Conflicts intensify within Egyptian ruling elite

Conflicts and divisions are intensifying within the Egyptian ruling elite just a few weeks before the parliamentary elections due in October, and one year before presidential elections. Hosni Mubarak, the acting Egyptian president, is considered to be seriously ill and has so far failed to clarify any procedure for his successor. He never appointed a vice-president and said a few years ago that he would serve Egypt up to his dying breath.

There has already been discussion for some time as to whether the 82-year-old dictator would stand again in 2011 as the presidential candidate of the governing National Democratic Party (NDP). The media has also speculated over a potential successor, with one name—Gamal Mubarak, the son of Hosni Mubarak—recurring time and time again.

A campaign began a few weeks ago aimed at boosting the chances of Gamal as a possible successor. Posters of Gamal appeared in neighbourhoods of Cairo and signatures on behalf of his candidacy are being collected via the Internet.

Gamal is the deputy general secretary of the NDP, but the party denies that it organized or supports the campaign for the president’s son. One prominent NDP member, Aley el-Din Hilal, declared that the campaign was simply a result of “voluntary social activity” and “individual initiatives”.

This is very unlikely. Gamal is a former investment banker and a representative of the neo-liberal economic wing of the NDP. He is as hated by the Egyptian population as his father, who has governed the country since 1981 on the basis of emergency laws. It is much more likely that sections, or at least sympathizers, of the “new guard” in the NDP, initiated the campaign. This consists of a comparatively more youthful layer of the business elite, which got rich quick on the basis of privatizations and economic liberalization and is intent on pursuing this same course.

Following a series of economic “reforms”, the narrow business elite around Mubarak and the industrial magnates Ahmed Ezz, Mohamed Mansour and Ahmed el Maghrabi were able to amass huge fortunes. The same reforms have led to the increasing impoverishment of the Egyptian population.

In 1991, i.e., prior to the implementation of the structural adjustment programs demanded by International Monetary Fund, around 20 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. Today this figure has risen to 44 percent. In the past 10 years, during which the growth rate of the Egyptian economy soared as a result of liberalization policies and the authoritarian regime was courted by ruling elites all over the world, absolute poverty rose from 16.7 percent to nearly 20 percent.

Tensions within Egyptian society have again intensified since the outbreak of the financial and economic crisis in 2008. The growth of the Egyptian economy decreased in 2009 and the recent period has been marked by a series of protests and strikes against the government. These have been brutally suppressed. In July, police savagely beat a blogger critical of the government, Khaled Saeed from Alexandria, to death on a public street. His death led to a wave of protests. In addition, there have been many strikes and protests in the spring and summer of this year against cuts to subsidies and low wages against a background of rising prices.

In this tense situation layers of the ruling elite in Egypt are concerned about the prospect of power remaining in the hands of Mubarak’s own family after the dictator’s death. This would dispel the last veil of deception surrounding the propaganda of Egypt’s slow path to democracy and could lead to a new outbreak of popular protest. There are also those inside the NDP who advocate a more cautious approach to the further liberalisation of the economy and privatizations in order to keep protests under control—in opposition to the course favoured by Gamal Mubarak.

This wing within the NDP, known as the “old guard”, was able to set its mark on the NDP congress held in 2009. In the years before the new guard around Gamal Mubarak and Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif were largely able to dictate terms in the party and cabinet. The old guard is led amongst others by one of the deputy general secretaries of the NDP, Zakaria Azmi, who has repeatedly criticized representatives of the new guard in parliament.

The current campaign for Gamal Mubarak means that the faction struggle inside the NDP is now being fought out in public. Just a few days after the first posters of Gamal appeared in Cairo, a second campaign commenced for Gen. Omar Suleiman. As minister and head of the Egyptian secret service since 1993 he has long been regarded as a potential successor to Mubarak. Suleiman is a close confederate of Mubarak and played a leading role in the implementation of the country’s pro-Western and pro-Israeli foreign policy. In what is obviously a sideswipe at the campaign for Gamal Mubarak, posters featuring Suleiman’s face declare that he is the “real alternative”.

