Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies

(Summer 2004), 13(2), 153174

Friend or Foe? Dependency Theory

and Womens Media Activism in the
Arab Middle East
NAOMI SAKR*

The second half of the 1990s saw an upsurge everywhere in womens activism
to improve their access to, and representation in, the media. Intensified activity
by women both produced and was mandated by the Beijing Platform for Action,
which emerged from the UN-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women
held in China in 1995. The Beijing Platform identified 12 critical areas of
concern, including poverty, education, violence against women, the effects of
armed conflict on women, and the need to end inequality in power sharing and
decision making at all levels. It listed communication systems and the mass
media as one critical area. Strategic objectives were to increase womens
participation in media decision making and promote non-stereotypical media
portrayal of women. Efforts to achieve these objectives were pursued inside and
outside the UN system. Within the United Nations, UNESCOs Communication
Division played a role. Outside it, international non-governmental groups such
as the ecumenical World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) and
the Association for Progressive Communication (APC) set up programs to
promote womens access to the media in various ways. The APCs contribution,
for example, was to support womens networking via the Internet.
In the Arab Middle East, responses to the Beijing stimulus came relatively
slowly, and the driving force for such responses was not always clear. Preparations for the Beijing conference had spurred some local groups in the region to
undertake data gathering and advocacy, often with international help. For
example, UNESCO was behind Tunisias Centre de recherche, documentation et
information sur les femmes when it hosted a conference on women and the
media in the run-up to Beijing. Outside involvement continued after 1995.1 The
British Council helped the New Woman Research Centre in Egypt to hold a
workshop on media monitoring in 1996. The US-based Ford Foundation
financed the publication of various women-related studies and conference
*Naomi Sakr is a Research Associate in the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University
of Westminster, London, UK, and a consultant on media and development in the Middle East to several
international organizations. She wishes to thank Jill Hills for comments on an earlier version of this article.
1
CMF-MENA/Naomi Sakr, Womens Rights and the Arab Media (London: CMF-MENA, 2000).
ISSN 10669922 print/ISSN 14739666 online/04/020153-22 2004 Editors of Critique
DOI: 10.1080/1066992042000244308

NAOMI SAKR

proceedings, as did Scandinavian aid agencies and German foundations. The

United Nations Development Program (UNDP) backed a gender-awareness
training program launched by the independent Palestinian broadcaster Al-Quds
Educational TV.2 WACC held a conference on Gender and Communication
Policy in the Middle East in Beirut in November 1999. Examples such as these
highlight the interaction between local activists and foreign partners and raise
questions about their respective roles. In turn, the process of identifying and
framing these questions has grown increasingly fraught as distrust of US and
European support for local activists in Arab countries has spread.
Some observers see attempts by agencies from rich Western states to influence
developing countries domestic policies on gender as proof that developing
countries remain structurally dependent on powers at the core of the world
economy.3 In dependency theory, widening inequalities between rich and poor
countries are seen to result from the workings of a global structural hierarchy.
Dominant groups in rich countries are said to define and shape development in
a way that ensures poor countries remain dependent on them.4 Today, more than
30 years after the emergence of dependency theory, a number of scholars and
activists (including those named below) are drawing on it, either implicitly or
explicitly, to critique relations between Western donors and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) in Arab states. The objectives of this article are to
examine the validity of this critique by reviewing opposing views of localforeign collaboration in campaigns related to womens status and human rights; to
analyze the specific case of how local and international players interacted over
the issue of womens representation in the Egyptian media in the decade from
1993 to 2003; and to relate findings from this examination to current debates
about external involvement in local activism.5
Conflicting Views of Activist Networks
Collaboration between local NGOs and external partners in the context of
women and the media is not self-evidently contentious. On the contrary,
cross-border links among womens groups sometimes are seen as non-hierarchical transnationalization of one of the twentieth centurys major new social
2
WomenAction, Women and Media for Social Change: Communications Initiatives Worldwide (Montreal:
WomenAction/Les editions du remue-menage, 2001), pp. 1012.
3
See, for example, Enid Hill, Introduction, in Enid Hill, ed., Discourses in Contemporary Egypt, Cairo
Papers in Social Science, 22, no. 4 (2000): 1819.
4
[A]id chains tend to claim and gather power upwards and concentrate it at ever-higher levels, according to
David Sogge in Give & Take: Whats the Matter with Foreign Aid? (London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 67. For
basic themes of dependency theory see Jill Hills, Dependency Theory and its Relevance Today: International
Institutions in Telecommunications and Structural Power, Review of International Studies, 20 (1994): 16970,
and Daya Kishan Thussu, International Communication: Continuity and Change (London: Arnold, 2000),
pp. 6064.
5
See the call for such empirical studies by Islah Jad in, The NGOization of the Arab Womens Movement,
Al-Raida, 20, no. 100 (2003): 43, 46.

