sábado, 5 de febrero de 2011

We the Egyptian People

Published: February 4, 2011

CAIRO — There are a bunch of gated exurbs on the fringes of this sprawling city with names like Beverly Hills and Mayfair. They are the retreats of the super-rich who’ve thrived on connections to the Mubarak family. A friend, Saïd Zulficar, visited one the other day and, impressed by the vast green lawn beside one villa, inquired what it cost to keep all that grass watered.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

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Friday Evening in Cairo

Op-Ed Columnist: Hosni Mubarak Agonistes (February 4, 2011)

Oh, said the owner, about 6,000 Egyptian pounds a month, or just over $1,000. Struck by the air conditioning blasting away in the midst of a mild winter, Zulficar also asked about the electricity bill: another 10,000 pounds, or almost $1,700. And, how was all that water arranged in a nation where farms aren’t getting enough for irrigation and subsidies for beans and bread keep the masses fed and anyone making over $100 a month is lucky? Oh, the owner smiled, my good friend Ahmed el-Maghraby sees to that.

El-Maghraby, the former minister of housing, is among those high-flying government officials who’ve now been named and shamed by the new government of Hosni Mubarak. In a desperate attempt to stem rage, Mubarak’s latest brigade has frozen the bank accounts of several former ministers and cronies from the puppet National Democratic Party. No matter that most of these officials shipped their fortunes to Switzerland long ago: The great clean-up, it is said, has begun.

Egypt’s not alone in seeing the gulf between its wealthy and the rest widen; that’s a global trend. But in a country of 83 million where almost 30 percent of the population is still illiterate, and the big bucks have often depended on an entrée to Mubarak’s son, Gamal, or his circle, the pattern has been particularly inflammatory.

I’ve heard many complaints in the tumultuous streets these past few days, but no words reappear as often as “corruption,” “stealing” and “thieves;” and nothing galls as much as a system of state-sponsored lawlessness where right and wrong is determined not in the courts but in Mubarak’s head.

Egypt had a Western-backed free-market economy run by a family with contempt for freedom: That’s problematic. It puts the global forces concentrating wealth into overdrive in the service of the chosen few.

“There’s no accountability, no independent judicial authority, no oxygen,” one Western diplomat told me. “Nobody knows the parameters. What system are you being arrested under? And if a judge does happen to order your release, they re-arrest you.”

I’m almost ready to shed a tear for el-Maghraby and the others now hung out to dry: They’re victims of the very arbitrariness from which they benefited. The exercise that now has them branded as criminals is futile. Only an open system can correct the ills of a closed one.

Without the transparency and independent authorities that would come with accountable and representative government, theft will just take new form. Somebody else will be arranging for those lawns to get watered for the croquet while farmland lies parched.

But 10 days into Egypt’s uprising, it’s still unclear whether Mubarak is ready to make way for that sea-change in the Arab world. One thing is clear: His time, like that of Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, has passed.

All of this raises a question: In the name of what exactly has the United States been ready to back and fund an ally whose contempt for the law, fake democracy and gross theft flout everything for which America stands?

There are several answers. To stop the jihadists, who threaten American lives; to ensure the security of another ally, Israel; to spread free markets, however distorted, from which U.S. corporations benefit; to secure stability in the most dangerous of regions. Hey, the world’s an imperfect place. Sometimes the best strategic choice is just avoidance of the worst. It wasn’t only during the Cold War that our thugs had their place.

I understand all these arguments. As our thugs go, Mubarak’s been solid. But such views have endured through a persistent blindness: The unwillingness to see that the Middle East has evolved; that American hypocrisy is transparent to everyone; that Islamic parties can run thriving economies and democracies like Turkey’s; that popular rage over cronies’ green gardens feeds the jihadist cause; and that the most effective support of Israel is not one that leaves Israel locked in a defensive crouch but one that encourages it to reach out to the modernizing forces in the Middle East, not least in the West Bank.

Democracies can coexist with politically-organized religious extremists, as Israel itself demonstrates. That is one of their strengths.

In Tahrir Square, the mini-republic that is the Egyptian uprising’s ground zero, I ran into Seif Salmawy, the managing director of a publishing company. He was smiling; I asked why. “Suddenly we are human beings,” he said. “We think we can decide and that what we decide has worth and that we have some value as humans. Before there was the president, the police, the army and their money: We the people were just there to serve them.”

“We the people.” Isn’t that how good things like “the general welfare” begin?

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 5, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

En este día....

ON THIS DAY

February 5

On Feb. 5, 1937, President Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of Supreme Court justices; critics charged Roosevelt was attempting to "pack" the court.

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On Feb. 5, 1900, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, the American politician and diplomat, was born. Following his death on July 14, 1965, his obituary appeared in The Times.

Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »

On This Date

1881	Phoenix, Ariz., was incorporated.
1917	Congress passed, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, a law severely curtailing the immigration of Asians.
1937	President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of Supreme Court justices. Critics charged that he was attempting to "pack" the court.
1958	Gamel Abdel Nasser was nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic, a short-lived union of Syria and Egypt.
1988	The Arizona House of Representatives impeached Gov. Evan Mecham, who was later convicted in the state Senate and removed from office.
1988	Panamanian military leader Gen. Manuel Noriega was indicted on bribery and drug trafficking charges in Florida.
1994	White separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Miss., of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. He was sentenced to life in prison.
1997	Investment bank Morgan Stanley announced a $10 billion merger with Dean Witter.
2001	Four disciples of Osama bin Laden went on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
2002	A federal grand jury indicted John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," alleging that he was trained by Osama bin Laden's network and that he conspired with the Taliban to kill Americans.
2006	The Pittsburgh Steelers won a record-tying fifth Super Bowl with a 21-10 win over the Seattle Seahawks.
2007	Astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested after driving 1,000 miles from Houston to Orlando, Fla., to mount a bizarre attack on a romantic rival.

Current Birthdays

Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron turns 77 years old today.

AP Photo/Mike Groll

Actress Laura Linney turns 47 years old today.

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

1928	Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, Professor, author, turns 83
1942	Roger Staubach, Football Hall of Famer, turns 69
1943	Michael Mann, Director, turns 68
1944	Al Kooper, Rock musician, singer (Blood, Sweat and Tears), turns 67
1946	Charlotte Rampling, Actress, turns 65
1948	Christopher Guest, Actor, screenwriter ("This is Spinal Tap"), turns 63
1948	Barbara Hershey, Actress, turns 63
1948	Tom Wilkinson, Actor, turns 63
1959	Jennifer Granholm, Former governor of Michigan, turns 52
1961	Tim Meadows, Actor, comedian ("Saturday Night Live"), turns 50
1962	Jennifer Jason Leigh, Actress, turns 49
1967	Chris Parnell, Actor-comedian ("Saturday Night Live"), turns 44
1968	Roberto Alomar, Baseball Hall of Famer, turns 43
1969	Bobby Brown, R&B singer, turns 42
1971	Sara Evans, Country singer, turns 40

Historic Birthdays

Adlai Ewing Stevenson2/5/1900 - 7/14/1965American politician/diplomat.Go to obituary »

70	Marie Sevigne 2/5/1626 - 4/17/1696 French writer, mostly of letters to her daughter
41	Belle Starr 2/5/1848 - 2/3/1889 American outlaw in Texas and Oklahoma territory
57	Andre-Gustave Citroen 2/5/1878 - 7/3/1935 French engineer/industrialist
71	Ralph E. McGill 2/5/1898 - 2/3/1969 American journalist
82	John Carradine 2/5/1906 - 11/27/1988 American actor
83	William S. Burroughs 2/5/1914 - 8/2/1997 American writer
75	Robert Hofstadter 2/5/1915 - 11/17/1990 American physicist, winner of Nobel prize
77	Andreas Papandreou 2/5/1919 - 6/23/1996 Greek prime minister

Driving Through Cambodia: A Road Trip Through Ruins and Unexplored Highways

JOURNEYS

Driving Through Cambodia: A Road Trip Through Ruins and Unexplored Highways

Vikas Bajaj

Nicolas Rapp fix- es a flat tire on his Land Cruiser at the entrance to Bokor National Park; transporting chickens; roadside cooking.

By VIKAS BAJAJ

Published: February 4, 2011

REPRINTS

A LIGHT rain started to fall as we drove up to the entrance of BokorNational Park in southern Cambodia. Up ahead lay the decaying remnants of a French hill station where colonists used to while away their weekends when they ruled this Southeast Asian country.

Vikas Bajaj

But a comedy of errors ensured that we wouldn’t get to see the ruins, which comprise the once-grand Bokor Palace hotel and a Romanesque Catholic church. The first obstacle we faced was a guard for a Chinese construction company that was reconstructing the road up to the old hill station, as part of a major renovation project there. Although other tourists had used the road just moments before we arrived, the guard wouldn’t let us pass, nor would he tell us when the road might reopen.

A heated argument ensued between the guard and my French travel companion, Nicolas Rapp, who had been driving a dark-green 1996 Toyota Land Cruiser around the globe for the last year. After several days of traveling with him, I had realized that this was part of his strategy for dealing with difficult officials — if he argued loudly and long enough he often persuaded them to let him pass just to be rid of him.

But the guard stood his ground. As we headed back to Nicolas’s car, we noticed a flat tire. No problem, he assured me, he would have it fixed in no time. But no sooner had Nicolas plugged the leak than the tube that connected his portable air compressor to the tire tore. He cut off the torn section and started again. After a minute, there was another tear. And so it went for an hour until we finally had enough pressure in the tire to drive to a gas station.

