As Egypt Smothers Reform, U.S. Looks On

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is again in Cairo’s Tora prison, sentenced to seven years at hard labor. Two years after Egyptian police raided and padlocked the Ibn Khaldoun Center--the leading Arab world think tank for political reform--the 63-year-old Ibrahim and four colleagues were re-convicted in late July of sullying Egypt’s reputation. Other charges were leveled, including embezzlement, but this trial was not about crime or the fate of a scholar of international reputation. This was a verdict against the dream of peaceful political reform in Egypt.

Ibrahim, a co-founder of the Arab Human Rights Organization, lent his exuberant voice and his good mind to tough and often unpopular causes. He understands the need to liberalize Egypt’s ossified politics. He believes that democracy is the long-term solution to the Arab world’s malaise.

Ibrahim’s efforts encompassed the Arab world, but his deepest commitment was to Egypt, the bellwether for regional politics. By the late 1990s, he attracted a following of young professionals who were stymied by “the system” but willing to work hard for change. He met their youthful impatience and their contempt for corrupt politics with the counsel of gradual reform.

Ibrahim always assumed that he enjoyed the tacit support of powerful political figures. I remember his elation when President Hosni Mubarak adopted the term “civil society.” Though he was ultimately naive, it is not so farfetched that enlightened politicos would applaud his efforts. Egypt’s secular military regime has confronted violent challenges from the communist left and the Islamist right, whereas men and women of Ibrahim’s ilk try to work peacefully.

One evening, I listened to Ibrahim’s proteges--sounding more like government apologists than reformers--urge Nile Delta peasants to work within the system. The Ibn Khaldoun Center also sponsored programs for teaching tolerance in schools and educating women about their rights as voters, and it helped prompt a major debate on granting women greater protection in marriage.

Many educated Egyptians do not even bother voting in precooked parliamentary elections, but Ibrahim sees elections as an opportunity to hold government accountable. In 1995, he helped to lead a stunning effort to monitor the elections and document egregious irregularities. The effort was vindicated when Egypt’s Constitutional Court invalidated the balloting and ordered new elections.

Meanwhile, Ibrahim and his think tank publicized patterns of discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. Charges of unfair treatment for Copts could undercut support in Washington for the $2-billion-a-year U.S. largess that Egypt enjoys.

Rather than embracing reform, Mubarak and his “iron circle” jealously guard their power and view any opposition voice as potentially erosive.

Before Ibrahim’s initial arrest in June 2000, an orchestrated campaign in the Egyptian press vilified him as acting against the nation’s interest. The underlying rationale for going after Ibrahim was to make an example of him and to make other reformers afraid to accept foreign funding.

Critics are tamed with tight financial reins. Brave souls who ignore the leash laws must now ponder a stifling cell in Tora prison.

The U.S. meekly expressed only “disappointment” about the jailing of Ibrahim. The amorphous war against terrorism tacitly licenses friendly dictatorships to imprison peaceful opponents. The issue at hand is only incidentally about a jailed scholar (who is also a naturalized U.S. citizen).

The United States’ standing in Egypt and the world is now contaminated by Washington’s feckless approach to political reform and its tolerance of repression and dictatorship. The Ibrahim case presents a fitting moment to debate whether a serious adjustment in policy is needed, and a test case to see whether such an adjustment is possible.

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Augustus Richard Norton headed the Ford Foundation’s Civil Society in the Middle East program in the 1990s and is a professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University. He was a fellow at the Ibn Khaldoun Center, 1999-2000.