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movements.6 A network-of-networks model depicts grassroots organizations

using communication technologies to gain global responses to local issues
concerning womens status. This model regards the possibility of global responses leading to local improvements as demonstrating the benefits of international solidarity and new technologies of communication.7 For swaths of Arab
public opinion, however, a cross-border solidarity model is not one that comes
to mind. Instead, so-called global responses to local issues are much more
likely to be explained in terms of neo-imperialism and dependency. In this view
there is often deep suspicion that womens rights activists are stooges of
Western domination.8 However intuitive, the suspicion is not dispelled by
scholarly research.9 Indeed, it appears to be supported by, among others, a study
by Anne Marie Goetz of contacts between womens movements and the World
Bank.10
The World Bank, keen to build public acceptance of unpalatable structural
adjustment programs among local communities, finds development-oriented
NGOs much more appealing as interlocutors than trade unions or other more
political bodies.11 It is thus in the interests of the World Bank, its backers and
other like-minded multilateral agencies to see such NGOs set up. Arguably, the
rise of NGOs for womens advancement forms part of a neo-liberal, self-help
package that creates an illusion of empowering women at the very moment when
women actually are being disempowered by pressure on states to cut back on
social services. World Bank economists have admitted in working papers that
so-called efficiencies in social services simply may shift costs from the visible
(predominantly male) to the invisible (predominantly female) economy.12 Here,
the difference between visible and invisible rests on the attribution of economic
value to productive work in the labor market and the non-attribution of economic
value to womens unpaid household labor, or reproductive work. Exploitation
arises where women unavoidably are involved in both productive and reproductive work, without any public or private arrangements made for one type of

6
See, for example, Valentine Moghadam, Feminist Networks North and South, Journal of International
Communication, 3, no. 1 (1996), esp. p. 124.
7
Annabelle Sreberny, Feminist Internationalism: Imagining and Building Global Civil Society, in D. Thussu,
ed., Electronic Empires (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 213, 219.
8
Sheila Carapico, NGOs, INGOs, GO-NGOs and DO-NGOs: Making Sense of Non-governmental Organizations, Middle East Report, 214 (Spring 2000): 12.
9
For Indian and African scholars concern that Western-funded NGOs reflect a taming of social movements
and a threat to civil society, see Mary Kaldor, The Idea of Global Civil Society, International Affairs, 79,
no. 3 (2003): 589. For some of the main points in NGOs disfavor, see Mary Kaldor, Civil Society and
Accountability, Journal of Human Development, 4, no. 1 (2003): 2122.
10
Robert OBrien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance:
Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 2466.
11
Ibid., pp. 31, 58.
12
According to the World Banks Africa Technical Department in 1994, quoted in ibid., p. 37.

