A Conversation with Saad Eddin Ibrahim

May 8, 2003

Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, one of Egypt’s best know democracy advocates, spoke informally with Human Rights First in our New York office on May 8 about what he calls his “three year ordeal.” The ordeal started on June 30th 2000 when Egyptian security officers took him from his home without explanation. Later he was twice found guilty by lower courts and sentenced to 7-years jail on a series of baseless charges filed against him – including one which states that Dr. Ibrahim’s democracy work “tarnished Egypt’s image abroad.” On March 18, 2003, after Dr. Ibrahim has spent more than 17 months in prison, Egypt’s highest criminal court acquitted Dr. Ibrahim of the charges brought against him. Human Rights First, which campaigned for an overturning of Dr. Ibrahim’s conviction, has worked with him since the early 1990’s on human rights issues in the region.

Neil Hicks, Human Rights First Middle East Director: Welcome everyone. It is our great pleasure, privilege and honor to have with us Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, well-known to all of you from his case over the last three years.

I’d like to ask Dr. Ibrahim today not to speak so much about his case itself, because I think most of us are familiar with it, but there are two issues which arose in the context of the case which are very important for our continuing work in Egypt and the Middle East which I would invite you to say a few words on. These were issues which came to life and were really very central to our concerns as were addressing the issue of Dr. Ibrahim’s imprisonment in Egypt.

The first of these relates to whether the human rights movement and even the human rights idea has authentic roots in Egypt and in the Arab world.

The second question relates more to US policy, and, of course, there was a great controversy about whether it was appropriate for the US government to intervene so explicitly in your case and to call for your release and to threaten punishment to the Egyptian government if you were not released. So, what are the limits to US intervention to promote human rights in a country like Egypt, and indeed, throughout the region? I think if there are good results from your imprisonment, and I’ve heard you say that you think there are, I think a reconsideration of these questions, among others, is one of them, and I would ask you to talk a bit about that, in addition to anything else you wish to say to us this afternoon.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: Thank you for inviting me, thank you Neil, you have been among the greatest supporters. I am touched by your continuous interest and solidarity.

Neil is an old friend. I’ve know him now for about ten years. We have both worked jointly on a number of initiatives, and therefore I will gladly discuss the two issues he raised…

Let’s take the first issue. Let me share with you some historical perspective on human rights in Egypt and the Arab world. Back in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, we tried to protest the invasion, and we were beaten up brutally for just demonstrating to express our views. About two weeks later, Tel Aviv had one of the biggest demonstrations in Israeli history also protesting the invasion, and it was very sad for Egyptians that we could not even express our anger, an anger that was shared by everybody around the world, including Israelis.

That [protest] was a moment of truth, the moment of the birth of the Arab human rights movement. There was an elderly human rights advocate among us, he was seventy years old, I was still at the time, in my fifties, no actually late forties, and this man, 70 years old, an elder statesman, a former cabinet member, fell down, and when we got up and were able to take cover in the nearby café in the district, the old man was in tears that after fifty years of struggle and public service and just peacefully trying to demonstrate, to say no to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he was beaten up and I was beaten up, we all were beaten up.

We also discovered, for the first time, during this protest the new means the police used, - these were canes that had electric shocks in them that knock you down, even when they just waved it at you, it didn’t even have to touch you. And of course they were all imported from the United States. This was new to us. It was new technology. To make a long story short, that was the beginning of our thinking that we had to do something, it was no longer just liberating occupied territories or Palestine, or social justice, we have to go back to the ABC’s of human rights.

So the same thing happened in other Arab countries, anyone who tried to demonstrate or protest the Israeli invasion, which the Israelis themselves were protesting, had a similar fate to ours in Cairo.

Some of us in Arab countries wrote to each other and described the experience and came to the same conclusion, we have to go back to the ABC’s. We had to work for the right to be able to even cry, to shout, to be angry, anything peaceful. We had a secret meeting because no Arab government would allow us to meet for the purpose that I will tell you about, we met, we deliberated and compared notes, and then, we concluded after three days of soul searching and agonizing, we decided we had to start a human rights organization, a pan-Arab human rights organization.

Why? Because at the time the only international human rights organization was Amnesty. And every time Amnesty International issued a report, the same thing would be said, “This is a western colonial voice trying to undermine our tradition, the old colonialists out of London, etc.” So we said the only way to do it was to do it ourselves. We don’t have to wait for Amnesty. Human rights was not on the scene at the time, we did not know much about Human Rights First or Human Rights Watch, that would wait a few years to appear, anyhow that was the beginning.

