achievements" of the Morsi "one man, one vote, one time" during his incumbency -an incumbency which was terminated by 35 million Egyptians calling on June 30, 2013, not for his head, but for his seat. The armed forces, under El-Sisi, were only the auxiliaries of that Second Revolution, not its igniters.
Morsi, in a booklet published in Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood in April 2013, called his program for Egypt "The Islamic Project." In its introduction his adversaries, the secularists, were attacked as "aiming at causing the public to reject the Islamic/Brotherhood experiment in order to perpetuate the environment of corruption which enabled them to accumulate ill gotten gains." (p.7) That 24-page booklet went on to cite the tactics of the anti-Morsi opposition. It listed 13 such tactics, including "the manipulation of the judiciary (tactic #5), "the fomenting of sectarian and ethnic violence" (tactic #6), and the propagation of "civil disobedience (tactic #13) -all of which on p. 8.
Then the Morsi manifesto goes on to respond to the question: "Is President Morsi a weak president or a strong president?" It answers as follows: He removed Field Marshall Tantawi: and General Anan; he cashiered the chief of National Intelligence; he dismissed the Attorney General, Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud; and he issued "the Constitutional Declaration" (of November 2012) concentrating all powers in Morsi's hands). On that achievement, the document cites Morsi as a genius because "although he rescinded that Declaration, he, in practice, preserved it effects." (p. 9)
The manifesto of April 2013 ridicules national secular opponents by name; denigrates Egyptian economic leaders; calls Israel "the Zionist Entity, and ridicules national consensus as destabilizing (pp.10-11)
The Morsi manifesto confronted Egypt with a clear and present danger: from civil war to splitting the country between North and South. That is not to mention their transparent attempt to ween away the public from its army at a time when the Brotherhood had its militias and Baltagias (thugs) as the enforcers of Islamist rule. A mere reading of the Islamist constitution of 2012 provides a non-controverted proof: The secularists, including the Christian minority, were pressured to abandon their seats on the Constituent Assembly; and articles agreed for inclusion in the final text were either deleted or re-written Islamicly. The plebiscite on that defective Constitution attracted only 22% of 53 million eligible voters, and its faked approval was less than 50%.
And when the call to prayer sounded in the parliamentary chamber, for the first time in any Egyptian Parliament since 1936, it was in effect a call to arms between the secularists and the Islamists. The former had their eyes on Egypt whose monuments were threatened by destruction a la Bamian Buddhist Temples by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The latter had their eyes on pan-Islamism, where Egypt historically does no belong.
When the Second Revolution of June 30, 2013, erupted, the lines of battle had already been drawn leading within 3 days to the ouster of a hated Islamic regime. That regime would have found common cause with ISIS on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq and Syria. The Nile is immune from that sectarian lunacy.
With Morsi's ouster by the will of the masses (the Islamist Constitution contained no provision for presidential recall), the Islamists struck back. In Sinai, a war by proxy with Hamas, an offshoot of the Brotherhood; in Cairo, guerrilla urban warfare at Rabaa, east of Cairo, and Nahda, west of Cairo. Two small emirates arose in the capital of Egypt whose 93 million inhabitants constitute 30% of all Arabs from the Atlantic to the Gulf.
Time now to review the urban Islamist rebellion from July 3 to August 14, 2013, the period of the so-called "investigations" by Human Rights Watch -the new self-appointed Trustee over sovereign Egypt.
"The Watch" claims that Egypt's security forces struck on August 14 with a scant warning to the Rabaa demonstrators. A blatant lie. The government of Interim President, Counsellor Adly Mansour, pleaded with the occupiers who paralysed life in two major sections of Cairo, for 6 weeks, to leave peacefully. In New York City, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement was given 15 minutes by the New York Police Department before they were dispersed by well-justified force.
"The Watch" claims that for 12 hours elapsed before the Egyptian security forces allowed the demonstrators a safe exit. Wrong again. The guerrilla warfarers were permitted two safe exits publicly and repeatedly announced by the authorities. The central purpose of the authorities was to effect a peaceful end to a trench warfare by the Brotherhood.
"The Watch" claims that the demonstrations were "largely peaceful." Wrong. In the two emirates of Rabaa and Nahda, weapons were stored; hostages were taken; firearms were used; the first casualty, a police officer, was felled by bullets shot from within the rebellious crowd; street pavements afforded the well-rehearsed fighters plenty of stone-power to lob at the forces of law and order; the so-called "martyrdom" was celebrated; "Down with Egypt" became a battle cry; calls on the members of the police forces and the army to defect were broadcast; and foreign intervention and funding were invited.
