Cairo Communiqué

 

Amr Moussa’s Move From Foreign Ministry to Arab League Signifies Cairo’s New Emphasis on Arab Unity

 

By Andrew Hammond

Egyptians, Arabs and Israelis were equally shocked to hear the news in February that Egypt had nominated its plucky pro-Palestinian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa for the post of Arab League secretary-general. Moussa has been Egypt’s top diplomat for 10 years, and has become Egypt’s most popular minister because of his strong statements in favor of the Palestinians and Arabs in general in their disputes with Israel. Indeed, Israel’s Foreign Ministry and, reportedly, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on its behalf, complained about Moussa to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In 1995 then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously talked of “poisonous winds” emanating from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. Moussa, they have often griped, has never visited Israel.

When asked once about a leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry report recommending “punishments” for Egypt’s strong public stance against settlement building, Moussa answered with succint diplomatic applomb: “Simply, I read the report and threw it in the bin.”

This was around the time Egypt was formulating its strong opposition to Israel’s post-Oslo idea of a “Middle East market,” which posited Israel as the region’s economic savior and pathway to U.S. technology. Moussa has been instrumental in the continuing attempt by Egypt to stymie these Israeli ambitions of regional leadership.

For that reason many Egyptians sniffed a plot when they heard the news that Moussa would no longer be their foreign minister. “The shock!” was the huge headline emblazoned across the front page of the Nasserist weekly al-Arabi. As newspaper columnist Salama Ahmed Salama pointed out, “He succeeded in making foreign policy a daily theme among ordinary people, and this is something new in Egypt. That’s why people will miss him.”

Last year Egyptians were treated to the scene of Moussa ferociously arguing with Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in defence of Palestinians in a U.S. television debate aired on Egyptian state television. Moussa even made it into popular song after the current Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation broke out in late September. “I love Amr Moussa and I hate Israel,” declaims singer Shaaban Abdel-Rahim in a recent huge hit. Some papers have suggested that because of this enormous street popularity—he had been mooted as a possible vice president to Mubarak—it isn’t just Israel that will be glad to see the back of him.

But Israel’s glee surely dissipated when its leaders realized what Egypt is up to here. Cairo wants to revive the role of the defunct, dormant and largely ineffective League, to use it to rally the Arabs as a whole round its own pan-Arab, pro-Palestinian policies. The advent of a Sharon regime in Israel makes that even more imperative than ever, in Egypt’s view, and Moussa is the man to do it.

Egypt sees itself as the leader of the Arab world and has been the main force behind plans to create an Arab economic union and hold Arab summits once a year. It recently signed a free trade agreement with Iraq, which has accused current League Secretary-General Esmat Abdel-Meguid of siding with Kuwait in reconciliation efforts after Baghdad’s 1990-91 occupation of the Gulf emirate. “The task of the Arab League is big in the new Arab system, based on an Arab summit every year and discussing Arab problems together,” Moussa told Egypt’s Middle East News Agency after news of his nomination came out.

Other Arab countries seem to agree with Egypt’s vision. Moussa’s nomination has ended talk of possible Yemeni, Jordanian, Algerian and Sudanese candidates, who have pulled out because of Egypt’s weight and Moussa’s stature in the Arab world. An Arab summit scheduled for late March in Amman is expected to approve Moussa’s nomination. He would then replace fellow countryman Abdel-Meguid in May, when the secretary-general’s second five-year term ends. “Moussa will bring some dynamism to joint Arab action, especially in the light of Ariel Sharon’s election victory in Israel,” said political analyst Nabil Abdel-Fattah.

It’s a sign of how much store Egypt is placing in the League that it did not initially prefer to offer Moussa as a candidate. Diplomatic sources say President Mubarak reluctantly decided to part with Moussa when it became clear that bickering was likely to ensue at the League over who should replaced Abdel-Meguid and that, in any case, none of the nominees were Egyptian. The bickering tended to prove Egypt’s point that only an Egyptian can unite the Arabs, although Moussa’s most immediately pressing task once ensconced might prove to be the most difficult: collecting arrears of $100 million in member states’ annual dues, some dating from 1987. “Egypt is investing its political clout on its Arab influence. Losing this post to somebody else would diminish Egyptian influence in the Arab world,” noted Salama.

