by Robin Wright
“We have something called negarrasoh in Egypt,” Shahbender explained. “It means ‘ring bells,’ like about someone’s shame. During the Fatimid period, if someone did something wrong, he’d be put backwards on a donkey and walked through town. A man next to him would ring bells and say, ‘This man stole two chickens. He is a thief’—or whatever he did wrong. Shame is very effective in Egypt,” she said.
“We have a long tradition of negarrasoh. This is the weapon we were trying to use.”
By the legislative elections, We’re Watching You also had a critical new asset—name recognition.
“In many places, people were waiting for our task forces. ‘Oh, you Shayfeecom people are here at last,’ they’d say,” Shahbender recalled.
Throughout the four weeks of elections, calls poured in from people who were not volunteers but had violations to report—some to telephone numbers that had not been released. “I had no idea how people got my private cell phone,” Shahbender said.
Egypt’s legislative elections differed significantly from the presidential poll in one pivotal respect: The Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to run, sort of. The party—like all religious parties—was formally outlawed from engaging in politics. But the government sporadically allowed its candidates to run as independents. Several Egyptian analysts told me that the government’s decision to let the Brotherhood participate had dual benefits. It would counter criticism that Egypt was not opening up enough, while also scaring the West into backing a slower pace of change, out of fear that the Brotherhood would be the alternative.
But in 2005, the government miscalculated the Brotherhood’s support. In the first round alone, the Islamic party won thirty-five seats, already doubling the total it had held in the previous parliament. Abruptly, the next two stages of the election turned nasty. In key districts, voters for ruling-party candidates were brought in to vote early, then police closed down polling stations or harassed voters to discourage voting.7
“From phase one to phase three, there was a buildup of violence and vote-rigging,” Shahbender told me. “We decided that we didn’t want only to monitor the vote. We wanted to prevent wrongdoing from happening. So when polling stations were closed up, we put up a fight for voters to be able to get in. And in some places we succeeded.”
On the final day of voting, Shahbender was in the village of Kafr Mit Bashar. The district was important because one of the candidates was the brother of Mubarak’s chief of staff. The polling was actually a rerun because of irregularities in the first balloting. A Western diplomat who monitored the local vote later told me that the ruling party had used the first vote to figure out where the opposition votes were—and then blocked them during the rerun.8
Shahbender arrived to find the polling station, at a local school, barricaded by police. “Villagers had put a ladder around the school and started jumping over and into the polling station. The police then moved the ladder,” Shahbender recalled. “We stood there and tried to negotiate with the head of the riot police. We said, ‘Look, let them in ten by ten, women first.’ We tried to ask nicely. We asked, ‘Why are they keeping them out? Where did the orders come from?’
“It was a routine for them,” Shahbender added. “The same thing had happened in other villages in earlier rounds of voting.”
Then the shooting began.
“There were about 200 voters, men and women—their children were playing in the dust behind them—waiting to get into the polling station. They were confronted by rows of riot police. Our volunteers were on the front line between riot police and voters,” she said, mapping it out with her fingers on the table.
“The police started beating us with batons. They fired rubber bullets and then live ammunition,” she said, pausing to add, “I now know the difference between the sound of rubber bullets and live ammunition.”
“Then they fired nine canisters of tear gas—for a crowd of 200 peasants who were not in any way armed. And then it was chaos. Children were running around calling for their mothers or fathers. One child had suffered a broken arm from a baton—you could see it—and he was crying.
“We hid behind our car, but we were suffocating from the tear gas. The villagers were shouting at the police, ‘Where are the Israeli forces that you are fighting?’ I told one of the kids to get onions. A journalist had told me that onions help with tear gas. Villagers were soon coming out of the field with onions.
“Our cameraman is a giant, but he was scared,” Shahbender continued. “We were all keeping an eye on the cameraman. He was our proof of what happened. In fact, I didn’t fully comprehend what happened until I saw it later on film.
“Afterwards, I understood that this was not about elections or change. It was about resistance to change, and I began to really understand what a big job we have ahead of us.”
At each stage of the voting, We’re Watching You issued public reports. By the third round, the group charged that the electoral process had lost credibility.9 After eleven Egyptians died in clashes at polling stations, it also charged that Mubarak’s government was responsible for the most violent election in Egyptian history.
“Security services perpetrated a great deal of unwarranted violence against voters, the media and civil society activists and prevented them from entering polling stations, taking pictures, and even prevented judicial officials from carrying out their jobs and monitoring the elections,” the Shayfeencom report concluded.10
We’re Watching You was quoted throughout the Middle East, by the international press, and by human-rights groups around the world. Only four months had passed since the launching of Shayfeencom, less than seven months since Black Wednesday.
After the election, the group began to diversify its focus. When I stopped in to see Shahbender, We’re Watching You had just begun to track avian flu. Rooftop poultry breeders are a Cairo fixture, and the disease had just hit Egypt. In a panic, breeders were dumping their dead chickens into the Nile, which is the main source of drinking water for millions of Egyptians.
Shayfeencom had received information about more than 100 patients hospitalized with suspicious symptoms. It was organizing doctors to quietly probe the cases, because government officials were saying little publicly. Five people were soon confirmed with avian flu, and two immediately died.
