WikiLeaks cables: Egypt's Omar Suleiman demonised Muslim Brotherhood
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 February 2011 16.41 GMT
Former spymaster turned vice president accused Islamist group of extremism in his contacts with US officials, leaked cables reveal
Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who has been appointed vice-president WikiLeaks cables show Omar Suleiman, Egypt's new vice-president, has long tried to portray the opposition Muslim Brotherhood as the 'bogeyman'. Photograph: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images
Egypt's new vice president, Omar Suleiman, has long sought to demonise the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in his contacts with sceptical US officials, leaked diplomatic cables show, raising questions whether he can act as an honest broker in the country's political crisis.
US embassy messages from WikiLeaks's cache of 250,000 state department documents, which Reuters independently reviewed, also report that the former intelligence chief accused the Brotherhood of spawning armed extremists and warned in 2008 that if Iran ever backed the banned Islamist group, Tehran would become "our enemy".
The disclosure came as Suleiman met opposition groups, including the officially banned Brotherhood, to explore ways to end Egypt's political crisis. The US has been exploring options for speeding up President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, including a scenario that calls for turning over power to a transition government led by Suleiman and backed by the military.
Mubarak, who had done without a vice president for 30 years, hurriedly appointed 74-year-old Suleiman as his deputy last month as protesters demanded the forcing out of the autocratic ruler.
Suleiman privately voicing disdain for the Brotherhood will not surprise Egyptians. The comments could stoke suspicions, though, as he draws the movement into a dialogue on reform in response to mass protests.
The clear implication in the cache of state department cables was that US officials were sceptical of Suleiman's effort to depict the Brotherhood as "the bogeyman".
In a cable on 15 February 2006, then-ambassador Francis Ricciardone reported that Suleiman had "asserted that the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] had spawned '11 different Islamist extremist organisations', most notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Gama'a Islamiya [Islamic Group]".
In the 1990s Egyptian security forces crushed groups that campaigned for a purist Islamist state by targeting tourists, Christians, government ministers and other officials, and have kept a lid on them since.
The Brotherhood once had a secret paramilitary section, but it now says it is committed to promoting its policies through peaceful, democratic means.
The government has been unable to prove any serious act of violence orchestrated by the movement's leadership for more than 50 years.
Suleiman, then Mubarak's top spymaster, was speaking to the FBI's director, Robert Mueller, who was visiting Cairo in February 2006, the cable says.
The cable, which uses the spelling Soliman, said he had told Mueller the Brotherhood was "neither a religious organisation, nor a social organisation, nor a political party, but a combination of all three".
It added: "The principal danger, in Soliman's view, was the group's exploitation of religion to influence and mobilise the public. Soliman termed the MB's recent success in the parliamentary elections as 'unfortunate', adding his view that although the group was technically illegal, existing Egyptian laws were insufficient to keep the MB in check."
The cable was referring to parliamentary elections in November and December of 2005, in which the Brotherhood made strong gains, although Mubarak's National Democratic party maintained a big majority.
In a cable dated 2 January 2008, Ricciardone reported Suleiman as saying that Iran remained "a significant threat to Egypt". "Iran is supporting Jihad and spoiling peace, and has supported extremists in Egypt previously. If they were to support the Muslim Brotherhood this would make them 'our enemy'," the ambassador reported Suleiman as saying.
In a cable dated 25 October 2007, Ricciardone said Suleiman "takes an especially hard line on Tehran" and frequently refers to the Iranians as "devils".
The cables suggest US officials have consistently responded sceptically to the Egyptian government's dire warnings about the Brotherhood.
In a 29 November 2005 cable to Mueller before his visit, Ricciardone said Egyptian authorities "have a long history of threatening us with the MB bogeyman". "Your counterparts may try to suggest that [then president George Bush's] insistence on greater democracy in Egypt is somehow responsible for the MB's electoral success," he wrote. "You should push back that, on the contrary, the MB's rise signals the need for greater democracy and transparency in government.
"The images of intimidation and fraud that have emerged from the recent elections favour the extremists both we and the Egyptian government oppose. The best way to counter narrow-minded Islamist politics is to open the system."
In a follow-up cable on 29 January 2006, Ricciardone seemed to foreshadow the current unrest when he wrote to Mueller: "We do not accept the proposition that Egypt's only choices are a slow-to-reform authoritarian regime or an Islamist extremist one; nor do we see greater democracy in Egypt as leading necessarily to a government under the MB."
