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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Necessary precautions
By Khaled DawoudHala Abdel-Moneim, a 29-year-old doctor, stood with her six-year-old son behind a cordon of policemen blocking the road toward the polling station. Her long, wide dress and the large head-scarf that covered almost half her body was an obvious indicator that she planned to vote for the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the country's largest political Islamic group and one that is officially outlawed by the government -- but she didn't get the chance.
Abdel-Moneim was one of millions of voters in eight of Egypt's governorates, including the capital, who headed for the polls on 8 November to vote in the first round of the third and final stage of parliamentary elections. She was also one of the many voters who felt first-hand the tension among nervous voters eyeing riot police and large crowds outside polling stations.
Angry rivalries among candidates' supporters fuelled anxieties throughout the country and in the case of Muslim Brotherhood candidates, voters felt outright hostility from officials posted at polling stations. In the Cairo district of Doqqi, where Abdel-Moneim was waiting to cast her ballot, prominent Brotherhood figure Maamoun El-Hodeibi ran against the ruling National Democratic Party's Amal Osman, a former cabinet minister and deputy speaker of the 454-member parliament that ended its five-year term this summer.
"Go tell [him] that you want to go home to do your homework," Abdel-Moneim pleaded with her son, pushing him toward a well-built riot police officer in full gear. The child started crying, clinging to his mother's dress and refusing to take one step forward. Abdel-Moneim went forward instead, asking to be let in to vote, but the police officer, surrounded by other policemen armed with rifles and tear gas canisters, refused icily and with indifference. "The place is very crowded inside. Wait for a while," he said. Abdel-Moneim waited.
As the number of voters blocked from the station swelled, hired thugs (of both sexes) attacked voters. A young man was apparently tempted by the chaos and ran after panicky people in the street, brandishing a large knife and banging on lamp posts with a piece of metal, making a terrifying noise. Amid the clamour, Abdel-Moneim was hit in the head by a stone, then nearly pushed to the ground by one of the female thugs. She quickly lifted her child and ran away.
A few minutes later, the situation had calmed down slightly and a bus loaded with voters and bearing a picture of the NDP candidate arrived. After a brief conversation with the same police officer, roadblocks were removed and the bus was allowed into the courtyard with its precious cargo.
Similar incidents of violence were reported in other towns and villages, but violence was not limited to electoral districts where the Brotherhood's 23 candidates were running. In Badrashein, in the Giza governorate, one person was killed and four wounded in a gun battle between supporters of two independent candidates. In the Toukh constituency, in Qalyubiya governorate, supporters of the Wafd Party candidate Mohamed Farid Hassanein clashed with police after waiting for hours outside polling stations. Hassanein staged a sit-in outside a polling station, accusing police of preventing his supporters from voting, and asked the presiding judge to put this on record.
In the Cairo district of Bulaq, where leftist Tagammu candidate and Al-Ahram journalist Amina Shafiq was running, NDP sympathisers blocked her supporters from voting and physically attacked them. In the poor districts of Gamaliya and Manshiet Nasser, where Housing Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Soliman was running against Nasserist Mahmoud Zeinhom, only the minister's supporters were reportedly allowed to cast ballots.
Although the ruling party has managed to win nearly 80 per cent of the 282 parliamentary seats available, many prominent NDP figures, including several provincial secretaries, lost the seats they had occupied for years. By contrast, the Brotherhood managed to win as many as 15 seats in the first and second stages, quashing speculation that regular police crackdowns and military trials for its members had largely weakened the 72-year-old group. The Brotherhood outdistanced all 14 opposition parties officially recognised by the state. Opposition candidates -- leftists and liberals -- have only managed to take a total of 10 seats.
In the small town of Bassous, in Qalyubiya province, voters who claim they were blocked from casting their ballots for a Brotherhood candidate clashed with police and burned tires. Police responded by firing tear gas into the crowd and arresting 13 people. A similar scene unfolded in Shubra Al-Kheima, on the northern outskirts of Cairo, where voters allege that they were prevented from reaching polling stations to vote for the district's Brotherhood candidate. Clashes with police ended in tear gas canisters being fired and nearly 40 people received medical treatment for gas inhalation. Police also arrested roughly 25 people in Ain Shams and Kirdasa, mostly supporters of Brotherhood candidates. The southern governorate of Assiut was also the scene of incidents of violence. At least 200 people were arrested after clashing with police there.
