CAIRO: Al Dostour’s editor-in-chief Ibrahim Eissa and three other journalists have been sentenced to one year in prison in a three-month-old case for insulting symbols of the National Democratic Party on Sept. 13. After paying LE 10,000 bail, Eissa is appealing the ruling as he fights in yet another case questioning his role in spreading rumors about President Hosni Mubarak’s health.
Eissa was summoned for questioned on Sept. 5. The case was then transferred to court with the first session due Oct. 1. Regarding himself as a son of Egypt’s more liberal past, Eissa has been held accountable for publishing a front page article saying that President Mubarak suffers from blood circulation problems.
Daily News Egypt: Were you the first chief editor to publish news about rumors surrounding President Mubarak’s health?
Ibrahim Eissa: Unfortunately I did not get the honor of being the first to talk about the rumors surrounding the illness of the president. The first time I published news about the rumors was on Aug. 24 and I refuted both the death and illness scenarios with a famous headline saying that the president’s health was superb.
We were polite when we published the story. We questioned what would happen to Egypt in the absence of the president, instead of using the expression after his death. We also asked for a clear statement from the Egyptian government or from the president’s doctor giving us news about his health, to at least mollify peoples’ fears. I think transparency entails that you know how your president’s health is doing.
When the Egyptian president underwent an operation in Germany everyone knew about it and there were daily statements about his condition. Although this kind of thing was new to Egypt, it seemed very positive. My comments about the president’s blood circulatory problems are behind this latest case and to this day no one has refuted what I said. I would challenge any doctor in Egypt with a conscience to deny the fact that President Mubarak has problems in his back and his ears. The real problem lies in the fact that they think that Gods are not supposed to get sick. There is a desire on the part of the regime to present the president as a pharaoh/God who never gets sick and is never weak, not human like the rest of us. For that reason you discover that they never talk about any of the president’s mistakes or physical illness. It seems that our president is not human, he is prevalently from Mars.
Why do you think the regime reacted this way to your comments about the president’s health?
I think that this time around, after the latest rumors, the regime’s think tank – which I believe is very security-oriented and very mediocre – thought that news about the president’s health should not be made public this time around. Or maybe a wing in the Egyptian government has helped spread the rumor so that people would become increasingly apprehensive and therefore submit to whoever they want to come to power. If it is an ‘evil’ think tank that’s what it would do.
About a week afterwards I wrote an article on Aug. 30 saying that the president suffered from a minor ailment, which is a slowdown in his cardiovascular cycle – a very common sickness that comes with old age. Anyone approaching 80 is prone to have these health problems. It is like the side effects of diabetes for example. I also said that it was nothing dangerous and that it could sometimes cause someone to faint. This explains what we have heard and what we also saw when the president fainted in front of hundreds of people.
Why do you think that even within media circles some people consider your attitude an over-stepping of boundaries?
There are two media and politics schools that are present in Egypt today, one of which includes the fossils of the July regime and the nationalization of the press. In this school the president is never even debated with and his orders are never questioned. Even when you look at Egyptian cartoons you will see that they only make fun of officials high up the hierarchy until the prime minister, but they don’t go beyond that point. This is the kind of tamed opposition they want because it works within the boundaries that they outline.
There is another school which I consider myself to belong to which is a school that doesn’t seem to have a lot of disciples here, which takes its roots in Egypt’s more liberal past before the July revolution. This school gives society the right to debate with its president and to criticize the president, as well as change its president. This school terrifies the circles of the regime as well as the media.
People from the former school describe the latter with comments like, “this is an undermining of the presidency’s rank or say that what I’m doing is audacious. I understand that this [post-revolution school] is an archaic and fascistic school and they are free to believe in it. It is as if they are talking about an army general instead of an elected president that is liable to criticism. There is a big difference between a personal attack and a political one.
They consider it a personal attack because I said that he was sick. When I say that President Mubarak’s policies are a failure or when I say something like he must leave, how is that an insult? It is a political evaluation.
Do you ever consider the fact that your articles have helped the rumors spread further?
There are two parts to the rumor, the first was that he had died and the second is that his health has deteriorated and that he is in critical condition. There is a huge difference between publishing the rumor itself and publishing news about the rumor. To publish the rumor you need an intelligence unit with super advanced technology. It is also important to note that the societies that launch such rumors have tools and bases, which do not include newspapers. However, when I write about the rumor I consider it an analysis.
