'Not in Ramadan'

An adviser to President Hosni Mubarak has reaffirmed Egypt's support for the US campaign against terrorism, but said that Cairo would like to see a halt to military attacks during Ramadan
President Hosni Mubarak's top political adviser, Osama El- Baz, has described as "unjustified" criticism levelled by some US newspapers against Egypt's position on the ongoing US military strikes against Afghanistan, reports Khaled Dawoud
"We have not turned down a single US request [since the military campaign started on 7 October]," El-Baz told the Foreign Press Association in Egypt on Saturday. "We supported the United States at the highest level because we were the victims of terrorism ourselves. We could not have supported what happened in New York and Washington [on 11 September], even if the people who carried out those acts were Muslims," he added.
Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were sharply criticised by several leading American commentators for their alleged failure to show enough support for the US campaign against terrorism. El-Baz said that Egypt "was not asked to join the military campaign, but we did not reject any requests for passage [of US aircraft carriers] through the Suez Canal; we exchanged valuable intelligence information and have been tracking down terrorists and their sources of financing. In other words, we are cooperating fully."
El-Baz denied that Egypt's call for an international conference on fighting terrorism was aimed at embarrassing the United States or delaying its military campaign. "We only said that it would have been better if the current military activity had UN backing in order to avoid any claims that this was a war by the West against Islam. If there had been a UN cover, that would have given international legitimacy to the attacks, and people opposing them would not have had a strong argument to make against them."
However, like representatives of most Arab and Muslim governments, El-Baz said Egypt would like to see a halt to the US-British attacks during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, which begins in mid- November. "The US-led coalition should avoid as much as possible any operations in Ramadan," El-Baz said, echoing a similar view expressed by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. El-Baz added, "Ramadan is a spiritual month which Muslims devote to prayers, and fighting would be an affront to the feelings of many Muslims. We hope that military operations will end, at least in their present form, during Ramadan. They [the US] could continue the fight by other means, but continuing heavy bombardment and increasing the suffering of the Afghan people in Ramadan will have negative consequences."
Asked by Al-Ahram Weekly whether Egypt was hinting to the United States that it should wrap up its military operations soon, especially with the increasing number of losses among Afghan civilians, El-Baz did not give a direct answer.
"Nobody knows how long this campaign will last," El-Baz said. "But the shorter, the better, and the more they [the American forces] stay away from civilians, the greater support they will get. They must make a 100 per cent effort [to avoid killing civilians], even if they do not achieve a 100 per cent result," he added.
He also blamed the US and Western media for making a hero out of Osama Bin Laden, the prime suspect behind the 11 September attacks. "It was the Western media which portrayed Bin Laden as a strong man who cannot be defeated and who is very difficult to capture," El- Baz said. He also denied claims that the majority of Arabs and Muslims saw Bin Laden as a hero or a fighter for a just cause, reiterating that the Saudi dissident only recently began speaking about the suffering of the Palestinians to increase his popularity.
Asked whether Egypt has frozen the assets of suspected terrorists, as the US has requested, El-Baz said that Egypt has long been tracking sources of militant funding. He added that Egypt fought a bitter battle against militant Islamists between 1992 and 1997 and prior to the US request Egyptian banks were alert to prevent suspected terrorists from using their facilities to channel funds for their activities.
El-Baz, who has been one of Mubarak's top advisers since he took office over 20 years ago, again lashed out at European countries that criticised Egypt's human rights record during the confrontation with armed militants. He said that suspected militants were moving freely in several European countries "such as Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and, sometimes, the Netherlands," and in some cases they had been given political asylum. These militants, he added, raised funds and plotted attacks back home. When Egypt sought their extradition, European countries said that they could not hand over alleged militants to a country where they faced the possibility of capital punishment.
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