Implicated or not – and there’s no doubt the police and military were not unhappy at seeing al-Ahly being given a good drubbing off the pitch as on it – the blame is being placed firmly on the authorities rather than the Port Said fans. And that perception is, in its way, more important than the facts of the case.
Over events in Egypt, as in Syria, the West still holds to the view that movements for freedom should be civilised affairs, in which the voice of the “people” overwhelms the forces of tyranny and finds a stable expression in democratic votes.
Hence the efforts still being made, despite everything, to find some form of consensual outcome to the gathering civil war in Syria. The Arab League, as much as the West through the UN, still talks of a diplomatic outcome in which President Assad can somehow be persuaded voluntarily to give up power, and a new government of all parties be brought into being.
In the same way, diplomats and the politicians still hope that the generals in Egypt will see it in their interests to give up their privileges and promote a gradual but sure transition to democracy. And, if this does not seem to be happening, then you hear a reverse pessimism about it all: that true democracy can’t be achieved and that the only victors will be the religious right.
This is simply to misread the situation. Revolutions are about power and the transfer of it. This never happens easily, as Americans as well as Europeans should know. In the Middle East, the transfer is made all the more confused because the uprising came from mass movements without organisation or unity.
What we are seeing at the moment in Egypt and Syria is a precarious balance between the desire of most people, or at least the most vocal people, who want change to a freer system, and the equal wish of the majority for security for fear of the chaos that ensues from change.
Minorities such as the Copts, Armenians, Alouites and Shia have good reason to fear the worst from majority rule. But then so do traders and shopkeepers have cause to dread a collapse in order, even if they’ve enjoyed precious little from the rule of law.
In the end, President Assad will go, as will the military rulers of Egypt. It’s too late for the kind of compromises that diplomats in the UN keep talking about. Their rule will end because these are internal struggles in which neither the soldiery nor the public is willing to accept the progressive butchery of its own people. The harder the crackdown, the greater the desertions. They will also go because there will be no outside intervention to save them. Even Russia does not see in its interests, or capability, to step in directly to rescue the Alouite regime in Syria, while the US, for all its history, doesn’t see a future in military rule in Egypt.
Britain and France proclaimed Libya a triumph of intervention. The reality is that it has put off anyone deploying the military again. It’s a new game and still without rules.
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The Independent