155

NAOMI SAKR

work to be modified to accommodate the other.13 Financial or other pressures on

women to increase their productive labor, while the reproductive work of care
provision increasingly is made a private responsibility through public service
cutbacks, result in further exploitation. This is in stark contrast to the history of
what has been described as state feminism in Arab countries such as Egypt and
Tunisia. As Mervat Hatem has noted in relation to Egypt under Nasser, state
attention to womens reproductive and productive concerns helped to remove a
structural basis of gender inequality by making reproduction a public, not a
private, issue.14 In this case the retreat of the state leaves women more
vulnerable again to dependence on patriarchal families and the markets
fluctuating demand for womens labor. Where foreign agencies and local NGOs
claim to be collaborating for womens benefit by circumventing the state, the
question arises as to how lasting structural improvements in womens situation
can be achieved without the states active involvement.
Women in Arab countries have good reason, therefore, to be skeptical about
the bountiful wells of international financial and moral support for their NGOs
that sprang up during the 1990s.15 In fact, local critiques have been expressed in
various forums, but more often in terms of cultural imperialism and structural
dependency rather than as an explicit call for salvaging state feminism.16 Various
concerns about foreign funding breeding corruption and being tied to normalization of Arab relations with Israel were highlighted during an episode of the
weekly program Lil Nissa Faqat (For women only) that aired on the Qatarbased Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel in June 2002.17 Entitled Foreign Funding and
its Effect on Womens Issues, the program was introduced by its presenter,
Muntaha al-Ramhi, with the hypothesis that foreign promotion of womens
activism was aimed ultimately at spreading Western cultural and lifestyle
patterns that would help to open up Arab markets even further to Western
imports. A guest speaker on the program, the Lebanese journalist and writer
Hayat al-Huwaik Attiya, said that foreign-backed NGOs were agents of intellectual and cultural dependency because the mindsets and procedures of inter-

13

See, for example, Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, Accumulation, Reproduction and Womens Role in
Economic Development: Boserup Revisited, in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Laurie Nisonoff and Nan
Wiegersma, eds., The Women, Gender & Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), pp. 4849.
14
Mervat Hatem, Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 24 (1992): 23132. For application of the term state feminism to
Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba, see Emma Murphy, Women in Tunisia: Between State Feminism and
Economic Reform, in Eleanor Doumato and M. Posusney, eds., Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle
East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), p. 176.
15
Consensus within the Egyptian womens movement about the need to place reservations on the acceptance
of foreign funding is noted in a New Woman Research Centre report, The Feminist Movement in the Arab
World (Cairo: Dar El-Mostaqbal Al Arabi, 1996), pp. 5455.
16
For examples see Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian
Womens Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20110.
17
The show was broadcast on 24 June 2002; other guest speakers not mentioned here were two university
professors, Nadia Mustafa from Egypt and Raoufa Hassan from Yemen.

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national donors were being internalized by local people through conferences and
seminars held in first-class hotels, away from the realities of everyday life.
That Huwaik and her fellow panelists saw a structural dimension to this
process was reflected in their agreement on labeling it soft colonization. In the
light of dependency arguments like these, the NGO practice of leap-frogging18
looks very much like neo-imperialism too. This is the practice whereby local
groups, instead of investing their efforts in improving local democracy by
engaging directly with the state, use their international contacts to bring the state
under external pressure to make the changes they seek. For Abdullahi An-Naim,
a prominent lawyer and human rights scholar from Sudan, such a practice
reinforces what he calls human rights dependency and is possible only because
of other systemic dependencies.19 In the Arab case, governments have to respond
to Western pressure because they depend on Western financial or military
support. Thus, human rights dependency legitimizes other dependencies and
perpetuates dependent relationships.20 An-Naims analysis suggests that local
NGOs misdirect their efforts when they seek international visibility. Such
visibility is costly, making human rights NGOs dependent on external finance to
produce glossy reports in foreign languages and service long international
mailing lists. This in turn makes them accountable to foreign funders rather than
to their local community.
In An-Naims view, international visibility for specific violations of human
rights is not the answer when violations are massive, endemic and structural.
He recognizes that human rights advocates have to resort to the international
media because the media in the Arab world are either co-opted or restricted by
the government.21 The implication, with respect to activism geared to empowering women via the media, is that local groups stand to achieve wider-ranging and
more long-term results by stepping off the international circuit, embedding
themselves in their local constituency and attending to the deficiencies of local
media instead of turning to international media as an alternative. A comparable
diagnosis is reached by Islah Jad, an activist in the Palestinian womens
movement, who argues that NGOs need a different form of organization if they
are to escape the limits on participation and the competitive dynamic created by
their existing structures, including their external links.22
As both An-Naim and Jad acknowledge, NGOs in the region are caught in a
catch 22 situation. If they seek foreign support, it is because governments
block their local entrenchment, making registration contingent on intrusive
18

