Major General Omar Suleiman, Egypt's patriotic fighter, suffered injustices when he was alive, and more injustices when he died. The first reason is ignorance: He was the head of the intelligence services, working in the shadows, with no direct contact with the ordinary citizens. The second reason, meanwhile, is his quarrel with the Muslim Brotherhood, or his war against the Islamist group despite its huge popularity in Egypt. There are other reasons, but they are sufficiently marginal for me to overlook them. Since the man is now with his maker, and since I have no personal interests or benefits from talking about him, I would like to correct the information being circulated and repeated by people who do not know him and who never saw him. Nor have they ever asked him any questions or received any answers, to allow them to judge whether they accept the answers or not. After Major General Omar Suleiman became the chief of the intelligence services in the early nineties, and then a minister, I used to meet him on average once every year. In other words, I conducted around 20 journalistic interviews with him, and perhaps the most important one, in terms of the information it contained, was the last one, which took place at his home in Cairo on May 16 this year. The interview lasted about three hours, while previous interviews took only about two hours each, and most of them were attended by a colleague from Al-Hayat's bureau in Cairo. After our last interview, I published two parts in this column on May 20 and 21, 2012. I chose the most important bits of some of what I had heard, but not all. However, I should have appreciated the fact that the General was already outside of power, and thus freer in disclosing information, which is why I had concluded the interview after filling 24 pages with his statements. Today, I can add what I had not published during the life of the General, including two stories I heard from him. The first was about a meeting between him and a Gulf official in power (I have his name), as I said in the piece that was published. Although I still have the transcript of the interview with Major General Omar Suleiman, I will not name the senior Gulf official before I receive permission from the other parties involved, because the issue touches on security relations between two Arab countries. The General appeared to be moved, because the senior official did not believe that he and Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi did not conspire to oust Hosni Mubarak, despite the fact that they enjoyed a good relationship. The second story involves the attempt on his life in an ambush near Kobri El-Kobba medical complex on 30/1/2011. I wrote that I had heard from him the name of those he accused of standing behind the incident, but did not mention it. Today, I say that Omar Suleiman believed it likely that Gamal Mubarak was behind the attempt, because he thought that the General ruined the idea of Gamal Mubarak becoming President of Egypt. Major General Omar Suleiman was at war with the Muslim Brotherhood, a war where there have never been any truces, throughout his official career. Perhaps this happened because Suleiman took the post of intelligence chief in the early nineties, a decade during which Egypt experienced a wave of terrorism from extremist groups, claiming the lives of dozens of Egyptians and foreign tourists. The Muslim Brotherhood is no doubt innocent of terrorism, but the problem that politicians like Hosni Mubarak and security men such as Omar Suleiman had was that all terrorist groups were offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood. This meant that the latter became under suspicion by extension, and not because of anything they had perpetrated. In the last meeting I had with Omar Suleiman, he expressed fears that the Muslim Brotherhood would dominate Egypt, and impose religious rule that would lead to internal strife, whether the winner was going to be Mohamed Mursi, Mohamed Abu Awa or Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh. He said that the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, the Islamic Jihad and al-Takfir wal Hijra were all founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood or defectors from the group, and that these fundamentalist groups engaged in terror in the nineties and have Egyptian blood on their hands. He reminded me that Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh was the one who founded al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, and now he is claiming to be a moderate. The General predicted that banned groups would return to politics – and some have indeed returned-, and expressed his concern that the climate of hostility to Israel may lead to armed attacks against it, ending with an Israeli occupation of a deep section of Sinai to prevent rockets from being fired against it, or with a war that would make Egypt lose the support of the U.S. and other Western countries, at a time when Egypt is completely unprepared for war with Israel. In the ongoing climate of hostility with the Muslim Brotherhood, I understand it if they would respond to him and make accusations against him. However, repeating some of these constantly may convince ordinary people that they are true, when they are not. I shall continue tomorrow. [email protected]