It is not clear who exactly is behind the campaign for Suleiman, but one of his supporters published a statement declaring that general Suleiman was someone respected by both the ruling party and the opposition. He was the only one who could prevent the plans to install Mubarak’s son as the new president, it argued.

So far Hosni Mubarak and other prominent members of the NDP have declined from officially siding with either Gamal or Suleiman. In any event, the posters featuring Suleiman were removed after just a few hours and Egyptian newspapers were banned from reporting on the posters. According to a report from BBC news, thousands of copies of the independent daily papers Al Masry Al Youm and Al Dustoor were destroyed. The BBC Middle East expert, Madgi Abdelhadi, reported that this measure was aimed at suppressing information about the campaign for Suleiman, which in turn reveals the extent of the differences within the various wings of the political elite. The struggle for power, however, is already in full swing and demonstrates the instability predominating in the country as a whole.

The campaign for Gen. Suleiman could also be an indication of the preferences of the military, whose leadership has so far refrained from lining up with either the old or new guard. There are numerous personal links between leading military figures and the old guard within the NDP, many of whom began their own careers in the army. The military leadership is fearful that its own grip on power and influence could suffer should the new guard prevail within the NDP.

Sections of the opposition had already gone on the offensive some months ago. In February, Mohamed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, founded a new independent political platform named the “National Alliance for Change”. El Baradei announced his desire to stand as a possible independent presidential candidate should reforms be introduced which guaranteed a fair election.

El Baradei speaks for a layer of the elite that is of the opinion that growing public anger with Mubarak’s pro-Western course and increasing social inequality can only be headed off in future by a movement operating independently of the NDP. In interviews he has repeatedly warned the Western elite of the dangerous character of their policies, which he said threaten to drive the Arab masses into the hands of extremists such as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

El Baradei has intensified his campaign recently, meeting with the leader of the parliamentary block of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Saad el-Katatny, and prominent alleged “leftist” activists such as Emad Atiyya. At one such meeting with “leftist” supporters he stressed that he could not achieve the necessary political change on his own. This was a task to be taken up by all Egyptians. Two weeks ago he featured in a video on his Facebook page in which he called upon all Egyptians to join his newly created political platform.

The Mubarak regime has reacted to El Baradei’s campaign with increasing nervousness. The Arab network for human rights reported that the publishers of a book that supported El Baradei were arrested and their computers confiscated by police a week ago. Supporters of El Baradei have already suffered mistreatment at the hands of the police. A government newspaper stated recently that accusations would be made against El Baradei that he was an atheist and his daughter was not married to a Muslim. El Baradei termed the reports a slanderous campaign unleashed by a regime intent on combating “change”.

In response, El Baradei called for a boycott of the parliamentary elections due in November. Any participation in the election was directed against the “national will” to transform Egypt into a democracy, he said. At the same time he stressed that the next months and years would be critical regarding a change of power in the country and declared that the ruling NDP had failed.

“When I look at the temple they built, I see a decaying temple, nearly collapsing. It will fall sooner rather than later,” he added. “I will never enter this temple. What we call for is to bring down this temple in a peaceful civilised manner.” He noted that the patience of Egyptians was running out. El Baradei then told reporters, “If the whole population boycotts the elections totally, it will be in my view the end of the regime.”

According to media reports the opposition is split over the demand for an election boycott. The banned Muslim Brotherhood backs El Baradei, but has announced its intention to take part in the elections.

The immediate role of Hosni Mubarak remains unclear. NDP minister Mufid Shehab announced that the candidates for the presidential election would only be announced in the summer of 2011. One thing is already certain, however—none of the ruling factions or the opposition represent the social and political interests of the Egyptian toiling masses. (WSWS)

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Food riots erupt in Mozambique

Rioting continued in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, for a third day on Friday in response to increased bread prices and the general rise in the cost of living. At least 10 people are dead, including a six-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy, and more than 400 wounded as police have opened fired on angry demonstrators. Hundreds of people have been arrested.

Protests have also occurred in Matola, a neighboring city to Maputo, and in Beira and Chimoio, urban centers in the central part of the southeast African country.

