By Marcus Halaby
Saturday 1 March 2014
Barely a month after a rigged constitutional referendum held to enshrine continued military rule, Egypt’s post-coup regime has seen the sudden resignation of its prime minister Hazem Al Beblawi and his cabinet.
This has taken place even as the regime continues its repression of Muslim Brotherhood activists, and of the broader Anti-Coup Alliance led by it, which has been holding weekly demonstrations across the country, including in provincial regions that had not previously seen mass protests.
Iran’s Press TV has reported that Egyptian security forces are currently holding 692 university students in detention, with 21 students from Al-Azhar University recently sentenced to five-year prison terms for “rioting”; while Turkey’s World Bulletin reports that three courts in Alexandria have given 220 protesters seven-year prison sentences for “participating in illegal protests”.
Turkey’s Anadolu Agency also reported Anti-Coup Alliance spokesmen Hisham Kamal and Ehab Shiha accusing the security forces of subjecting female detainees to rape and sexual assault.
The Anti-Coup Alliance’s demands include the release of prisoners and the punishment of those involved in the killing of protestors, in particular the massacre of up to 2,600 unarmed protesters outside Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque on 14 August 2013. The four-fingered “R4BIA sign”, showing solidarity with the victims of this massacre, has become a symbol of the anti-coup protesters, and has been banned by the coup regime.
The irony will not be lost on Egyptian revolutionaries that, while the West supported a coup, led on the ground by fascists, to overthrow Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych after his police shot dead over a hundred protesters, the US Congress has recently lifted sanctions on Egypt, imposed after the coup, and granted a $1.5 billion aid package to Sisi’s murderous regime, which has slaughtered thousands. There is now blood on the hands of hypocritical imperialism.
Military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will remain defence minister in the new government of outgoing housing minister Ibrahim Mahlab, previously an official in former dictator Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). Mahlab vowed on his appointment as prime minister to “crush terrorism in all corners of the country”, in order to “restore security and safety to Egypt”.
At the same time, the coup regime’s Interim President Adly Mansour has reconstituted the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) under Sisi’s leadership as defence minister, leading to speculation that Sisi may now not stand for election as President in March or April after all, but will instead continue to operate as the post-coup regime’s real leader behind a screen of constitutional legitimacy.
The Beblawi government’s resignation was also accompanied by strikes, with Imam Youssef of the Salafist Asala (“Authenticity”) party, a component of the Anti-Coup Alliance, commenting that a “handful of labor strikes” had doomed to failure a government that “came to improve the coup’s image”.
Journalist Mostafa Bassiouny of Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists (RS), associated with Britain’s’ Socialist Workers Party (SWP), reported a revival of strike struggles amongst iron and steel workers and workers in factories in El Asher, Alexandria and Suez. More than 10,000 workers at state-owned textile factories in Mahalla El-Kubra struck on 10 February, demanding that employers raise their wages from £44 per month to the official minimum wage of £105.