The past month has seen the emergence of two very different approaches to street protests in Egypt.

On the one hand, the use of violence as a means of protest has gained renewed vigor. Port Said erupted into clashes at the end of January after death sentences were issued to 21 people for their role in the deadly football riots the year before. And a new, violent and mysterious protest group called the Black Bloc has emerged in the last few weeks whose predilection for street fighting and aggressive tactics has become well known.

On the other hand, however, resistance to President Mohamed Morsi’s government is evolving in other ways. Recently in Port Said, although violence has continued, there has also been a marked shift toward organized strikes and civil disobedience. (more…)

It was only one week ago that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, suppressed for decades, was celebrating a glorious victory. Millions of Egyptians lined up to participate in the first of three rounds of voting for a new Egyptian parliament. Three days and millions of ballots later, Egypt’s election authorities declared the Islamist movement the ultimate victor with a vote share of around 40 percent. The al-Nour coalition, representing a fundamentalist Salafist strain of Islam, won nearly a quarter of the vote. Egypt’s liberal parties, in the meantime, came in a close third place. But regardless of whose party ended up with the most votes, it was clear from the onset that all Egyptians won. The election was the fairest and cleanest experienced in modern Egyptian history.

All of these feelings are spoiled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the group of military men that have effectively been running the country since they pushed their former boss out of Cairo last February.

Egypt’s top generals have long been the elite class of society, using their positions behind the scenes to formulate Egypt’s foreign policy while grabbing a big slice of the nation’s industrial output. The resignation of Hosni Mubarak, who was an Air Force pilot himself, threatened to jeopardize many of those perks — even if popular approval of the army soared as a result of their siding with the protesters. And while the common Egyptian is still sympathetic to the army command, often considering them the only public institution that they can trust, Egypt’s military council had made things very difficult throughout the period of transition.

Trying to hang on to executive power for an extended period of time was the latest argument used by Egyptian protesters to retake the streets of Tahir. The objective of the strike was clear: pressure the military council to hand over its authority immediately to a civilian government.

Like the previous mass protests in Tahir, violence between demonstrators and security forces occurred, killing forty people in the process. The generals backed down after these clashes, perhaps alarmed that ordinary Egyptians were beginning to equate the military with the old Mubarak machine. Presidential elections, which were delayed by a year, were moved back to its original date of April 2012.

The generals are at it again though, this time appointing a civilian council made up of technocrats, former politicians, union leaders, artists and intellectuals that will be responsible for vetting candidates for the Constitution writing committee.

For some reformers and secularists who lost big time in the elections, the army’s decision to steal back some of the thunder away from the Islamists in the future parliament could not be a better gift. Despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s record of caring for the poor and establishing a system of social services for Egyptian citizens, many (most evidently women, civil rights activists and nationalist candidates) are concerned that the Brotherhood will reinvent itself once it takes power. Add the Salafists to the mix and liberals around Egypt are questioning whether the progression of their country will be stalled or turned back.

Diluting the parliament’s power to appoint who serves on the Constitutional Assembly, as was originally promised by Egypt’s generals, kills that sentiment for the time being. Unfortunately, the generals are breaking their promises to the majority of Egyptians who actually voted for an Islamist politician.

Egypt’s people must be asking themselves a number of questions. Is the military intent on staying forever? Why is it interfering in the democratic process? And what is the purpose of voting if the representatives that are put in office are powerless to do the people’s work or forced to defer their role to an unaccountable body of military men?

These are all fair questions. Without answers, each question makes the journey toward a new and democratic Egypt the slightest bit longer and rockier.

The Egyptian army showed its true colors this week. On the first day of Ramadan, a day of celebration and peace if ever there was one, the army cleared Tahrir Square of the tent city that had controlled it since July 8 and arrested some of its occupants. This overt use of force against the revolution should persuade the people that the army is not their friend.

Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February under somewhat mysterious circumstances. After claiming that he would remain in power the night before, the veteran Egyptian president quickly disappeared to the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. The Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces stepped in. It is possible that the army persuaded him to leave and equally possible that the power elites had planned this move to make the new government popular.

The army has paid lip service to the demands of the protesters but done little to satisfy them.

First, the families of the martyrs of the revolution, many of them camped out in Tahrir, have not seen justice. They are demanding restitution and getting the strong arm instead.

Second, as many as 20,000 of the peaceful revolutionaries jailed since the beginning of the uprising received trials lasting a few minutes and sentences lasting several years. The jailed youngster, including blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad, a 26 year-old sentenced to three years imprisonment for criticizing the military, usually have had no access to proper legal counsel.

