HARDAKER: Summer in Cairo and the streets are boiling but it’s not just the heat. Democracy is on its way to the Arab world’s most influential capital, a city crammed with more than twenty million souls. Anger has an outlet and it’s hissing and fizzing. Students, doctors, lawyers, Islamic groups – you name it – they’re here.
Their rallying cry is “kifeya” enough, enough of President Hosni Mubarak and enough of twenty-four years of state of emergency. Dr Ali Abd Al Fattah is a senior Muslim Brotherhood official.
DR ALI ABD AL FATTAH: We have in Egypt tens of thousands of people in custody without committing any crime.
HARDAKER: But this is a very Egyptian piece of democracy. It’s being permitted by the State, it’s confined to a tiny city corner and they’re no match for security, but that it’s come even this far is in no small part due to the work of Egypt’s leading democracy campaigner, Saad Eddin Ibrahim.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: I continue to speak my mind on all issues. I take pride in helping to set the agenda of Egyptian public debate. We have raised issues that nobody had raised before.
HARDAKER: Saad Eddin Ibrahim was thrown into gaol five years ago on various charges including fraud and damaging the good name of the state, but his real crime was something else. He spoke his mind about the state of democracy in Egypt. His case caused an international uproar. After two and a half years all charges were quashed.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: I am enjoying my freedom. I’m enjoying the margin of fighting that I have since I get out of prison.
HARDAKER: What are the scars from being in prison?
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: Scars, my health, that is the only downside of an experience that otherwise was a very rich experience. It helped me grow. It helped me know myself, it helped me know my society, my president, the Egyptian elite, the Egyptian intellectual and also to appreciate my family and to appreciate normal, simple Egyptian people.
HARDAKER: Dr Ibrahim has been left with nerve damage and it’s difficult for him to walk. A legacy of being sleep deprived for weeks on end while in detention. At this family wedding he’s an honoured guest, the internationally revered freedom fighter, returning to his hometown.
Outside this circle of friends and family though, the sociology professor remains a dangerous man with a dangerous mind. He’s concentrating now on making sure Egypt’s presidential elections are free and fair. At his centre in Cairo, he’s organised the training of election monitors with money from the United States Government and though he will surely antagonise the state all over again, he’s ready for the battle.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: The pressure is always there. I think the difference is that I have learnt to manage pressure. I have learnt to answer back and to answer back very forcefully and to speak to Mubarak directly and that’s what the role an intellectual is, to speak truth to power.
HARDAKER: Mubarak of course is President Hosni Mubarak, the most powerful man in the most powerful country in the Arab world. For the first time he’s having to campaign for election. Hosni Mubarak has been Egypt’s uncontested President for nearly a quarter of a century and he’s been a valuable ally for the United States. It donates two billion dollars a year to Egypt, in return the President has been a stable friend in a hostile neighbourhood.
PRESIDENT HOSNI MUBARAK: [Speaking at rally] I speak to you today as Egypt is on the doorstep of the first competitive presidential election
HARDAKER: In this room, the President doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody.
PRESIDENT HOSNI MUBARAK: [Speaking at rally] This election I am sure will be free and honest and transparent.
HARDAKER: But Hosni Mubarak has another audience in Washington. The Americans have been paying a great deal of attention to Cairo.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: You don’t know what happens behind closed doors but definitely the noise they make is the right noise, the statements they make are the right statements and as an activist I will take it and run with it and push for it. I do not, I give people the benefit of the doubt. I am not a professional anti-American like many of my fellow intellectuals here and elsewhere.
HARDAKER: Egypt matters now because the Bush Administration has made it a key testing ground for bringing democracy to the Middle East. Earlier this year the US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice came to town. She delivered a major speech aimed at Cairo, the heart of the Arab world.
CONDOLEEZA RICE: For sixty years my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: I personally welcome the assertion of her country’s commitment to democracy, her admission that they had been in the wrong for sixty years by preferring stability over democracy, something that they paid dearly for on nine eleven and they’ll continue to pay for it so long as they stick to this stability business over freedom and democracy.
