'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Notes from Cairo, #2

I have gathered such a lot of great material from my time here in Egypt so far that it has been a challenge for me to figure out how to write it. One of the most interesting things has been the interview I did with Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Dr. Issam al-Arian last Sunday (February 11). But even just to write that has been a challenge for me, as I felt the need to put in a lot of background and it was getting fairly unwieldy.

Plus, I was still running around doing a bunch of other things, as well.

So I finally decided to write the background material separately, and to upload it here. Expect the interview itself within the next few hours.

But right now, I probably need to go out for a long walk and clear my head. Often, when you're crossing a major street like Qasr al-Aini Street or the Nile-side corniche, this involves playing the terrifying game of Extreme Human Frogger. Cairo is about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city I have ever been in. I haven't seen a single posted vehicular speed limit within the whole city. Don't the people here realize that allowing public space to be so hostile, or even potentially lethal, for pedestrians means that a whole chunk of members of society-- the disabled, the elderly, mothers with young children-- become effectively prevented from real social inclusion?

To say nothing of the damaging effects of the pollution...

But enough whining... I have actually been having a really great time here... And truly, this time as always I really do love Egypt!

1. Entering the twilight of the Mubarak era

Medical science is a powerful tool that has done much to increase human wellbing and lengthen the productive and hapy lives of miliions of people. However, no-one has yet found a way to prolong human life indefinitely.  (Even the kings of Saudi Arabia, who have unconstrained access to all the most expensive forms of medical treatment, have had to learn this.)  Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak, is 78 years old.  And though he's remarkably, as they say, "well preserved" for his age, still the fact remains that in Egypt today there's an almost palpable sense that his powers are waning.  Everywhere there is talk of the succession-- and this, though he has another four and a half years to serve on his current six-year term in office.  But already, there are many rumors of who might be in line for the succession, and how various sectors of power might be circling around and lining up to position themselves for the moment when either there's the next scheduled election (September 2011), or, even before that, his powers might fail to the point that some other form of succession becomes necessary.

Mubarak has notably never named a Vice-President, a step that could have muted or even eliminated all this uncertainty around the succession.  He himself became President after his predecessor, Anwar as-Sadat, was assassinated in 1981-- by virtue of the fact that he had at the time been Sadat's VP... and prior to that, Sadat became President in 1970 by virtue of the fact that he had been the VP of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel-Nasser.  So having a designated VP did on both those earlier occasions ensure a nearly trouble-free succession.

So why has Mubarak never named one?  What he says  to people bold enough to ask is that he considers it undemocratic for a president to name the person who thereby becomes almost certain to be his successor.  But other possible explanations have certainly also been mentioned here, including that he does not have enough trust in anyone to name him as VP (with an undertone that that VP, if underhanded enough, might actually undertake some action to speed up the succession...  ), and that he has been waiting and/or hoping for his son Gamal Mubarak (named after you-know-who) to have enough experience of national governance to be able to fit "naturally" into the successor's shoes...

This latter prospect would be a kind of a replay of what happened in Syria-- another avowed "republic"-- where Bashar al-Asad became the successor to his father, the late President Hafez al-Asad, on his death in 2000.  (In the United States, yet another avowed republic, we have also seen the re-emergence of a tiny trend of family succession...  Is this a worldwide phenomenon, I wonder?)

So there is much speculation about who the main contenders for the succession might be.  Egypt is currently a complex form of a (mainly) one-party state, with the party in question being the National Democratic Party, which was established by President Sadat in 1978, mainly as a first attempt to constrain the influence of the military, which has played the key power-broker role inside Egypt ever since it was the group of the "Free Officers" that overthrew the British-supported monarchy here in 1952.  The military still, by all accounts, seeks to play that role, though several well-clued Egyptian analysts say the domestic-focused "State Security" apparatus plays a much greater role than it used to.  Bottom line: a lot, though not all, of what goes on in the NDP is a little bit of a facade.

Another thing worth bearing in mind: the NDP has never had any existence separate from the ruling power or the state.  Iin the past there were frequently many jokes made at its expense-- that it had no real principles, was just a patronage machine, had no  real raison d'etre, etc...  But in the past few years it seems to have been trying to come to grips with the task of defining itself and its role more precisely.  This in reaction to a number of things including: changing influences in an Egyptian society that has now moved quite a distance away from the old Nasserist notions of social equality and a large state role in the economy; the challenge of trying to define itself in reaction to the threat from rising sociopolitical forces in Egypt, with at their head the extremely strong Muslim Brotherhood; and finally-- probably the smallest role motivating these political changes has been earlier, nannying urgings of Condoleezza Rice and her boss that Egypt (which is of course a significant US aid recipient) should take significant steps towards democratization.