There were 30 of us, and we did not represent everybody, so we thought let us prepare an assembly: a bigger crowd, intelligentsia, statesmen, activists, and so on. I was put in charge of organizing a big meeting to deliberate this issue, and hopefully to declare the birth of the Arab human rights movement. It took me a whole year, through late 1982, all 20 Arab capitals would not give us the green light to hold the meeting in any of those countries, so we ended up going to the nearest country that would give us permission, and that was Cyprus, and that was where the Arab human rights organization was declared.

I was honored by being the first Secretary General of the first meeting, and that elderly man who was beaten brutally, was at that time, 71 years old was president, was elected president of the Arab Human Rights Organization.

For nearly a year, we could not find a headquarters. In the first year the Arab human rights organization was operated from my office at the American University in Cairo. Anyone who comes to that office will see still all of the signs that we had up there at first.

Of course, human rights, as a concept, was new in the Arab world, but so are many other new concepts, and nobody rejects them because they are new. Development is new. Gender equality is new. Modernization is new. So we began to take on anyone who raised questions about how authentic or unauthentic the question is, but is it a need? Is there a clientele? Are there people who will benefit from it?

I don’t care about this very phony argument that some of our rulers raise to either undermine or cast doubt on our integrity or our patriotism or indigenous quality. The question is need. Therefore, we went ahead, we started doing our work, for nearly a year, we did not get any response from the government after we questioned their behavior in certain cases or after we investigated certain violations.

The first response from a government was great, a great celebration, that somebody is taking us seriously and answering our outcries. I think the second time was from the Minister of the Interior in Egypt, and that was just great.

So every time you could engage the government, even if they said “no, you are on the wrong track,” or “we did not do what you are alleging us to have done,” we just wanted to engage with states in that part of the world and to give legitimacy to our work. Not necessarily to succeed in every initiative, but to engage in serious dialogue. It took us two more years before everybody began to take notice, and for governments to answer. Not always in a nice way, but at least [they were responding]…

It took another 15 years to get Egyptian government permission to recognize us as a human rights organization. They did not actually do that until Mary Robinson came to Egypt two or three years ago.

They cast doubt on foreign organizations, they do. But who doesn’t? It is always autocratic, dictatorial regimes or their cronies. I don’t want you or people like myself, like-minded people, to be too concerned – yes, take notice, answer it, we have counterarguments, but we will go ahead with our work.

And I must say, when it started back in 1982, there was no single Arab country that had electoral politics, competitive elections or even the pretense of elections, but today, there are ten or eleven Arab countries with varying degrees of democratic politics, there are now something like 30, 35 organizations that have the words “human rights” in their title, 15 of them are in Egypt, and probably another 15 in different Arab countries, there are even some outside the Arab world like in Vienna and Canada, in London and in Paris, Arab organizations or branches of the Arab organizations. So I think if you persevere, and if you persist, you will see results. And we have seen results in my lifetime. That’s why I am an incurable optimist, in spite of all that I have seen.

Do we find roots? Yes, in all kinds of literature, from the Koran, in traditions, to support the fact that human rights, though a new concept, the idea itself is as old as any in our history.

Is there a counterargument against it? Of course, there are counterarguments to show that it’s not. That many of our leaders never even recognized human rights, true. But it has been a fact everywhere in the world, including in the West. It took nearly 300 years for the human rights declarations and covenants to materialize. Think of the Magna Carta, all the way down to the Universal Declaration. So it is not just us in the Arab world and third world who are trying to establish the tradition and the roots and to justify human rights. We have to take a longer perspective.

All right, now we move on to the second question: American behavior during my own case.

Right from the beginning, when I was choosing an agenda for Arab human rights, back in 1982, the same charge was made against me by the government, and interestingly by old leftists, who said this is a Western ploy, an American attempt to dominate and invade our minds. I was singled out because I was a dual citizen and teaching at an American institution, and also at that time I was smoking American cigarettes!

Here is a guy who is trying to be a champion of human rights, he is a dual citizen, he is married to an American, he is working at the American university, and he is smoking American cigarettes! Marlboro – at the time I was a heavy smoker.

