Scarcely a month after the coup d’état that brought down President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s army, hailed as saviours by millions of citizens fearful of Islamism, seems to be rewriting the terms of transition to an inclusive democracy. After the rapture, the Tamarod (rebellion) movement that repossessed Tahrir Square should brace for a hard landing. Tamarod regrouped the vital forces that brought down Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in 2011, remobilising against the Brothers’ divisive drive to reshape Egypt in their own image and occupy its buckled institutions with loyal Islamists. But these rebels allied with supporters of the ancien regime they had dreamed of sweeping away.
The army, in the benign narrative of the past month’s turmoil, did its patriotic duty and merely delivered the coup de grace on behalf of an adoring nation. Egypt would thereby get a second chance to relaunch the revolution. The generals, all starch and sharp creases, and their grasping incompetence during the first stage of the transition from the Mubarak order forgotten, would reboot Egypt.
Always a delusion, that vision was cut to pieces in Saturday’s dawn attack on a Cairo sit-in of Morsi loyalists, which human rights groups suggest was a massacre executed by security forces. After army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called on Egyptians last Wednesday to take over the streets and give him a “mandate” to confront “violence and potential terrorism”, the scores killed became a chronicle of deaths foretold. Under the old, if implausible script, the army had suspended the constitution and set up a caretaker government to produce an inclusive constitution and a fair electoral law, after which there would be new parliamentary and presidential elections. Now, it seems, Gen Sisi has sensed greatness, giddied by the masses that came out to assist the Brotherhood’s political suicide.