"I am grateful and hope that no other intellectual will go to prison because of his opinions. It is a victory for democracy and human rights issues." -Saad Eddin Ibrahim

On 18 March, the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest criminal court, acquitted Saad Eddin Ibrahim and his three co-defendants of charges of embezzlement and anti-patriotic activities.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC), and director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, a research institute engaged in election-monitoring and grassroots democracy campaigning. He is a naturalised US citizen, and has spent most of the last three years being tried and retried on the same set of charges.

His release was welcomed around the world as a victory for democracy, carried out by a courageous individual: “An articulate and energetic voice has stood up to a repressive government” was how William F. Schultz, executive director of Amnesty International USA , greeted the verdict.

This is more than a story about an individual man – it is also a parable about power: about modern political life in Egypt, and about American mediation in the Middle East.

The labyrinth of gomolokiya

On a visit to Saad Eddin Ibrahim in his tiny office at AUC in early June 2002, during a pause in his trial, I asked him if he was a dissident. “I think of myself as a free thinker, an activist rather than a dissident” he replied. “I’m not out to get into power. I was helping the regime.”

In the last two presidential elections, he had worked as an adviser to President Mubarak; he had been Mrs Mubarak’s tutor while she was a student at AUC, and had written a speech that she delivered at a conference in Geneva two weeks before his first arrest, in June 2000. For his academic work on Egypt’s Islamic groups, the government had granted Ibrahim access to Cairo’s jails. Before his fall, Ibrahim was close to the Egyptian ruling elite.

Ibrahim was convicted on three counts: of accepting donations from the European Union, which violates Military Decree No. 4/1992, a law invented to control the foreign money flowing through Egypt; of embezzling funds from the EU, a charge which the EU itself denies; and of tarnishing Egypt’s image.

This third charge has been the most cited and the least understood. The vaguely worded law prohibits “the dissemination abroad of lies and rumours for personal interest”; here, the prosecution’s case rested solely on a fax Ibrahim sent to a German non-governmental organisation (NGO) in September 1997, in which he suggested that Egypt’s Coptic minority was being persecuted and that Egypt’s 1995 parliamentary elections had been fixed.

No-one has ever denied either of these claims; indeed, they are two of Egypt’s many open secrets. Egypt’s elections are corrupt – no one is allowed to run against Mubarak, for example – and the Copts are regularly persecuted.

Ibrahim, as he explained it to me, was punished for saying them. The Ibn Khaldun Center, which organised election monitors and sent researchers into Coptic neighbourhoods, was straying into sensitive territory. But the final provocation came from Ibrahim himself. In al-Majallah, a London-based Saudi magazine, Ibrahim coined the phrase gomolokiya – a combination of the Arabic words for “republic” and “monarchy,” making something like “republonarchy” – to describe the monarchic tendencies of Arab leaders.

“I was ostensibly talking about Syria,” he told me, “but inevitably comparisons with Egypt were drawn. In the Arab regimes where the ruler has had an adult son – Iraq, Syria, Yemen – the regime internalises its sense of ownership, as if the state were private property. The leader feels entitled to bequeath it.” Mubarak, whose 39-year-old son Gamal is his obvious successor, was not amused. “It was”, Ibrahim told me, “the straw that broke the camel’s patience.”

Ibrahim was first arrested in June 2000. He was released after six weeks of detention, and arrested again, along with twenty-six researchers from the Ibn Khaldun Center. The trial lasted six months, and on 21 May 2001 he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years of hard labour; his co-defendants were given shorter sentences, and they all spent nine months in jail before the verdict was overthrown. On 29 July 2002, the retrial reconfirmed the sentences for Ibrahim and five of his co-defendants; on 3 December, he was again released from prison.

