White House pressed on Egyptian democracy

A bipartisan group of senators and foreign policy analysts is pushing the Obama administration to prepare for the looming end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt by putting a new emphasis on Egyptian political reform and human rights.

The group’s immediate goal is to pressure Mubarak to allow international monitors to observe Egypt’s parliamentary elections in November, but the overall aim is much broader.

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“The bottom line is that we are moving into a period of guaranteed instability in Egypt,” said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar with the Brookings Institution who co-founded the Egypt Working Group with Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “So the idea [that] we can keep puttering on as if nothing is going to change is a mistake. ... What we need now is to move to deliverables.”

The pressure from the academic and political community comes amid widespread expectation that the 82-year-old Mubarak — who reportedly is seriously ill — may soon cede power to his son, Gamal.

And the Obama administration has stepped up talking about respect for democracy, civil liberties and human rights, for example in President Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly last week. Obama also touched oncivil liberties when he famously chose Cairo as the place to give his major address to the Muslim world in June 2009.

But Egyptian civil society activists complain the Obama team — like preceding U.S. administrations — has been too muted in its calls for greater democracy and human rights in Egypt. They say the U.S. has placed a greater priority on seeking Egypt’s help to advance fragile Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, as well as Cairo’s lead role in reconciliation negotiations between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas.

But while President Mubarak promises Washington much on these fronts, Egyptian civil society activists contend that he delivers very little.

“We have a feeling that Mubarak has managed to bluff one more [American] administration, as he has done for 28 years,” Egyptian- American sociologist and civil society activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim told POLITICO. “He’s very skillful at portraying himself as the stalwart [Arab partner in the Middle East peace process], and arguing the focus should not be on elections and democracy while he has to attend to other important files — Gaza, the Palestinians, Iran, Syria; on all these [he portrays himself as] the best ally, the lever.”

“Frankly, I have not seen any” sign the Obama administration is pushing Mubarak much on free elections, Ibrahim said. “We hear noise that behind closed doors they do. But that doesn’t really carry much weight.”

U.S. officials bristle at the suggestion that they give short shrift to human rights and democracy concerns in Egypt. Obama raised them with Mubarak during a White House meeting in early September, officials say. The White House also criticized Egypt for renewing a controversial emergencies law last spring under which hundreds of civil society activists have been arrested on national security grounds.