Voice of Russia
July 9, 2013
The U.S. has a role with every faction or group in Egypt – Rozoff
Recorded on July 6, 2013
AUDIO
Leaders of the Otpor! movement which helped destroy the former Yugoslavia are active in Egypt training radical youth of the CANVAS movement. Both groups are funded by NGOs, the U.S. State Department and the CIA and their sole purpose is to overthrow and topple governments. After what can be called a military coup d’etat in Egypt, the U.S. has been quiet because they are also supporters of the Egyptian military. Voice of Russia regular contributor Rick Rozoff spoke about these issues and more in this exclusive interview with the Voice of Russia’s John Robles.
This is John Robles speaking to Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop Nato website and international mailing list.
Robles: Hello, Sir, how are you this afternoon?
Rozoff: I’m very good, John. Thanks again for the invitation to be with you.
Robles: Nice to be speaking with you again. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on, in your opinion, in Egypt and about some of the U.S. links to some of the candidates, former candidates, etc?
Rozoff: It’s still a situation in progress, and we are talking about a series of events that really culminated in what can only be characterized as a military coup d’etat two days ago, at least our time here, which would have been Independence Day in the United States, aptly enough I suppose, right? July Fourth.
What we do know for a fact is that the government elected roughly a year ago in a runoff election headed by the Freedom and Justice Party, which is the political front of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was removed and that in its stead an interim government administered by the military is in control, again, as was the case two years ago.
Robles: He was backed by the U.S., but he was a fundamentalist Islamist which I think was a problem he had in more or less secular Egypt. What’s your opinion on that angle?
Rozoff: That’s correct that Egypt has been a secular parliamentary democracy since Abdel Nasser came to power in the early 1950s, and not only secular but tolerant of religious minorities, including a fairly substantial Coptic Christian minority, as well as non-believers.
The government up until fairly recently at least passed the litmus test for being a secular parliamentary democracy, even if they violated the basic tenets of that democracy, with leaders for life: Hosni Mubarak for 30 years, for example. Nevertheless, compared to the attempt to install a government two years ago or a year ago rather, that in many ways took on the aspects of a theocracy, with a religious tinge, given the fact that the political party in control until Thursday was the electoral manifestation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Certainly, as you are suggesting, those sectors of Egyptian society that were accustomed to secular rule would certainly be upset, I am certain, to see what they may have seen as the beginning of the process of an increased religious restructuring in society, including, possibly, laws modeled after religious requirements and such like. Unquestionably that was a factor in the protest that led up to the coup on Thursday.
However we do have to recall the original Tahrir Square activities of early 2011 and recall the color revolution technique that the United States and its allies, with the United States in the first place, has employed over the last 13 years or so, starting in Yugoslavia in 2000 and later in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon – successfully – and in Moldova, arguably, and unsuccessfully in a number of other countries.
And what that includes, I mean we’ve talked about this a bit before, John, is the whole political technology of generating so-called flash mobs that congregate in large numbers instantaneously without government detection in city squares, organized through so-called social media like Facebook and Twitter with a host (really an army) of US-funded so-called non-governmental organizations that seem to have unlimited financial assets, largesse that they can distribute amongst maybe thrill-seeking or fun-loving young people, including handing out $200 and $300 smart phones and have them set up.
This is something that now recently retired Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, boasted about, we’ve talked about before on your program, which is that the State Department was going to “batter down firewalls and spread the voice of freedom” to Russia, China, India, Iran and other countries, using the very social media we’re talking about, Facebook and Twitter in the first place.
Robles: According to the U.S. that is what happened in Egypt!
Rozoff: Yes. We do have to recall with the overthrow of Mubarak two years ago, that for over a year there was a military junta, again, and that during that period of time that something in the neighborhood of 36,000 people had been arrested under security laws, that is more than over the entire 30 years of the Mubarak administration, and that was quite all right with the United States: the champion of human rights around the world had no problem whatsoever with the military junta in Cairo at that time as it evidently doesn’t have now.
The very fact that the U.S. ambassador in Cairo has refused to characterize what is clearly a military takeover as a military takeover, because to do so would run afoul of American law that disallows the continuation of military support to any country where there has been a coup d’état, even though the African Union has suspended Egypt’s membership in the African Union because of the extra-constitutional nature of the events of two days ago.
Robles: Don’t you think that stopped a massive amount of bloodshed?
Rozoff: There is a line by the Irish writer, poet, dramatist Oscar Wilde which says because one side is wrong doesn’t necessarily mean the other side is right.
And I think frequently in a situation like this, we have to also keep in mind that the government of Morsi had expelled a good number of so-called NGO figures, Americans, which were instrumental in the overthrow of Mubarak and then quite clearly could be – and this is something we could only speculate about as we don’t eavesdrop on Langley, Virginia, the Central Intelligence headquarters, the way they eavesdrop or the National Security Agency eavesdrops on everything else and everyone else – but I think we are safe in assuming that the US wants a finger in every pie and a whole lot of pokers in the fire, and that they’ve got contacts inside government and opposition, and the new generation of opposition, and they can generate, or exploit or assist opposition groups at will.
Now another thing that one has to recall is when the so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia at the very beginning of 2011 and quickly spread to Egypt, and thereafter led to NATO and US Africa Command’s assault against Libya and the overthrowing of the government after almost 30,000 air flights over the nation by NATO, that one of the groups involved in the opposition inside Egypt is something called the April 6th Youth Movement, which quite openly – I invite your listeners to go to YouTube and type it in, it has the word revolution in it – it is a documentary put out by what is now know by the acronym of CANVAS but what was formerly known as Otpor! in Serbia, in Belgrade. These are people funded by the US State Department, unquestionably by the CIA, by a number of NGOs, to overthrow the government in Yugoslavia in the autumn of 2000, that is the government of President Slobodan Milošević, and it became the prototype for training the youth brigades for the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine and earlier the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and all the subsequent ones.
In this documentary you’ll see Popovic and Marovic, the two leaders of CANVAS, openly bragging and showing videos of themselves instructing the Egyptian youth on how to overthrow a government, with these training sessions occurring both in Belgrade and in Cairo. So we know that the US has a role in most every faction or every group active in Egypt.
You were listening to an interview in progress with Rick Rozoff the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and mailing list. You can find part 2 on our website at English.ruvr.ru. Thanks for listening and we wish you the best.
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