Coup d'etat or is it?

On 5/9/14, I spent the morning with one of my best friends from my Bechtel days. We haven't seen each other in almost twenty years, yet when we met, it felt as if we had kept in touch all that time. It was wonderful to fall back into our old friendship so naturally. He's been living in Egpyt since we last saw each other (along with a few other places in the Middle East), and I appreciated the fact that he made an effort to see me when he only had four days here. 

After we (my friend, his brother and I) talked about our families and caught up (as much as we could in a couple of hours) with each others' lives, I asked them about the situation in Egypt. Whenever I saw something on TV or read something on the web, it seemed as if the situation was chaotic, volatile and dangerous. Arab Spring toppled Mubarak's regime, then ushered in democratically elected Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood. Then there was a military coup, and Morsi was overthrown. In the eyes of the international audience, this coup d'etat was a blow to Eqyptian democracy, and I didn't fully understand what was happening in Egypt. So, I asked them, because whenever I saw one of those stories, I mostly spent the time worrying over my friends' and their families safety. They explained that this "coup d'etat" was caused by the actions of the "democratically elected president" taking many very undemocratic political steps to consolidate his power, thereby forcing the Egyptian people to act. 

"As president, Morsi granted himself unlimited powers giving as reason that he would "protect" the nation from the Mubarak-era power structure, which he called "remnants of the old regime," and the power to legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts. In late November, he issued an Islamist-backed draft constitution and called for a referendum, an act that his opponents called an "Islamist coup." These issues, along with complaints of prosecutions of journalists and attacks on nonviolent demonstrators, brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets in the 2012 Egyptian protests."      -- Wikipedia.

Listed below are some of the relevant excerpts from Wikipedia leading to the 2014 "coup d'etat."

 On Friday 28 June, protests against Morsi started to build throughout Egypt including in such cities as Cairo, Alexandria, Dakahlia, Gharbiya and Aswan as a "warm up" for the massive protests expected on 30 June that were planned by Tamarod. 

Pro-Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood supporters started counter demonstrations at the Rabia Al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City.

Prior to the protests, Christians, particularly in Upper Egypt, received threats from pro-Morsi protestors, pressuring them not to take part in the protests. Sheikh Essam Abdulamek, a member of parliament's Shura Council, said in an interview on television that Christians should not participate in the protests and warned them "do not sacrifice your children [since the] general Muslim opinion will not be silent about the ousting of the president."

On 29 June, Tamarod claimed that it collected more than 22 million signatures from a petition calling for Morsi to step down as president.
 
On 30 June, millions of protesters demonstrated across Egypt against Morsi. They (the Egyptian people) accused the Brotherhood of hijacking Egypt's revolution and using electoral victories to monopolize power and impose Islamic law. 

In response to the events, Morsi was given a 48 hour ultimatum by the military to meet the people's demands and to solve political differences or else they would intervene by implementing their own road map for the country saying that this should not be characterized as the threat of a coup.    

My friend and his brother told me they were at one of the gathering sites in Cairo (I forget the name of the square) to show their support for the movement started by Tamarod (a grassroots movement that was started to show opposition to President Morsi and force him to call early presidential elections). Tamarod, which means rebellion, will become a political party following the 2014 Egyptian presidential elections. 

Though my friend and his brother weren't certain who the right person would be the office of Egyptian president, they were 100% certain that Morsi had to go. After having suffered under 30 years of Mubarak's regime, the Egyptian people were impatient for real democracy to take place. They didn't want a pretender who'd hijack it for his own agenda rather than listen to the voice of the people. More importantly, they didn't want to wait around another year let alone a full presidential term to see what would happen. The people of Egypt were tired of waiting. 

 My friend and his brother felt that the actions of Egyptian military were "democratically" supported by the Egyptian people who showed up at the demonstrations and signed petitions. 

I decided to write about this because most of what I got from the media was that a democratically elected president was overthrown by the military, not the whole complex story behind the supposed "coup d'etat."

I know the media can't report everything. There just isn't the bandwidth to do that, but I wish there weren't so much spin on the story. I guess, ultimately, it's up to you and me to dig deeper into the stories that matter to us.

P.S. - I haven't written about the Nigerian situation because, as a mother of a daughter, I'm quite traumatized by this. I might write about this in the future.

P.P.S. - Please let me know if I got some of the facts wrong. I searched on the web and Wikipedia for the information I've used, but the quotes are from Wikipedia.