<html><body>Progress and Prospects of Democratization in Egypt and throughout the Arab World April 6, 2005 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording. <TABLE width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%">11:45 a.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="86%" colSpan=2> Registration</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="22%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="64%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%">Noon </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="22%">Introduction:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="64%">Joshua Muravchik, AEI </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="22%">Speaker:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="64%">Ismail Serageldin, Library of Alexandria </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="22%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="64%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="14%">2:00 p.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="86%" colSpan=2> Adjournment</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. MURAVCHIK:  Welcome to the session.  I'm Josh Muravchik of AEI.  I'm going to have the honor of introducing our speaker.  I welcome you all here, and especially welcome Ambassador Fahmy, thank you for being here and as well as Abu Mund (ph) and Heshema Makib (ph) from the Egyptian embassy and the press office here. Our speaker is Dr. Ismail Serageldin.  He is truly a man of parts and of stunning accomplishments.  In addition to being the director of the Alexandria Library which is a world-class cultural institution which has few equals, he is also distinguished professor at--University in the Netherlands.  He is the author of more than 50 books and monographs and some 200 scholarly papers.  Most impressive is the great range of his interests and accomplishments which began in the hard sciences but take in a whole range of cultural and political affairs. I had the privilege of meeting him at a breakfast hosted by Ambassador Fahmy early in 2004 to tell a group of us about the plan for the Alexandria conference.  I was quite taken from what I heard about what he intended to do, bringing together distinguished thinkers from the entire Arab world to try to discuss and then come together on a common program for reform within the Arab world. What was so impressive was on the one hand this enterprise had the support and blessing of the Egyptian government, and on the other hand to hear him describe it, it sounded as if it would put forward a very far-reaching program of reform.  It seemed to me to be hard to picture that such a far-reaching program of reform could be put forward. As I listened to him that morning, I felt that I was in the presence of a very experienced individual, but also a very penetrating intelligence.  His remarks made me think and at moments they made me chuckle.  Someone asked him whether he wouldn't be accused of doing the Americans' bidding by promoting this kind of reform and his very fast response was, "And if the Americans say they are against corruption, shall I say I'm for corruption?" Then the conference was held.  It was opened by President Mubarak, so it clearly had the  stamp of approval of the Egyptian government on it, but it was a conference as I understand correctly aside from the opening by President Mubarak that consisted entirely of individuals in the private sector from every one of the Arab countries, several hundred in all. The statement that was issued under Dr. Serageldin's leadership I think remains the single-most significant program of reform in the region that's come from within or from without.  I had, to be honest, expected that when this reform program got to the subject of democracy that it would be hedged and that there would be words that could be taken to have many different meanings.  Democracy is a word that's often been misused or used in the loosest sense, but just the opposite was the case. The statement is actually a bell-clear statement of what democracy is and the desire to have it.  If you'll allow me to read you just a little phrase from it, the statement says, "When we talk of democracy systems, we mean without ambiguity, genuine democracy.  This may differ in form and shape from one country to another due to cultural and historical variations, but the essence of democracy remains the same.  Democracy refers to a system where freedom is the paramount value that ensures actual sovereignty of the people and government by the people through political pluralism leading to transfers of power." It goes on in his vein, not hedging or ambiguous in the least way.  In fact, it makes me feel a little bad that I've been working on this subject for years and years going way back while Dr. Serageldin was devoting himself to much tougher things like hard sciences, and I couldn't have put it any better or even as well as this.  So I felt very fortunate when my friends at the Egyptian embassy said that we could host an event here for Dr. Serageldin during his visit to Washington. He has agreed to speak to us both about issues of reform in Egypt and throughout the region, and we're very honored and happy to have you with us. DR. SERAGELDIN:  Josh, it's a pleasure to be here, and it's a pleasure to talk to you about such a topic that is obviously close to my heart. I think just a brief explanation of the civil society nature of this initiative, and I did go to President Mubarak and ask for his blessing and that's because some of you may not know, but I believe Alexandria is a unique creature.  It has no parallel anywhere in the world.  It doesn't belong to the government.  It's not under any ministry, not even under the prime minister.  It is issued by an Egyptian law that attaches it to the president, not the presidency.  The president personally has the highest symbol of national sovereignty, and then Article 4 of that law which has a wonderful name, Rule No. 1 for 2001, the first law of the new millennium, a nice omen.  A few weeks after it will be Rule No. 98 for 2002, but that wouldn't have the same cache. But the fact remains that Article 4 says the president shall define the manner in which it shall be administered, and its financial and administrative affairs shall be run without being constrained by any other law in Egypt.  So we have our own statutes, our own procurement regulations.  We are managed by an international board of trustees that is two-thirds non-Egyptian.  That's another thing that I don't know of any institution that is established by national law which is then administered totally by a two-thirds majority international board of eminent people elected in their own right, chaired by the president or his designate, and his designate is the First Lady. So that is the structure and, therefore, since it's attached directly to the president, I felt it was only appropriate given the topic we are about to discuss, everything from term limits to democracy, that I should forewarn him.  I asked for his blessing because I also said we intend to ban all ministers from attending from Egypt and from any other country.  Of course, that's not exactly a common occurrence in our part of the world, and I said but this is what we need and he said fine. He then actually came and delivered at speech at 10:00 a.m. in which he invited the civil society to be partners with government in bringing about change and reform and left by 11:00 with the ministers and the prime minister and so on, knowing full well that the conference was scheduled to start only at 6:00 p.m.  So all the government are done, the officials started the conference at 6:00 that day, and I presided over it. Thank you for what you said about the results of that conference, and I'll say a few words about it because it has become really a bit of a movement and not just a declaration or an event that we're talking about. Let's go back a bit.  Why would I make such a strange request to the president of my country as to say I want to have a conference that bans all government officials, and in fact, initially I didn't want any foreigners present for the first conference.  