What would you like to happen with 1.3 billion dollars? Giving it to the Egyptian Military doesn’t rank high on my list .
Egyptian Military brutalizes protestors
WORLD Egypt Raids Offices of Nonprofits, 3 Backed by U.S.
Mohammed Asad/Associated Press Egyptian military personnel stood guard as officials raided a non-governmental organization offices in Cairo on Thursday.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN LEE MYERS Published: December 30, 2011
CAIRO – Security forces shut down three American-financed democracy-building groups and as many as six other nonprofit organizations on Thursday, in a crackdown on foreign money that signaled a new low in relations between Washington and Egypt’s military rulers.
Two of the organizations, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, had been formally authorized by the Egyptian government to monitor the ongoing parliamentary elections set to resume next week. Critics said the surprise raids contradicted the military’s pledge to hold a fair and transparent vote.
Another American-financed group whose offices were closed, the advocacy group Freedom House, had completed its application for official recognition just three days ago.
Human rights activists said security forces barging into the offices of respected international organizations was unprecedented, even under President Hosni Mubarak’s police state.
The raids are the latest and most forceful effort yet by the country’s ruling generals to crack down on perceived sources of criticism amid rising calls from Egyptian politicians and protesters and some Western leaders for the military to hand over power to a civilian government. Those calls were amplified by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s expression of outrage last week over the military’s beating and stripping of female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
On Thursday, a State Department spokeswoman announced that it was “deeply concerned” by the raids.
“Suffice it to say we don’t think that this action is justified,” the spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said. “We want to see the harassment end,” she added, calling the raids “inconsistent with the bilateral cooperation we’ve had over many years.”
Another senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in private channels, the United States had sent an even stronger message: “This crosses a line.”
“It’s triggered by ongoing concerns about control,” the official added, as the ruling military council confronted the mounting pressure to hand over power.
Others called the raids a major challenge to Washington’s policy toward Egypt, which receives $1.3 billion in year in American military aid.
“It is a major escalation in the Egyptian government’s crackdown on civil society organizations, and it is unprecedented in its attack on international organizations like Freedom House, which is funded in large part by the United States government,” said Charles Dunne, director of Middle East and North Africa Programs at the organization, which advocates for democratic reforms. “The military council is saying we are happy to take your $1.3 billion a year, but we are not happy when you do things like defending human rights and supporting democracy.”
Contingents of soldiers and security officers armed with automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests burst into the offices of all the nonprofit organizations at roughly the same time, around 1 p.m.
The officers provided no warrants or explanations, according to officials at several of the groups. They detained the group’s employees inside for more than five hours in some places. The security forces collected stacks of binders and files, confiscated computers, and sealed the doors as they left. At the National Democratic Institute’s office in Cairo, armed men in uniforms and plain clothes could be seen through a locked gate slicing open boxes of files stacked in a garage.
“Nobody understands what’s going on,” said Belal Mostafa Gooda, an Egyptian employee of the National Democratic Institute, in a furtive phone call from inside its locked gate during the raid. “We can’t move inside or go outside,” he said, adding, “They’re searching all the papers and files and all laptops, and we don’t know what will happen.”
The raid hit at least one German democracy-building group. The security forces also struck the Egyptian Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory, which studies the military and its spending. The officers also shut down an organization that argues for judicial independence.
Egyptian human rights groups are almost completely dependent on foreign financing because the hostility of the Mubarak government scared away Egyptian donors, and many received considerable support from the European Union as well as the United States.
But Egypt’s military rulers began railing against the dangers of foreign financing to Egyptian sovereignty around the time last spring that the United States said it would allocate $65 million to help foster electoral democracy here. Although the United States is Egypt’s most important benefactor, its policies in the region are also very unpopular here, making it an easy target.
And Egyptian state news media has made it clear since the military-led government began investigating allegations of improper financing months ago that its principal target was money from the United States; in the most infamous instance, a state-owned magazine greeted the new American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, a few months ago with a cartoon cover depicting her holding wads of burning cash in the middle of Tahrir Square. “Ambassador from Hell,” read the caption.
As new clashes have broken out between military police and protesters challenging military rule – more than 80 have died since October – the generals have often warned that there were “hidden hands” trying to stir up trouble or even “bring down the state.” And they have increasingly suggested that those hidden hands could be foreign-financed.
In a television interview last month, Maj. Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen suggested several times that the investigation into foreign financing of nongovernment organizations would shed light on the unnamed instigators whom he said were behind the protests and clashes in the streets. “We tell the Egyptian people, and the Egyptian people are smart, that there are people who are trying to demolish the country,” he said.
Most human rights and democracy groups in Egypt already operate in a legal twilight because of Mubarak-era laws allowing only nongovernment organizations licensed by the government. Before and after his ouster, the Egyptian government has seldom granted such licenses to genuinely independent organizations, which means most human rights or democracy groups or advocates operating in Egypt could be subject to closure or imprisonment at any time.
But until now, many independent groups have been tolerated nonetheless. Many organizations, including the American groups targeted in the raid on Thursday, say they operate with a policy of openness toward state security, keeping them well informed of their activities.
“We are in the same gray zone everybody else is,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch here, a group that was not raided. “We are not licensed and we can be shut down and jailed and all of that, but we keep the authorities informed.” She added, “I don’t think anybody expected there would be a new crackdown in the aftermath of revolution in January.”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.
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