Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  Egyptian security forces snatched me as I was leaving my seat in Parliament amid the cries of my political allies and the suspicious indifference of my opponents. I was dragged away and assigned to a new seat, at Tora prison south of Cairo. Now I sit writing by candlelight, trying to make sense of what is happening to me, my country and the Middle East.

  Only 89 days before my arrest, I had celebrated the birth of my “liberal” dream: the Tomorrow Party. This project to form a new opposition group in Egypt had suffered governmental rejection for three years, and we won our license to operate only after four legal battles in court. It was a momentous achievement: ours was the first liberal party to be licensed in Egypt since the military coup of 1952. Now a white, rectangular placard is posted at Tora prison carrying my photo and the number 1387.25

  Nour’s arrest came shortly before President Mubarak proposed a constitutional amendment allowing multiparty elections for president. Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail, remembered the day of the announcement—and Nour’s reaction.

  “Ayman was on a hunger strike, and I went to visit him, to try to convince him to stop, when he heard on the radio about the proposed amendment,” she told me. “So he immediately wrote a letter and said, ‘Give this to the party and have them approve it, and then give it to the media.’”

  Nour had decided to run for president.

  “I thought he was really going crazy,” she told me. “He was in prison!”

  Under mounting pressure both at home and abroad, the government soon released Nour on bail—shortly after Condoleezza Rice canceled her first trip to Egypt as secretary of state to signal displeasure over the arrest.

  Nour ran a quixotic campaign under the slogan “hope and change.” His platform offered Egyptians a two-year transition period. It would include an end to emergency law, release of political detainees, press freedom, an anticorruption campaign, education reform, and new laws to convert Egypt into a parliamentary republic.

  Nour often spoke emotionally, occasionally breaking down from a combination of exhaustion, excitement, and behind-the-scenes harassment. Crass stories were leaked to the press, including one that his father had falsified Nour’s birth certificate to cover an illegitimate birth, a sensitive issue in Egypt. Another widespread rumor alleged that his two teenage sons played “satanic” music in a band, another sensitive issue in a deeply religious society.

  “At the heart of frustration is oppression and the loss of hope,” Nour said on the day he opened his campaign. “The worst thing they stole from us is hope.”26

  Nour came in second out of ten candidates, at a distance, with almost eight percent of the vote.

  Defiant and still facing charges, Nour then ran again for parliament. This time, he lost the seat he had held for a decade in his stronghold. His supporters charged fraud.

  A month later, in December 2005, Nour was convicted on the charges of forging names on his petition to register the party. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict was condemned by governments and human rights groups worldwide. The White House said it was “deeply troubled” by the trial and called on Mubarak’s government to act “in the spirit of its professed desire for increased political openness and dialogue” and release Nour.

  As usual on human rights issues, Cairo had no public reply.

  Nour had been in prison again two months when I arrived in Egypt, so I called on his wife. A few hours beforehand, however, I received an urgent text message from her to go instead to a Cairo district court. Ismail had just been informed that her husband was being brought from prison to face seventeen new charges.

  When she arrived, however, Ismail was also told she was going to be charged with two offenses.

  The court proceedings were over by the time I got there. Getting anywhere in Cairo takes a long time. But Ismail, the family lawyers, and a small crowd of supporters were standing out on the curb of the courthouse with banners. She had a bullhorn in her hand and she was shouting as loud as she could, “Down, down Hosni Mubarak. Shame on the regime! End tyranny. Freedom for all!”

  Police milled around on the outskirts, and I saw a line of young thugs with truncheons walk by single-file and deploy beyond the police. Ismail continued her one-woman protest until she was almost hoarse, and then it broke up.

  Nour and Ismail met when she was an editorial assistant for Newsweek in Cairo. It was a love marriage. Her first assignment for the magazine had been to profile a young opposition figure under fire. He had recently launched a campaign against torture in prison and then been roughed up. During the interview, she asked his marital status—for the article. He took it as a sign she was interested and later asked her out. They were married two years later.

  Since then, they have had an unusual political partnership.

  Nour and Ismail live in a large apartment in the trendy Cairo suburb of Zamalek. The living room wall has an enormous picture, in oils, at least ten feet long, of Nour talking with a handful of colleagues in the courtyard of Egypt’s parliament. There is a pool on the large rooftop terrace and, as we talked, a large fluffy cat kept circling it.

  Ismail has dark hair that falls in wavy curls. She has a creamy-soft face; she once was a television presenter on a government-controlled station. But she was also edgy and drained from the courthouse experience. Suddenly she was dealing with her own legal crisis.

  “You know,” she said, “I remember one of the incidents they’re now charging me with. It was two months ago, and I was beaten on the head by a policeman at a demonstration. I told Ayman I wanted to file a report, but the policeman asked Ayman not to do it. Ayman told me this man is too poor, so we didn’t do anything. And then he files a report against us!

  “These are the dogs of the regime,” she said. “We should have filed a report just to protect ourselves.”

  Ismail was exhausted from threatening telephone calls. “They call late at night and say, ‘If you keep talking, he will never let him out of prison. Shut up. Stay home.’