The riots and strikes, organized primarily by cellphone text messaging, are the popular response to sharp increases in water and electricity rates, and in particular to the government’s announcement that bread prices would climb by 25 percent on September 6.

Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, is one of the most impoverished nations in the world, ranked 175th out of 179 countries on the UN Human Development Index. Seventy percent of the population of 23 million survives beneath the poverty line and an estimated 54 percent are unemployed; the statutory minimum wage is US$37 a month. Annual per capita income for the population as a whole is only $807.

Some 16 percent of the Mozambican people are infected with HIV, and more than 1 million of the country’s children do not attend school. According to the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, 44 percent of children “suffer from stunted growth and nearly 20 percent of those under 5 are underweight” (Associated Press).

Demonstrations began in Maputo Wednesday after several days of rumors of impending protests. According to news reports, thousands of people lined the streets of Bagamoyo, an impoverished neighborhood north of the capital city’s downtown.

Police declared the action illegal, on the grounds that no group had applied for a permit, and attempted to break up the protest. The primarily youthful crowd responded by burning tires, barricading streets and throwing stones at police. Shops, gas stations and buses were also damaged. Several wagonloads of corn near a railway station were seized by protesters.

The major highway connecting South Africa to the port of Maputo was reportedly blocked in several places, by tree trunks, utility poles, rocks, tires and other debris.

The police acted with brutality, opening fire on the crowds. The claim by spokesman Pedro Cossa that police used no live ammunition, but only rubber bullets, was belied by the death toll and the wounded who poured into Maputo hospitals. (A different police official asserted that units fired their weapons only “after they ran out of rubber bullets”!)

A report from AFP commented, “Doctors at Maputo Central hospital said victims of the protests streamed into the wards throughout the evening, most with gunshot wounds. ‘We have treated over 100 people since the violence started yesterday, many patients had gunshot wounds,’ said Antonio Assis da Costa. ‘The last patients came in around 1:00 a.m., most of them were young boys,’ added the doctor.”

On Thursday, the protests continued. A street vendor told AFP, “Yesterday I received an SMS [text message] saying the strike must continue for three more days.” The country’s public television meanwhile “showed images of running battles between police and residents of shantytowns outside Maputo.”

The army was also apparently called out in force. Police spokesman Cossa claimed Thursday that “the army was called on to carry out the clean-up in the streets and not to restore order. Since last night it has helped Maputo City Municipal Council to clean the city.” Other observers, however, maintained that the army was patrolling the streets of the capital.

Protesters, many of them youthful, have called on President Armando Guebuza, of the ruling Frelimo party, to resign. Frelimo, which has ruled Mozambique since independence from Portugal in 1975, is a corrupt, bourgeois outfit, which especially since the mid-1980s has opened the country up to foreign investors. The latter are especially interested in “Mozambique’s untapped oil and gas reserves, and titanium mining is a growing source of revenue,” according to the BBC.

Guebuza, also according to the BBC, is a former member of Frelimo’s armed wing during the independence struggle against Portugal and now “a millionaire businessman…who made his fortune in the energy, transport and port industries.”

The regime, insulated from the poverty and fury of broad layers of the population, reacted with predictable bluster and demagogy to the riots and strikes. Government spokesman Alberto Nkutumula told a press conference September 2 that, “The [bread] price increase is irreversible. Prices will only fall if all of us work hard.”

Guebuza, in a nationally televised address, said he understood the anger of the people over rising prices, but was upset about the violence of the protests. “It is sad that people used the right to demonstrate peacefully to turn it into violent protests…. The government is aware of the poverty of the people. Combating poverty is part of the government’s five year plan.”

Frelimo was returned to power, and Guebuza to a second term as president, in general elections held in October 2009, with approximately 75 percent of the vote. However, only 44 percent of the electorate cast ballots, and there were numerous claims of voting fraud.

The Mozambique News Agency (AIM), pushing the government line, slandered the protesters, claiming that television interviews with rioters showed that some “were clearly drunk.” The government news agency went on, “The rioters interviewed made no specific demands, but merely complained about the high cost of living. Implicit in this, perhaps, is a call for the government to subsidise basic foodstuffs.

