 In February of this year, when almost everyone was treating the anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt as a cause of celebration, I was shocked to read the following verdict by the historian Andrew Roberts in the Spectator: We should abhor policy created by mobs, and assume that all revolutionary change will ultimately be for the worse, especially in a part of the world with so few model democracies. The future seems to be in the hands of the Cairo mob, which has been irresponsibly egged on by an American president desperate to be seen on the side of the nice middle-class liberals who are always the ultimate losers in revolutions. Far better the American president who said of the Latin American strongman: ‘He may be a sonofabitch, but at least he’s our sonofabitch.’
Wasn't he being unduly cynical? All revolutionary change will ultimately be for the worse? In 18th Century France, perhaps, but not in the Arab world where it was hard to imagine any regimes being worse than the present ones. Surely, the Arab Spring represented a step towards freedom and democracy, however small? I regret to say that, judging from the events of the past weekend, Andrew Roberts has been proved right. In an article published in the Boston Globe yesterday (hat tip Tom Gross), the journalist Jeff Jacoby described an attack by the Egyptian military on a group of peaceful Christian demonstrators on Sunday: What happened in Egypt on Sunday was a massacre. Government security forces assaulted Coptic Christians as they marched peacefully to the headquarters of the state TV network. They were protesting the recent burning of St. George's, a Coptic church in the Upper Egypt village of El-Marinab. Yet broadcasters loyal to the ruling military junta exhorted "honorable Egyptians" to help the army put down the protests. "Soon afterward, bands of young men armed with sticks, rocks, swords, and firebombs began to roam central Cairo, attacking Christians," the Associated Press reported. "Troops and riot police did not intervene." Graphic video of the violence was quickly uploaded to the Internet. So were even more graphic images of the murdered protesters.
Jacoby went on to point out that in the eight months since Mubarak's departure, the ruling military junta has tried and convicted 12,000 Egyptian civilians in military tribunals, more than in the entire 30 years of Mubarak's rule. The country's emergency laws have not only remained in force since Mubark's ouster, but have been expanded to include such offences as "spreading rumours" and "blocking traffic". The only group which isn't persecuted by Egypt's military dictators are Islamist hardliners who have been given a free rein to terrorise the country's Coptic Christian minority. Con Coughlin documented the latest outrages in the Telegraph on Monday: During the latest outbreak of Coptic-related violence in Cairo on Sunday night, several Copts are reported to have been crushed to death by the tracks of an armoured military vehicle that ploughed into a group of protesters as they sang hymns and held aloft the Cross.
The upshot of this barbaric treatment is that the Copts are choosing to leave Egypt en masse in spite of having been there for 19 centuries. The Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organisations worked out last month that 90,000 Christians have left the country since last May. At that rate, one third of the country's Coptic population will have vanished within a decade. So much for the Arab Spring. As Andrew Roberts predicted, the overthrow of the region's strongmen has not resulted in the birth of democracy. Rather, it has just unleashed an Islamist mob. The Telegraph.
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