The Chronikler

Criminal injustice in Egypt

By Khaled Diab

Egyptian police and a decades-old emergency law stand in the dock of public opinion following a young man's alleged murder.

6 July 2010

The 'before' and 'after' shots looked like the makeover from hell. Before, we have a clean-cut young man who appears to be rather reserved and perhaps even somewhat shy. After, his once-youthful and pleasant face looks up with dead eyes, disfigured beyond recognition. It looks like it has caved in on itself, particularly around the mouth and jaw.

The cause of his death? It depends on whose side of the story you believe. According to eye-witnesses and Khaled Said's family, the 28-year-old Alexandrian was dragged out of an internet cafe and brutally beaten to death.

According to the official story, as outlined in two coroner's reports, he died of asphyxiation caused by his attempt to swallow a packet of 'bungo' (a form of marijuana), presumably out of fear of being caught in possession. The post-mortem did concede that the young man had injuries resulting from a "collision with solid objects", but claimed that these had not led to his death.

With public distrust of the police almost universal, the Egyptian public – not to mention human rights groups – are highly sceptical of the investigation's findings. Why? Well, the evidence doesn't really add up and the government has got form when it comes to covering up police brutality, which human rights groups say is "systematic" and "endemic".

Many see this as a blatant attempt to posthumously tarnish the good name of a law-abiding young man – who was also reportedly apolitical – to mask the ugly handiwork of the regime's iron fist.

But if Said was not a political activist nor a criminal, why was he attacked by police in the first place?

The original theory doing the rounds was that he had objected to a heavy-handed police raid of the internet cafe and this provoked the fragile egos of the two plain-clothed officers. His family allege that this was retribution for his posting online of a video, which appears to show police officers dividing up the spoils of a drugs haul.

Since the dead can't protest, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have refused to be cowed or intimidated into silence and have taken up Said's cause. A Facebook campaign set up to keep his memory alive and to seek justice for the young "martyr" has attracted nearly a quarter of a million members in Arabic and 25,000 in English.

And, unlike some earlier campaigns that did not venture far beyond cyberspace, this one has spilled out onto the Egyptian streets. In addition to the hundreds who attended Said's funeral, "flash mobs" have organised a number of successful protests. One of the most poignant was when thousands of people stood in a long chain along Alexandria's seafront – spaced five metres apart, in part to get around Egypt's draconian emergency law, which bans mass public assemblies – and stood silently or read their Qur'ans and Bibles.

In fact, silence has been the by-word. As one Egyptian commented on Facebook: "If speaking up only brings more violence, then silence will have to articulate our grief."

Last Friday, large protests took place in a number of major Egyptian cities, with opposition figurehead and the main challenger to President Hosni Mubarak in next year's elections, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former IAEA chief, joining the Alexandria sit-in.

Despite this concerted show of public anger, the two officers allegedly behind Said's death remain on active duty.

"The nation is on the verge of social explosion, and amid all this, you'd expect the regime to act very cautiously regarding issues of political freedom and human rights to contain public anger, but they are just doing the exact opposite," my brother, Osama, tells me in disbelief. "It feels bad to be ruled by authoritarianism, but it feels even worse to be ruled by stupid authoritarianism that is unable to think before it acts."

Although Said's death is a huge tragedy for his family, if it helps to ram the final nail in the coffin of Egypt's emergency law, then this tragedy will not have been in vain. Three decades old, this draconian legislation has hung over the heads of Said's generation their entire lives and has effectively transformed Egypt into a police state.

The unconstitutional emergency law, which activists have been trying to reverse and repeal for years, grants the police and security services so much discretionary power that it has led to torture and even murder, with few perpetrators brought to justice. The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights documented 46 torture cases and 17 cases of death between June 2008 to February 2009 alone.

"Under the state of emergency, the power of security forces has become absolute. It has become a hegemonic force in the country, even judicially," says Bahey Eddin Hassan, general director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. "Without a real balance of power, you do not have the rule of law and judicial independence. Without real balance, you lose the voice of the people."

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Egypt’s online struggle for democracy

By Osama Diab

In Egypt, political advocacy is being sparked online, on sites like Facebook, but there is significantly less room for movement in Egypt's real world than in its virtual world.

Tuesday 23 March 2010

In Egypt, many political movements have started, or have grown significantly, on Facebook, such as the April 6 Youth Movement and now the national campaign to support Mohamed ElBaradei, former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Nobel Peace Prize winner, for the presidency of Egypt.

