Never Ending Emergency: Egypt Thinks It Democracy
International news agencies have reported that the People's Assembly voted on Monday to extend the emergency law for another two years. The extension came in spite of promises, repeated endlessly in 2006, that emergency rule would be replaced by an anti-terror bill once the current extension expired. The emergency law, in force since 1981, grants police and security forces sweeping powers, allowing them, in effect, to hold Egyptian citizens indefinitely, without charge. Some 305 MPs voted in favour of the extension, and just 103 voted against. Addressing the assembly on Monday, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told MPs that the government had found it too difficult to draft an anti-terror bill in two years. "I told the assembly two years ago that I hoped the government would be able to draw up the bill in two years but the experience of other countries has served to underline that promulgating such a law without adequate study is disastrous," said Nazif. The main difficulty facing the government, said Nazif, was to strike a balance between public freedom and domestic security concerns.."Nazif promised that the emergency law would be invoked "in the battle against terrorism" and drug-trafficking and not to limit political freedoms. Amid protests from Muslim Brotherhood MPs, Nazif appealed to MPs "not to allow the forces of evil and terrorism to undermine security and stability". Al-Ahram has reported that civil society organisations joined forces with opposition MPs to condemn the extension, charging the regime with using the 27-year-old emergency law to stifle protests and muzzle freedoms of speech. A statement signed by 103 opposition MPs said, "27 years of emergency rule have led to the proliferation of human rights abuses, including systematic torture in prisons and police stations." The statement argued that by extending emergency rule for another two years the government was tacitly admitting that for the last three decades Egypt had needed extraordinary laws to guarantee its stability and still needed such laws, hardly an advertisement for foreign investments.Hafez Abu Seada, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights accuses the emergency rule of turning Egypt into, what he terms, a police state. "It reflects a mindset that prefers security interventions to political solutions for Egypt's many crises." Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, believes that the government opted to extend emergency law because to abolish it would mean doing away with emergency courts. "It is not preparing a new anti- terror law that the government finds difficult," he says. "Their problem is containing the results of abrogating the emergency law, particularly the elimination of emergency courts." Muslim Brotherhood MPs complain that since 1981 50,000 of their supporters have been detained under the emergency laws. "Most of them have been arrested again and again for no reason while others were referred to emergency and military tribunals," says Brotherhood MP Mohamed El-Beltagui. We feel that such long continuation of emergency and its further extension are extremely anti-people and unwise steps for Egypt. Such emergency benefits only the ruling class and stifles stabilization of democracy. Unfortunately such countries and rulers are best friends of western powers.So-called national interest of big powers are the basis of such support whatever it may mean for people of the countries under such dictators or kings .There is no short-cut out of this. Long struggle awaits the people of these countries. .
