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EGYPT ARMING WHILE REGIME IS SHAKING
"What Has Happened To The World?"
Confused Egyptian Prison Guard
MID-EAST REALITIES � - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 6/20:
Arab States, including Egypt, are arming at a growing pace. Even combined they
are still no match to defeat Israel. But their detterence capabilities are growing,
they might be able to seriously bloody Israel in years ahead, and this whole situation
is one more factor propelling the Israeli Generals, foremost among them Ariel Sharon,
to ponder the risks of a deadly strike now upon the Palestinians, even at the risk of
regional war, rather than waiting for a day when the situation might be even more
problematical and dangerous for them.
At the same time the Mubarak Regime is showing growing signs of confusion and
desperation.. For years the Egyptian intelligentsia remained silent as the Egyptian
State used near barbaric means of ruthless suppression and torture against
nationalists of Islamic orientation. A police state of fear and lawlessness has come
to characterize the underpinnings of the regime. Now far milder but nevertheless
severe repression has come to a prominent member of their own circles -- Saad Eddin
Ibrahim -- and the message is clear to all that anyone who speaks up and opposes the
regime should fear for the knock at the door. As the New York Times article below
suggests but does not say the Egyptian Secret Police and the Nazi Storm Trooers of
yesteryear have very much in common -- and not just because S.S.I. is reminiscent of
S.S.
EGYPT BUYS MISSILES FROM NORTH KOREA
By ELI J. LAKE and RICHARD SALE
WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- Questions about Egypt's efforts to acquire advanced
missile technology from North Korea are likely to make the coming visit of Egyptian
Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher el-Sayed's to Washington an awkward one, administration
officials and intelligence sources said Monday.
Despite denials from Egyptian officials, including President Hosni Mubarak himself,
the latest U.S. intelligence reports suggest Egypt is close to
obtaining the technology for the No Dong class missiles from North Korea, rockets with
a range of 800 miles -- far greater than the best Scuds in the
Egyptian arsenal, which can travel at most 300 miles.
A growing chorus of U.S. administration officials and lawmakers has privately raised
concerns about Egypt renewing military ties with North
Korea, and the sources said the Bush administration is likely to press Maher al-Sayed
on this issue.
One U.S. intelligence official says recent reports estimate there are between 50 to
300 North Korean technicians on the ground in Egypt already
working on the missile program. The source tells United Press International the
Egyptians will have "wide exposure" to North Korean technology as a
result of the program.
Another U.S. intelligence official tells UPI, "Egypt is pretty much going to get what
Iran got" from the North Koreans. In Dec. 1993, Iran and North
Korea signed an agreement to build a production line capacity for the No Dong inside
Iran, though that missile had only been tested in 1993 and
deployments were much later.
In an interview Friday, Egypt's ambassador in Washington dismissed the allegations
his country was trying to attain the missile technology. "The
allegations that we are developing a joint project with the North Koreans are false,"
Nabil Fahmy told UPI.
"We are denying the No Dong program." But other Washington analysts suspect things are
different. Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh Burke Chair for
Strategic Assessment at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington,
said he has reason to believe the Egyptians are pursuing some
joint military projects with the North Korea. "The missile I think they have been
working on with North Korea is along the lines of the Scud class
with a range of about 500 kilometers (310 miles). But I've seen reports of more
ambitious projects."
North Korea has missile arrangements with Iran, Libya and Syria -- three states the
U.S. considers sponsors of terrorism. But Egypt is regarded as
one of the leading American allies in the Arab world, and receives U.S. military aid
approaching $1.3 billion a year.
The issue of Cairo's interest in North Korea's missile program has surfaced in
Washington just when the Bush administration has signaled its
intention of resuming bi-lateral contacts with Pyongyang that had been suspended in
January when President Bush took office.
Bush had stated publicly that the North Korean leadership could not be trusted as an
interlocutor. But earlier this month, the administration
announced that it was prepared to resume talks on a broad range of issues including
troop reduction in the demarcation zone separating the two Koreas, and halting
Pyongyang's missile development. The North Koreans also agreed to a resumption of
talks.
Last Wednesday, Jack Pritchard, the U.S. envoy to the Korean peace talks met with the
North Korea ambassador to the U.N., Li Hyong Chol, to discuss the modalities of
further talks.
Egypt's military relationship with North Korea goes back to the early 70s, when
Pyongyang sent an air battalion to Egypt as a sign of solidarity in its
war with Israel in 1973.
But the relationship intensified after then-President Anwar Sadat signed a peace
treaty with Israel in 1978 -- angering Egypt's Soviet patrons. North
Korea stepped in to fill the gap by providing Egypt with much needed spare parts.
Egypt's military museum in Cairo is alleged to have been designed by North Korean
architects.