Facebook activism has done a lot for Egyptian dissidents and continues to worry the Egyptian regime. A group on Facebook supporting Mohamed ElBaradei managed to attract more than 130,000 members, and its membership is increasing at a fast rate.

Even though online activism can't achieve the change young Egyptians dream of on its own, it is an important first step for mobilisation in a political environment that doesn't allow for other forms of political rallying. However, it is unlikely that desktop activism can translate into something tangible unless it is backed by other forms of action.

Currently, there is little indication of this rally in the virtual world transferring to the real world. Not under this constitution. Therefore, lobbying for constitutional change seems like the right starting point.

Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution makes it technically possible but practically impossible for independent candidates to run for the top seat. It says that independent presidential candidates need the endorsement of at least 250 elected members of the parliament and municipal councils, of which at least 90 come from both branches of the parliament. These excessive requirements are all the more burdensome considering that the vast majority of Egypt's parliament is made up of ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) members.

This is why ElBaradei stresses the importance of constitutional reform. The former IAEA chief has been offered a position in many political parties that would enable him to become a party nominee. However, ElBaradei made it clear many times that he insists on running as an independent because his will to reform and amend the constitution outweighs his will to become president.

The question here is if ElBaradei, along with his supporters, would be able to exert enough pressure to amend the constitution so it would allow for independents to run for president in 2011. Unless the pressure is immense, the answer would most likely be no.

The reason is that constitutional amendments that have taken place in recent years were carefully tailored to make the next elections confined to the NDP candidate (probably Gamal Mubarak) and a few political figureheads from Egyptian parties who were closely monitored and given permission to operate by the Egyptian government.

It will be a great show: five or six candidates from the handful of small, unpopular and poor parties against Gamal Mubarak, with all the media, financial resources and state apparatuses on the latter's side to help him win in every legitimate and illegitimate way possible. With the deck stacked so greatly in his favour, a victory for the NDP candidate is highly likely.

This does not mean that ElBaradei's supporters should stop working on expressing their will to reform Egypt's political infrastructure and present ElBaradei as their candidate and symbol of change, but patience will be necessary.

ElBaradei supporters should expect that he will not be able to run in the coming presidential elections in 2011, but if support for ElBaradei's continues to grow, the momentum may be a force in the longer run. ElBaradei and his supporters emphasise the importance that change and the transition of power happen peacefully and smoothly, which means the process might take longer, but that it will also be more sustainable.

Abdelrahman el-Taliawy, an ElBaradei enthusiast says, "We are a very fortunate generation. We grew up to find ourselves connected, open to the world and, in a way, uncontrollable. We can feel ourselves holding the future with strings in our hands. But we are tied to our mystic past and grim present. If we are planning to do great things, then we will have to begin with revolutionising our own country."

el-Taliway goes on, "For us, ElBaradei represents that hope. Hope that we can really change the terrible conditions that we grew up to find ourselves part of. We're prepared to work with him on campaigns, talk to the people in the streets and publicly protest if we must. Now, we are united and we can feel the power of what we can do. They can never take that from us again."

This article was first published by WorldPress.org on 28 February 2010. Republished here with the author's permission. ©Osama Diab. All rights reserved.

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Splitting Egypt’s political atom

By Khaled Diab

Can Mohamed ElBaradei's campaign for the Egyptian presidency save a country close to political meltdown?

Monday 15 March 2010

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My plan for a democratic Egypt

By Khaled Diab

With the right leadership, Egypt could rid itself of nepotism and inequality to become a prosperous and egalitarian society.

22 January 2010

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Diagnosing the Middle East’s ills

By Osama Diab

Author and journalist Brian Whitaker diagnoses the Arab world’s problems.

18 January 2010

When debate opens up on the problems in the Middle East, finger pointing is the first weapon in the argument. Whether it is Middle Easterners blaming contemporary problems on centuries of Western interference or the West focusing on authoritarian regimes and militant religion, the source of problems in the region can always be found in one place: somebody else’s lap.

Brian Whitaker sums this up succinctly in the first sentence of his book What’s really wrong with the Middle East: “The problems of the Middle East are always someone else’s fault.”

Whitaker should know: he spent seven years as the Middle East editor at British daily The Guardian and holds a degree in Arabic from the University of Westminster. Whitaker utilises his depth of experience in the region to diagnose the problems that plague it, conducting a series of unstructured interviews with a kaleidoscope of people to pinpoint what he believes to be the Middle East’s key problems. But don’t expect the book to be an author’s sermon on the ills of the region. What’s really wrong with the Middle East cedes the pulpit to Whitaker’s interviewees.

