New Pressures Imperil Mubarak’s Thaw of Egyptian Media Censorship : ‘The Official Press Does Not Report a Lot of the News, While the Opposition Press Makes Up a Lot of It’

Towering like a lighthouse above the sea of papers on his desk at Egypt’s largest daily newspaper, Al Akbar, columnist Mustafa Amin reflected on the different risks run by Egyptian journalists under Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and, now, Hosni Mubarak.

“When Nasser didn’t like you,” Amin recalled, “he hanged or imprisoned you. When Sadat got mad, he stopped you from writing. When Mubarak gets angry at you, he goes on television.”

Since Mubarak assumed the presidency, after Sadat was assassinated 4 1/2 years ago, the Egyptian press has been given a degree of freedom unequaled in any Arab country save Lebanon.

While the government-controlled “mainstream” press continues to swathe its occasional criticism in layers of sycophancy, a lively opposition press gleefully attacks almost everything except the army and Mubarak himself.

Until now, Mubarak has tolerated and even encouraged this criticism as part of his policy of “democratic openness,” an attempt to introduce limited democratic reforms to serve as a safety valve for dissent.

But mounting domestic unrest, some of it fueled by the opposition press, has increased concern that Mubarak, under pressure from the military and other conservative elements, may feel obliged to crack down.

Indeed, when articles in the opposition press helped spark anti-government student demonstrations in January, an exasperated Mubarak warned that enough was enough.

“I often ask myself, what would happen if things went on this way, how much longer Egypt could tolerate this abuse, how long the government can stand this constant agitation,” he said. “The country and the government cannot tolerate it any longer.”

Mohammed Sid Ahmed, a prominent columnist and editor at the left-wing daily Al Ahali, said: “Until recently, Mubarak saw the freedom of the opposition press as an asset for the regime. But now he is beginning to question whether it isn’t a liability.”

Part of the problem, a Western diplomat observed, is that although Mubarak has used the opposition press to “broaden the base of what is politically legitimate in Egypt,” a truly independent press cannot exist here.

Government control of most advertising revenue in the state-managed economy means that newspapers must toe the line of the political or religious groups that finance them. Freedom of the press does not mean unbiased, independent reporting but rather the license to express different political views.

As a result, a Western analyst said, what the opposition press prints is often “truly outrageous, a compendium of myths, distortions and occasionally outright lies posing as investigative reporting.”

He continued: “The problem is that the official press does not report a lot of the news while the opposition press makes up a lot of it.”

The gulf between these two extremes was graphically illustrated by the way the press dealt with the case of Suleiman Khater, an Egyptian border policeman who shot and killed seven Israeli tourists in the Sinai last year and was found dead in his jail cell on Jan. 7, an apparent suicide.

The government press observed a news blackout, reporting nothing at all about Khater’s murder trial, but the opposition press fabricated detail after detail in order to turn the affair into a vehicle for attacking Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

Newspapers and magazines controlled either by leftist groups or Islamic fundamentalists called Khater the “hero of the Sinai.” Contrary to all eyewitness accounts, they reported variously that the slain tourists were spies and that they had disrobed in public, spat on the Egyptian flag and attacked Khater.

One fact that every opposition press account failed to mention: Four of the seven slain Israelis were children.

The Khater affair, which provoked student riots, also embarrassed the editors of the mainstream press and led to demands for more editorial freedom in order to counter the opposition press.

“The Egyptian national press made a big mistake when it ignored the (Khater) issue,” wrote Ibrahim Saada, editor of Akbar Al Yom, Al Akbar’s weekend sister publication. “Had the national newspapers given full coverage to the incident and trial, they would have prevented efforts to misrepresent and falsify issues, thus arousing the indignation of many Egyptians.”

The result has been an attempt by Mubarak, who in a sense is Egypt’s editor in chief, to strike a better balance by giving the official press a longer leash while putting the opposition press on a shorter one.

When Egypt’s underpaid police conscripts mutinied last month, forcing the government to call in the army to quell three days of rioting, Mubarak moved immediately to forestall criticism.

Summoning the heads of the opposition parties to a meeting, he “laid down the law, telling them in no uncertain terms what the consequences of trying to exploit the crisis would be,” an informed source said. The result was uncharacteristically muted coverage of the riots in the opposition press.

At the same time, Mubarak allowed the official media to report the disturbances in uncustomarily graphic detail. “For once,” a Western diplomat said, “Egyptians could turn on their radios and television sets and find out what was happening. It was unprecedented.”

Mubarak has also tried to preempt the opposition by allowing Egypt’s most famous critic and columnist, Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, to begin writing in Egypt again for the first time since Sadat fired him as editor of Al Ahram, the main government newspaper, in 1974.

But the reappearence in Akbar Al Yom of Heikal’s “Speaking Frankly” column, once the most widely read and influential commentary in the Arab world, has stirred old passions and, in some influential quarters, fears of a return to the heady days of Nasserism, when Heikal’s influence was at its peak.

After 107 people were killed and 719 injured in February’s police riots, the military put pressure on Mubarak to crack down hard on the opposition, according to diplomatic sources.

So far, Mubarak has refused to do this. Indeed, in a nationally televised speech after the riots, he praised the role played by the press in countering Libyan and Syrian radio propaganda, and he said that democratic reforms must continue.

However, with an economy teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and social unrest that has spread from the campuses to the camps of the 282,000 men in the security forces, concern persists that Mubarak will be forced to roll back some of his democratic reforms to remain in control.

“For Egypt, freedom of the press is a luxury,” Mohammed Sid Ahmed said. “For Mubarak, its value is based on the extent to which it can contain (anti-government) forces, not unleash them.”