The other conference will be different. That was because there was and still is to a certain extent, but certainly there was at the beginning of 2004 a very powerful resentment against the world powers, primarily the United States, but the world order in general, a feeling of a sense of injustice, a feeling that Arabs and Muslims were being kicked around, around the world, that we were declared collectively guilty of terrorism and everything else, that the burden of proof for instance was on us rather than the other way around.  And that on top of that, the rich and powerful were imposing their agenda on our side and there was at the time, anyway, no clear signal that there was movement likely on the Palestinian-Israeli question and, therefore, the situation was even more inflamed than it is today. Under those circumstances, there was a very powerful resentment against proposals for democratization reform coming from the U.S. or coming from the E.U.  I'm annoyed by that in a different way.  I've been talking about democratic reforms in Egypt since the 1960s and I'll be damned if now somebody in Egypt comes and tells me you can't talk about democracy because that's serving an American agenda.  To hell with you.  Democracy is for us. We've been asking for it.  We want it.  We want the rule of law.  We want transparency, accountability, pluralism, participation, et cetera, and we need to make clear that these indeed are Arab and Egyptian demands.  They are not something being imposed from the outside.  There is a strong reformist element, national champions who recognize that and will say, yes, this is what we want for ourselves. Patrick Klausen (ph) here may remember well, we learned at the World Bank the hard way that you could not impose economic reform, much less political reform, if you did not have real champions inside the country who believe in reform, who are willing to fight for it, who will actually put their political careers on the line for these reforms. At best what you will get would be fenagling to give you the letter of the agreement but not the spirit of the agreements you are trying to make to bring about economic reforms.  This is I think in the end an essential lesson.  So we need to strengthen the local reformist champions, those who have roots in their society, those who are credible in their society. Hence a civil society initiative was needed, and President Mubarak agreed and played the game, played the game in the sense of not coming to the conference.  He came to give it his support and blessing, but distancing it enough so there was no intrusive government presence on deliberations.  And it did produce a document that clearly condemned all forms of terrorism, focused primarily on internal reform of the Arab world, and listed four major areas of reform:  political reform, democracy, human rights, freedom, rule of law; economic reforms, removing through barriers, youth employment, regional integration, integration with the world economy; social reforms, family, education and removal of all forms of discrimination against women, all forms; and cultural forms where we demanded a change in the religious discourse, a change in the public and media discourse in our societies because we believe it was not helpful; and that we wanted to promote rationality and a scientific outlook as opposed to obscurantism and prejudice. All of these paths are described in the Alexandria Declaration, and it was a good statement, clear and unambiguous as Josh said.  I'm very grateful that you saw it in that light.  So did we.  Although we do recognize that there is a huge difference between Djibouti and Dubai and between Somalia and Lebanon, we do recognize these differences, we do not use it as an excuse to imply nonaction.  We're saying each move on the path you have a different starting point, but all should be moving in that path as rapidly as you possibly can. That's what we did in that conference, but that was not all.  We decided to launch a movement right after that conference.  The document became kind of a blueprint and we wanted to get a whole range of things done, which we did. At the highest level we wanted to educate our public about what philosophical concepts that are essential.  We took the first as freedom of expression.  So we held an Egyptian conference, an Arab conference, and then international conference, on the issues of freedom of expression.  How do you actually create those wise constraints that people free, a difficult phrase that requires much thought, and the fact that the U.S. is still struggling with the proper interpretation where the boundaries of freedom and the boundaries libel begin, where hatemongering is allowed and under what circumstances, et cetera. So we needed to push that, and we did.  Next year we want to get on to something like citizenship, the meaning of citizenship, and that' what I call the philosophical lines, so to take these concepts and elaborate them and so on, although some people are pressing me to redo another freedom of expression because it's so central.  I wrote an essay called "The First Freedom" because it was really an essential one.  I say you haven't driven the nail home hard enough.  We need another round on freedom of expression.  Maybe we'll do it and we'll see what we can do. The second part is really to strengthen the Arab civil society.  Why should we do that?  Those of you who are familiar with the pioneering and seminal work of Robert Putnam of Harvard on Italy called "Making Democracy Work" published in 1993 from Princeton University Press, it became very clear.  His question was, why is Northern Italy so much richer, more vibrant, more effective than Southern Italy, although they have the same government, the same constitution, the same law, the same currency and the same economic program, et cetera?  So why is there such a huge duality in Italy?  He found that it was because you have a very vibrant civil society in the north, while you had a set of hierarchical and much dense civil society associative structures existing in the south of Italy.  That's a very powerful argument that is also substantiated by other studies which we did when I was at the World Bank and that time and again show this coming in. So we want to create a vibrant Arab civil society, and so we started by sponsoring the Human Rights Conference in 2004.  And the second follow-up conference exactly a year later which was just done a few weeks ago in mid-March 2005 was about Success Stories of the Arab Civil Society in order to shift the tone and tenor of the discussion away from what are we not doing to saying, look, a lot of people are doing some interesting things here.  Why don't you do more of that? We had 120 examples from 16 Arab countries where 500 delegates attended from all over the Arab world.  They were broken down in groups dealing with women, with health issues, with education, with environment, with all the range of issues, human rights work, with political participation work, et cetera.  And it was very interesting so that each could see the examples of what others had done and say, my God, I could do that. They drew strength from each other.  They were all proud to show what they had done under difficult circumstances.  We came out with clear demands that there should be better enabling legislation for the civil society of the Arab world and that's something we hope to work on again. Then we deepened the attention to the reforms in Egypt, and we held three conferences dealing with education, economics and youth, especially youth employment which is a time bomb in Egypt and in the Arab world.  In those conferences we had the ministers present, but they weren't delivering the speeches.  They were responding to the critiques that were coming from the floor.  It was an engaging dialogue. Then we sought international experience to encourage people.  We invited Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia who really did an enormous transformation in Malaysia including embracing science and technology.  