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Amanpour

Review of the Week's Happenings in Egypt; Replay of Pussy Riot Documentary Director

Aired July 12, 2013 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to our special weekend edition of the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

This week has seen the volatile brew of Egyptian politics spill into the streets again. The high stakes battle in the United States over whether or not to call it a coup continues because billions of dollars in aid to Egypt are at stake.

The United States has called for a rapid transition back to civilian democratic rule and this week the acting president, former judge Adly Mansour, named an interim prime minister, the respected economist Hazem el- Beblawi and outlined a road map to amending the constitution, holding parliamentary and presidential elections, all within six months.

The military-backed interim leaders are calling for national reconciliation, an inclusive path forward, including with the Muslim Brotherhood. But after more than 50 of their supporters were killed in clashes with the military early this week, the group is sticking with its call for, quote, "an uprising" to protest Morsy's ouster and to demand his return.

The Brotherhood sense of growing grievance is exacerbated by the arrest of Morsy and other top leaders and Egypt's media. Now firmly toeing the military line, has taken to calling the Brotherhood terrorists. And their television stations have been silenced.

So what is the fate of democracy in Egypt and indeed around the right now? Joining me are Mona Makramebeid, a former senator in Egypt's parliament, who resigned in protest at Morsy's presidency and Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who has the broader view. He joins me by phone from Doha.

Welcome to you both.

And first to you, Professor Makramebeid. How do you get the Muslim Brotherhood into the process now?

PROF. MONA MAKRAMEBEID, FORMER MEMBER, EGYPTIAN PARLIAMENT: Well, it's going to take time but you have to send positive messages.

I think the opposition needs to stop any further incitement on demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood and strive instead for reconciliation because, after all, they have worked together to bring down the old Mubarak regime and they must find a way to coexist in a new and reconciled Egypt.

AMANPOUR: OK --

(CROSSTALK)

MAKRAMEBEID: -- where it comes.

AMANPOUR: All right. And I'm going to turn to Shadi Hamid, because obviously what you're saying is everybody's wish list, in a perfect world, that is what everybody would want.

Shadi Hamid, is that possible? Is the Muslim Brotherhood amenable, do you think, eventually to some kind of outreach to come back into politics? Or are we going to see the bad old days of the Brotherhood pitted against the government of the time and then being more of a --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: I'm just going to ask Shadi. Mona, hold on a second.

Shadi?

SHADI HAMID: Yes, this is a problem with military coups. If they lead to a crisis of legitimacy, you have one part of the country that considers Mansour the new president and other parts still considers Morsy the legitimate president.

But without election, without an organized political process, there's no real way to resolve that fundamental crisis. And Brotherhood members now are on the streets, saying they won't give up their claim of legitimacy. So it's very difficult to see a way out.

Then Mona talks about positive messages, and how important they are; killing dozens of unarmed protesters is not a positive message.

And once you have what the Brotherhood calls martyrs, I mean, it becomes very difficult to stand down from that for them, you know, after such loss of life. So I think before yesterday, before those events, we could have been maybe a little bit more optimistic. But now it's difficult to see a way forward.

And not only that, you've had hundreds of arrest warrants issued for Brotherhood members. Their businesses are being scrutinized, Islamist TV channels being shut down. So this is not inclusive so far. It's only been a couple days. So it's not a positive sign.

AMANPOUR: Right. You mentioned, you know, part of the country now against Morsy; part of it for Morsy.

Where do you think the Muslim Brotherhood is going to end up? Is it going to go back to, as I said, the bad old days when they are excluded from the political process and they are a protest movement?

HAMID: Well, that's why the focus, not just on the part of Egyptian government but the international community is to push the military to make a good-faith (ph) gesture to the Muslim Brotherhood, to give them rock- solid guarantees so they feel they have a place in this new political process, because what they're saying is why should we join the process when we won't be allowed to fully participate or they won't be allowed to win elections?

I mean, let's say hypothetically, the Brotherhood's political party wins a plurality in the parliamentary elections. Would they be allowed to appoint a prime minister?

Or would an Islamist president be allowed to govern Egypt again after the previous one was deposed?

So there's a real question there: are Islamists allowed to win and govern through the democratic process? And based on what we saw a few days ago, one of -- the answer seems to be no.

AMANPOUR: All right.

HAMID: That an Islamist president came to power and was deposed through a military coup.

