Cairo, October 01: Some Egyptians are lashing out at the government over the case of Culture Minister Faruq Hosni and his failed bid for the top job at UNESCO, blaming the regime or Hosni himself for the defeat.
Egypt fought a tough diplomatic battle to get Hosni elected, and when the man lost out to Bulgaria’s Irina Bokova last week.
Hosni told an Egyptian weekly: “My fight was not against candidates but against states. The conspiracy was bigger than you can imagine.”
Many critics agree that Jewish groups and some pro-Israeli states had a big role in his defeat.
But some add that part of causes of Hosni’s failure may lie much nearer to home.
Ezzat el-Qumhawy, editor of the state-owned daily Al-Akhbar’s literary supplement, said Hosni has made a series of mistakes during his 22 years as culture minister that came back to haunt him.
“If we consider that the most important work by UNESCO is taking care of artifacts, many Egyptian artifacts were threatened with removal from the world heritage sites list because of Hosni’s negligence,” the literary critic said.
Novelist Ala Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building, said Hosni’s identification with US-backed President Hosni Mubarak contributed to his defeat.
“Egyptians view Hosni as a minister imposed for 22 years by a regime led by Mubarak for 30 years without a single free election, so it is natural that Egyptians associate Hosni with a despotic and corrupt regime,” he wrote in the daily Al-Shoruk.
Hosni reached the fifth and final round of voting before losing to Bokova.
Writing in the independent daily Al-Dustour on Wednesday, Radi said: “Defeat and failure and regression will keep following this regime, whose members’ policy is to stay in office forever.”
“The rigging of elections and barring judges from supervising them and closing down unions and starving the Egyptian people and terrorising them with the emergency law will remain obstacles to any achievements.”
Then US-backed vice president Mubarak assumed the presidency after the 1979 assassination of Anwar Sadat by has remained in power since then.
Aswany and Radi were repeating a longstanding litany of opposition complaints against the US-supported president.
—Agencies