The latest unclassified CIA report to Congress on the acquisition missile technology
says, "Egypt continues its effort to develop and produce
ballistic missiles with the assistance of North Korea. This activity is part of a
long-running program of ballistic missile cooperation between these two
countries."
Ambassador Fahmy, however, dismisses the rather broad characterization, but confirms
that there were such contacts five years ago. "The unclassified
report talks about stuff from five years ago, it was a limited program and that's
where it stopped," he says.
Still, Congress and the administration clearly need to be reassured. Congressional
sources tell UPI that when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
visited Congress in March he told an informal group of House and Senate lawmakers that
Egypt was trying to acquire advanced Scud class missiles from North Korea.
Richard Murphy, former U.S. Middle East negotiator and senior Middle East Fellow with
the Council on Foreign Relations warned "Not all intelligence reports are true." But
he added, "if these reports are true, it could not provide Israel with a better excuse
to use its own highy effective Jerico medium range missies."
One House staff member told UPI, "Given the concerns about North Korea's activities
in the proliferation of ballistic missiles and the fact that
theater missile defense was designed to counter that threat -- something like this
does not help Egypt's image."
Indeed, Egypt's new foreign minister will be arriving in Washington Wednesday when
questions are being raised about the size of the $1.3 billion
annual U.S. military assistance package for Cairo.
In budget hearings in May, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., then the chairman of the
Senate panel charged with appropriating the foreign aid budget
questioned Secretary of State Colin Powell on the size of the U.S. contribution to
Egypt's military.
Powell countered that he thought it to be a sound investment. Other groups too,
including Israel's powerful lobby in Washington, have privately
begun expressing similar reservations questions about military aid to Egypt, according
to several Congressional staff members. The military assistance
package goes mainly for modernizing conventional forces liked armored and air
divisions -- but not towards developing ballistic missiles.
MUBARAK REGIME IS NOW ON TRIAL IN EGYPT
By MARY ANNE WEAVER
[New York Times, 17 June]:
Late one evening last summer, Saad Eddin
Ibrahim, a prominent Egyptian-American
civil rights advocate and one of the Arab
world's leading social scientists, was working
in his study - a spacious one, on a quiet,
tree-lined street in the suburb of Maadi, one
of Cairo's most fashionable neighborhoods.
The room was bursting with books, stacks of
papers, family photographs and half-finished
cups of tea. On that particular evening, the
61-year-old professor of sociology was alone
in the house: his American-born wife,
Barbara, was out of town; his son, Amir, was
out with friends; and his daughter, Randa,
was at her own home with her husband and
Saad Eddin's second, recently born
grandchild. It seemed unusually quiet, the
professor thought to himself. Evening prayers
had recently ended at the adjacent Victory
College mosque, and the worshipers had left.
With their departure, all noise, all sounds,
seemed to have come to an end.
A partly bald and bearded man of medium
height and build, and an outspoken proponent
of his views, he ensconced himself on the sofa
and began to read. He may have fallen
asleep, or simply been deep in thought; he
can't quite recall. Whichever it was, he
gradually became aware of a persistent
drumlike pounding on his front door. Sleepily,
he made his way down to the entrance foyer,
opened the door and was abruptly jolted
completely awake. A dozen armed guards
from State Security Investigation, or S.S.I.,
stormed into the house, as 40 or so others
cordoned it off. Some raided his study and
eventually carted off scores of boxes of files
and books, his computer - and the family
safe. Others surrounded him. "Come with us,"
one of them said. "Come with us. You're
under arrest."
"I looked out of the door," Saad Eddin said a
few weeks ago, as we sat in the open-air cafe
of my Cairo hotel one late April afternoon. "It
was like the siege of Stalingrad. Armored
cars surrounded the house. Guards were
posted everywhere. Why had so many
people come to arrest one harmless
intellectual? Why didn't they just make a
phone call? I would have come."
It was a little before midnight when Saad
Eddin Ibrahim was bundled into an armored
car and driven about three miles, high above
Cairo, into the Mokattam Hills to the Ibn
Khaldun Center for Development Studies.
Established by Saad Eddin 12 years before -
and named for the great medieval Islamic
scholar - the center had emerged as a leading
exponent of democratic reform and
intellectual freedom in the Arab world.
As the armored car continued to climb the
sinuous mountain road, Saad Eddin glanced
out of the window. "I could see the whole
motorcade," he said. "There were at least 10
cars ahead of me and another 10 behind:
bright lights in the darkness. There are so
many layers, so many conflicting images, in all
of this, and it was that night that I first saw the
contrast, the physical part - two starkly
different images, one romantic, one harsh.
