Why Egyptian Army Backs The People
Updated: 1:45pm UK, Wednesday 03 July 2013
By Sam Kiley, Middle East Correspondent, in Cairo
Egypt's Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (Scarf) has pirouetted through a revolution and successive crises.
With extraordinary agility, the military sloughed off its history of dictatorship and took on a new costume of defender of the State and its people in 2011.
It has now locked horns with the Arab world's most populous nation's democratically-elected president, again in the name of the people.
Could there be other motives for his new found champion of Egypt's industrial workers.
The Scarf's chairman, General Abdul Fatah al Sisi, British and American trained, gave the president 48 hours to end an uprising against his first year in office, or ...
The rest is unclear. But leaks to local and international media indicate that a coup has been planned.
The threat is new. The complaints are not.
In December last year and in the following February, the general called on the government to acknowledge the will of the people.
Then, as now, large sections of society are angered by attacks on the media and the Islamisation of the new constitution.
On June 15, many were horrified when President Mohamed Morsi called on Egyptians to join a 'Holy War' against President Bashar al Assad of Syria - seemingly putting Egypt's weight behind a Syrian jihad.
His party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was banned by the military in 1954.
Its members suffered decades of persecution, imprisonment, exile, torture and death but emerged as the most well-organised element of the 2011 revolution - and won political power as a result.
This has been anathema to the military which see themselves in the Nasserite tradition of modernising Arabs.
But there may also be less high-minded reasons for the military to be backing 'the people' against the president.
The armed forces control vast amounts of the Egyptian economy. Its investments and holdings include hotels, fridge factories, mineral water bottling, car manufacturing. Its agricultural operations make it the country's biggest food supplier.
Officially it acknowledges generating $198m (£130m) a year. The true scale is probably several times that figure.
Now Egypt's economy is on its knees. It has been bailed out by Qatar but remains dangerous vulnerable to debt default.
Two years of instability has been bad for the economy and the military's assets inside that economy.
Law and order has been collapsing - the Sinai is now a largely military zone where Egypt's army has been sent to fight Islamists.
Towns like Port Said have been largely abandoned by the police.
Religious tensions have risen between Muslims and Egypt's 10 million Christians.
So the economy continues to decline.
The military may well want to head off a further collapse of central power and seize it in the 'interests of the nation'.
But such a move might not be bad for its business, either.
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