It's a Muslim country but very strongly pro science and technology pro openness with the West, pro teaching English, pro teaching science and math, and he transformed that country from one that was largely dependent on rubber exports a quarter of a century ago to one where 75 percent of exports are manufactured in some form or another. The other one we invited was Michel Rocard, former prime minister of France, currently head of the French group in the E.U., to explain how Europe had been constructed.  Despite all the differences and the bloodshed that existed between the different European countries, how did they build a structure that evolved from an actual economic union toward the Maastricht agreements, towards--to no visas towards the euro, and now they're talking about a new constitution.  It was a very engaging debate. But above all we want to create networking, and in this last conference we established a new tool which we're going to call the Arab Info-Mall and do an observatory that will do assessments of performance in various countries and has been adopted by all the people who are there. So within a year actually we haven't done too badly as far as building up the sense of consciousness, expanding the support network among the Arab civil society, and of course, the Egyptian civil society. What has been happening in Egypt?  Before I get to that I'd like to say a word about what I see as the dynamics of reform in our part of the world.  I think that for all intents and purposes, speaking of the Muslim and Arab world and specifically the Arab world more than the Muslim world, we have what I've referred to elsewhere as the iron triangle of competing forces that are locked together like three people who are tied to each other and they're thrown over there and they're struggling with each other, but we have somehow to sort it out. We are locked in a battle that cannot accept coalitions.  Why?  The first of these and the most power of the corners of that triangle are the remnants of a statist centralized strongly totalitarian government that was built in the 1950s and 1960s and has been gradually liberalized in different forms but that still retains a very strong outlook, a control-oriented approach to running everything from the economy, political expression and to public media, et cetera. The second part of that triangle is their nemesis, the remnants of or the inheritors of the Muslim Brotherhood in its various types.  I'm not talking about the militant extremists who claim in the name of Islam to cut off heads of people and assassinate victims and hostages and so on.  I'm talking about strong mainstream currents which go from strongly fundamentalist whose primary demands would be everything from application of sharia law to women wearing the veil to the banning of alcohol in hotels, et cetera, to people who just generally speaking identify very strongly of themselves primarily as Muslims and who place, to use the American parlance of the last election, place moral values at the highest order of the national agenda. You've had your own debates here in the United States.  You recognize what I mean when I use that easy--except that ours are not Christians, they're Muslims, but it is very much the same idea, that we must protect the values of the family against all intrusions. Here the intrusion is seen as coming from outside.  Here you have people talking about gay marriage and other things like that.  We're saying all of that stuff is being exported from the United States and the West to undermine our cultural values.  That is a group that is not insignificant and it provides the backing for that second part of the triangle which is an Islamist current which has a well-organized presence in the streets of the Arab world and whose manifestations are not including the extremist militant armed terrorists.  But it's a mainstream political current and it's a powerful one. The third angle, the third part of that triangle, is the reformist.  You quoted from the declaration, you have to change it because of the United States because were they to use the word liberal that would mean that democracy is liberal, democracy in the sense of political liberalism, except in the U.S. you've succeeded now in making the L word carry a baggage that it didn't require.  So that's real democracy. But the fact remains what we are talking about are whether you follow the parliamentary system as they have in the U.K. or in Sweden or you call it a presidential system like you have in the U.S. or a somewhere in between system like you have in France, what we are talking about, we understand each other on the principles of democracy, it's the rule of law, it's participation, it's pluralism, it's change of parties, et cetera. In fact, my friends went through that in the Alexandria Declaration.  As a scientist I must object because I did object to one part, but I went to along with the majority of it.  They actually specifically asked for total separation of powers and I told them that this was not a formal requirements of democractic systems.  In fact, parliamentary systems do not have such a separation of power between the legislative and the executive. In the U.K. you cannot be prime minister or a member of the cabinet if you're not a member of parliament.  So I wouldn't say that they're not democractic, but the majority of people felt that way.  That's something that you couldn't have obtained with any amount of funding from--it was generally the view that they felt strongly that they needed that separation of powers so it's there. People who want to see religion, yes, in terms of values, religion, yes, in terms of even parties that stand for that like the Christian Democratic Parties in Europe, why not have Muslim Democratic Parties, provided they're willing to accept that you are not going to impose Islamic sharia on non-Muslims and that equality before the law also means equality between men and women. If you don't accept those two criteria, then I don't think that you are really the basis for democracy.  So if people want to say, no, we want to protect Islamic values as our essential values, our own values, et cetera, fine.  I think that's perfectly legitimate.  But if it is to say what we want is really the transformation of the legal system to be an application of sharia as we interpret it, because I think sharia could be interpreted very liberally, very progressively, but nevertheless, then that would be not as effective. But the fact remains that these three groups as you can see have a problem.  No two can make an alliance against the third, stand at different corners, really, in this, and we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation.  That is what it's all about.  We are in a battle for transforming our societies in this beginning of this new century in a way that we believe is compatible with our wishes, our aspirations, expressed in the Alexandria Declaration,  drafted and signed by eminent Arabs from 18 Arab countries out of the 22. So with that set of dynamics it's not clear right now what happens, but what happens is that invariably you end up having some actions that go one way and some actions that go another way.  Then people here start trying to explain that very cohesively as if all of these things are happening by virtue of a giant master plan.  I can assure you that the powers that be in Egypt and in the rest of the Arab world who are advancing towards democracy and openness are not doing so based on a fully articulated step-by-step plan. So you get these kinds of peculiar things like the arrest of Ayman Nour most recently and then his release by the judiciary.  They said who would order that?  I say I don't know who would order it, but certainly it was if somebody has paid the agents to try to undermine the initiative that Mubarak was taking at the time when he was making his historic decision to change the constitution and allow for the first time a multicandidate presidential election and to go through universal suffrage for the election rather than an electoral referendum system that was prescribed in the conference which he inherited, which he didn't write, he inherited that constitution from President Sadat, and while he is going that, while on earth did anybody want to arrest an opposition figure and release them?  