HARDAKER: So if democracy is the answer, who will carry its torch? Ayman Nour is one presidential candidate, the kind of the alternative the United States would like to encourage. He’s young, he wears a suit and he’s committed to secular democracy. The forty one year old lawyer became a cause celebre for the United States earlier this year. He’d been detained on charged of electoral fraud, charges he denies and when Condoleeza Rice came to Cairo, she made a point of meeting him.
AYMAN NOUR: She asked me what I thought about the steps toward democracy. She said it was like an open door. I said no, it is like a revolving door – when you open it, it closes on the other side.
HARDAKER: Ayman Nour has become a rallying point for the disaffected in Cairo’s educated urban classes. Inside the Nour bubble, it’s easy to get carried away. Outside it’s clear that what matters is not so much what Ayman Nour stands for, as who he is standing against.
MAN AT RALLY: Twenty-four years of failure under Mubarak’s rule leads me not to vote for him. On what basis should I vote for him? Twenty-four years of failure.
HARDAKER: But even Ayman Nour knows he stands little chance.
AYMAN NOUR: My chances are based on Egyptian desire for change. You only have to go to the street, to the taxi driver, to the masses of Egyptians who are suffering from poverty, tyranny, oppression and emergency laws – then you will find out the amount of anger and desire for change.
HARDAKER: Egypt’s problems would test the wisdom of the Pharaohs. Top of the list is unemployment. Young men with university degrees are frustrated by the lack of professional opportunities. Ahmed Mustafa is thirty years old and a graduate in computer science. He’s been driving taxis for the past seven years.
AHMED MUSTAFA: I didn’t go to the institute and study computers to drive a taxi. My wish was to find a job using my qualifications and to become a respected computer engineer with a nice office. Unfortunately there is no such job for me – that’s why I’m driving a cab.
HARDAKER: One man who sees the hardship daily is a small supermarket owner who returned from America five years ago.
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Go back fifteen or twenty years ago, the living in Egypt was better, a lot better. Now it’s just a struggle. The people struggle to make a living honestly. It’s 80% of the Egyptian people they’re on the ground.
HARDAKER: You mean they’re so poor?
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Yeah so poor, 80%. It’s very miserable really but what can you do? I am only one person, what could I do?
HARDAKER: Political Islam. It’s the power of the streets. Officially though it’s invisible. The Muslim Brotherhood is far and away the biggest opposition group here but it’s banned from running for any government elections. In Egypt’s second city, Alexandria, the Muslim Brothers control the doctor’s union. Its chief spokesman is Dr Ali Abd Al Fattah. He too has been sent to prison, in his case, twelve times and Dr Fattah believes it’s only a matter of time before the Brotherhood becomes part of the official political scene.
DR FATTAH: The strength and popular appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood represents real competition for this regime which can’t compete now, and that’s why it needs extraordinary laws and pre-emptive strikes against the Muslim Brotherhood.
HARDAKER: Back in 1954, Egypt’s revolutionary President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brother’s disbanded their military operations in the mid 1960s and since then there’s been no violence committed in their name but questions have remained over the Brotherhood’s possible links with more radical offshoots, such as this group of fundamentalists on trial after the assassination of President Anwar Sadt twenty five years ago.
Today the Muslim Brotherhood is not linked to Al Qaeda nor is it on the US list of terrorist organisations. Despite this, its members regularly serve time in prison and with Egypt’s economic problems, there’s a ready support base for the Muslim Brothers.
DR FATTAH: The Muslim Brotherhood is an important part of Egyptian society. We feel the suffering of the people and we try to relieve that suffering.
HARDAKER: In a country strapped for social and health services, these people look to the Muslim Brotherhood. It operates a shadow social welfare system. As it gives clearer vision, the Muslim Brotherhood wins hearts and minds but the group isn’t only getting support from the poor. Better off people like Mamdouh Zakki also subscribe to their values.
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Our religion in Egypt is a lot better. In U.S.A there is no religion – everyone going his own way – but in Egypt we have mosques. I teach my kids our religion.