OBrien et al., Contesting Global Governance, p. 62. The outcome of leap-frogging, whereby appeals to
the international community result in international pressure on governments, has been described by other
authors as the boomerang effect; see further Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
19
Abdullahi An-Aaim, Problems of Dependency: Human Rights Organizations in the Arab World, Middle
East Report, 214 (Spring 2000): 22.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., p. 23.
22
Jad, The NGOization, pp. 4445.

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supervision by government officials who hold power only because the population
as a whole is denied its civil and political rights.23 Yet, at the same time,
governments cite reliance on foreign support as the very reason why they should
intervene to stop NGOs from providing a conduit for malign foreign influence.
No doubt the state is a key source of legislation that can empower women by
ending structural gender inequalities. Likewise, only the state can repeal media
laws that currently impede open debate about these inequalities. As one development specialist has noted, it is impossible to conceive of development without
communications because people need to communicate in order to form collective ideas about what they consider to be desirable development.24 Moreover,
precisely because gender inequalities are linked to a dichotomy between public
and private spheres, visibility in the public sphere is a prerequisite for achieving
change in the private sphere. Positive media exposure is thus central to
unblocking the route to womens empowerment.
From all of the above, it follows that any discussion of local activists
dependence on Western backing should pay due regard to the state and its
policies on local activism. Thus the present study, focusing on womens media
activism, asks whether specific NGO campaigns on this issue detract from local
democratization efforts by diverting attention from basic issues of media
pluralism and freedom of expression. It asks whether attempts to raise womens
profile through the media create a mere facade of empowerment that masks a
reality of disempowerment caused by economic adjustments unfavorable to
women. It also seeks to establish whether localforeign partnerships are inclusive or exclusive in terms of encouraging local participation and cooperation. The
case study starts, however, by situating local NGO activism on women and the
media in the context of the UN human rights apparatus.
CEDAW, the Media and NGOs
Since many parts of the UN system provide a crossroads for collaboration and
encounters between local and foreign, state and non-state actors, the principal
UN treaty outlawing discrimination against women provides a useful backdrop
against which to view the work of local NGOs. The Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) came
into effect in 1981. It is part of the UN apparatus of human rights treaties and,
as such, is binding in international law on states that have signed and ratified it.
By mid-2002 the majority of Arab states were party to CEDAW, albeit with
reservations placed on a number of its clauses.25 Those states yet to commit
23

Naomi Sakr, Freedom of Expression, Accountability and Development in the Arab Region, Journal of
Human Development, 4, no. 1 (2003): 3942.
24
Sue Ellen Charlton, Development as History and Process, in Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Laurie
Nisonoff and Nan Wiegersma, eds., The Women, Gender & Development Reader (London: Zed Books), p. 11.
25
The CEDAW articles that have attracted most reservations from Arab states include Article 9, giving women
the same rights as men with respect to the nationality of their children, and Article 16, dealing with matters
of marriage and family relations, including divorce and custody of children. Algeria, Jordan and Morocco also

