Barack Obama the citizen could yet right the wrongs he did to the Arab world

As in all high-functioning dictatorships, Cairo was on lockdown on the days preceding 4 June 2009. The recently elected President of the United States of America Barack Obama had chosen Egypt from which to address a Muslim world his country had been vilifying for over a decade, and what better excuse for the Egyptian regime to round up hundreds of students for questioning, holding them for days, incommunicado at undisclosed locations?

The US was silent after a military coup removed the democratically elected president and ordered the massacre of over 1,000 peaceful protesters

Ironically, his address was to be given under the dome of century-old Cairo University’s grand hall, a historical flashpoint for political and social struggle. 

Hope

While it was clear to me that the choice of Cairo, versus Turkey or Indonesia, was a nod to the Arab and Muslim world’s most brutal and authoritarian establishment, and a strategic gesture to Israel that Egypt continued to be the US’s most prized client, guaranteeing the Jewish state’s security, it was still hard to overcome the intoxication of hope that invariably accompanied any mention of President Obama.

I received my media permit to attend the speech with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, knowing all too well that Obama’s charm offensive, while possibly sincere on a very personal level, as I wrote in an editorial the next day, was also good PR, a distraction to cover up the US’s global hegemony, using soft power and the popularity ratings of its charismatic president to win over Arab and Muslim hearts and minds as America continued to bomb Afghanistan, occupy Iraq and unequivocally support Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

READ: Obama: American dream, Arab nightmare

Like most people in the audience, I was both in awe of Obama’s inspiring words of equality and mutual respect, yet keenly aware that we had heard iterations of them all before and that when push came to shove no matter how well-intentioned an individual the US president was, he never acted outside the limitations imposed on him by Washington’s powerbrokers and lobbyists.

Reality

Eighteen months later, the Obama administration’s commitment to support the will of the people, what the president described that day under the dome, the “human right” to have “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed”, was put to the test first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

The popular uprisings that swept the Arab world were met with a hesitant US administration whose unstated mantra was expediency, pragmatism and Israeli security

The popular uprisings that swept across the Arab-Muslim world were met with a hesitant US administration whose unstated mantra was expediency, pragmatism and Israeli security.

READ: Obama's true legacy is... Trump

The honeymoon with Egypt’s young revolutionaries was short-lived, however, when after two turbulent years that witnessed the only free and fair legislative and presidential elections ever held in the Arab world’s most populous country, the US was silent after a military coup removed the democratically elected president and ordered the massacre of over 1,000 peaceful protesters within the span of a few hours. As Human Rights Watch described it, the Rabaa crackdown in August 2013 was the “world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” 

Yet until this very day, the US administration has not described this illegal regime change as a coup, even when the defence minister who led it now sits in the presidential palace, just as an estimated 40,000 political activists, democracy advocates and innocent citizens whose only crime was to presume that they had the right to express their opinion during peaceful protests, languish in prison on trumped up charges, under the pretext of fighting terrorism and safeguarding national security.

Execution from the sky

Egypt is but one example of Obama’s ambivalent legacy in the Muslim world. According to the New York Times, “whereas President George W Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, Obama has authorized 506 strikes that have killed 3,040 terrorists and 391 civilians.” The most troubling aspect of this was his administration’s “efforts to institutionalize and normalize the practice”.

And of course, Guantanamo is still open for business, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

It is difficult to scrutinise these aspects of Obama’s presidency without being overwhelmed by righteous indignation. Perhaps if he hadn’t set the bar so high, perhaps if he hadn’t made promises he couldn't keep in the face of a debilitating Congress intent on exposing his weaknesses, the anti-climax would not have been so disappointing. Then again, any condemnation of Obama cannot be seen in isolation of a decades-old American foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East and the Muslim world as a whole.

New chapter

Now that he is no longer in office, I believe that Obama, the inspiring author of “The Audacity of Hope”, is uniquely positioned to right some of the wrongs perpetrated by the system he temporarily led.

Something tells me this ex-president still has a lot more to give and despite everything, I, like many from the region who still look up to the US as symbolic of values and political processes we believe the Arab world should emulate, am certainly willing to give “Obama the citizen” a second chance, especially as the shadow of a Trump presidency begins to cast itself across the globe.

Rania Elmalky is the former Editor-in-Chief of Cairo-based newspaper Daily News Egypt.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Egyptians listen to US President Barack Obama as he delivers a speech at Cairo University, at a coffee shop in Cairo on June 4, 2009. AFP)