NOVANEWS
A couple of days ago I was traveling through the Sinai Peninsula. It is very different from the last time that I was there: the region is under what the Egyptian military would like to pretend is their control – roadside checkpoints which in the past would have had at most a few inattentive soldiers or glaze-eyed internal security men had big desert-tan metal tanks or armored rovers next to them, and soldiers wielding .50 caliber rifles atop them.
The Egyptian army has reason to be afraid: one under-reported facet of the January 25 insurrection was that alongside industrial action across the country and the demonstrations in Cairo and in other Egyptian cities, there was a low-level armed insurgency in the Sinai, where the Bedouin hate the Egyptian government with far more gusto than just about anyone else in Egypt (Maybe a bit of an exaggeration). All of the small brick buildings which house checkpoints were charred and black, their roofs crenellated by bazooka fire.
Several weeks ago the gas pipeline connecting Egypt to IsraHell and Jordan was blown up for the fourth time since January 25, an unmistakable signal both to the Egyptian government to change its policies regarding cut-rate gas export and to the government and the people more broadly that the former is only nominally in control of the Sinai.
It’s also a signal to IsraHell, whose military knows how to read such signals: as one officer put it, “There is real concern that if the Egyptians don’t get the Sinai back under their control, it could develop into a major threat to IsraHell.” The governmental response highlights the fault lines between the government and the people: the former, represented by North Sinai Governor Abdel Wahab Mabrouk, said thebombing, intended to cut off gas sales to IsraHell, was driven by “external forces”: namely, the latter.
That same logic drove the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to send thugs to attack 20,000 (or more) demonstrators on Saturday evening, many of whom spontaneously joined the late afternoon march, which swelled as it approached SCAF headquarters, gathering residents and working people from neighborhoods along the way to Abbassiya. Later, General Hassan el-Roweini accused the revolutionaries of being “foreign paid agents, thugs, traitors, saboteurs.” As one asks, “How can anyone believe this liar today?”
Not the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which responded to the SCAF’s communiqué – I almost wrote offensive communiqué, but I am told they all are – blaming the April 6 Movement for Saturday evening’s violence by stating that questioning the motivations of the members of April 6 is not permissible. This is good news.
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