[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 72 (Friday, June 10, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 10, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        DON'T PANIC ABOUT EGYPT

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the moves toward peace in the Middle 
East have encouraged all of us who have hoped for that for so long.
  Many countries have played a role in that.
  Norway, clearly, played a brokering role in bringing the Palestine 
Liberation Organization [PLO] and Israel together. Tunisia played a key 
role in being willing to host the PLO during this transition period and 
giving an example of a moderate government that is successful to the 
PLO leaders.
  Less well-known is the leadership of President Mubarak in Egypt. In a 
recent article I saw in the Jerusalem Report on June 2, 1994 titled, 
``Don't Panic about Egypt,'' Leslie Susser tells in some detail what is 
happening in the Middle East and provides additional details about 
President Mubarak's leadership.
  I join many others in being grateful to President Mubarak for that 
leadership.
  I ask that the Jerusalem Report article be inserted into the Record 
at this point.
  The article follows:

                        Don't Panic About Egypt

                           (By Leslie Susser)

       Well after midnight on May 4, just hours before the planned 
     signing ceremony of the Israel-PLO peace deal, President 
     Hosni Mubarak swept dramatically into the sideroom assigned 
     to the Israeli negotiating team in Cairo's Al-Itihad Palace. 
     He put his arm around Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, took him 
     aside and whispered, ``You must give Arafat the Muasi area on 
     the Gaza coast (south of Gaza city).'' Rabin agreed.
       During the ceremony 10 hours later, when Arafat refused to 
     sign the maps attached to the agreement, it was Mubarak who, 
     once offstage with the PLO leader, gave him a brutal tongue-
     lashing and cowed him into putting pen to paper.
       Not for nothing was the signing staged in Cairo. Egypt has 
     played a crucial role in helping Israelis and Palestinians 
     surmount innumerable obstacles on the way to agreement. 
     According to Tel Aviv University's Prof. Shimon Shamir, a 
     former Israeli ambassador in Cairo and an expert on Egypt, 
     Mubarak's role was ``decisive.''
       Rabin himself has long recognized the importance of Egypt. 
     Within two weeks of forming his coalition government in July 
     1992, he traveled to Cairo, his first trip abroad as prime 
     minister. Because of its peace treaty with Israel, Rabin sees 
     Egypt as uniquely placed to bridge differences between Israel 
     and the Arab world, in particular the Palestinians.
       The prime minister's aides speak of the Rabin-Mubarak 
     relationship in glowing terms. They say when problems 
     surfaced with the Palestinians, Rabin would automatically 
     pick up the phone to the Egyptian leader. Says one senior 
     aide: ``Rabin and Mubarak are both military men, and 
     respect each other's blunt speech, ability to stick the 
     point and to solve problems in a practical way. Mubarak 
     often praises Rabin's honesty and contrasts it with what 
     he saw as former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir's 
     deviousness.''
       Rabin was understandably concerned about reports earlier 
     this year that the threat to Mubarak's regime from Islamic 
     radicals was growing. He even speculated in closed meeting 
     about Mubarak's vulnerability to an assassin's bullet and, 
     when word got back to Mubarak, apologized to the Egyptian 
     leader for seeming to doubt his regime's stability.
       The height of the apocalyptic reporting on Egypt was a 
     London Sunday Times spread on February 20, quoting American 
     and Israeli intelligence sources as saying that the Egyptian 
     regime was in danger. The report was prompted by abortive 
     assassination attempts in November on both President Mubarak 
     and Prime Minister Atef Sidki, and an intensification of 
     fighting between Egyptian armed forces and Islamic militants, 
     especially in the South, where the fundamentalists hold sway 
     in large areas.
       The Americans quickly made it clear that while they 
     believed there could be a long-term threat to the regime, it 
     was not tottering. And Israeli intelligence pooh-poohed the 
     whole story. By their reasoning, even if the radicals manage 
     to assassinate Egyptian leaders, they do not have the 
     organizational infrastructure or the military support to 
     effect a full-scale coup. They have infiltrated the army, but 
