The US Department of Defense's Foreign Policy magazine's selection of Omar Suleiman as the most powerful intelligence chief in the Middle East opens a new round of presidential speculation, writes Gamal Essam El-Din According to a report by the US Department of Defense's Foreign Policy magazine on 21 July, the director of Egypt's general intelligence service Omar Suleiman is the most powerful intelligence chief in the Middle East. Suleiman led a list which included Israel's Mossad chief Meir Dagan, head of the Iranian Quds Force Qassam Suleimani, the Syrian military's deputy chief of staff Assef Shawkat and Saudi Prince Muqrin bin Abdel-Aziz, the director-general of the kingdom's general intelligence. Foreign Policy 's report is the most recent in a series of American and Western press reports focussing on Suleiman's growing role in Egyptian and Arab politics. Suleiman has long been posited as a possible successor to President Hosni Mubarak, though the suggestion ignores a number of constitutional hurdles between Egypt's general intelligence chief and the presidential palace. Appointed director of the country's intelligence service in 1993, Suleiman, 74, enjoys a close relationship with President Mubarak. He was born in 1935 in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Qena and graduated from the Military Academy in 1954 when he was just 19. Suleiman received further military training in the former Soviet Union at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy, where President Mubarak was also a military trainee in the 1960s. In June 1995 Suleiman advised President Mubarak that he should take his armoured limousine to Ethiopia during an official visit. As Mubarak was leaving the airport, with Suleiman beside him, his car came under heavy fire by Egyptian Islamist militants. After returning to Cairo, Mubarak entrusted Suleiman with clamping down on the regime's Islamist militant opponents, a task which boosted his standing in the eyes of Western intelligence agencies. More recently, Suleiman has been serving as mediator in indirect talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis and direct reconciliation talks between the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas. Despite his closeness to President Mubarak, political pundits point out that Suleiman might not necessarily become president. Hussein Abdel-Razek, a political analyst with the leftist Tagammu Party, views the Foreign Policy story as part of a growing trend among Western media outlets to speculate about post-Mubarak Egypt. "Recently," he says, "the Israeli press joined the fray, drawing up scenarios in which Suleiman is always a prominent hopeful." Western and Israeli reports about Egypt's 2011 presidential elections, says Abdel-Razek, ignore two facts. "First is that President Mubarak may well contest the next presidential elections, even though he will be 83." Abdel-Razek discounts rumours that President Mubarak intends to step down ahead of 2011 to let his son Gamal compete for the post of president. And Article 76 of the constitution, he points out, is clearly weighted in favour of members of the higher councils of legal parties standing as candidates. "Suleiman is not a member of the ruling party's 45-member higher council or of any other party. If he ran he would have to stand as an independent, and for any chance of success he would be in the odd position of fielding himself as an independent yet requiring the full backing of the NDP." Political pundits also discount the presidential hopes of Ayman Nour, founder of the liberal-oriented Ghad Party who was released from prison last February. "Ghad is now split into two factions, and the Political Parties Committee refuses to recognise the one headed by Nour." As a consequence, says Abdel-Razek, the Supreme Presidential Election Commission (SPEC) will not accept Nour's application to be a candidate. Besides, he adds, there is the matter of Article 25 of the penal code which prevents convicted felons from exercising political rights for a period of six years from the date of their release. In December 2005 Nour was sentenced to a five-year jail term after he was found guilty of forging the signatures necessary to get an official licence for his party. Last February Nour was released on health grounds. In a recent visit to the Nile-Delta governorate of Kafr Al-Sheikh, Nour vowed that Ghad would contest the elections. Secular opposition activists from Egyptians for Change and the Kifaya movement announced recently that they are preparing legal challenges to regulations limiting the ability of independent candidates to run for president. The Alliance of Egyptian Americans, a group of expatriate Egyptian opposition activists, announced that it is trying to convince Mohamed El-Baradei, the current head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who steps down next October, to field himself as a candidate in 2011. Rumours are rampant that El-Baradei will stand under the umbrella of the liberal-oriented Wafd Party, though in an interview with Al-Mehwar satellite channel last week, Wafd's chairman, Mahmoud Abaza, said it was too early for the party to chose a candidate. The Tagammu Party, says Abdel-Razek, is also hedging its bets. Abdel-Razek believes the party should refrain from putting a candidate forward. "I would not want to see the party participating in what is basically a one-man race." Tagammu's former chairman Khaled Mohieddin, Abdel-Razek reveals, fell under heavy pressure to run in 2005 presidential elections but refused. "It was the right decision. It is impossible to have fair elections in Egypt in the absence of international monitors," argues Abdel-Razek. Leading officials of the ruling NDP also insist it is too early to select a candidate, though Abdel-Razek would not be surprised if Gamal Mubarak emerges as a candidate. "He is the president's son, a member of the NDP's higher council and the favourite choice of the business and bourgeois class."
