Members of the Arab Affairs and National Security Committee of the Shura Council called for doing away with US aid and other foreign funds provided to Egyptian NGOs during the committee’s meeting Monday.
The committee said foreign funds should be replaced with national sources of funding.
Members of the committee also accused the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation of negligence, saying it should have firmly addressed violations by foreign NGOs.
Mona Bakr, assistant minister of international cooperation said the ministry first called for suspending US aid—a part of which goes to NGOs– in 2007. However, there wasn’t sufficient political will to stop the aid, she added.
The ministry also addressed the US Department of State about the matter in the past, but did not receive any response, she said.
Allegations that these NGOs were spying on Egypt are the concern of the National Security Agency, she said.
Saif Abdel Fattah, political science professor at Cairo University, meanwhile, called for forming a fact-finding committee to investigate the suspension of US aid to Egypt. He said such a committee should look into whether the handover of Americans charged in the foreign-funded NGOs case to the US was part of a deal to give Egypt US$50 billion in exchange for the suspects.
He added that such a deal, if it exists, undermines Egypt’s sovereignty.
The issue of granting permits for foreign NGOs was used in the past by State Security to pressure these organizations at certain times, he claimed.
The whole case is politicized and intended to destabilize the judiciary, he said. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is responsible for any deal brokered in the handover of the American defendants in the NGOs case, he added.
Hafez Abou Seda, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said the issue has been greatly politicized, and that the minister’s claims that these NGOs were working to create chaos is not true, or else the government would have kicked them out of the country long before.
Translated from Al-Masry Al-Youm
