CAIRO, 3 November 2003 — The Egyptian union of journalists lodged a fresh protest yesterday against remarks made by the US ambassador to Cairo criticizing the country’s press.
The Egyptian Journalists’ Union sent a letter to Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher demanding that he summon US Ambassador David Welch “to prevent him from continuing his campaign against the local media,” according to a statement.
“The repeated interference of the US ambassador in the affairs of the Egyptian press violates diplomatic rules,” it said. The union renewed its call for “writers, intellectuals and journalists not to deal with the US ambassador.”
During a conference at the American University in Cairo on Oct. 20, Welch deplored what he called “regrettable articles” in the Egyptian press “proposing crazy conspiracy theories, or attacking the United States in very hostile terms.”
He took particular offense to an Egyptian newspaper he did not name which described a deadly Oct. 4 Palestinian suicide attack in the northern Israeli city of Haifa as a “’brave commando operation’ rather than a purely terrorist act, that’s both hostile and dishonest.”
The union named the paper in question as daily Al-Gumhuriya.
In September 2002, a lively debate had already pitted Egyptian intellectuals against the US ambassador.
The debate broke out following an article Welch wrote for daily Al-Ahram, calling on Egyptian editors not to publish articles spreading a theory blaming the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States on a conspiracy and not on Osama Bin Laden.
Nearly 200 intellectuals, mostly leftist thinkers, published in response a petition calling for the expulsion of the ambassador.
Last month, the official MENA news agency said the journalists union had refused a $1.35 million grant from the US Agency for International Development to sponsor training for 50 journalists at a US university.
