Risky path for Egypt’s rulers

Growing concern over the escalating political strife in Egypt has led to the military Government taking the ultimate sanction of declaring its main opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist group, blaming it for a spate of bombings and attacks against the police.

This is far from a new tactic: countries around the world regularly declare troublesome organisations to be terrorists. In many cases there are very good reasons for doing so, in others it is simply a political move to silence opposition.

Australia recently went down this path by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, currently a participant in the Syrian Civil War, a terrorist group, with the aim of stopping the steady trickle of Australian nationals heading over to Syria to fight for it.

In Egypt’s case there is a difficulty. The Muslim Brotherhood was until the middle of last year, the national Government. By some estimates it still has the support of some 30 per cent of the population, and in a country of more than 86 million, that’s an awful lot of people to prosecute and lock up.

So obviously the current Government must adopt other tactics – that is the arrest some key leaders, agitators and a few ordinary Brotherhood supporters trawled up at one of the many often violent demonstrations taking place across the country; the hope being that the vast majority will be cowed or at least persuaded to give up their radical ways and return to business as usual.

As is often the case, journalists are among the targets. In Egypt it was the arrest of  four Al Jazeera journalists (one was later set free) accused of joining the Brotherhood and making biased and false reports that damaged the country’s reputation abroad.

If biased reporting is a crime then the staffs of organisations ranging from Fox News to the Sydney Daily Telegraph had better watch out. The arrests are simply a way to silence reporting that does not accord with the Government’s line – something that in this information-charged world where anyone with a mobile phone is both reporter and camera-person, is doomed to failure.

The Government could quite possibly have more success with its overall strategy of silencing dissent, although judging by the examples of Libya and Syria the harder the crackdown, the more the population tends to push back.

What it is in danger of doing is creating a vacuum that will be filled by even more radical Islamic groups bent on turning Egypt into an Iranian-style Islamic State - that would be a savage blow to any hope of future peace and stability in North Africa and the Middle East.