Does the West play the Syrian game in Egypt?

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, received John Kerry, US Secretary of State. Some 30 trainees of the EC joined them for an informal chat on the transatlantic alliance. (EC Audiovisual Services).

The Americans after having managed to become the target of aggressive rhetoric from all sides of the Egyptian political spectrum they now try to enter again in the picture behind the European Union. To this effect the US Secretary of State, John Kerry and the European Union High Representative, Catherine Ashton issued a joint statement on the political crisis in Egypt. Ashton is mentioned first in this statement and consequently Kerry appears as just undersigning the text.

In any case the statement was the product of joint work by two high ranking EU and US officials. The Special Representative for the Southern Mediterranean Bernardino Leon and the Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, have been working together during the past week. According to the EU press release, “they urged the Egyptian government and opposition parties to begin a process of genuine reconciliation, and move ahead inclusively to consider amendments to the Constitution and prepare as quickly as possible for Parliamentary and Presidential elections”. The two western officials also cooperated closely in this effort with visiting senior representatives from the UAE and Qatar.

As the presence of the senior representatives of UAE and Qatar is underlined in the joint Ashton and Kerry statement, it is obvious that the oil rich Gulf Arab states are also backing the suggestions contained in the EU – US joint statement. The relevant part of the text goes like that, “…we have suggested a number of practical ideas…These have included a series of modest confidence building measures, including public statements condemning violence and supporting peaceful resolution of political differences; a commitment to meaningful negotiations, requiring compromises and broad political participation; an end to incitement in public statements and the media; steps to scale down and ease tensions surrounding the ongoing demonstrations at Raba’a al-Adawiya and Nahda Squares; and immediately beginning the process of releasing detained political figures”.

Of course those EU-US suggestions didn’t have any practical effect on what is happening in the streets and the squares of the Egyptian cities. Secularists, supported by the authorities on the one side and Muslims on the other keep throwing stones and even kill each other. The gap dividing the pro secularist government and those who back the ousted by the army and imprisoned President Morsi widens every day. These developments however do not strengthen the army. On the contrary they weaken the position of the generals.

In this respect the entire Sinai region has become no man’s land and the Egyptian authorities appear unable to control the Muslim fighter units operating there, probably controlled by Al-Qaeda . If the reports are true that the Egyptian generals asked Israel to intervene and kill Muslim fighters in Sinai, then the end of the generals might not be very far away. In Egypt whoever is known to have cooperated with Israel in order to kill Muslims, cannot be long-lived.

It’s not only Sinai though that sounds the alarm for the ability of the Egyptian secularists in the army and the political elite to bring the country out of its woes even at a great cost in lives. The large Christian population factor complicates even more the Egyptian equation. Traditionally the Christian Coptic Church of Egypt is under the protection of the state. Unfortunately it seems that the government is not any more able to fulfil its duties to the 7 million Egyptian Christians and protect them from the Muslim mobs.

Yesterday the Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued a press release saying that it is “deeply concerned by continuing attacks against Egyptian Christians, which have increased in frequency since the removal of the Morsi regime and have prompted Pope Tawadros II to cancel his weekly public sermons. Violence and hate speech targeting religious minorities was already on the increase under the former president’s rule. Since his removal from power, attacks on the Coptic community in particular have increased sharply, primarily but not exclusively in Upper Egypt, following allegations from several Islamist sources that Christians played a pivotal role in the removal of Morsi’s regime”.

There is no doubt that the situation in Egypt may soon develop into a full-scale civil war. If the army generals and the secularist government they appointed will be obliged to openly ask help from Israel and the US, then their days as rulers of the whole Egypt will be numbered. The next day the country may become the theatre of vicious fighting and end up like Syria.

Let’s see what the West thinks of that. According to the joint EU-US statement “the European Union and the United States remain deeply committed to a strong, democratic, inclusive and prosperous Egypt. We recognize that many challenges lie ahead, but we also believe that much is possible for Egyptians. We are convinced that a successful democratic transition can help Egypt lead the rest of the region toward a better future, as it has so often done during its rich and proud history”.

The West says, but obviously doesn’t think so, that only democracy may solve Egypt’s stalemate. This is a country that never knew how the democratic game is played. The truth is that the West’s support to those local political forces which wanted to bring democracy didn’t solve any problems in Syria, Libya and Tunisia lately or in Iraq, Afghanistan and Algeria in the past. It just destroyed all those countries. It is more than certain then that the West doesn’t care about democracy or the social and political sustainability of all those Peoples. The hypocritical interest of the West about democratic rule is very thin to cover the willingness to completely destroy any country, which may present a real risk for the EU and US interests in the distant future.

If Egypt could ever become a strong populist-Muslim state like Iran, then better destroy its internal political and social cohesion by supporting Morsi against Mubarak and then the generals against Morsi. If all that is not enough then do some provocative killings and bombings like in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many other countries of the world. At the end the air forces will do the rest, now without pilots. Some unstable characters will drive the deadly drones and turn the war and the killings in the desert into a game played tens of thousands miles away. Who needs real people? Only profits are important.