Tough choices for Egypt (page 1 of 4)

By STEPHEN ULPH CAIRO

A billion dollars a year is a lot of money. Not surprisingly, few aspects of the relationship between Washington and the Middle East provoke as much controversy as the $24 billion in economic aid that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided to Cairo over the past quarter-century. To date, American aid to Egypt has remained remarkably robust, surviving the US budget deficits of the mid-1980s, the end of the Cold War and the growing disgruntlement of the American public.
In terms of American aid, the Middle East trails far behind Latin America. Since the inception of USAID in 1975 with the Camp David accords, however, Egypt is the country in the region (Israel and Turkey excepted) that receives the most money from Washington. Alongside Morocco, Egypt received 95 percent of net flows to the Arab region between 1990-98. Egypt, which receives $815 million annually, and Israel, which receives $1.2 billion, make up America's largest overseas assistance program. The two countries were originally targeted with the aim of consolidating peaceful relations in the region.
But aside from Egypt's political support for the Gulf War - in exchange for which the United States wrote off $11 billion of debt - the United States hasn't gotten much bang for its buck. Despite Egypt's styling itself as the linchpin of Middle East peacemaking, the view in Washington is that the country has less influence than it once had and is unable - or perhaps unwilling - to significantly shift policy for issues other than those that Cairo deems important domestically.
The classic illustration of Cairo and Washington's divergent interests was the treatment of 62-year-old human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, whose dual Egyptian-American nationality wasn't enough to spare him a seven-year prison sentence last May. The high-profile human rights campaigner was charged with "defaming Egypt" in a report produced by his Ibn Khaldun Research Center on the deteriorating relations between the country's Muslims and Christian Copts, for "receiving foreign funds illegally" during his work monitoring parliamentary elections and for an article criticizing the Egyptian trend for dynastic succession, notably the apparent grooming of President Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, for power.
The incident unleashed a storm of complaint, particularly in view of the fact that Ibrahim's research center was precisely the sort of NGO targeted by the $30 million program to "strengthen civil society." Republican Senator Tom Lantos spearheaded a petition by 61 members of Congress protesting the unseemly rapidity of the legal process, while US media comment was openly caustic: "It's hard to guess," declared the Washington Post, "why Hosni Mubarak thought it was worth delivering this slap in the face to an ally that has backed his government and effectively kept him in power for the past 20 years. . . . Perhaps he felt it would have no effect on the appropriation of another easy $2 billion. The administration and Congress should prove otherwise."
The aggressive tone was matched in the Egyptian media by a defensive retort that "American aid does not give Washington a veto of Egyptian policy." For the average Egyptian, it was likely to have been the first time he had even heard that the United States was injecting $1 billion into the country every year. Inevitable questions as to where it was all going - for a population whose per capita income has steadily dropped to $1,390 - has left the government under increasing attack from opposition parties, such as the Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood, which remain suspicious of whatever social or political strings may have come attached to the aid.
Camp David.