My friend Mona Eltahawy wrote a brilliant article entitled “Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are the new tools of protest in the Arab world”. The genius in this article lies in the fact that it was published on 7/8/2010, in the Washington Post, or six months before the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Mona started with Khaled Said's death, a young businessman, under torture, and the lies of the Interior Ministry in its statement on his death which claimed that he suffocated after swallowing a bag of drugs. Mona then talked about how the new media published his images with clear signs of torture, as authorities cannot control social media websites. I also read in the same article that 3.4 million Egyptians use Facebook, and that two million of these are under twenty five. I will continue my talk about the files in my office on the news of the Arab countries. Before the eruption of the revolutions of rage, these were few, and were mostly about Egypt because Egypt is the ‘Mother of the World'. But today, I have a file on every single Arab country, and since my office and that of the secretary have run out of space for them, I thought I'd refer all the material on the time before Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation to the archives. In what concerns the Egyptian file, I chose to preserve all the material after 25/1/2011, and found that Al-Ahram's edition on that same day a year earlier contained a front page headline about President Mubarak's Police Day keynote address, in which he said that Egypt's security is his first priority. There are thousands of pages in Egypt's dossier that will be preserved for posterity, but I decided to suffice myself today with the months that preceded the collapse of Mubarak's regime, as they reflect subtle indications that the ruling party failed to take notice of. On 23/10/2010, the Los Angeles Times continued what Mona Eltahawy started with an article about how the Egyptian government's crackdown on the media was intensifying, in which it documented the dismissal of journalist, stifling of commentators and suspension of television programs. The article also said that the Egyptians had found an outlet in the new media, which the government could not bring under control. Human Rights Watch had condemned the killing of Khaled Said, and called for those who attacked him to be punished. This is while Amnesty International deplored the trial of three Egyptian human rights activist on counts of defaming the state. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei also joined in the condemnation of the death of a detainee under torture, and the repeated official denial did nothing but confirm the allegations. Moreover, the Christian Science Monitor published news on the torture of other detainees, with pictures of such incidents all over the web. Also, the expulsion of the prominent journalist Ibrahim Issa, Chief Editor of Al-Dustour, sparked a lot of controversy both locally and internationally. Of course, if I am to choose material on Egypt exclusively from last year, I would find that three main topics dominated this material, and are, the health of Hosni Mubarak, the legislative elections in November, and political inheritance. Since the President's return from Germany, where he underwent surgery to remove his gall bladder, coincided with the return of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei who announced his candidacy to the presidency and called for the boycott of the legislative elections -because they were not going to be free and fair-, major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and major international think tanks (and of course the Israel gang) closely followed developments in Egypt, as though they were Egyptian newspapers. Perhaps one of the best things I read in this regard was a report entitled “The Contenders” about the presidential elections, written by Joshua Hammer, published by the New Yorker magazine on 5/4/2010. As regards the newspapers, the New York Times in particular followed the topic the most, day after day, followed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. A Likudnik American website even quoted an Egyptian Interior Ministry official named Hamed (or Hamid) Rashid as saying, on 18/4/2010, to Members of Parliament that the ministry allowed security forces to use live ammunition against opposition protesters, mostly supporters of Dr. ElBaradei, if they attacked the police. The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, came under fire for insisting on running in the elections. At an Iftar dinner, they heard their guests criticize their position on the elections. Karima al-Hefnawi, leader of the Kefaya movement, shouted at Dr. Mohammed Badie, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, asking why the brotherhood does not take the initiative, and why are they not boycotting this farce? The supreme guide replied with an Arab saying that has an exact equivalent in English, which is “Haste makes waste”. The Muslim Brotherhood must have no doubt been surprised like me and everyone else when they did not win any seats in the parliament. I admit that this possibility did not occur to me at all. The third round of the previous elections had been rigged, and yet, the Muslim Brotherhood still managed to win 88 seats in the parliament. On 22/12/2010, I wrote that I was surprised when the Brotherhood did not win any seats in the new parliament, and said literally: I hope the President will dissolve the new parliament in due course, and order that new elections be held. The major think tanks were also interested in following up the developments in Egypt. The pro-IsraelWashington Institute for Near East Policy spoke about the President's illness, the improvement of the Egyptian economy, and the decline of Egypt's regional role to the extent that the Nile waters were now being threatened. In truth, this last issue met with more concern in the West than in our countries. And as regards the prestigious Carnegie Middle East Center, it published a number of reports on the elections which it expected would not be free and fair. I had hoped that there would be room for me to write about the news on the magnificence of Egypt's antiquities, which received as much coverage as the issue of the President's health and political inheritance did; however, I will save these for another day. Today, I want to say that I hope that the negative focus on Egypt last year will turn into positive focus this year. [email protected]
