In a quirky reversal of the old principle, the Arab establishment agrees with what its anti-war protestors say, but will apparently defend to the death its right to stop them saying it.
About 600 anti-war protestors defied state hostility to stage a protest against war in Iraq in Cairo on 15 February.
By most standards it was a poor contrast to the millions who gathered elsewhere - even 2,000 Jews and Muslims defied fierce public hostility in Tel Aviv to make the same point the same day.
Yet Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak would find little to disagree with in what the protestors have to say, based on media reports of their respective views. It illustrates the Egyptian regime's inability to manage anti-war sentiment at home without resorting to repression and restraints on free speech.
The government assigned some 3,000 General Security riot police to corral the Cairo protestors. And reacting with knee-jerk hostility and driven by fear of what protestors might say next, anti-war activists had already been rounded up and jailed for weeks before the weekend's global protests.
Chief among them, Ibrahim el-Sahari, a journalist with the independent financial daily el-Alam el-Youm, who was arrested on 6 February in connection with his part in an anti-war protest at January's Cairo Book Fair. El-Sahari is the author of the book In The Name of Iraq: A New War for Oil and Hegemony, critical of Egyptian and Arab responses to US strategy.
Others under arrest included Sabri el-Sammak, director of production at Aflam Misr el-Alameya, the production company of award-winning Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine.
State Security arrested 11 demonstrators against the war against Iraq on 18 January. They had gathered in the same spot, Sayyeda Zeinab, as the 15 February protestors. All face charges of disrupting public order. At least eight are reported to still be under pre-trial detention in Tora prison.
The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) says such arrests "are blatant violations of the right to peaceful assembly and the right to the freedom of opinion and expression".
EOHR has called for the immediate release of all detainees and urges the authorities to guarantee the right of citizens to express their opinion peacefully as stipulated by the Egyptian Constitution and international conventions on human rights as ratified by the Egyptian parliament.
The 15 February protest denounced both war on Iraq and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. AFP reported that they carried banners waved Palestinian and Iraqi flags and chanted "George W. Bush is the enemy of God". The most contentious target was the Gulf state of Qatar, expected HQ for any US-led invasion of Iraq, which was abused for its cooperation with Washington.
But so far Egypt has been confused by the protests, unable to square them with its traditional opposition to street demos and nervous that criticism of US strategy may lead to more wounding criticism of its response to it.
In a scathing comment article for the London Independent, British journalist Robert Fisk - a fierce opponent of US strategy in the Middle East - noted that the presidents and kings of the Arab world agree with their people, but do not wish them to express these shared views.
"It's one thing for Mr Mubarak to criticise the United States - quite another for Egyptians to do so," he wrote after the 15 February Cairo protest. "What on earth, one wonders, did the 3,000 Egyptian security police think as they surrounded their protesting brothers and sisters?"
This nervousness is not new. Last December a planned high profile international anti-war conference in Cairo nearly collapsed in the face of overt and covert state attitudes to the event and what it represented.
Organised by the recently formed group for the "Popular Egyptian Campaign to Resist US Aggression on Iraq" it broke new ground by linking opposition to a US strike on Baghdad, anti-globalisation themes and support for Palestine - again, all stances that Mubarak has taken in the past.
The three day-event attracted a host of Western peace and anti-globalisation activists, including former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former United Nations officials Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday, both of whom resigned over the Iraq issue.
But last minute cancellations by hotels that had allegedly agreed to host the event, again allegedly in the face of doubts that the event had official approval, nearly scuppered the whole conference.
An additional problem facing the anti-war movement is the regulated nature of Egypt's self-styled political 'opposition', which exists only with the consent of the state and which jealously guards its position.
The new anti-war movement's refusal to align itself with any party, whether official or officially approved opposition, cost it heavily. Both sides' party media ignored the event, with only the English language Cairo Times covering it in any detail.
And Egyptians are ambivalent about the kind of western style campaigns for fundamental human rights that the Egyptian anti-war movement emulates.
The Cairo Times reported mixed responses at last December's conference to German journalist Harald Schuman assertion that Arab activists must consistently demand domestic reform in addition to opposing US regional ambitions.
"The Iraqi people are also suffering because their regime is as corrupt as all the others," said Der Spiegel correspondent Schuman, he said. "You can only be credible if you don't turn a blind eye to your own failures."
The oft-held view among some in Cairo is that Egypt should be left alone to establish standards of human rights on its own terms, through its own choice of strategy. Democratisation, they argue, is an evolutionary process, not always a matter of applying global standards to individual circumstances.
Thus even some human rights groups bridled at US criticism of the jailing of Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim for seven years on charges including the damaging of Egypt's image abroad.
As Hafez Abu Saeda, Secretary General of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, recently told Radio Netherlands: "I think it is important to link economic aid and democratisation. It's more useful than to focus on an individual case. There's no effort from the US to support democratisation in Egypt and this is not a good thing."
Yet as Mubarak tries to reassert Arab opinion by bringing forward a summit on the issue from March to this month it may also be time for a change in attitude to public opinion.
Things are moving faster in other Arab states. There were more than 10,000 people at a protest in Beirut on 15 February, linking communities who fought each other during the civil war there. And there was a huge state-organised protest in Syria - whose current UN Security Council seat gives it a key role - that drew a claimed 200,000 people.
"The war in Iraq has turned us into part of the world. The streets of London and Paris have freed the streets of Cairo and Damascus," an Egyptian journalist told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz this week.
"But it is still not clear to us if we are demonstrating against America, for Iraq, or with Europe. We will have to wait a few more days to see where we are, where the people truly stand."
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Links:
Robert Fisk on Arab anti-war protest.
A fledging anti-war movement steps on a few toes. Cairo Times report.
Ha'aretz on the 'voice on the Arab street'.
Radio Netherlands report from Cairo.
Beirut Daily Star report on the Lebanese protests.
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20030219_egypt.shtml
