Egypt must let its people go

The Mubarak regime's resistance to scrutiny of the forthcoming presidential
election shows how much Egypt has to learn about democracy, writes Brian
Whitaker

Guardian/UK
Monday May 16, 2005

Two short sentences in a speech by the US president, George Bush, had
Egypt's political dinosaurs in a flap last week: "Egypt will hold a
presidential election this fall," Mr Bush said. "That election should
proceed with international monitors and with rules that allow for a
real campaign."Given that Egypt has a long history of blatantly rigged
elections and that President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic party
(NDP) has a stultifying near-monopoly on the country's politics, it
is difficult to see how anyone could object to international monitors
or allowing a real election campaign, but object they did.

The Mubarak regime has got itself into a mess. Instead of accepting
that political reform is inevitable, embracing it wholeheartedly
and then claiming the credit, it is resorting to half measures and
belated sops to its critics that can only worsen its predicament in
the long run.Mubarak has dominated Egypt's political scene for almost
24 years. He is coming to the end of his fourth six-year term, but it
should have been obvious that clinging on to power for a fifth term
in a presidential "election" where he was the only candidate would
not go smoothly: the world has moved on and that sort of thing is no
longer acceptable, even in Egypt.

The president's age (he turned 77 earlier this month) and the apparent
attempts to groom his son to succeed him have also been ringing alarm
bells among his critics.

Last autumn the NDP held its annual conference and trumpeted some
long-needed economic reforms. The moment, exactly a year before the
presidential election, would have been opportune to start the process
of political reform as well, but there was not a word of it.

It was only in the face of public criticism of his presidency that
was unprecedented by Egyptian standards and protests by the Kifaya
("Enough") movement that Mubarak relented and announced in February
that he was willing to allow more than one candidate in the election.

This led to a bizarre debate among Egypt's political elite about the
qualifications needed by presidential candidates, the result of which
was a complex set of rules approved by parliament last week.

To outsiders, many of the arguments used in this debate sounded
quaint and comical, but they exposed senior Egyptian politicians'
lack of grasp of the essential principles of democracy. The discussion
was all about protecting voters from "unsuitable" candidates. This
entirely missed the point about elections: it is for the voters to
decide who would make a suitable president and who would not.

One simple and obvious proposal - to let anyone stand provided they
could collect a certain number of signatures from voters supporting
their nomination - was dismissed out of hand by Ibrahim Nafie,
a columnist for the semi-official al-Ahram newspaper.

"This idea is potentially dangerous since it opens the door to the
possible purchase of signatures," he wrote. "Nothing could be better
guaranteed to cheapen the nomination process to the highest office
in the land than turning it into something akin to a public auction."

Others expressed fears that unpatriotic candidates or foreign agents
might run for the presidency. So what? If someone wants to stand on
behalf of the Unpatriotic Alliance of Foreign Agents and Subversives,
why not let them? Does anyone seriously expect them to be elected?

Under the rules parliament approved last week, there is apparently
no risk at all of cheapening the nomination process because it is
virtually impossible for anyone to stand as a candidate without the
blessing of Mubarak's NDP. Since these intrinsically unfair rules
involve a change to the constitution, voters will be asked to approve
them later this month in a national referendum.

It is a preposterous choice: vote yes if you want phoney elections
with more than one candidate; vote no if you want to keep the system
as it is.

So far, Mr Nafie has failed to denounce the referendum in his column
as a cheapening of the constitutional process, though undoubtedly it
is. The constitution needs to be thoroughly overhauled rather than
tinkered with for Mubarak's political convenience.

Reactions to the idea of international election monitoring have also
been bizarre. If the intention is to hold proper elections then it
ought to be no big deal.

Unable to state in public the real reason for their objections -
that monitoring would obstruct the hallowed Egyptian tradition of
ballot-rigging - the politicians have been desperately searching
for other excuses. "We all reject any intervention in our internal
affairs," was the best line that Safwat el-Sherif, speaker of the
Shura council and a Mubarak sycophant, could come up with.

Having run out of plausible arguments, the regime is increasingly
raising the bogey of foreign influence as a way to resist change
and defend the indefensible. Would-be presidential candidates are
almost automatically smeared as foreign (ie American) agents despite
the fact that one of them, Ayman Nour, speaks little English and has
never visited the US.

Playing the nationalist and anti-American card is another short-term
expedient that could easily backfire. Mr Nour has already returned
the insult, suggesting that Mubarak is an American agent - a claim
that contains a measure of truth since Egypt depends heavily on US
aid and the president makes regular trips to Washington with his
begging bowl. In fact, he was due to have made one such pilgrimage
this week but decided he was too busy and sent his prime minister,
Ahmed Nazif, instead.

He was not too busy, however, to give an interview to a Kuwaiti
newspaper in which he made some fatuous comments about anti-government
demonstrators. "Battling unemployment requires investment," he
said. "With these demonstrations that we are seeing, the investor
will flee, meaning unemployment will spread. It is obvious that the
unjustified demonstrations have no programme. They are staged just
to create a state of unrest that drives out the foreign investor."

In reality there is nothing that discourages foreign investors in
Egypt more than the bureaucratic procedures imposed by the Mubarak
government, which serve no real purpose other than to facilitate the
collection of bribes by officials.

These are the desperate bleatings of a president who has patently lost
the plot. Of course, he can carry on arresting demonstrators by the
busload and using hired thugs to intimidate opposition candidates;
there is also no doubt that he can secure a fifth presidential term,
by fair means or foul, if he wants to. But the regime's legitimacy
is steadily ebbing away.

The only consolation is that Mubarak has so far refused to say whether
he indeed plans to seek a fifth term. This may simply be a tactic to
keep his opponents guessing, but while he remains officially undecided
there is still a slender chance that his closest advisers may persuade
him to retire gracefully while he can.