The president says local monitors will be allowed to observe next month's parliamentary elections. But will this guarantee a fair poll, asks Gihan Shahine Rights groups welcomed President Mubarak's surprise announcement on Monday that local monitors would be allowed to oversee the upcoming parliamentary elections from inside polling stations, but many also expressed fear the executive power would place obstacles in the way of application. "The president's statement is no doubt a step forward to democracy but what we should be concerned with is whether the presidential decree will actually be put into effect without hindrances," said Saadeddin Ibrahim, director of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Human Rights and the coordinator of the Independent Committee for Elections Monitoring (ICEM), which now involves 14 non- governmental organisations. The minister of justice had earlier announced there was no problem allowing local monitors to observe parliamentary elections, but rights groups were similarly sceptical the statement was meant only as "media propaganda" since no rules on monitoring specifics were actually drafted. Doubts resurfaced that the government would repeat the same scenario of the September presidential race when the Supreme Electoral Committee announced it would let local monitors into polling stations on the same day of the polls. No more than 10 per cent of all the stations did so. This time, Ibrahim said, "it is the president himself who promised to allow local monitoring and we hope the executive power will not turn the decision into a cosmetic step, putting all kinds of obstacles in the way of application, as it did with the amendment of Article 76 of the constitution, which allowed for the first-ever multi-candidate presidential elections. "Cheating has become a way of life in Egypt and old habits die hard," Ibrahim said matter-of-factly. Rights groups have already reported a string of violations as well as violence which marred the first day of candidate registration in the parliamentary campaign. Local monitors said the executive powers showed clear bias to members of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), allowing them to apply before other candidates and allowing them to receive the two most prominent electoral signs, the camel and crescent. Negad El-Boraie, head of the Group for Democratic Development and a member of the National Campaign for the Monitoring of Elections (NCME), said the local councils had abandoned all neutrality when they allowed certain candidates to launch their electoral campaign before they were supposed to, according to the rules, and gave them strategic locations to post their banners. A preliminary report by the ICEM similarly said that members from opposition groups and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood had their applications rejected without reason. Some candidates were reportedly mistreated by the authorities and had their electoral signs changed. Again no reasons were given. The ICEM also reported that some of its monitors were harassed, detained and interrogated. That said, however, the director of the Cairo Centre for Human Rights Bahieddin Hassan believes the parliamentary race will witness less flagrant violations than those marring previous polls when rigging, violence and police interference were the norm. "The whole international community is keeping a close eye on Egypt now more than ever and abuses will have to be managed in a more professional manner that will avert worldwide scandals -- as was the case in the presidential race," Hassan, who is also a member of the Civil Coalition for Monitoring Elections (CCME), said. El-Boraie similarly expects less fraud in November than in past polls, but that it would still be unfair all the way through. Despite the long list of irregularities that monitors said marred Egypt's presidential elections last month, human rights groups said fraud was less than in previous polls -- and not enough to overturn the result which gave President Mubarak an overwhelming 89 per cent of the vote. But that, according to Hassan, was "a normal outcome of a non- competitive race where the result was almost a foregone conclusion". Civil groups, however, expect a fiercer race in the parliamentary elections where competition is already tough, not only among members of various parties and independent candidates, but sometimes even within the same party. NDP members have more than 85 per cent of parliament's 444 seats. Observers like the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) Chairman and CCME coordinator Hafez Abu Seada expect an opposition alliance which would include the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and members of the Kefaya, or enough, movement. This may boost the opposition challenge. A less optimistic Hassan, however, would not expect the opposition "to secure more than 10-15 per cent of the seats, at the very best, in such a politically-stagnant environment where apolitical voters would rather cast their ballots for those who serve their personal interests [most likely those from the ruling NDP] or are from the same village or tribe where they belong, than vote for those providing a real reformist agenda". Besides, according to Hassan, many people "are apathetic about participating in elections in the first place since they know that NDP members will win anyway and that President Mubarak will remain in power forever". An undaunted opposition alliance, however, is now calling upon the government to allow for an international observer status, which they have long opposed preceding the presidential polls, as one way of guaranteeing a fair vote. The alliance announced it would ask international civil groups to monitor the elections including London-based Amnesty International, the New York- based Human Rights Watch and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The government, however, insists on its hard-line rejection of foreign monitoring on the grounds it would constitute interference in the country's local affairs. El-Boraie argued that "democratic governments would boast having international monitors to show they are conducting free polls." For El-Boraie, rejecting foreign monitoring "can only mean the government knows there will be fraud and does not want it revealed to the world". Egyptian civil groups, for their part, are currently mobilising and training thousands of volunteer monitors to oversee the overall electoral process -- assessing the electoral campaign, observing the voting itself, evaluating voter classifications, results and complaints, and providing a final detailed report. "The challenge is much stiffer than in presidential elections where we had only three serious candidates out of 10 on the ballot," Ibrahim said. "Local monitors now have a heavy burden on their shoulders with 30,000 people competing for 444 parliamentary seats in 222 polling stations nationwide." Ibrahim said ICEM would field 5,000 candidates to observe the parliamentary elections compared with 2,000 in the September presidential race. El-Boraie said the NCME, which sent about 500 monitors in the presidential polls, had already recruited a further 1,000 for the parliamentary race [it aims to reach 4,000 when the polls open] and will furnish them with all technological facilities. In the same vein, the EOHR said its coalition of rights groups would field 1,400 monitors in November compared with 1,000 in the presidential polls.
