Reuters’ Jonathan Wright has a good profile of profile of Gamal Al Banna, who recently published a book. We recently posted about Al Banna, who recently came out with a book calling for a re-interpretation of Islam to be more in tune with the modern world.
Tag: egypt
Another look at the Taba bombers
It’s amazing how quickly the Taba bombings have faded from memory and gone from an event that was meant to shake up Egypt to an almost non-event. Still, the latest update is that the Egyptian ministry of interior has issued a statement saying that Al Qaeda had no links with the bombers who were arrested about a week ago.
That seems probable. There hasn’t been extensive coverage of this in English to my knowledge, but the profile of the bombers really does not make them out to be mastermind terrorists of Muhammad Atta caliber. I did a story for The Times reporting the basic facts, but it got cut down a fair amount. I’m reproducing the relevant excerpts below:
The [interior ministry] statement identified Ayad Said Saleh, a Palestinian living in the northern Sinai town of Al Arish, as the mastermind behind the operation. Saleh and one of his accomplices, Suleiman Ahmed Saleh Flayfil, were killed as they tried to escape the bombing scene but were caught by the explosion, suggesting that the bomb timers had malfunctioned and that the attacks were not intended to be suicide bombings.
“This confirmed that the incident was not a suicide bombing operation as the Palestinian and Egyptian were killed as they escape from their vehicles after they had failed to set the timers properly,” the statement said.
The two men were identified through DNA samples taken from body parts found on the scene of the bombing, it added.
Two other men who participated in the operation – Flayfil’s brother Muhammad and Hamid Jumaan Jumaa Jumaan – are still at large.
Investigations have also led to the arrest of five men – most of them Sinai Bedouins from Al Arish – who, while not directly involved in the bombings, participated in their preparation.
The ministry of interior said that several of the men who were arrested owned or worked in small workshops were the put the bombs together with unexploded ammunition from wars fought between Egypt and Israel in Sinai. These were rigged to timers recuperated from washing machines and placed in vehicles that were stolen for the operation by a one of the men, who was a known stolen car dealer.
Another one of the men arrested, a Bedouin from the area where the bombings occurred who owned a holiday camp, provided information to the bombers on the resorts that were targeted.
Saleh, the alleged mastermind, worked as a driver, had a long criminal record, and was most recently involved in the rape of a young woman in his car. The statement said he had “recently become a religious extremist.”
“[The attacks] were a response to the breakdown in the situation in the Occupied Territories and was targeted at Israelis staying in the hotel and the two holiday camps,” the statement said.
The statement however did not mention whether the nine men were part of any organisation. Three groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings, including Al Jamaa Islamiya Al Alamiya (the International Islamic Group), Kataib Al Tawhid Al Islamiya (the Islamic Brigades of Belief in the Unity of God), and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades. The last of these groups, named after a leading Islamist activist, was previously unknown but has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks in the Arabic-language press and may be affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Overall, the bombers — if this is them, which some people doubt considering the extent of the damage caused by the bombings in heavily policed area — don’t really seem like Al Qaeda types. Petty criminals turned radical, perhaps. And the fact that they used old unexploded ordnance and washing machine timers doesn’t inspire much confidence, either.
Incidentally, a friend of mine who works at a local human rights organization has told me that there were massive arrests in Sinai during the investigation — and a lot of torture and brutality against innocent civilians. His research will probably make it out as a report soon, but it’s a reminder that these attacks only tend to worsen the already rather dire impunity with which police and security services operate in Egypt.
Egypt tries to make itself useful in the Western Sahara
Al Jazeera reports that Egypt is now getting involved in the Western Sahara dispute, claiming it can bring the two parties back to the negotiating table.
“Egypt, which has a neutral position on the issue of Western Sahara, will engage in contacts with the two parties,” Mubarak’s spokesman Majid Abd al-Fattah told reporters on Sunday after the president met with visiting Moroccan Foreign Minister Muhammad Binaisa.
