CAIRO, 25 December 2004 — Just weeks following the signing of a major economic agreement between Egypt, Israel and the United States, the legacy of the Egyptian president who made peace with his neighboring country is under the spotlight in a defamation case launched by one of his daughters.
A ruling is scheduled tomorrow for the first of two cases brought by the late President Anwar Sadat’s daughter Ruqqiyah naming one of his vice presidents, Hussein El-Shafei, as the main defendant.
Both cases take issue with El-Shafei’s contentions that Sadat worked for the CIA and mishandled the 1973 October War. Ruqqiyah, according to briefs provided by her lawyer, Samir Sabry, claims injury as Sadat’s “daughter and as an Egyptian citizen” by the comments it describes as being in “the realm of the absurd.” El-Shafei is the main defendant in both the suits that also name a newspaper, satellite channel and book publisher — organizations that disseminated interviews with the former vice president in which he made the allegations.
Ruqqiyah is seeking 3 million Egyptian pounds in damages in the first case, launched in September 2003, and 10 million Egyptian pounds in the second, which was filed in November. El-Shafei, who left political life when he resigned from the Sadat administration in 1975, returned to the public eye in 1999 when he gave an extensive account of his career to Al-Jazeera, the Qatari satellite channel. During the 13-part series, Witness to an era, El-Shafei spoke about his experiences in the 1948 war, as an architect of the 1952 revolution and his brief tenure as a vice president to Gamal Abdel Nasser.
It was his comments on Sadat though that attracted the most attention. El-Shafei has since made similar remarks about the late leader in other venues including another Al-Jazeera show, broadcast at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution, and in July 2003 in an interview with the Egyptian Al-Jeel opposition newspaper. Most recently, his views were carried in a book of the transcripts of the Al-Jazeera shows published in Egypt this summer. Explaining the reason for two suits, Sabry said that each time the comments were made public in yet another venue his client was reinjured.
In the first case, which concerns the remarks published by Al-Jeel, the defense questions the validity of Ruqqiyah’s claim, saying the criticisms leveled at her father were in his capacity as a leader — not as a parent, according to a brief provided by El-Shafei’s lawyer, Abdel Moneim El-Sherbini. The brief argues that the matters raised by El-Shafei would be better left to debate by historians and military experts than the courts. Beyond that, the defense’s main argument is that political journalists and military experts have raised questions about a relationship between Sadat and the CIA and the decisions he made toward the end of the 1973 October War.
The defense has also highlighted the context in which El-Shafei made the contentious remarks. El-Sherbini said, “According to Egyptian law, if someone is asked to give their account of events, and something in that account insults another person, the person giving the account should not be punished because when asked to give testimony, it must be correct.” Thus, he added, the Al-Jeel interview, which was published to coincide with an anniversary of the revolution, like the Al-Jazeera interviews, sought El-Shafei’s comment on the basis of his having been a “witness” to the events of the revolution and a member of the Nasser and Sadat administrations.
Days ahead of the announcement of the ruling, Nagy El-Shihaby, chairman of the board for Al-Jeel said that the editor who was in charge at the time of the publication of the article is no longer with the paper.
