• EGYPT
  • September 19, 2013
  • 4 minutes read

Wael Haddara: We lost our country on July 3rd (Full transcripts)

Wael Haddara: We lost our country on July 3rd (Full transcripts)

… I would say that it was probably best described as an uneasy relationship. It was an unprecedented scenario. I don’t think really anyone in Egypt, or outside of Egypt for that matter, anticipated that Egypt would erupt in the way that it did on Jan. 25. …

… [Talk about] why the relationship was uneasy.

… Fundamentally I think the autocracy of the last 30, if not the last 60 years has created a society that is very much authoritarian at all its levels. So the idea of coming together in a civil sense and working together, coordinating, was not something that proved to be very easy in Egypt…. The notion of being able to come together, work together and resolve our own differences wasn’t something that had had a lot of practice in Egypt.

But on top of that, a lot of the early decisions that were made by both sides served to further undermine this mutual trust that could have existed.

And what was the relationship concurrently with the SCAF [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces], with the military?

… As an outsider, I personally felt that the relationship was also uneasy. But one of the problems, one of the challenges was in how that message was communicated and how that relationship was described.

And so there was a certain mythology that was built around the armed forces, starting with their non-intervention in the revolution, or at least their supposed non-intervention in the revolution, and their refusal to essentially do what then [Muammar al-]Qaddafi or [Bashar al-]Assad did in Libya and Syria, respectively.

So the notion of the army protecting the revolution is a mythology that was built around that, a notion that the army is a red line; no one should criticize the army.

That mythology was slowly built over 2011, supported largely I would say by the Brotherhood, at least in terms of the discourse, the messaging. And I think that was another reason why there was ongoing mistrust. The Brotherhood did not understand why the revolutionaries would insist on picking fights with the army, and the revolutionaries did not understand how the Brotherhood could trust the army to oversee a transition to democracy.

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