Egypt’s Undemocratic Election

 If there was any doubt that Egypt’s upcoming presidential election will be neither free nor fair, the arrest of former military chief of staff Sami Anan shortly after announcing that he would run for president has made it crystal clear. The March vote will in no way confirm President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s popularity among the Egyptian people. This election campaign is merely an extension of the internal power struggle among the military and the regime’s security services, and it has nothing to do with democratic mechanisms worthy of the name.

(Sara Khorshid "Egypt’s Undemocratic Election" Foreign Policy January 24, 2018)

Years of extrajudicial arrests of activists and opponents, enforced disappearances and killings, lengthy political detentions, and plenty of prison and death sentences have left Egyptians craving an alternative. [...]  In the current moment of despair in Egypt, it seems easy to forget what everyone knows — that the army and its leadership have enjoyed an undemocratically privileged status and immunization from public or parliamentary accountability since Nasser and the Free Officers ousted the country’s monarchy in 1952. The only civilian to make it to the presidential office in modern Egyptian history, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, was ousted by the army in 2013
[...]  there will be no hope for democratization in Egypt without a dismantling of the regime’s kleptocratic powers and a radical reformation of the security agencies that have immunized themselves from real public oversight and accountability for decades. Many committed democrats tried to be optimistic when Morsi was ousted in 2013. They wanted to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist conservatism was gone and that Sisi wouldn’t dare to defy the people’s will again after he saw them take to the streets en masse in 2011 and 2013. They learned the hard way that they were wrong — that military rule is military rule and that a regime where the security agencies call the shots is the antithesis of democracy. 

We should show that we disapprove of such behavior among our 'allies', and refuse now to repatriate any heritage objects to this corrupt regime.