Friday, March 25, 2011

CAIRO: An Egyptian judge who exposed corruption in Hosni Mubarak’s era said Thursday he will work to create jobs and restore Egypt’s dignity if he is elected in the first competitive presidential election.
Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates met Thursday with his Egyptian counterpart Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi to discuss military action in Libya and aid to Egypt.

Judge Hisham al-Bastawisy, 59, told Reuters he faced retribution from the Mubarak administration after exposing election rigging in 2005. Harassed by internal security forces, he left Egypt and spent the last two years living in Kuwait.

Now he is home, seeking a role in helping Egypt’s recovery from three decades of Mubarak rule ended by the mass uprising that swept him from power in February.
Bastawisy declared his presidential bid this week, becoming the latest high-profile figure to throw his hat into the ring for the election scheduled for later this year by the military council to which Mubarak handed power.

Other prominent candidates so far include Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, former U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei and liberal politician Ayman Nour.
“My most challenging mission, if I won, is to bring security and dignity together to the Egyptian citizen,” said Bastawisy during an interview at his Cairo apartment.

Political oppression by the Mubarak administration and abuses by his security forces were triggers of the rebellion, together with the bleak economic opportunities for the young in a country of 80 million people.
“I would like to implement an economic system that would consider the social conditions of the majority of Egyptians,” he said, referring to the poor.
“I will also focus on solving the high rate of unemployment by improving the education system and provide people with better qualifications to meet the demands of the job market,” he said.

Measures taken against Bastawisy by the Mubarak administration included a travel ban in 2008.
He was one of a group of judges who launched a campaign in 2005 to demand judicial independence and full judicial oversight of elections.

“I was detained and investigated by state security when I joined other judges to document the violations encountered in the Egyptian elections in 2005,” Bastawisy said.

“The violations were horrible and they included physical attacks on judges who were supervising ballot stations.”
The new interior minister has pledged to reform the police force in line with the demands of the protesters who rose up against Mubarak.

The hated state security apparatus has been dissolved.
Bastawisy said the problem was with the political leadership, not the police force. “The problem of the security agencies were not in the police officers but in the former regime which had asked from them to work in this way without any respect for international human rights laws,” he said.

Gates, on his first visit to Egypt since Mubarak stepped down, assured Tantawi of sustained American aid.
Gates said he “thought there was support for sustaining military support to Egypt as well as other forms of aid – economic aid,” Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said, citing figures from Egyptian officials that indicated revenues from tourism, a main earner, were down 75 percent.

“They are hurting economically and very much need us and others to continue to do what we can to assist them,” Morrell said. “This is a sensitive and concerning situation for them.”
Morell said neither Tantawi nor Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf raised objections to the coalition’s operations in Libya, Morrell said.

Tantawi also wanted “to reaffirm Egypt’s commitment to their peace treaty with Israel,” Morrell said.
Separately, Mubarak loyalists clashed with opponents in Cairo Thursday as they sought to have his name removed from public institutions, a security official said.

Around 200 Mubarak supporters carrying pictures of the ousted president threw stones and glass bottles at political opponents during clashes outside the Abdeen Court in central Cairo, the official said.
Around 300 people had gone to the courthouse to back a request to have Mubarak’s name removed from metro stations, libraries, streets, schools and other public establishments. – Agencies