AMANPOUR: All right. Let me put this to Mona.

Will an Islamist be able to win again? Can you imagine a situation? I mean, let's say they come back into the process where the Muslim Brotherhood contests the upcoming elections. Is there that possibility?

MAKRAMEBEID: Why not? I mean, but the Muslim Brothers must realize that if they come back, they must come back as a political party. They will contest elections as a political party and not as a religious party, not have clerics impose on them and on us their way of life or their vision of a new Egypt.

So if they contest the elections, why not? If -- and let the best man win. First of all, I hope they can gain back some of their -- some of their popularity because their popularity is down completely, even before the 30th of June.

And but I believe that these two years have served as a lesson for everyone, whether it's the government, whether the Islamists, the army, the youth, the opposition parties, everybody has made mistakes. And today they must face the truth and they must see where they have gone astray.

Today the objective must be a constitution, a focus on citizenship and on sovereignty.

And of course, solve the socioeconomic problems, because people in the street don't care about the constitution. They care about having a better life and that's what the revolution promised them. And that's what nobody was able to fulfill, neither the president nor the opposition parties.

So we are today, we are faced with enormous challenges to build a new Egypt. But, Christiane, you must admire the sustainability and the courage of Egyptians to go forward and to risk so much for a new democratic, civic country.

AMANPOUR: Well, what I want to ask you, though, is, you know, there have been a lot of popularly backed military interventions in history and none of them have gone well at all. In fact, quite the opposite, whether it's in Latin America or in Pakistan or, indeed, potentially in Egypt.

Is there not a twinge of worry that you have that the military is in control in your country right now?

MAKRAMEBEID: No. First of all, the military in our country is totally different. I have been -- I have been an adviser to the SCAF for eight or nine months, for the time they were there.

I know General Sisi from being there, not personally. He is younger; he is not like the old tellers (ph) who were there. He's much more open to the West.

And he's much more in tune with what the demands of the people, as you can see, his first gesture was to show that this is representative of the people. He got the Sheikh el-Azar (ph) a rised (ph) institution.

He got the pope, a highly respected figure in Egypt, by both Muslims and Christians. He got Dr. ElBaradei, who was elected by the youth and he got people from the Nour Party (ph), whom I know very well.

So I mean, it's already -- I mean, a message and a strong message.

Second, he did not take time to have a civilian government, to have the representative of the highest constitutional court be the head of the party -- of the country as an interim president.

AMANPOUR: All right, Mona.

Let me ask you, Shadi, you get the last word. As people are watching around the Arab Spring world, I said Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Syria is gloating all over this; others are really disappointed by what's happened.

What is the message about what happened in Egypt to Islamists, in politics, around your region?

HAMID: Well, it's a bad message. I mean, Morsy was incredibly disappointing as a president. No one can doubt that. But that doesn't justify a military coup against the first elected leader after a revolution. And what precedent does that set?

And the question going forward is whenever there's an unpopular president, the military can step in and either depose that person or put pressure on them to intervene in the political process.

Suddenly the real concern here that people are going to look at the Egyptian case and say, there might be a little bit of democracy but within constraints and the military is allowed to intervene whenever it wants. And what if that's replicated in other countries that are looking to Egypt right now?

And as you pointed out, coups don't have a good history. They lead to civil strife. And we're seeing that now.

And you know, I think it's worth emphasizing too that there's always the risk that radical Islamists, those who are more prone to using violence, are going to use this to their advantage and make the case to ordinary frustrated Arabs that democracy doesn't work, that violence is the only way.

So I think we have to look broader at the implications here. And in my view, they're very concerning.

AMANPOUR: We will keep watching.

To Mona Makramebeid and Shadi Hamid, thank you so much for joining me.

Now while the fight for democracy goes on in Egypt, the fight for democracy and freedom of expression has also been waged in Russia, led by three young women who turned performance art into a protest that captured the imagination of the world and landed them in prison. Now a new documentary gives us a front-row seat with a trial and the tribulations of the trio known as Pussy Riot. We'll have that when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. Now Now it was the punk performance heard around the world, a band of women activists, storming Russia's main orthodox cathedral to sing an anti-Putin song.

The performance in February lasted only 40 seconds, but ended with three band members -- Katya, Masha and Nadya -- arrested and charged with hooliganism, quote, "motivated by religious hatred."

