The rotten state of Egypt is
too
powerless and corrupt to act
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 1 January
2009
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt - a country
where 'the idea of service has simply ceased to exist'
There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses"
– the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of
Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to
the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar
Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after
three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La
Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the
anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that
Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to
shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they
will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of
secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the
princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.
Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah
crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations
with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind
of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the
Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates
which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah
crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers
that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain
and the US. Why blame Mubarak?
To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border
without permission from Washington tells you all you need to
know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the
Middle East for us.
Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with
Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any
Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the
West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without
subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both
ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make
emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem
– "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow
Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at
the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers
called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.
The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its
response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that
has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of
service – health, education, genuine security for
ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a
land where the first duty of the police is to protect the
regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security
police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless
regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son
Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested
by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora
complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.
There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade
in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its
physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and
government officials are often scrupulous in their religious
observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged
elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young
American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo
hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic
chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the
Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors
abandoned their patients to attend prayers during
Ramadan.
And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily
slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani
wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the
regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars
against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry
sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers
and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says,
"of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah
border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the
Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza
prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been
dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change
the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general
in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their
millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do
so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister,
could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of
trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they
created in their own country."
But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.
Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the
Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering
is a symbol of its own political sickness.
Robert Fisk
