On the State of Egypt (11 page)

First, any Egyptian patriot opposes foreign interference in the country’s affairs for whatever reason, but it is truly surprising that the Egyptian regime objects to foreign interference only when it’s about repression against Egyptians. In all other fields the regime welcomes and seeks out foreign interference. In economics and foreign policy the Egyptian regime carries out U.S. instructions to the letter. In fact senior officials have expressed more than once their sympathy for the U.S. Army as it faces growing casualties in Iraq, and have publicly proffered suggestions on how to reduce the casualties. The Egyptian government has said it would be willing to train Iraqi policemen, to strike at the Iraqi resistance, of course, and where was its national pride then? Egypt has met every impertinent U.S. request without objection, from the release of Israeli spy Azam Azam, to sending the Egyptian ambassador back to Israel, to signing the QIZ trade agreement with Israel and the United States. So officials in Egypt have no misgivings about foreign interference in their affairs; in fact they seek it out, they boast of the special relationship with the United States, and, whenever someone tells them Egypt should have an independent national will, they accuse them of inflexible thinking and of being relics of the “totalitarian era.” But when the foreign intervention is about repression, detentions, torture, and the other crimes committed against Egyptians, only then do Egyptian officials say foreign interference is unacceptable and brag about national dignity.

Second, the United States is in fact the country least qualified to talk about democracy and human rights. The U.S. Army’s crimes at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are still fresh in the memory, and since the Second World War, successive U.S. administrations have consistently, in order to protect U.S. interests, provided support to the worst and most despotic Arab rulers. The U.S. record is even dirtier in Latin America, where, by the admission of its own officials, the CIA conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile in 1973, to kill Chilean President Salvador Allende, and to hand power to U.S. proxies. All this well-known history prevents us from trusting the United States when it talks about democracy. In fairness we should remember that the West is not just the United States and the imperial powers. There are hundreds of western NGOs, and the volunteers in these NGOs defend human rights as an ideal and expose rights violations everywhere, even in western countries. These organizations are respected, have a voice in the West, and have influence over public opinion there, more so than the governments do. Besides, as a matter of principle and of law, detaining and torturing innocent people cannot be considered part of a country’s internal affairs, because these crimes are against humanity as a whole and anyone has the right to condemn them. When the Egyptian regime detains three thousand people in al-Arish in Sinai for months on end without trial, tortures them, gives them electric shocks, and rapes women in front of their husbands and children, these heinous crimes cannot be considered an internal Egyptian affair, because torturing the innocent and violating their humanity is in no way a national matter.

Finally, I hope Egyptian officials realize that the state of affairs is intolerable and cannot continue. President Mubarak, after a quarter of a century in power, is preparing to organize a new referendum in which he will win 99 percent of the votes as usual so that he can stay in power forever, to be succeeded in office by his son, Gamal, and maybe Gamal Mubarak’s son after him. We have so much poverty, unemployment, rampant social injustice, repression, vote rigging, and abuse of innocents that life has become impossible for millions of Egyptians.

Important signs of change have appeared recently, and I hope officials understand them before it is too late. I hope they ask themselves: What is it that drove a well-known writer like Mohamed al-Sayed Said to confront the head of state with the truth about the grievous state of the country? How did the Kefaya movement come about and how was it able, in the space of a few months, to persuade thousands of patriotic intellectuals to join? What is it that drove university professors and respected citizens to go out in the streets and face the possibility of being beaten by an army of riot police simply in order to speak out and say “enough” to rule by Mubarak? Why did thousands of students from Cairo University assemble and force open the university gates so they could join the Kefaya movement’s latest protest? All of these are sure and unmistakable signs that change is necessary and a price the regime will soon have to pay, whether it likes it or not. Egyptians have a yearning for freedom, justice, and a dignified life. This is the issue. To those who think they have a right to repress Egyptians, like Galal the butcher with his wife, we say, just as Awad the wise grain merchant said, “If you don’t want anyone interfering in your household, then you should show some self-respect.”

