The prognosis amongst parliamentarians and politicians is unanimous, reports Gamal Essam El-Din. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal ensures Arab hate and distrust of American policies for generations to come Last week, the People's Assembly denounced Israeli and American colonialist actions in the Arab world for the third time in just over a month. The first two times delegates slammed Israel's state-sponsored terrorism against Palestinian leaders in the occupied Gaza Strip. On 8 May, the assembly again gathered to condemn; this time, it was the shocking revelations of torture perpetrated by US and British forces in Iraq. But while the speeches had been fiery the first two times, last Saturday the assembly was cool and collected. The primary difference was speaker Fathi Sorour's decree that instead of an open forum for individual delegates' speeches, an overall assembly statement condemning the humiliation of the Iraqi detainees would be read aloud. The People's Assembly was shocked, the statement said, by the goings on at Abu Ghraib. While taking note of the fact that the American government admitted that its troops had perpetrated the acts, the assembly said they must be considered hideous international crimes to be condemned by the international community as a whole. The statement referred to both the Third Geneva Agreement's Article 16 regarding prisoners of war, as well as subsequent Geneva conventions and their annexed protocols regulating the treatment of prisoners and civilians in wartime, and 1993's United Nations Vienna Convention Programme on human rights. The statement also mentioned the 1992 UN Security Council resolution that led to the creation of the international criminal court in former Yugoslavia, one of the basic functions of which is bringing state officials accused of rape and sexual violence to trial, as well as 1998's international criminal law whose basic rules state that torture or any form of sexual violence must be considered a crime against humanity. In rather measured tones, the statement then called for international humanitarian organisations to mobilise to stem the tide of these grave human rights violations. The statement also called for the criminals who perpetrated these heinous crimes to be harshly penalised. It demanded an end to the occupation of Iraq, a return of the country's sovereignty, the election of a legitimate government, and a constitution approved by the Iraqi people. The Ruling National Democratic Party's (NDP) reaction to the scandal seemed similarly formulaic. NDP Secretary-General Safwat El- Sherif, addressing the party's Political Club on 8 May, said the party strongly condemned the crimes to which the Iraqi people were being subjected, and asked the international community to shoulder its responsibilities in terms of defending human rights and values, especially those of the Muslim peoples in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. Across the assembly, meanwhile, the tone and pitch of the reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal was far from reserved. MPs interviewed by Al- Ahram Weekly said the crimes that had been committed were so reprehensible that they would represent a PR disaster for the United States for generations to come. Ahmed Abu Zeid, chairman of parliament's Arab Affairs Committee, said that if President Mubarak once warned that America's invasion of Iraq would create 100 Osama Bin Ladens, "then I warn that the savage way the Americans dealt with Iraqi prisoners could create generations of Bin Ladens determined to take revenge and retaliate against America". Abu Zeid said the US must do three things to improve its image in the Arab world: fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; harshly penalise the soldiers who committed the crimes; and, above all, launch a sincere and serious effort to bring peace to Iraq, Palestine and Israel. Abu Zeid doubted America's willingness to do these things, especially in an election year. The problem, Abu Zeid said, was that time was of the essence -- the longer it takes America to improve its image, the more likely it is to become the target of terrorism and reprisal. Wafdist MP Mohamed Abdel-Alim saw the torture revelations as clear evidence that America's rhetoric about democracy and freedom in the Middle East was just that -- rhetoric. Abdel- Alim, a journalist, said US war crimes against detainees at Abu Ghraib and other US military detention camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Guantanamo Bay were systematic, and not perpetrated by just a few people. Abdel-Alim, whose Kafr El-Sheikh district of Fiwa was visited by US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch last week, issued a statement condemning Welch's visit, calling it "a stain on Fiwa's Islamic face". Last month, Welch had requested a meeting with some of the assembly's leading MPs, purportedly to discuss parliament's unprecedented level of outrage against American and Israeli policies. According to informed parliamentary sources, Welch aimed to contain some of the anger, and affirm the strategic relationship between Egypt and the United States. The latest scandal, however, combined with Israel's killing of Hamas's leader Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantisi and US President George W Bush's soft spot for hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has made Welch's damage control an ever more impossible task. Appointed MP Abdel-Rahman El-Adawi, an Azharite cleric, said the events at Abu Ghraib only served to support suspicions that America really is launching a crusade against Muslims, and had instructed its soldiers to do these things deliberately, to humiliate the Muslim and Arab people. "Sexual humiliation is particularly offensive to the Arab and Islamic world, where both Islam and Christianity forbid homosexuality and frown upon public nakedness," El-Adawi said. Even though the Americans knew this, he said, they did it anyway, and in a very humiliating way.
