“Unfortunately it’s the Israel card that trumps everything else,” said Khaled Fahmy, a historian at the American University in Cairo. “The army is effectively promising impotency and are rewarded for it. They are paid not to fight. This is the main prism through which U.S. foreign policy looks at this region, and the high brass of the Egyptian military knows this.”
Since the spring, the military chiefs have allowed or ordered major crackdowns on protesters that have left as many as 100 people dead, and they have sought to enshrine their powers in a new Egyptian constitution but so far have failed. Now the generals seem to be using civil society groups as scapegoats, accusing them of using foreign funds to support nefarious efforts to destroy Egypt.
“This is an internal judicial issue,” said a military official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “We are applying law against the organizations that break it.... Please don’t make this bigger than it is.”
But civil society leaders were defiant Friday, slamming Egypt’s military rulers for attempting to shut down human rights and advocacy groups and accusing them of using tactics from the Mubarak era to throttle an unfinished revolution. Twenty-eight rights groups signed a statement accusing the military of taking vengeance on organizations that participated in the uprising against Mubarak.
By raiding the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute and Freedom House — all Washington-based and funded in part by the U.S. government — as well as Germany’s Konrad Adenauer foundation, the military angered American and European leaders. The Obama administration warned that economic aid could be withheld unless authorities returned seized equipment and stopped harassing the organizations.
“No one really believed us,” said Ziad Abdel Tawab, deputy director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. “This action proved that this is a true campaign against all the actors” involved in the uprising last winter.
In Berlin, German officials summoned the Egyptian ambassador to protest the raids. The U.N. human rights office called on Egypt’s rulers to “carry out their important work without undue influence” and criticized the “unnecessarily heavy-handed measures,” according to the Associated Press.
Egyptian presidential hopeful and revolutionary favorite Mohamed ElBaradei condemned the raids, saying efforts to suppress human rights groups would be “a major setback” and would “surely backfire.”
Warrick reported from Washington.
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