CAIRO – It’s lunch time in Cairo and two dozen Egyptian activists and intellectuals take break for tea and date bars. They’ve gathered in a community center near the city’s main train station to discuss new efforts to bring democracy to their country, which has been governed by an emergency law banning nearly all public expression for all of Hosni Mubarak’s 23 year rule.
Also on the agenda, news reports saying the Bush administration is threatening to defund the entire United Nation’s Development Program because of an as-yet-unpublished paper by Arab academics.
According to the head of the panel, Egyptian social scientist Nadir Ferangi , the Bush administration threatened to defund UNDP because the Arab academics who wrote the report implicated the U.S. government in human rights violations in the Middle East. "For example,” he told Reuters, “the United States is suppressing the two national liberation movements in the Arab world – in Iraq and in Palestine.”
At today’s human rights meeting in Cairo, few were surprised at the development. "The American government supports the Egyptian government, and the Saudi Arabian, and [in years past] supported the Saddam government," noted Fereez Zehran, the event’s keynote speaker. "This is the American policy: support the governments of the Middle East."
American taxpayers give the Egyptian military $1.3 billion dollars every year – making Mubarak’s government the second largest recipient of U.S. arms after Israel. Since September 11 and Bush’s war on terror, Egyptians say, America’s interest in large scale crackdowns has intensified, as has Mubarak’s brutality. After terrorist attacks in October killed 33 tourists near the Israeli border the Egyptian state has rounded up – and tortured – hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. None of them have been allowed to see a lawyer and only a handful have been charged with a crime.
Human rights lawyer Ahmed Saef al-Islam Hamed describes the Egyptian government’s methods:
"First," he says, "the Egyptian government said the bombing was done by remote control, so they arrested everyone who had anything to do with remote control. Then they changed their mind. They said that what happened in Tabba happened using pipe bombs, so they arrested everyone with knowledge of pipes. Then they said that one of the bombers had a red car, so they arrested everyone who owned a red car and everyone who was employed driving a red car."
Even more worrisome, says Saef, is a new system the state security police will be using to watch over the people of Sinai. He says every person in Sinai is being assigned five people to watch for the authorities. Those who don’t make regular reports will be punished. "It’s fascism pure and simple," he says.
With the U.S. strongly backing the Mubarak government, activists here say they only have one option: to organize at the grassroots and take to the streets. But they have a problem.
"The emergency law controls everything in our society now," explains Hagag Nail, executive director of the Arab Program for Human Rights, "you can’t speak, you can’t make a meeting unless you have permission."
Nail concedes that popular mobilization against the government will send many people to prison, but he thinks it is necessary.
"We would like to connect to the people in the streets. It’s the only way," he says. "The government may catch us and put us in the prison, but we will continue and continue and in the end we will arrive to change everything around us."
So far, though, few activists seem willing to risk prison to mobilize against the emergency law and the Mubarak government. Though dissatisfaction is high, opposition demonstrations are almost nonexistent. Next year will be critical. Hosni Mubarak’s fifth term in office ends next year, and the 76-year-old leader has been grooming his son, Gamal, to take over.