“I deliberately chose not to interview politicians or any of the talking heads favoured by visiting journalists,” Whitaker tells Egypt Today, adding that the people he talked to were not selected according to any agenda. “They were mostly people I had come across in the course of my work who seemed to have interesting things to say. I tried to let them shape the interviews as much as possible. I didn’t have a fixed set of questions or anything like that. I gave them a list of 10 statements — about politics, oil, the media, corruption, etc. — and asked them to choose those they wanted to talk about.”

Whitaker divides the book into nine chapters, each tackling one topic that, in his opinion, hinders reform. For example, the first chapter explains how education in the Middle East is designed to discourage free and critical thinking. Instead, it encourages “thinking inside the box” and is used by regimes to maintain power. The book moves on to explain how power is inherited and is usually driven from the father’s power. In chapter three, there is a discussion of the distance between Arab governments and their citizens, as well as the often-negative perception the public has of governments.

Although Whitaker emphasises that regime change will not immediately solve the problems of Arab countries, he spares no criticism of the region’s governments. He sees power in the region as an almost genetic inheritance that engenders all manners of nepotism, bribery and administrative corruption.

However, in Whitaker’s mind, Arab countries are more than simply repressive political regimes. Deep faults in civil society, he posits, are doing just as much damage to the region as the regimes that manage it.

“What I’m saying in the book is that the problem is a lot more complex and you have to look at Arab society as a whole, not just the regimes,” he explains. “It does mean there are no quick fixes. I’m sorry about that, but to pretend otherwise would just be deceiving ourselves.”

Whitaker similarly takes to task the censorship of the press and the internet, the lack of political expression in Arab countries, discrimination, resistance to globalization and the lack of openness to other cultures fostered in this climate.

With emphasis on interviews and real-life stories, supplemented with studies and comments from experts, What’s really wrong with the Middle East reads more like an in-depth feature article than a textbook survey of the region. “I wanted to give it a different flavour from most books about the Middle East,” says Whitaker, “so I decided to use Arab sources wherever possible — things that Arabs had written or said, but preferably available in English so that Western readers could explore them in more detail if they wanted to.”

The book took Whitaker more than a year and a half to compile and write, due in part to the legwork he felt was necessary. “To stop it from becoming too dry and academic, I wanted to include some face-to-face interviews,” he explains. “I made trips to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as to France, Belgium and the Netherlands especially for that.”

Whitaker’s objectives in writing the book were two-fold. First, he believed that debate in the West about Arab countries and the problems plaguing them was ill-informed — especially in the United States during the Bush presidency.

“I wanted to give a more complete picture,” Whitaker says, “one that delves beyond the usual issues such as terrorism and dictatorship into areas that are less often talked about: authoritarianism within the family, corruption, social discrimination, the pressure to conform and not think outside the box.”

His other objective was to confront the culture of denial in Arab countries. “If the problems are acknowledged at all, they are usually blamed on outsiders,” he says. “Western countries certainly bear some responsibility, but that’s no excuse for Arabs to sit back and do nothing. At some point they’ll have to say: ‘OK, we’re in a mess. How are we going to get out of it?’”

In the book, Whitaker points to how the invasion of Iraq highlights the West’s belief that overthrowing tyrants is a silver bullet to address the region’s woes. He finds that ousting authoritarian regimes is not a panacea for the region as a whole. The book implies that authoritarianism exists in schools, colleges, families and the workplace, and overthrowing regimes will not and cannot instantly change that. The thread Whitaker weaves throughout the book is that political change and democracy cannot happen unless preceded by social change.

While the title implies that someone — maybe Whitaker — holds all the answers, the author’s real conclusion is that there are no quick fixes for the region’s ills.

Despite his challenging observations, Whitaker believes strongly that progress is being made: “Arab society is definitely changing, if only slowly at the moment. But the more it changes, the more it is likely to change. And I think the forces driving that change — globalization, satellite TV, the internet, foreign travel and so on — are virtually unstoppable in the long term, even if there are setbacks along the way.”

This review first appeared in the January 2010 edition of Egypt Today. Republished here with the author's consent. ©Osama Diab. All rights reserved.

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Should America fear a democratic Egypt?

Osama Diab

The depiction of Egypt as a country of religious fanatics who await a breeze of freedom to turn Egypt into a radical regime is far from accurate.

14 January 2010

A senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdel Moniem Aboul Fotouh, who is known for his moderation, recently said that the party is not as popular as people think.