"The Watch" claims that the Rabaa stand, the field hospital, and the mosque were torched, "probably by the security forces." Probably?! A case of conjecture whose advocate I would not admit to my lectures on the law of evidence. If you have no proof, zip your mouth!!
"The Watch" again shows how soft its head is on the law of evidence. It had to admit that "few of the demonstrators were armed;" but its selected evidence asserts that "the police killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators." It also had to admit that the demonstrators lobbed Molotov cocktails at the police. Then it states that it was able to document these episodes in "a few cases." How few? And are you professionally capable to reach these vague conclusions on the basis of "hearsay evidence" gathered over one year of the occurrence, and collected from witnessed already biased for being a party to that conflict? Get Real!!
Egypt has lost nearly 500 army and police personnel, even before declaring your beloved Muslim Brotherhood and its franchise, Hamas, terrorist organizations. Its public is still under a terrorism alert in the subways and above ground. Its forces are still confronting the Islamic marauders in Sinai and on the Libyan borders. Yet at the same time, Egyptian engineers are now rebuilding the Coptic churches destroyed by the Islamists during their reign of terror in upper Egypt. They are also refurbishing neglected Jewish temples. Its diplomats are in an overdrive to rescue the Palestinians in Gaza from further death and destruction through the Egyptian cease fire initiative which is being prolonged whenever it comes to its end.
And now Human Rights Watch is calling for an investigation of the country's leadership including the Interior Minister who had nearly lost his life to a drive-by terrorist bomber. You must be nuts!!
When the State is fighting for its life, security takes priority front and center. The hundreds who were unfortunately killed at Rabaa and Nahda were put on harm's way by the Brotherhood whose baby organization. Egypt is a part of the presently-boiling Middle East in regard to which President Obama, in a recent interview on August 8 with Thomas Friedman said: "Our (meaning the U.S.) politics are dysfunctional, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a warning to us: societies don't work if political factions take maximalist positions."
Well said, Mr. President!! Maximalists, like the Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihad, and ISIS, never win. This is because they demand of their opposing party only one small thing: non-existence!!
So Mr. Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, and Ms. Sara Leah Whitson, Director of its Middle East Division: You were not deported from Egypt when stopped at the Cairo airport on Sunday, August 10. You cannot be deported if you were not admitted into the country.
And how arrogant can you get to proceed to Cairo after being denied a visa in order to perform another stunt for publicity as you presented yourselves to the airport authorities as "tourists." You were no tourists. You were "agent provocateurs" who wished to unfurl your report calling for investigating El-Sisi and others on the basis of an evidence-free report intended to harm, without credible cause, Egypt's standing worldwide.
To repair the damage to your reputation, and in the absence of the status of a super power, I strongly urge you to stay home to take care of the multitude of human rights issues on which you would be luckier in collecting credible evidence.
Unless you claim immunity from reason, it is "The Watch," not Egypt, that has a lot to account for. Egypt, through its venerated judiciary which was pummelled during the Brotherhood's rule, is capable of handling the events of August 2013. It has, without your prodding, appointed my friend, Counsellor Fouad Abdel-Monim Riyadh, formerly of the ex-Yugoslavia Tribunal, to head a national commission of inquiry into those events. So butt out!! Egypt is not a banana republic.
Your claim to world-wide concern everywhere for human rights rings hollow. Your "Watch Tower" must have been on vacation during the Bush Jr. administration. Where were you when John Yoo as counsel for the Department of Justice advised that the Geneva Protocols of 1949 providing for the protection of civilians during times of war are obsolete. Acting on this advice, the U.S. detained and tortured hundreds of civilians from various Muslim countries. The highly-placed perpetrators are still at large in the U.S., yet fearing detention if they ventured abroad.
Mr. Ken Roth, also known to me as "Mr. Watchman": I wish I were the attorney for "plaintiff Egypt" in a case against you and your funders in Cairo, a proper venue where the events took place. The cause of action would have been incitement to violence. The evidence would have been the limited riots of your "Muslim Brothers" in Egypt this August 14. Your attorney would have advised non-appearance at that trial. But in abstentia, I most probably would have secured a favorable verdict. And under the theory of universal jurisdiction, you would have been a target of detention in any of the members of the League of the Arab States (22 minus Syria -suspended membership, and Qatar -no diplomatic relationship with Egypt for its support of "Brotherhood" terrorism in Egypt). No statute of limitations.
But wait, here is a tip from this blogger: There is an exit!! Declare your actions as immunized as "Acts of State," under the official seal of "The People's Republic of Human Rights Watch." Then the whole world would have joined me in a prolonged and hearty laugh!!
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