That's part of this swaying too and fro between various forces that exist in society. I think if we understand that, then a lot of the apparent inconsistencies will disappear and not every single action is approved in accordance with the master plan.  In fact, there's a lot of give and take and a lot of things that are obstructed and incomplete. If we look at Egypt can we say something more than conferences?  Yes, we can.  We've had actually a wonderful year.  We've had a wonderful year that has seen the abolition of the hated State Security Courts.  There are two kinds of State Security Courts.  There were those that, for example, condemned Saad Eddin Ibrahim before.  And those are those which are called State Security Emergency Courts.  Those are usually for terrorists and drug offenders.  But fundamentally, the first kind has been abolished.  They no longer exist. The Human Rights Council was created, headed by former U.N. Secretary General Butros Butros-Ghali who is for those of you who don't know this, he is himself a Christian married to a Jew.  And his vice chair is the eminent jurist Dr. Kamel--who is a very eminent jurist of an Islamist background.  That is a very, very distinguished group and they are really moving in this direction.  We have had the ban on imprisoned journalists and the president's discussion that he will be willing to even consider constitutional reform and even what we had asked for in terms of the need for change and removing some of the old guard. We have a new government as of last July headed by a 52-year-old I.T. specialist including a number of ministers who are 40 years or slightly under.  In fact, Mahmud--is 37 if I'm not mistaken, Ahmed--is 41, so roughly in their forties. The economic team promptly set to the task of implementing all the reforms that we had in the Alexandria Declaration.  Actually, they would have made the Republican hearts glow.  In the first 6 months they slashed and simplified taxes and customs tariffs, unified multiple exchange rates, abolished the crazy quilt of special exemptions to industrial ventures, established qualified industrial zones between Israel, the U.S. and Egypt that had been held up in committee for 6 years, liberalized the exchange of transactions, removed the shackles of commercial banks to operate freely in foreign exchange, refurbished the privatization program, established the one-stop-shop for new ventures that reduced the time it took from 120 days to 30 days today, and hopefully even less.  Not bad for 6 months by a new team.  Well, it's 8 months now, so a little bit longer, and it's coming together. But above all I think beyond that we have had the bombshell that President Mubarak put forward.  This needs a little bit of explanation.  Recall that the president is not obligated to do any of this.  He could stay and say I'm going to stay with the constitution until it is changed.  He didn't have to become the advocate of change of the constitution himself. One of the greatest presidents of the United States did exactly that.  If you recall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt when FDA sought a third term, people said to him, how can you seek a third term?  He said, show me where it bans it in the constitution.  As you all know, it didn't ban it the constitution, he got his third term and his fourth term.  He died into it, but later on the Twenty-Second Amendment was only approved in 1947 which did ban more than two terms. But it was allowed in the constitution so Mr. Mubarak in effect was allowed by the constitution to seek additional mandates and to maintain the electoral system the way it was. The fact that he had presided over all these other measures I was talking about and that he personally took on the task of saying I want to change Article 76 of the constitution to change the electoral system and allow for the first time in Egypt to have a multicandidate open presidential election by universal suffrage, I think it something that he deserves a lot of credit for. He did it I think above all because he is recognizing that the younger generation needed a vision of the future which has not been sufficiently articulated.  Why do I say this?  Let me just add three things that I think are very important [inaudible] In the last 20 years, the number of newspapers in Egypt went from 27 to 504 licensed newspapers today, not counting 1,100 journals of which about 560 or scholarly, so the rest are not.  Radio and broadcasting channels went from 106 to 529.  And TV channels went from two to 32 public channels to date plus six privately-owned channels in Egypt, not counting the fact that of course today you get BBC, CNN, al-Jazeera, Arabia (ph), everything else comes to anybody. But the Internet, my favorite, the Internet, Internet went from 75,000 subscribers in 1997 to over 3.5 million people at the end of 2004.  From 75,000 to 3.5.  Chatrooms, blogs, you name it, it's all out there, it's active.  The Library of Alexandria gets 20,000 hits a day from Egypt alone.  All these young people are there. And I think it is these people who need to hear a different vision and a different credo.  They need to hear that we are not just Egyptians and proud to be so, but that the world is home, humanity is our family.  Nonviolence should be our creed.  Peace, justice and equality, dignity for all should be our purposes.  That we should be engaged and rational and tolerant and try to learn and understand mutual respect for all others and open with outstretched arms ourselves to others. That I think is the agenda that these young people need to hear.  They need a vision of a future where they will have a place, not where they are simply seen as an unemployment statistic.  They need an attack that addresses their needs and not just their economic prospects, and I think that is what the debate is going to be about in the next 5 to 10 years in the Arab world. As that new generation comes of age we're expecting that in the next 10 to 15 years we need 75 to 80 million new young people to enter the labor force in the Arab world.  Egypt alone will have about 190,000 to enter the labor market every year.  So we're talking about a very large number of young people who are becoming citizens, participants, economic agents, who seek their place in the sun and we must find a way of promoting that, creating a society that is for them and by them.  And it is our task, people like me, old guys like me, to help bring about that transition. What can the U.S. do about that?  You can do a lot.  I think we need your help.  We need you to assist us in establishing better connections with the rest of the world.  We need you to support our education systems, promote rationality, promote science, promote difficult issues in technology, help us with the free flow of information which is important, help us learn to learn, discover new ways, join you in this enormous adventure into new--the United States is leading in science and technology across the world.  Help us in many, many ways that we promote the pluralistic vision of the future that we will have, but do not try to force a new hegemonic tutelage because proud people will resent it. I was reminding people at my table earlier on when about 15 years a presidential candidate for the United States was shown to have received some funding from abroad and the enormous sense of outrage that the America people felt at the time.  What makes you think that people in other countries won't have the same sense of outrage about other powers coming in and funding the political activities of various people? But the other kinds of activity I'm talking about, that essential bedrock on which democracy can be built, requires funding and requires your support. I know it's difficult to do at a moment when you are considering yourselves locked into a war of terror.  