“If there was a real partisan life in Egypt and the wheel of democracy started turning and election were held without fraud, the brotherhood won’t come to power and won’t get more than 25% of the seats and not 90% like some people think. Egypt is not just the Muslim Brotherhood,” Aboul Fotouh told al-Shorouk newspaper.

This comes in stark contrast to how the Islamist group is typically viewed in the media, especially the Western media, as the most powerful political alternative to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). It is a little ironic how the media thinks the brotherhood is more powerful than some of its members, such as Aboul Fotouh, do.

The conviction that the Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s most serious and organised opposition movement is relatively new and is closely linked to their 2005 parliamentary success. The brotherhood managed to win 20% of the seats.

This took place just a few months after former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice openly embarrassed the regime’s undemocratic practices. "Throughout the Middle East, the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty," Rice said. "It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy."

But it wasn’t long before the US feared democracy in Egypt and backed away. A foreign policy article published this year commenting on Bush’s push for democracy in Egypt stated, “For a brief moment, the policy seemed to be showing results […] Unfortunately, as the deteriorating situation in Iraq drew away its attention, and when elections produced results that were not to its liking, the Bush administration essentially gave up on democracy in Egypt in 2006.”

Many political analysts believe that the brotherhood was ‘allowed’ to win that many seats. The regime perhaps wanted to send an indirect message to the Bush administration implying that it’s either us or them (in this case, the brotherhood). A fifth of the seats in parliament was the price Egypt was willing to pay in order to pass on the message.

For the same reason, Egypt’s government never ‘allowed’ a similar scenario to happen to liberal secular political parties that showed signs of popularity and could be to America’s liking. Ayman Nour, a popular liberal opposition figure that seemed like a favorable option to the Bush Administration, was thrown into jail for challenging Mubarak and achieving a considerable success as Mubarak’s runner up in the 2005 elections.

The brotherhood might not be really as popular as the media make us believe and is just used by the current regime to delay calls for democracy in Egypt. Studies and research on the popularity of political groups are usually conducted to serve political goals. Therefore, there are no reliable figures on how well-liked political groups really are. But there are signs, other than Aboul Fotouh’s statement, that it is not a foregone conclusion that the brotherhood will sweep up the votes if offered the opportunity to run in a fair election.

Now that the talk about who will succeed President Hosni Mubarak is more heated than ever, opposition groups have been trying to suggest qualified names to run for presidency. The point is to counter the belief of some that Egypt has no competent alternatives for the top seat outside the Mubarak family.

All the names suggested to rival the NDP’s candidate in the 2011 presidential elections did not include a single Islamist, which implies that even if some people are sympathetic toIslamist politicians, they don’t necessarily trust their ability to take control of the top job. Some might argue that the brotherhood decided not to offer a candidate, but most of the suggested name never expressed willingness to compete either.

Also, in a poll carried out by Zogbi International, 58% of Egyptians considered their primary identity to be citizens of their country, while 20% said Arab was their primary identity. Only 17% defined their primary identity as Muslim and 5% fell under the “not sure” category. Out of the six countries surveyed, only Egypt and Lebanon did not tick “Muslim” as their primary identity.

Above all, Egyptians are also more often than not very proud of their pre-Islamic and ancient Egyptian history. In Egypt, the number of shops, products and companies named after ancient Egyptian figures, such as Cleopatra, Sphinx, Nefertiti and Ramsis is striking, including the Egyptian football team – the Pharaohs.

Moreover, many of Egypt’s critical industries that contribute massively to the country’s GDP and employ tens of millions have a liberal bent, and people dependent on them might not feel secure about the future of their livelihoods under Islamic rule.
Such industries include the media and tourism sectors. For example, the Egyptian tourism sector represents 11.3% of Egypt’s GDP and 19.3%  of the total investment made in foreign currencies, according to the Egyptian tourism ministry.
Egypt also has a thriving banking sector that dates back to 1856. Egypt, along with South Africa, has the biggest and most advanced financial markets on the continent. The concept of riba (lending with interest) is traditionally prohibited in Islam, which makes the whole concept of banking and investment undesirable if not forbidden in some Islamic schools.

In addition to its modern economy with a thriving business sector and a large tourism industry, the country has also long been the regional centre of the arts, culture and the media, as well as a melting pot for people from many different cultures and backgrounds throughout its history. With all these factors and a significant religious minority, no one can claim with any certainty that Egyptians will embrace Islamic rule with arms wide open.

Published with the author's permission. ©Osama Diab. All rights reserved.

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The Middle East must look to the future

By Khaled Diab

A secular society confines religion to the spiritual sphere where it belongs, and leaves worldly affairs to human resourcefulness.

April 2009

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