A laudable aim, no doubt, but I find it strange how over the past year at least Egypt has tried to position itself as a negotiator and mediator in virtually every conflict in the region. There’s always been Palestine, but now Egypt is taking the risk of becoming directly involved by essentially helping run a post-Israeli pullout Gaza Strip. Then there was Iraq, where Egypt is training police officers and hosting a regional conference later this month. And there’s Sudan, on which Egypt will be hosting a conference in a few days.
The Egyptian government would probably say that this is normal due to Egypt’s stature in the region and its long-standing role as mediator, which it particularly developed during the Oslo peace process. I don’t think this is the whole story, though. In fact, Egypt has been unable to assert itself as a mediator during most of the Bush administration, which preferred to bypass altogether regional leaders like Egypt. That has been the case with Israel/Palestine, where Egypt had to take a risky position in the Gaza Strip to re-enter the picture. In Sudan, a country Egypt considers its “near-abroad,” it was completely bypassed in the Machakos process and does not seem to have much relevance to the UN sanctions process right now. In Iraq, Egypt was ignored and then offered police training support, it seems to me, mostly to ingratiate itself to the Bush administration which has desperately been looking for Arab partners in the occupation of Iraq. Police training is so far all they could get, but it is better than nothing.
The bottom line is that Egypt’s influence is waning, and that its current activity probably shows two things: it is eager to maintain the appearance of influence for domestic and regional purposes, and it is eager to convince the US it is a useful ally and not, as many US policy-makers (and not only neo-cons) believe, an obstacle to the spread of democracy in the Arab world. I wrote an article (here [pdf] if you have a subscription) about this in the Middle East International a few months ago.
But going back to the Western Sahara conflict, while I don’t think that Egypt can make much progress where the UN, EU and US have failed (especially considering Moroccan and Algerian intransigence), it would be a good thing for more attention to be given to it. James Baker, who worked as the US’ special envoy, has given up, but hopefully the next president, whoever he is, will send someone new and try to get it going again. The conflict has lasted for too long for no particularly good reason except stubbornness and inertia. This Economist story has a good update, and concludes:
The simple fact is that Sahrawi dreams of independence have not faded. Both in Laayoune and in the far-off refugee camps, there is talk of taking up arms again for what everyone calls The Cause. In September, Morocco received a jolt when South Africa added its moral weight by recognising Sahrawi statehood. And at the UN, even America has declared impatience with supporting a mission whose initial mandate was to arrange a referendum, and which has so far cost $600m.
I must say I think the story is a bit too biased against Morocco. But then again, I’m told my Moroccan roots tend to show when discussing the Western Sahara. My feeling is that while Morocco should at least grant some form of limited sovereignty to the Saharaouis, it is important that the Sahraoui movement does not simply hand over what it reaps to Algeria, which has been pulling the strings all these years. I think that is a key concern for Morocco that has to be solved, and also believe that a semi-federal system that would integrate a large degree of autonomy for the Western Sahara would not only be good for that region, but for Morocco at large. It would help the slow and halting spread of democracy in the country by putting decision-making into the hands of locals rather than in Rabat. It’s a tendency I observed traveling around Morocco a few weeks ago, and I hope it continues.
Freedom House on Egyptian women
Abu Aardvark mentioned this study on women in Egypt [PDF] a few days ago. While he highlighted the bit about how the study finds no one reads, listens or watches US-sponsored Arabic media (no big surprises there) I found the next finding more telling:
Women’s political rights: a hollow equality. Women have equal rights to vote and participate in political debates, most Egyptians say. Exercising these rights does not matter, because they see political rights as meaningless in Egypt’s current political system. Many Egyptians see formal politics as an elite game and view debates among political leaders as irrelevant to their lives and concerns. Few Egyptians say that they have ever voted in elections. Reasons cited for not participating in formal politics include not seeing a direct impact on their lives, perceptions of electoral fraud and cheating, and bureaucratic inefficiencies making it difficult to obtain voter identification cards.
Frankly, this does not only to apply to women, but to roughly everywhere in Egypt. In my district in central Cairo, which have hundreds of thousands of highly educated Egyptians living in it, less than 5000 people voted in the 2000 parliamentary elections. The apathy will continue as long as politicians do not offer real practical alternatives.
