Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Pages 50, 77

Cairo Communiqué

Arab Media Coverage of Al-Aqsa Intifada Calls Mubarak Government to Account

By Andrew Hammond

Suddenly the Egyptian government had a public to answer to. One of the main theater of operations during the violent clashes between Palestinian civilians and the Israeli army has been the visual media. For not only did it bring the conflict into the living rooms of families around the globe—it brought it into the homes of families the length and breadth of the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq. The ability of the new Arab satellite media to affect sentiments throughout the region has been brought home dramatically, and it is beginning—slowly—to force Arab leaders to change their style. If the first intifada, which lasted six years, shocked the world with its images of brute force used to crush civilians under occupation, the second one has shocked the Arab world in particular.

Leading the pack has been the maverick Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera. With its CNN-style news coverage, endless talk shows, and phone-ins that allow sidelined opposition figures as well as the ordinary Arab on the street to say exactly what they think, it has led the media’s frenzy to discuss the plight of Palestinians and their apparent lone battle to defend Jerusalem for Arabs and Muslims. Even state television channels are being forced to keep up the pace, and no less so in Egypt, whose citizens have been treated to the highly unusual spectacle of seeing their president harangued over his readiness to go to war. “I just can’t afford to take us into a war,” Hosni Mubarak pleaded, with alarming and disarming honesty.

Statements such as that sit alongside clearly populist moves aimed to appeal to popular opinion, such as the airing of the classic 1960s Arab film “Al Nasser Salaheddin,” embedded in the mind of every Arab. In it actor Ahmed Mazhar mimics the Muslim conqueror Salaheddin Al Ayyoubi’s reconquest of Jerusalem after 100 years of Crusader occupation. Egyptian state television showed the film the day of the Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit, where, under Mubarak’s auspices, U.S. President Bill Clinton brought together Israel’s Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an attempt to end the fighting. Mubarak was under intense domestic criticism for having agreed to host the summit, which was seen in part as a deliberate American ploy to upstage the Arab summit due to take place in Cairo the following weekend.

“I just can’t afford to take us into a war,” Mubarak pleaded.

The government’s irritation at the Arab media’s role in fanning the flames of dissent at its policy of moderation showed through in its press commentary. In effect referring to Al Jazeera, editor Mamdouh Mahran wrote in the pro-government paper Al Naba, “We will not pay attention to those who wanted to destroy the efforts of President Mubarak to save the Palestinians, using the cannons of loud speeches on their suspicious television channels and rented radio stations.”

Leading state-owned political magazine Rose Al Yousef ran a campaign against the Qatari channel, accusing it of being “in the service of Israel” because one talk show presenter suggested that Egypt was not fulfilling its leadership role in the region.

Following the Arab summit, the state media came out firing in all directions, claiming that Egypt skillfully had led the Arabs toward a strong stand that warned of further action if Israel continued its “brutal” repression of civilians, but left the door open to a peaceful resolution by refraining from severing all Arab diplomatic relations with Israel. Instead, the summit agreed that all forms of Arab-Israeli cooperation will cease, with individual countries reconsidering the current status of contacts with Israel.

The main move in this direction was Tunisia’s decision to close its low-level diplomatic liaison office in Tel Aviv and Israel’s office in Tunis. Two days after the summit King Abdullah of Jordan, the only country besides Egypt to have full diplomatic relations with Israel, headed for Washington to sign the United States’ first free-trade agreement with an Arab country. In the view of cynics, Egypt simply doesn’t want to jeopardize its massive U.S. aid program by taking the radical action of closing Israel’s embassy in Cairo.

The government protests otherwise. “Which is better—to cut relations and remain, as Arabs, absent from what is going on around us politically, economically and socially, or to remain close to the decision-making circles, while not giving up on one [Arab] right?” wrote Samir Ragab, editor of the state-owned daily Al Gomhouriya and a close confidante of Mubarak, on Oct. 23, the day after the two-day summit ended.

Al Ahram, the state’s flagship paper, wrote: “The summit chose the most balanced means to manage the conflict at its most difficult and sensitive moment, although there are millions of protesters inside Palestine and outside still criticizing the fact that the more belligerent alternatives were not followed.”

