by Robin Wright
“Other papers put Mubarak on the front page at least 320 days a year, and the only reason they don’t do it 365 days is because they can’t say the only thing he did that day was go to the toilet,” Kassem said.
Starting a quality paper in a country with long-standing press restrictions was “like flying a 747 jetliner,” Kassem lamented, moving his hands slowly like the lumbering aircraft. “It’s so big you have to move gradually. It’s not like a Cessna that can dart in and out of the skies.” He focused particularly on recruiting young reporters who had not been jaded by work in the government-controlled media.
Kassem vividly remembered the morning that his editor walked in with Zeiny’s four-page testimony in his hand.
“He was very excited, and he said, ‘This document is from a judge who says the election was rigged.’ I closed the door because this was a very serious charge. It was the biggest story we’d ever had,” Kassem said. “Then I called our lawyer. He said we needed to get her signature on the document, or she could always deny it the next day—and then the paper would be closed down. We’d only been publishing a short time.
“So the editor and I went to her together. The paper was already late, and I had to call every two or three minutes to keep it open. We’d have to remake the front page,” Kassem continued. “When Zeiny said she would sign it, we decided to go with it. That’s when I turned off my cell phone and stopped taking calls on the office phone from anyone, even the paper’s shareholders.”
Zeiny’s testimonial, which ran in full, began starkly. “I was there. I was part of the whole thing.” She continued:
This is a testament for truth’s sake. If I did not record it, I would be accountable before God on the Day of Judgment. By what I write here, I do not intend to support or defame any party. It is merely a question of telling the truth, to which I have devoted my life, and to honor the justice that I have vowed to uphold.
Point by point, Zeiny outlined suspicious activity during the vote count. The presence of a State Security official at the table where the final vote was tallied “was in itself a dangerous indication to me,” she wrote. She questioned the inappropriate involvement of a government lawyer as “well beyond my comprehension that a state lawyer and defender became part of an authority to adjudicate and supervise the competition between two people, one of whom represents the government.”
When the vote count was coming to a close, she wrote, she heard officials “intensively” using their mobile phones to relay the results; she heard the word “sweeping” in several conversations to describe Heshmat’s victory. She also heard one colleague comment, “Fiqi’s defeat will turn the world upside down.”
Because she is an observant Muslim, Zeiny added a personal note in her testimonial.
“To spare any political shows, I would like to say that I disagree with the Muslim Brotherhood organization with regards to many of their orientations and views.” Before the election, she added, she had hoped Heshmat would not run again, “after all the troubles he went through in the last session of parliament.
“However,” she continued, “as he had already presented himself for elections, we should respect his supporters’ will and, above all, carry out the responsibility delegated to us as neutral supervisors.”
During our conversation at the hospital, Zeiny had also volunteered her deep disagreement with the Brotherhood. She had never joined any political movement, she said. Candidly, she added, she had never even voted.
At the end of her testimony in The Egyptian Today, Zeiny appealed to other official witnesses to join her in revealing the truth. “One of the judges told me that he could not sleep after he saw what had happened,” she wrote.
Zeiny’s testimony was published three days after the Damanhur election. The Egyptian Today publisher told me that he was so nervous about attempts to block its publication that he did not turn on his cell phone again until nine that morning. The first call, he said, was from his mother. She reported that the paper was not available anywhere on newsstands.
Kassem panicked. He immediately called the paper’s distribution manager and asked him to contact vendors. It would not be the first time publications had been “removed,” as he put it, by government agents or allies.
“By one P.M., we finally found out what had happened,” Kassem told me. “No one had touched it. The paper had just sold out—very, very early.
“Then people started calling and asking us to run the story again the next day. And that’s what we did—for the next four days. Vendors were reporting that customers were reserving copies overnight and paying for them in advance. Some people wanted several copies!” Kassem said.
“In January, our circulation was only 3,000. It was increasing steadily about 500 copies a month, but after we ran this story, it jumped to 30,000. Now it’s around 40,000,” he added. “Today, we’re the fourth largest newspaper in the country.”
I asked Kassem if he was concerned about repercussions. Three of his reporters had recently been charged with libel for an article about alleged corruption by Egypt’s Minister of Housing.
“We get new cases against us regularly. At some point almost every week my assistant Christine will hand me a new case. But we don’t get convicted,” Kassem said, shaking his head. One of the three reporters in the recent case had been convicted on a technicality over his identity papers, but not for libel or slander.
“The government hates the idea of a free press and is not committed, whatever it says. But it’s ultrastupid for Mubarak not to leave a reasonable margin for the press. On satellite television, twenty or thirty million people can watch Kefaya condemning Mubarak personally. And it’s not feasible for the government to try to control [telephone] text messages.
“No,” Kassem told me, “closing Al-Masri al-Youm would be a big mistake. We’ve now come too far.”
I had also asked Zeiny if she was concerned about the repercussions—losing her job and source of income as a single woman, getting summoned by the government to testify, or being ostracized.
