An enemy of human rights
AMERICAN presidents must sometimes deal with unsavoury foreign leaders in pursuit of national interest. But that doesn’t require inviting them to the White House and lavishing them with praise.
Yet that’s what President Trump did on Monday in not just welcoming but celebrating one of the most authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, a man responsible for killing hundreds of Egyptians, jailing thousands of others and, in the process, running his country and its reputation into the ground.
The expressions of mutual admiration that permeated the Oval Office were unctuous. Trump praised Sisi for doing a “fantastic job” and assured him he has a “great friend and ally” in the US. In return, Sisi, barred from the White House during the Obama administration and craving the respect such a visit would afford, expressed his “deep appreciation and admiration” for Trump’s “unique personality”.
Trump acknowledged that the two countries “have a few things” they don’t agree on, but he pointedly did not mention the abysmal human rights record of al-Sisi’s government, which the State Department and human rights groups have accused of torture and unlawful killings.
Nor did Trump raise the case of Aya Hijazi, a US citizen who works with street children. She was arrested in May 2014 on specious human trafficking charges and imprisoned for 33 months. Her case has been a cause célèbre among rights groups, though she is but one of 40,000 people who have been detained, most for purely political reasons.
Egypt is one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and receives some $1.3 billion in annual military aid, but years of tumult have strained relations. Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in 2011, and after a brief period of democratic rule that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, a military coup in 2013 engineered by al-Sisi overthrew the Brotherhood and led to more repression.
Sisi first cracked down on the Islamists, including a 2013 massacre that killed more than 800 people, then turned his sights on secular opponents.
Trump has made it clear that human rights and democracy are not his big concerns and that he places more value on Egypt as a partner in the fight against IS. What he does not grasp is that Egypt it cannot be a force for regional stability nor the partner Trump imagines on counterterrorism or anything else if Sisi does not radically change his ways. Sisi’s repression against enemies real and imagined, his management of the economy and inability to train, educate and create jobs for his nation’s youth can only fuel more anger and unrest.