Robert Fisk: Egypt
is a nation caught between Islam and the West
12 October 2001
Egypt used to accuse Britain of being a hotbed of
"terrorism". Why were Egyptians opposed to President Hosni
Mubarak's rule given permission to live in London? Why did the British
allow Egyptian Islamists to encourage fellow Arabs to overthrow the
democratically elected government of the Arab world's largest country?
In upper Egypt, in the towns around Assiut, the
"Islamist'' gunmen were hunted down by the Egyptian mukhabarat
(intelligence services) with great ruthlessness.
It must be hard to be an ally of the West. An
Egyptian police colonel once told me – and he was an intelligent,
educated man with a strong sense of morality – that unless he did his
job, then his wife and daughters would be hanging from lamp-posts as
"apostates". It was a war between "good" and
"evil".
Mr Mubarak's last near-assassination – the
latest of 33 alleged attempts – was when "Islamists" hid
explosives in the airline staircase down which he was supposed to have
walked at an Egyptian airbase. The attempt on his life in Addis Ababa was,
Mr Mubarak said, arranged by Osama bin Laden.
Really? The repeated attacks on foreign tourists
in Egypt have been blamed on Mr bin Laden. So – by extension – is the
murder of President Anwar Sadat almost a quarter of a century ago, by an
organisation, Takfir wa Hejira, which is today accused of an alliance with
Mr bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. The only problem is that Mr bin Laden
would have been in his early 20s at the time, hardly a "terrorist
chief", least of all because he was at the time a loyal Saudi.
PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. Making a Channel 4 film in 1993, Beirut to
Bosnia, in which I spent a lot of time with the Egyptian mukhabarat in
Luxor, the Valley of the Kings tourist resort which had been bankrupted by
the flight of tourists. Yes, they admitted one hot evening over the Nile,
most of the "Islamists" who spread their word in the towns
around Luxor were Saudis. Their leaflets had been printed in Saudi Arabia.
And why hadn't the Egyptians dealt with this? Well, one Egyptian detective
confided, Egypt wasn't going to attack a country which brought it great
wealth: Saudi Arabia.
Just as the Bush administration is curiously
reticent to talk about the Saudi links to the crime against humanity on 11
September – the fact that more than half the hijackers appear to be
Saudi, that Mr bin Laden is (or was) a Saudi – so Egypt has escaped the
net of suspicion. President Mubarak, who is much shrewder than his enemies
would suppose, broke his "Islamist'' opposition by turning the
imprisoned members of extremist groups against their uncaptured comrades.
It costs £2bn to keep Egypt afloat and on
"our side". I wonder if – with a little more generosity and
forethought – we might have spent this money in Afghanistan, to give
Afghans a life of prosperity and security that Mr bin Laden and his
friends could not equal. But Egypt was our friend; it had made peace with
Israel. Its president was ours.
But not its people. Mohamed Atta was an Egyptian
who flew a Boeing airliner into the World Trade Centre. He seems to have
visited Saudi Arabia. And oddly enough, when I used to chat to the
principal Egyptian lawyer defending the "Islamists" of Egypt, he
gave me his visiting card. His head office? In Saudi Arabia.
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