HARDAKER: And you see that as being more valuable than the kind of life they would have in America?
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Oh yeah.
HARDAKER: Mahmoud Zakki spent almost twenty years in the United States before returning with his family. He believes Egypt needs democracy but he’s not interested in any of the candidates officially on offer.
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Most the good people, they are in gaol.
HARDAKER: The Muslim Brotherhood?
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: Yeah the Muslim Brothers. They are in gaol for no reason. They don’t do anything.
HARDAKER: I guess the reason from the point of view of the Government is that those people are a threat to the State.
MAHMOUD ZAKKI: These people don’t do anything. Every six months they take them, they put them in gaol. Every six months.
HARDAKER: It’s hard to know exactly how much support the Muslim Brotherhood has. Estimates vary between thirty and fifty per cent of the population. The Muslim Brothers have abandoned their decades old slogan, ‘Islam is the Solution’. Now it’s ‘Democracy is the Solution’. Their goal is an Islamic state, perhaps like Saudi Arabia but the sceptics fear that with power, they would be anything but democratic themselves. Certainly the United States won’t be getting any favours.
DR FATTAH: America doesn’t want democracy, whether it’s the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement, or an Arabian nationalist movement which is democratic because it will reject U.S. support for Israel and the occupation of Palestine. It rejects the U.S. war in Iraq and the U.S. imposition of an oppressive new world order.
HARDAKER: Even the poorest are watching satellite TV. Publicity for America is all bad. Its attempts to bring democracy to Iraq are the nightly horror show.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: Iraq was suppose to be a model in the regime transitions from non democratic to democratic rule. Instead it became a quagmire and a bloody exercise and that is definitely not good for the Iraqis, not good for the United States, not good for the region, not good for us as democracy advocates.
HARDAKER: This is America’s dilemma, both here in Egypt and the broader Middle East. If it wants true democracy it risks the rise of an Islamic Government. If it wants stability, it risks more and more anger and more and more converts to extremist Islam. So in the meantime, the United States is backing the gradual reform of Hosni Mubarak and at the same time fostering the growth of a new political class.
President Mubarak is promising change, including an end to emergency rule and opening up the state run media. There’s no doubt the President will be returned but the Muslim Brotherhood has decided to encourage its followers to vote rather than to boycott the election. There’s no sign yet though that the President will be bringing the Muslim Brotherhood inside the political tent.
Do you think that if an Islamic organisation continues to be shut out of democracy, is there the risk in the future of violence against the ruling regime?
DR FATTAH: Violence is the result of a lack of freedom. The proof is that Egypt has had emergency laws for more than fifty years – yet the violence continues.
DR SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: You will have to deal with them sooner or later because they are not going to disappear. They have been on the scene, something like the Muslim Brothers since 1928 so I tell you now about nearly eighty years and I am arguing that engage them and it is only engagement that will moderate them and will give democracy the kind of credibility it deserves.
HARDAKER: Today Dr Ibrahim and his wife Barbara are unpacking the past. The sixty seven year old academic is moving into his new study.
BARBARA IBRAHIM: Here’s one we’ve been looking for right here, Nelson Mandela.
SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: Nelson Mandela book I got in prison .....
HARDAKER: He cherishes the book Nelson Mandela sent him in prison.
BARBARA IBRAHIM: Egypt needs more Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s. I’m very proud of him and what he does and as I said, I think he’s inspiring now a lot of other people to take risks and that’s what we need around here.
HARDAKER: He acknowledges there’s a fear of what democracy might deliver in Egypt.
SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM: Of course the fear is legitimate but since when do we allow fear to paralyse us? If you allow fear to paralyse you and to stagnate and to keep the status quo, that means you are really helping dictators to remain in power – somebody like Hosni Mubarak will remain in power forever. I would rather take the risk then live with a dictator.
HARDAKER: By the end of another Presidential term, Hosni Mubarak will be eighty-two. In the last few months he’s been talking a lot about change, and free and fair elections. By his actions though, he will show how far the US can push democracy not only in Egypt but in the entire Middle East.