The Oakland Post

Support of dictatorship in Egypt must end

By Laura Landolt
Posted: Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 9:39 pm | Last Updated: Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 9:59 pm Comments Print This Email This Tweet This Delicious

As I write this commentary, many courageous human rights activists that I’ve met in my research on the pro-democracy movement in Egypt are being beaten and detained — not just in Tahrir Square, but in their offices and homes.

The good news in Egypt is that Mubarak may finally step down — and the sooner he does, the less blood will be shed.

The good news here at home is that events in Egypt are forcing the most careful reexamination of U.S. foreign policy toward that country (and hopefully the world) since the end of the Cold War.

We’ve been playing both sides of the fence for too long. Over the last few decades we’ve sent a brutal dictator billions of dollars in military and economic aid — on the claim that he was protecting us from Islamic fundamentalism.

We failed to notice that there is an important difference between the Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate group that renounced violence in the 1960s and worked within the Egyptian political system for reform (similar to Christian Democratic parties in Western Europe); and violent jihadis like al-Qaeda, whose primary target has been civilians (Muslims, Christians and Jews) across the Middle East and North Africa (more recently in the U.S.)

Because we were more interested in Egyptian “stability,” we overlooked Egypt’s permanent Emergency Laws that denied its citizens civil and political rights. We overlooked the Mubarak regime’s policies of detention without trial and systematic torture.

Indeed, recent figures put the number of political prisoners in Egypt at 20,000. The hypocrisy of this position is clear — we cannot effectively demand democracy in Iran (or anywhere else) while supporting an equally dictatorial ally.

More recently we’ve been sending much smaller amounts of pro-democracy aid to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Egypt.

Again, you can’t support dictatorship and democracy at the same time.  Many government officials formed NGOs to receive that democracy funding and used it to present a façade of political reform.

Even our own USAID officials in Egypt were under surveillance and often actively intimidated by Egypt’s Interior Ministry.

Meanwhile, Egyptian human rights activists, who bravely challenged the regime and faced regular detention and torture, were unable to accept our assistance for fear of being labeled foreign agents and prosecution for treason.

Indeed, the Mubarak regime used the most prominent pro-democracy (and pro-U.S.) activists like Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Ayman Nour as examples, and we looked the other way.

If it could imprison and brutalize these well-known friends of the U.S., what would it do to anyone else?

When you play both sides of the fence, you are always on the wrong side. At this very moment these brave pro-democracy activists are fighting and dying to overthrow our old friend, Mubarak. Whose side are we on?

Now the world wants to know whether we really support democracy, or not. We can’t continue to play both sides of the fence.

If we truly believe that democracy is the best system of government, and that democracy facilitates compromise and peace, how can we justify supporting dictators? In the long run, indeed, how can this strategy facilitate our primary objective of stability?

We must use this tragedy to re-examine our foreign policy priorities and our strategies for achieving them.

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Laura Landolt is an assistant professor in the political science department at Oakland University. In addition to gender and development, as well as domestic and transnational movements, she has specialties in Middle East politics, democratization, U.S. foreign aid and global governance.

In the summer of 2010, she completed research in Cairo, Egypt. Since 2007, Landolt has collected over 45 interviews with human rights activists in Egypt for the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review.