CAIRO, Egypt — In an Egyptian courtroom on a sunny summer morning, a judge declared that 43 employees of non-governmental organizations in Egypt, including more than a dozen Americans, were criminals. The ruling marked another blow for civil society here -- and the end, for now, of U.S.-funded efforts to promote democracy in Egypt.
The guilty verdict also marks the culmination of a process that has soured the Egyptian staff of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Cairo -- as well as one American staffer -- toward their leadership in Washington. In multiple interviews, these staff described how NDI entered Egypt's post-revolutionary period looking to promote transparency and lay the groundwork for an expanded role for civil society -- and ended up accomplishing the exact opposite.
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The NGO employees were convicted of working for and taking money from unregistered organizations. Robert Becker, an NDI political parties trainer who was fired for his refusal to leave Egypt, was sentenced to two years in prison. NDI's four Egyptian staff, meanwhile, were handed one-year suspended sentences. The NDI staff who left the country and were tried in absentia, including country director Julie Hughes and senior program officer Lila Jaafar, received five-year terms in prison.
Following the verdict, NDI released a statement saying that it was "shocked and deeply distressed by the unjust conviction today of its employees," and vowed to appeal the decision. It added that those convicted were victims of a dispute between the U.S. and Egyptian governments, and that NDI had always been fully transparent in its activities in Egypt. NDI staff members in Washington were not immediately available for interviews on the details of the case, but those left behind in Egypt spoke before the verdict about their frustration with the support they have received from the organization.
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It all started with a raid. Ten months after the uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, on Dec. 29, 2011, Egyptian police stormed the offices of 17 NGOs across Cairo as part of a criminal investigation into their funding. In the offices of NDI, a democracy-building organization affiliated with America's Democratic Party, men armed with AK-47s burst in and demanded that the staff hang up their phones and wait in a conference room as the police seized their files and computers.
The raid took six hours. At one point, according to the NDI staff present, the phone of one of the officers blocking the door rang -- the ringtone was set to No Doubt's "Don't Speak."
Egyptian officials -- looking to make a clean break from Mubarak's cozy relationship with the United States -- were now speaking darkly about the true intentions of the NGOs. They had been angered by the decision of President Barack Obama's administration to allocate $65 million to NGOs supporting the country's transition to democracy, bypassing the government in Cairo. Fayza Aboul Naga, the minister of international cooperation, a holdover from the Mubarak era, released a report accusing the organizations of leading a U.S. effort to sabotage the revolution, and referred to one Washington-based NGO, Freedom House, of doing the work of the "Jewish lobby."
The anger soon reached fever pitch. "A member of parliament actually went on air... and he asked for the execution of the Egyptians [working for the NGOs]," said Rawda Ali, an Egyptian program assistant for NDI. "Because they are spies, you know, and how dare they work with foreigners?"
But still, the NDI leadership balked at taking their case to the Egyptian public, preferring to deal quietly with the Egyptian government, which at the time was led by a clique of high-ranking military officers. Hafsa Halawa, another NDI program assistant, recalls a conversation she had with Lila Jaafar, the senior program officer who left the country after being charged. "[I told her] this is not a joke. This is not going to be something you could make die politically," Halawa said. "She looked at me and said, 'Oh my dear, you're so young. You don't understand how this works.'"
But in post-revolutionary Cairo, it was harder to cut the sort of backroom deal that was common in the Mubarak era. Public opinion mattered more -- and it was turning sharply against the NGOs. On Jan. 21, 2012, Sam LaHood, the director of the International Republican Institute's Egypt program and the son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, tried to board a flight at Cairo airport, only to be turned away. The NGOs soon learned that the government had slapped a travel ban on as many as 40 foreigners.
The Americans, with one notable exception, responded by taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, where Egyptian police could not reach them. On Feb. 6, the Egyptian judicial ministry named the 43 NGO workers who would be charged with working for and receiving money from unregistered organizations.
According to the NDI's Egyptian staff, the Americans' retreat into the embassy marked the first fracture in their previously close ties with their colleagues. The discussions were no longer about how to fight the accusations or get NDI registered, but how to get the Americans out of the country. "We basically got cut out," said Halawa. "They went in the embassy and decided to go on a blackout. They didn't call, they didn't email."
But there was one remaining loose end: Becker, Halawa and Ali's supervisor, refused to go into the U.S. Embassy, having made it known that he wouldn't dodge the charges by fleeing the country. Becker is a longtime Democratic Party campaign operative who ran Gov. Bill Richardson's 2008 presidential campaign in Iowa and Obama's 2012 get-out-the-vote campaign in Milwaukee even as he was on trial -- he has remained close to Richardson, who has offered him advice on how to approach the case for much of the past year.
The Egyptian staff under investigation said their initial contact with their NDI-appointed lawyer, Sarwat Abd El-Shahid, was solely focused on trying to convince them to convince Becker to leave.
"They said you're absolutely fine, don't worry about yourself. Nothing is going to happen to you guys -- we need to protect the Americans," Halawa recounted. "We really believe that Robert staying in this country is detrimental to your case."