Now, of course, the Bushites have moved significantly away from their earlier campaign for "democratization" in the Middle East.  But it seems to me significant that the NDP people are nonetheless continuing their push to try to (re-)define themselves, their party, and the political system over which they rule.  Well, they're doing so in their own particular, very top-down kind of way, of course.  But still, something (however small) is happening.

The Carnegie Endowment's Michele Dunne has a fairly thorough January 2007 paper here (PDF) on the political reforms currently being considered by the NDP.  She sees the main goal of the reforms as being to position Gamal Mubarak optimally for the succession.  More to the point, it positions the NDP optimally for any future rounds of slightly more multi-party elections, regardless of who the NDP's candidate for the presidency might be.  It's true, the party apparatus has taken some steps recently that seem to boost Gamal's image and nationwide popularity; but there reportedly remains some non-trivial resistance to the idea of a Gamal succession within the party's ranks.  (And reportedly, even more resistance to him from within the security organs whose role, in the end, will probably still be decisive.)

Dunne makes quite clear, meanwhile, the extent to which the proposed "reforms" are intended to provide some show of democratization while continuing to circumscribe the political power of the Muslim Brotherhood.

You can also find some excellent commentary on the NDP's current "reform" proposals from Egyptian female blogger Baheyya... including in this January 8 post in which she writes:

One of the many political absurdities left behind by Mr Anwar Sadat is something called “The Political Party Affairs Committee.” This thing, composed exclusively of NDP members, gets to cherry pick the regime’s opposition (see Law 40/1977). This means that we have opposition parties headed by the likes of Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy, president of al-Umma Party... Shaykh al-Sabahy includes among his many preoccupations the mandatory return of the fez, the intricacies of dream interpretation, and the mysteries of astrology, all veritable burning issues in Egyptian politics. During the presidential elections campaign of 2005 in which he served as one of the principal contestants, al-Sabahy simply could not contain his admiration and support for President Mubarak, and vowed to vote for him on election day. Yes. Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy presides over a legal opposition party in Egypt, but Islamist Abul Ela Mady and Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahy (no relation to Shaykh Ahmad) are repeatedly and unequivocally turned down when they avail themselves of established channels for forming legal opposition parties. What’s wrong with this picture?

What's wrong indeed!

Anyway, going back to Michele Dunne's paper, she wrote that back during the heady heyday of the Bushists' "democratization" push in the Middle East, 2004-2005, they increased US government funding for "democracy-building assistance" projects in Egypt from $5 million to $50 million annually.  She noted,
What she completely fails to note there, of course, is the signal event that happened in late January 2006 regarding democratization in the Middle East: namely the victory won by Hamas in the parliamentary elections held in Palestine.  It was that development more than any other which was surely responsible for the Bushists' decision to jettison their democratization agenda.

Still, the election-monitoring training given to thousands of Egyptians in 2005 may well prove to have left a legacy of skills that can prove helpful in future elections, too.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood

This is a huge country whose politics certainly affects the balance within the whole region.  Back in Nasser's day, Egypt exercized a palpable degree of leadership over much of the Arab world-- and Nasser's charisma was felt much further afield, too.  The other day I was in the luxurious new headquarters of the Egyptian Journalists' Union, and there in a fourth-floor hallway was a small exhibition of black-and-white photos from the past 55 years of the country's history, including Nasser playing his role of a leading light at the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was a precursor of the Non-Aligned Movement, Nasser with various other world leaders, etc...

Egypt isn't nearly as weighty as that in world affairs any more.  It even got upstaged by the Saudis during the diplomacy to conclude the recent Fateh-Hamas agreement-- something which was noted by many of the Egyptians I've been talking to.  (One noted that the only reason the Saudis could do it was because nailing down the agreement involved going considerably outside of what was permissible to the Americans.  "And the Saudis could do that where the Egyptians couldn't, because the Egyptians get money from the American pocket but the Americans get money from the Saudi pocket.")

But even though it doesn't have the strong leadership role that it once had, Egypt does still remain a remains a big player in Arab politics; and within Egyptian politics without a doubt the most significant non-governmental player is now (as frequently throughout the past), the Muslim Brotherhood.

The MB's weight in society certainly seems to have increased significantly since the days, back in the late 1970s and through late 1981, when I used to come here quite often from my home-base in Lebanon to cover some fast-breaking political developments in Egypt... Back then-- the twilight years, as it turned out, of former Pres. Anwar as-Sadat-- the MB were considered to be a large but still definitely "behind-the-scenes" player in Egyptian social life.  Among the foreign journos in Cairo, this or that individual was rumored to "be connected" in some way or another to the Brotherhood.  But I don't recall that they had much of a recognizable public profile or public presence.  There were also-- then as now-- various very small and very violent Islamist movements, such as the group that apparently organized Sadat's assassination in October 1981.  But Nasser and Sadat had both repeatedly taken strong actions againstall the country's Islamists, including the MB; and its influence seemed to have thereby been largely "contained."

