Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (13 page)

The next morning, the government announced that Fiqi had won. Zeiny was stunned. She immediately contacted other officials who had supervised the poll to discuss what happened.

At this point she paused in her story. “There is some information that I can’t tell you,” she said. “I was told in confidence by other officials, and I can’t repeat it unless I am called to testify. All I can tell you is that two high-ranking officials confessed to me that in cases like this documents are changed. But I don’t know how it’s done.”

Zeiny agonized about what to do. When she got back to Cairo, she decided to pull together all the threads of what she had witnessed in a document.

“I hesitated, and I was feeling very anxious,” she recalled. “I had colleagues calling me and saying, ‘Let it go.’”

Zeiny stayed up all night working on language, but she was still not sure what to do when she finished the draft. Then she picked up her morning newspapers. Every day, Zeiny told me, she gets three newspapers delivered to her door. Two are government-owned,
Al-Ahram
and
Al-Akhbar.
The third is the new independent
Al-Masri al-Youm,
or
The Egyptian Today,
which then had only been publishing for seventeen months.

“By complete chance, the new paper was on top of the pile, and there was a picture of Mustafa Fiqi on the front declaring that there was no fraud,” Zeiny recalled, laughing.

Fiqi had made a big deal during his campaign about not seeking preferential treatment because of his government connections. “I’ve announced from the beginning that I’ll quit if there’s any rigging,” he had said at his last campaign rally, the night Zeiny arrived in Damanhur. “I believe in my freedom and the freedom of others.”
²⁰
He said the same thing after the election.

“When I saw this statement, all hesitation ended,” Zeiny said.

“That’s when I decided to call the new paper and give it my testimony.” It proved to be a fateful liaison.

The day after I talked to Zeiny I called on Hisham Kassem, publisher of
The Egyptian Today.
He also happens to be the president of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, and he had run as an independent in the 2000 parliamentary elections but lost. Kassem is a tall man with silver-flecked black hair and a well-groomed mustache that fits the contours of his mouth right up to the ends of his upper lip. He chain smokes Kents, sometimes double-puffing.

The Egyptian Today
was the country’s first independent daily in Arabic. Others had tried as weeklies or in English, including Kassem’s own
Cairo Times,
but eventually closed.
The Egyptian Today
opened in June 2004 with a run of only 500 papers. Early issues, Kassem told me, “were a disaster. The first six months were hell.”

But the paper soon settled into a groove of bold, hard-hitting, but fact-based stories and wryly sharp editorial cartoons, both mainly about regime shortfalls. Its first rule was that pictures of Egypt’s leadership would not be a fixture on the front page.

“Other papers put Mubarak on the front page at least 320 days a year, and the only reason they don’t do it 365 days is because they can’t say the only thing he did that day was go to the toilet,” Kassem said.

Starting a quality paper in a country with long-standing press restrictions was “like flying a 747 jetliner,” Kassem lamented, moving his hands slowly like the lumbering aircraft. “It’s so big you have to move gradually. It’s not like a Cessna that can dart in and out of the skies.” He focused particularly on recruiting young reporters who had not been jaded by work in the government-controlled media.

Kassem vividly remembered the morning that his editor walked in with Zeiny’s four-page testimony in his hand.

“He was very excited, and he said, ‘This document is from a judge who says the election was rigged.’ I closed the door because this was a very serious charge. It was the biggest story we’d ever had,” Kassem said. “Then I called our lawyer. He said we needed to get her signature on the document, or she could always deny it the next day—and then the paper would be closed down. We’d only been publishing a short time.

“So the editor and I went to her together. The paper was already late, and I had to call every two or three minutes to keep it open. We’d have to remake the front page,” Kassem continued. “When Zeiny said she would sign it, we decided to go with it. That’s when I turned off my cell phone and stopped taking calls on the office phone from anyone, even the paper’s shareholders.”

Zeiny’s testimonial, which ran in full, began starkly. “I was there. I was part of the whole thing.” She continued:

Point by point, Zeiny outlined suspicious activity during the vote count. The presence of a State Security official at the table where the final vote was tallied “was in itself a dangerous indication to me,” she wrote. She questioned the inappropriate involvement of a government lawyer as “well beyond my comprehension that a state lawyer and defender became part of an authority to adjudicate and supervise the competition between two people, one of whom represents the government.”

When the vote count was coming to a close, she wrote, she heard officials “intensively” using their mobile phones to relay the results; she heard the word “sweeping” in several conversations to describe Heshmat’s victory. She also heard one colleague comment, “Fiqi’s defeat will turn the world upside down.”

Because she is an observant Muslim, Zeiny added a personal note in her testimonial.

“To spare any political shows, I would like to say that I disagree with the Muslim Brotherhood organization with regards to many of their orientations and views.” Before the election, she added, she had hoped Heshmat would not run again, “after all the troubles he went through in the last session of parliament.

“However,” she continued, “as he had already presented himself for elections, we should respect his supporters’ will and, above all, carry out the responsibility delegated to us as neutral supervisors.”

During our conversation at the hospital, Zeiny had also volunteered her deep disagreement with the Brotherhood. She had never joined any political movement, she said. Candidly, she added, she had never even voted.

At the end of her testimony in
The Egyptian Today,
Zeiny appealed to other official witnesses to join her in revealing the truth. “One of the judges told me that he could not sleep after he saw what had happened,” she wrote.

