While the Egyptian uprising ended 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak's reign, the young revolutionaries in Egypt were not the first to rise up against the President, or be angered by him and write him off. I had written in this column on the first of March about what King Hussein told me once. As I was following with him a press conference held by President Hosni Mubarak and Benjamin Netanyahu in Sharm el-Sheikh in 1997, he said that he was tired of dealing with the Egyptian President, and that he would let him be the pioneering, sovereign leader, provided that he ‘gets off his back'. I also wrote how King Abdullah II expressed the same annoyance with the Egyptian President, whom he described as being someone who wants nothing out of the peace process except his role in it, and said that the Americans and Israelis have crossed him out as an unhelpful element in the peace process, as King Abdullah II described him. I wrote the above on the sidelines of an article on Jordanian tribal figures and a statement they addressed to King Abdullah II. The article sparked huge controversy and a record number of comments objecting to it, prompting me to write about the aspects of my links to Jordan to ease the controversy without backtracking on a single word I wrote in the original article. Prior to this issue with the Jordanian tribal figures' statements, I wrote on 10/11/2010 an article about dealing with President Mubarak, which carried the title “Bad luck around the corner”. I usually don't write titles for my articles published in this column, sufficing myself with ‘Ayoon Wa Azan'. However, the computer and archive department at Dar al-Hayat posts titles for all articles for archiving and retrieval purposes. My article published in November was about the personal disagreement between President Bashar al-Assad and President Hosni Mubarak, on which I just said, “I know the details from those directly involved in Egypt and Syria”. My article at the time was correct...albeit incomplete. This is because President Mubarak was still in power. Today, I intend to complete the subject and clarify some of its intricacies, as it covers an important background to the deterioration that beset Egyptian-Syrian relations and its causes. Those whom I mentioned and who were directly involved were the Egyptian and Syrian Presidents, in addition to Gamal Mubarak, and Omar Suleiman; Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Egyptian Foreign Minister at the time, had corroborated the details as I presented them to him. In short, President Assad wanted to end the tension in the relationship with President Mubarak, by congratulating him on his safe return from Germany after the surgery he underwent there. However, President Ali Abdullah Saleh got involved in some way. The Syrian President thus received an invitation asking him to visit President Mubarak on Monday at eleven in the morning, - in March of last year i.e. one year ago. President Assad decided to decline the invitation, the time of which having been specified for him to the day and hour. He took it to be a summons not an invitation, as he was supposed to have the option to choose the date of the visit. Lt. General Omar Suleiman told me what happened, although the majority of my discussions with him revolved around renewed efforts for mediation between Hamas and Fatah (which in turn failed as well). I also visited Gamal Mubarak at the Air Force Club, and met with him for nearly two hours. We agreed that I should try to convince President Assad to ease the tensions with President Mubarak and to contract him again. Today, I can say with the accuracy required by the historical nature of this issue, - while all witnesses to what I'm saying are still alive-, that I found President Bashar al-Assad to have also crossed out the relationship with the Egyptian President, as did Jordan. In other words, he beat the Egyptian youths to rising up against President Mubarak by six whole months or a little more. I usually write down what I hear from President Assad as I sit with him. I selected the following remarks from the transcripts of that interview, and I highlighted them because I think they are important points: - Is it possible to get President Mubarak to understand that my policy is different from his? He is in an alliance with the United States and a peace treaty with Israel, and I'm on the other side of this. - Is it also possible to get President Mubarak to understand that he is not my father, and that I'm not his son, and that I want the relationship between the two countries to go through official channels? - The personal dispute will not affect other relations between the two countries. Economic cooperation is ‘one hundred percent' (a point also confirmed by Gamal Mubarak). I believe that President Assad realized that it was difficult to convince President Mubarak to change his approach in dealing with other leaders, and decided to freeze the personal relationship. Other Arab presidents, in addition to King Hussein, King Abdullah II and President Assad, must no doubt have also become annoyed with the Egyptian President. I have information from the latter himself about the relations with Qatar, which were in crisis over many years, and which improved only in the recent months before the ouster of Hosni Mubarak's regime; but this was too little, too late. [email protected]
