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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Prominent NGO figure arrested
By Mariz Tadros and Jailan Halawi
At 10.30 pm last Friday, Saadeddin Ibrahim, an AUC sociology professor and director of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Developmental Studies, was arrested at his home in the southern Cairo suburb of Maadi for allegedly receiving foreign funding with the intention of smearing Egypt's image. Charges against Ibrahim, who was remanded in custody for 15 days, include drafting reports on the internal situation in Egypt and other Arab countries in exchange for money from abroad, receiving bribes from foreign donors, embezzlement and forgery. State Security Prosecutor Hisham Saraya also accused Ibrahim of having "exploited the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Developmental Studies to establish contact with a great number of countries and foment internal problems that could threaten Egypt's stability." Ibrahim was also charged with obtaining "several million Egyptian pounds from foreign parties under the pretext of conducting research work in various fields."
The principal accusation directed to Ibrahim is that he received around $220,000 from the European Union to finance a documentary on parliamentary election participation that was regarded as "harmful to Egypt's reputation."
Nader Gohar, the owner of the video film production company which produced the documentary for Ibrahim, was also arrested, but released on the same day.
Nadia Abdel-Nour, the centre's financial director, a Sudanese, was arrested last Friday and remanded in custody for 15 days pending investigations. On Monday, the prosecutor ordered the arrest of five other centre employees, who were also taken in custody for 15 days. They were questioned about their involvement in the case of fraudulent electoral cards found on the centre's premises, prosecutors said. The centre has been shut down.
According to prosecution sources, some 17,000 forged electoral cards were seized at Ibrahim's house. Ibrahim, these sources add, has denied any connection with the forgeries, and has blamed researchers at the centre for any and all infractions.
Prosecutors accused Ibrahim of having instructed researchers at the centre to register fictitious voter names on the cards, buying them off at LE300 each. He then "received around LE50,000 from the European Union" as part of an EU-sponsored programme to educate citizens about their civic rights, prosecutors said.
Ibrahim holds US citizenship, in addition to his Egyptian nationality, and was visited on Monday by a US embassy official, who confirmed that he was being well-treated. The US ambassador to Egypt, Daniel Kurtzer, has spoken to a number of high-ranking government officials, including Prime Minister Atef Ebeid and Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, about Ibrahim's case.
A family source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that on her last visit to Ibrahim, he was being treated very properly and his health was good.
Ibrahim's arrest surprised many people. As an acclaimed sociologist with an international reputation, he has been involved in developmental work for decades. In recent years, however, he has been the subject of heated controversy triggered by his sponsorship of a series of annual conferences on ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world. These conferences seemed to classify Egyptian Copts as an ethnic minority similar to Kurds and south Sudanese, provoking the wrath of both the state and a many Egyptian intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian. They insist that Copts and Muslims are integral components of the same national and ethnic fabric, and have accused Ibrahim of pandering to extremist expatriate Coptic organisations in the US, which, they claim, are being supported by American Zionist groups to foment religious strife in Egypt.
Two US-based Coptic organisations have condemned his arrest and called for his release. The family source could not dismiss the possibility that Ibrahim's arrest might be related to his work on "the minorities' issue".
Hafez Abu Se'da, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), who was himself arrested in 1998 for accepting foreign funding, is a member of the team of lawyers defending Ibrahim. Abu Se'da said that no accusations related to the Coptic issue were directed at Ibrahim during the interrogation, except vague and general allusions to threatening national stability.
Ibrahim, Abu Se'da said, was arrested on the basis of a military decree issued in 1992 which prohibits the acceptance of foreign funds without prior permission from the government. But Abu Se'da challenged the legality of this decree which, he says, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Administrative Court.
The Ibn Khaldoun Centre was registered as a non-profit civil company but had applied for registration under the now-annulled NGO law. "Accepting foreign funding is not a crime," Abu Se'da said, wondering why the government decided to crack down on the centre now, although it has been receiving foreign funding for more than 12 years. If there are financial irregularities in the project, it is the EU's responsibility, as the funding body, and not the Egyptian government's, to do the auditing, insisted Abu Se'da.
EU sources told Al-Ahram Weekly on condition of anonymity that they have not released any statements because no official accusations have been made. They said since they have not been contacted by any of the concerned authorities, they were not going to act on hearsay. However, the sources stressed that the European Union has the right to fund non-governmental civil activity under the Framework Agreement which governs relations between the EU and Egypt.
"It is an agreement to which the Egyptian government is signatory and, therefore, any funding of human rights activities is done with its knowledge and is official and legal," a source said. The source added that the funding they gave to the Ibn Khaldoun Centre was through the Meda-Democracy Programme, a project intended to raise awareness of the importance of participation in elections among young people and marginalised groups.
The Ibn Khaldun Centre was allocated a sum of 170,000 euros, with a small part going to the documentary film on voting rights. "The documentary was for local consumption. It was not produced for foreign viewing," the source said.
Playwright Ali Salem, who wrote the script for the 10-minute film, said the centre had hoped to show it on local television before the balloting. "The script promotes Egypt's image, and urges Egyptians to participate in elections," he said.
European sources said they audited the project last year and found no financial irregularities. "We were satisfied that the objectives of the project were being delivered," they said.
Several human rights organisations have issued declarations condemning Ibrahim's arrest and expressing fear that it may be the first in a series of measures intended to curb the freedom of civil institutions in the country.
Gasser Abdel-Razek, head of the Hisham Mubarak Legal Centre and a human rights activist, believes that the arrest has very dangerous implications for civil society. He believes the government is attempting to tarnish activists' reputation by portraying their acceptance of foreign funding as a sign of lack of patriotism.
Abdel-Razek asserted that human rights organisations are concerned with the political context of the arrests, which indicates that the state is increasingly intolerant of any form of independent expression. Resorting to the 1992 military decree "means that they can arrest anyone for receiving foreign funding, even if they are working in the field of development or charity," he said.
Mohamed El-Sayed Said, the deputy director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and a board member of a number of human rights organisations, is perplexed by the timing of Ibrahim's arrest. He adds, however, that lately there were signs of a build up towards such a measure. He explains that the arrest of EOHR's Abu Se'da in 1998 had been preceded by "a vicious smear" campaign launched by a number of newspapers. The same happened with Ibrahim. "For a few weeks now, some newspapers have been slandering Ibrahim, accusing him of being an agent for the US, of corruption and of unpatriotic sentiment," Said stated.
According to Said, it is the substance of the work of human rights organisations, and not their foreign funding, that provokes the government's ire. "Many diverse organisations in Egypt, including economic and social research centres, even business associations, receive foreign funding," he noted.
Said believes that the government's move against Ibrahim will "kill civil society or force it to commit suicide". He sees the move as another step in a series of measures against civic expression. Ibrahim's arrest came one month after the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that Law 153 governing NGO activities was unconstitutional. Elections at the Bar Association have been indefinitely postponed and Al-Shaab newspaper, mouthpiece of the Islamist-oriented Labour Party, has been suspended.
Speculation is rife about what will happen next to Ibrahim. Some believe the government's decision to place his name on the list of people forbidden to leave the country may be a step towards his release. Others see that the arrest of his programme officers means he is unlikely to be released soon, and that he will probably remain in custody for a further 15-day period. If he is formally indicted and put on trial, Ibrahim could face up to 15 years in prison.
Related stories:A snag in the national fabric-22 - 28 June 2000
Old cheque bounces back-17 - 23 February 2000
Human rights and the numbers game- 21 - 28 January 1999
Poll watch-dogs keep low profile - 23 - 29 November 1995Relates sites:
Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Developmental Studies
