People Like Us (7 page)

The account of this incident remained a draft on my computer. I definitely would have scored with it, because Dutch readers would have gotten the shock of their lives. But how representative was this fruit-juice guy? How should I contextualize a conversation like this? In Western countries, correspondents use conversations with ordinary people to illustrate trends. First come a couple of great quotes from John on the corner and then, “John is not the only New Yorker to feel this way. At least 60 percent think ...” But I couldn’t get hold of any reliable opinion polls, and all relevant statistics were kept secret. So there I was, left with the comments of literally one man or woman on the street.

 

 

Y
ou might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I attempted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. One such attempt was a success story about a Dutch development project in Fayum, an oasis that was two hours’ drive to the south of Cairo. The weekend supplement was putting
together a themed issue on development aid, and as part of it they wanted an account of one failed project and one successful one. “I can do that,” I said, and via the embassy I got in touch with a Dutch hydro-engineer. I’ll call him Roland. He was a nice guy about my age, who immediately invited me to meet up with him.

Oases always made me think of three trees, a hut, and a goat, but Fayum was a stretch of green the size of Luxembourg, with 3 million inhabitants. Things were going wrong in Fayum; the population was exploding while the irrigation system was just getting worse. “They’ve got enough water, but they’re not using it correctly,” Roland told me in his office at the Ministry of Irrigation. Just like in the ministries in Cairo, the civil servants were either napping, staring into space, or pottering around and making relaxed phone calls. Roland’s room was the only one with air-conditioning and a computer that worked. We drove out into the countryside in his four-wheel drive. He pointed at the rubbish: “People didn’t used to have plastic bags. They still behave as though rubbish were going to decompose. Artificial fertilizers and pesticides are great, but you have to teach people how to use them. Here you’ve got one ministry engineer per five hundred farmers, and the engineers are pricks who look down on the farmers.” Peasants or farmers? These are small and simple people.

“This is what’s going wrong.” Roland pointed to a blocked irrigation canal. “Farmers dump their rubbish and pesticides. There are increasing numbers of bloody conflicts over stolen water, and the civil servants are too lazy or corrupt to intervene.” He outlined the solution: If the farmers were to set up water boards, as the Dutch had done centuries before in their polders, these water boards could help farmers do their own
irrigation, maintain their canals, raise awareness, and resolve conflicts.

Roland’s people had run a trial of this idea, and it had been a success. Roland got out of the car, walked over to two farmers, and proudly asked one of them what happened now if a Fayumi was caught stealing water. “We smash his face in!” they said. The farmers did what all Egyptians do after a joke—they shook hands. “But afterwards we call an emergency meeting of the board,” the older farmer said. “On behalf of the Egyptian people, I’d like to thank the Dutch for their help,” he said, now with disarming solemnity. “There are fewer stabbings now, and I have much more harvest.”

We said goodbye, and I showered Roland in compliments. I had my success story—who said that development aid was a waste of time? Roland smiled. But, a few weeks after my rather celebratory article was published, one of his colleagues, well-oiled at the time, told me the real story. The idea behind development aid is to render Western specialists unnecessary, as quickly as possible. People have to do it themselves. So the Dutch water managers had pushed on to the next step: Give the water boards rights, hold elections for the board, give the board an advisory council, and raise contributions for the employees. But these would be directors chosen and paid for by the farmers themselves, wouldn’t they? That wasn’t the intention, the ministries of construction and irrigation in Cairo let it be known; power should stay with them. The water boards were condemned to fail.

 

 

S
o I wrote some things that later turned out not to be true, and the opposite occurred, too. On one occasion, a Dutch diplomat put me in contact with a Syrian MP, Riad Sef. His
brother and son had been murdered by the regime, she said, and his sports shoe factory had been destroyed. “If you want patriotism, go to Riad Sef,” she added. “He could easily seek political asylum with us, but he’s staying here. And he dares to test the limits.”

When I called him, I could go round at once, whereupon Sef shook my hand and burst out with, “Everything, everything, everything but everything here is lies. And these lies persist because the government controls everything—your daily bread, your career, your idea of the world. Did you know that you weren’t allowed to own a fax machine here until recently, or satellite dishes, or foreign currency?” Sef lit up another cigarette, and explained that he was one of the few MPs who hadn’t got his seat through a fixed election run by the regime. “Perhaps they thought I’d back down, and it was hard to get around me. I stood for election in the Damascus district, a lot of people know me, and no one would have believed it if I hadn’t won a seat. What’s more, if there’s Western criticism, the regime can always point at me and say, look, we do have opposition.”

I stopped and shook my writing hand, which had gone numb; I could hardly keep up with Sef. “Votes in parliament are fixed in advance,” Sef explained. “Just like the agenda and the speeches. A typical address begins with something like, ‘This law is fantastic—a gift to the people from the president.’” He lit another cigarette. “I’ m not exaggerating. Recently, a speaker read out his notes in the wrong order. He only noticed halfway through. The parliament here is an applause machine, and the seats are gifts for loyal servicemen.” Could he broach this abuse of power in the press? Sef sniffed, “Journalists know exactly what they can and can’t write about. I mean, they are appointed by the regime.
Once in a while the press can write freely about corruption, but only at the expense of people who have fallen out of favor of the regime.”