Though the afternoon was frustrating, it was also revealing. These things are bound to happen when road-tripping in a country like Cambodia, one with a limited driving culture. There’s no AAA to call, and bicycles and scooters are more common than cars — something Nicolas may have gotten used to, but that required some adjustment on my part.

As chronicled on his blog, Trans World Expedition, Nicolas had stared down many such challenges. A bad car accident stranded him in Honduras for two weeks as that country was going through a major political crisis. In Africa, he drove in intense heat with a broken air-conditioner.

In late November, I had met up with Nicolas in Bangkok, the city where I grew up, to join him for a weeklong loop through Cambodia, a country neither of us had seen but one that I had long hoped to visit.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Cambodia was widely known as a place from which hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the killing fields of the 70s. In 1997, when I was an intern at The Associated Press’s Bangkok bureau, my editors asked if I would travel to help cover a coup there. I was living with my parents that summer, and they demanded that I turn down the offer, which I did.

But in the last decade, Cambodia has emerged as a popular destination for travelers who have wearied of more developed countries in Southeast Asia. It is perpetually referred to in guide books and travel stories as “like Thailand 10 years ago.”

And indeed, during our trip, I was struck by how reminiscent the country was of the Thailand of my childhood, before it was overrun with resorts, shopping malls and tour buses.

Cambodia’s two-lane highways were well paved and relatively empty — the upside, perhaps, to the lack of a car culture. We most often shared the roads with those scooters and bikes. Every so often, we would spot farmers transporting rice, sugar cane and other produce on carts hitched to cows or to small diesel engines fitted with truck tires and long handlebars. The other cars on the road were mostly Land Cruisers or Lexus sport utility vehicles, most likely owned by the country’s small economic elite and organizations like the United Nations, which have been helping to rebuild the country.

Some of this may soon change. Over the last few years, Cambodia, with the help of international organizations and China, has invested significantly in its roads, removing hundreds of land mines and thousands of rounds of ammunition to make way for miles of asphalt. But there is much more construction ahead and road culture is just beginning to catch up.

Sari, a driver and guide whom we met at the Angkor Wat complex our second day, said he occasionally saw European overland travelers, but that few foreigners, including the neighboring Thais, drove into and around the country.

We had another glimpse of this slow development at the Thai-Cambodian border, where we waited an hour for Cambodian customs officers to return to the office after lunch. They seemed utterly confused about the paperwork that Nicolas needed to bring his Land Cruiser into the country temporarily. He eventually took control, pointing out where they had to sign, stamp and tear the relevant documents — a successful example of his assertiveness.

Elsewhere, we were greeted warmly — sometimes with a disconcerting attentiveness. In the southern coastal town of Kep, where we spent the night after our luckless afternoon at Bokor, we camped near a family that lived in a shack on the coast. We arrived after the sun had set and quickly started popping up the tent, a clever contraption that Nicolas had affixed to the top of his car, complete with a built-in ladder. We poured ourselves generous glasses of rum with lime juice and soda to help make the warm and humid evening more bearable. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed around our electric lanterns.

As we worked, the men of the house stared at us and made comments to each other in Khmer, which neither of us understood. We tried to speak to them in English, but that proved unsuccessful.

Their vigil over us became unnerving after a while and I tried to break the ice by offering them some of the Thai-style chicken and stir-fried vegetables I had cooked on Nicolas’s petroleum-powered stove. They happily accepted and took the food back to their shack; we ate at a folding table Nicolas carries in the car.

Later, the family reciprocated in their own way. In the morning, when I started to head to the public toilet a few hundred yards away, the head of the family gave me a ride on his scooter.

Almost everywhere we went, people were fascinated by Nicolas and his Land Cruiser, which he bought in Brooklyn for $6,000. When we stopped by the side of the road to heat up leftover spaghetti on our way to Phnom Penh, a group of children gathered and stared at us. When we turned around, waved and said hello, they ran away, shrieking and laughing.

Nicolas says he hit the road because the financial crisis and recession had made New York, where he had lived for almost a decade, depressing. So, he quit his job as an art director at The Associated Press and drew down his savings to finance his trip. He estimates that he will spend about $50,000 on the trip. (He will likely arrive back in New York this month after driving cross-country from Los Angeles, where he has shipped his car from Asia.)

After only a week as his travel companion, I doubted that I could do what he had done. I was already aching for the creature comforts that you have to forsake when you go on the road, especially in places like Cambodia.

I couldn’t help but smile when we arrived at a small beach in Thailand 20 miles past the Cambodian border. We were greeted warmly by a family that ran a small restaurant. They showed us spots where we could camp and later in the evening they sold us beer and spicy papaya salad. Nobody eyed us suspiciously. They had seen many like us before.