     only at junior officer level. Without the generals they 
     cannot succeed.
       After last November's plot, seven of the would-be assassins 
     were rounded up and hanged, and a huge arms cache was found 
     in Cairo, complete with underground bunkers, explosives and 
     vast quantities of weaponry, including RPG rockets. The find, 
     gloated Hasan al-Alfi, Egypt's minister of the interior, was 
     a death blow to the radicals. But other Egyptian officials 
     saw the arms cache as a worrying sign of unanticipated 
     organizational capacity on the part of the militants.
       Egypt's Foreign Minister Amr Moussa denounced the Western 
     reports of a threat to the regime as stemming from ``sheer 
     ignorance of the Egyptian situation.'' Shimon Shamire agrees: 
     ``A regime that has half a million people in the internal 
     security services, a strong bureaucracy and a firm tradition 
     of governmental control can hardly be said to be tottering.''
       Isreli Foreign Ministry assessments are also upbeat about 
     Egypt's ability to remain the leader of the Arab peace camp. 
     ``Even in the unlikely event of a different regime coming to 
     power, it will still need Western money to fight poverty. And 
     that means continuing the peace orientation,'' says a senior 
     official on the Egyptian desk.
       Meanwhile, Egyptian radicals are not having things all 
     their own way, even among the poor, where their hold is 
     strongest. Attacks on tourists have sparked something of a 
     backlash--critical articles in the press, a greater effort by 
     the Islamic establishment to distance itself from them. 
     Shamir points out that 10 million Egyptians earn a living 
     from toruism--which, before the radicals struck, had become 
     the country's top foreign currency earner, head of the Suez 
     Canal and oil.
       But what most encourages Israel's Foreign Ministry is the 
     spread of a new liberalism among Egypt's leading 
     intellectuals. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, 
     Marxist ideology, the main intellectual prop for Arab 
     nationalism, increasingly has given way to the new ideology. 
     And for Egyptians, this entails a pro-Western, pragmatic, 
     free-market orientation--a package that includes peace and 
     economic cooperation with Israel.
       And the intellectuals, Dr Said al-Nagar, Mustapha Fiqy, Ali 
     Salem and Sa'ad Adin Ibrahim among them, have not stopped 
     there. They have coined a new concept, ``Middle Easternism,'' 
     which they see as a substitute for Arab nationalism. In 
     facing up honestly to the problematics of the region, they 
     argue, non-Arab power brokers have to be taken into acocunt--
     Iran, Turkey and Israel.
       Although strongly supported by the liberals, the regime has 
     never openly endorsed them. Indeed, according to Shamir, the 
     Egyptian leadership is somewhat embarrassed by their support 
     because of their outspoken secularism in what is still 
     basically a religious society.
       The regime has chosen rather to fight fundamentalism by 
     delegitimizing it in Islamic terms. ``The radicals have 
     nothing in common with true Islam,'' Foreign Minister Moussa 
     thundered in a recent interview. In line with this approach, 
     theology professors from Al-Azhar university often appear on 
     TV to lend their support to the government line. And whenever 
     militants cross over to the other side, they are put on 
     television to denounce radical practices.
       Although the liberal intellectuals are a relatively small 
     group, the pragmatism they advocate is widespread. An April 
     survey in the newspaper Akhbar al-Yawm showed an astounding 
     80 percent of Egyptians in favor of warmer ties with Israel--
     out of Egyptian self-interest.
       The survey showed that although there is still a great deal 
     of distrust where Israel is concerned, Egyptians today put 
     economic self-interest before ideological feuding. There is 
     even heated debate--in the press and the coffee shops--over 
     fears that other Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf, 
     may rush toward normalization of ties with Israel and leave 
     the Egyptians, the pioneers, behind when the fruits of peace 
     begin to ripen.
       Senior Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem, believe the 
     key to comprehensive peace in the Middle East--and to 
     Israel's integration into the region--lies in Damascus. But 
     once that peace is achieved, they say, the road to the new 
     Middle East will almost certainly run through Cairo.

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