Zeiny’s testimony was published three days after the Damanhur election.
The Egyptian Today
publisher told me that he was so nervous about attempts to block its publication that he did not turn on his cell phone again until nine that morning. The first call, he said, was from his mother. She reported that the paper was not available anywhere on newsstands.

Kassem panicked. He immediately called the paper’s distribution manager and asked him to contact vendors. It would not be the first time publications had been “removed,” as he put it, by government agents or allies.

“By one
P.M.
, we finally found out what had happened,” Kassem told me. “No one had touched it. The paper had just sold out—very, very early.

“Then people started calling and asking us to run the story again the next day. And that’s what we did—for the next four days. Vendors were reporting that customers were reserving copies overnight and paying for them in advance. Some people wanted several copies!” Kassem said.

“In January, our circulation was only 3,000. It was increasing steadily about 500 copies a month, but after we ran this story, it jumped to 30,000. Now it’s around 40,000,” he added. “Today, we’re the fourth largest newspaper in the country.”

I asked Kassem if he was concerned about repercussions. Three of his reporters had recently been charged with libel for an article about alleged corruption by Egypt’s Minister of Housing.

“We get new cases against us regularly. At some point almost every week my assistant Christine will hand me a new case. But we don’t get convicted,” Kassem said, shaking his head. One of the three reporters in the recent case had been convicted on a technicality over his identity papers, but not for libel or slander.

“The government hates the idea of a free press and is not committed, whatever it says. But it’s ultrastupid for Mubarak not to leave a reasonable margin for the press. On satellite television, twenty or thirty million people can watch Kefaya condemning Mubarak personally. And it’s not feasible for the government to try to control [telephone] text messages.

“No,” Kassem told me, “closing
Al-Masri al-Youm
would be a big mistake. We’ve now come too far.”

I had also asked Zeiny if she was concerned about the repercussions—losing her job and source of income as a single woman, getting summoned by the government to testify, or being ostracized.

She thought a minute. “I can’t say I’m afraid—or not afraid,” she offered. “I suspect I will have to testify someday, and there may be other consequences. But in the end, I felt I had to say that the election was rigged. And, for once, there was a place to do it.”

The forces of change can take circuitous routes.

Nasser Amin is a forty-something lawyer who is a cross between the Marlboro Man—he steadily smokes the brand—and a campus intellectual. When we met, he was wearing well-fitted jeans, and the sleeves of his crisp, open-necked white shirt were rolled up to his elbows. The first thing a normally serious Egyptian friend told me about Amin is that his eyes twinkle and, behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, they actually did. He seemed perpetually bemused.

Amin is the director of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession. It is a lofty idea housed in a modest office with dated equipment. Its whitewashed walls are decorated, sparsely, with posters. One near Amin’s desk declares, “Same blood, same rights.”

On the day I visited, a Khamsin storm had engulfed Cairo. All we could see from the windows of Amin’s eleventh-floor office was a sky of sand. Khamsins whip sands from the Sahara Desert across North Africa in late winter and can consume the horizon as completely as a dense fog. Rain clears it away after a few days, although falling drops pick up the fine grains, leaving everything in already dust-encrusted Cairo splattered with little circles of more dust. As we talked, the outside shutters flapped noisily from the storm.

I went to see Amin to hear about the hottest political conflict in Egypt. Emboldened opposition may have redefined the races for president and parliament, produced some fresh political faces, and expanded the parameters of activism. But a real rebellion was erupting among an unlikely force—Egypt’s judges.

Unlike newer Arab countries, Egypt’s judiciary has a history of independence dating back to the nineteenth century. It has long been the most respected branch of government, whether Egypt was ruled by monarchs, nationalists, or autocrats. For most of its history, however, it had been a largely passive force.

“Judicial tradition in this country prevented judges from getting involved in almost anything,” Amin explained. “They wouldn’t go to places where there might be a problem. They wouldn’t even go to a café and join debates. Their position was that they’d wait until the issues came to them. It was a tradition that kept the judiciary very neutral in Egypt. They had a real aura of being the highest and most noble elite in this country.

“But,” he continued, “it also left the judges so isolated among themselves that sometimes you felt they were sitting in a temple. Things around them could be burning, but they wouldn’t do anything about it.”

The judges also had diminishing power.

After Egypt’s 1952 revolution, judicial authority steadily eroded under a sequence of strong presidents. Attempts by the judges to reassert themselves—and the law—were repeatedly beaten back. Capitalizing on the mood of crisis after the humiliating 1967 war with Israel, the Judges Club in Cairo called for greater freedoms to be protected by a stronger judiciary.
²¹
President Nasser responded in 1969 by firing more than 100 senior judges, in what is still widely remembered as the “massacre of the judiciary.” In 1972, a new law then gave the executive branch wide powers over the judicial branch.
²²

The Judges Club offered proposals again in 1986 and 1991 to reform the nation’s laws and ensure the judges’ ability to uphold them. But the government balked at putting the drafts to a vote in parliament. It also increasingly meddled, either directly or through surrogates, in promotions, assignments, and salaries. And it tried to co-opt poorly paid judges with the carrot of bonuses or the stick of threats.
²³

“The government knows the judiciary is held in high regard in this country, so it tried to use the judges to carry out its own policies and crimes—and then claim that it happened under the judiciary so people would accept it,” Amin told me.