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themselves to CEDAW in any form by February 2003 were Oman, Qatar, Sudan,
Syria, and the UAE.26 Given the wide-ranging guarantees enshrined in CEDAW
and the number of Arab signatories, the process of putting pressure on governments to honor their obligations under the treaty would seem to constitute a
suitably comprehensive and localized approach to ending rights violations of the
massive, endemic and structural kind referred to by An-Naim.27
Moreover, CEDAW is framed to take account of ideas expressed by women
in their own societies about discrimination that they themselves experience. In
the very act of obligating states to eliminate all forms of discrimination against
women, CEDAW requires them to discover womens own perceptions of laws,
policies, and practices. These perceptions may well reveal that what appears to
be oppression from outside a culture may be found tolerable and even advantageous by women within it, and what they find discriminating and subordinating
may not be apparent from outside.28 In other words, adherence to CEDAW
makes it even more imperative that women should have the opportunity to speak
for themselves, instead of being subject to the invisible discrimination of being
patronized or prejudged. In this respect, as in other articles of CEDAW that deal
with specific forms of discrimination, access to the media to express the full
diversity of womens voices is a prerequisite for effective application of the
Convention. In fact, the issue of representation in and through the media runs
through the text of CEDAW. Article 5, for example, requires signatory states to
eliminate prejudiced and stereotyped notions of the roles of the sexes. Article 7
guarantees equality in political and public life. Article 10 covers education,
including access to literacy programs, and picks up on Article 5 by noting,
among other things, the need to revise textbooks and teaching methods to
eliminate any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women at all levels.
Article 11 deals with employment issues, including womens equal right to free
choice of profession and employment, promotion, job security, training and
retraining. These employment-related rights are particularly significant in respect
of recruitment and retention of women in the media sector.
Yet another link between CEDAW on one hand and womens use of the
media on the other, lies in the prompting that the Convention affords for media
coverage of government policies to eliminate discrimination. One set of prompts
exists in the process mandated under Article 18, whereby governments are
required to submit a report at least every four years on measures they have taken
to guarantee equality for women. These reports are monitored by the ConvenFootnote 25 continued

placed reservations on Article 15, guaranteeing women equality with men before the law. Kuwait entered a
reservation on Article 7, reflecting the fact that women in Kuwait are not permitted to vote in elections or stand
for public office.
26
UNDP, Human Development Report 2003 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
pp. 33134.
27
An-Naim, Problems of Dependency.
28
Rebecca J. Cook, State Accountability under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, in Rebecca J. Cook, ed., Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 241.

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tions own treaty body, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. This Committee is composed of 23 experts,
who are elected by states that are parties to the Convention but who serve in a
personal capacity; they are chosen with due regard to the equitable representation of different parts of the world and different legal systems. In recent years,
the Committee increasingly has reached out for information from non-governmental sources to help it to assess government reports. Its responses to the latter
are made available to the general public through the Website of the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights.29 In this way, as with the similar systems for
monitoring compliance with other UN human rights treaties, the reporting
process and committee feedback provide ample material for informative local
media coverage. Evidence shows that a single news item on treaty monitoring
can prompt much wider media interest when the subject being monitored is
highly newsworthy.30 The Committee itself regularly urges governments to
publicize its comments, along with information about CEDAW provisions and
implications.
Germane to the question of how UN human rights treaties can address
massive, endemic and structural violations is the fact that CEDAW actually
reinforces rights and freedoms already contained in other UN human rights
instruments. These include the UN Charter, the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (IESCR). All of these promote equal rights between men and women.31
On matters pertaining to freedom of expression, it is of particular importance
that CEDAW builds on existing treaties. Thus, CEDAW does not expressly
mention the right to freedom of expression, just as it does not expressly mention
some other basic human rights, because these are incorporated through the
definitions and obligations set out in Articles 1 and 2.32 CEDAW also acknowledges that the civil and political rights enshrined in the ICCPR may be
meaningless unless the economic, social and cultural rights enshrined in the
IESCR also are guaranteed. That is to say, CEDAW codifies existing guarantees,
builds on them, and also introduces some additional provisions, such as the
requirement in Article 5, already noted above, to eliminate stereotyped notions
of the roles of the sexes. This gets to the heart of the devaluing of womens
invisible reproductive work in the private sphere. As one analyst has put it,

www.unhchr.ch .
Andrew Clapham, UN Human Rights Reporting Procedures: An NGO Perspective, in Philip Alston and
James Crawford, eds., The Future of UN Human Rights Treaty Monitoring (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 18283.
31
Cook, State Accountability, pp. 23435.
32
Andrew Byrnes, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, in
Wolfgang Benedek, Esther Misaakye and Gerd Oberleitner, eds., Human Rights of Women: International
Instruments and African Experiences (London: Zed Books, 2002), p. 125.
29
30

