Dordt College
May 2010
On October 6, 1981, Anwar Sadat, the President and Field Marshall of the Arab Republic of Egypt, was assassinated by militant Islamists at a military parade commemorating the start of Egypt’s 1973 war with Israel. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that followed that war was seen by many Arabs as a betrayal, and Sadat paid for it with his life (“Egypt’s President”).
In the wake of the assassination, Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, ascended to the presidency and declared a state of emergency. The state of emergency has never been lifted, and Mubarak has used his powers under it to rule Egypt single-handedly for the past thirty years.
Today, Mubarak’s administration exercises strict control over newspapers, television and radio stations, universities, and of course, Egypt’s political system. Labor strikes are forbidden without specific permission from the government. According to Freedom House, “The Emergency Law allows arrest for innocuous acts such as insulting the president, blocking traffic, or distributing leaflets and posters.” The Emergency Law allows the government to detain citizens without charge, and try them without constitutional protections in courts controlled by the executive branch. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, there are 16,000 people detained without charge in Egypt under this law. Prisoners in Egypt are “subject to torture, overcrowding, abuse, and a lack of sanitation, hygiene, and medical care” (“Freedom in the World.”)
With no political accountability, governance in Egypt has deteriorated. Under Mubarak’s mismanagement, the average Egyptian survives on an annual income (adjusted for purchasing power) of $6,000 a year. For purposes of comparison, in neighboring Israel, the average annual income is over $28,000. (“Egypt,” “Israel.”) As of 2008, 40% of Egyptians lived in poverty (Knickmeyer). Corruption is pandemic. Egypt is ranked 111 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The corruption, cruelty and incompetence of the Egyptian regime were epitomized in May 2009, when President Mubarak personally ordered that the country’s entire pig population be culled – to stop the spread of swine flu. The Egyptian government proceeded with the culling even after world health officials informed them that, despite the name, swine flu was not spread by pigs. Some 400,000 Egyptian Christians were affected by the decree (Slackman).
The political and economic stagnation created by the Mubarak regime spurs violence and instability in the region. In the 1990s, a wave of reactionary terrorism in Egypt claimed the lives of 1,000 people, including many foreigners (David). Both Mohammad Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, are Egyptian.
Because of its peace treaty with Israel and its opposition to Islamic terrorism, the Egyptian government is viewed by the United States as a crucial Middle East ally. Since Egypt made peace with Israel, it has received $28 billion in economic aid and $50 billion in military aid from the United States (Diamond). U.S. economic aid to Egypt, which was cut to only $200 million in 2009 (or about $2.60 per Egyptian), is dwarfed by the $1.3 billion in military aid the Mubarak regime receives. As Ahmad El-Nagger of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writes,
U.S. security and military aid to Egypt...does not aim to strengthen Egyptian military power against any external threat, as this would be contrary to the declared U.S. objective of ensuring Israeli security and maintaining Israeli military supremacy over its Arab neighbors, including Egypt. Instead, this aid is devoted mainly to strengthening the regime’s domestic security and its ability to confront popular movements.This aid makes the United States complicit in the continuing Egyptian police state. But it also gives us powerful leverage.
President George W. Bush tried to use that leverage to encourage political reforms. In 2005, he pressured Mubarak to hold free elections. American pressure coincided with the emergence of the broad-based Kifaya (Arabic for “Enough!”) reform movement in Egypt, which held open demonstrations calling for an end to Mubarak’s rule in December 2004 (“Freedom in the World”). Responding to external and domestic pressure, Mubarak amended Egypt’s constitution to allow for contested presidential elections. All previous presidential elections under Mubarak had been rigged referendums on Mubarak’s continued reign. (“Egypt after Hosni Mubarak”).
Egypt’s landmark multicandidate presidential election was held in September 2005. The official results declared that Mubarak had won by a hilarious 88%. Soon after the elections, his main challenger, Ayman Nour, was imprisoned. And when the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist party, won a record 20% of the seats in the parliamentary elections that followed, the United States backed off its press for democracy. Mubarak picked up on the signal, revised the constitution to further suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, stepped up his campaign against opposition parties, and extended the Emergency Law. According to Freedom House, “[Egyptian] Authorities have cracked down more zealously on protesters and labor activists in recent years, partly because U.S. pressure for democratic reform has eased” (“Freedom in the World”).
Still, American influence had briefly helped to widen the space for expression carved out by Egypt’s struggling opposition groups. In interviews given before the presidential election, one Egyptian opposition candidate claimed that “80 per cent of political freedom in this country is the result of US pressure,” while “20 per cent is the result of domestic pressure,” and George Ishak, the coordinator of the Kifaya movement, said that “what is being said abroad has an impact” (Howeidy). Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations would later write that Bush’s pressure “allowed democracy activists to pursue their agendas in new ways.” “With Washington watching,” he wrote, “Arab authoritarians had to reposition themselves as reformers, making it more difficult for them to crack down on real reformers.”
