Dear friends, the following is an e-mail message I got from an american friend and I really want to share it with you
Dear Sister Yahia and the Leaders of the Uprising,
Salaam
I would like to share some of my thoughts with all of you as I consider these to be very important and relevant at this phase of your struggle.
In a country there are essential organizations such as the police, army, etc. who are absolutely necessary for the functioning of a society at any given time – emergency, uprising or any other time. They know how things work and they sometimes are indispensable especially in this time when the society is extremely vulnerable and volatile and going through the initial restructuring period.
I do not claim to know your police or security networks. However this I know that they are Egyptians and therefore many of them would have sympathy for you and would like to help you if they are given a chance.
Even under a mass-murderer like Saddam or autocratic leader like Mubarak the top part of an organization could be bad and should be removed to have fresh new leadership, the rest of the pyramid structure of the institutions who carried out orders the leaders set for them. They are not really a threat to the national restructuring. They are salvageable and can be retrained and influenced to change their mindset to serve the country.
You would get depleted and tired fast if your focus is on the wrong things. You have a long hard struggle ahead of you. The goal should be not to make them your enemy. Most of them worked because they were scared of the consequence of not obeying the system and/or got heavy compensation from the Mubarak regime. If you work from moral high ground and become generous towards them by offering a chance to change, you would be surprised what you might see happening in them.
Instead you are making them your enemies and adversaries and push them to go to the other side to fight you. That counterproductive agenda could be changed to your benefit now. Just think about it. They know how to run the country while you do not. You just opened the gate but you mot know how to chalk out your path to achieve your goals. You may need more time and patience to figure out what is in your country’s best interest.
It is generally a blunder -- and history could prove me right -- to get rid of the entire institution and rebuild anew. It takes a long time and enormous investment of time and effort that your society may not have at this stage. The repercussion of this in terms of generating fear and anger to force them to go against you in many ways even they are fired and on the street. The rest who stay may feel threatened by you and may not feel loyal to you or may also work against you behind the scene. You could win them over by being generous, patient and understanding. Please do not make them desperate and careless about the cause. That would be your greatest defeat. You need to help transform your entire nation and they are part of your nation even though they did bad thinks in the past.
The goal of you should be to reclaim as much of the old establishment as possible and with minimum suffering and dislocation possible.
The goal is to win over the hearts and minds of those that are fearful today and who may go offensive to save themselves. That would be counterproductive and difficult for you ahead. You have a long way to go still to establish a viable democratic government.
In this whole process and whole time you the leaders of the uprising who helped to bring about an enormous change in your society should be wise, shrewd, patient and calculative and your vision should be long and you should be focused on the bigger purposes and goals as your priority should be set right.
History is full of such failure. I am going to give only two examples even through there are many in history.
China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1960s took a similar approach of reshuffling and wholesale changing the entire power infrastructure of governance. The enormous loss of leadership and their loyalty, the enormous enmity and distrust within the society, removal and even killing countless Chinese, all these caused China to lose ten years of its national life and went enormously degraded as a society, It took a long time and a lot of pain for China to catch up.
The other more recent example is Iraq. America’s leadership became blind folded and it did three mistakes right after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. America invaded a country without much post-invasion plan to make the nation succeed and then it became shaky and disoriented. America though its job ends just after invading a country and then the country people would run it. A baby cannot run before it can stand up and starts walking. The situation was like that. And look what happened. The nation lost countless lives and almost a decade in time.
In order to please the 60% Shiia population America got rid of the whole system of the administration that was run by Sunni majority and especially belonging to the Baath party. The whole country went absolutely dysfunctional in no time when America fired all the Baath people in the system: no security, no discipline, no structure. If America could have remove the top and rehabilitated the rest to function it could have given the nation a boost in its initial weak period.
The second blunder was even worse: they fired the whole 300,000 Iraqi army that existed in Saddam’s time. Within 72 hours bomb started to blast and these did not stop since then.
The Third blunder is that America failed to be neutral and thus it helped to fire up the sectarian conflicts.
If these did not happen the UN could have used the international experts to help Iraq rebuild in its very weak and initial period. Today you would have seen a different Iraq, a different region and a different Muslim World.
I hope you do not misunderstand me. I have been thinking and agonizing about the Muslim world for a long time and Egypt’s success now could compel many Muslim majority societies to follow in its foot step. That is an enormous possibility Tunisia and Egypt have brought before us Muslims and we are enormously proud about you.
I intensely pray faith, patience and wisdom prevail in all of you and all of us together.
Your True Well-wisher in this National Struggle.
Salaam,
Ruby Amatulla