But let me read to you as my last words, they're not in my words, but in somebody else's words, what American senior military officials said how, "the United States that just came out of a traumatic ordeal that shook the national psyche to its foundation should deal with a part of the world that's far away and turn by war, poverty, disease and hunger.  And he said there is a vast importance of our people to reach some general understanding of what the complications really are, rather than react from a passion, prejudice or an emotion of the moment. "It is virtually at this distance merely by reading or listening or even seeing photographs or motion pictures to grasp at all the real significance of the situation, and yet to the whole world hangs on a proper judgment." The speaker was George Marshall outlining what became known as the Marshall Plan, and he said the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of desperation of the people concerned will mean that there is no political stability and no assured peace without economic security and then openness, and that therefore U.S. policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. In that generous spirit of America we will find strong supporters and allies in the reformers of the Arab world.  We want to work with you.  We want to recreate the effusive vision of the plant that the United States brought after World War II, rather than an exclusive vision where we would feel as outsiders.  We think we will have a contribution to make.  With your help we know that we will be able to do it.  Thank you. MR. MURAVCHIK:  I think you can all see why I was so impressed the first time I had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Serageldin.  He is willing to take questions.  I have a question for you, too, but I'll let some others go first. MR. WEISS:  Richard Weiss (ph), the Hudson Institute.  I had heard and it's cited as fact, it may or may not be fact, in Washington, that the United States spent a lot of money developing the sewer system in Cairo.  People cite this and say we spent all this money and we really never got any credit for it. I see the value of helping develop Internet access in Egypt, but is there a mechanism, is there a middle way that we could use that would make people in Congress feel comfortable that they were getting visible returns from money they would spend on such a project without being so heavy-handed about it that it would wound the pride of Egypt or any other recipient government? DR. SERAGELDIN:  I think the short answer is probably not.  If you want very short-term immediate returns on investment, then you're not really talking about societal transformation. We've not learned to our great regret after the bubble of the '90s that you can't run corporations on a quarterly financial basis, that even corporations need some sort of sense of vision and tactics about where they are going.  Otherwise, the pressure to deliver results leads to all sorts of things which we known shouldn't happen. Now you're talking about transforming societies.  You want to accelerate the pace of transformation.  But I believe that reform like development is like a tree.  You can nurture its growth by feeding its roots, not by pulling on its branches.  If you pull on its branches, you risk really uprooting the whole tree. That's something we learned in the development business, and even more so in what we are talking about now.  It is possible, of course, in extreme cases, and I emphasize the words extreme cases, similar to Germany, Japan and Italy after World War II, where you actually took over the whole country, the country was in ruins, it had been formally defeated, all the establishment of the country formally signed on.  Possibly what is now going on in Iraq is close to that model. But out of that other than that, every single society has transformed itself at paces that may or may not accelerate.  The U.S. has not had a perfect union except through a Civil War.  It has been fighting with issues of civil liberties until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  We have had a lot of things that have gone on in that 200-year history which we all admire as much as we did. We do not frequently like to recall, I'm a great admirer of American history and that's why I recall all those things, either the major compromise that was done at the birth of the United States and at the birth of the constitution where the slaves were counted as three-fifths of the free people in terms of allocation of weight between the states until that was resolved technically by the Civil War.  Nor do we talk about the other compromises that the U.S. had to deal with in order to bring itself to where it is today. This took a long time to do.  So societies have to sort out a lot of their internal differences.  Even today as we can see, you still squabbles and quarrels about states' rights versus federal rights, et cetera, in the United States. So sorting out these problems will take time.  If you want an immediate result, I don't think you will be able to show that except you could show some progress.  For example, you could say I'm going to link up Egypt with the Internet.  This was not a small amount.  I had to pay $2 million which is about ten times I should pay by the Egyptian government or by the U.S. government to an American company, ten times what you will normally get for 155 megabits per second connectivity here. It has the only fiber optics passing in the area and they charge what they charge and you either pay it or you don't get it, so we paid it.  But things like that can shown fairly quickly.  I doubt that short of these interventions of that kind, one would be able to show immediate things. Credit is given, and I think it is more important for the United States to think in this terms I'm going to say right now, you don't need credit, somebody is saying, "you're great."  You need people to actually think that.  People say, why is the United States so unpopular today?  People say because it's so powerful.  Not true.  The U.S. is much, much, much weaker than it was in 1945. I think the peak of U.S. power by any criterion you will use, 1945 to 1949, the U.S. was the only economy that had not been bombed out.  Its soldiers were occupying Germany, Japan, Italy and everywhere else.  It was the only country in the world that had the nuclear bomb, and its industry was in full swing.  The rest of the industries were in shambles. They represented 50 percent of global GDP.  Today is represents about 30 percent.  It was the world's largest creditor nation.  Today it is the world's largest debtor nation.  So why was it that in those days the U.S. was admired, loved, everybody wanted to emulate the United States?  I think it was of a vision that the U.S. leadership brought at the end World War II, founding on one side the Breton Woods institutions which, incidentally, included the WTO which was not approved at the time by the U.S. Senate and became the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 50 years later it's rightful name, but IMF, World Bank, WTO; the United Nations where there was a General Assembly, everybody was equal, every nation was equal, and the Security Council where the big powers would have a veto.  In In a general spirit they said not just the main four allies, but China, the largest of the developing world should equally have a seat.  Recall India was still a colony of the U.K. at the time, so it was a very generous gesture to include people; to create an International Court of Justice; to create an Economic and Social Council as well as the Secretariat; and you established the Nuremberg Principles which said this is what has to be applied. It was a sense of saying we, the United States, are very powerful, but we want the system which includes you all.  And no matter how small you are, you will still have a vote.  The General Assembly will give you that vote.  You may not have a veto, but you have a vote.  You have a way of expressing yourself.  We're inviting you.  This includes you in the embrace of the United States. Plus the revolutionary concept of investing in your enemies to turn them into your friends, and they became your staunchest allies for all these years. I think these are the kinds of things that made the United States more accessible, more acceptable and admired.  