Free On the State of Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany Page A

Duffy in front of the whole country. But even that was not enough to enable the prime minister to put his heinous act behind him. He had to go back to Rochdale and visit Duffy at home, where he spent forty minutes and repeated his apology. Finally Duffy accepted the prime minister’s apology but she refused to come outside with him to announce in front of the media that she had forgiven him. So Brown went out alone and announced once again that he had made a mistake and regretted it but now he was relieved that Duffy had graciously accepted his apology.
    At the same time that the British prime minister was insisting on apologizing to an ordinary British citizen simply because he described her as bigoted in a private conversation recorded by mistake, hundreds of Egyptians had been sleeping for months on the street in front of the cabinet office and parliament, along with their wives and children. These people were representative of the millions of poor Egyptians whose standard of living has fallen so low that they cannot support their children, but Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has never taken the trouble to go out and listen to these poor people or to try to help them in any way. On the contrary he abandoned them and went on holiday to Hurghada with his new wife. As for the young people demonstrating in favor of amending the constitution and demanding freedom and an end to the emergency law, they have been beaten up, dragged away, and detained by Central Security Forces (the Egyptian army of occupation), and some members of parliament from the ruling party have even suggested they should be shot.
    This vast difference between the behavior of the two prime ministers—one in Egypt and one in Britain—must make us pose the question: Why do the authorities in Britain treat their citizens with such respect while the authorities in Egypt treat people as though they are criminals or animals? The difference here is not ethical; it is political. There’s no evidence that Gordon Brown is more moral than Ahmed Nazif, but Brown is an elected prime minister in a democratic system, so he knows that he is the servant of the people, who are the source of all power. He also knows that if he lost the trust of the voters then his political life would be over. Ahmed Nazif, on the other hand, is not elected in the first place but appointed by President Mubarak, so what matters to him is not people’s confidence but the approval of the president. Similarly, no one elected President Mubarak, who seized power thirty years ago through repression and rigged elections, so it does not matter much to him whether Egyptians have confidence in him as long as he can subjugate them through the security agencies. If Gordon Brown ruled Britain by fraud and by emergency law, he would not have apologized to Gillian Duffy. In fact he would probably have had her arrested and sent to the nearest State Security office, where she would have been beaten, strung up by her legs, and electrocuted in sensitive parts of her body. Maybe Duffy would be tried in a State Security emergency court on charges of causing trouble, insulting a symbol of the state, and endangering social peace in Britain.
    It’s the way the ruler has obtained power that determines his behavior while in power. This fact, which is well established in the developed world, still escapes some Egyptians, who judge a ruler on his policies in office and do not pay much attention to how he came to power. Some Egyptians still dream of a benevolent dictator who would be above all laws but would use his overwhelming power to ensure justice. The concept of the benevolent dictator, just like the concepts of the noble thief or the honest whore, is no more than a meaningless fantasy. How can a dictator be benevolent when dictatorship in itself is patently unjust? But the concept has infiltrated Arab thinking over many centuries of despotism. It would be fair to mention here that genuine Islam offered a great