CAIRO — By storming the offices of international and domestic pro-democracy groups Thursday, Egypt’s military rulers took a perilous gamble: cracking down on dissent ahead of a transition to elected governance at the risk of alienating their most important benefactor, the United States.
But faced with a sharp reaction from Washington, the ruling generals appeared to retreat Friday. They promised the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, that the raids on international organizations would stop and that confiscated property would be returned immediately, the State Department said.
Yet the offices of three raided American organizations remained closed Friday.
“We’re getting mixed messages from the authorities,” said Leslie Campbell, regional director of Middle East and North Africa programs for the National Democratic Institute, one of the U.S. democracy-building groups shut down Thursday.
The unprecedented raids on at least 17 offices belonging to seven civil-society organizations, including the American groups, represented an escalation of an effort by the military rulers to suppress growing dissent. The effort appears aimed at heading off what they fear could become a second revolt when Egyptians mark the Jan. 25 anniversary of the start of the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
“They’re constructing a narrative about what’s going on in the country to support their moves and to try to build support in the run-up to Jan. 25, to quash potential serious dissent,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt expert at the New York-based Century Foundation. “They think they are untouchable . . . but the patience of the international community is not going to be unlimited.”
One Washington expert said the raids on the U.S. pro-democracy groups marked a “moment of truth” for the Obama administration. The military rulers were acting as though democracy promotion marked the biggest threat to their rule, said Michele Dunne, a former National Security Council staffer who now heads the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
“If the Egyptian military is not allowing a real democratic transition to civilian rule, if it is harassing civil society, and if it is trying to prevent the United States from funding civil-society groups, the time has come to suspend the military aid until things improve,” she said.
