Militant Islamists Call Truce in Egypt

The Irish Republican Army agreed to a cease-fire this month, and now another terrorist organization, less well known to the wider world but just as deadly, is offering a truce to authorities.

Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group)--the most active militant group in Egypt and an organization accused of more than 1,000 killings of police, intellectuals, foreign tourists and Christians in the past seven years--says it is abandoning violence in its battle to attain an Islamic state here.

A proclamation of an unconditional cease-fire was read on behalf of six of the group’s jailed leaders when 97 alleged militants went on trial nearly three weeks ago on various charges, including the murder of a police general and a series of bombings of banks and tourism offices.

Mohammed Amin Abdelalim, one of the accused, read the statement from the defendants’ cage. He urged all group members to halt military operations at home and abroad and cease inciting attacks.

The announcement has been publicly repeated twice, with spokesmen insisting that it had not been forced on the defendants by their jailers.

If the call is answered, the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds al Arabi commented, it would represent “one of the most important developments on the Arab scene” in recent years.

The secular Egyptian government, so far, has dismissed the cease-fire as empty talk and “a farce,” an opinion reaffirmed by Interior Minister Hassan Alfi after six police officers were killed in an alleged ambush by militants Tuesday near Minya.

Meanwhile, some group spokesmen, in exile in Europe, also insist that there have been no policy changes and there is no truce.

But most analysts agree that the defendants’ statement represents the most serious offer from the group’s leadership since the violent insurgency started in 1990.

The group’s main leaders feel they are on the losing end of battles with police and the army, and, if nothing else, they want time to regroup and rethink strategy, analysts say.

In an interview with The Times, Montasser Zayat, the lead lawyer for the jailed extremists, characterized the cease-fire as “a sincere wish” and suggested that Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric who is the group’s spiritual mentor and who has been convicted in the U.S. of conspiracy to blow up New York monuments, may soon endorse it publicly.

The most important reason behind the cease-fire is “the military defeat that the Gamaa faced,” said Zayat, an Islamist lawyer known to be close to members of the illegal group.

Egyptian authorities have been cracking down mercilessly on this group and other Islamic militants for years. Zayat estimates that 35,000 Islamists are in prison and about 100 have been executed, in addition to scores reportedly killed in various shootouts with police.

There are two further reasons for the cease-fire, Zayat said:

* Group leaders believe it is time to assess their situation and seek “a new strategy” that would let them operate openly without losing their credibility as advocates for an Islamic state.

* The militants feel less hostile toward the government of Hosni Mubarak now that the Egyptian president seems to be standing up to Israel and its hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The group is “patriotic” and believes intra-Arab conflicts should take a back seat to the main “religious” conflict between Israel and the Arab world, Zayat said.

Besides the Gamaa leadership, the cease-fire call was endorsed by two leaders of Islamic Jihad, the other principal violent Islamic opposition. Egypt’s oldest and most important Islamist organization, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, says it has never supported violence.

Zayat said he is convinced that the cease-fire eventually will take hold. “It takes some time to convince everybody to go along with a step like this,” he said.

But he insisted that things are only looking up for the Islamic group: “The Muslim renaissance is continuing, and, according to our religious beliefs, the future belongs to Islam.”