  “I got a call once at midnight,” she continued. “He said, ‘If you don’t shut up, you will have a case of vice—he meant prostitution—against you.’ My parents are willing to have their daughter face any charge, but not this one. I have children. What would this do to them?

  “Then there were the threats of kidnapping the kids, stopping my brother’s business. They got women on the phone who said that they had had relations with my husband, that they had a baby with him. Another time they would call and say, we know what you are doing, what you are wearing, where you are sitting.

  “They do everything they can think of,” she added, “to plant fear in the hearts.”

  After Nour’s election losses and arrest, the Tomorrow Party fell into disarray. It split into two factions, after one side tried to remove Nour from the leadership.

  For all their problems, however, the democrats remain determined.

  I asked Ismail how she could hold out any hope for political change in Egypt, given her husband’s defeat in two critical elections, his imprisonment, the collapse of the party, and the personal harassment.

  “Oh, definitely, there will be change,” she said. “This culture of fear, of hidden anger, of hidden torture, of hidden suffering, of hidden everything is being shaken.

  “For so long, this country was closed. People didn’t have a voice,” she said. “We may not be winning elections, but now we can challenge the system and the president in public, and be heard. We have suffered a lot, and we will suffer a lot more. But we have done a lot too.

  “Nothing,” she added, “is as eternal as they once thought.”

  A year later, however, her husband languished in prison, largely forgotten by the outside world and unable to connect with Egyptians. Ismail held a Tomorrow Party summit to try to rally support. Five police trucks with police in riot gear assembled outside the meeting. But only fifty people showed up.27

  Of the three “crats,” the autocrats are both the toughest and most vulnerable
.

  Many now recognize the new political undercurrents. They feel the pressure of satellite television, the Internet, and public opinion they can no longer easily control. For them, politics is now a game of calculating two factors—what token changes they can risk, and how much repression they can use—in the quest to hold on to power.

  Before my final trip to Cairo, I made arrangements, through the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, to see Gamal Mubarak, the son of the Egyptian president. The younger Mubarak had emerged in 2000 as the young face of the regime. I wanted to talk to him about whether Egypt’s autocrats could change and, if so, how much.

  A tall man in his early forties, Mubarak has a trim, athletic build. He is noted for his well-tailored suits, and he wears his dark, slightly receding hair slicked back. He is a stark contrast with his bulkier father in other ways, too. While the president was born in a village—a fact still reflected in his speech—Gamal Mubarak grew up in the presidential palace. His father worked his way through Egypt’s military academy, while Gamal Mubarak earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business from the American University of Cairo. The president did part of his pilot’s training in the Soviet Union, while Gamal Mubarak worked six years at the Bank of America branch in London and started a private equity firm before returning to take up politics.

  Since Gamal Mubarak’s political debut in 2000, Egypt’s notorious political grapevine has frequently reported that he is his father’s favored political heir.28

  One of the major reasons the Egyptian regime appeared so brittle for so long was because President Mubarak refused to appoint a vice president—the route to the top job for all but one of Egypt’s presidents since the 1952 revolution. Mubarak balked after inheriting the presidency when Anwar Sadat was murdered in 1981. And he did not change his mind after an assassination attempt on his own life during a 1995 trip to Ethiopia or when he collapsed from illness during a nationally televised speech to parliament in 2003. He was not willing to designate a deputy or a running mate when he opened the presidency to popular elections in 2005. Nor did he budge when his health, at age seventy-eight, became the buzz of Cairo because of his frail appearance at the televised All-Africa Cup soccer championship in 2006. By then, Mubarak had become the third longest ruler in Egypt’s 6,000-year history.29

  Only half jokingly, Egyptians often referred to President Mubarak as “the last pharaoh” for his failure to share power or name a deputy. Many believed he was holding the position open to avoid the emergence of a rival to his son. Cairenes whispered that First Lady Suzanne Mubarak was particularly anxious to see her second son succeed her husband.

  The president denied that he wanted to create a new political dynasty. “It’s nonsense,” he once huffed.30 Gamal Mubarak—sometimes called Jimmy by friends—also claimed to have no presidential ambitions. “I am neither seeking nor do I wish to nominate myself,” he told Egyptian television in 2006.31

  But almost everyone I talked to in Egypt, including government officials speaking in private, did not believe the denials. The issue had become a regular feature of the new protest rallies. Kefaya demonstrators had a sequence of rhythmic chants: “Wanted, wanted, a new president—with conditions: Not corrupt. Not a dictator. And no kids!”

  “No to Hosni, No to Gamal,” they would cry.

  The demise of monarchies was one of the dominant themes of the twentieth century worldwide. The Middle East’s biggest upheavals, after gaining independence from European powers, were also revolutions that toppled kings in the name of social justice. But in the twenty-first century, several Arab countries began moving to establish new dynasties: President Mubarak created prominent political space for son Gamal. Libya’s Col. Moammar Qaddafi ceded power increasingly at home and abroad to son Saif. Before his ouster, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was grooming sons Uday and Qusay. When he died in 2000, Syrian President Hafez al Assad left son Bashar in power; the originally designated heir and older son, Basil, had died earlier in a car crash. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh put son Ahmed in charge of the most powerful branch of the military.