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Article 5 digs deep into the private realm.33 Article 14 was also innovative in
that it explicitly requires signatory states to take account of the particular
problems that rural women face.
As a mechanism for putting pressure on states to honor the obligations they
themselves have undertaken, CEDAW and its associated reporting procedures
have a great deal of potential. To date, this potential has remained under-exploited in Arab states. One set of reasons exists inside Arab countries, as may
become apparent from the case study in this paper. The other set relates to
CEDAW itself. For example, the Committee has not been given enough time to
review all the reports it actually receives, let alone the much larger number it
would receive if all signatories honored their reporting obligations. In the 20
years between starting its work in 1982 and the end of January 2002, the
monitoring committee had held just 26 sessions. It was originally scheduled to
meet for only one two-week period per year, which was less than the time
provided for other treaty bodies.34 From 1997, as the Committee struggled to
keep pace with its workload, special arrangements were made for it to hold two
three-week sessions per year to clear the backlog of reports. Such a backlog
effectively reduces pressure on governments to deliver their reports on time, or
even, in some cases, to deliver them at all. On both these countslack of time
for the Committee and lack of pressure on governmentsit is clear that
non-governmental groups have a major role to play in making CEDAW work.
At the national level, they may have the capacity to pressure a government into
delivering a report. At the international level, NGOs also have an obvious role
in briefing the CEDAW Committee on possible shortcomings in government
reports. Precisely because signatory states may be less than wholehearted in
complying with obligations they have undertaken by ratifying CEDAW, the
process of reporting on compliance cannot be left only to governments. Alternative or parallel reports produced by NGOs are thus crucial to the monitoring
process. In 1998, the Committee decided that NGOs should be invited to provide
country-specific briefings to its pre-session working groups.35
Clearly, campaigners against discrimination do not have to rely on the
prescribed reporting timetable to make effective use of CEDAW norms and
guarantees in a national context. Indeed, international research suggests that
NGOs make most effective use of hearings before a UN human rights treaty
body when their involvement in those hearings takes place within an overarching
national strategy of which international monitoring is only part.36 That finding
can be tested in relation to Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, all of which have
33

Christine Chinkin, Gender Inequality and International Human Rights Law, in Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire
Woods, Inequality, Globalization and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 106.
34
Byrnes, The Convention, p. 130. For more on this point see Mara Bustelo, The Committee on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women at the Crossroads, in Philip Alston and James Crawford, eds.,
The Future of UN Human Rights Treaty Monitoring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 8188.
35
Byrnes, The Convention, pp. 136, 161, n. 78.
36
Ibid., p. 138.

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submitted reports to CEDAW and all of which have active NGOs. Here, I focus
on Egypt and will review the activities of local foreign-funded NGOs and the
government vis-a`-vis the media before and after the CEDAW Committee session
in January 2001 that dealt with the Egyptian governments report. Evidence
gathered from this examination can be used to evaluate criticisms leveled at
NGOs for perpetuating Egyptian dependency on the West.
Activism on Women and Media in Egypt
Scrutiny of Egypts performance on womens rights was timely in January 2001
in that it followed changes in Egyptian laws pertaining to rape and divorce.37
However, it was also a major event because of the period that had elapsed since
Egypts last report. Egypt signed CEDAW in 1980. It should have reported back
in 1982 and every four years after that. In fact the CEDAW Committees 2001
session considered the countrys third report and combined fourth and fifth
reports,38 thereby ending a reporting hiatus of more than 10 years.
NGOs promoting womens rights in Egypt relied heavily on foreign funding
during the second half of the 1990s, following the external stimulus created by
the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994
and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. However, there
were also internal reasons why womens NGOs appeared more active during this
period. One was an expectation that the existing law governing NGOs was about
to be relaxed. Law 32 of 1964, a relic of Jamal Abdul Nassers presidency
(195470), placed restrictions on all private voluntary associations, making their
registration contingent upon approval from the Ministry of Social Affairs. The
appointment of Mervat Tellawi as Minister of Social Affairs in 1997 was seen
by some NGO activists as a signal from the government that it planned to amend
Law 32. Ms. Tellawi had experience of working within the UN human rights
machinery, having headed the CEDAW Committee in 199091. Pending the
anticipated relaxation of Law 32, many voluntary groups, including those
espousing a feminist agenda, avoided formal registration. Womens groups in
particular remembered the treatment received by the Arab Womens Solidarity
Association (AWSA) in 199091. This pan-Arab organization, formed in 1985,
was based in Cairo and headed by the outspoken and internationally prominent
Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi. When the association adopted a confrontational stance toward conservative Islamist positions on gender, the government
first ordered the closure of its journal, Nun, and then closed the association
itself.39 With the resurgence of NGOs in the late 1990s, foreign funding flowed
37

