The Egyptian government’s prosecution of 44 pro-democracy activists has been described as inexplicable, strange, crazy and counter-productive for a government that is in desperate need of international assistance.
Why is the ruling military apparently willing to risk up to $1.4 billion in U.S. aid by cracking down on non-governmental organizations?
“It makes me feel strange,” says Charles Dunne, “because I love Egypt, I lived there for three years as the political-military officer in the U.S. Embassy, where I dealt with all of these generals who are now running the show.”
“The work that we are trying to do in Egypt is to help them do what they say they want to do, which is have a democratic transition to a civilian government,” says Dunne, Middle East director for Freedom House, “and the Egyptian military is doing everything they can to shut that off and shut that down.”
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have threatened to veto the aid package to Egypt if the crackdown continues, although the Obama administration can invoke a national security waiver to override Congressional objections .
“It’s crazy. Here you have groups that have been operating in the country for years, who have applied to register, to a country that we have given over $50 billion to and now they want to try Americans,” says Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman from Virginia. “It just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Based on what they are doing, there’s no way the administration will be able to waive this and I think you are going to have to suspend or cancel or cut the aid,” Wolf says.
But the authorities in Cairo appear confident that their political calculus is more accurate than those voices in Washington who believe the U.S. government could not possibly countenance providing aid to a regime that is about to put on trial several U.S. citizens, including the son of a member of President Obama’s own Cabinet.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is convinced that Washington is hamstring since, as one analyst notes, “with the rise of Islamist parties and the evisceration of the liberal alternative, there is no one left to partner with in a post-SCAF Egypt.”
For Egypt’s current rulers, attacking the NGOs is a win-win-win: the image of Cairo standing up to Washington and prosecuting foreign-funded troublemakers bent on destabilizing Egypt plays well with the public – one of the few sources of good PR for the beleaguered generals; the attack on civil society weakens the country’s most vibrant democratic forces – including those most capable of scrutinizing the military and holding the generals accountable – while attracting the support of the resurgent Islamists; and all without jeopardizing the aid package, which will be forthcoming, the generals confidently expect, because the administration would not dare sacrifice the U.S.-Egypt relationship and risk regional instability for the sake of a handful of NGOs.
“The vilification campaign against supposedly foreign-backed rabble-rousers has resonated with a suspicious Egyptian public,” writes Sarah Topol. Over the summer, they “unleashed” Fayza Abul-Naga, the minister of international cooperation and a self-declared nemesis of foreign funding and civil society.
“Abul-Naga has been a dogged campaigner against human-rights organizations and their foreign sources of funding since her appointment in 2004,” Topol notes. “But never had she been given so much leeway to go after them.”
The generals’ rationale even finds an echo within Washington’s think-tank community.
“If there is anything the United States can do to help Egypt in this difficult period, it is not to equate progress toward democracy with accepting the presence of American NGOs,” says the Carnegie Endowment’s Marina Ottaway.
“Egypt’s actions toward American NGOs are problematic, but the threats to the Egyptian transition are much more serious, and this is what needs to be addressed,” she argues.
There is a link between Washington’s two setbacks in the Middle East this weekend, writes Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: namely, the administration’s message that the cost for ‘bad behavior’ will be low.
“One of the great ironies of the current crisis is that a revolution whose most democratic and liberal proponents benefitted from the training provided by U.S. NGOs has now turned on those very institutions,” he contends:
The reason is simple — Egypt’s current rulers are evidently convinced that Washington needs them even more now than we needed Hosni Mubarak over the past thirty years. After all, so this logic goes, the United States may have been willing to partner with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in engineering Mubarak’s departure, but with the rise of Islamist parties and the evisceration of the liberal alternative, there is no one left to partner with in a post-SCAF Egypt.
The SCAF is also sending a signal that external actors will not determine the trajectory of Egypt’s transition or force the military to cede its prerogatives to civilian authority, says a leading analyst.
“All the democracy and governance assistance flows in the direction of establishment of a truly democratic system in which the military will come under civilian control eventually and will need to be accountable,” says Michele Dunne, director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council, “So I think there’s a certain amount of signaling here to the United States: ‘Don’t think you can push us to that direction. We’re not going to go quietly.’”
But the SCAF appears confident that it has accurately interpreted the Obama administration’s own set of signals to suggest that the crackdown on pro-democracy groups will not be allowed to eclipse more significant strategic imperatives, as demonstrated by Washington’s relatively timid comments after December’s raids on the NGOs. The issue would “not distract us from the overall importance of the bilateral relationship between Egypt and the United States,” Jeffrey D. Feltman, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, told Al-Masry Al-Youn.
The administration “should have sent a clear message, in public, that failure to resolve the NGO crisis quickly and amicably could trigger a serious breach in U.S.-Egypt relations,” says Satloff. “Without such clarity, the SCAF quite logically interpreted this to mean that it would be subordinated to larger strategic concerns . The result is that, like Russia and China, the SCAF concluded that it would pay no significant price for its objectionable behavior.”
The SCAF isn’t the only illiberal force in favor of assaulting pro-democracy forces. Senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood, blame civil society groups for “sowing chaos” at the behest of foreign-funders.
“They are paying money to some youth to incite violence and make riots everywhere,” said Mahmoud Ghozlan, a senior member and spokesman for the Brotherhood. “The foreign hands are very clear.”
Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi today called for a speedier transition to civilian rule:
Election Commission Chief Abdel-Moez Ibrahim told The Associated Press that based on Tantawi’s orders, nominations for president would be accepted March 10, a month earlier than the original date. He didn’t give a date for elections, but it was an indication that the vote may be held about a month ahead of schedule.
The ruling council pledged “to hand power to an elected civilian authority in a democratic, transparent and honest way.”
