Conditions urged on US aid to Egypt

Dissident seeks greater freedoms

WASHINGTON - Egypt's most prominent exiled dissident is prodding American legislators to use their leverage over US aid to Egypt to force the Cairo government to foster greater political and media freedoms and a more independent judiciary.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, 69, a sociologist from the American University in Cairo, is lobbying Congress to attach conditions to America's $1.5 billion annual aid to Egypt. "I am pushing for conditionality, and I would like the democracy and freedom agenda to be a bipartisan one," Ibrahim said.

But a previous effort to tie portions of Egypt's aid to an easing of its political climate proved short-lived, and even Ibrahim's friends say his effort is misguided. Francis Ricciardone, who recently stepped down after three years as US ambassador to Egypt, said Ibrahim's crusade was "totally idealistic and, in that sense, admirable but not realistic."

Ricciardone, a guest scholar at the US Institute of Peace, said he differed with Ibrahim "on the utility and the meaning of proposing conditionality on foreign aid. In my personal view, it is not a useful tool of diplomacy."

On Aug. 2, Ibrahim was sentenced to two years in jail with hard labor after an Egyptian court ruled that his writings in foreign newspapers had tarnished Egypt's reputation and harmed Egyptian interests. He has not been in the country since June 2007 and says he wants to avoid putting his family through the pain of further imprisonment. He was jailed in Egypt three times from 2000 to 2003, during which he suffered strokes that have left him in frail health.

In early September, he met with Senators Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, Representatives Nita Lowey, Democrat of New York, and Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, and foreign policy staff members of five other legislators. On Monday, Ibrahim gave a lecture at George Washington University and held a teleconference with young Egyptian activists. He conferred with representatives of the National Endowment for Democracy and the US Institute of Peace, ahead of meetings yesterday and today with other members of Congress.

Egypt, which became the second-largest recipient of American aid in 1979 after it agreed to make peace with Israel, has seen its $2 billion annual bounty shrink in the past two years. President Bush's aid request for fiscal 2009 is down 12 percent from this year's $1.71 billion package.

In December, Congress passed a bill to withhold $100 million in military aid until Egypt stopped the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip from the Sinai Peninsula, implemented judicial reforms and curbed torture by the state police. According to Ibrahim and news reports at the time, President Hosni Mubarak was enraged by the conditions, the first of their kind. In March, to gain Cairo's cooperation in cooling tensions between the Israeli army and Hamas in Gaza, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a waiver of the bill.

Ibrahim said he would like a waiver to be embedded in the new legislation but be applied only if certain benchmarks are met.

When the next foreign operation appropriations bill comes up, it will have the same language as the previous bill regarding the withholding of $100 million in military financing, according to Lowey's staff. That portion of the 2009 bill has received House subcommittee approval.

Egyptian press attache Karim Haggag in Washington reiterated Egypt's rejection of any aid, American or international, that is tethered to conditions, warning it would be "counterproductive."

"I fail to see how that approach would benefit the stated objective of furthering human rights," he said.