Whatever You Do In Tahrir or Elsewhere, Do Not Mess with the Armed Forces!!

On March 14, Egypt's Minister of Defense, General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, issued another warning to the demonstrators and conflicted political forces in his country.  As usual, the warning was indirect, but could not be misunderstood.  "We are going to confront anyone who threatens Egypt's peace or Egypt's army!!"

Expanding on this verbal shot across the bow of the street forces which has disrupted life and normalcy in Egypt, El-Sisi, who was addressing Egyptian border forces, added: "The armed forces have been working at their highest levels of fighting preparedness for the restoration of the country's sovereignty, the guarding of its territorial and sea boundaries, and the rebuffing of everyone who might even think of threatening Egypt's peace or the security of its armed forces."

El-Sisi was not only addressing Egyptians.  He was also baring the teeth of Egypt's army, a huge professional force whose traditions go back to Muhammad Aly, the founder of modern Egypt in 1805, to all other Arab nationalities involved in the smuggling into and out of Egypt of arms, drugs and humans.  Against that geostrategic background, the General promised continued modernization of the border forces, stretched from the borders of the Sudan (south), to Libya's (west), to the Mediterranean (north), to Gaza's and the Red Sea (east).

The armed forces had contributed massively to the destruction of the Mubarak regime through telling the dictator that they belonged to Egypt, not to its President.  Thus they could not open fire on the Tahrir demonstrators who were shielded by their national army from destruction.  Egypt was neither Libya under Qaddafi, nor Syria under Assad.

By the same token, the armed forces, in their oath of service, do not pledge loyalty except to "Egypt and the Armed Forces."  This is not the oath of a sectarian army, or of a militia, or of an Islamist force or of a secular force.  It is a pledge to serve Egypt as a whole.  That is especially so under the new Constitution of November 2012 which provided for a special status for the armed forces, under a system of civilian oversight.

The gist of all those declarations was "DO NOT MESS WITH THE ARMED FORCES!!!"  The results were nearly immediate:

• The mutiny within the ranks of police officers evaporated.
• All police precincts and related offices were back to work.
• The Minister of Interior pledged better armament and other equipment to the police forces.
• The chaos in Port Said which needed intervention by the armed forces came to an abrupt end.
• The calls on El-Sisi to assume power disappeared.  That call by the secularists for an army coup was disregarded.

The public seems to have awakened to a central fact of Egypt's difficult transition to democracy:  The armed forces were not going either to replace the police or to stage a coup.  The armed forces were not going to be manipulated by the new political forces continually contending for power in the new Egypt.  

Commenting on the return to near normalcy to the Egyptian Street, Muhammad Hassanain Heykal, the writer/statesman of the Nasser era, and the oracle of Egypt at that time said:

"The religious and the secular forces in Egypt, being on a collision course, have realized that the armed forces have refused to be dragged in the quagmire of the politics of the public square.  But if public safety and the functioning of the State are in peril, then the armed forces will come to the rescue."