“However, the government—which is already subsidizing fuel—has ruled out any further blanket subsidies. Several of the recent price rises are beyond the government’s control—the strength of the South African currency, the rand, has dictated a rise in prices denominated in the Mozambican currency, the metical, for all goods imported from South Africa.”

The government blamed the bread price increase on “the relative shortage of wheat on the world market,” produced in part by the drought and fires in Russia, which has led the Russian government to impose a ban on wheat exports.

Moreover, argued the news agency, with remarkable arrogance and indifference, the poverty of the Mozambican population, only about 14 percent of whom have access to electricity, makes the increases in the cost of electricity “a most unconvincing excuse for a riot.”

Behind the upheavals in Mozambique lie the ongoing global economic crisis and recent, painful increases in food prices, which threaten millions worldwide with hunger or even starvation.

As the government news agency reports, in 2009, “Mozambique exports fell by 19 percent compared to 2008, due to falling international demand and lower prices. In the face of these setbacks, Mozambique has seen increases in the price of fuel, energy, water and bread.”

A report issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme argued that due to a skewed rainfall pattern favoring Mozambique’s north and leaving its south dry, “250,000 people from low-income households in the semi-arid and arid areas of Tete, Gaza, Inhambane and Sofala provinces will require some 40,000 tons of emergency food assistance to meet their basic dietary requirements from August until the next harvest in March 2011.”

João Mosca, a Maputo-based economist, told the IRIN news service that in 2009, Frelimo “suppressed price rises to woo voters. Manipulating the economy during the electoral period has now led to generalized price increases, Mosca said, but [the] ‘government has to be conciliatory, otherwise the riots might continue.’”

Global food prices are rising, raising the specter of 2008’s widespread rioting. The FAO noted September 1 that the world food price index had risen by 5 percent from July to August, reaching its highest level in two years.

The agency also forecast the 2010 wheat crop would decline by 5 percent over last year, reflecting a cut in Russia’s harvest.

The Associated Press commented Friday that the street protests in Mozambique were only the most recent sign of popular unrest. “Countries from Asia, to the Middle East to Europe are feeling the strain.” In Egypt, “recent protests over rising food prices left at least one person dead.” Prices of many food items in flood-ravaged Pakistan have risen by 15 percent or more following the destruction of 20 percent of the country’s crop and agricultural infrastructure.

“In China,” writes AP, “officials are threatening to punish price gougers, while in Serbia, a 30-percent hike in the price of cooking oil reported for next week has led to warnings of demonstrations by trade unions.” (WSWS)

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Japan’s new political crisis

The current contest for the post of Japanese prime minister is another sign of deep-seated political instability fuelled by the country’s economic stagnation and worsening social crisis as well as growing global rivalries and antagonisms, particularly between China and the United States.

If Ichiro Ozawa wins the top job in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) on September 14, he will become the country’s third prime minister in just over a year. The Democrats ousted the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in national elections in August 2009, ending its virtually unbroken half-century grip on power.

Ozawa is challenging Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who took over after Yukio Hatoyama stepped down in June. The immediate issue that sparked Hatoyama’s resignation—his unpopular decision to cave in to US demands to maintain a controversial US Marine Corps Airbase on the island of Okinawa—has again opened up. Kan stands by the agreement with the US, while Ozawa this week has called for new negotiations with Washington.

Behind the protracted dispute over the US base lies a more fundamental dilemma for Japan’s ruling elite: how to balance its growing economic dependence on China, its top export market, against its longstanding strategic reliance on the US as military ally and protector.

During last year’s election, the Democrats sought to capitalise on popular hostility to the LDP’s support for US militarism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by promising a more independent foreign policy. Ozawa returned to the issue this week, obliquely underscoring Nan’s kowtowing to Washington, by declaring: “The [US] alliance isn’t a relationship of subordination, but it’s an equality partnership.” Ozawa has already indicated his support for closer ties with China, by leading a huge delegation of politicians and businessmen to Beijing last December.

