Crackdown Coming to Egypt

Instability is mounting in Egypt. Tomorrow protesters, responding to a call from commander of the military, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, will fill the streets and public squares and violence will be the likely result. The only question is how much violence. Will the clashes between opposing groups -- Muslim Brotherhood vs. Tamarod/Mubarakists -- be so great that the military cracks down with a heavy hand and martial law is declared? It is a distinct possibility. The United States, unhappy with el-Sisi's handling of the post-Coup transition, has held up the delivery of four F-16s.

General el-Sisi is going back to the well. The best part of the coup so far has been the June 30 protests. The robust turnout, inflated wildly, had Western news consumers, myself included, feeling that Morsi had to go. The initial queasiness I felt when the military intervened, suspended the constitution and locked up Morsi in an unknown location has only gotten worse since July 3.

The coup is indefensible. But el-Sisi is going to give it a go. (See yesterday's Moon of Alabama post, Egypt: Preparing The Repression, for a good discussion of el-Sisi's call to fill the streets.) The gamble is that enough protesters will show up to justify General el-Sisi's obvious next step: a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

One aspect of the coup has been a complete success -- for the Israelis. Eighty percent of the tunnels connecting Egypt to Gaza have been shut down by el-Sisi's military. Gaza's economy has basically ground to a halt. The story, "Gaza’s Economy Suffers From Egyptian Military’s Crackdown," is told today in the New York Times by Fares Akram. I was somewhat aware that the commerce trafficked through the tunnels is taxed by Hamas, but I had no idea the extent to which Gaza's economy -- and the Hamas government -- relies on such traffic:

More materially, Hamas relies on the taxes it collects from the underground trade. Experts have estimated the group’s annual budget at $900 million. Hamas employs almost 50,000 government workers in Gaza, and two-thirds of the budget is said to be spent on salaries. 

Omar Shaban, a Gaza economist and the director of PalThink, an independent research institute, said taxes collected from the tunnel trade made up about a third of the budget. Additional income has come from taxes on local businesses, many of which also depend on cheap commodities from the tunnels that are now in short supply. Fuel from Egypt is sold here at half the price of fuel imported from Israel.

General el-Sisi can count on some powerful allies -- Israel, Saudi Arabia, et al. -- when civil war blows up in Egypt.