Commentary: A nation set adrift on a river of troubles

 
8 July 2013

The fighting in Cairo overnight suggests that Egypt is adrift — with little chance of a compromise for an interim government.

The Muslim Brotherhood of ousted president Mohamed Morsi has called for a nationwide jihad, an Islamic uprising to restore him to power.

The hardline Islamic al-Nour party has withdrawn from talks with the army to form the new government. And there are Islamic groups beyond them that want no truck with any of the forms of western secular politics.

An emergency programme to address the worst of the economic and social crisis now engulfing most of Egypt’s 84 million citizens is desperately needed. It seems pretty far off, however. The hand-wringing commentaries from western media are as useless as they are well-meaning.

Morsi fell because it was feared that he would push his country to catastrophe. Most of his efforts were devoted to ensuring that he could not be voted out.

He seemed to have neither the will nor the knowledge to tackle the crises of daily life — getting food, clean water, and fuel to ensure survival. Tourism has now collapsed. Morsi even appointed a governor from the hardline Gamaa al-Islamiya to Luxor, a prime tourist destination. In 1997 its militants murdered 58 tourists in Luxor — which it has never denied or regretted.

Egypt is the gift of the Nile, as Herodotus the ancient Greek historian and gossip put it, but now this proposition is being tested to breaking point. The Nile is in crisis. Climate change has brought higher sea levels, flooding salt water into the delta. The pressure of more mouths to feed has brought over-farming.

Ethiopia is alarmed at Egyptian activities in the upper reaches of the Nile. Other neighbours like Saudi Arabia must wonder if the toxic mix of economic, social, and climatic crisis and violent politics is the beginning of something that will engulf the whole region.

The Obama administration told Morsi he had to make a deal for a cross-party government to tackle the country’s problems. No deal, said Morsi, and so the US gave the army the nod to make its move.

No deal is no answer, though that is what the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists seem to be saying. It is pretty certain that they would fail if they tried to run Egypt as a theocracy. Meanwhile, year on year the Nile is less of a gift than it once was.

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