As protesters throw rocks that blot out the Egyptian skies and Molotov cocktails light the night, many are calling for swift change in Egypt’s government. In an attempt to quell the protests that began on Jan. 25, embattled President Hosni Mubarak appointed a familiar and apolitical face as the first vice president in 30 years: Omar Suleiman.
Suleiman has been dubbed a “fix-it man.” Many have hoped that his past experience in negotiating cease-fires would enable him to calm the uprising that is tearing Egypt apart. However, this man is not the leader of the opposition, a voice for those rioting in the streets, or a revolutionary leading a movement; he is a company man being promoted.
With Barak Obama and other world leaders trying to negotiate an immediate transition to Suleiman, we have to wonder what a President Suleiman would bring to the table for Egypt and for its relations with the U.S.
A fix-it man for the U.S. as well as Egypt, Omar Suleiman is not a stranger to U.S. foreign policy. He has been one of America’s closest allies in the rendition of terrorism suspects.
Rendition is a tactic where the U.S. avoids domestic due process by outsourcing harsh means of interrogation to foreign governments. Often the U.S. has turned a blind eye and simply accepted the information given back to them from these interrogations.
Since 1993, Suleiman has been in charge of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, a group that has often taken U.S. terrorist suspects and “interrogated” them in ways that America could not.
The EGIS’s most famous interrogation under Suleiman came in 2001. A suspected terrorist named Ibn Sheikh al-Libi was sent to Egypt to confirm “the Bush Administration’s contention that there were links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein,” according to rendition expert Jane Meyer of the New Yorker.
According to Meyer, the interrogators “locked him in a tiny cage for eighty hours … and punched him for fifteen minutes,” and al-Libi eventually told them what they wanted to hear.
Al-Libi’s testimony was used in speech after speech, in discussion after discussion in the run-up to the Iraq war. Soon thereafter, U.S. soldiers were walking through the desert sands of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction or links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were ever found. Al-Libi retracted his statement and simply said, “They were killing me. I had to say something.”
Rendition remains an important part of our war on terror and Suleiman an important partner to the U.S. in this practice. Suleiman’s links to the U.S. are explained best by Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, “We have a saying at the agency when we have a very good friend: ‘We have a lot of time for him.’ We always had a lot of time for Director Suleiman.”
In a climate where the Egyptian people are calling for human rights, for an end to the 30-year rule of Mubarak, Suleiman is not the revolutionary many are looking for.
The Egyptian people are not calling for a leader of their feared intelligence agencies. They are not calling for the man who carried out the heavy hand of Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian people are calling for their rights, calling for hope of a tomorrow where democracy exists, and for a government that understands that revolution in its people means revolution of its government.
While ousting President Mubarak is a step towards change in Egypt, the promotion of Suleiman, the “fix-it man,” represents only a transitional leader for the Egyptian people. He may be a strong ally to the U.S. but he will not bring the transformation of government that the Egyptian people seek. He is not a leader of this cause; rather, this cause made him a leader.