The Nigeria Police Force is the Best

Egypt: Mubarak plays it again!!

Saad S. Khan

saadskhan@yahoo.co.uk

Nov. 12 was the first stage of Parliamentary (s)elections in Egypt, to be followed by two more juggleries on Nov. 20 and Dec. 1, and the pseudo-electoral ritual that started with Hosni Mubarak’s inauguration would come to an end.

Condaleezza Rice would keep her mouth shut for another five years and that is all that matters for the power centres in Cairo. The runner up in Presidential elections of two months ago, Ayman Nour is shown to have lost his parliamentary seat in urban Cairo that he had retained for the last decade. The Egyptians have the full right to “choose” Hosni Mubarak and have a further opportunity to “choose” his son Gamal Mubarak after his death but the choice does not unfortunately extend to other candidates, rather it is limited to choosing the duo and going to jail.

In the past fortnight this was in effect the third “gang rape” of democracy in the developing world, first in Zanzibar, then in Azerbaijan, and now in Egypt. The Orange revolution of Ukraine has increased the miseries of people all over the world. Ukraine gave them a false glimmer of hope, and the people in these three countries came out with Orange T-shirts, to launch peaceful protests against their rights to choose the leadership being stolen from them. But the powers hate orange color now and the color was soon turned to bright red with blood, Police was ruthless in all the three countries and the people were thrashed inhumanly. The people ask why the Police in Ukraine was difficult. Well, the Americans have not forgotten their rivalry with the erstwhile USSR and Russia appears to be the Successor State. Bush and Blair just wanted to give a kick in the groins to Putin, by his preferred choice for Kiev being thrown out of the window. Viktor Yuschenko was simply the only alternative. The ex-communists could not dare allow the Police to kill protesters (unless they were lunatics and) wanted themselves to be tried in courts for crimes against humanity. The Western funding and support for demonstrators was writing on the walls of Keiv.

The case for Egypt is different, where Hosni Mubarak the man who ruled Egypt with an iron hand for 24 years, has become President for the fifth six-year term. What’s wrong with that after all, when he has just won over a majority of 88% in the first-ever multi-candidate Presidential polls? Isn’t it that Blair too has won a third term in office only recently? And unlike Blair, Mubarak has recently won a referendum also in which he had asked the people whether they want to have a multi-party democracy or not, again with a 83% majority. It is a separate matter, however, that the figures are those of Mubarak’s government’s spokesman and the people who protested that fateful referendum day in May last, were subjected to brutal torture by the Police and the women activists were groped and sexually molested by Mubarak’s NDP hooligans under the very noses of the Police. After all, it is democracy --- Egypt-style--- and it at least satisfies the democratic instincts of Condoleezza Rice. Whether the Egyptian people are also happy with this sort of democracy is not a matter for concern for anyone in Washington or Cairo. With the gagged press and increasingly ruthless State, there are no verifiable ways of finding the public mood any way.

I will come to the elections a little below; for me, the referendum itself that was meant to give legitimacy to this farcical exercise is curious enough. What the Egyptians were asked goes like this: whether they would like to have multi-party elections or were happy with Mubarak being re-elected again and again as a single candidate. Good enough! Only a fortnight ago, another comic referendum on amnesty was held in Algeria, purportedly on “amnesty” to opponents, where the military-backed government put a question to the people whether they would like getting killed by the state forces or they wanted a respite.

Another referendum was held in Uganda also on the people’s choice for multi-party democracy. In all three places, turn out was low and people could just laugh at it. These referenda are like keeping people hostage, taking away their money and kicking them every hour, and at the end of the day, on US pressure, holding a referendum to ask the people if they would be satisfied with lesser number of kicks per day or not. And if somebody holds a protest, then go on torture him or her for being against the government’s commitment to wider participation (sic). I wish Ms. Rice, who is a woman herself, on her pre-election Cairo tour had at least expressed shock over the sexual assaults on the women pro-democracy activists on Referendum day. Yes, her boss President Bush was kind enough to say that violence against peaceful demonstration does not conform to democratic norms. Well, who is saying it does? The point is that Egypt is only next to Qaddafi’s Libya and Islamov’s Uzbekistan in suppression of political dissent. And this is something that has to be taken head on with no mincing of words. This May Referendum, declared a fraud by none other than 2000 judges of Egypt who announced a boycott of monitoring the September elections. ought to have been condemned by the whole civilized world.

