What Egypt could learn from Southeast Asia
By Michael Vatikiotis
CAIRO - Egypt today looks a lot like Indonesia did 10 years ago. The economy is
growing, and investors are optimistic, but the turgid pace of political reform
is holding the country back. There is much that Egypt, which views itself as
the leading power in the Middle East, can learn from Southeast Asia's largest
country, Indonesia, and its moderate Muslim neighbor, Malaysia.
Perhaps the first and most important lesson Cairo will learn is that political
change is inevitable and stalling on reform prolongs the agony of transition.
In resisting demands for full democracy, Indonesia under former strongman
Suharto wasted valuable time it could have used to develop checking and
balancing institutions of governance.
Listen to Egyptian leaders today and you hear many of of the same excuses.
Prime Minister Ahmed Mahmoud Nazif insists
that there is momentum for political reform, but that it will be a slow and
gradual process. "This is normal," he recently told an audience at the World
Economic Forum in the Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh.
It's just what Indonesia pronounced throughout the 1990s, in fact. When asked
about mounting pressure for more freedoms that sometimes burst on to Cairo's
streets, the government's response, like Suharto's, is to insist that investors
prefer stability to chaos. In the interest of preserving stability, Egyptian
police in mid-May ruthlessly pummeled demonstrators protesting the punishment
of two liberal judges. The crackdown happened just a day before President Hosni
Mubarak's son and presumed heir to the presidency, Gamal Mubarak, was received
at the White House in Washington.
Here is yet another parallel with Indonesia's 32 years of strict authoritarian
rule. Indonesia was also a staunch ally of the United States and a huge
beneficiary of aid and investment - a legacy from the Cold War era when Suharto
was viewed in Washington as a bulwark against the spread of communism.
Washington turned a blind eye to repression in Indonesia, or only meekly
protested particularly violent episodes.
Anti-democratic bulwark
Today in Egypt, President Mubarak is similarly seen as a bulwark against the
rise of Islamic extremism. Washington currently gives Egypt close to US$2
billion a year in aid. To be sure, diplomatic notes of protest have been sent
to Cairo over the severity of the crackdown on dissent. But for the most part
these are weakly phrased and have not adversely affected the flow of financial
assistance. More important to Washington these days is the fact that Egypt is
aligned with the United States against Iran.
By delaying reforms and withholding freedom, Indonesia lost almost a decade of
growth and went through a wrenching, often violent, process of political
transition after the departure of an authoritarian leader who insisted that
stability come before change. Sadly, Egypt is treading the same path.
Asked about the recent reinstatement of tough emergency laws that restrict
freedoms and allow the persecution of opposition leaders, Nazif said the policy
was only a stopgap measure until anti-terrorist laws could be put in place. He
insisted that Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981, is committed to
constitutional reforms that should be framed by the middle of next year.
Yet critics say that Mubarak shows no sign of loosening his highly centralized
style of political leadership, and that opposition activists are being targeted
for persecution using the courts and punitive tax provisions. Civil-society
activists such as Magda Zulficar argue that Egypt is only on the path to
"democratization", not democracy, which still looks like a distant goal. "We
don't have a culture of democracy, we have a patriarchal society. It is very
difficult to change."
Again, much the same was said about Indonesia before the 1998 street protests
that drove Suharto from power. But change, when it came, proved that ordinary
people do indeed understand what democracy means. An Indonesian election in
2004 saw almost 87% of registered voters decide on whom they wanted to be
president without any guidance from above.
Inevitable change
The same thing will inevitably happen in Egypt, which is home to a culture and
society every bit as sophisticated as Indonesia's. For those who would say that
the growing Middle East conflict is an obstacle to democratic change, there is
the counter-argument that two of the most democratic societies in the Arab
world today are Lebanon and Israeli-occupied Palestine, where conflict has been
endemic for decades.
Lebanon's articulate Prime Minister Fouad Siniora argues that the winds of
change are picking up in the Middle East. "There is a process of making people
more and more aware of democracy. We see more and more the process of elections
taking place," he said. "This process is gaining ground in the Arab world."
The worry in the minds of many Egyptians is that given the chance, the winners
in any free election might be the militant Muslim Brotherhood. Here, too, Egypt
could take a leaf out of Southeast Asia's book. Malaysia and Indonesia have
both grappled with militant Islam for decades. In Malaysia, the principal
opposition party is the Islamic Party of Malaysia (Parti Islam se-Malaysia, or
PAS), which has held power in one state government for more than a decade. In
Indonesia a cadre-based grassroots Islamic party won almost 7% of the vote in
the 2004 parliamentary elections, and is now aiming to gain control of
Jakarta's local government in the next five years.
It is a mistake to stifle democracy in the name of holding conservative
religious forces at bay. Democracy has a way of tempering religious passions.
For instance, PAS was forced to moderate a conservative program of religious
law in the state of Kelantan simply because local opposition to the proposed
changes would have meant losing power to the nationally ruling party. Malaysian
Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, who preaches a message of tolerant Islam, was
re-elected by a landslide in a general election against the PAS in 2004.
Egypt's ossified leadership is using the threat of the militant Muslim
Brotherhood to retard the reform process even further. This will only increase
the frustration felt by Egyptians who inhabit a growing informal sector that
isn't benefiting from the $3 billion in foreign investment that, according to
Prime Minister Nazif, has poured into Egypt in the past six months.
Along the way to the shiny new convention center built in a quick eight months
for the World Economic Forum, a sign declared that Egypt is "open for change".
In a speech, Mubarak said that he recognizes the changing realities of the
world around him and that he has embarked on a path of reform. The hope is that
its course is not as long and winding as it was in Indonesia - or that when
political change comes, it is not as violent.
Michael Vatikiotis is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
He is currently a visiting research fellow at Singapore's Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies.