Now a guy, I remember [wrote an] article [critical of me]. He was an old Marxist liberal living in Paris. For some reason, he went to renew his passport, and the Egyptian embassy took it and never returned it. So he wrote to me and wrote to the Arab organization, “if you are really for human rights, get me back my passport.” So surprisingly, that was the first and last time the Minister of the Interior ever answered me, as Secretary General of the organization. I wrote to the minister, telling him of the case, and that of course was the tradition. Once you establish that there is a problem, you write to the government involved, and see how they answer.

The same standard you follow here, and Amnesty follows. If in two weeks we don’t get an answer, we would write them back, if they don’t answer again, then we would publicize the case etc. It was a standard process.

To my surprise, the Minister of the Interior answered and investigated the case, found it was true that the passport of the gentleman was withheld, and he had ordered that the passport -- renewed -- should be returned. “Please convey to him that he is welcome back to Egypt,” the Minister said to me. Needless to say that Minister of the Interior did not last very long, one of the shortest tenures ever in Egypt.

So I wrote to the gentleman in Paris, telling him the good news, and he had a column in a weekly Arabic newspaper, and was honest enough to write up the whole episode, and to apologize for the 12 articles he wrote against me when the organization was first starting. This is just to show you that the most leftists were very suspicious of the concept of human rights and Western human rights organizations, and the Arabs who were trying to emulate Western human rights movements.

But now the elections of the Arab organizations, the Egyptian organizations for human rights, are one of the most intensive elections. All the parties, including old Marxists, old Nasserites, everybody competes to be part of it. So it is there, it is continuing, it is becoming an arena of good competition, good rivalry, and there are -- every day actually, or every few weeks, new organizations, more specialized, some for Arab prisoners, some for Arab women, and now the newest one, for personal sexual choices, which was created in the aftermath of the Queen Boat incident.

Now when the Americans or other Western powers intervene, of course, because the government is the culprit in most of the human rights cases, even though the government relies heavily on the generosity of Western donors, it does not hesitate to accuse us of being clients of the West. In my case, even though the American president did not interfere until two years after my arrest and conviction, and even though it was so late; the Egyptian government, in a very demagogic way, through its own media, tried to paint me as a stooge of the Americans, [to explain] why the American president has done what he did.

The whole thing may be symbolic, because the money that was being suspended was a request, to make up for Egyptian losses after 9/11. Congress earmarked these funds for friendly countries, and Egypt was one of them. [It was to receive] some $47 million for the compensation for losses of tourism and so on. It had not been approved by Congress yet, nor had the money for Israel been approved. So all that President Bush did was to say was that he would not submit it for approval.

There was a big uproar in Egypt about this. [People were asking] “why the United States would do this for one man, for one individual? There must be something fishy there.”
“Why would the United States endanger the relationship with Egypt, which has been on the best terms with the United States for the previous twenty-five years, for one man?” And the question gives rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. Our region is fertile ground for conspiracy theories, so they believed I must be doing something very mysterious, even though I was in prison and helpless to say anything.

So at times, because of this, the American gesture looked like the kiss of death. It looked in the beginning as though they had hurt me and damaged my reputation, but I personally was not overly concerned, because when you have been accused of everything under the sun, one more accusation does not matter. It was my family, my supporters outside prison, who were concerned.

The response in the prison was fascinating. The bankers began to count everyday – there were big banking scandals, and many of those involved in the scandals were also in prison – they began to count how much I weighed. Typical bankers, counting the money: $47 million [divided by] every day in prison – I had [been sentenced to] seven years at the time. And there was a new respect by these bankers for me.

The other interesting reaction was from the Islamists. They began to express their admiration for the United States for what they did. You wouldn’t expect that, would you? The only thing they had a qualification about, [was] why the United States, if it is truly a defender of human rights, why it has defended me and not them (the Islamists)?

At the end, as I mentioned elsewhere, that move, even though it looked like the kiss of death, but in the long run it helped. It put all the issues for which I was in prison on the national agenda. And when I was acquitted by the Court of Cassation, the government had to make some symbolic moves, to show it was concerned about the issues for which I was tried, including some very important ones: such as appointing a woman judge for the first time, for the government to show it was for gender equality. Second, they declared they will do away with state security courts, which are the ones that convicted me; the third one, is to establish a supreme council for human rights.

We don’t know the details yet, what they will do, but the discussion seems to indicate that this council will be a mixture of state appointees and public figures from civil society. That council will oversee and be a watch dog over human rights. There was a fourth: Coptic Christmas.

