I'm George Galloway, member of
parliament and anti-war campaigner. And
this broadcast is made by Mala Media,
but you could feedback to me on it via
Twitter at George Galloway or on
Facebook at George Galloway MP. I want
to talk to you today about the situation
in Egypt where over a year ago a
military juna led by General Cece seized
power from the elected Muslim
Brotherhood government led by President
Morsey and has been bathing the country
in blood. Ever since I had been banned
from Egypt under the previous
dictatorship of Hosim Mubarak in a
vindictive act provoked by my repeated
breaking of the siege on Gaza bringing
convoys from all over the world. After
the Egyptian revolution, which overthrew
Mubarak, I returned to the country, in
fact, several times, including to
campaign in the first free presidential
election, not for President Morsy, but
for one of his rivals. Naturally, of
course, in the final ballot, I supported
President Morsey against his opponent, a
remnant of the Mubarak regime. I believe
that President Morsey made mistakes
during his short one-year tenure as
Egypt's leader, though these mistakes
have been exaggerated, often grossly. I
also believe that he remains the
legitimate president of Egypt and that
his usurpers have no legal or political
legitimacy. Mubarak is now out of prison
whilst President Morsey and tens of
thousands of others are behind bars. The
remnants of the old regime are back with
a vengeance. The military juna, which is
what it remains, despite the general
appearing nowadays in a lounge suit, has
systematically reversed the gains of the
revolution and ruthlessly repressed not
just the supporters of the legal
legitimate president, but even those who
misguidedly supported the military coup.
Now Islamists, leftists, liberals, Arab
nationalists, human rights campaigners
fill the prisons together and the
torture chambers, even the graveyards.
The luckier ones have merely been
internally banished to the rank of
non-persons. The grim prison state that
is now General Cece's Egypt is worse,
much worse than the dictatorship of
Hosni Mubarak. And that's saying
something. With remarkable smoothness,
the so-called international community
has pretended that none of this ever
really happened. Those who are forever
telling us how much they believe in
democracy have nothing to say about the
overthrow of democracy in Egypt. And
after just one year, those who endlessly
lecture the world on human rights have
lost their tongues at the wholesale mass
imprisonment of human rights
campaigners, at the widespread use of
torture, at the mass death sentences
being handed out after farcical trials,
sometimes lasting just a few hours. And
those who are ready to go to war when
governments gunned down their own people
have forgotten if they even noticed the
massacre of Rabba in which thousands of
civilian protesters were shot down like
fish in a barrel, trapped in a square
and slaughtered. Those who mournfully
commemorate Tienaman Square can't even
bother to pronounce Rabba and don't even
pretend to care about it. All television
stations, radio stations, opposition
newspapers, dissident journalists,
non-government organizations who ask
awkward questions, who refuse to tow the
line, have been closed down, banned,
banished, exiled, and countless numbers
of them killed, tortured, thrown into
grim dungeons. CC now leads one of the
most ruthless dictatorships in the
world. But you would never know it if
your information came only from the
so-called mainstream media. The other
Arab dictatorships, particularly Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,
themselves terrified at the prospect of
democracy in their own countries, are
pouring in billions of dollars to the
coffers of the Egyptian Juna. Most of
it, as usual, being snaffled by the
army. The army has been restored to its
former inglorious role of owning banks,
hotels, shops, factories, farms. Cece,
hailed by some misguided people who
hopefully now know better as the new
Nasser has turned out to be just another
tinpot military ruler faithfully
carrying out the orders of Israel and
the United States. The siege of Gaza has
been intensified by CC tunnels
destroyed. The gates of Rafa locked
fast. Close coordination between the
Juna and the Zionist state has resumed
with full force. The Muslim Brotherhood,
which for decades endured brute tyranny
without resort to violence, and which so
recently won the free elections in
Egypt, have now been pronounced a
terrorist organization and wiped off the
official political map of
Egypt. Egypt matters. It is the heart of
the Arab world, the most important Arab
country. Democracy matters. If the
message to the Arab world is that
democracy is too good for them, that
they can overthrow their tyrants, but
they can replace them only with those
who will continue business as usual with
Israel and the West, then we are killing
all faith in democracy in the Arab and
wider Muslim world. And what will be the
result of that? One obvious conclusion
that the Arabs may draw is that
democracy is a chimera, a sham, a fraud,
and that there is no point in it. What
could be more radicalizing,
fanaticizing, extromising than what has
happened to the elected Islamist
government in Egypt?
If this conclusion is the one that is
drawn, then we will all reap a terrible
harvest because Muslims will
increasingly be drawn to the al-Qaeda
ISIS view of the world with all the
terrible consequences for them and for
everyone which will flow. I hope that is
not the conclusion which will be drawn.
That instead the struggle for freedom in
Egypt and elsewhere will take a
different course and take cognizance of
the mistakes that President Morsey made
and the mistakes made by his opponents
which have helped lead to the disaster
in Egypt. In the short term, we must
encourage unity in Egypt against the
dictatorship and for a return to
democracy.
Internationally, all progressive people
must put aside whatever differences they
have with the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood and get behind the campaign
to isolate the juna of General Cece to
highlight its crimes to force their
governments to take a stand against
Cece's dictatorship. Over the next few
months, I will be doing everything I can
to build that broad alliance. I hope you
will join me. Wasalamu alaykum and peace
be on all of you.