Columnists are still debating the newly-announced constitutional declaration, with at least one writer labelling President Mohamed Morsy’s announcement delusional.
Dismissing the illusions
Amr Hamzawy
Al-Watan Newspaper
Hamzawy offers President Morsy some advice. He advises him that the current crisis over his “tyrannical” declaration will not be resolved by him issuing a simple explanation. Hamzawy confidently asserts that under no circumstances will youth movements, unions, political parties, and civil society activists bow to the constitutional declaration, even over time.
He advises the president to resist the temptation to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood’s capability to manage the street and contain dissident demonstrations by organising pro-Morsy marches will control the current crisis. Even using the same security apparatus of Mubarak and resorting to human rights violations will not affect popular determination to cancel the constitutional declaration, Hamzawy believes.
The goal of the opposition is not to oust Morsy but to encourage him to withdraw his unilateral declaration and pursue national dialogue. Hamzawy states that the president’s legitimacy is dependent on him respecting the same rules of democracy that brought him to power.
Reporting from Iran
Fatima Naout
Al-Watan Newspaper
Implying a parallel between the current post-revolution political turmoil in Egypt and the devolution of the 1979 Iranian Revolution into a theocratic regime, Naout recounts what she describes as the bitter fate of Iran when the Ayatollahs took power and hijacked a popular revolution.
Naout states that while the Iranian revolution broke out in the hopes of replacing the tyrannical regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi with a modern democracy, Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power to head a brutal regime whose cruelty dwarfed the crimes against humanity committed by the Shah’s security apparatus, SAVAK.
She describes how the mullahs used the same prison used by SAVAK to torture dissidents daring to oppose their regime, including school children who refused to accept from their teachers that obedience to Khomeini was the same as obedience to Allah.
Naout explains how the Revolutionary Guard proudly claimed that hanging unbelievers in the streets was doing them a favour, on the grounds that the psychological harm they must have experienced while living would exceed the pain of being executed. Thus, dissidents were honoured by being slaughtered, and protected from heresy and sin.
Through all of this Naout did not mention Egypt directly, but reading between her lines one can imagine a similar fate for the revolution here.