Before leaving, I asked Shahbender if she was going to get her pink voting card when registration opened up again. “Yes,” she laughed. “Of course.”
I also asked if she was worried about becoming a target of the Egyptian government, particularly its massive State Security intelligence service.
She pulled slowly on a cigarette. Shahbender said she had quit smoking several years earlier, but took it up again after Black Wednesday.
“Yes, I have to be realistic,” she said. “Besides, they make a point of letting us know that their ears are listening.”
The State Security intelligence headquarters is on Lazoghly Square, not too far from Shayfeencom’s office. A heavily guarded building set behind a black marble arch, it is the most feared address in Cairo. Amnesty International and other human-rights groups cite it as a place where detainees are regularly interrogated and tortured.11 As shorthand, Egyptians often refer to State Security simply as Lazoghly.
When we met, Shahbender’s divorce had been finalized a month earlier. At the same time, she had acquired a little black Pekingese puppy. She named it Lazoghly.
“Now I walk around home or the office,” Shahbender chuckled, “and I say, ‘Here, Lazoghly. Here, Lazoghly. Where are you, Lazoghly?”
The agents of change in the Middle East are not always outsiders or newcomers. A new generation of whistle-blowers is emerging from within.
Noha al Zeiny has been on the Egyptian government payroll since she graduated from Cairo University Law School in 1976. She immediately joined the Ministry of Justice and rose through the ranks until she became a top official in the chief prosecutor’s office. In 2005, she was sufficiently senior—and trust
ed—that the government dispatched her to supervise a key constituency in Egypt’s parliamentary elections.
That’s when Zeiny dared to speak out.
It was not an easy decision, she told me, when I caught up with her at Cairo’s military hospital, where she and her sister were tending to their critically ill mother.
Like a growing number of Egyptian women, Zeiny wears hejab, or modest Islamic clothing. When we met, her black hair was covered by a dark piece of cloth that tightly encircled her face and was pinned together right under her chin. Her wholesomely round face bore no makeup, and she was dressed in a comfortably loose navy blue sweat suit. The effect was a stark contrast to the stylish Shahbender, who is distinctly secular in appearance and outlook.
Sitting on a hospital-room chair as her sister spoon-fed supper to their mother, Zeiny spoke in the deliberate, sequential language of a lawyer building a case. She speaks basic English but was more comfortable using technical terms through an interpreter. At the end of each translation, she would nod her head in approval and then continue.
The turning point for Zeiny was November 12, 2005. “I was sent to Damanhur to help supervise the election,” she began. Judges supervise elections, but there were not enough judges for all the polling stations, so the government had also dispatched senior staff from the Ministry of Justice.
Damanhur is a microcosm of testy Egyptian politics. The city of more than 200,000 people is about two thirds of the way from Cairo to the historic Mediterranean port of Alexandria. Damanhur survives off the fertile cotton, date, and potato fields on the Nile Delta, but it is not a backwater. Ahmed Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1999, was born in Damanhur.
Zeiny was supposed to show up the morning of the election, but she decided to arrive the night before. “It was midnight,” she recounted, “and from the minute I got there, I heard people shouting, ‘Heshmat, Heshmat, We are with you.’ It went on all night. One group would chant for awhile, and then another group would pick up and continue.
“For me, this was a strange experience,” she explained. “I’d never seen or heard anything like it.”
Gamal Heshmat was the incumbent—kind of. The Damanhur election in 2005 was really about how much democracy—and Islam—Egyptian politics would tolerate. Heshmat was a key to the answer.
The son of a Ministry of Education official, Heshmat had joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was in medical school. “It was the idea of purity, the idea of religion for the sake of religion, of serving the people without payback,” he told The Los Angeles Times.12
Heshmat went on to become a family doctor and university professor. But in 2000, he decided to put his political beliefs into practice and run for parliament. He won.
The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed in 1954, but since 1984 its members have run as barely disguised “independents” or in alliance with—effectively under the protective cover of—secular parties. It is part of a political game Mubarak played with the movement; the government does not want to legalize any religious party, but it also has to deal with the reality of the Brotherhood’s popularity. Heshmat was one of seventeen Brotherhood “independents” elected in 2000.13
The clean-shaven doctor, whose balding pate still has a lonely tuft of hair in the front, quickly gained attention as an upstart legislator. He made daring allegations about government corruption. He assembled a report on torture by State Security, notably at Lazoghly Square.14 He also campaigned against controversial literature, charging that three popular novels had implicitly pornographic passages and a fourth was blasphemous.15
The fourth book was Banquet for Seaweed, a book first published in 1983 and cleared for reprinting by Egypt’s Ministry of Culture almost a generation later. In it, two Iraqi intellectuals escape Saddam Hussein’s regime and end up blaming oppression in the Arab world on dictators and conservatives. But one passage describes God as a failed artist. That was enough to spark protests in Cairo and Heshmat’s demand for its banishment. The government withdrew approval of the book.
