Farouk Hosni is Egyptian minister of culture. Egypt has a rich and complex culture, which reaches back many millennia. Cairo is one of the great urban metropolises of the world and a centre of the Arabic film industry. Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, is the only Arabic language writer to win the Nobel prize for literature. Egyptian young people, desperate to engage with each other and their peers abroad, have embraced the internet including blogs and Facebook. (Of course Egypt’s culture was even richer before Nasser drove out its Jewish community and the Greeks and Italians that lived and thrived there for centuries.)
Unfortunately for Egypt – and the rest of the world – Farouk Hosni is a notorious crony of the country’s authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak. He has served as culture minister for 21 years and is now 71. He is deeply complicit in and responsible for the stifling atmosphere, censorship and imprisonment of dissidents and bloggers. Abdul Kareem Soliman, a blogger in Alexandria, was jailed in 2007 for four years after criticising Al-Azhar university and calling President Mubarak a dictator. His trial lasted five minutes.
Hosni’s idea of culture is a nice flaming pyre of books by Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and Etgar Keret. Last year Hosni personally offered to burn any Hebrew-language books if they were found in the new library in Alexandria. He said: “If there are any there I will myself burn themselves in front of you.” Hosni banned ‘The Band’s Visit’ an Israeli film about a poor Egyptian band that is marooned in an Israeli backwater.
Hosni embodies the usual toxic cocktail of nationalism and anti-Semitism that Arab regimes use to keep their populations cowed so they rage against the Jews and Israel instead of the decrepit monarchies and sclerotic dictatorships that keep them poor, terrorised, uneducated and isolated, as reported in great detail by another branch of the UN, which compiles the Arab Human Development Report
Incredibly – or not – Hosni is now the front-runner to head UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Association, based in Paris. Hosni is supported by Arab and African states. Arab and African states strongly support Sudanese president Al-Bashir, who has for five years organised a campaign of genocide in Darfur, so there is no reason why the Arab League and the African Union should have any doubts about someone who merely wishes to burn books, rather than women and children.
The furore around Farouk Hosni has largely passed the British media by although The Times has good piece on him. French intellectuals such as Bernard Henri-Levy have called for Hosni’s appointment to be blocked. France and Germany and other western democracies are likely to oppose his opponent. According to The Times Benjamin Netanyahu now supports his appointment. Not suprisingly, faced with the loss of an enormous salary, pleasant offices in Paris and a vast budget to support his cronies’ projects, Hosni has now apologised. Hilariously, he now claims to be a ‘liberal’.
Beyond the question of a cosy sinecure for an ageing bureaucrat is something far more significant. The row over Hosni’s appointment is part of a continuum that has seen a rise in both the confidence and power of what human rights activists called ‘The Abusers Club’. We have seen how Sri Lanka triumphed at the UN Human Rights Council, preventing any investigation into the conflict in which it seems that 20,000 people may have been killed, either shelled by the Sri Lankan army or used as human shields by the Tamil Tigers. Even those who question the Sri Lankan government’s account are now in danger. The BBC reports that Poddala Jayantha, a prominent Sri Lankan journalist has been abducted and beaten.
This gulf, between western democracies and the Abusers Club is growing and is irreconcilable. Those who still believe in the ideals on which the UN was founded – human rights, free speech and peace – argue that despite all its faults the UN is a forum where all countries and regimes can meet and manage international affairs and crises. After the UN’s failure to investigate the war in Sri Lanka, this argument is already barely credible. If UNESCO chooses a censor and would-be book burner as its head, then the debate will be over.