The people have been calling desperately for their release but the military has not been forthcoming. “Egypt’s military leadership has not explained why young protesters are being tried before unfair military courts while former Mubarak officials are being tried for corruption and killing protesters before regular criminal courts,” said Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch.

The generals’ reliance on military trials threatens the rule of law by creating a parallel system that undermines Egypt’s judiciary.

Instead of trying the peaceful and innocent, Egyptians expected trials of the police, the thugs and the ancien régime. The police were the repressive hand of the government while Mubarak was in power and have lost most of their power since the revolution. Police and Interior Ministry snipers are responsible for the deaths of many of the protesters killed in the early days of the revolution. The youth fought back and repelled the police but the government had other tricks up its long sleeve. During the eighteen day demonstrations that brought down Mubarak, the government released a number of thugs from prison to attack the people. They burst into Tahrir Square on the Day of the Camels, riding camels and horses into the area and wielding swords and sticks. After the police fled, the thugs went to every neighborhood to terrorize the people into begging the police to come back. Instead, the people banded together to protect themselves and their families.

The corrupt ministers of the old government, too, are perceived to have been protected since the fall of Mubarak. Demonstrators demanded a complete overhaul of the Interior Ministry and were given a reshuffle. The people want justice, which to them means the trial and sentencing of the police, the thugs and the thieves, and they want their money back. Thus far, they have not found it.

Fourth, the ever present Palestinian question was supposedly answered when Egypt’s government announced in May that it would open the Rafah crossing to the Gaza Strip, providing some relief to the Palestinians trapped in the territory. Both Israel and Egypt have imposed a strict blockade of Gaza since 2007 when Hamas took it over. Restrictions on movement in and out of Gaza have eased slightly but progress has been minimal. All the real demands of the protesters have gone unheeded.

The army will do its best to ensure that the privileged position beyond the control of civilian government that it has always maintained remains protected. For the past several months, volunteers have stood at every entrance to Tahrir Square, checking passports for anyone who might be a known thug. They were able to enter the square once or twice nonetheless, with violent results.

On Monday, the army seemed to usher them in with the soldiers. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that “military police, Central Security Forces and civilian supporters” destroyed the sit in that had characterized the heart of Cairo for weeks. Perhaps the paper did not want to editorialize but it is probable that the “civilian supporters” were the very thugs that have tried to wreck the revolution since the Day of the Camels.

At last count, the military and its supreme leader, General Mohamed Tantawi, enjoyed broad support among the Egyptian people. This move may sour the belief that the army is a friend of the revolution. Either way, Egyptians have no reason to continue to trust their government or end the demonstrations of the ongoing revolution.

There is a huge problem going on in Egypt, according to the thousands of democracy activists who continue to pour into Cairo’s Tahir Square. And the issue, despite its importance to the strength of Egypt’s democratic transition, is not getting much attention from the United States or the United Nations.

Hosni Mubarak and his hated internal security services may be gone but the vestiges of the old regime are still being used by the Egyptian military to retain order, prosecute demonstrators who fail to abide by curfew and instill a signal to the Egyptian people that a switch to political freedom is not going to come without some obstacles along the way. And if this Washington Post article is any indication of what the protesters are experiencing, the hallmarks of democracy could very well be in jeopardy.

Mona Seif may not be a household name in Egypt, akin to that of Nobel Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei or Arab League Chairman Amr Moussa, but that is not stopping her from investigating thousands of cases indicting members of the Egyptian military for abuse over the past month and a half.

Working as an associate in the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, Seif has unveiled a cache of documents, totaling 5,000 cases, where the military detained protesters on trumped up charges, hauled them away into overcrowded prisons and prosecuted them in military courts. Charges such as violating curfew, carrying a weapon and assaulting law enforcement personnel are frequently used by Egyptian soldiers to round up demonstrators continuing to protest against the slow pace of reforms, with some of those prosecutions resulting in multiyear prison sentences. Those unable to afford a decent lawyer, like the vast majority of Egyptians, are increasingly lost in a prosecutorial system without much hope of challenging the state.

In other words, “the military is governing according to decrees similar to those relied on by Mubarak.” For the tens of millions of Arab activists who are demanding better control over their own lives, cases such as these have the danger of halting momentum and showing Arab governments in similar situations that repressive tactics work to maintain their positions.