Iraq Back in the Arab Fold

The summit also was characterized by its inclusion of Iraq. It’s probably fair to say that Egyptian diplomacy skillfully seized the right moment to bring Baghdad back into the Arab fold by announcing a summit on the issue of Jerusalem only. Mubarak made his call for an Arab summit when feelings were riding high about the murder by Israeli soldiers of 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Durra while the boy was taking shelter in the arms of his father. The Saudis and Kuwaitis, still angry with Iraq over its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, could hardly refuse 100 percent Arab participation.

Another summit is scheduled for March in Jordan. Even if more than Jerusalem is on the agenda, it’s almost unthinkable that Iraq would not be invited. The Egyptians also calculate that they have another chance in March to take tougher action against Israel if the politics of moderation have not produced results in the interval.

The main resolutions of the summit’s final communiqué were as follows:

The summit welcomed “the Intifada (uprising) of the Palestinian people” and described the sacrifices of Palestinians in the uprising as a “valuable asset” in the fight for independence. Arab leaders called for:
• Palestinian right to compensation for damage caused by recent clashes
• Creation of the Jerusalem Intifada Fund to provide financial help to families of people who die in the fighting
• Creation of the Al Aqsa Fund to finance projects to preserve the Arab and Muslim character of Arab East Jerusalem
• All Arabs to donate one day’s wages to the Intifada
• Arab states to seek to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes via the United Nations
• Arab states to cease establishment of any further relations with Israel and to end all participation in multilateral peace talks
• Reaffirming that U.N. Resolution 478 of 1980 calls on countries not to move their embassies to Jerusalem or recognize it as Israel’s capital without a final peace, and an Arab threat to break relations with any country that violates the resolution.

It was the failure to announce a break in all current diplomatic relations with Israel that provoked disgust in newspapers and among street protesters all over the Arab world and, just before the communiqué was released on Oct. 22, even led to reports of Barak’s praise of Mubarak as a “great Arab leader” championing moderation. Then the Israelis, apparently having read the entire document, reacted angrily to its “language of threats,” with Barak claiming it provided a green light to a continued campaign against Israeli occupation. And that, perhaps, was the most significant decision of the October Arab summit—its endorsement of the new intifada, the Aqsa intifada as the Arabs are calling it, fought in defense of Jerusalem as a holy city for Muslims.

Parliamentary Elections

Against this backdrop of regional tension, Egypt has been conducting parliamentary elections. The first of three rounds of voting took place Oct. 18 in the governorates of north Egypt and Sinai. The results were quite a slap in the face for the state’s National Democratic Party (NDP), which won only 21 seats outright. Despite all manner of harassment, short of the arrest of its candidates, the leading Islamist Muslim Brotherhood managed to win two seats in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. The leading opposition Wafd Party failed to win any seats in the first vote.

A huge bloc of 120 seats went to an Oct. 24 runoff vote. This gave NDP candidates who faced defeat in the first round a chance to mobilize police and government officials into busing state employees to polling booths and making sure they gave their vote to the government’s party.

The Brotherhood paper Al Daawa related this telling encounter between its candidate in a district just north of Cairo and a local police chief. The chief told the candidate bluntly: “If you succeed in the elections, I won’t stay in my job one day longer.” That pretty much explains the logic behind the arrests of over 1,000 campaign workers for Islamist candidates. Local police chiefs act on their own, out of the conviction that keeping Islamists out of parliament is what their Interior Ministry bosses want them to do.

Since 1987 the Brotherhood for the most part has ditched its slogan of “Islam is the solution,” viewed by the government as provocative and dangerous. Supporters of Brotherhood candidate Hussein Al Darag, from the industrial district of Shubra Al Kheima, were detained for putting up posters with the offensive phrase, as well as proclaiming, “Together let’s build a world with religion.” Darag, however, took the Interior Ministry to court and won. The judge ruled that since the second article of the constitution says Islam is the official religion of the state, and Islamic law is the basis which should be used in legislation, there was no crime in plastering the neighborhood with posters saying Islam is the solution. The official policy of the Brotherhood’s leadership, though, is to not antagonize the authorities if at all possible, and the controversial slogan was not resorted to elsewhere.

Nevertheless, in these new days of intifada and heightened nationalist and religious passions, the government may well start to find fewer and fewer Egyptians who care about its dictats on what’s in and what’s out.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.