Global Maritime: Egypt’s ‘litmus test’

Egypt’s ‘litmus test’
Friday, February 4, 2011
Professor John Measor is an expert on the Middle East.

Global News recently spoke with John Measor about the violent to the protests in Egypt. Before joining the faculty at SMU this academic year, Dr. Measor completed studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.

He will participate in a live online question-and-answer session with Global News on Friday afternoon, as the world waits to see what transpires on the 11th and, possibly, most crucial day of protests.

What do you expect to see happen on Friday?

It’s the litmus test for the regime. In some ways, I will be surprised if it survives tomorrow. Maybe it will be in power for a couple of days after that, but if the protests tomorrow are as large or larger – the regime will have lost.

This will be a fundamental change across the region no matter what happens. Either the demonstrators will be absolutely crushed, and that will have to be dealt with, or some change will come about — which will have immense implications for the entire region.

What are we missing from the story in Egypt?

The regime has been pumping out over state media that what’s driving the protests are foreign agitators who are from Israel, the United States and Qatar: Qatar [because of] Al-Jazeera, the U.S. because it’s controlled by Jews and Israel for obvious reasons. We’re not getting that here.

We increasingly know the two parties in conflict — one is a predominantly the 25-and-under crowd, in the hundreds of thousands. We don’t know who is supporting them among the rest of the population out there, because we’re not seeing it.

All of the other political parties are in a reactionary mode. The kids who don’t have any leadership are engaging in the fistfights. They want change.

This is a really popular revolt: It’s very easy to get very romantic about it. It’s probably bad to be that way. These things tend not to end well.

What do the protests and clashes in Egypt mean for the rest of the region?

[The leaders in the region] aren’t stupid people: They’re trying to get ahead of the curve. That’s going to be the game from here on out. If Egypt falls, it will be impossible for them to get ahead of it, but if Egypt can hold on, they might have a chance to get a head of it.

The dynamic in the region has been fairly stable for the last three decades. If Egypt changes, all of that changes.

Egypt itself is very important. There are about 300 million Arab — 80 million of them are Egyptians.

For 500 years, Egypt has been the centre of the Arab world culturally, politically and economically. For the last three decades –oddly enough of the length of the Mubarak regime – it’s basically become insignificant and not important.

So, that’s a reason: Egypt becomes important again, no matter what comes out of this.

The country that is most likely to be the next to see major demonstrations will be Jordan; the dynamic there is identical to that in Egypt — with the added proviso that two-thirds of the population is Palestinian and that if such events were to take place, the chances of Israeli or American direct intervention would be very real.

A ‘Day of Anger’ is planned for Saturday in Syria. What should we watch for there?

Syria’s actually a lot different. The first thing is that it has no foreign patrons; all of these other states [in the region] have big foreign patrons. Syria does not have a foreign patron that has any leverage over it.

The state is the same, in that it is an authoritarian dictatorship – really nasty guys. The difference is, the ruling elite in Syria is an ethnic minority over a huge majority population.

The Syrian opposition is so weak, in comparison, that they’ll have a lot of trouble organizing something like this. What you’re seeing is being organized outside of the country. If they were inside the country they would be dead or in jail.

Trust me, the Syrian regime is doing everything it can to keep footage of events in Egypt off of Syrian media. They can do so fairly effectively, but then, so is China.

If this had started in Syria, which is also an important country, but not as important as Egypt, obviously our reaction to it would have been very different. We would have been very much in favour of the protesters. It would have been easier for our policymakers, at that point. Egypt’s difficult.