Secrets of Brotherhood’s manipulation of crisis to drive wedge between Arab countries

Mohamed Yosry

The Brotherhood spares no effort to take advantage of any situation for the sake of driving a wedge between Arab countries, especially those friendly to Egypt, and the corona pandemic that has swept the world, closed international airports and led to the disruption of flights around the world has been no different.

There are thousands of Egyptians working abroad, especially the Arab Gulf states such as Kuwait, which issued a number of early decisions like other countries to deal with the corona virus. But the Brotherhood had another position and insisted on exploiting any decision that Kuwait takes regarding foreign labor from Egypt.

Smear campaign

The Brotherhood and its media trumpets began a subversion campaign between Egypt and Kuwait since the outbreak of the corona crisis, in an attempt to demonstrate that any decision regarding foreign workers in Kuwait is intended only for Egyptian workers.

The campaign utilized social media pages affiliated with the group’s loyalists and some public figures with Brotherhood tendencies in Kuwait to attack Egypt and claim that it ignored the conditions of its citizens in Kuwait. On the other hand, some scenes depicting the conditions of employment violations in Kuwait were included to make it seem as though Kuwait was intentionally humiliating Egyptian workers by using figures on social media hostile to the two countries. The most prominent figure was the Kuwaiti Mubarak al-Baghili, who wrote a series of tweets insulting Egypt, and the Brotherhood contributed to spreading the tweets widely through their media platforms in an attempt to show a rift between the Kuwaiti and Egyptian peoples.

Distortion and fraud

The Brotherhood exploited some statements of Kuwaiti public figures talking about the corona crisis and their relationship with labor brokers, depicting them as belonging to Egypt. They also included statements by famous Kuwaiti actress Hayat al-Fahad, who has been critical of the situation of illegal foreign workers in Kuwait in general. The Brotherhood promoted her statements through the group’s platforms and claimed that they were directed at Egypt, which Fahad denied completely. She said in statements published by Kuwaiti and Egyptian media, “I learned art from the Egyptians; it was Egyptians who taught us… All our beloved ones are Egyptians.”

The Kuwaiti actress added that she had not thought that she would offend Egypt or any Arab country, stressing that Kuwait could not dispense with any of its workers and that her statements were taken with the aim of insulting Egypt.

Distorting the facts

Brotherhood platforms have promoted news that Kuwait has issued a decision to evacuate stranded Egyptians at its expense, and that Egypt has requested 600 Kuwaiti dinars from the Kuwaiti government for each returning Egyptian. The group’s trumpets claimed that Kuwait accepted this measure as a result of the Egyptian state’s failure and its inability to return its citizens stranded in Kuwait and that the Kuwaiti decision comes within the framework of rejecting the presence of Egyptian labor, as they are a source of transmitting the corona virus. These lies sparked a war of words between Egyptians and Kuwaitis on social media, although the Kuwaiti decision was not specific just to Egyptian labor, but all foreign labor in general.

Kuwaiti Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, and Interior Minister Anas Al-Saleh issued a decision on March 30 to allow violators of the Residency Law of all nationalities to leave the country without paying any incurred financial fines, as well as without incurring travel costs for airline tickets, and with the possibility of returning to the country later.

Formal reactions

On April 9, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Ahmad Nasser Al-Sabah held a telephone conversation with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, in which the two sides discussed the historical relations between the two countries.

The two ministers expressed their uneasiness and total rejection of the abusive and purposeful attempts to prejudice these relations or to compromise their foundations, stressing that what unites the two peoples is a bond of brotherhood.