  For the regimes, the issues were ostensibly stability and continuity. But the trend emerged at a time when the systems in each capital were failing, and change was the more popular public theme.

  Gamal Mubarak made his formal political debut after the 2000 parliamentary elections, in which the ruling party had the poorest showing in its history. His father brought him in as chairman of a new Policy Secretariat designed to reform and reinvigorate the National Democratic Party.

  The Egyptian leader told the press it took a week of coaxing to get his son to take the job. “They told me he could help upgrade the party,” the president said. “I hope there will be forty or 100 people as active as him, so that I have a broad base of young leaders to choose from.”32

  Over the next six years, the younger Mubarak became assistant secretary-general of the ruling party. His peers took key party positions, replacing his father’s old guard. He made choreographed trips to Washington for talks with top White House, State Department and Pentagon officials. At home, he was widely photographed for the state-controlled media. And he held “Meet Gamal” town-hall meetings across the country with targeted groups, notably students and business leaders.

  He struck themes of change at every stop.

  “I think it’s time we stop viewing reform as something which is always imposed from outside,” he told 600 faculty and alumni at his alma mater in 2003. “We cannot claim to have achieved all our objectives, or that we are nearing the conclusion of the reform process. Much still needs to be done.”33

  A government reshuffle in 2004 led to the nickname “Gamal’s cabinet,” because the executive branch now included so many of his associates. During the 2004 party conference, his picture was emblazoned along with Egypt’s Olympic heroes on a four-sided billboard in downtown Cairo.34

  In 2004, a new book entitled Gamal Mubarak: Restoration of Liberal Nationalism described him as the most qualified person to be Egypt’s next leader. It was written by a university professor—and a senior member of the ruling party.35

  But the dead giveaway was shortly after the volatile 2005 elections, when the regime postponed city council elections for two years. The issue was not just local power; the move also made it more difficult to run for the presidency. Under the amendment proposed by President Mubarak and passed in the troubled May 25, 2005 referendum, independent presidential candidates had to have the written endorsement of at least 140 elected members of local councils as well as ninety members of the People’s Assembly—just to run. Without a new round of local elections, only the ruling party qualified.36

  Opposition movements quickly charged that the move was to foil any real competition to Gamal Mubarak. Even analysts on the government payroll told me they believed the often relentless government campaign against Ayman Nour was an attempt to derail a future rival to the younger Mubarak. The two men were the same age.

  Nour referred to the rivalry after he lost the presidency. “I dared to challenge the pharaoh,” Nour said afterward. “And the pharaohs used to kill all the possible male heirs except their own. Mubarak wants to hand Egypt over to his own son, Gamal, and Gamal could never beat me in a free election.”37

  When I made the request to talk to the younger Mubarak several weeks before my trip, Egyptian officials assured me that he was quite eager to answer questions about his reform agenda. I had interviewed his father several times in Cairo and Washington over a twenty-year period, so it seemed straightforward. But as soon as I arrived in Egypt, a foreign ministry official whom I had known for two decades traveled through tortuous Cairo traffic just to tell me that, unfortunately, Gamal Mubarak was “in retreat”—no specifics, just that he would be unavailable during my entire trip.

  I was instead invited to call on Osama al Baz, the longtime chief presidential adviser who studied law at Harvard, worked in the Arab-Israeli peace process dating back to the 1970s, and had become the old-gua
rd mentor to the younger Mubarak. Baz had chaperoned him on his Washington visits.

  Baz is a slight, wiry man with a thin face, graying hair, age spots, and eyebrows that arch at the very end rather than in the middle. We met in his cavernous, paneled office at the Foreign Ministry; it was decorated with fading brocade couches and a tired philodendron in a brass pot. He was dressed informally in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and no tie.

  Baz promised that he would work immediately—“yes, immediately!”—to get the promised meeting back on track. But in the meantime he offered his own reflections about Gamal Mubarak and the first family’s reform agenda. He speaks with a congenial but little-tough-guy insistence that reminded me of Edward G. Robinson.

  “Egypt is already in a state of transition,” Baz told me, waving his hand as if it was old news. “But you have to do it within the realm of political stability. There are peculiar conditions here. A political system depends on a country’s past, and the political and social factors at play, and a nation’s needs.

  “For that reason,” he continued, “Gamal believes there’s no formula that can fit all countries at all times. You also can’t do reform overnight, in a way that will result in massive unemployment.”

  Like many Arab regimes, Egypt invokes the China model, with economic reform to precede political openings, in the name of avoiding instability.

  The younger Mubarak was particularly focused on issues that most affect Egypt’s youth, Baz said, such as education and employment.

  Egypt’s education system was so broken in the first decade of the twenty-first century that most public schools had abridged double shifts, and some planned triple shifts to accommodate a burgeoning young population. Egypt needed to build at least 30,000 schools within the next five years just to provide enough classrooms for a single eight-hour shift, a senior official at the government’s largest think tank told me in deep frustration.