But what if Sef could convince his colleagues in parliament to do their work—that’s to say, monitor the government? Would that be possible? “Forget it. All important data are kept secret. The military, the regime’s leaders, and the president’s family are untouchable. MPs get no expenses and no research funds. You don’t get a secretary, or an office, or Internet, or newspapers. That kind of support would cost fifteen hundred dollars a month, but you only earn two hundred fifty. I’ve got money of my own; that’s how I can do this.” I asked if he could say anything about the business interests of the president’s family, the defense budget, or the expenditure of oil profits. For the first time, he fell silent; Sef shook his head, no, and indicated with his hands,
Don’t forget, we’re being listened to
. There I was, a journalist from a rich country like the Netherlands, sitting opposite a man who could have been my father and yet didn’t dare to answer me. I asked whether I could write what he’d just recounted, and he nodded theatrically,
Yes.

I’d just started copying it out when I bumped into a couple of Syrian human rights activists at a diplomat’s party. “Riad Sef?” one of them asked in derision. “Don’t tell me you fell for that one. That man is so much part of the secret services, how do you think he gets away with saying things like that?” Rather disconcerted, I shut up and decided to use only a part of Sef’s speech in a running story, in amongst other talking heads. A year later, I was back in Syria and filed this article:

The fact that Sef was going to prison for years suggested that the donor darling at the diplomat’s party might have got it wrong, but you could never know for sure. A Syrian journalist once told me that members of the regime in Damascus earned a lot of money selling military search warrants which, according to him, Syrians could use to get refugee status in Europe. From time to time, a refugee was sent back because the European immigration services had decided that Syria was no longer a dangerous country. This was bad for business, so the refugee would be killed on his return, and Syria would qualify as dangerous once again.

It was a horrible story, but was it true? I asked around amongst colleagues, diplomats, and others and they said, “That Syrian journalist? He’s so in the secret services—everyone knows that, don’t they?” A while later, the journalist was suddenly imprisoned, causing everyone to wonder whether they’d locked him up to enhance his credibility, whether he’d gone too far, or whether in fact he wasn’t in the secret services.

In Beirut, an Iraqi doctor, who’d fled his country, claimed that Saddam’s regime confiscated stillborn babies in the hospitals and froze them so that they could produce them as “victims of the sanctions” when reporters or left-wing European
MPs came to visit. This was another horrible story, but how could I check whether the doctor was telling the truth?

 

 

I
t was a struggle; even when thought I had my facts straight, something would happen and I’d think,
No, there’s something fundamentally wrong here
. One example was the Saad Eddin Ibrahim affair. He was the most important donor darling in Egypt, and had been running mediagenic campaigns for years on the emergency situation, discrimination against Christians, the regime’s abuse of power, and other sensitive matters. A year before the election—or what passed for one—Ibrahim had received money from the E.U. to make a film to explain how elections worked. He’d had a ballot scene in it, and now the country was up in arms. His name had been taboo in the Egyptian media for years, but now both the state press and the so-called independent press were beside themselves: Ibrahim had committed “election fraud” and had used foreign money to “soil Egypt’s reputation.” For weeks on end, the press dished the dirt on Ibrahim’s Ibn Khaldoun Center: “Star of David found at Ibn Khaldoun,” “Ibrahim wants to make Muslims eat horsemeat.” Only the tiny independent English-language
Cairo Times
reported how much proof there was of election fraud (none) and analyzed the regime’s motives: Ibrahim was famous and had an American passport. Eliminating him was a clear signal to any Egyptians who were considering expressing their opinions on CNN.

The
Cairo Times”
interpretation seemed the most convincing to me, so that one made the paper. Matter closed, you would think, and the afternoon after sending the article I took time off to attend the graduation projects of the film students at the expensive American University in Cairo.

I sat next to a man in his early twenties from the Haram slum district, “Hazem.” He was wearing his only presentable suit because this was his big chance. One of the students had an uncle who was high up in the Ministry of Information, and Hazem had arranged to ask the uncle a question. He would work the answer into a flattering article for a newspaper and then he’d go back to the uncle and ask him for a job. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the uncle, and Hazem had to bite his tongue in frustration. We chatted a while and I got onto the subject of Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Hazem nodded in relief, “Unbelievable, isn’t it? You see how our regime has to be on its toes all the time? You don’t want to know how many enemies Egypt has—the last thing I heard was that Israeli girls had spread AIDS in the Sinai desert.” I looked at Hazem and thought,
Should I write only about what is happening in Egypt, or also about what people
think
is happening here
? But, again, how could I—without access to reliable opinion polls—find out what the average Egyptian thought?