The question is whether the scorched earth methods practised by Sisi and his government are helping to build legitimacy among the Egyptian population, including in economically disadvantaged areas such as north Sinai, the Western Desert, and Upper Egypt. First, pro-Sisi talk show host Mahmoud Saad was barred from going on the air when the private channel al-Nahar accused him vaguely of “demotivating the army”, apparently because one of his guests had the temerity to mention the 1967 defeat by Israel during a programme on October 24. High anxiety about the broader implications of the Sinai attacks was also evident in a curious exchange between Egyptian authorities and the media. Sisi has also made it clear recently that, despite earlier hints to the contrary, he is now in no mood to reconsider the harsh anti-protest law issued in November 2013, which has been used to jail many prominent youth leaders of the 2011 anti-Mubarak revolution.
But it also seems that it can be used to prosecute demonstrators blocking a road, an everyday occurrence in Egypt. The decree applies, inter alia, to transportation networks, power stations, bridges, gas pipelines, and oilfields. While the tunnels under Rafah have been a persistent and serious problem, the total media blackout in Sinai makes it impossible to know what actually happened and whether the demolitions were truly necessary or rather a hasty exertion of collective punishment against Sinai residents.Īnd collective punishment for the attacks went far beyond Sinai, as Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi used the occasion to decree on October 27, that henceforth any civilians attacking or obstructing “vital” public facilities would be referred to military court. There was the remarkable scene of Egyptian bulldozers demolishing houses to create a buffer zone in Rafah following allegations that militants or weapons had entered from Gaza to carry out the attacks. The Egyptian authorities’ responses to the October 24 killings, however, raise questions about whether what happens in Sinai stays in Sinai.
These were the first death sentences issued against Ansar, a group that has been carrying out attacks since 2011. The October 24 ambushes appeared to be revenge attacks for several specific moves by the Egyptian state against Ansar, including the October 11 killing of a senior Ansar leader and the October 21 sentencing to death of seven alleged Ansar militants for killing nine soldiers in Cairo in March. Inside Story – Has Sisi’s Egypt failed on security? The October 24 attacks certainly had a Sinai-specific context: A deadly game of cat-and-mouse between Egyptian security forces and local terrorist groups, with Ansar Beit al-Maqdis at the forefront. If the ratings are correct and Egypt is stabilising, then one must argue that what is going on in Sinai is disconnected from what is happening in the rest of the country. Either the ratings are correct – and Egypt is stabilising generally despite a marginal insurgency in a remote region – or the ratings are incorrect, and Egypt is headed for more instability. There are at least two ways to explain the evident disconnect between the economic forecasts and the eruption of violence last week. It has left thousands of Egyptians jailed for a year or more now: some sentenced to multiyear terms for no more than marching in a demonstration, some enmeshed in chaotic mass trials, others not even charged yet, and some on extended hunger strikes. The October 24 attacks and their aftermath also come on top of a vast crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood as well as various other groups, such as the liberal April 6 Youth Movement. The October 24 attack in the northern Sinai provoked a furious reaction from the Egyptian military, including the bulldozing of hundreds of houses in the border town of Rafah as well as adopting a new law that will send many civilians to military courts. No sooner had the ink dried on those reports than Egypt suffered the greatest number of deaths from terrorism in a single day – 31 soldiers killed – since 2005. Citing a “stabilised political and security situation”, Moody’s Investor Service changed Egypt’s rating to stable from negative on October 20, one of several recent reports assessing that the country’s political unrest was dying down and forecasting that the economy should be headed for significant improvement.
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