On the day that my retrial was to start, which was January 7, the government declared that this was going to be a national holiday. For the first time, the Copts got a national holiday in Egypt. The Copts celeberate Christimas like the Orthodox, on the 7 or 8 of January. So that was declared a national holiday.

These are all important measures. I consider them, as Neil says, “positive fallouts” from the case. It made the 3 year ordeal worth it, despite the agonizing moments. But I was vindicated, and the issues for which I was fighting are now high on the agenda.

QUESTIONS

Audience: I think everyone would be interested to hear you speak about what the time was like for you while you were in prison. And if you can, give us a little bit more about what your interaction was like with the Islamists. How did you build the relationships with those you did?

Saad: I was in and out of prison three times in those three years. I would be released each time the Court of Cassation overturned my conviction. The first time was the toughest, because of the interrogation. Because during the interrogation you are there under emergency laws, like here, you don’t know much about the people who are arrested, who are interrogated. They could be locked up. Even the lawyers might not know much about what is going on, like at Guantanamo. Those 45 days were very tough for me and my colleagues, 27 others.

You don’t know what they can do [to you]. Even though 20 of the males were with me in the same prison. There I was in complete isolation for 45 days, it was like basic training in the military. You are stripped of your identity. You are just a number. No one talks to you. You only get orders from the guards. That was by far the toughest.

The second and third time I was in a different prison, and there, once you are convicted, and you become a prisoner, then you have certain rights. Egypt still has a mark of civility that makes them abide by certain rules, regulations. Some of these things were very well known to me since I was a human rights activist. It also helped me that the prison guards knew I knew, because as Secretary General, I had visited prisons to investigate cases so the officers tried to be correct with me.

But also, some of the people I observed back in the seventies, when I was doing work on Islamic militants, sociological research, were still there in prison, some were there for 20-30 years, and they were still there, even those who had completed their sentences. All of these guys knew me, and to the extent they could welcome me, they welcomed me, and they went out of their way to help me.

For the second and third time, I was again in solitary confinement, but again, prisoners found ways of communicating with me. There is an informal system at work, the Islamists of all shades who have been there a long time and have families to support, began some micro-economic enterprises of their own. One was laundry and ironing, and to pick up the laundry and drop it back off was the most effective way for anyone to communicate. So the first thing I do when I see my laundry is to search the pockets for messages. We had a very extensive correspondence system this way. Another way was through the cafeteria, some prisoners ran a special cafeteria, since the prison food is hardly edible, and there were some well-to-do prisoners (bankers, members of parliament, about 50 of them) who provided very good business to these small enterprises.

There were 500 prisoners in my prisons, 300 were Islamists, ranging from the most militant Jihad [group] to the least militant. They were in three different cell blocks.

Altogether there were six cell blocks, and I was in cell six, which was for the least dangerous, because we were all over 60, or “VIPs”. I had a cell across the hall from three former cabinet members, members of parliament and six bankers. There were also judges and police officers who had been implicated in torture or bribery or abuse of authority. That was cell block 6, and it also provided the most business for the small enterprises.

I was not supposed to talk to anyone until I broke my ankle, and my outside time – which had been one hour twice a day was increased to three times a day, three hours each.

At first, it was not very useful to have this time seeing as I was in a wheelchair, but after one week in the wheelchair I discovered a very nice way of socializing, and that is that someone needs to push the wheelchair. The waiting list for everyone who wanted to push that wheel chair and talk to me grew very long. And they asked where I wanted to be wheeled – the only place to go was to the mosque, so I became very religious for those months. You go to the mosque for noon and afternoon prayer, so I would go at least twice a day, and it would take about 40 minutes to be pushed from the mosque and back. So in those 40 minutes, if someone wanted to tell me his life story or ask me something, since I was keeping a prison diary, I had a lot of stories from these wheelchair expeditions.

Was it tough? Loss of freedom is always tough. I was determined to make the best out of it. As a social scientist, the prison provided a great laboratory. Lots of sad stories, I saw people collapsing in prison, and others who suffered more than I did and remained tough. Who makes it and doesn’t make it always comes back to support networks, inside and outside the prison. It’s fascinating. I learned a lot, about myself, and Egypt, I learned about human nature in general. You think you know it all, then you go to prison.

Audience: As you described, the work you’ve chosen for your life is against the tide, trends, culture. Can you find an experience from when you were a young man or a boy that made you choose this?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: You know I began to write my autobiography in prison. I was almost finished. I was all the way to the night of my arrest, and I thought I would wait until I got out to write the last three years. In prison, you are alone and have time and have no distractions, and it’s amazing how much you think.

