Sisi can’t keep tourists or Egyptians safe, so why back him?

Naturally not one for our Muslim readers, but as an occasional sunburned Brit abroad, I hear that the Savoy Hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh do a great “Bloody Mary”. That intoxicating mix of chilled vodka, tomato juice, celery and the essential tabasco sauce doesn’t offer real blood, of course, but that’s not to say that it isn’t inspired; the Savoy has an intimate relationship with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who knows about Egyptian blood all too well.

As those who attended the protests outside Downing Street last week may have spotted, the Egyptian flags, lurid placards of a grinning Shrek-like Sisi and twenty metre-long red, white and black banners held up by pro-Sisi demonstrators, were all sponsored by “Savoy Group – Sharm El-Sheikh”. The group’s logo was everywhere.

The Savoy Group footed the bill for marketing one of the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East; a dictator worse than the ousted Hosni Mubarak. This, though, wasn’t the first time that the Sharm El-Sheikh hotelier has expressed its support for Al-Sisi’s violent ways. In October 2014, it hosted a pop concert featuring the quirky Seventies and Eighties disco band Boney M. All proceeds, those who bought tickets were told, went to “Sisi President of Egypt’s #SupportEgypt fund to help the country get back on track”.

Savoy Group is an Egyptian company which owns and operates three hotels and a selection of luxury villas in the Red Sea beach resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. Like all Egyptian tourism companies, and entirely legitimately, Savoy has a strong interest in keeping the Sinai safe. Its chosen strategy, it appears, has been to back Al-Sisi’s military dictatorship rather than elected-then-ousted President Mohamed Morsi. This, we presume, is because the owners of Savoy Group believe, erroneously, that General Al-Sisi, surrounded by his junta, is capable of keeping Egypt safe. However, it seems increasingly obvious that Al-Sisi is incapable of doing this; the alleged downing of Metrojet flight 9268 by operatives from Daesh/ISIS in Sinai Province is the most compelling evidence to date.

(A gentle note to Sisi at this point: there’s little point in forcibly evicting thousands of northern Sinai residents, bulldozing their homes, cutting off their electricity, phone and internet communications, and deploying thousands of trigger-happy troops, if a terrorist can pay $20 to smuggle a bomb onto a flight from Sharm El-Sheikh airport.)

Even if ISIS-Sinai Province didn’t down the plane – and initially sceptical US intelligence services now put the chances that it did at 90 per cent – employees at the Savoy Group already feel uneasy. “The damage is already done,” a Savoy Group hotel manager told Agence France-Presse. “Even if it was pilot error or an accident, people believe it was a bomb.”

So what are we to make of Savoy Group’s investment in supporting Al-Sisi? The financial investment is admittedly small; printing hundreds of posters and banners for pro-Sisi protesters in London, and hosting a cheesy disco fundraiser. Yet it is symptomatic of mass delusion in Egypt. As I wrote last week, Al-Sisi is surprisingly popular. When I attended the protests in Whitehall during his visit, the pro-Sisi protesters outnumbered the anti-Sisi group by three-to-one. They too are completely deluded.

Consider that in the month before the downing of Metrojet 9268, which killed over two hundred Russian tourists, Al-Sisi’s counter-terrorism forces claimed to have killed more than five hundred insurgents, although this is a figure that we should treat with a large pinch of salt. Nevertheless, what is the point of killing five hundred terrorists if the following month the group they supposedly belong to can still pull off an attack on such a scale?

In July, Sinai insurgents were able to launch the largest military conflict in the peninsula since the Yom-Kippur War. Yes, you read that right; the largest military conflict in Sinai since Israel went to war with Egypt in 1973.

Since then, as Foreign Affairs detailed this week, there have been over two hundred more attacks. If Al-Sisi has been elected on a mandate to keep Egypt safe, that’s a fairly damning indictment of his ability to do so. As was the killing of twelve tourists and their guides in Sinai earlier this year by security forces who later claimed that it was the tourists’ own fault, because they were in the particular locality “illegally”.

There is no excuse for what ISIS-Sinai Province is doing. The group pre-dates the 2011 revolution, when it was called Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis. It is hurting Egyptians by hurting the tourist economy, and the taking of over two hundred Russian lives is inexcusable.

Yet if Al-Sisi is to be judged on his ability to keep Egyptians safe, he is clearly failing. The insurgency will continue so long as he is in power, unless he intends to kill or arrest everyone in Sinai. Whatever he does, oppressive dictators are nearly always fighting insurgencies of one kind or another. Savoy Group has backed the wrong president, but it’s ordinary Egyptians who have made the bigger error. A vote for Al-Sisi was a false economy, a promise of security when he can, by his very nature, bring only instability. He can’t keep tourists or ordinary Egyptians safe, so why back him?

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