In fact, you didn't have to ask do people recognize this is not recognize that at the time, will we get credit for it or not, because the whole world was looking to the U.S. not only for leadership, but for inspiration.  You inspired us all, and I know you can do it again and again and again, because you've done it in other times as well including the landing on the Moon. MR. SCLADONE:  Tom Scladone (ph), National Endowment for Democracy.  When Arab reformers meet and think about possible future paths for the development of their societies, what models do they look toward?  Are there examples in the Central European transition after communism-- [End side A, begin side B.] MR. SCLADONE:  [In progress] --in governments that were formed in those countries?  Are there models in Asia or in Latin America or perhaps other places that might show a path forward for the Arab countries? DR. SERAGELDIN:  Yeah, I think people are looking at the paths to transformation.  The fact of the matter, however, is that we are looking very much at what can apply from each of these models to the particularities of our own societies, the realities of that triangular distribution of power and the interplay you have between these forces.  I think that as a result of that we look to Asia as well as to Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union and Central Asia. But there is a strong desire to look at the finished product, so to speak.  We like to look and compare ourselves related to how systems work in the United States and how they work in Europe and try to learn from that. For example, one of the big issues that is being touted in Egypt is the abolition of the emergency laws.  The president has said that he does not feel that he can deliver security without the presence of these laws, although he is not abusing them. It is a case in the United States, you are yourself struggling with the Patriot Act.  In the U.K. you may recall the Law Lords sent back three times the government versions on the new rights to detention for the Belmarsh detainees and so on. Why is it that these countries that fought terrorism of the IRA variety, after all, there have been no bombs exploding in downtown London as there were at the time of the IRA, and people from my part of the world would say and at the time they did not call it Catholic terrorism, they called it the IRA.  So why is that now we call it Muslim terrorism when it wasn't the case?  Why don't you name it the bin Laden group, or we didn't have the Baader-Meinhof group, we didn't have Red Brigades, we didn't have groups like that, and Aldo Moro was assassinated in Italy, and you've had all these cases and attempts on the lives of President DeGaulle in France, in all of those cases people dealt with it through regular law but now there is a feeling that you need special laws. So what we have said, we being the reformists, to the president and the others, why don't we have a terrorist law?  Let's engage with and study what we're doing in Spain after Madrid, what they are doing in France, what they're doing in the U.K., what they're doing in the U.S., what they're doing elsewhere, and have a terrorism law and then lift the state of emergency that's been there?  And that's one of the things that is in the cards. So we are looking very much, not so much as what happened after the fall of communism, as to saying what should the finished product be like, and then how do we navigate our way in the midst of these three competing courses in order to go to that end product? MS. HILLS:  Alison Hills (ph) from ExxonMobil.  I had a follow-up question when you were talking about the Muslim Brotherhood.  I know that a lot of scholars have written at great length about their role in civil society, even comparing some of their activities to what was enunciated in the Robert Putnam study on Italy. I was wondering if you could comment about what kind of a role they would attempt to have or would be permissible in the upcoming elections. DR. SERAGELDIN:  I think they are in force on the street, they are well organized, and they have a very clear if limited program.  The limitations of their program are really a lot of the trappings of moving towards the application of sharia, plus a very strong tendency, I didn't talk about it here, but about the censorship that is going on in my country that is not the official censorship which tends to be much more liberal in allowing sex and other movies that people consider obscene; most of the sites considered obscene are either on television or others.  They're not really obscene.  They're MTV, Britney Spears types, young Arab girls who sign to music with their bare midriff which is considered today to be pornographic channels are being allowed. They are looking for a series of interventions of that kind and they represent a well-organized minority, but well organized is the operative word.  They are present and, therefore, they will vote. We have in our part of the world, contrary to the image that has been put up in the press, from people I have read in editorials that said Mr. Mubarak is the biggest obstacle to reform.  That's not true.  I think Mr. Mubarak is ahead of the institutions in Egypt, and he is not the only one.  Look at Kuwait.  The Emir of Kuwait twice sent the laws to the parliament suggesting that women should have the right to vote and twice the parliament rejected him.  Now we are in this peculiar situation where an inherited monarch may dissolve parliament, and it may actually be a progressive move.  You're kind of in a strange Catch-22 sort of situation, but that is true. So we have situations where a lot of rulers are ahead of the establishment structures that represent that part of the triangle that I mentioned or the Islamic part.  I am confident, for example, that within Syria, Mr. Bashar Asad personally is much more open, much more liberal than the establishment and institutions that he had inherited. So we have these battles and I think they will be present.  It depends they will field their own candidate or rally behind another candidate.  It is not clear what they do, but I know that their program is highly focused on establishing as close as possible to a sharia law and as close as possible to an Islamic identity which causes problems for people like me because I'm a great believer in the fact that there's a lot of non-Muslims, whether they're Christians, Jews or nonbelievers who are citizens and should be treated equally before the law and especially also the gender I mentioned, I say unabashedly everywhere I'm for equality of the sexes; not equity, not fairness, equality, and that is something that is unlikely to pass right now. Egypt of course is way ahead of Kuwait.  We're not talking giving women the vote.  We got the first elected woman in parliament in 1956.  Rawya Atiya was the first woman to be elected, so we are not talking about getting them elected, we're talking about the full rights of citizenship in everything pertaining to marriage, pertaining to divorce, pertaining to inheritance, et cetera. In these battles, the real obstacles will be from the Islamist side, and the battles on security and so on will be on the other side, but we'll see. MS. ABEDRE:  I'm Helen Abedre (ph).  I'm an Egyptian journalist.  I'm from Alexandria, too.  I have a question, Dr. Serageldin.  I would like to know your opinion regarding the freedom of press in Egypt.  As you know, last year, late February 2004, President Mubarak promised to forward the matter of arresting the journalist as a criminal case to the parliament within a days.  He did it actually, but since then we didn't hear anything regarding that and it's still the old policy regarding for arresting the journalist.  I would like to know your opinion what can be done to move forward on that matter. DR. SERAGELDIN:  In any society there are imperfections in what's going on right now.  I believe that anybody objectively looking at the press in Egypt, not just the three major papers which were state owned from Nassir's days.  