The ashes of the Bush doctrine

There was a fire today at a community center started by Ayman Nour. There is no reason to believe the fire was anything more than accidental, but this was a good line by Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail:

The board of the Nour Association, which ran the centre, has decided to send ashes from the fire to US President George W Bush “as a gift for his announced support for democracy in Egypt”, Ismail said.

Ismail and Nour’s two sons, now in their early teenage years, will have graduated high school by the time their father is released from jail. They must be really appreciative of US support for democracy in Egypt.

Adhaf Soueif campaigns for Alaa

And not just because he’s her nephew. From the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

During the last month Egyptian state security forces have arrested close to eight hundred citizens for (peacefully) demonstrating solidarity with Egyptian judges demanding the independence of the judiciary (see www .baheyya.blogspot.com). Since then, thirteen have been released. Among the young activists still in custody in Tora jail is my nephew, Alaa Abd El-Fatah. Because he is a prominent computer man and blogger he has become the centerpiece of the campaign to free all the detainees. The following is a letter of support for him. I hope New York Review readers will consider signing and circulating it.

Ahdaf Soueif
London, England

Soueif is said to have used elements of the story of how Alaa’s parent met each other in her novel In the Eye Of The Sun. Alaa’s father, Ahmed Seif Al Islam, was a communist activist in the 1960s and a frequent guest of Nasser’s jails. As a political prisoner, he got occasional visits home on the understanding that he would come back. He decided to run away with his young wife, Alaa’s mother (activist and professor Leila Soueif, Adhaf’s sister **updated from comments**), and apparently fathered his first-born. When he voluntarily returned to the prison weeks later, the story goes, the prison guards congratulated him on being a future father.

Thanks to Moorishgirl for the link.

Updates from Tora…

Gamal 3abdel 3aziz 3eid, Mohamed el-Sharqawi’s lawyer, said his client resisted an attempt, Thursday 9am, by the prison authorities to transfer him to the forensic medical department, for a second visit. Sharqawi, according to 3eid, told the security officials he was already referred to the forensic medical authorities once, last Sunday, and did not comprehend why he would be referred again.

3eid said his client, whose body is healing from the torture marks, suspected the security wanted to destroy the original report made on Sunday by the forensics, (the report hasn’t been disclosed yet to 3eid) and replace it with a new one that does not bear witness to his clients’ treatment in police custody.

In another development, the US ambassador in Cairo asked the Egyptian government to “explain its side of the story,â€� in remarks made at an American Chamber of Commerce meeting on Wednesday. The government explained “its side of the story,” in an interior ministry statement on Thursday, saying no torture happened, and that Sharqawi and Karim el-Sha3er were arrested for blocking the traffic. The ambassador has yet to say which “side of the story” he buys…

British journalists to demonstrate in solidarity with Cairo colleagues

Another event is planned in London for international solidarity with democracy activists in Egypt. I received a press release from the British National Union of Journalists, calling for a demo, outside the BBC World Service building, Bush House, Aldwych, London, from 12 noon to 1pm on Monday 5 June. The press release denounced the attacks on reporters in Cairo, and mentioned specifically Dina Samak and Dina Gameel of the BBC Arabic Service, who were assaulted on Thursday May 25.

“I was president of Egypt”

This may seem rather strange, but I own a small collection of 1950s-era portraits of Muhammad Naguib, Egypt’s first president (1952-1954.) Few people remember him, and in fact most assume that Gamal Abdel Nasser was Egypt’s first president. In fact, Nasser was the strongman behind the coup and Naguib, who had been the head of the army under the monarchy, took on the post to assure a smooth transition. Nasser ended up overthrowing him and jailing him (in a psychiatric hospital) and then assumed the presidency himself.

Muhamed Naguib Time Cover-1

I don’t know enough about Naguib to say what would have happened if he had consolidated power at the expense of Nasser, but I get the feeling it would have been a less transformative experience for Egypt (particularly for the social mobility that took place under Nasser, bringing a lot of poor people out of their misery) and also a less totalitarian experience. Naguib resembles those weak Arab military strongmen seen in Syria and Iraq in the 1950s — most of them coming out of the old system and with their “class interests” associated with the bourgeoisie rather than the petty middle class. Some say Naguib was committed to restoring multi-party democracy after the 1952 coup and introducing a more democratic constitution than Egypt has ever had since. Nasser, who craved power more than anything else (but, in contrast to his successors, seems to have not been corrupt, even if tolerated corruption around him), would not stand for it.
When he was released (in 1970, I think) from his house arrest, Naguib wrote a book titled “I was president of Egypt.” I always thought that title was full of pathos, as if Naguib had to remind people, in the context of Nasser’s megalomaniac personality cult, that he had been president.

What makes me write all of this is this cool cover from Time magazine posted on Fustat.

Al Destour: interview with a State Security officer

A translated version of an interview with Walid Dessouki that appeared in the independent weekly Al Destour is over at The Skeptic:

(Journalist) El Balshi – Let us go back to state security. Is it true that you have files for everybody?

Dessouki – We have 70 million files. But it is not always the same. Even young children have files (laughs).

El Balshi – And the journalists?

Dessouki – We have files for all journalists. But we focus on certain people and there are others whom do not care about because they are in their own world. Not all journalists are alike. You in Dostour of course have a very special status.