The other notable finding was:
Concerns about shortcomings in Egypt’s schools. The general public in Egypt sees education as the most important right for women, but they worry that Egypt’s public schools are not up to the task. Several Egyptians issue harsh critiques of the current education system, saying that teachers are poorly trained and schools are ill equipped. Many complain about having to pay teachers for private lessons so their children can pass exams, a payment that several view as bribery for a basic entitlement.
Until about two years ago, money assigned to education under the USAID program in Egypt was shrinking fast and scheduled to be re-assigned elsewhere altogether. The biggest item on the budget was for the commodity import program, which essentially provides support to banks lending money to importers buying American goods. The Bush administration has somewhat slowed down the shift away from education, which was good, but this is by no means safe for the future. Interfering in another country’s education system is a controversial thing to do, of course, but USAID and other organization should be able to do their utmost to support serious educational reform. That would offer an opportunity for some real reform as well as fulfill a laudable US policy objective towards the Arab world. The responsibility for the state of education in Egypt of course lies with the government, but this is one area where we should not be afraid to offer our help, even if it is at the expense of American exports.
Hizb Al Ghad granted license
Hizb Al Ghad (the Party of Tomorrow), was approved a few hours ago by the Higher Political Parties Committee (HPPC) of the Egyptian Shura Council, the upper house of parliament. The HPPC has, for the past two decades, routinely denied new parties licenses on the spurious grounds that they did not bring anything new to the political scene, one of the requirements for founding a party in Egypt. The Hizb Al Ghad people are of course ecstatic, and we are waiting to see if more parties were granted licenses. Remember yesterday I posted that there were rumors this was going to happen. Well, for one party at least it did.
I don’t want to go into the details of the case right now, but it is likely that the decision came a) from high up, i.e. Mubarak, and b) to avoid the embarrassment of having the administrative court rule in favor of Hizb Al Ghad and overturning the HPPC’s decision. Note that the key decision-maker at that level is Safwat Al Sherif, the former Minister of Information and current head of the Shura Council and secretary-general of the ruling National Democratic Party. As you might guess, he’s no fan of new parties.
The bottom line: a good first step, but one that probably would have come anyway through the judicial system. Will be more excited if Karamah and Al Wasat, for instance, get through and if currently frozen parties (such as the rather nasty left-Islamist Labor party and the ridiculous Ahrar party) are unfrozen.
Petition against Mubarak
Egypt’s pro-democracy movement is gathering some steam:
More than 650 people – Islamists, Communists and 30 lawmakers – signed a petition in the name of The Popular Campaign for Reforms, to try to amend Egypt’s constitution to limit a president to two terms.
The petition, a copy of which was faxed to The Associated Press, called the system of one-man rule in Egypt “an obstacle to all opportunities for reform and progress.”
The left and the Islamists have taken some time to get together and find common ground, but at least they finally have. The group that’s still missing, though, is precisely the one Western powers would most like to see succeed the military regime: the “liberal” businessmen who have been nurtured for years as a rising force in Egyptian politics and are now — to a certain extent — represented by Gamal Mubarak and his cronies.
Update: Abu Aardvark offers his own analysis, and a conversation I had with one of the activists who signed the petition suggest that the Islamists are not really on board: although they sent a representative to sign the petition, yesterday the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood denied any knowledge of the petition, effectively dissociating himself but maintaining a certain level of ambiguity.
At the end of the day, the petition itself is not that significant if there isn’t a follow-up to make it a more general opposition to a another Mubarak term. The petitioners gathered under the banner “Enough” when they held their gathering, that feeling now has to be communicated to others who have also had enough.
New parties rumor
There has been a rumor going around Cairo that President Mubarak has decided to grant the Hizb Al Ghad (Party of Tomorrow) and Karamah (Dignity) party licenses, and that this will be carried out within a couple of days. Now, I don’t take too much stock in rumors, especially as, at least in the case of Hizb Al Ghad, there is a case pending in the administrative court. (Read Ursula’s post from last month for more info.)