I'm not talking about--you have a lot of others from "Sawt al-Umma," to this, so that, so there are literally hundreds of different papers.  They write brutally about anything they want.  Nalsiri (ph) has written no inheritance of power, no to Gamal Mubarak, no to this.  It's been quite an open and vibrant press. In addition to that, there are cases, a case where one journalist was beaten up and stripped of his clothes and thrown out by thugs from another group.  There has been another case where somebody was arrested.  But in a sense, these are very, very few and far between, and usually when they come to light they are decried by most people today including the higher authorities. The degree to which this was the case, you may recall was the case also of the priest who was photographed in a rather flagrant situation, and that was also banned as being equivalent to Hitler's literature.  But, yes, but there are a few imperfections here and there, but I think anybody who has lived through the years from Nassir, through Sadat, through Mubarak until today, there is no comparison in the level of freedom of press. You may also be intrigued to know that the 500 delegates who attended the last Alexandria Conference in March voted that we should have an annual conference for the civil society, that it should be in the Library of Alexandria.  They said specifically, even the Tunisians actually said this, that this is where we have the greatest space of freedom for discussion anywhere in the Arab world.  I was very pleased to hear that, obviously. So, yes, there are imperfections and I think we should root them out and we should denounce them wherever they occur, but they are much fewer than there were 10 years ago.  In turn, those are not comparable to what it was like 20 years ago or during the Nassirite period. MR. SANDS:  David Sands (ph) from the "Washington Times."  I want to go back to the two nodes of the triangle, you talk about the reformers, but also the Islamic.  You seem to reject an alliance with the Islamic movement.  It seems like there are parts of the Islamic movement that you could ally with.  You talked about the Christian right here or the values people in America, they are clearly part of the political process here.  You have Christian Democratic movements in Europe that are clearly part of the democratic process.  You don't think that would work in the Egyptian context? DR. SERAGELDIN:  No, I don't think it would work because the agenda right now will collapse around two issues.  Issue number one is the issue of the status of women, and issue number two is the willingness to accept that non-Muslims should be equal in every way before the law. To me these should be nonnegotiable, hardcore beliefs of anybody advancing a democracy and that we should be fighting for that.  I know people can tell me women didn't have the vote in Appenzell, Switzerland, until 1971, and I say that was 30 years ago, going on 35 years ago.  So if we look at Appenzell today, it has votes for women in Switzerland.  So let's not argue about that. So if I think if there are among the Islamic currents people who would be willing to accept fundamental precepts of democractic truths, at least those are the two that I would hold to.  Then by all means we could create alliances, but I'm not sure that it will happen. I'm not sure there would be individuals, but that's not the mainstream movement that is termed the Islamic Movement is about.  It's a very powerful movement.  It has a lot of presence.  It is striking to see how a generation of women that had taken off the veil have their daughters now put on the veil, so it's like a pendulum swinging.  But from the previous generation at the time of my mother, were fighting for women's rights and they got the first woman elected and all of that, they fought for removing the veil, and then now we see their granddaughters putting back the veil in droves. So there's a lot of movement.  And these are societal movements.  I don't think they are really religious movements, they're societal movements.  They are movements that adhere to a sense of value, a sense of loss.  When people are worried about the loss of values, drift occurs.  You get this resurgence towards our roots, and that's good, but it should be good only to the extent that it doesn't result in limiting or abridging the rights that should be given to non-Muslims and to women before the law. AUDIENCE:  --from the United States Institute of Peace.  This very issue that you mentioned, also earlier you mentioned that the--and the Muslim Brothers are a major or at least a significant current.  This also goes for Hamas, Hezbollah and others.  Also because they provide all kinds of services that the governments could not, becoming more popular as you just mentioned. The question is, is there a concern in Egypt and other Arab countries that in genuinely free elections they can win?  Take the model of Algeria in 1991, or if you wish, the Turkish model or the Indonesian model.  What is the Egyptian model?  Is there concern about it?  Because it can happen.  You can see it in quite a lot of countries, also in Lebanon, Iraq now. It's kind of a paradox.  You have democracy, but then it turns out to be misused by Islamists to run their own show. DR. SERAGELDIN:  It's now because let's be clear. I'll come back to why I'm making these two points. Democracy is not just about majority rule.  It is also about protecting the rights of the minority.  Otherwise, you could have legalized discrimination of every single variety by the majority against the minority and that would not be, at not in my book, a properly democractic system. So that's why in our declaration we wrote freedom, no impediments to freedom of action, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, of individuals is at the heart of that and individuals will be in the minority and the individuals therefore should have the right to speak and express their views. If the majority wants to suppress those rights, then we are in a fundamental conflict, and this is the heart of the democractic process.  Yes, majority rules, but no majority cannot strip the minority of its rights.  Otherwise, you get into a fascist type of situation as we saw in Germany.  After all, they did pass a lot of laws in Germany about Jews and the Holocaust.  There was never formally a law, but there were laws stripping them of their--there were laws that were passed to give Hitler more and more power, et cetera. So the question is, can you have an unfettered action of the majority or should there be guarantees for the minority?  That I think is the nub of the issue.  Nobody would deny the right of any movement whether they want to call themselves communists or they want to call themselves Islamists or they want to call themselves democrats or parliamentarians or whatever they want to call it the left or the New Dawn or whatever or National Democratic Party, they have the right to organize themselves into a party, fun for elections, put candidates forward. But our concern should be can we guarantee a democractic transition that does not lead towards the abridgements of the rights of a minority or the rights of women. MS. MONTGOMERY:  Jean Montgomery.  You mentioned that there were approximately 890,000 young people that would be coming into the labor force each year I believe in Egypt alone. DR. SERAGELDIN:  890,000.  Almost 900,000, yes. MS. MONTGOMERY:  My question is this, I understand that most of what you're talking about here is really addressing political liberties of people, but it has an effect on the economy of your country.  My question is whether there is a sense that by freeing up various individuals in their different capacities, various organizations in their different capacities, would help produce enough jobs in total and that require the kinds of skills, that you have young people who have those skills to do?  