El Balshi – Don’t you feel bad about the people you beat. Don’t you ever reconsider and think about joining the people?

Dessouki – That is good idea (Laughs). Why is there no “people for change”? We have journalists for change” and engineers for change”. Who is left?

El Balshi – State security officers for change! What do you think? Are you considering?

Dessouki – (Laughs). Anyway folks. Don’t forget. We shall see each other again next Thursday. And the one after that. The one after will be a day. But again I tell you whoever wants to demonstrate should look for somewhere else to stay the night.

Surreal.

Strategic victimhood in Sudan

A very unusual op-ed in the NYT slams Darfur activists and the media for not giving a better picture of the real situation in Darfur and Sudan conflict in general. This is not a topic I know much about — although I’ve known for a while, from very-well informed diplomatic sources, that the situation is a lot more complicated than it appears — but the arguments presented are thought-provoking, not only about Sudan but about the media’s role in presenting conflicts:

Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.

This reality has been obscured by Sudan’s criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.

In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur’s rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination.

You really have to read the whole (short) thing to get the point, especially as all of this has been very much under-reported.

Police crackdown on anti-torture demo

I got out of the cab in front of the ultra-posh Four Seasons Hotel, on the Nile Cornish, by 5pm. The southeast side of the Four Seasons faces a narrow street, where Qasr el-Nil Police Station lies. Operating from an old shabby villa in Garden City built in the pre-republican age, next to the Indonesian embassy, is the police force in charge of security in downtown Cairo, Garden City and Zamalek. And it was in this affluent neighborhood that security agents took rounds in torturing Karim el-Sha3er and Mohamed el-Sharqawi, and sexually abusing the latter on the evening of May 25, 2006. Rights activists had called for a stand by representatives of human rights organizations in front of the police station today.

I arrived, not knowing what to expect. Deep down, I had been hoping the government would be a bit embarrassed about the growing torture scandal, that they might allow a small group of lawyers and professors to protest in front of the police station, and allow reporters like myself to do their job.

My hopes were dashed right away. I saw a group of around three dozen rights activists and lawyers carrying banners, shouting against torture, while at least 200 plainclothes thugs, uniformed and plainclothes security officers including two generals—add to that a phalanx of black-clad riot police conscripts, worked hardly to prevent them from marching on the Qasr el-Nil Police Station. The protestors were violently pushed by the thugs and the officers away. Women doctors from the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence were shoved away. Continue reading Police crackdown on anti-torture demo

Al ard bidoun al fellahin

It’s a few days old, but don’t miss Maria Golia’s latest column for the Daily Star. It’s about one of the most important issues facing Egypt today — an existential one of greater long-term concern than even democratic reform — but one that the government seems to do little about. It’s about land, and how the little area of arable land that Egypt has is being rapidly being transformed from agricultural land into housing or commercial property.

Imagine you have a country, a big one, yours to do with what you please. There’s just one catch. Nearly all the land is desert, which makes the remaining 5 percent the place where 70 million people not only have to live, but farm in order to eat. Around half the people live in towns, and half live in the country. The country half are largely farmers. They constitute 36 percent of the total work force. They work for almost nothing and supply your table with hand-grown foods. Plus, their labor enriches you – they contribute around a quarter of your GDP and exports. So how do you treat the farmers?

Common sense says you encourage them because working the land, as they have for generations, is a noble and profitable pursuit. You might even reward them for accomplishing so much with so little space, water and cash. But not if the country were Egypt. In that case, you would herd the farmers off the land and into jail, raze their villages and give them nothing. Meanwhile you would build on precious agricultural land for fast money.

Read the whole thing for statistics — one of the great thing about Maria’s writing about Egypt is that it’s always shock-full of fascinating stats, as her book Cairo, City of Sand was — and the worrying conclusion: Egypt needs urgent, comprehensive land reform (beyond the limited, and at times disastrous, reform undertaken by Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak) not only to improve the conditions of fellahin but to literally prevent the country from running out of land. I’m always astounded that Egyptian newspaper columnists, who often speak about the need to achieve autarky in food supply (dream on!), urge the government to make farmers grow more wheat but never mention that there is less and less arable land available to grow anything at all. The disconnect between the urban intelligentsia and rural folks could not be wider. The column has a great line on this: “Only abiding shame in their rural past can account for successive administrations’ criminal neglect of Egypt’s countryside.”

New arrests of protesters

I have just heard via SMS that Hossam el-Hamalawy, a locally hired journalist for the LA Times who has recently been posting on this blog, has been arrested at a protest today at the Lawyers’ Syndicate. Others who were arrested include activists Adel Mashad, Emad Mubarak and Ayman Ayad.

Hossam, who has a history of activism in left-wing groups and at the American University in Cairo, has been arrested before. One time was in front of my very eyes as we were coming out of the Hardees on Midan Tahrir in Spring 2003. He was not doing anything and was not involved in the protests taking place that day, but a State Security officer had decided to arrest him nonetheless.

Hopefully there will be more information about this later on from people on the scene. Let’s hope those who were arrested today don’t get the same brutal treatment others recently received.

Update: Just heard from Hossam, he said he was “attacked by five plainclothes thugs who smashed his camera and detained him for 15mins.” The others are still under arrest.