Nearly two weeks after Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak’s visit to the United States, Egyptian newspapers are still searching whether the aging ruler has managed to secure his younger son’s, Gamal, chances to become Egypt’s next president.
Observing the avoidance of US officials commenting on issues of political reform, Egyptian journalists, almost unanimously, agreed that Washington has once again restored to its old-fashion diplomacy of advancing stability over any democratic change in the Middle East, a policy turn which would further contribute to the political agenda of Mubarak junior.
Next to a story about a possible inheritance of presidential power in Gabon, the independent daily Shorouk newspaper, highlighted a Jerusalem Post commentary by the former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, Zvi Mazel, in which he analyzed how Mubarak has exploited both domestic and regional contexts to push the project of political succession.
The Shorouk’s translated piece (interestingly the Arabic version omitted Mazel’s impression that Mubarak has recently appeared tired) outlined a rather detailed mechanism of power transfer where Mubarak, 81, would call for early presidential elections just after the 2010 parliamentary elections to guarantee a smooth and peaceful transition while he is still alive.
Mazel found it particularly interesting that Gamal joined his father in Washington, a move he believed it was intended to introduce him to the US policy-makers.
The Shorouk’s version only slightly referred to the Israeli diplomat’s hard core argument that an American OK for turning over the presidency to Gamal lies in Egypt’s important role as a mediator in the Middle East most pressing problems especially finding a lasting peaceful settlement between Tel Aviv and the Palestinians and containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Israeli writer, therefore, saw no American interest in calling for democratic elections that could bring the Islamists into power.
Shorouk Editor in Chief Abdel Azim Hammad, however, disclosed the details of what might be labeled as the current “US-Egyptian deal”.
According to Hammad, who accompanied Mubarak during his 16-19 August visit to Washington, Egypt proposed that the starting point of any future Israeli-Palestinian peace talks should be the demarcation of borders rather than trying endlessly to resolve the issue of freezing the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank (Israeli and Palestinian media reports said last month that Obama’s Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell had actually suggested focusing on the border issue as an initial point for negotiation). Quoting a senior Egyptian official, Hammad wrote that the Egyptian President told his American counterpart that Arab states accept the principle of “land swap” whereby Israel gives parts of its land in exchange of the Palestinian territories currently occupied by the settlements.
Hamad also wrote that Egypt will contribute to the other side of the peace equation by encouraging Arab states to embark on preliminary normalization steps with Israel, a demand strongly advocated by US and Israeli officials to convince the Israeli ruling right-coalition to provide reciprocal concessions to the Palestinians.
A possible link between political succession and Egypt’s involvement in the Middle East was utterly dismissed by state-run newspapers.
Abdallah Kamal, editor-in-chief of the daily Ros el Yusuf, dedicated quarter of the newspaper’s front page to refute what he described the “allegations” of the Kuwaiti writer Fouad el-Hashim.”
el-Hashim wrote in the Kuwaiti daily el-Watan, that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has escorted Gamal to a special meeting with leaders of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to probably market the president’s son as a “friend of Israel”, and citing the ongoing trial of members of Lebanese Hizbullah cell in Egypt as a proof of it.
Although el-Hashim’s article has hardly been covered in any Egyptian media outlet, Kamal exerted great efforts to invalidate the Kuwaiti writer’s assumptions, stating instead that a meeting with American-Jewish organizations was solely conducted with President Mubarak. Kamal also asserted again that Gamal’s participation in the Egyptian delegation to Washington has been made public previously and that it was the second time he accompanied his father to the United States since 2004 (Gamal visited the States alone three times at least during the last 6 years).
Putting aside the ‘strategic’ prospect of grooming the president’s son to power, another Gamal-related incident caught the attention of the press this week. During his August 26 visit to el-Nagah village of Behira Governorate in Egypt’s Nile delta, as part of his campaign to raise awareness about the country’s most impoverished areas, a group of young people gathered around the meeting hall wearing T-shirts printed on them “Tala’a Gamal Mubarak” (Tala’a means literally in Arabic patrols or pathfinders, but it also signifies the Arab’s adoption of models of youth organizations established in totalitarian regimes in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany such as Tala’a el Ba’ath, the youth branch of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ruling party).
Although these young men were never admitted to the meeting as it was intended exclusively to local and party officials, some Egyptian writers and columnists found this event particularly alarming. The Nasserite writer Gamal Fahmy dismissed the possibility that this group is a part of what he called “Gamal’s secret organization”.
In his article, “Towards Dissolving the Militia of Nepotism” in the independent daily Dostor, Fahmy argued that these poor young men only wanted some material benefits from the president’s son, probably a free Iftar, a meal which breaks the dusk-to-dawn Muslim fasting.
Ibrahim Eissa, editor in chief of the Dostor, went further to interrogate the ‘unintentional mechanism’ of political inheritance in Egypt. In “The Enchanted Gamal’, Eissa wrote that different Egyptian security agencies voluntarily stepped in to provide different types of services to the president’s son from recruiting potentially loyal supporters to back his ambitions to actually eliminating his opponents, both real and imaginary.
For Eissa, Egyptian security officials have not been following certain presidential schemes, rather they were reading the president’s mind and acting accordingly to his ‘anticipated wishes’ as long as Mubarak himself has never showed any serious signs to oppose political succession.
This “politics by insinuation”, if one may say, refers to a kind of mobilization that Eissa has been writing about for the last four years quite stubbornly to dissect the “roots of authoritarianism” in Egypt. Eissa, in a way, believes that there is a certain ‘Egyptian submissive habitus’ which pushes different segments of the population to abide by the ruler’s directives.
