How Egypt’s Turmoil Echoes Algeria’s Bloody Civil War -- Vivienne Walt, Time
Millions of voters elected an Islamic political party to run the country, but the military stepped in, forced out the winners of the election and handpicked a group of politicians in their place. No, this is not Egypt in 2013. It was Algeria in 1992. And in the eyes of some, the bloodshed that followed that fateful Algerian decision 21 years ago offers sobering lessons for the generals in Cairo, who forcibly removed President Mohamed Morsi from office on Wednesday, one year after he’d won a democratic election, igniting violent street fighting between members of his Muslim Brotherhood and the massed ranks of protesters that had pushed for his ouster. “There is indeed a similarity,” Faycal Metaoui, a political columnist for Algeria’s al-Watan newspaper, told TIME on Sunday, adding that Algerians had been gripped by the news from Egypt playing on satellite networks all week. “In both countries, the army arrested a political process involving Islamists.”
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My Comment: Islamists have never struck me as the compromising type. They were uncompromising in Algeria in the 1990s that led to years of civil war and bloodshed .... and in today's Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood does not strike me as the compromising type either.
Update: A Vietnam precedent to last week's Egyptian coup?
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