Words to ponder:

On January 24, Major Mohamed Farid, the head of criminal investigations at Mashtoul al-Souk police station in Sharqiya Province, tortured Mohamed Salem to force him to confess to a theft. This torture resulted in a fracture in Salem’s spinal column, which completely paralyzed both legs, made Salem an invalid, and led to fecal and urinary incontinence. (The Egyptian Association against Torture)State Security headquarters in al-Arish smelled of roasting skin because of the hundreds of detainees being tortured with electric shocks. (
Al-Ahali
newspaper)Human rights in Egypt have recently seen a significant transformation. (Egyptian Foreign Ministry statement)We assure you that Ayman Nour was absolutely not beaten. The injury under his left eye came about when his face collided with the finger of one of the policemen as he was being arrested. (People’s Assembly statement)Imagine, God forbid, what would have happened if someone less wise than President Mubarak were ruling Egypt.… It would have been a disaster. (Mustafa al-Fiki)Citizens must be informed in advance before the water is cut off. (President Hosni Mubarak)

February 27, 2005

The Party of the Great Collapse

T
he official media blackout, statements from the Ministry of Interior, articles by the government’s scribes, none of them can diminish the gravity of what happened in central Cairo during the Eid holiday. More than a thousand young men gathered between Adli Street and Talaat Harb Street and started attacking and molesting women at random for four full hours. Any female who had the misfortune to be passing through the area at that time—girls, women, young and old, with or without
hijab
or
niqab
, walking alone, with friends, or even with their husbands—would have met the same fate. Hundreds of sex-crazed young men would have attacked her and completely surrounded her with their bodies, and dozens of hands would have reached out to pull off her clothes and grope her breasts and between her legs. Some people rallied round and saved one or two girls whose clothes had been torn and who were lying in the street half naked.

The girls who were assaulted were not prostitutes or delinquents, just ordinary Egyptians like my wife or your wife, my daughter or your daughter, whose only crime was to believe that we live in a decent country and to have gone out for a walk at the Eid holiday. This heinous crime took place in front of dozens of witnesses. Many photographers took pictures of it and posted their pictures on the Internet. I have seen the pictures and I grieved for my country. I will never forget the girl in the
hijab
who appeared in the pictures with her clothes completely shredded (though the fiends forgot to tear off her head covering) as dozens of hands groped her naked body. I will never forget the sorrowful and pained expression on her face as she was violated in the street. She resisted the assault as much as she could but in the end she collapsed.

What happened is not just a crime but also a moral and social catastrophe we need to analyze in order to understand what is happening in Egypt. First, the young men involved come from poor unplanned districts of the city, from the lowest strata of Egyptian society. Initially they gathered to buy movie tickets, but when they discovered the tickets were sold out they went on an angry rampage, smashing the facade of the Metro movie theater. When they realized there were no police in the whole area and felt that their numbers gave them strength and made them immune to punishment, they gave free rein to their primitive instincts to assault any woman who crossed their path. Once they had finished with one girl, one of them shouted out, “There’s another one,” and everyone repeated after him, “Another one, another one,” and they all rushed off to their new victim. This hysterical form of mass aggression is merely a rehearsal for the total chaos that could break out anywhere at any moment. There were reports on the Internet that what happened in central Cairo was repeated in the Delta towns of Zagazig and Mansoura over the Eid. Without doubt the young men who took part in this mass assault to satisfy their sexual appetites would turn at the first opportunity to plunder, looting, and arson.

Second, the sexual frenzy that overwhelmed these young men is not just an expression of sexual frustration. Sexual desire can often have buried within it feelings of despair, frustration, injustice, insignificance, and futility, and all of these are common among the poor in Egypt. These young men are the children of destitute, broken people who die of kidney failure or are poisoned by drinking sewage water, people who have cancer from Youssef Wali’s pesticides, people who burn to death in trains to Upper Egypt or drown on the ferries of death. They do not care if they live or die. These rampaging young men are the children of unemployment, impotence, and overcrowding. They live crammed into tiny rooms in buildings without utilities or public services. They have lost all hope for the future, hope of work, of marriage, or even of emigration abroad. They live without dignity, and any policeman can detain them, beat them, and abuse them. What is striking is that when they assaulted their victims, these young men used the same methods the police and State Security personnel use with the wives of detainees and suspects to extract their confessions. This frenzied and hysterical behavior no doubt contains a large dose of revenge against an ugly and hostile reality that does not provide the minimal conditions for a decent life. These young men, when they commit these communal acts of sexual assault, might well be taking revenge on those responsible for their wretched and degrading lives.