After a guilty verdict, the three were sentenced to two years in prison. Katya, on the left, was later released. But Masha and Nadya remained in penal colonies. The trial sparked an international outcry against President Putin and the suppression of free speech and political activism in Russia.

Protesters took to the streets in Russia and around the world. It also attracted the attention of celebrities like Madonna, who paid tribute to the group at her concert in Moscow when she donned a balaclava, the group's signature headgear. And she had "Pussy Riot" written across her back.

Now the group is the subject of a new documentary on HBO: "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer."

Maxim Pozdorovkin, the director and producer of this film, joins me now.

Welcome.

MAXIM POZDOROVKIN, "PUSSY RIOT" FILMMAKER: Thank you very much.

AMANPOUR: First and foremost, why did you decide to make it into a film?

POZDOROVKIN: Well, it was such an incredible story, my collaborator, Mike, and I, we are always interested in stories about art and politics. And I had grown up in Moscow and was interested in the same kind of avant- garde art and loud punk rock and same kind of political issues of them. And so immediately.

AMANPOUR: So they -- I want to ask you, they call themselves feminist punk group. So are they just punk? Are they anarchists?

Are they social activists? How would you describe --

(CROSSTALK)

POZDOROVKIN: They're leftist Marxists. I guess the first thing is that they have quite a band. They're an art collective and they see themselves as performance artists who take on the guise of a band and stage these guerilla performances in symbolic locations.

They are radical leftists, essentially, as well. And so in that way they're --

AMANPOUR: And they're -- when you say they're not a group, it's because actually there are a lot of them. It's not just three or four people. They have a lot of them. They're all in balaclavas. You don't really know who's who. And they pop up in various locations.

POZDOROVKIN: Yes. And they're, again, sort of this cult of individuals. They want to have -- kind of create a new visual iconography for a protest movement.

AMANPOUR: So what do they actually want?

POZDOROVKIN: Well, there are a lot of things. I think they want to transform the system fundamentally. I mean, they want a feminist revolution.

Many ways, you know, what we show in the film is the story before feminist revolution. They want, you know, more equality; they want a new kind of government. They want a sort of a more tolerant, more humanist government essentially.

AMANPOUR: They really exploded into the popular imagination and into the world sort of knowledge after Putin was elected as president again. And I guess I'm trying to figure out -- Putin is a powerful man with all the powers of state.

Do they really, really see a threat to their manhood or their statehood from what these -- what these women did, even in the cathedral?

POZDOROVKIN: No, I think that there's two issues there. I think that it's -- the idea of hooliganism and punishing social order goes back to a lot of the Soviet kind of countries, an idea of punishing people who step out of line.

And with this story, it's also, I think one of the things that has been overlooked is the role of the patriarch ideal and the orthodox church and the Moscow patriarchy in terms of how they pushed forward for the -- for prosecution of these women.

And since their arrest have actually pushed forward all sorts of anti- blasphemy laws, which actually criminalize what they did. So had they done what they did today, there would already be a law criminalizing it.

AMANPOUR: And yet there wasn't at the time, because one of the key pieces of video that you show in your film is the defense attorney saying, you know, there's no law against blasphemy and what they did was not criminal. He was very harsh against the judge. He just out and out said that this is a political show trial.

POZDOROVKIN: Yes. Yes and I mean, what they were charged with was Article 213.4 and it's basically a hate crime, but it's not quite clear how what they did actually qualifies, because it's clear we didn't have any religious hatred to speak of.

AMANPOUR: And they said that in jail. They said we are not haters; we're just trying to make a point.

POZDOROVKIN: Exactly.

AMANPOUR: What when you were -- when you were making this film, you went around and talked to some of the parents and you talked to the fathers and the mothers of the three main protagonists.

Do you think -- because certainly one of the fathers thinks that they may have just gone a step too far, taking it into the cathedral. I want to play a little bit of your interview with one of the fathers.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STANISLAV, KATIA'S DAD (from captions): Pussy Riot members would meet in our apartment. There were many of them. I couldn't tell them apart, so many came through from different towns. Some of them even lived with us when they had nowhere to stay.

I knew they were composing something. Then they started cutting out these silly balaclavas.

I asked, "Are you girls planning to rob a bank?"

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So I was really touched, actually, by the interviews with the parents. You know, they didn't really get it, but they supported their girls.