At one point I received the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, and as much as I knew about Mandela from my readings, reading his autobiography was something else – very rich, very revealing, very helpful to me. And I remember noting to one of the wardens, how similar this memoir was to the one described in Mandela’s autobiography. He said, “I thought you would know better – he was in the same prison system, designed by the British colonials.” It was so familiar!

Mandela was a lawyer, so he knows all of the rights, how to file a grievance, then he realizes the guard in the hallway is more important than the prime minister. He told how someone brought him food once, and he gave an apple to the guard, who was then very kind to him. He would do anything that Mandela wanted. So Mandela discovered, the first trick in prison, is to be on good terms with your guard. If you are on good terms with him, so many things can be done for you. That is something you learn.

The other thing is very touching is his discussion of fear. He said he was afraid many times, and that used to bother him because he had a heroic image with his followers, and I said, you know, I was afraid many; times, and I admitted to myself many times my fear, and it is a human feeling you should not apologize for. But what he learned was how to confront and manage his fears. And this helped me a lot. And it explained why former prisoners were afraid to speak. Courage increases the further you get from Cairo all the way to the comforts of New York.

With regard to my childhood, I had my first confrontation with my school teacher when I was 9-years old. Again, it was a question of justice. I was the first in the class and yet being deprived of being first. The first in the class has a lot of privileges in Egypt – a lot of little symbolic privileges that loom large for children. How could I be first of the class and not get the same privileges?

Then all the way to confrontation with Nasser at the age of 17 over torture. And then I had another confrontation with another teacher when I was president of the Arab students’ organization in Canada back in 1966. So you take that history, being a student activist right at the beginning, burning with feeling of justice as a child, all the way to ending up confronting every president we had – Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. But of all the 3 presidents, Mubarak put me in prison. They all yelled at me, Nasser declared me persona non grata and I stayed in this country for a number of years because of it. That changed my life, there was a process obviously, activists in the 60s were confronting the establishment. I met my wife at a civil rights march, that’s how we first met. All of this must have contributed to my life.

Audience: Your mention of civil rights movement, leads me to ask, we are spending a lot of time here now trying to challenge our own government in a lot of things that are going wrong, both at home and abroad, and I would be interested to get your take from where you sit in Egypt, on what kind of an impact Attorney General John Ashcroft and all of the denials of civil and human rights in the US, how is that playing in Egypt, and from our perspective as a US based human rights organization, what are the things that you think we could be doing both here and with respect to Egypt?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: First of all, let me tell you how it is perceived in Egypt. The government amplifies everything the US government has done since 9/11, which are clear restrictions of civil liberties. And saying basically, “we told you, Americans who have lectured us in the past, about human rights and civil liberties are doing it themselves when violence occurs. So we don’t want to hear anymore about human rights or civil rights, national security is foremost.” That is hurting our cause. It is undermining what is so great about America, what made America part of the dreams of many people around the world.

Now you must confront it, you have done that in the past, it will probably take some time to get over the shock of 9/11. I was heartened by the anti-war demonstrations, to show that there are enough people who are conscious enough, who are not mesmerized by the whole aura of American patriotism.

When I came here as a student in early 1963, the leftover of McCarythyism was still in the air. However, one of the great things about American culture is this ability to reflect and examine and to revisit and to criticize.

My PhD supervisor was an American of Japanese descent, and I learned what the US did to Japanese-Americans during WWII. My wife’s parents are of German descent, and they lived to be 100, so they told us of the discrimination during WWI. I think it is up to what is left of the 60s generation to lead. I went to go speak at an event and everyone of my generation was there, but younger faculty and students were not as present. When I spoke, I was told that perhaps 10% of this years’ graduating class were as active as they were in the 60s. So there is a lot of work to do. But there are two good things about American political culture: one is revisiting and regretting as they did with the McCarthyism and the Japanese scare, the German scare. And I hope that it doesn’t take ten years for that to happen.

I think when President Bush is reelected, things will quiet down and there will be time. I should probably say if he is reelected. Because I feel there is an industry [maintaining a state of insecurity] in the US to keep support behind the current administration. And I have a feeling, now correct me if I am mistaken, that this will continue until the election. The fact that the Republican convention has been put off until the second anniversary of Sept. 11, is very telling. They want this to be the crescendo of the campaign.

But I am hopeful this will be over soon.