As the Wafd crisis escalates, the party's mouthpiece disappears from the newsstands. Salonaz Sami reports This week, for the first time in 21 years, Al-Wafd newspaper did not make it to the newsstands. The paper's disappearance is directly related to the ongoing infighting over the Wafd Party's leadership. That struggle reached its peak last week, when the party's Higher Council decided to sack Wafd Chairman Noaman Gomaa, and replace him with Gomaa's deputy, Mahmoud Abaza, until new elections for the chairman's post are held. Gomaa has been fighting his removal with all his might. He accused Abaza of receiving foreign funding to lead the coup against him. After obtaining an order from the prosecutor-general to take charge of the party again, Gomaa decided to stop the publication of the party's mouthpiece and fire its editors Abbas El-Tarabili and Magdy Sarhan, accusing them both of colluding with Abaza against him. Gomaa's move shocked the paper's journalists, who decided to organise sit-ins in front of the Press Syndicate building and the prosecutor- general's office. The syndicate's board was sympathetic to their plight, saying the paper's staff should not have to pay the price for the party's internal wrangling. The state-affiliated Higher Press Council, meanwhile, met on Sunday and also decided that Al-Wafd should come out as soon as possible. One sticking point involves the name of the party's chairman ordinarily printed on the paper's front page. With Gomaa insisting that his name continue to appear, the Higher Press Council said it was more important for the paper to come out, even without a chairman's name on its front page. El-Tarabili told Al-Ahram Weekly that Gomaa's decision to fire him -- ostensibly because El-Tarabili was past retirement age -- was baseless. "It was Gomaa who personally appointed me as editor-in-chief five years ago," he said, even though El-Tarabili was already past retirement age then. "Why has he suddenly remembered how old I am now?" Al-Wafd, El-Tarabili said, is the party's mouthpiece, and the party's Higher Council decided to sack Gomaa. As such, it was only normal for Gomaa's name to be removed from the front page. "It's not the journalists' fault," he said. One of the paper's journalists, Sameh Awadallah, said Gomaa had offered El-Tarabili and Sarhan a deal: if they left Gomaa's name on the front page, they could stay on board as editors. Both of them, along with all of the paper's journalists, rejected the offer, Awadallah said. "Instead, the journalists presented the prosecutor- general with a petition, asking that he respect their will to keep Gomaa away from the party." Louis Greiss, a member of the Higher Press Council, blamed the current crisis on the fact that "Gomaa is not a great politician like the party's founders Saad Zaghloul and Moustafa El-Nahhas, and later Fouad Seraggeddin." Because Gomaa is more of a law professor than a veteran politician, "he has never been able to deal with issues in a political or diplomatic way," Greiss said. Gomaa needed to understand that leadership does not stem from force, but rather via conviction and persuasion. Closing the paper down revealed Gomaa's tendency to be a dictator, Greiss said. "Al-Wafd is a liberal party, and its chairman should be aware of this fact." According to Awadallah, it was ironic that Gomaa would close the paper down, when years of stringent attacks against the regime never managed to do so. Federation of Arab Journalists Chairman Salah Hafez said the party's problem is part of a larger crisis infecting almost all opposition parties, "most of which are structurally weak, and thus draw on their mouthpieces to prove that they still exist". As such, Hafez suggested, there needed to be a clear demarcation between a party's mouthpiece and its leadership. "Although theoretically this is impossible, it's practically a necessity if these papers want to continue to fulfill their positive role in Egyptian politics." At the party itself, meanwhile, the chairmanship issue is still far from being resolved. As the door for chairmanship nominations closed on Monday, Abaza surprised all by refusing to nominate himself. In fact, only two leading members -- Mostafa El-Tawil and Talaat Gadallah -- decided to stand. An administrative justice court is set to deliver a verdict next Saturday on whether the prosecutor-general's decision to allow Gomaa to re-claim the party's chairmanship is valid or not. Hani Anan, a member of the Kifaya movement, called the prosecutor's decision "wicked, for it doesn't fall under his jurisdiction, and appears to have been taken to keep the party's wounds open." Anan said that "what happened at the Wafd is a result of the deterioration that has plagued secular opposition parties in recent years." The only good that might come out of these latest developments, he suggested, would be a review of political parties' performance in general. "Parties should extract lessons from the goings-on at the Wafd, and start reforming themselves now." Gomaa told the Weekly that Al-Wafd would be back on the newsstands as soon as he is fully in charge of the party again. His fight, he said, was not a matter of merely trying to hold on to power, but rather an effort aimed at preserving principles of legitimacy within Egypt's oldest party. "It is by no means acceptable that a political party chairman be dismissed from his position just because a group with personal interests want to do so," he said.