That is, you don't produce a lot of jobs that are low-skilled and you have a lot of high-skilled, highly educated people that are needing employment which I understand is a problem in some countries. My question is, is there a sense that liberalizing the politics, the political aspect here, would help in restructuring the economy so that these jobs would be more available? DR. SERAGELDIN:  I would like to be able to say yes, but the short answer is probably no in the sense of I think, first of all, it's wrong to try to make the case that you need democracy in order to have economic growth because you need democracy because of democracy, because of its guarantees of freedom, because of what it does for human rights, because of what it does to give you the rights of citizenship regardless of whether or not it helps or doesn't help economic performance. I think that it would be a terrible way of belittling the democractic idea.  In fact, if you look at the fastest-growing economies in the world today, whether it's Vietnam or China, they are not exactly models of participatory democracy.  But the issue therefore is separate.  I think we need to pursue the economic reforms because we must create those jobs for young people.  Otherwise, it's a time bomb without that. But we must pursue the democractic reforms because that is the least we can do to respect the human rights of our fellow citizens.  I think it would be a mistake for anyone, a privileged person, I am a privileged person, to say as long as I'm in the elite and I'm fine, then let's worry about economics and not worry about the rest. No, we must worry about the rest and I think that we must pursue the four angles and I think the Alexandria Declaration I think was remarkably balanced in that it said political reforms, economic reforms, social reforms and cultural reforms, the discourse, the way we speak of our view of the others. Why do we say this cultural reform part?  I argue that ultimately the political and the economic will be the easiest of the two.  In fact, your question about Islamic currents are because of the social-cultural dimension that then keeps coming back.  Transforming that, we need to liberate the Arab mind, the Egyptian mind, the Muslim mind, from the tyranny of bigotry and fear and unleash all its creative potential.  When that existed, for over 700 years the Muslims and the Arabs carried the torch of reason, the torch of tolerance, the torch of progress, the torch of science, to the whole world, in what at the time was known as the Dark Ages in Europe. We can relive this again.  We have it within our societies to recreate that.  But to do that we must first liberate our minds from the tyranny of fear, the tyranny of obsession with the outsider and be able to know we will do those reforms ourselves.  We welcome an outstretched hand, but we do not wait upon it.  We will do it ourselves.  It will be home grown and it will succeed.  It will take us a bit longer or a bit shorter time, but with our friends maybe it will take us a little shorter time to get there. But we will get there and we have to get there the hard way which means working from the bottom up and not just waiting for decisions from the top down.  Luckily we have alliances that can work with some enlightened people at the top and a lot of active people at the bottom.  Between us we should be able to resolve the iron triangle between us.  We should be able to reinvent better futures in the very crucible of our minds and then go about making them a reality. MR. MURAVCHIK:  I should end on that really wonderful oration, but I'm going to still ask you my question as the final question. I was on a panel recently with two Arab journalists one of whom, pointing to the recent events in the region said that the Middle East now is like Wenceslaus Square in 1989.  And the other one who was of a very different mind said, no, it's like Tiananmen Square in 1989. Those are rather dramatic metaphors and perhaps put the question in too pointed a way, but to put it in a less pointed way, given the very great democratic foment which you had a lot to do with encouraging that's now increasing, if you look ahead let's say, 3, 4 or 5 years, do you expect that we will see any, some, several countries in the Arab world that we will call democracies at that point? DR. SERAGELDIN:  I think the short answer is yes, but I do believe that different countries would follow different paths. If you ask me are we at Tiananmen Square or Wenceslaus Square, I would say that entire square which is Cairo 2005.  It's a different situation, a different time, different people, and it will be a mistake to try to emulate past patterns onto the future. I do believe, however, that the changes are real.  I think that the changes are real that we are moving towards democracy.  Maybe not as fast as some of us would like, but certainly faster than others feel comfortable with.  Yes, we are opening the door and, yes, there will be Islamist currents that will come forward and that will make a lot of people uncomfortable. But I believe at the end of the day that people like myself will win and we'll win very easily and very handily because the march of history is on our side. Let me give me just a small historical tidbit here.  How many people in this room remember Savonarola?  Do you know Savonarola?  At the time of the Medicis and the beautiful explosion of art and liberty that was known as the Renaissance being born in Florence, there was a countermovement led by a fanatical priest by the name of Savonarola who then established a theocracy for 10 years in Florence.  He forced the Medicis to flee, the Medici women to burn their dresses in public, to strip themselves of the jewelry and to melt the jewelry into gold to be given to the Church.  He forbade all forms of revelry.  He obliged people to do mortification of the flesh and all sorts of things. Today it's just a blip, a footnote in history.  The march of the Renaissance was the march of the Renaissance.  If you happened to be living in Florence during those 10 years, that would not have been exactly a few of history, right?  You'd have said my God I'm living under the worst theocratic regime, people are being burned.  All sorts of things happened at that time. But it is a blip in the march of history.  Even then when you write history, you have to remember you're talking to an Egyptian.  The Old Kingdom started a long time ago.  The New Kingdom in Egypt ended in 1300 B.C.  So we have a sense of history. And then you look at something like the communist experiment, a mere 70 years.  A mere 70 years in the history of things when you think of the 100 Years' War and you look back on the march of history, these are small aberrations. Reform of the kind we're talking about, the openness to science, the openness to pluralism, the respect for human rights, gender equality, the notion of participation, citizenship, freedom of expression, that is the march of the 21st century.  And there may be delays here and there, but we will succeed.  Of that I have no doubt.  And even errors, false steps, movement forwards and backwards have to be expected. It is not the implementation of a building by design of an architect sitting somewhere.  It is a societal experiment and in a societal experiment your path is designed by the interactions of different individuals.  In the end we do not want to create the perfect democracy that bans a lot of people who feel very strongly about Islamic values from having forms of expression.  But nor would we want that their form of expression robs others of their rights to express. Finding that uneasy balance is what it's all about, and every society will have to it for itself.  You cannot import it from outside.  The sensitivities are different, and in that process we all trying to do this home-grown reform.  We welcome your assistance, we welcome your assistance, but not your tutelage. MR. MURAVCHIK:  I'm sorry, that was the last question.  Perhaps you can catch him to the side, but Dr. Serageldin, you certainly did not disappoint.  This was a wonderful, rich session.  I learned a lot.  I think that I probably speak for everyone else in the room in saying that we are very delighted and honored by your joining us.  Thank you, and thank you all for coming, and thanks, too, to Ambassador Fahmy and--we are very indebted to you. [END OF TAPED RECORDING.]</body></html>