For independent candidate Gamila Ismail, defeated in the 2001 election, the fight goes on, writes MICHAEL JANSENin Cairo
GAMILA ISMAIL, independent candidate for a meandering con- stituency that brackets the Nile, arrived 15 minutes late for her meeting with the world’s press, a combative smile on her rouged lips. Her aides quickly taped election posters on to her gleaming black car, armouring her steed for carefully calculated assaults on the strongholds of the Egyptian regime.
For Ismail this election campaign is but a battle in the crusade for greater democracy. She ran and was defeated in 2001 and struggled for four years to obtain freedom for her former husband Ayman Nour, who stood against incumbent Hosni Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election, lost and went to jail.
Yesterday’s first objectives were schools in Zamalek. “I want to reach parents through their children and move new voters” to register and cast ballots. “I will hand out my brochures and speak to teachers. This is not legal, but the NDP [the ruling National Democratic Party] has been in the schools for years.”
Her first stop was the Port Said School on a leafy street on the island of Zamalek. But she was sent away without breaching the school’s defences. At the third, the American City Schools, she met three embarrassed teenagers in the library and spoke to them about the need to vote to secure a decent future for their country.
Going walkabout she shook hands with shopkeepers and customers selecting fruit from displays of deep red apples and pale green custard apples. At the Gomhoria butchery, Ismail paused to chat with Fateh Said Muhammad, who stood proudly beneath a photo of himself with the Egyptian film star Omar Sharif, a good customer for steaks and chops. “If he was running I would vote for him,” said the butcher.
Her next objective was the monumental symbol of the state, the massive Mogamma, located at Tahrir Square, the very core of the city. Here thousands of civil servants have documented the lives of generations of Egyptians.
A small group of bystanders gathered round as she waited for permission to enter. Eventually she swept through security and was conveyed to the seventh floor where she toured offices connected by corridors cluttered with discarded steel desks of 1960s vintage, piles of dusty carpets, broken chairs and a sagging divan, windows broken, walls grimy, the air filled with dust as old as time itself and not a computer in sight.
In the first room she entered, Ismail was verbally assaulted by a woman covered from head to toe in black. “I protest the price of meat. We cannot afford to live . . . I have been working her for 27 years. I get 500 pounds a month (€64). If I go to vote I am doing wrong.” Ismail argued loudly against this defeatist attitude even though she faces Hisham Moustafa Khalil, the son of a former foreign minister and stalwart of the ruling NDP.
“I have come to the centre of Cairo where we normally go to protest, express our political opinion, express how angry we are.”
But in Tahrir Square, once a place for protest, there were few signs that Egyptians will vote on Sunday for a new popular assembly in an election that will be won by the NDP but is, nevertheless, being strongly contested.
By contrast on the isle of Manial, election posters and fairy lights left up since the Muslim feast last week created a cheerful atmosphere. But at the local office of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition group, the mood was grim. The message was: “We are not boycotting, we will carry on in spite of harassment and violence and the arrest of 1,200 of our supporters.”
Candidate Hussein Ibrahim said: “These elections have become fraudulent even before they began.”