|Area:||997,690 sq km (385,210 sq mi)|
|Population||(2002 est.): 66,341,000|
|Chief of state:||President Hosni Mubarak|
|Head of government:||Prime Minister Atef Ebeid|
Egypt began the year 2002 with a devalued currency. On Dec. 13, 2001, the government devalued the Egyptian pound 7.8%—to E£ 4.50 to the U.S. dollar—in an effort to boost the economy and help the tourist industry, which had been hit hard in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.
Pres. Hosni Mubarak visited the U.S. and met Pres. George W. Bush on March 5. In a joint news conference, Mubarak proposed holding a summit in Egypt between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Mubarak urged the U.S. to play a more active role in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, and he also supported the peace initiative proposed by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. (See Biographies.)
President Mubarak was active in conferring with his Arab allies. He met Jordanian King Abdullah II on April 21 and again on June 19, the Saudi crown prince on May 11 in the Egyptian resort Sharm al-Shaykh, and Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad on May 11, June 19, and September 30. All these deliberations focused primarily on the revival of the dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
To show Egypt’s support for the Palestinians, Egyptian Minister of Information Safwat al-Sharif announced on April 3 that Egypt had suspended all contacts with Israel with the exception of diplomatic communications needed to help the Palestinians. When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Egypt on April 9, large demonstrations in support of the Palestinians were sanctioned by the Egyptian government to send a message to the Bush administration.
On June 7–8 President Mubarak met President Bush at Camp David, Maryland, and pressed him to set a timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Mubarak stated that he did not expect that “anti-Israeli violence” could be stopped until some tangible progress had been made toward Palestinian statehood. Mubarak expressed the urgency of the matter by saying, “We have to exert or make the maximum effort to solve the Palestinian problem, to calm down the situation.” Without that, he warned, expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq would be “very dangerous.”
The case of Saʿd al-Din Ibrahim—a professor at the American University in Cairo who had been sentenced in May 2001 to seven years’ hard labour for having accepted money from overseas without obtaining government approval—continued to capture the limelight. His retrial and that of 27 staff members from his Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies began on April 27, 2002. On July 29 the 27 members were convicted of bribery and fraud charges and were sentenced to varying terms of one to three years in jail. Ibrahim was again sentenced to seven years of hard labour for having defamed Egypt and accepted foreign research funds without government approval. The U.S. Department of State expressed its deep disappointment, but its reaction was mild and ineffective. Leading foreign-affairs New York Times analyst Thomas Friedman (see Biographies) took the Department of State to task and stated that it should have expressed its “outrage” for the Egyptian government’s jailing of an innocent academic, human rights activist, and American citizen. Though Egypt was dependent on the U.S. for $2 billion in military and economic aid, the government’s conviction of Ibrahim seemed intended to show the Egyptian people that their government was not subservient to the U.S. It appeared that President Mubarak was basking in this defiance. His foreign minister, Ahmad Maher, stated that the U.S. protest would not alter the verdict against Ibrahim, and he proudly announced, “Egypt … will not bow to pressure.”
A new TV show, a 41-part series called Horseman Without a Horse, began airing in November. It told the story of an Egyptian journalist who struggled against British occupation and Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the series was partly inspired by the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Mubarak’s spokesman, Nabil Osman, insisted that it was not anti-Jewish. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, however, declared that a disclaimer should appear before the airing of the show, making it clear that the Protocols were forged and that “different forms of expression should not be abused to propagate events that might incite hatred.” It was the first time that a domestic group had leveled criticism against the government.