Only recently has it been reported in public that Moussa’s political background is distinctly Nasserist. The opposition al-Arabi published a list of prominent politicians who joined a secretive young Nasser group as students in the 1960s called al-Tanzim al-Tali’i, or the Vanguard Organization. Moussa was on the list, and so was Mubarak’s current political adviser, Osama al-Baz. Moussa’s likely successors as foreign minister are all cut from the same political cloth as him, such as current ambassador to Washington Nabil Fahmy and current ambassador to the United Nations Ahmed Abul-Gheit. So as far as Israel is concerned, the poisonous winds are not likely to abate any time soon.

 

Literary Freedom a Sacrificial Lamb

The Egyptian government has made a strategic decision to clamp down on literary freedom in order to keep political Islam at bay. That’s the upshot of a huge ruckus in January which saw champion of artistic freedom Culture Minister Farouk Hosni wage war against “pornographic” literature by novelists whom he says have gone too far beyond the bounds of public decency.

It all started in the first week of the new year, when Hosni sacked five literary figures in charge of a state-funded literature series because they approved three novels which the minister said contained sex scenes serving no literary purpose other than to titillate, and in cheap language at that. But the decision coincided with a complaint about the three novels made in parliament by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and most influential Islamist group. Supporters of freedom of expression concluded that Hosni was running scared from the Islamists, not least because of last year’s public demonstrations over another novel whose alleged blasphemy led to calls for Hosni’s resignation.

Since being appointed in 1987, Hosni has succeeded in alienating a number of constituencies affected by culture ministry policies and activities. Many of his critics thus united in howling abuse at his decision to ban the novels and his almost daily appearances on state and Arab satellite television denouncing literary license.

A painter himself—whose works, it has been noted, include nudes—Hosni has drawn fire from antiquities experts who say he doesn’t understand monuments, intellectuals who don’t take him seriously and, of course, Islamists convinced he’s too liberal. “The minister has a long history of sanctioning a policy of licentiousness in publication,” Brotherhood leader Mustafa Mashhour recently said, unconvinced by Hosni’s new-found sense of propriety. “It’s not unlikely that he took this position so that he keeps his job in the event of a cabinet reshuffle.”

Even Hosni’s bachelorhood—not the acceptable thing for a 59-year-old in a conservative Muslim country like Egypt—has raised eyebrows. “The minister has inflicted great damage not only on Egyptian culture, but on Egypt’s politics too,” wrote novelist Gamal Ghitani in the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab. “All of this is so that he can protect his job... and so that the diamonds on his fingers shine more brightly as he waves them in threat at writers.”

“These are the theatrical movements repeated by all haters of freedom,” wrote the weekly in a caption under a series of pictures of Adolf Hitler in mid-rhetorical flow. Hosni is known for his expressive hands movements.

Hypocritical though the minister’s position may have been, however, it’s clear the state was fully behind him. “There is freedom, but we don’t accept things which contradict our traditions. We should take care that freedom agrees with our values,” Mubarak said at an eagerly awaited meeting with intellectuals at the Jan. 24 opening of the Cairo International Book Fair. His remarks made it clear that writers should observe limits to avoid giving ammunition to Egypt’s rowdy religious lobby. That has been the theme of a number of respected writers and analysts regarded, like Mubarak, as “secular-leaning.”

“There is a climate in the country whereby many people are waiting for any trap the government falls into on religious and moral issues,” said political analyst Wahid Abdel-Meguid.

“The basic issue is that...there is a lobby which aims to set up a religious state instead of the civic one set up 200 years ago,” wrote al-Ahram columnist Salama Ahmed Salama.

The storm has seen the break-up of a decade-old alliance the government forged with leftists after radical Islamist groups took up arms against it in 1992. Certainly Farouk Hosni never again will rely on them to such an extent. Instead opposition groups, including Islamists, are likely to get more of a say in Egypt’s hefty program of state-sponsored arts, through appointments to the ministry’s raft of authorities, committees and publications.

The state, then, is trying to make a kind of peace with political Islam, without having to ally with the politicians of the Islamist lobby as such. One can’t help but feel, however, that the victim in all this is literature itself. The Book Fair saw at least a dozen works by well-known authors such as Egypt’s Nawal al-Saadawi, the Moroccan Mohamed Choucri and Moroccan anthropologist Fatima Mernissi removed from bookstores on the orders of foreign publications censors. Even some of Hosni’s supporters have acknowledged that two of the three banned novels, in which disillusioned socialists ponder their idealistic youth, had real literary merit.

Writers who want to delve into sex relations, however, now know that they risk marginalization—at the very least.

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