Why Dictators Like Sisi Always Pretend to Be Democrats - Foreign Policy
There’s something farcical—but entirely rational—about the way authoritarians such as Egypt’s Sisi invoke legal justifications for repression.
Adam Berry/Getty Images Last week, Egypt’s House of Representatives approved amendments to the country’s anti-terrorism law that strengthen the powers of the presidency and the country’s armed forces. With these changes, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can undertake “measures to preserve security and public order.” No doubt the Egyptian authorities will define the preservation of security and public order as broadly as possible. The result is a law to combat terrorism that will likely be more expansive than the emergency measures the Egyptian leadership had lifted a week before, which it had used routinely against both violent and peaceful opponents of Sisi. The Egyptian state giveth, and the Egyptian state taketh away.
None of this was shocking, though my blood ran cold when I read that conducting research on the military and writing about it without written permission from the government would result in a sizable fine. If I were doing my dissertation research now instead of in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would have never embarked on the project that became my first book.
But that is the point, of course: to strike fear in the hearts of graduate students, scholars, and journalists. This is not just trivial maliciousness but legal cover to abuse people like the poor Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni, who was in Egypt not studying the armed forces but was, nevertheless, hunted down, tortured, and killed for researching a topic the government did not like.
Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East. Twitter: @stevenacook
source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/10/why-dictators-always-pretend-to-love-the-law/
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