Third, if such an act of mass sexual assault took place in the West, many would hurry to accuse western society of decadence and moral decay. When it happens in Egypt, it means the religiosity so prevalent today is superficial and without substance. For centuries Egypt had its own understanding of Islam, a tolerant and open-minded understanding compatible with the civilized nature of Egyptians. Egypt always managed, in quite an unusual way, to preserve its form of Islam with its openness to the world, and Egyptian women were the first in the Arab world to be educated, to work outside the home, and to win society’s respect as human beings with rights equal to those of men, at least until the end of the 1970s, when Egyptian society was subjected to a sweeping invasion of Wahhabi ideas from Saudi Arabia. One factor that led to this invasion is that President Anwar Sadat used religion to overcome the leftist opposition, and the Mubarak regime continues to support Wahhabism in order to benefit from the political submissiveness it installs in people’s minds. Another is that the price of oil increased several times over after the October 1973 war, giving Saudi Arabia more influence than it ever had before and enabling it to impose its understanding of Islam on Egypt and the Arab world. As corruption and despotism added to poverty in Egypt, millions of Egyptians flocked to work in the Gulf, and came back years later with money and Wahhabi ideas. Sectors of Egyptian society acquired Saudi customs and forms of behavior previously unknown in Egypt, such as the
niqab
, beards, white gowns, closing shops at prayer time, taking one’s shoes off when going into a house, and so on.

In reality the Wahhabi ideology sees women as merely vessels for sex, a source of temptation, and a means to produce children. What preoccupies the Wahhabis most is covering up women’s bodies and preventing them as far as possible from mixing in society, in order to ward off the evil of their allure. This debased view of women strips them of their identity as human beings and considers them to be merely females. It believes that women have no willpower and such a weak sense of honor that to be alone with one inevitably leads to sin. In the eyes of Wahhabis a woman is not fully competent; she cannot drive or wander around alone without a man to protect her from abduction or rape. Although these ideas purport to promote virtue, in the end they lead to a view of women as sexual prey who cannot say no or defend themselves. The man has to protect a woman from others, but if he can obtain access to other men’s women and escape punishment then he will not hesitate. Remember that in Saudi Arabia abducting and raping women and children is a frightening phenomenon and a real danger. Now we can see how until the end of the 1970s Egypt, open-minded and moderate, showed true religiosity in behavior and social relations, whereas now, sullen and strict about the externals of religion, the country is far removed from the spirit of Islam. All it has is a veneer, contracted like an infection from Bedouin societies that are closed, backward, and hypocritical.

This tragedy has revealed that the Ministry of Interior no longer considers protecting people to be one of its duties. The police forces that search Egyptians and hold them up in the streets for hours simply because a member of President Mubarak’s family or one of his ministers happens to be passing in a motorcade, the security agencies that abused, beat, assaulted, and dragged along the ground people who demonstrated in favor of democracy and the independence of the judiciary, all this vast apparatus of repression never thought of sending forces to secure the downtown area during the Eid holiday. In fact several policemen and a young officer appear in pictures of the incident, completely indifferent to the carnival of sexual assault raging in front of their eyes. One policeman acted as instinct should have dictated, just one policeman whose sense of honor impelled him, on his own initiative, to take off his belt and try to beat back the frenzied hordes with it. But his courage counted for nothing against their numbers and against their determination to ravage another victim. In fact the comments by the Interior Ministry on the disaster, both on the television program Ten PM and in the government newspapers, were contradictory and to a large extent inept. They denied what happened and said Kasr al-Nil police station had not received any reports of sexual assault, as though a policeman’s duty is merely to sit in a police station and wait for reports to arrive. We would like to ask Interior Minister Habib al-Adli: What would have happened if these sex-crazed young men, whom your officers left to assault Egyptian women for a full four hours, had instead been chanting slogans against President Hosni Mubarak? Would not an army of riot police have been deployed immediately to crush them? Is protecting President Mubarak from hostile chants more important to you than protecting the honor of Egyptian women?