Caravans in the desert, I thought, as I looked
at the twinkling lights, or the carts of death, during the French
Revolution, taking
their victims to the guillotine."
It was June 30, the last day of the fiscal year, and Nadia Abdel Nour,
the financial
manager of the Ibn Khaldun Center, had worked late that night
supervising the
closing of the books. A genteel, attractive woman of 50 or so, with
luminous dark
eyes, she is a Sudanese refugee and the sole support of her large
refugee family. At
around 8 p.m., as she waited at a nearby bus stop, her neatly ordered
world began
to fall apart.
"They grabbed me from behind, blindfolded me, threw a bag over my head,"
she
later said. She had no idea who they were. She was terrified. "I thought
I was being
kidnapped!" she said with a shudder.
"When we arrived at Ibn Khaldun, I found her there," Saad Eddin said.
"She was
outside the center. She was sobbing and shaking. She was still
blindfolded. She had
no idea where she was, or why."
As Saad Eddin and Nadia Abdel Nour watched in bewilderment, dozens of
S.S.I.
officers began tearing the Ibn Khaldun Center apart. Others surrounded
the building,
blocking all access roads. Still others took up positions around it,
their automatic
assault weapons drawn. Many of their faces were partly concealed by
visored
helmets, and it was impossible to know who they were.
All across Cairo that evening, lawyers and economists, students and
social workers
were arrested and taken off to high-security prisons. By the following
week, 28
officials and employees of the Ibn Khaldun Center, along with
representatives of the
League of Egyptian Women Voters, had been swept up. Most remained in
prison
for two months. During that time, not one of them - not even Saad Eddin
Ibrahim -
was charged. They were held under Egypt's draconian emergency laws, which
President Hosni Mubarak has renewed every three years for the 20 years
of his
presidency.
It was nearly dawn when Saad Eddin Ibrahim and his 20-car security
escort were
ushered through the gates of S.S.I. headquarters -- where he was held
through the
following night. For 14 hours, Saad Eddin was interrogated about his
work, his
public lectures and his dozen or so books. Interrogators came and went
from the
windowless spartan room. Some were from the office of the public
prosecutor,
others from S.S.I. After that ordeal, he was transferred to the
high-security section
of the Tora prison complex in South Cairo, one of the country's most
dreaded
detention sites. He would spend six weeks there before being released on
bail.
"My first interrogation ended at about 8 o'clock that night," Saad Eddin
said. "It was
just twilight when I arrived at Tora Mazra'at. An elderly, white-haired
police
corporal was sitting at a desk. He peered at me over his half-glasses:
'Dr. Saad
Eddin Ibrahim?'
"I thought he was reading a newspaper, but it was too early for that,
and then he
said: 'I'm Ali Hamdan. I was a private here 20 years ago, when you came
to do
research. It was a long time ago.' He paused for a moment and then he
asked,
'What has happened to the world?'
"I saw the human face of Egypt that night in this old man," Saad Eddin
said.
"Previously, I had seen the brutal face of the state. There have been so
many faces
of Egypt in all of this, so many threads. There I stood in handcuffs,
and I had to
comfort this old man."
UP TO 300 N. KOREANS IN EGYPT FOR MISSILE PROGRAM
WASHINGTON � World Tribune, 21 June: Cairo is proceeding with plans to buy North
Korean missile engines and up to 300 North Korean technicians are in Egypt for the
missile program according to new intelligence reports.
The engines are for the No-Dong missiles, which has a range of between 1,000 and 1,300
kilometers.
The number of North Koreans are said to have increased over the last two years both in
Egypt and in neighboring Libya. Much of Egyptian missile development is said to be
taking place in Libya, Middle East Newsline reports.
The latest intelligence reports, the officials said, undermine Egypt's credibility and
some members of Congress are threatening to review all U.S. aid to Cairo unless the No
Dong sale is terminated. The issue was raised last month by then chairman of the
Senate Appropriations subcommittee Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher has arrived to a frosty welcome from the Bush
administration and Congress due to the reports that Cairo has accelerated cooperation
with North Korea in the development of intermediate-range weapons.
Maher is scheduled to meet U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell today and National
Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice and congressional leaders on June 22. This
is his first official visit to the United States since he became foreign minister.
Officials said Egypt has pledged that it does not cooperate with North Korea and said
some of Washington's allegations refer to cooperation that ended in 1996.
Still, Maher will not be extensively questioned regarding the North Korean missile
sale. U.S. officials said Maher, who assumed office last month, is not regarded as the
right address for such concerns by Washington.
Instead, the officials said, the issue will be raised when Egyptian Defense Minister
Hussein Tantawi arrives in Washington later this year. Tantawi is expected to discuss
Egyptian request for F-16s and other U.S. weapons.
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