Mutiny puts pressure the Egyptian people they share the powerful feeling of national frustration that has been growing steadily in response to the insults inflicted on Egypt by the United States and Israel.
Recently this feeling was expressed in a distorted way by the mobilization touched off by the trial of the "mad policeman" of the Sinai and
THE MUTINY on February 26-27 of the draftees of the Egyptian special security police force created by President Anwar Sadat in 1977 has assumed an extraordinary dimension and raises some important questions. SALAH JABER
This mutiny comes nine years after the mass explosions of January 18-19, 1977, which were provoked by a sudden increase in the price of necessities, in compliance with a recommendation by the IMF. After that the imperialists adopted an emergency plan to bail out the Sadat regime.
Nonetheless, the combination of a creeping austerity program with imperialist financial aid could only temporarily attenuate the crisis of the Egyptian capitalist economy.
The Egyptian foreign debt has grown steadily. At the beginning of this year, it reached 25, 000 million dollars. At the same time, the outlook for the country's balance of payments, which has been hard hit by the sharp drop in oil prices - both because Egypt exports oil and because there has been less money coming back into the country from Egyptian workers working in the Arab oil producing countries - and because of a sharp drop also in revenues from tourism, will only be further aggravated by the mutiny. And this is to say nothing of the effect the rebellion have in promoting capital flight and in dissuading potential investors.
All in all, the imperialists' Egyptian protege is in a very tight corner. The living standard of the Egyptian masses is continuing to nose dive. The "propensity to rebel," to use the jargon of the bourgeois economists, is steadily increasing.
The worst thing for the Egyptian bourgeoisie is that it is not only the workers in overalls who are rebelling, as the workers in the textile industry did just recently (more than 200 of them were arrested). The revolt has spread to the workers in uniform, the draftees.
The rumor that the length of service of draftees was going to be extended by a year was only the spark that ignited the potential for explosion that had been building up for a long time among these children of the Egyptian people, who were reduced to a modern form of slavery and forced to repress their brothers and sisters, forced to repress the very sections of the population that they would join at the end of their service - the workers and the unemployed.
the mutineers and those who joined them, the regime resorted this time to using the army, including tanks and helicopters. Full-scale battles took place, with their inevitable toll of dead and wounded.
Nonetheless, less than in certain mass outbursts in other parts of the world. Paradoxically, that is the result of the fact that this time the rebels were themselves soldiers, themselves armed.
There could be no doubt about the final outcome of the battle. The army had the advantage in numbers and armament. But - and this is the the Egyptian bourgeois state - the army itself is also a conscript army.
The army itself has already experienced mutinies. The soldiers are as discontented as their comrades who are enrolled in the police. They come from the same social classes, and along with them and the rest of Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, 1977 (DR)
his subsequent "suicide." For a broad mass current, Suleiman Khater, the "suicide." a comrade of the mutinied policemen, has become a martyr, because in the eyes of many Egyptians he was defending the "national honor" when he fired on Israeli tourists in the Sinai.
This state of affairs has not gone unnoticed by the Israeli leaders, who rushed to proclaim loudly their solidarity with Mubarak. In the last analysis, the Egyptian mutiny confirms the irreplacable role of the Zionist state for the defense of the imperialist bourgeois order in the region.
In the Middle East today, the Zionist army is the only one that is in no danger — in its present condition -of being tom apart from within.
fact, it represents the redoubt of the Egyptian bourgeoisie! distorted expression of Egyptian na"distortion" is steadily gaining ground in the Egyptian mass movement.
In fact, in the mass movement the Islamic fundamentalist current stands out today more and more as the faction most radically opposing the regime, Israel and the West, and this is true notably in the armed forces.
From the soldier who killed Sadat to the "mad policeman" of the Sinai, fundamentalism that is national cause, in the absence of a revolutionary left with any
As for the legal opposition, including the left opposition, the Progressive Unionists of Mohieddin, once again it displayed a craven attitude. In a meeting with Mubarak on February 27, it signed a common statement denouncing the "disorder"!
In order to stay on the regime's good side, the reformists are leaving an open field to the Islamic current to channel the rebellion of the masses in a country which, moreover, does not have an autonomous organized workers' movement.
The contradiction between the ripeness of the objective conditions for revolution and the lag of subjective conditions has reached an extreme in Egypt. That makes the tasks of the Egyptian revolutionary Marxists all the more considerable. International Viewpoint 10 March 1986
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
EGYPT on regime