Middle Eastern Exiles Conduct a War of Words From Abroad

Next door to a fire station and a Jewish cemetery in a quiet, working-class London neighborhood, Saudi Arabia’s least favorite sons are plotting a revolution from afar.

Call it rebellion 1990s-style, online and interactive.

Computers whir and copiers churn out the latest critique, scathing complaint and freewheeling rumor about the estimated 5,000 princes and princesses in Saudi Arabia.

The phone rings every few minutes, and journalists traipse in and out of the cramped offices of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights. A helpful staffer is quick to hand out a video of an anti-government demonstration inside the kingdom.

Smiling, the group’s spokesman, Mohammed Masari, points to the state-of-the-art fax machines that dial 1,500 telephones.

“These are what’s causing all the trouble,” said Masari, a 49-year-old professor of theoretical physics.

Trouble, indeed.

Masari and his fellow Saudi dissidents have almost single-handedly shaken the conservative kingdom, home to a quarter of the world’s crude oil reserves and the birthplace of Islam.

So much trouble, in fact, that Britain wants to deport Masari to a Caribbean island.

Masari is not alone. Across Europe, Islamic activists from the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria are using the haven of secular, democratic Europe to try to change the Middle East. Often, the European countries in which they reside are allies of the Arab regimes they seek to topple.

In some respects, it is the most recent incarnation of Europe as a breeding ground for revolutionaries in exile. Recall Ayatollah Khomeini’s agitating from Paris in the 1970s, or Lenin’s exile in Switzerland, Germany and other European countries before the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The new generation of exiles has succeeded in unsettling staunch U.S. allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Those states have demanded extradition of some suspects, raising questions about who is entitled to asylum and how big a threat the activists really pose.

“These groups are a thorn in the side to the governments,” said Gregory Gause, a Persian Gulf expert at the University of Vermont.

“I don’t think they can overthrow them,” he said. “What they are is a source of information in countries where the regimes don’t like their people to have information.”

The shades of Islamic activism vary as much as the governments they are fighting--from avowedly secular regimes in Egypt and Tunisia to Saudi Arabia’s rigorously Islamic monarchy.

Egypt, for example, has struggled with a slow-burning insurgency by Muslim militants in southern Egypt since 1992. More than 880 people have died, and the government insists the violence persists because of support from sympathizers abroad.

In Saudi Arabia, an amorphous collection of conservative Islamic activists has accused the royal family of everything from vast corruption and sexual perversion to kowtowing to the infidel West. The criticism is of special concern to the House of Saud because for generations it has staked its legitimacy on upholding Islam.

The exiled activists make up a Who’s Who of Islamic militancy: Rachid Ghannouchi, the Tunisian Islamic leader based in Britain; Ayman Zawahri, the Egyptian militant last reported living in Switzerland; and Masari, who arrived in London in 1994.

Zawahri and countless others made their reputations fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Now they move freely and frequently throughout Europe.

Among them are supporters of Algeria’s militant Armed Islamic Group. French and German officials complain that freedom of movement makes it easy to funnel arms, medicine, false papers and money to Algeria.

On the flip side are activist groups designed primarily to get the word out. Masari’s group is one. Others are offices of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Action Group, both set up in London in the last year.

Those groups mark the first formal opposition in exile that President Hosni Mubarak has confronted during his 15 years in power in Egypt.

“They have managed a public relations operation that is quite effective,” said Gilles Kepel, who has written on Islamic extremism in Egypt and teaches at New York’s Columbia University.

“Exile gives access to international networks of solidarity, of financing, of access to the media,” he said.

The groups are coy about their financing, claiming to receive most of their money from individual contributors.

One name frequently mentioned by Egyptian officials is Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi who made a fortune in construction. He ran afoul of Saudi authorities, who revoked his citizenship, and now lives in Sudan, where he is close to Islamic leader Hassan Turabi. He came out in public support of Masari’s group in 1994.

Like their financing, the activists’ goals are kept vague.

Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi opposition have wrapped their agenda in the rhetoric of human rights and democracy. But the brotherhood supports an explicitly Islamic state, albeit one where it says Christians are equal and women can go out and work.

Masari’s group, in its original declaration in May 1993, did not define human rights in terms of universal standards but rather within the confines of Islamic law, known as Sharia. Interestingly, the group’s Arabic name specifies “the defense of Sharia rights.”

Another organization that denies having an explicitly Islamic program is the Egyptian Action Group, housed in a dingy second-floor apartment in a rundown neighborhood of north London.

Its 15 members send e-mail, faxes and letters to 1,000 addresses in Europe, America and the Middle East. Atop a conference table sit stacks of a report called “Democracy in Crisis.”

“We use every possible means to pass information to people,” said Ahmed Fahmy, a 46-year-old businessman who heads the group.

Much of its campaigning focuses on the crackdown on the brotherhood inside Egypt. The group helped send lawyers to observe the military trials that sentenced 54 brotherhood leaders to jail.

“We are not secular, and we are not Islamic,” Fahmy said, without noting the irony of the statement. “We agree on a basic minimum: We want Egypt to embark on a democratic path.”

Arab governments deem the groups and individuals a threat. They have recently sharpened their criticism of Europeans for sheltering the activists, straining relations.

“I keep telling them . . . they are going to pay a very high price in the future” for playing host to the exiles, said Mubarak, who was the target of an assassination attempt by Islamic militants in June.

Mubarak and other Arab leaders have sought extradition of several militants--a touchy subject with European countries unwilling to surrender suspects facing the death penalty at home.

As a result, Arab governments have taken steps on their own to confront what they deem the militant threat. Opposition and human rights groups said Egypt sent at least 100 agents to Britain late last year to track the movement of activists.

In a sign of coordination, Prince Turki Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, visited Egypt’s capital after the bombing of a U.S.-run military building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in November.

Zaki Badr, a former Egyptian interior minister, has reportedly gone to Saudi Arabia to advise the government in its fight against Islamic opposition. Badr was fired in 1990 after saying, among other things, that he wanted to kill all Muslim militants--whom he estimated number about 500,000.

At least one activist sought by Egypt has disappeared.

Talaat Fouad Qassem, a 38-year-old political refugee in Denmark, arrived in Croatia on Sept. 12 en route to Bosnia where-- his supporters said--he planned to write about the civil war.

Qassem, who worked as a spokesman abroad for the Islamic Group, Egypt’s main militant movement, was thrown out of Croatia on Sept. 18 because he did not register with police after arrival. He has not been seen since.

His demise would remove someone the Egyptian government perceives as a threat. In Copenhagen, where he had lived since 1992, he appeared on a local television station on Saturdays to preach and read the Koran. He sometimes drew thousands to his sermons during Muslim holidays.

His wife, who is pregnant, and other family members contend he was abducted to Egypt and killed. The Interior Ministry refuses to comment.

But the Egyptian government has made its intentions clear.

After a car bomb ripped through the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan in November, killing 17 people and wounding more than 60, Mubarak warned: “The hand of justice will reach them sooner or later.”