April 25, 2002

The Daily Star

Change in Western view toward terrorism has seen many Arab governments curry US favor
even as their peoples go the other way

Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star

Mohammed Ibrahim Soliman, an Egyptian wanted for alleged involvement in the 1997 massacre by Islamic extremists of 58 foreign tourists at Luxor, was arrested in Brazil by federal police on April 15 and is awaiting extradition to his native land. Chalk up one more coup for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s war against fundamentalist militants who have challenged the secular, US-backed regime in Cairo, a war that is as relentless as American President George W. Bush’s but predates it by a decade.

The problem is that Mubarak, and other US allies, increasingly appear to be seeking to rid themselves of domestic opponents under the pretext of fighting global terrorism. Mubarak’s government, like others in the Arab world that have been battling with Muslim dissidents, has been winning hands down on the security front since the events of Sept. 11 brought about a dramatic change in the West’s comfortable perceptions about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter and giving sanctuary to political fugitives who faced torture and death in their homelands.
The wave of arrests across Europe, and more recently in Asia and in Latin America, of Egyptians, Lebanese, Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians underlines how the focal point of the US-led operation against Islamic extremists remains solidly grounded in the Arab world and the conflict in the Middle East.
The US response, post-Sept. 11, has been to assist “friendly” states, invariably quasi-democracies where human rights abuses, corruption and poverty are rife, to crush their internal opposition. For some regimes, such as Egypt’s, it has been easier to demonstrate their anti-terrorism commitment by cracking down on Islamists at home than give unconditional support to Bush’s campaign that could incite popular anger among their populations. It seems to be a fine line, although one that Mubarak has often trodden before.
But US support for Israel against the Palestinians, particularly in recent weeks, has complicated the issue and the failure of Arab leaders to take any meaningful action to halt the bloodletting could mean that continued crackdowns on internal dissent ­ largely by Islamic movements ­ could boomerang.
Arab regimes which for years have kept the lid on public demonstrations have been forced by the rising tide of anti-US anger in the Arab street ­ as often as not fueled by criticism of the Americans in the tightly controlled media ­ to allow public protests against the US and Israel over the Israeli incursions into the West Bank. These have become increasingly strident and caused considerable concern in the corridors of power, as witnessed by the heavy-handed response in some Arab states to such protests.
The danger is that Egypt, and other Arab regimes who are using Bush’s war to eliminate domestic challenges, rounding up intellectuals and others critical of their policies, may only be aggravating the problems they face from their own populations.
For years, Mubarak had scolded the West for harboring fugitives like Soliman. Not any more. After September, many Western governments dropped their liberal policies that precluded extraditing fugitives to Egypt, and countries like it that enforce the death penalty or have seriously flawed human rights records, and delivered them on the proverbial platter to Cairo. Third World countries, falling over themselves to prove their anti-terrorism credentials and avoid confrontations with the US, are doing the same.
Egyptian criticism of the US, however, masked covert cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Egypt’s security authorities. Dozens of Egyptian fugitives seized abroad have been quietly transported to Cairo by the Americans, shunning international laws and conventions. Some were put to death in Egypt.
The Washington Post reported on March 11 that US agents often participated in the arrest of Egyptian fugitives in third countries and that between 1993 and 1999, Egyptian Islamists were returned to Cairo by US authorities from Scandinavia, the Balkans, Jordan, Central Asia, the Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
“Dozens of other covert renditions, often with Egyptian cooperation, were also conducted,” the Post quoted US officials as saying. “The details of most of these operations, which often ignored local and international extradition laws, remain closely guarded.”
After Sept. 11, the Egyptian government found itself with a greater degree of latitude to pursue Islamic hard-liners at home. With the revelations that Egyptians such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s closest associate, hold senior positions in Al-Qaeda ­ not to mention that another Egyptian, Mohammed Atta, led the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers ­ Cairo was anxious to head off international criticism.
Some Egyptian commentators argue that the government simply exploited the crisis to hammer domestic opponents, many of whom have no revolutionary aims. The Islamic insurrection that began in 1992 had been effectively curbed by 1997. Indeed, there has been no major attack by Islamic extremists since then ­ probably because most of the key militants fled and joined bin Laden in Afghanistan to wage their war from outside Egypt. It would appear that the internal jihad has largely collapsed, as it has generally across the region, with the diehards, like Zawahiri, allying themselves with bin Laden for his more ambitious conflict against the West.
Either way, the government’s actions are driven by political opportunism of the most cynical kind. It is difficult to see, given the government’s track record in crushing dissent, that any of this presages an eventual political liberalization. Emergency laws imposed following the assassination of Anwar Sadat by Islamic extremists in October 1991 remain in place and have been invoked for another crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of Islamic fundamentalism, is a case in point.
The Brotherhood, which advocates non-violent means to bring about political reform, constitutes the only serious political opposition to Mubarak. Since Sept. 11, dozens of members of the Brotherhood, many of them university professors and clerics considered to be moderate, and other Islamists across the political spectrum have been rounded up.
By Nov. 11, some 260 had been referred to military jurisdiction, where judged are appointed by the Defense Ministry and where normal legal procedures and rules of evidence do not apply. There are currently three mass trials under way in military courts, a structure much criticized by human rights groups but which has now been adopted by the Americans themselves.
In the largest trial, 94 defendants ­ four of them still at large ­ have been accused on plotting to assassinate Mubarak and destabilize the country. They are supposedly members of a previously unknown group called Al-Waad (The Pledge) that prosecutors have hinted was an Al-Qaeda “sleeper cell” who were rounded up in May 2001, four months before the suicide attacks on the US. Initially they were accused of smuggling weapons to Hamas, but defense lawyers allege that the more serious charges, which carry the death penalty, were simply tacked on after Sept. 11.
The premise seems to be that public opinion in the West, absorbing post-Sept. 11 curbs on civil liberties to combat a new kind of terrorism, is unlikely to lose any sleep over a crackdown on Islamists. Indeed, a few weeks ago, the chief government investigator in the trial of 94 Islamists postulated even more draconian security measures when he declared: “Adopting extremist talk or thought could be a crime.”
Expect more of the same in the months ahead and an intensification of anti-American hostility throughout the Islamic world. Saddam Hussein, for one, is probably counting on it. Ariel Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians only stoke the flames. Mubarak, like some other Arab rulers, may yet find himself having to crack down even harder on internal dissent.

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