Keep the Heat on Egypt

Egypt’s interior minister said recently that the government was taking exceptional care in the case of jailed activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim because he had U.S. and Egyptian citizenship and was Egypt’s most prominent democracy proponent. That statement turned out to be so much hot air July 29 when a judge peremptorily proclaimed Ibrahim’s guilt on trumped-up charges. The judge turned what was supposed to be a routine hearing into judgment day.

The Bush administration quickly and rightly criticized the verdict and seven-year prison sentence. Last week Washington sent an even clearer message when it rejected Cairo’s request for more money on top of the $2 billion the U.S. sends annually. It is clear that Ibrahim was convicted not for the ostensible reason, receiving foreign funds without authorization, but for criticizing the autocratic government of President Hosni Mubarak.

Ibrahim, 63 and in poor health, was a sociology professor at American University in Cairo and director of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Social Development Studies. He monitored Egyptian elections and pointed out the vote-rigging that canceled out democracy. The government decides what political parties can function and wins elections so overwhelmingly that many Egyptians don’t bother to vote. Ibrahim also documented discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic Christians and the country’s poor human rights record.

Ibrahim’s activities were too much for Mubarak’s regime. Two years ago Ibrahim was charged with receiving illegal funds from the European Commission to monitor elections and with defaming the country in his human rights reports. The judge conducted a six-month trial with thousands of pages of evidence but took little more than an hour to issue a verdict. An appeals court overturned the conviction without saying why, at which point the government should have dropped the charges. Instead it continued the Alice-in-Wonderland process with a new trial.

Human rights activists in Egypt are more wary now about speaking out or accepting foreign funds. That’s bad for a nation that prides itself on being the intellectual center of the Arab world and that could be a leader in developing democracy. Rather than promoting a civil society, Mubarak’s government continues its repression and intolerance of all dissent.

The Bush administration should keep urging Egypt, a nation that depends on U.S. aid, to move toward political freedom. Aside from Israel, the Middle East is a wasteland when it comes to representative government. Ibrahim was only trying to change that.