In his interview on CBS, the General-turned-President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi looked visibly uncomfortable as he lied, evaded questions and downplayed the many crimes he has committed since taking power in 2013 through a military coup against the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. It is no surprise that he demanded CBS pull the interview for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes program: in Egypt, he is used to controlling the media.
But it is also no surprise that he agreed to it in the first place. After all, the U.S. is a “great friend and ally” of Sisi, in the words of President Trump. And it was only this week that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set off to Cairo to reassure America’s allies that they have the full support of the administration.
But however you shake it, or hold it up to the light, there is no way to see Sisi’s reign in Egypt as anything other than a disaster for democracy. Civil society slides towards total disintegration. The country is an ‘open-air prison’; torture and murder are tools of the state. More than 60,000 prisoners of conscience rot in jail, and even prominent figures, such as the writer Mostafa al-Naggar, and hundreds of other young Egyptians, have likely been ‘disappeared’. Women speaking out against sexual harassment are arrested. Egypt now jails more journalists on “false news” charges than anywhere else. And General Sisi’s farcical ‘landslide’ electoral victory was but another insult to the values that once held firm in this great country.
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