While a parliamentary report was full of praise for this year's session, independent analysts were far less enthusiastic. Gamal Essam El-Din reviews the assembly's harvest During a visit to Germany's Bundestag (lower house of parliament) last week, Fathi Sorour, the speaker of Egypt's People's Assembly, was full of praise for the recently concluded eight-month parliamentary session. Sorour told German MPs that the parliament's work contributed to the advancement of Egypt's political and economic reforms, and lavishly praised the assembly's roles as both a legislative authority and a government watchdog. While Sorour painted a picture of Egypt as a flourishing parliamentary democracy, local political pundits as well as opposition and independent MPs had a vastly different take on the recently completed session. They charged that deputies had lost their legislative and supervisory powers, and that Sorour himself had transformed the assembly into an autocratic and toothless institution. Meanwhile, a People's Assembly report which appeared this week, summarising the achievements of the 2002-2003 session, spoke of "serious parliamentary performance", "enlightened MPs with a high sense of patriotism", and "democratic debates". Addressing the assembly on 18 June, Sorour described the parliament's third session as historical. "The assembly held 114 meetings during this session," he said. "This is the most that Egypt has seen since 1866 [the first year of the parliament's existence]." Sorour said the assembly had passed 158 laws, compared with last year's 159. Of these, 124 dealt with financial and budgetary issues, while 34 covered political and socio-economic matters. According to Sorour, parliament's 2002-2003 session was one of the busiest when it came to debating and endorsing a series of landmark laws aimed at economic and political liberalisation. Of these, Sorour cited new laws governing labour, unified banking and telecommunications. Opposition MPs, meanwhile, argued that the above figures actually revealed the extent to which parliament tows the government -- or rather the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) -- line. Independent MP Adel Eid told Al- Ahram Weekly that parliament's legislative agenda has now become the prerogative of the NDP's influential Policy Secretariat. Eid argued that the secretariat has become empowered with the final say regarding the agenda of bills that must be debated by parliament. "Most of the laws endorsed by parliament during its third session were the brainchild of this secretariat," Eid said, "which transformed both the parliament and the government into powerless entities that have become subservient to the policy secretariat." NDP MP Ahmed Abu Zeid, who chairs parliament's Arab Affairs Committee, dismissed the charge that parliament had become powerless in the face of the Policy Secretariat. "This secretariat reflects the NDP's vision for political and economic reform, and it is essential that NDP MPs support this vision in parliament," he said. Independent MP Hamdeen Sabahi, meanwhile, argued that Egypt's legislation process has long been the exclusive domain of the NDP. "This monopoly was exploited to produce a lengthy list of infamous laws, the most recent of which was the extension of the Emergency Law for an additional three years." According to Sabahi, calls by independent and opposition MP for the amendment of laws (such as the ones regulating professional syndicates (100/ 1993) and press activities (96/ 1996)) -- with a goal towards broadening the scope of political and constitutional liberties in Egypt -- were shelved. In fact, out of 52 bills drafted by MPs, only three were approved. Even these three were proposed by NDP MPs, and merely dealt with non-political matters. None of the dozens of laws proposed by opposition and independent MPs were passed. Sorour, on the other hand, also praised what he termed the assembly's successful role as an effective government watchdog. According to the speaker, MPs submitted 134 questions and 611 requests for information to cabinet ministers, compared to 158 and 745 -- respectively -- in 2001/ 2002. Sorour also boasted about deputies taking part in 10 out of 39 interpellations (a more serious level of inquiry involving charges that must be answered by cabinet ministers). According to Sorour, most of these supervisory tools dealt with economic issues such as banking corruption, privatisation slowdown, the foreign exchange crunch, and the proliferation of private sector monopolies. The government, Sorour said, was very keen to answer MPs' questions and respond to their interpellations. Opposition and independent MPs, however, charged Sorour with manipulating supervisory tools to cushion any serious criticism of the government and its cabinet ministers, especially those occupying leading positions in the NDP. In this respect, MPs cited the ministers of information (Safwat El-Sherif), interior (Habib El- Adli), parliamentary affairs (Kamal El-Shazli), and agriculture (Youssef Wali) as being above any kind of parliamentary criticism. A case in point, Eid said, was Wali, the deputy prime minister and the NDP's deputy chairman for internal affairs. Wali was the target of a whopping eight of the 39 interpellations mentioned by Sorour, most of which dealt with corruption in the agricultural sector, the ministry's responsibility for the importation of substandard meat and carcinogenic pesticides, the sullying of fish resources in a number of Egypt's lakes, the appointment of cronies, and consorting with Israel. Eid said Sorour manipulated the interpellations to protect Wali from any serious criticism, in spite of the fact that several agriculture ministry officials, such as his former right-hand man Youssef Abdel- Rahman (chairman of the Principal Bank for Development and Agricultural Credit), were implicated in high-profile corruption cases. In fact, Sorour allowed Wali to answer just one of the interpellations, involving pollution in Manzala Lake, an issue analysts called the weakest of the eight interpellations submitted against him. Afterwards, the press described Wali's response as more of a showcase orchestrated by Sorour to polish Wali's image in front of the assembly. Interior Minister Habib El-Adli seemed to receive similar treatment. Although he was supposed to answer six interpellations regarding the Interior Ministry's allegedly repressive handling of political activists as well as the expansion of ill treatment of citizens in prisons, Adli ended up not having to face any interpellations at all. According to Sabahi, this proved that parliament has no power to exercise any control on the Interior Ministry. The 2002 Arab Strategic Report issued by Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS), meanwhile, argued that interpellations dealing with thorny issues have been shelved for many years now. According to the report, parliamentary debates are manipulated by Sorour, and controlled by the fact that NDP MPs prefer supporting their party at the expence of strengthening the assembly's supervisory powers. Along the same lines, NDP deputies -- at several points during the previous session -- were ordered by their party's leaders to vote for the removal of two opposition MPs widely considered to be the government's most vociferous critics. The subsequent by-elections to replace these deputies, observers said, were rigged so that MPs with government sympathies would come out victorious -- with an added benefit being the resulting intimidation of other opposition deputies, especially those from the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