The flap over the book won public attention because it suddenly pitted moral values against freedom of expression—and spurred a heated debate about political correctness in Egypt. Islamists were outraged. Intellectuals counterprotested. Columnists filled newspapers with criticism. Officials resigned from the Ministry of Culture.16
And Heshmat was soon stripped of his seat in parliament. It happened circuitously. In late 2002, two years after his election, the People’s Assembly rammed through approval—in twenty-four hours—of a government report citing irregularities in Damanhur’s 2000 election and calling for a new vote. Heshmat was forced to run again—with four days’ notice of the new poll.17 This time, he lost. The State Department’s annual Human Rights Report noted “heavy-handed police interference on polling day” in favor of Heshmat’s opponent.18
A few months later, Heshmat was jailed. Members of Egypt’s parliament have immunity from prosecution. Once he lost his seat, however, he was vulnerable. Heshmat was arrested for membership in an illegal organization—the Muslim Brotherhood. He was held for four months, although never officially charged or tried.
After his release, Heshmat decided to run for parliament again in 2005. That’s where Zeiny came in.
“I was asked to supervise one of the polling stations in a primary school on November 12,” Zeiny told me. The vote actually went smoothly. Her station stayed open late because, as often happens in the Middle East, many voters showed up at the end of the day.
“This is important,” Zeiny stressed, “because that means I was also one of the last stations to close.” Afterward, she accompanied the ballot boxes under heavy security to a large tent set up in a military-school compound where votes from each Damanhur polling place were individually counted.
“We were sitting around counting, and we could all hear each other,” Zeiny recalled. “Representatives of the candidates attended the process, which was the first time this happened and was one of the most positive things about the election.”
Heshmat’s chief opponent was Mustafa Fiqi, who had served as chairman of parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee as well as Egypt’s ambassador to Austria and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But Fiqi had never run for office. Egypt’s legislature, which has 454 seats, includes ten members appointed by the president. They often go to Egypt’s minority Coptic Christians and women—and Mubarak allies in the National Democratic Party. Fiqi had always been one of the ten. Born in a village near Damanhur, Fiqi had moved to Cairo as a student and never returned.19 He went back in 2005, only to run against a popular local doctor.
“It was quite clear by the end of a long night,” Zeiny recalled, “that Heshmat had won an overwhelming majority. All of the polling stations were announcing ‘Heshmat.’ ‘Heshmat.’ ‘Heshmat.’” She calculated that Heshmat had about 25,000 votes to about 7,000 for Fiqi. Fiqi’s representatives were visibly disappointed.
It was almost dawn when Zeiny finished; most of her counterparts were long gone. She lingered to hear the final result, but as the process was wrapping up, she was asked to leave. She thought the request strange, since she was one of the supervising authorities. But the results were so obvious that she returned to her hotel.
The next morning, the government announced that Fiqi had won. Zeiny was stunned. She immediately contacted other officials who had supervised the poll to discuss what happened.
At this point she paused in her story. “There is some information that I can’t tell you,” she said. “I was told in confidence by other officials, and I can’t repeat it unless I am called to testify. All I can tell you is that two high-ranking officials confessed to me that in cases like this documents are changed. But I don’t know how it’s done.”
Zeiny agonized about what to do. When she got back to Cairo, she decided to pull together all the threads of what she had witnessed in a document.
“I hesitated, and I was feeling very anxious,”
she recalled. “I had colleagues calling me and saying, ‘Let it go.’”
Zeiny stayed up all night working on language, but she was still not sure what to do when she finished the draft. Then she picked up her morning newspapers. Every day, Zeiny told me, she gets three newspapers delivered to her door. Two are government-owned, Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar. The third is the new independent Al-Masri al-Youm, or The Egyptian Today, which then had only been publishing for seventeen months.
“By complete chance, the new paper was on top of the pile, and there was a picture of Mustafa Fiqi on the front declaring that there was no fraud,” Zeiny recalled, laughing.
Fiqi had made a big deal during his campaign about not seeking preferential treatment because of his government connections. “I’ve announced from the beginning that I’ll quit if there’s any rigging,” he had said at his last campaign rally, the night Zeiny arrived in Damanhur. “I believe in my freedom and the freedom of others.”20 He said the same thing after the election.
“When I saw this statement, all hesitation ended,” Zeiny said.
“That’s when I decided to call the new paper and give it my testimony.” It proved to be a fateful liaison.
The day after I talked to Zeiny I called on Hisham Kassem, publisher of The Egyptian Today. He also happens to be the president of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, and he had run as an independent in the 2000 parliamentary elections but lost. Kassem is a tall man with silver-flecked black hair and a well-groomed mustache that fits the contours of his mouth right up to the ends of his upper lip. He chain smokes Kents, sometimes double-puffing.
The Egyptian Today was the country’s first independent daily in Arabic. Others had tried as weeklies or in English, including Kassem’s own Cairo Times, but eventually closed. The Egyptian Today opened in June 2004 with a run of only 500 papers. Early issues, Kassem told me, “were a disaster. The first six months were hell.”
But the paper soon settled into a groove of bold, hard-hitting, but fact-based stories and wryly sharp editorial cartoons, both mainly about regime shortfalls. Its first rule was that pictures of Egypt’s leadership would not be a fixture on the front page.