With Popular Amr Moussa at Arab League, Mubarak Names a Kinder, Gentler New Foreign Minister

By Andrew Hammond

Not until Ahmed Maher was standing in front of President Hosni Mubarak at a swearing-in ceremony in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh did Egypt know who its new foreign minister was. Maher himself didn’t know for sure until a phone call from Mubarak two hours beforehand had him running to catch a plane from Cairo—though diplomats claim he had been given a hint two weeks earlier that he was Mubarak’s choice. Until the last minute, speculation had been that Maher’s brother, Ali, current ambassador in Paris, would take the job once incumbent Amr Moussa moved over to become secretary-general of the Arab League on May 15. Even on that day itself, Egypt’s state-owned papers trumpeted Ali Maher’s likely appointment, expecting Mubarak to swear him in the next day. Instead, Mubarak picked Ahmed and swore him in on the 15th.

This is military man Mubarak’s way, never wanting to look like he can be pushed around or second-guessed—as if, God forbid, he were a mere civilian politician. Nevertheless, he tried to justify the secrecy later that week in an interview with the state-owned al-Mussawar magazine, claiming the proper and organized way to conduct political work was to announce the new guy the minute the old guy was out. The interview, however, raised eyebrows for Mubarak’s comments on the qualities that led to his choice of Maher. “He knows the right time to choose to make his comments and announce his positions,” Mubarak said.

This was taken as criticism of the outgoing Moussa and might explain the mystery of why Mubarak decided to let his immensely popular foreign minister go to the League. Although diplomats have said Mubarak offered Moussa as Arab League secretary-general to prevent bickering among the Arabs over who should succeed Esmat Abdel-Meguid, rumors have persisted that Moussa, 64, was being “kicked upstairs” to the toothless institution as a polite way of removing him after 10 years as foreign minister. Various theories had it that Mubarak was annoyed with Moussa, envious of him or pressured by the Americans to get rid of him.

Moussa was no ordinary Egyptian government official. He has achieved enormous popularity because of the charismatic style with which he has dealt with the Israelis. He even was featured in a recent hit song in Egypt that went “I hate Israel and I love Amr Moussa.” He often was cited as the civilian figure in Egypt whom the country readily would vote in as their president—if they had a real choice.

Maher, Arab diplomats say, is quite different in style, quieter and more polite, a bit of a yes-man. And that, it seems, is what Mubarak wants. Diplomats have suggested that Moussa’s manner of directly telling U.S. officials that he disagreed with their appraisal of events in the region was becoming something of an annoyance to Mubarak. The 66-yeark-old Maher, Egypt’s ambassador to Washington from 1993 to 1999, when he officially retired, will know not to take that path.

At the Arab League, Moussa is promising a new era. He wants to streamline its operations and make it an essential player in quickly coordinating unified Arab positions on the issues of the day. Cairo is hoping that, with Moussa in charge, the League will become a more effective instrument for realizing its policy goals of Arab economic union and a common policy on the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mubarak himself has played a greater public role in recent months. He spent most of April waging a public relations war with Israel, seeking to prove that his leadership is more respected by the rest of the world than is that of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. As far as Egypt is concerned, Sharon is trying his best to provoke confrontation with his Arab neighbors, including Egypt—whose great fear is a repeat of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Then Egypt allowed itself to be provoked into taking measures that led to a disastrous war with an Israel well-prepared in advance. Mubarak has said in interview after interview with local and foreign media, and in speech after speech, not only that Egypt does not want a war, but that there will not be a war.

The first provocation Cairo focused on was a statement by Sharon’s media spokesman accusing Egypt of smuggling arms to the Palestinians. Asked about the claim on state television, Mubarak said Sharon “wants to make trouble with those around him,” although he didn’t directly refute the allegation. His confidants in the press launched a heavy counterattack. Wrote Samir Ragab, editor of the state-owned Al Gomhouriya, in the April 18 issue, “Any attempt to drag Egypt into it will not pass by easily, especially as we are not using twisted methods, turning this way and that, or conspiring against anybody, so any claim that we are smuggling arms to the Palestinians or anyone else across our borders had to be answered without hesitation.”

