The Egyptian Revolution: A Work In Progress?

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
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Tahrir is alive again.  Its historic revolution has not yet run its course.  The armed forces rule; the Government of Issam Sharaf manages as best as it can; the trials of Mubarak, his sons and his stalwarts have not yet begun; and those, young and old, who brought Mubarak down, feel that their basic demands remain unfulfilled.  The Revolution is not yet a work of progress, but a work in progress.

Impatience is everywhere.  The Deputy Prime Minister, Dr. Yehia El-Gamal, a friend of this blogger and a colleague at Cairo University School of Law has resigned; the populace now want Prime Minister Sharaf be replaced; nearly 700 of the top Egyptian police leadership are pushed into retirement, with 17 of them stigmatized by the killing of hundreds of protesters in January/February; and the Tahrir revolutionaries are not yet mollified.

Some voices reach me to bemoan what they call "the dictatorship of anarchy" and the young at Tahrir and at other similar places in Alexandria and Suez are described as the multitudes of "No."  The doom sayers are worried that, as they put it to me on the phone from Cairo, "Egypt is on its way toward destruction."  Very dire predictions which are not backed by the events on the ground.

For after 60 years of stifling dictatorships which began with Nasser in 1952, and ended with Mubarak in 2011 after recasting Egypt into a security State, Egypt has vaulted over the high fence of oppression into the green meadows of popular sovereignty.  Some demands are basic, others are not so basic.  But the public somehow knows that there is no going back to the prior age of darkness.

The Minister of Interior, Mr. Mansour Issa, has declared on July 13 that his Ministry will no longer intervene in political matters, but will focus on criminal justice and maintenance of public order.  The Supreme Military Council, the interim collective presidency, announced that elections for the two houses of Parliament will take place in either October or November this year.  The Coalition of revolutionary organizations has abandoned the call for sacking Prime Minister Sharaf to allow for continuity which will produce a new cabinet.  It is expected that the Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (equivalent to the U.S. Federal Reserve), Farouk Al-Okda, shall be the new Finance Minister.  Others, including prominent Copts, like George Ishaak, are slated to join the new Cabinet.

Stability begets prosperity.  The Revolution returned to the Egyptians their dignity, but delayed their economic recovery.  Tourism has been badly hit; unemployment remains high; public institutions remain in quasi paralysis.  Yet public spiritedness is back in full.  Threats to the freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal were short lived; calls for civil disobedience in Alexandria and Suez were abandoned; and the Cairo Stock Exchange witnessed an unexpected euphoria.

So what brought the pendulum of the Egyptian Revolution to its natural center, after the dire proclamations that the mother of all Arab revolutions was in danger of a slide back to anarchy?  The Supreme Military Council and the Prime Minister held extensive dialogues with the Revolutionary Coalition; the Supreme Judicial Council declared that the trials of the symbols of the Mubarak regime will be aired on radio and TV in real time; the armed forces stressed that they and the people are together bound in unity; new police forces were back in the streets; generous monthly pensions, reaching up to $500 per family of victims of the Revolution began flowing; and popular committees were formed to protect public institutions from counter-revolutionary attacks.  The work in progress is turning into a work of progress. 

A Constitutional Republic on the Nile is rising.