CAIRO — Julie Hughes, a veteran pro-democracy worker, was crushed when she missed out on Egypt’s revolt last year. In a Facebook posting at the time, she said, “It’s like having your next door neighbor throw an incredibly joyous party and you don’t get an invitation.”
So when she got an offer from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to return to the field as Egypt country director, Hughes, 44, didn’t think twice. “Egypt is going to be interesting,” her new boss told her.
Nine months later, Hughes is one of 43 pro-democracy workers, including 19 Americans, who face criminal charges from the authorities in Cairo for operating without proper registration and receiving foreign money. She is banned from leaving Egypt and subject to arrest. Along with Hughes, five of the other Americans are still in the country, according to a list released by Egyptian state media.
The lives of Hughes and other pro-democracy workers have been upended in a drama that not only threatens U.S.-Egyptian relations but highlights the uneasy relationship between American democracy activists and some foreign governments.
The Egyptian ruling generals who are cracking down on the NDI and similar groups are the latest in a line of foreign leaders from Moscow to Addis Ababa who fear that they are targets of a regime-change playbook scripted in Washington and carried out under the guise of building civil society.
Heba Morayef, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Cairo, said nongovernmental organizations involved in political work have long been radioactive in the eyes of the Egyptian state. Analysts in Cairo say the current crackdown could bolster the military’s portrayal of foreigners and international organizations as illicit agents attempting to shape the future of post-revolutionary Egypt to further Western — and in particular U.S. — interests. After almost every outbreak of violence or sustained protest over the past year, the generals have warned of “foreign hands.”
Charles Dunne, the Middle East director for Freedom House, one of the pro-democracy groups being investigated, said he found out that he was on the list of those to be charged in an e-mail from his office manager in Cairo.
“I had no idea I was a fugitive from justice,” said Dunne, who is based in Washington.
He spent the day coordinating with the group’s Cairo lawyer — hired in recent months — and trying to make sense of the seemingly haphazard list.
“I’m as puzzled as everyone else,” Dunne said. “What it looks like is they took all the major international groups working in Egypt, fingered all the management-level employees and lumped in the people overseas who are running the programs.”
The charge that the United States trumpets democracy to destabilize certain regimes is a familiar one in some parts of the world. The allegations almost always focus on U.S.-funded groups that work with political parties or journalists to build professionalism and independence, creating twin threats to the existing order.
The fall of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in 2000, followed by successful popular revolts in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004, led to deep suspicion in parts of the former Soviet bloc, particularly Russia, that the United States was funding revolution through the NDI, the International Republican Institute and other groups.
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