Ibrahim’s conviction and sentencing caused an international outcry. Both the US State Department and the European Union condemned the verdict; Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have championed Ibrahim. The attention to the case contributed to the US State Department’s decision on 14 August 2002, to refuse Egypt’s request for an additional $130 million of anti-terrorist aid; in explaining their decision, the State Department reiterated its concern over the verdict, although without the increase Egypt still receives two billion dollars of US aid each year. This international uproar has been focused on Saad Eddin Ibrahim the individual.

The convenient scapegoat of a failed politics

The Saad Eddin Ibrahim affair, however, has little to do with Saad Eddin Ibrahim itself. According to Mohamed Sid-Ahmet, one of Egypt’s most influential political commentators and journalists, “the trial is more related to Egypt-US relations than to the person of Ibrahim, whatever crime he has committed.”

Egypt’s aid package from the US is larger than that of any other country except Israel. In exchange, America has a compliant ally in the Middle East. “Egypt opted for peace with Israel when it was not certain,” Sid-Ahmet said. “If there was a setback on that issue, putting back into question the whole Middle East, others cannot do anything without Egypt. Perhaps Egypt is not a military challenge to Israel – but it is not only a question of the military challenge.”

The politics of the Middle East turn upon the axis of Israel and America. Saad Eddin Ibrahim has argued in favour of normalisation of relations between Egypt and Israel: “this has been a limiting factor for a number of Arab intellectuals who might have defended him,” Sid-Ahmet told me. Ibrahim attended conferences in Israel, and his case has received support there. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post of 31 May 2001 championed him as “an Egyptian patriot and a great believer in the future of Arab society and culture.”

Although Ibrahim’s support for Israel is in line with Mubarak’s policy, this has been used as a way to attack him. As part of the government campaign to demonise Ibrahim – one newspaper called for him to be hanged in public – the official Egyptian news agency, MENA, last summer suggested that Ariel Sharon had intervened on Ibrahim’s behalf, and this was why the original verdict was overthrown.

It seems unlikely, and Ibrahim himself denied it, but the taint stands. Ibrahim provides an elegant scapegoat. In prosecuting him, the Egyptian government can appear to be anti-Israel at home while simultaneously maintaining ties with the US; and by releasing him now, Mubarak can rebuild his ties to America when he needs them most. As Sid-Ahmet commented to me, the Saad Eddin Ibrahim affair “has become a classic case. If you want to talk about political misconduct in Egypt, you say three words.” It is as shorthand for a larger political story that we must read the Saad Eddin Ibrahim affair.

A looking-glass world

The timing of Ibrahim’s release is entirely political. The day after the acquittal, an opinion column in the New York Times declared that “yesterday’s verdict will restore some of Egypt’s good name”, without adding that it is precisely now that Egypt needs to appear to America to have a good name, and precisely in publications like the New York Times. There have been demonstrations in Cairo against war in Iraq for the last month; Mubarak, in order to present a US-friendly image to the US, is conscious of the photogenic gesture of the elderly academic walking free. But the gesture is hollow.

At the beginning of March, the Egyptian parliament passed a state decree which extended emergency law for a further three years. Egypt has been ruled under emergency law since President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist terrorists in October 1981. The emergency law severely restricts the activity of NGOs and democratic activists: Hisham Kassem, chairman of the Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights, said that the law “threatens to decapitate human rights groups.”

But on 6 March, Mubarak’s son Gamal – head of the ruling National Democratic Party’s policy committee – announced the abolition of Law 105 of the 1980 emergency statutes. This has the effect of limiting the powers of state security courts, the courts that repeatedly convicted Ibrahim.

The 18 March acquittal was therefore cosmetic. When he left the courtroom, Ibrahim told the Cairo Times – a left-wing paper – that his release “shows that these courts must go. They are a scandal in the face of the Egyptian judiciary.” But by then, the courts had already been abolished. In the through-the-looking-glass world of the Saad Eddin Ibrahim affair, his acquittal is more a sign of continued political repression than of democratic opening, and one of the many silent side-effects of America’s war in Iraq.