Mubarak has had enough of his share in ruling the country; in fact, he is the second longest ruler of Egypt since the famous Ottoman Governor-turned autonomous Sultan, Mohammad Ali, in the early 1800’s.

It is certainly unfair to allow Mubarak to become a Sultan by founding a dynasty for his family, and all that too in the name of democracy. The Egyptian constitution allowed the President two terms only.

Mubarak “won” (well, he was the sole candidate each time) his second term in 1987 and went on for a constitutional change to lift that bar through his rubber stamp parliament. Likewise, any candidate with no previous military experience was barred from contesting elections previously, because that suited him. Now a change has been effected to lift this bar because this suits his son Gamal to succeed him. The gimmick of multi-party was introduced as a face saving, not for Mubarak who has no qualms, no regrets and no reservations about the type of armoured democracy that he has, but for his mentors in Washington D.C. It was as evident as a daylight sun that elections were mere eyewash. Mubarak was being imposed on the nation as a demo-God, as someone perfect and infallible. Even the private press was highly biased in his favour in election converge, as the costs of journalistic impartiality can be high in Egypt. The human rights associations were silent and the few like Kifaya [literally: enough], which thinks the nation had had enough of Mubarak and his family, led some demonstrations that were met with shameful levels of State violence. Many leading figures of the Egyptian society like the activist Rifaat Said, the political scientist Saad Ibrahim and the novelist Nawal Saadawi were among those who boycotted the elections. So all but one of Mubarak’s rival candidates were paper candidates, put up by government backing, including the 71-year old academic Noman Gumaa of the Wafd Party. This had to be so because the electoral laws were awfully tilted for Mubarak’s interests. The requisite approval for candidacy had to come through Mubarak’s NDP-dominated rubber stamp parliament, which meant that every party had to get its rival, i.e. the NDP’s, approval even for putting up a candidate.

The only “real” opposing candidate was the 41-year old daring lawyer, Aymen Nour, of Ghad (tomorrow) Party who was made victim of another of the draconian electoral laws of collecting 50,000 signatures for candidacy, a thing possible only for the State machinery in the Egyptian context. He did manage that but he was accused of forging a few of signatures and imprisoned for fraud. He was about to be barred from the race when in her visit to Egypt, Ms Condoleezza Rice made it a point to meet him. Mubarak was frightened enough to at least let him nominally run, but since the elections Nour is in and out of court time and again, facing the ultra humiliation of sitting in cage, for the hearings. The principal witness against him has since withdrawn testimony that he said had been elicited under duress but Ayman Nour is still facing the music for trying to effect a democratic change. Ukranians are lucky, Egyptians are not; since the US priorities in the two regions are different. No Orange revolution is up for Nour to hand him back the victory stolen from him, where he would be sworn in as Viktor Yuschenko was in Ukraine through US funded street protests.

Egyot is a nation teeming with 26 million frustrated youth. The spate of suicide attacks in the past years has taken a new dimension with the introduction of women in the so-called martyrs brigades. In one such revealing incident this April, a young man Ihad Youssai Yassin, his sister Nagat and his fiancée Iman killed themselves in three coordinated suicide attacks on tourists in three different parts of Cairo. Egypt is like pent up lava now that can explode any time.

The US commitment and casualties in Egypt would then have to be manifold greater than in Iraq. Remember, Egypt borders Israel, Iraq does not! The civilized world has now to watch him from trying to turn Egypt into a nightmare.

To paraphrase, what Condoleezza Rice said in June, the US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the cost of democracy has achieved neither. It is time to abandon excuses to avoid democracy. I hope she believes in what she says! The writer is a Cambridge-based scholar and a widely read analyst on politics, governance and human rights in the Muslim world. He is the Editor (Asia and Middle East) of Quarterly "Cambridge Review of International Affairs".

Views/Comments of the esteemed readers are welcome at Saad.S.Khan1@gmail.com