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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Another row over defining normalisation
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
President Hosni Mubarak asserted Egypt's commitment to press freedom in an opening address to a conference of the World Association of Press Councils (WAPC), held in Cairo this week. "In Egypt, we have decided that [freedom of the press], in accordance with the law and constitution, is one of the pillars of government," Mubarak said.
In the address, read on his behalf by Mustafa Kamal Helmi, speaker of the Shura Council and chairman of the Supreme Press Council, Mubarak urged that "there should be a balance between the responsible freedom of the press and the rights of journalists, individuals and society."
During the three-day conference which began Thursday, Ibrahim Nafie, chairman of the Press Syndicate and the Arab Journalists Federation, said "nothing is more dangerous to the freedom of the press than journalists who lack the basic talent to reflect reality freely. Without developed journalistic talent, any talk about new technology is absurd because technology by itself does not make a free or responsible press."
Judge B B Swant, chairman of the association, said "freedom of the press is not the freedom of the owners of newspapers, but the freedom of the individuals and people."
Just hours before the opening, the Press Syndicate issued a statement calling for a conference boycott due to the presence of an Israeli journalist who is a WAPC member.
"The national and syndicate responsibilities make a conference boycott necessary in line with the many general assembly resolutions that ban all types of professional and syndicate normalisation with Israeli personalities and institutions until all occupied lands are liberated," the statement said. "This is also in keeping with the recommendations of the Arab Journalists Federation," the statement added.
"Our goal is not condemnation or punishment," said Yehia Qalash, secretary-general of the Press Syndicate, but going on record as taking an anti-normalisation stand.
The debate over normalisation resulted in one casualty. Abdel-Aal El-Baqouri, former editor of the leftist Tagammu Party's mouthpiece Al-Ahali, resigned from the party's membership in protest against the presence of Rifaat El-Said, the party's secretary-general, at the meeting.
"I submit to you, with great sorrow, my resignation from the party, to which I belonged since its establishment, in protest against the participation of Rifaat El-Said, the party's general secretary, in the conference. I resign with a heart filled with pain for my party that once took a great historic stance against Camp David," El-Baqouri said in a letter to party chairman Khaled Mohieddin. El-Baqouri was referring to the 1978 Camp David peace accords signed between Egypt and Israel.
El-Said said he did not believe that taking part in conferences attended by Israelis could be called normalisation. "Otherwise, we would have to pull out of the United Nations, the Red Cross, etc. We would be out of our minds to abandon all international gatherings that Israelis participate in and isolate ourselves," he told Al-Ahram Weekly.
El-Said took pride in "having resisted normalisation from the very beginning when the price was imprisonment."
What is normalisation then? "For me, normalisation is having relations with any representative of the Zionist entity," El-Said said. "Attending conferences does not mean having a relationship with them."