Bush’s reluctance to pressure the Egyptian government on political reform post-2005, and Obama’s reluctance to do so thus far, are rooted in two perceived American interests: the need to get Mubarak’s support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, and the need to avoid an Islamist takeover of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood’s startling gains in the 2005 elections, and Hamas’ subsequent victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, compounded American fear of the latter.
This fear is probably unfounded. The performance of the Muslim Brotherhood in elections that were essentially controlled by Mubarak should not be seen as an indication of their actual popularity. According to Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, “leaders like Mubarak actually gave more space to Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood than to more secular-minded democratic activists, to create the illusion that that the only alternative to their rule was an Islamist takeover. When it bought that lie, the United States reaped not just popular resentment but a rising security threat.” According to Amr Hamzawy of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, support for Islamist parties in the Arab world has a “ceiling.” They might be more popular than the corruption of the status quo, but in free and fair elections, the majority of Egyptians would probably not vote for a theocracy. Hamzawy puts the ceiling for Islamist support in the Arab world at about 20% of voters. (David). And judging by the fate of Fatah in Palestine and the Shah in Iran, if anything could increase that ceiling, it would be the continued rule of a corrupt, secular autocrat like Mubarak.
As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is a short-sighted policy indeed that tries to lay the groundwork for a lasting peace on the promises of brittle dictatorships like Mubarak’s. Egyptians are not blind to the close tie between American support for the Egyptian government and the Egyptian government’s recognition of Israel, and the fact that the United States justifies their continued oppression in the name of Israel’s security is not doing any favors to long-term Egyptian-Israeli relations.
Egypt’s next round of presidential elections will be held in 2011. Two popular Egyptians appear to be preparing for runs against Mubarak: the recently-released Ayman Nour (Pisch), and Mohammed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who recently retired and was welcomed upon his return to Egypt by a seemingly spontaneous movement of Egyptians calling on him to run. This is an opportunity the United States cannot afford to miss. The 81-year-old Mubarak is in poor health, and has never appointed a vice president (El-Naggar). If he dies in office, he will probably be succeeded either by his son Gamal, or his military chief, Omar Suleiman (“Egypt after Hosni Mubarak”). Either way, it is not certain how the transition process will play out. And in politics, uncertainty can lead to violence. If Egypt is to avoid a violent power struggle, a military coup or a revolution, it will have to make a peaceful transition to democracy while Mubarak is still alive.
The United States should take steps now to pressure Mubarak into holding free and fair elections in 2011, ideally with international monitoring. If Mubarak refuses, we should threaten to start withholding military aid. Even if Mubarak tries to rig the vote again, Egyptian reformers will be able to exploit the space of expression created by U.S. pressure to publicize the rigging. Covert rigging will not be an option; if it occurs, it will be blatant. And considering the fragility of Egypt’s power structure and the story of Ferdinand Marcos, that just might be enough.
Works Cited
Cook, Steven A. “What the Neocons Got Right,” Foreign Policy. 11 March 2010. 27 March
2010.
“Corruption Perceptions Index 2009.” Transparency International. 12 April 2010.
David, Peter. “Waking from its sleep.” The Economist. 25 July 2009.
David, Peter. “How to stay in charge.” The Economist. 25 July 2009.
Diamond, Larry. “Why Are There No Arab Democracies?” Journal of Democracy 21:1 (2010).
“Egypt.” CIA World Factbook. 27 March 2010.
“Egypt after Hosni Mubarak.” The Economist. 23 July 2009.
“On This Day 1981: Egypt’s President Sadat assassinated.” BBC News. 27 March 2010
El-Naggar, Ahmad Al-Sayed. “U.S. Aid to Egypt: The Current Situation and Future Prospects.”
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. June 2009. 27 March 2010.
El-Nagger, Mona. “Mubarak Returns to Egypt; Succession Debate Persists.” New York Times.
27 March 2010
“Freedom in the World 2009: Egypt.” Freedom House. 12 January 2010. 27 March 2010.
Howeidy, Arima. “The American Factor.” Al-Ahram Weekly. 9-15 June 2005.
“Israel.” CIA World Factbook. 27 March 2010.
Knickmeyer, Elle. “In Egypt, Upper Crust Gets the Bread.” The Washington Post. 5 April 2008.
Malinowski, Tom. “The Mubarak Test.” Human Rights Watch. 13 May 2009. 27 March 2010.
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/05/13/mubarak-test>
Pisch, Sallie. “Egypt’s Ayman Nour confirmed as al-Ghad’s presidential candidate.” Bikya
Masr. 14 March 2010. 27 March 2010.
Slackman, Michael. “Cleaning Cairo, but Taking a Livelihood.” New York Times. 24 May
2009.