In their televised debate on Thursday, Kan and Ozawa signalled opposed approaches to Japan’s economic woes. In line with the turn in ruling circles globally, Kan continued to insist on measures to rein in the country’s huge public debt, approaching nearly 200 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). His proposed doubling of the country’s sales tax was a major factor in the DPJ’s disastrous result in July’s upper house elections. Ozawa called for the fulfillment of the DPJ’s 2009 election promises and renewed stimulus spending as the economy again slowed in the second quarter.

There were also differences over the value of the yen against the US dollar—it is near a 15-year high, impacting on exporters and threatening to further undermine growth. While Kan has promised “bold action” on the currency, Ozawa declared during the television debate: “We must stop the rapid rise of the yen by all means.” Ozawa’s threat to intervene directly in the money markets to bring down the yen’s value could bring Tokyo into conflict with Washington, which is banking on a cheap dollar to help American exports.

Ozawa’s challenge has provoked opposition in the international financial press. A scathing Financial Times editorial on August 29 was headlined “The wrong man for Japan” and bluntly declared that Ozawa would be “a disaster”. The newspaper cited his latest anti-American comments, his involvement in election funding scandals, his unpopularity in the polls, and his connection to LDP-style politics. It warned of the dangers of further political instability in Japan.

What the Financial Times regards as disastrous is Ozawa’s turn away from the austerity agenda now being pushed by international finance capital in every country. The huge stimulus packages and bailouts that governments used to prop up capitalism in the midst of the 2008-09 global financial crisis resulted in debts that must be clawed back at the expense of working people. In Japan, the massive public debt goes back even further to the collapse of share and property speculation in the early 1990s that inaugurated two decades of economic stagnation. A return by Japan to stimulus spending would only encourage other countries to follow suit.

However, the government is confronting the same political predicament as its counterparts around the world—any attempt to impose the needed austerity measures threatens to provoke an outpouring of opposition. The press in Japan and internationally have highlighted the fact that Kan is outpolling Ozawa by four to one. But such polls are virtually meaningless in conditions where the overwhelming sentiment is hostility to all parties and the political establishment as a whole. The Democrats swept into office last year on an anti-LDP tide, but in the space of nine months the Hatoyama government’s standing collapsed from 70 percent to less than 20 percent.

The volatility in Japan is another expression of political and economic processes that are producing crises in one country after another. While the form might be different, the hung parliament in Australia, the collapse of support for the Democrats in the US and the emergence of an unstable Tory-Liberal government in Britain reflect widespread suspicion, alienation and outright hostility to the established political parties that are responsible for militarism and war, attacks on democratic rights and a deepening social gulf between rich and poor.

As in other countries, the political landscape in Japan is changing irrevocably. The country’s post-war politics was dominated by the ruling conservative LDP and opposition, reformist Socialist Party of Japan (SPD)—all within the framework of a Japan that was economically and strategically dependent on the United States. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of Japan’s speculative bubbles in the early 1990s produced upheavals as the ruling elites sought to refashion their policies and political instruments to meet the challenges of globalised production and sharpening great power rivalries.

The Liberal Democrats suffered a series of splits in 1993 that included the defection of factions led by Hatoyama and Ozawa and led to a short-lived non-LDP coalition government in 1993-94. The SPD imploded after forming a grand coalition in 1994 with the LDP, its arch-rival for decades. The Democrats emerged as an unstable mélange of ex-Liberal Democrat factions, right-wing Social Democrats and former “independents”. Having come to power, all the internal contradictions are now on display. Commentators are already speculating that the DPJ could split after September 14, which could lead to the government’s fall.

This situation presents a crisis for both the corporate elites and the working class in Japan. From the political wreckage of the parties on which it has relied since World War II, the ruling class must fashion a political mechanism for prosecuting its strategic interests and imposing its economic agenda.

For all their disgust and opposition to the political establishment, workers and youth lack a political party and program to defend their class interests. That is what needs to be built—a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, to fight for the perspective of socialist internationalism. (WSWS)

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