CAIRO, 14 October 2005 — Egyptian opinion makers, with memories of the Cold War and suspicions of the United States, gave a skeptic reception to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the first NATO secretary general to visit the most populous Arab nation.

Members of the Egyptian establishment asked Scheffer tough questions about NATO’s role after the end of the Soviet Union, its attitude toward the Muslim world and what cooperation with the military alliance could offer a country like Egypt.

“Many people have the feeling that NATO is not playing a fair game...NATO is working for its purpose, not for anything joint or common between Egypt and NATO,” said Gehad Auda, a political science professor invited to hear Scheffer.

“You have a lot of skepticism. The dominant image is still the image of the Cold War era,” added Hassan Nafaa, professor of political science at Cairo University and another guest at Scheffer’s lecture, organized by an Egyptian think tank.

“We have the impression here that NATO is dominated by the United States and that’s an obstacle to really modifying the image of NATO,” Nafaa added.

Scheffer arrived in Cairo on Wednesday and has had meetings with Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. A NATO statement had said he would meet President Hosni Mubarak but a NATO official said yesterday that such a meeting was not on the program.

In his speech on Wednesday evening, Scheffer tried to persuade leading Egyptians, including former ambassadors, that NATO and other countries faced the same threats from militant Islamism, weapons of mass destruction and smuggling.

He offered dialogue and intelligence cooperation and invited Egypt to join NATO naval patrols which monitor shipping in the Mediterranean for any suspicious activity.

An Egyptian official source, quoted by the state news agency MENA, said Aboul Gheit linked dialogue with NATO to progress in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Scheffer said NATO was not active in the Middle East peace process.

The Egyptian opinion makers challenged NATO’s assertion that it has found new goals since the end of the Cold War or that it is more than a military alliance. They also faulted Scheffer for advocating military solutions to militant Islamism.

“He doesn’t understand anything about terrorism because he thinks that terrorism is just a matter of operations, little groups attacking the public,” said Auda.

“But without knowing the roots, without knowing how things are done, he still thinks in terms of hard security,” he added.

One speaker at the meeting said: “The answer is to search why it (terrorism) happens, the roots of it. If you are not going to deal with those, there is no hope.” Scheffer answered that poverty and deprivation were among the causes but, in the case of militants brought up in Europe, the roots were extremely complicated and beyond NATO’s mandate.

“What do these people want? They want to destroy our societies. They hit everywhere...indiscriminately. That’s a big fight we have to fight and that is also part of transforming NATO,” he added.

“Most people here think you have to fight terrorism through other means other than military means...In that context NATO could not really offer any tangible alternatives,” said Nafaa.