Karamah, an older party founded by ex-Nasserist MP Hamdeen Sabahi — one of the most honest men in Egyptian politics and a respected younger leftist leader — has quite a different background that Hizb Al Ghad. It has ties with the revolutionary socialists, the underground leftist movement that has been one of the main forces behind street protests against the Iraq war and the occupation of Palestine, as well as with Egypt’s growing anti-globalization movement. Karamah is motivated by ideas of social justice, while Hizb Al Ghad’s central issue is constitutional reform. The first has grassroots support among intellectuals and left-wing activists, as well as some poor areas, while the second’s main strength is the personality of its leaders, maverick MP Ayman Nour and former MP Mona Makram Ebeid.
Many of the regime’s fiercest critics nevertheless take pride in the independence of the judiciary (I am more pessimistic on this myself), and if Mubarak can decide overnight to make the court decide in Hizb Al Ghad’s favor (it seems they have a solid case anyhow), while it will be good for that party it won’t say much for the judiciary. But it’ll be interesting to see what happens, and I guess we’ll know by the end of the week if the rumors are true.
Update: Just to clarify things, the Hizb Al Ghad ruling by the administrative court which could grant it party status is scheduled to come tomorrow. This is what probably started the rumors. Regarding Karamah, it has already been denied several times by the Higher Political Parties committee, as has Al Wasat, a centrist party mostly led by former Muslim Brothers.
Makram Ebeid’s Op-ed
Mona Makram Ebeid, a former Egyptian MP turned leading opposition figure, had penned a new editorial for the Daily Star. She reviews the unwillingness of her country’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to move ahead with even limited political decompression. It’s all worthwhile, but I am a big taken aback by the following paragraph:
Among those who expressed their most vociferous criticism were individuals seeking to establish new political parties. During its 23-year existence, the governmental Parties Committee has systematically refused all requests submitted to it (except one) to legalize parties. All other legalized parties since 1990 owe their existence to the State Council, which though bounded by a restrictive law, has tended to interpret it more broadly than the Parties Committee, which remains a mere puppet in the hands of the executive branch. Most significantly, one party, Hizb al-Ghad (The Party of Tomorrow), whose guiding principles are liberty, democracy and respect for fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, has watched its appeal to be licensed, which it lodged with the State Council, adjourned for the third time. The irony is that the adjournment coincided with the ringing call by the NDP to widen political participation!
The part that’s highlighted above about the Hizb Al-Ghad struck me because at no point does Makram Ebeid tell us that she is a leader of that party, and nor does her biographical information at the bottom of the editorial. I’m all for attacking the NDP, but the Daily Star should know better than to provide her a platform for her own political propaganda without saying who she is. Indeed, that might be a better way to promote her party.
Sinai terror attacks
After a seven-year hiatus, terrorism is back in Egypt. After you read below the fold, do check out this radio transcript from ABC. A Jihadist group has claimed responsibilitz, but the Egyptian government is saying it could be related to the current fighting in Gaza.More later.
Blasts kill 30 on Egypt-Israeli border
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By Sarah el Deeb
Oct. 7, 2004 | Three explosions shook popular resorts on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Thursday night as many Israelis vacationed at the close of a Jewish holiday. Officials said at least 30 people were killed and 114 wounded, and witnesses gave unconfirmed reports that all three explosions were caused by car bombs.
Hersh and the Egyptian abductees
The Guardian is running excerpts from Seymour Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. The one linked to below is particularly interesting for those of us who have been following this from Egypt, explaining how US intelligence kidnapped two Egyptian Islamists (at least one of whom was a member of Islamic Jihad, Ayman Al Zawahri’s organization before he joined Al Qaeda) from Sweden and handed them over to the Egyptian security services, who used their favorite information-gathering methods — electrodes attached to genitals — to make them more cooperative.
Rumsfeld’s dirty war on terror:
On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. “Both were dirty,” a former senior intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes, told me, “but it was pretty blatant.”
The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance. Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.
There are a number of other alleged Egyptian Islamists that are thought to have been kidnapped from whatever country they were in and flown to Cairo for torture and interrogation, including one who was apprehended in Syria and is thought to have died while in custody. We’re not likely to find much more about them, though, at least not if we don’t have the kind of contacts Hersh has in the US intelligence community.