Egypt has always been a fairly strongly religion-observing country.  At noon on Fridays, many of the side-streets and alleys of the relatively modernized "city center" areas of Cairo fill up with the worshipers who have overflowed from the nearby mosques: they lay out their prayer mats in the street and go ahead, should-to-should, to perform their prayer rituals there in the street.  Many men-- including Pres. Sadat-- proudly sport on their forheads the smudge (or three smudges) of bruising that result from frequently pressing the forehead to the floor during prayers.  The appearance of those forehead marks seems a lot more widespread now than it was in the 1970s... And so is the wearing of hijab headcoverings by Egyptian women.  Actually, I've been coming to Egypt every couple of years since 1981; and I would say that the biggest increase in hijab-wearing rates happened back in the late 1980s.  In recent years, I reckon the biggest increases in overt bodily signs of religious observance has been in the forehead- marks of men-- many, many men now have them-- and in the (re-)appearance in Cairo of women wearing face-veils (niqab.)  Sometimes these are face-veils that hang under the eyes, and sometimes there is one hung under the eyes and then a piece of more transluicent veiling that goes over the eyes as well.  Women who wear the niqab always wear gloves in public, as well.  (As I saw with Sister Maha of Hamas, when I was in Gaza last March.)

The niqab isn't nearly as frequent as the hijab, but I honestly don't recall seeing more than one or two women wearing it when I was here in early 2004.  This year, there are many more munaqqabat (women wearing niqab.)

However, we shouldn't draw a straight line between signs of religious observance and affiliation with the MB.  My old friend Prof. Saad Eddin Ibrahim-- who was imprisoned along with a huge group from all sectors of society, including Islamists, during Sadat's crazed last weeks in power in 1981, and has kept in touch with some of his Islamist cellmates ever since-- says that when he was called in to see the new head of the much-feared State Security service not long ago, he was interested to see that that man-- who is the one who has been detaining (and mistreating) hundreds of MB members in recent weeks-- also has the forehead marks...  And so too, as noted above,  did Sadat himself.  Evidently, there are many people who are strongly religiously observant within pro-regime circles, as well as in the MB.

Anyway, after Mubarak came to power as president in 1981, he started slowly to allow the MB slightly more of a public role, though this was still not a role as an open player within the country's politics.  In the 1980s-- and with Mubarak's indirect permission-- the MB was able to run a small number of candidates on the parliamentary list of the historically liberal-nationalist "Wafd" Party, and later through a similar deal with the Labour Party.  Thus, periodic crackdowns against the MB still continued, but the MFB at least gained a recognizable presence in national politics.

In the elections of 2005, the MB again participated, but under a different arrangement. This time, its members ran as "independents", but they did so under the MB's own main slogan of "Islam is the solution", so everybody knew who they were.  They won 88 of the country's 444 elected seats.  (There were numerous problems at the polls. See e.g. the details in this WaPo editorial on the matter. Many analysts have noted that the MB would have done considerably better if the vote had been fully free and fair.)

Having its members in parliament has notably not provided the MB with any protection against the continuation of arrests and other forms of opression.  Last December, these campaigns took a new turn, after a notorious event at Al-Azhar University.  I have heard many accounts of this event during my 16 days in Egypt so far.  The best sense I can make of the accounts is roughly as follows....  The state authorities had first of all tried to prevent the pro-MB students at AZU from participating in elections for the university's "official" student union.  Those students then established their own, "free student union" in response.  That riled the authorities, who then moved to expel  those students from AZU's student housing, and the students then held a sit-in at the university.

In the course of the sit-in, some of these students then organized what has been described to me as "a karate exhibition", and they did so while wearing black clothes, black face-masks, and bandanas with the word "Samedoon" (steadfast) written on them, in conscious imitation of the "look" of a Hamas rally.

That really got the authorities riled!  So then the police intervened, and arrested at least 140 students and 17 other senior members of the MB, including Khairat al-Shatir, who is the MB's deputy supreme guide and is described as having coordinated the many economic ventures the MB has been running throughout the country. Human Rights Watch noted that this was a continuation of an arrest campaign that had netted "at least 1,000" alleged members of the MB since last March.

This week, HRW reported this:

It should probably be noted at this point that Mubarak can do this because Egypt has been continuously under "Emergency Regulations" ever since that last, crazed crackdown of Sadat's in 1981.