Category: Blog

Egypt begins military trial of more than 30 leading MBs

Posted on By 3arabawy

The kangaroo military trial of the MB leaders opened today, and was adjourned till 3 June. Here’s a report by AP’s Nadia Abou El-Magd:

CAIRO _ A military trial of at least 33 leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood began Thursday under heavy secrecy, one of the largest such tribunals in years in a crackdown against Egypt’s most powerful opposition political movement.
Defense lawyers were boycotting the session, protesting that the court didn’t notify them of the trial’s start _ they learned from their clients. There was no public announcement of the trial date, a sign of the secrecy surrounding the proceedings.
Human rights groups in Egypt and abroad have repeatedly condemned Egypt’s policy of trying of civilians before military court, which usually issue swift and harsh verdicts with no possibility of appeal _ except for asking the president for clemency.
Civilian courts have twice ordered the release of the top defendant, Khayrat el-Shater, and a number of his co-defendants. The first order for their release came in January, and days after it President Hosni Mubarak ordered the Brotherhood members tried instead before the military court. A new court order for their release came Tuesday.
El-Shater is the Brotherhood’s third-highest ranking member and is known as the fundamentalist group’s chief strategist and financier. He was arrested in December on suspicion of money laundering and terrorism, and afterward the government froze the assets of 29 Brotherhood members and several companies linked to the group.
The charges against the defendants in the military trial have not been made public, but a are believed to be connected to money laundering and terrorism.
“We haven’s been officially notified about this trial,” said Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsoud, a member of the defense team as he waited outside Haykstep, a military base outside Cairo where the trial is taking place. “The whole thing looks suspicious.”
Most of the defense lawyers were staying outside the base, though one lawyer went inside to observe. Journalists were not allowed into the base, but court officials confirmed the trial had begun. The number of defendants was unclear, with the lawyers saying 33 and the court officials saying 34 Brotherhood members were on trial.
The Brotherhood has been banned since 1954 but has continued to operate and is Egypt’s most powerful opposition movement. Its lawmakers, who run as independents, hold 88 seats in the 454-seat parliament.
The group advocates implemenation of Islamic law but says it wants democratic reforms in Egypt, where Mubarak has had a quarter century of authoritarian rule. The government accuses the group of seeking to take over the country.
More than 300 Brotherhood members have been arrested in a crackdown since December, after Brotherhood students carried out a military-like parade. That prompted government accusations that the movement was forming an armed wing, providing students with combat training, knives and chains. The group denies forming a militia.
Egypt’s Emergency Law, in place without interruption since 1981, authorizes the president to refer civilians to military trials. In 1995, in advance of parliamentary elections in that year, the government arrested many senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood and referred their cases to military court, which convicted them of nonviolent offenses and sentenced them to prison terms of up to five years. The group has undergone several military trials since then, though Thursday’s was the largest in years.
Last month, the constitution was amended to allow the president to refer civilians to military court _ a provision aimed at maintaining the power even after emergency laws are lifted, as promised by the government.

Wedding of Mubarak's son seen as part of succession

Posted on By 3arabawy

A story by Jonathan Wright of Reuters…

Wedding of Mubarak’s son seen as part of succession
CAIRO, April 25 – Gamal Mubarak, the 43-year-old son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, might as well have been on the campaign trail through the provinces this week. Only he isn’t a formal candidate for any elected office.
In the Nileside town of Minya, as a senior ruling party official, he took the chair at public meetings, chatted with senior citizens, kissed a donated Koran, accepted bouquets of flowers and inspected handicrafts at a girls’ school.
At the end of this week he takes another step which could help him qualify for the highest office in the land — the presidency his father has held for more than a quarter century.
In a family ceremony in Cairo on Saturday Mubarak will marry Khadiga el-Gammal, the blonde daughter of wealthy contractor Mahmoud el-Gammal and a woman more than 20 years his junior.