She thought a minute. “I can’t say I’m afraid—or not afraid,” she offered. “I suspect I will have to testify someday, and there may be other consequences. But in the end, I felt I had to say that the election was rigged. And, for once, there was a place to do it.”
The forces of change can take circuitous routes.
Nasser Amin is a forty-something lawyer who is a cross between the Marlboro Man—he steadily smokes the brand—and a campus intellectual. When we met, he was wearing well-fitted jeans, and the sleeves of his crisp, open-necked white shirt were rolled up to his elbows. The first thing a normally serious Egyptian friend told me about Amin is that his eyes twinkle and, behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, they actually did. He seemed perpetually bemused.
Amin is the director of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession. It is a lofty idea housed in a modest office with dated equipment. Its whitewashed walls are decorated, sparsely, with posters. One near Amin’s desk declares, “Same blood, same rights.”
On the day I visited, a Khamsin storm had engulfed Cairo. All we could see from the windows of Amin’s eleventh-floor office was a sky of sand. Khamsins whip sands from the Sahara Desert across North Africa in late winter and can consume the horizon as completely as a dense fog. Rain clears it away after a few days, although falling drops pick up the fine grains, leaving everything in already dust-encrusted Cairo splattered with little circles of more dust. As we talked, the outside shutters flapped noisily from the storm.
I went to see Amin to hear about the hottest political conflict in Egypt. Emboldened opposition may have redefined the races for president and parliament, produced some fresh political faces, and expanded the parameters of activism. But a real rebellion was erupting among an unlikely force—Egypt’s judges.
Unlike newer Arab countries, Egypt’s judiciary has a history of independence dating back to the nineteenth century. It has long been th
e most respected branch of government, whether Egypt was ruled by monarchs, nationalists, or autocrats. For most of its history, however, it had been a largely passive force.
“Judicial tradition in this country prevented judges from getting involved in almost anything,” Amin explained. “They wouldn’t go to places where there might be a problem. They wouldn’t even go to a café and join debates. Their position was that they’d wait until the issues came to them. It was a tradition that kept the judiciary very neutral in Egypt. They had a real aura of being the highest and most noble elite in this country.
“But,” he continued, “it also left the judges so isolated among themselves that sometimes you felt they were sitting in a temple. Things around them could be burning, but they wouldn’t do anything about it.”
The judges also had diminishing power.
After Egypt’s 1952 revolution, judicial authority steadily eroded under a sequence of strong presidents. Attempts by the judges to reassert themselves—and the law—were repeatedly beaten back. Capitalizing on the mood of crisis after the humiliating 1967 war with Israel, the Judges Club in Cairo called for greater freedoms to be protected by a stronger judiciary.21 President Nasser responded in 1969 by firing more than 100 senior judges, in what is still widely remembered as the “massacre of the judiciary.” In 1972, a new law then gave the executive branch wide powers over the judicial branch.22
The Judges Club offered proposals again in 1986 and 1991 to reform the nation’s laws and ensure the judges’ ability to uphold them. But the government balked at putting the drafts to a vote in parliament. It also increasingly meddled, either directly or through surrogates, in promotions, assignments, and salaries. And it tried to co-opt poorly paid judges with the carrot of bonuses or the stick of threats.23
“The government knows the judiciary is held in high regard in this country, so it tried to use the judges to carry out its own policies and crimes—and then claim that it happened under the judiciary so people would accept it,” Amin told me.
But the tide began to turn in April 2005, Amin explained, after the case of the bounced check.
“It was a very ordinary case on a very ordinary day in an Alexandria courtroom,” he began. “It’s almost a funny story. But it reignited something very serious in this country.”
The case centered on a bounced check in the amount of roughly $500 written by one Ayman al Jazzar. The tale—which I subsequently also heard from parties to the case—began rather simply: The judge asked Jazzar’s lawyer if the signature on the bad check was his client’s or a forgery.24
The lawyer asked to see the check. He looked it over. He then handed it to a man behind him.
The lawyer had originally informed the judge that Jazzar would not be in court and that he had a power of attorney to act on his client’s behalf. So the judge, now curious, asked the identity of the man holding the bounced check. It was, of course, Jazzar, who proceeded to admit that the signature was indeed his—effectively acknowledging his guilt.
The court session then erupted into an angry free-for-all: The lawyer loudly insisted that the statement was inadmissible, charging that the judge didn’t know the law and was too young to be in the court in the first place. The furious judge countered that the defendant was in court and had willingly volunteered the information.
“Shut up,” the lawyer shouted at the judge. And the judge replied to the lawyer, “No, you shut up.” Others in the courtroom joined in the shouting. The judge then cited the lawyer for contempt.
I heard plenty of other juicy details of the raucous court session—some of them involving assaults on the judge rather than just insults—although accounts varied too widely to settle on one version. But the bottom line, on which all agreed, is that the case of the bounced check quickly became a cause célèbre for both sides.
Like a hero, the lawyer was carried on the shoulders of his colleagues from the courthouse onto the streets of Alexandria. The Alexandria lawyers’ union then went on strike, forcing local courts to be temporarily suspended.
