(Host) Even with the election of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed
Morsi as the country’s first-ever freely elected civilian president, the
Egyptian Revolution continues to look uncertain. Today commentator and
veteran ABC News foreign correspondent Barrie Dunsmore reviews where
things now stand.
(Dunsmore) From the moment the thirty year
dictator Hosni Mubarak was swept out of office by a broadly based
popular revolution, there were two basic questions.
One: Would the 84 year old opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, become the major political force in a democratic Egypt?
Two:
Would the firmly entrenched Egyptian military – which had wielded not
only total political power for decades but had also taken over control
of the country’s economy – ever be willing to cede power to a civilian
authority?
Sixteen months later it would seem the answers are:
Yes – because the Muslim Brotherhood has won the key elections for both parliament and the presidency.
And no – because the Egyptian military has strongly signaled it will not turn over real power to civilian control.
What
exists in Egypt for the moment is a standoff – between the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – over who is
actually going to run the country. Just two weeks before June 30th, the
date the generals had promised to hand over power, they instead issued a
series of decrees which stripped away most of the powers of the
presidency and shut down the Islamist led democratically elected
parliament. The army also created its own body to write a new
constitution which would preserve the military’s primacy – and martial
law was re-imposed.
Mohammed Morsi, the new president-elect is
60 years old. He earned a doctorate in engineering from the University
of Southern California and later taught in Egypt. But he is best known
for his fundamentalist views within the Muslim Brotherhood. He became
the accidental presidential candidate, when Mubarak-era judges banned
the Brotherhood’s first choice.
By most accounts, Morsi’s
inclination would be to turn Egypt into an Islamist state with limited
interest in women’s rights, minorities or Egypt’s liberal traditions,
But in his first address Morsi went out of his way to appeal to all
Egyptians, promising to respect the rights of women, Christians and
secular Muslims. As he put it, "I will serve all Egypt. There will be no
distinction between anybody."
That commitment is making a
virtue out of necessity. For if Morsi is going to successfully challenge
the authority of the military, he is going to need broad support –
including from the secularists and liberals whose passionate protests
led the revolution.
An all-out bloody confrontation is certainly
possible, but not inevitable. There is one idea circulating, that
having made their point, the generals may now step back to allow new
parliamentary elections and a new Constitution acceptable to both sides.
In return they would expect that key military, security and
intelligence functions would remain under their control.
The
benefit of such an arrangement would be stability – which is essential
to attracting new foreign investment and tourism so that Egypt’s
crumbling economy can be restored. Sounds plausible. However like most
major revolutions, after just 16 months the Egyptian version is far from
having run its course.