Analysts say Egyptians would find it hard to accept an unmarried head of state. They note that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a bachelor when he succeeded his father Hafez in 2000, found himself a bride less than six months after taking office.
“Things are moving perfectly towards their target,” said Gameela Ismail, wife of imprisoned opposition politician Ayman Nour, who challenged Hosni Mubarak for the presidency in 2005.
“The wedding is the final part before the curtain comes down and Gamal becomes the president,” she told Reuters.
Khadiga, who has mostly kept out of the public eye so far, fits the “first lady” profile set by her future mother-in-law Suzanne and by Suzanne’s predecessor, Jihan el-Sadat.
Suzanne Mubarak and Jihan, the widow of assassinated President Anwar Sadat, cultivated the image of modern cosmopolitan women. Unlike more than 80 percent of Egyptian women, they leave their hair uncovered in public.
Like Suzanne and Jihan, Khadiga speaks fluent English. She is a graduate of the American University in Cairo, where Gamal Mubarak also studied in the 1980s.
Her most extensive appearance in public was at a World Economic Forum event in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last year, when she sat between Gamal and Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif and mingled with international business people.
FAMILIAR FACE
President Mubarak and his son have denied they have any presidential plans for Gamal, a former investment banker who is assistant secretary-general and head of the policies committee in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
But analysts and the opposition say there is no other plausible explanation for his political activities over the past five years and his gradual emergence on the public scene.
“The advantage Gamal has gained from the president is not only something past and present. He is also expecting a future benefit through being the next president,” the opposition newspaper al-Dostor said on Wednesday.
The state media once covered Gamal’s political activities only sporadically and discretely. They now show his photograph as often as they show those of many ministers, making him a familiar face to an increasing number of Egyptians.
The question now is not whether he is the chosen successor but how the Mubarak family and the ruling party will organize a smooth succession, the analysts say.
His only superior in the ruling party is aging apparatchik and secretary-general Safwat el-Sharif, who has been in government service without a break since the 1960s and is not considered a serious contender to succeed Mubarak.
Mubarak, who celebrates his 79th birthday on May 4, the same day as the public wedding party in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, won a fifth six-year term in presidential elections in September 2005 and has never appointed a vice president.
If he does not last till his current term expires in 2010, the prime minister would take over temporarily but the choice of a successor would fall to the ruling party, whose candidate would face a minimal challenge from the small opposition parties able to field presidential candidates.
Under constitutional amendments passed in 2005 and this year, the country’s largest opposition force, the Muslim Brotherhood, would not be able to compete because the government refuses to let it form a political party.

Labor movement possible future for Egypt opposition

Posted on By 3arabawy

A long report by Paul Schemm, on the current strike wave in Egypt and the opposition:

The largest wave of labor unrest to hit Egypt in the past half century could be more than just the birth pangs of a liberalising economy but also the mass movement needed to revitalise a flagging opposition.
Starting in 2004 and then picking up speed two years later, wildcat strikes have flared across the country, hitting everything from small food-processing factories to the massive state-owned textile firms.
“There are contradictory developments going on. On one level, you can say that the tide is receding and the (opposition) movement is subsiding,” said Wael Khalil of Kefaya, a loosely organized protest movement that appeared on the scene two years ago but has since lost much of its momentum.
“At the same time, the level of discontent is higher than before, and not only the workers,” he said, noting that while Kefaya’s urban protests have been easily crushed, the government has been quick to respond to workers’ demands.
“The thing about the workers movement is how frightened the government is — it is really a demonstration of how a mass movement can bring about change,” he said.
For every single strike over the past few months, government agencies have been quick to negotiate with the workers and grant their demands, which have generally been for unpaid bonuses, benefits and salaries.
“The government has the money to pay it because the price of oil is high and they’ve sold off a bunch more public sector enterprises,” explained Joel Beinin, the head of the Middle East Studies department at the American University in Cairo and a long time observer of Egypt’s labor scene.
“This is the biggest, longest strike wave at least since the fall of 1951,” he added. “Just in terms of the size of what we are talking about, it is substantially different from what we’ve had before.”
In his writings, Beinin has described the strikes as “the most substantial and broad-based kind of resistance to the regime.”
In 2006 alone, the independent daily Al-Masri Al-Youm counted 222 instances of labor unrest, including a week-long strike at the massive spinning and weaving complex at Mahalla al-Kobra north of Cairo involving some 20,000 workers.
The trend has continued in 2007 with daily reports of strikes.
There are indications, however, that the government has become fed up with these protests and sit-ins, and Labour Minister Aisha Abdel Hadi has suggested that rabble rousers are behind the wave.
“This situation has gone on long enough — we are working to solve the problems of the workers, but there are those who want to ignite a revolution,” she said on television mid-April.
Government ire has recently focused on labor NGOs like the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS), which they have publicly accused of fomenting the strikes.
In April, the organization’s offices were closed down in the southern town of Nag Hammadi, the northern industrial complex of Mahalla, and on Wednesday police dragged activists out of their headquarters in Cairo’s gritty industrial suburb of Helwan.
“Closing the offices of a labor rights group won’t end labor unrest,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East Director of the Human Rights Watch.
“The government should be upholding legal commitments to Egypt’s workers instead of seeking a scapegoat.”