However disturbing these accounts are, the Egyptian people need not diminish their hopes for a new and more open political system. Indeed, the practices being used by the Egyptian military thus far appear to be more in line with molding the future of the democratic transition than hijacking it outright.

It is important to remember that the Egyptian military, especially under Mubarak, transformed itself into the most powerful institution in the entire country. Authoritarian politics proved to be quite beneficial to the generals, all of whom expanded their business contacts, collected billions of dollars in expenditures annually and earned millions more in profits from their private corporations.

In exchange for absolute loyalty to the Mubarak regime, the Egyptian military was awarded greater freedom of maneuver in the economic realm. The military’s patronage network, which it depends on for gaining new recruits and paying soldiers already in their ranks, rose to a level that was unheard of under Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Factories owned by the military produced products that had a high demand in society and farms operated by the generals grew and sold cheap bread for millions of Egyptians who were unable to purchase it at market prices.

With Mubarak gone, that economic advantage is in peril. The transfer of power to civilian leadership runs the risk of curtailing the perks that the Egyptian military has come to take for granted over the past three decades. Egypt’s new president may not be as supportive or sympathetic to the military’s business ventures.

Call it an excuse, but the abuses currently undertaken by the armed forces could simply be an attempt to ensure that calls for democracy do not get out of hand. Egyptians are tired of being marginalized politically, so it is understandable that so many are worried about the military undercutting civilian politics before the process even begins.

This month’s referendum established parliamentary and presidential elections starting in September. The Supreme Military Council may just be using its authority for the time being to defend its interests before the soldiers return to the barracks.

It isn’t exactly the most ethical practice that the military can implement. But it’s not necessarily the death of Egyptian democracy either.

It’s not every day that a powerful dictator is pressured to flee his palace, let alone after a short three week period of popular demonstrations. But now that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, ceded control to the Egyptian military and fled to his Sharm el-Sheik hideout, this is the reality that the Egyptian people face.

The announcement of Mubarak’s departure, read aloud on state television by Vice President Omar Suleimen, was short but sweet:

My fellow citizens. In this difficult time that the country is going through, President Mohamad Hosni Mubarak has decided to relieve himself of his position as president and the Supreme Military Council has taken control of the state’s affairs. May God protect us.

It was an undignified exit for an autocrat that the United States only a month ago considered their most stable and effective ally in the region. 

The protesters that camped out in Tahir Square in central Cairo were jubilant at Mubarak’s sudden resignation which occurred only a day after the president defiantly refused to shed his position until elections in September. Tens of thousands of Egyptians embraced one another with hugs and wept tears of joy, and millions more across the Middle East have been inspired by what the collective power of the citizenry can do.

Yet as Egyptians continue to celebrate, this is only the very beginning of the transition to democracy. As Iraq, Palestine, Germany post-World War II and France after its 1789 revolution have demonstrated, transforming a political system previously dominated by autocracy is an especially difficult task to accomplish. And while Egypt’s generals have taken some positive steps toward greater transparency — including the dissolution of the parliament and a promise to revisit the Constitution — democracy will not occur overnight.

The United States too, will experience a noteworthy shift its their geopolitical position. Hosni Mubarak cooperated and advanced virtually every American and Western policy in the Middle East without a compliant, including the containment of Iran and the closing of the Egyptian-Gaza border in order to drain Hamas of its weapons caches. With Mubarak finished, Washington will quickly discover how much more difficult it will be to convince a new Egyptian government to continue those policies, most of which are extremely unpopular across the Arab world.

Democracy may be a cornerstone of the American political culture but it will also prove to be a headache for the Obama Administration’s entire Middle East policy.

Ironically, the Egyptian political faction that emerges as the most powerful in Egypt’s government does not really matter for the United States, despite those who argue that a Muslim Brotherhood-led administration would completely eradicate Egypt’s pro-Western bent. At this point in time, all of Egypt’s political parties — the Muslim Brotherhood, the liberal el-Ghad Party and the secular Wafd — will find themselves questioning Cairo’s existing foreign policy for the sake of garnering popular support and repositioning themselves for Egypt’s next order.

Mubarak may have been a dictator who oppressed his own people for three consecutive decades but he at least consistently toed the American line. Now that Egypt is building a post-Mubarak future, Washington should expect its dependable Arab ally to revisit programs that may not be in its own interest. The sooner that the White House is prepared for this to happen, the quicker Washington will be able to forge a brand new relationship with a more pluralistic and humane Egyptian partner.