Egypt's "Democracy" : Another Bush embarrassment...

[Contrary1]

Dec. 30, 2005 - "Egypt’s presidential elections last September were supposed to be the highlight of the Bush administration’s campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East. Instead, they’ve become an embarrassing acknowledgement of its failure. The electoral process started out on a hopeful note. President Hosni Mubarak had never allowed his quarter-century rule to be challenged at the polls; in previous votes, he had been the only candidate in a yes/no referendum. In 2005, Mubarak decided opposition groups would be permitted to run in parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, opposition newspapers were allowed to publish, allowing some alternative to Egypt’s state-controlled print and electronic media.

No one ever thought Mubarak or his National Democratic Party (NDP) would let the reforms go so far that he’d lose his grip on power. But even the Bush administration has been chagrined at the lengths to which the regime has gone to destroy its opponents while pretending to let democracy take its course. Those measures have been especially extreme in the case of the country’s leading opposition candidate, Ayman Nour, who heads the Ghad (or Tomorrow) Party. A baby-faced lawyer 30 years Mubarak’s junior, Nour, 41, had limited funding but a flair for the dramatic: during one of the periodic bread shortages in Cairo, he got up in parliament and dared the prime minister to eat a slice of the rock-hard stuff the government was distributing to the needy. (The offer was declined.) At other times, Nour belittled Mubarak as an impotent old man afraid of his own people because the president made his campaign visits by helicopter instead of the traditional bus.

Then came the crackdown. In January 2005, authorities trumped up forgery charges against Nour based on the petitions he filed to place his name on the presidential ballot. He was even accused of forging his own name. Officials stripped him of parliamentary immunity in the middle of the night, arrested him on the steps of the Assembly and dragged him down to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the country’s most public place. There policemen kept him kneeling with boots on his neck while they waited an hour for the prison van to arrive, a public humiliation. He was in jail for six weeks..."

more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10654690/site/newsweek/

[tx_dem41]

1. Thank you for posting this. Its not only Bush's embarrassment

either. The outcome of "dictatorships/kingdoms" in Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and to a much lesser extent Jordan, will shape the Middle East and thus, the U.S, for years and years to come. Yet, both sides of the political spectrum could seemingly care less about it.

[tx_dem41]

2. Kick because it's an important story. n/t

[Auntie Bush]

3. Sounds like Egypt's Democracy is just a tad bit worse than ours.

[eridani]

4. What in bleeding hell are we supposed to do about the fact--

--that Egypt isn't a democracy? Lots of countries aren't and some have horrible dictators. I say stay the fuck out and let civilians in NGOs help other civilians who are working for democracy in their countries.