The Judges Club in Alexandria rallied its own, calling an emergency session to discuss the flap. It was the latest of several similar confrontations, and the judges wanted to stem the tide, Amin told me.
“This story represents a lot of what is happening in this country in the crisis over authority,” he said.
In the midst of the Judges Club meeting, a senior judge stood up and said the core issue was not really the lawyers’ challenge, but the judges’ general loss of credibility.
“So they started discussing how their standing had sunk so low,” Amin explained, “and they decided on the following: They were discredited when they supervised tainted elections in 2000 and had said nothing. When the government settled its accounts with opponents and political prisoners through the courts, they had not taken a stand. When the government kept emergency law in place for over twenty years, they did nothing to challenge it. And when the government refused to implement the judges’ rulings, they did not follow through.”
“And so they started to look beyond the lawyers to the body that was really insulting the judiciary—which was the government,” Amin added.
The Judges Club in Alexandria ended up calling for broad new legislation to ensure judicial independence—and for a gathering of all 8,000 Egyptian judges to take a joint national stand.25 Their summit convened in Cairo on May 13, 2005, in a massive tent put up on an empty lot across the street from the national Judges Club, a stately structure with chandeliers, marble floors, and imperial columns that was built during the last days of Britain’s colonial presence.
The session was stormy. But Egypt’s judges agreed to issue a direct challenge to Mubarak’s regime. They called for major reforms to foster the rule of law. They demanded full independence from the executive branch. And they voted to put the government on notice that they would no longer provide cover for its behavior—from election fraud to prolonged emergency law.
Egypt’s press dubbed it the Judges’ intifada, or uprising.26
“This was an important turning point,” Amin explained.
To avoid scandals or constitutional crises in the past, judges had usually taken their concerns to the Ministry of Justice. “But now the majority of judges have changed their basic philosophy,” he said. “They have come to the conclusion that they are part of this society—and that they must act rather than defer to other authorities.” In other words, the judges’ summit set the stage for a confrontation with the government.
Judge Hesham Bastawisi, a widely respected member of Egypt’s highest court, was one of its first victims.
I visited Bastawisi at his home in Cairo’s Nasser City, a remote suburb of high-rise concrete apartment buildings, to hear this part of the story. Bastawisi is a slightly balding man with white hair and rimless glasses. He was wearing a gray pinstripe suit, and he smoked nervously. We sat on faux-French settees with embroidered pictures of musicians serenading comely courtesans. A framed verse from the Koran on black velvet hung on the wall next to a bookcase neatly filled with a set of encyclopedias and law books. His daughter, who wore the pink hejab now popular in Cairo, sat with us.
The government had just stripped Bastawisi of his judicial immunity and referred him to the government’s chief prosecutor for investigation. The problem went back to Egypt’s troubled parliamentary elections.
After Noha al Zeiny’s bold testimonial, Bastawisi had gone one big step further: He filed formal complaints demanding an investigation into the vote-rigging. He also charged that some of his brethren had been involved in election fraud.27 And then he took the case to the media.
Bastawisi spoke with authority. He was one of fifteen senior judges—selected secretly by his peers at the Judges Club—in charge of receiving complaints from colleagues deployed at polling stations. Egypt’s Ministry of Interior organizes the mechanics of an election, but the judges officially oversee it, basically acting as supervisors on voting day, monitoring the
count, and then certifying the results.
Fraud during the election, Bastawisi told me, had been insidious nationwide. “By the end of the election, I had three bags of complaints—big bags, like big grocery bags,” he said, holding out his arms to approximate the size.
“There was one particularly horrifying story about a group of judges who had to escape with the ballot boxes because the police refused to protect them from the thugs,” he said. “They ended up hiding under the stairs to protect the votes.”
Unlike past elections, the Judges Club this time was not keeping quiet—even under threat.
“When we started exposing the problems and saying some judges of ill repute who work closely with the government were involved in fraud, we were dismissed as a minority of renegades and transferred to the prosecutor’s office for investigation,” Bastawisi told me.
He was not alone. When I saw Bastawisi, three of the fifteen on the Judges Club election committee had been stripped of their immunity. Over the next month, the list grew to eight judges. Egyptians began talking about a second “massacre of the judiciary.”
The crackdown was not just to get the judges to withdraw their complaints, Bastawisi explained. It was also to prevent the Judges Club from releasing a final report, after a five-month investigation, which could challenge the election results—particularly in districts where the ruling party had won.
Noha al Zeiny’s revelation about Damanhur had been shocking. But she was only one voice. And while she was a lawyer who worked for the Ministry of Justice, she was not a judge. The Judges Club, on the other hand, had the clout to legally challenge the legitimacy of the entire election process. And unlike past elections when the judges had avoided confrontation, this time they stood firm.
On March 17, 2006, Egypt’s judges assembled again in Cairo to hold an unprecedented public demonstration. Wearing the green or red fringed sashes of their profession draped across their suits, nearly 1,000 judges from across the country packed the street in front of Cairo’s Judges Club to demand change.