POZDOROVKIN: Yes. You know, for me, the story is one of kind of a younger generation making itself heard by any means necessary.

And what's interesting about the parents is that at the outset they didn't really understand and thought it was inappropriate. But once the system had overreacted, they actually understood the point that their daughters had been making all along.

AMANPOUR: And you are also trying to make another point. I found that very gripping. You show historical footage in the film, including at the show trials under Stalin.

And also Nadya, one of the main protagonists, during her closing arguments, she said, you know, in previous years under the Soviets, political dissidents were shoved off into, you know, gulags and psychiatric wards.

What are you saying? Are you saying that these kinds of show trials are still alive and well in Russia today?

POZDOROVKIN: No, I think that it's an interesting point, because it would be historically irresponsible to compare really the scale of repression under Stalin to what's happening right now.

But the mentality of public punishment, of making an example out of people by putting them on trial for purposes of like political, essentially conservative political thinking, that still remains an important part of a judicial system and the kind of mentality, of national mentality. So it's that's parallel.

And also the fact that there were people on the ground, people outside the trial that were comparing it to 1937. But I think that it's a bit overstated, that analogy. But that notion of a public spanking is significant.

AMANPOUR: I still am horrified to think that these girls, for the sake of one song, have been sentenced essentially to hard labor in a penal colony. I mean, that really does hearken back to the worst of the worst years, no matter, as you say, historically it wouldn't be accurate to compare the two eras.

But nonetheless, to send these girls out into the, you know, into the beyond, and two of them are mothers.

And one really touching moment was when Masha, one of the girls, the one with the long hair, she said, you know, nothing about danger to myself freaks me out. But I nearly had a nervous breakdown when one of these state people asked me whether I want my child to go into social services while I'm going through this.

How painful is it for these two girls who haven't seen their kids? And are they allowed to see them?

POZDOROVKIN: Yes, they do have regular visits with their children in the penal colonies, but as you can imagine it's incredibly difficult and especially Nadya's in a camp that's a bit further away and so it's been quite hard for them.

AMANPOUR: What do they do in those camps?

POZDOROVKIN: Well, Russian labor camps kind of have trade schools attached to them. So they sew police uniforms.

AMANPOUR: They sew police uniforms?

POZDOROVKIN: And they object to it on gender grounds and feminist grounds.

AMANPOUR: All right.

I want to play you a little bit of an interview that I did with Katya. She was one who was released because her lawyer, she changed her lawyer and, on appeal, her case was overturned.

But she was not repentant.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Are you finished with protests? Does this end your action, your political action?

YEKATERINA SAMUTSEVICH, FREED MEMBER OF PUSSY RIOT (through translator): No, of course not. We are not finished, nor are we going to end our political protest.

We do have our criticism; all of that remains in force. The situation in the country has deteriorated since our performance. And the trial itself is a testimony of that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So what does Pussy Riot do now? Is it still active in Moscow?

POZDOROVKIN: Well, they're trying to figure out how to -- essentially to rebrand themselves and how they can continue, because obviously no one expected this kind of resonance from this performance. They were happy to go along convincing people, you know, a small group at a time and getting people.

So I think that they're just fighting for the release of Nadya and Masha and then thinking about how to go ahead. Obviously, legally it's difficult for them to do more performances at the moment.

AMANPOUR: And what about this film? Will it be shown in Russia?

POZDOROVKIN: Yes, we're planning on showing it at a festival and end of November, early December. But it's a bit tricky because the punk prayer video itself has been deemed obscene and was ruled obscene by the courts after the women were sentenced. And so...

AMANPOUR: So you have to tell the story without those clips?

POZDOROVKIN: Yes. And then.

AMANPOUR: All right, Maxim, thank you very much indeed for joining me. Thank you.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, Malala Yousafzai, the brave Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and daring to speak out about it turned 16 on Friday. That would be incredible enough.

Now imagine a world where her birthday isn't celebrated with 16 candles like many girls her age, but as a triumph over ignorance and hate shared with millions of other young people around the globe.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MALALA YOUSAFZAI, EDUCATION ACTIVIST: Dear friends, on the 9th of October 2012 the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullet would silence us. But they failed.

And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this. Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, fervor and courage was born.

Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

AMANPOUR (voice-over): And we wish her a very happy birthday this weekend.

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That's it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com. Thanks for watching and goodbye from New York.

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