In a session on March 27, members of Parliament unanimously denounced any suspicious foreign aid or donations to non-governmental organizations and condemned the six associations that recently received a million dollar donation from the US Embassy in Cairo.
The deputies demanded stricter control over any foreign funds. People’s Assembly Speaker, Ahmad Fathī Surour, said obtaining funds from abroad to undermine national interests is a crime.
Kamāl al-Shāzlī, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, said that the Ibn Khaldun center, one of the six associations that received the US donation, is registered as a civil company, not as a Non Governmental Organization (NGO).
Minister of Insurance and Social Affairs, Amīna al-Jindī, failed to convince the Parliament and defend those associations. She said that 150 associations receive 350 million dollars in donations, which is in line with a number of agreements signed years ago.
She said that the NGO Law prohibits NGOs obtaining funds from abroad without prior permission and approval by the Ministry. She also affirmed that the funds received by associations are subject to monitoring as they are considered public funds. She also said that USAID had signed an agreement with the Egyptian government in 1998 to allocate 35 million dollars in a bid to enhance NGOs.
Minister of International Cooperation, Fāyiza Abu al-Najā, pointed to a grant for the NGOs Service Center [US AID financed]. The grant was five million dollars and then increased to 8.6 million dollars, from which 500 NGOs nationwide are benefiting. She also added that the government is responding in this regard to members of Parliament’s demands to back and support these associations.
Members of Parliament condemned foreign interference under the guise of financing NGOs.
Wafdist Member of Parliament Khayrī Qalaj uncovered suspicious associations working under the guise of human rights, while in fact they were receiving foreign finances to perpetrate crimes against the State. He called on the Foreign Ministry in a meeting of the People’s Assembly Human Rights Committee to assume its role in detecting the relationship of those associations with the foreign institutions.
Al-Usbou‘ focused on the issue of Sa‘d al-Dīn Ibrāhīm, the head of the Ibn Khaldun Center, and whether the Center deserved one-sixth of the million dollars offered by the US Embassy in Cairo to six Egyptian associations.
Al-Usbou‘ said Ibrāhīm’s project involved the monitoring of parliamentary elections in Egypt in 2005, by a coalition of NGOs led by Ibrāhīm. Ibrāhīm earlier formed independent committees to monitor the People’s Assembly elections in 1995, and then in 2000.
Ibrāhīm said that his dreams of fair, free and democratic elections were the direct reason for having him tried in a military court along with 27 other activists of his center.
In his report, Ibrāhīm said that the 2005 parliamentary elections would be the most ferocious, thanks to the Egyptians’ growing interest in political reform, the increasing role of the civil society, and the crescendo of Western pressures on the Egyptian ruling regime.