More seriously, judges who were supervising elections for the first time in the country's history were not spared the clashes of the crowds. A judge in the village of Nay, near the town of Qalyoub, was surprised that there were no voters coming into his polling station, although he could clearly hear the noise of the crowd outside. He went out to take a look and ordered the police officer supposedly protecting the polling station to allow voters in. The officer reminded him that judges were only responsible for the ballot box inside and had no authority outside the polling station. The two had a heated argument, with the judge stopping the voting process and insisting on the officer's removal.
"The NDP did not want to take any more chances or see more damage to its reputation after the first and second stages of voting," said one political analyst. "In Cairo, several cabinet ministers and top NDP figures were running and any more losses would have been humiliating for the NDP."
However heated the confrontations, most observers have noted that the scope of the violence in this year's ballot was by far smaller and more isolated than what took place during the last elections of 1995, when at least 40 people were killed in election-related violence. According to Interior Ministry statements, only five people have been killed since this year's elections began on 18 October.
Local reporters working for both national and opposition newspapers, as well as correspondents for the Arab, American and European press reportedly faced unprecedented harassment by police and what appears to have been hired thugs while covering last week's vote.
Safwat El-Sherif
Several reporters for the country's three largest dailies, Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar and Al-Gamhouriya, said they were either physically attacked, briefly detained or chased in the streets so as to be kept away from flashpoint areas. Al-Ahram and Al-Gamhouriya photographers said their cameras were confiscated, and a television crew for one of the government-owned provincial channels was barred from entering polling stations to film the voting process.
In response to the spate of complaints by local reporters, the Press Syndicate's council held an emergency meeting and issued a statement condemning the attacks against journalists and photographers by both police and supporters of the ruling National Democratic Party. The statement said that these incidents "violated the freedom of the press and the right of citizens to have access to information." The syndicate appealed "to all concerned authorities, and security authorities in particular, to intervene immediately to stop these violations and return the equipment confiscated from journalists." The statement asked the same authorities to refrain from any actions that "tarnish the positive image of parliamentary elections, which we are all counting on to achieve the democratic reform we aspired to." The syndicate also indicated that it was particularly alarmed by the fact that some of the attacks against reporters took place in the presence of policemen, who refused to intervene and who sometimes even offered protection to attackers.
Dale Gavlak, a correspondent for the American National Public Radio and the Vatican Radio and a board member of Cairo's Foreign Press Association (FPA), said that at least 15 foreign correspondents had filed complaints against violence. The majority of attacks against foreign correspondents took place in the Cairo districts of Doqqi and Agouza, where Brotherhood candidate Maamoun El-Hodeibi ran against the NDP's Amal Osman. Gavlak said that she was personally subjected to violence and that her tape-recorder was forcibly taken from her twice. "After interviewing voters who were not allowed to cast ballots, a young man came from behind, snatched my tape recorder and ran away," she said. People on the street chased the boy and recovered the recorder, only to have it stolen from her again while she was standing amidst a crowd of voters trying to enter a polling station near the Ministry of Agriculture. "I was complaining to a police officer, holding my microphone and chord. While talking to the officer, a young man snatched the chord and ran away. The policeman did nothing to stop him," Gavlak recounted.
Hussein Abdel-Ghani, a correspondent for the Qatari satellite television Al-Jazira, said that men dressed in civilian clothes attacked his cameraman while he was filming voters unable to cast their ballots in Doqqi. The cameraman's arm was nearly broken and the camera was confiscated.
Martin Drum, a correspondent for the German Radio ARD, said he was beaten by policemen dressed in civilian clothes after arguing with them to get his tape recorder back. He added that the German ambassador to Egypt has filed an official complaint with the Foreign Ministry, and his company has sent similar complaints to both the State Information Service (SIS) and the Information Ministry.
On Tuesday Al-Ahram newspaper reported that Nabil Osman, the head of the SIS received a delegation of FPA members who submitted a report to Osman detailing the various incidents of harassment encountered by FPA members while covering elections. Osman sent a copy of the report to minister of information Safwat El-Sherif, who phoned the head of the FPA, Volkhard Windfur, assuring him that an immediate investigation into the incidents reported will take place.
Related stories:
Registering the aftershocks
Rough riding in round three
See Elections 2000
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