The political establishment even attributed an American public rebuke of Sharon to Egypt’s warnings that the former general, one way or another, was escalating regional tension to dangerous levels. The Israeli army had briefly reoccupied parts of Palestinian-run Gaza after Palestinians fired mortars into an Israeli town, provoking a comment from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that the Israeli reaction to the mortar attack had been “excessive.” The Israelis withdrew within 24 hours. “It has not escaped our attention that this American position came hours after the firm statements given by President Hosni Mubarak the day before yesterday,” Egypt’s flagship daily Al Ahram said in an editorial. “Naturally the U.S. State Department could not ignore these warnings given by President Mubarak and so it decided to intervene quickly.”

In mid-April Mubarak embarked on a European tour, visiting Germany, Romania, then Russia—partly to improve Egypt’s trade balance with those countries, but also in an attempt to further isolate Sharon internationally. Since Sharon had a successful visit to the United States after becoming prime minister in March, this isolation probably does not bother him. The first Israeli official from the new government to visit Cairo, then, was Sharon’s “dovish” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. The visit turned into something of a public relations disaster for Cairo, however, after Mubarak gave imprecise information to reporters about cease-fire discussions Peres told him had been going on between Israel and the Palestinians. “The two sides have agreed to a cease-fire,” Mubarak announced. “After a cease-fire of four weeks, negotiations between the two sides will start to reach a solution to the current situation.” But it transpired from subsequent Palestinian denials, silence from Peres and a qualification from Foreign Minister Amr Moussa that there was as yet no major cease-fire agreement.

A Semi-Agreement in Principle

The next day Mubarak used a speech marking International Labor Day to cover up his tracks and embarrassment by claiming he said a “semi-agreement” had been reached “in principle,” and accusing the Israelis of trying to drive a wedge between Egypt and the Palestinians. Two days later Peres publicly put the incident down to a “mistranslation” on the part of Israeli Radio, although he finally acknowledged that cease-fire talks had taken place between the two sides. Egypt’s state media, meanwhile, employed all of this drama on the foreign policy front to good effect domestically—a not unfamiliar scenario. “Over the past two days, the world media has praised President Mubarak for his credibility and even-handed approach,” went a typical editorial comment written by Samir Ragab in the May 2 Al Gomhouriya. “Even newspapers famous for their pro-Israeli line, including American papers, have found it difficult to ignore the latest turn of events. They all concur that the Egyptian leader always tells the truth.”

Peres’ visit also produced a diplomatic incident over an opposition paper’s welcome for Israel’s veteran Labor Party politician. Al Arabi carried a large, front-page photo montage of Peres’ head patched onto a photograph of a man in Nazi uniform. The headline beside it ran: “Peres, the butcher of Qana and messenger of the great criminal Sharon, is in Cairo today.”

Israel’s bombing of a United Nations base at Qana in south Lebanon in 1996, killing 106 people, has gone down in the Arab world’s black book of Israeli atrocities since 1948. Peres was Israel’s prime minister, and running for re-election, at the time. Israel’s ambassador in Cairo, Zvi Mazel, presented an official complaint about the Nazi Peres photo to the Foreign Ministry and gave a bitter diatribe about racism in Egypt’s press to the media. “The Egyptian press produces hatred, while we in Israel produce hi-tech, and that’s the difference between us,” Mazel said. “The depiction of Peres in this way represents incitement and hatred which has no place in Egypt and the Middle East.”

Ironically, Peres and Moussa that week made a joint plea to reporters for an end to racism in Egypt and Israel. “I believe all of us have to make a real effort to stop the incitement and to stop the accusations,” Peres said. Moussa, standing next to him, added, “I agree that incitement, hatred has to stop, has to come to an end. It serves no purpose. It leads nowhere.”

Earlier in April Moussa slammed another diatribe against Arabs by Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yousef. “One must not take pity on them [Arabs]—they must be shelled with missiles…to destroy them,” the rabbi was reported to have said in a Passover sermon. Moussa characterized the comments as a call to “mass murder”—precisely the kind of limelight-grabbing sound bite, one suspects, that has so irked Mubarak.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.