In both cases the law was made less discriminatory against women. See further Mariz Tadros, Reporting
on Rape, Al-Raida, 88 (Winter 2000): 25; and Naomi Sakr, Seen and Starting to be Heard: Women and the
Arab Media in a Decade of Change, Social Research, 69, no. 3 (2002): 836.
38
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women: Egypt.
02/02/2001, A/56/38, paragraph 312.
39
Margot Badran, Independent Women: More than a Century of Feminism in Egypt, in Judith Tucker, ed.,
Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 14243.

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in for more seminars and projects and womens groups hoped to avoid the
treatment meted out to AWSA. The US branch of Save the Children even funded
a center for NGOs in Cairo, to help them raise funds and make contacts, and
began to staff the center in 1999. Of eight Egyptian NGOs receiving funding
from the European Union under its MEDA Democracy Programme in 1999, two
were concerned with womens rights.40 Advocacy work for freedom of expression was another sphere of activity receiving international support.
Contrary to expectations, the environment for NGOs took a sharp turn for the
worse. The long-awaited replacement for Law 32 shocked the NGO community
by being more draconian than its predecessor. Passed in May 1999, Law 153
threatened to deprive NGOs of any autonomy by controlling their funding,
contacts, appointments, and objectives, while imposing not only fines but also
jail sentences for infringements of the law. The law was in line with tight
controls maintained by the government over professional syndicates and political
parties.41 It came as a particular blow to a group of womens rights activists who
had applied to form a union of womens NGOs. This group suffered a further
setback in August 1999 when a Ministry of Social Affairs official warned that
they were meeting illegally and had no right to form a union. He informed them
that only one union was allowed in any field of activity and that another union
of womens private voluntary associations had already been formed.42 Mervat
Tellawi, who kept a low profile while the union project was being blocked, was
removed from her ministerial post in a cabinet reshuffle in October 1999. Amina
al-Guindi, who replaced her, delayed opening the Cairo center for NGOs.43 In
June 2000, Egypts Supreme Constitutional Court threw out Law 153 on a
technicality. But the government had recourse to another legal weapon, a
Military Order issued in 1992, which it used to charge NGO activists with
illegally accepting foreign funds.44 This clampdown was sustained until June
2002, when the legislature, dominated by President Hosni Mubaraks ruling
National Democratic Party, approved Law 84 on NGOs. This was harsher than
the 1999 version. It again banned the unauthorized receipt of foreign funds,
allowed the Ministry of Social Affairs to dissolve NGOs by decree, and
prohibited affiliation with international organizations.45
This series of disappointments was not conducive to solidarity among
womens NGOs. In a climate of mounting public suspicion of Western prescrip-

40

Personal communication from Sophie Huet, European Commission DG1B, June 1999.
Eberhard Kienle, More than a Response to Islamism: The Political Deliberalization of Egypt in the 1990s,
Middle East Journal, 52, no. 2 (1998): 21935.
42
Mona El-Nahhas, Feminists Tread Carefully, Al-Ahram Weekly, 26 August1 September 1999.
43
Personal communication from a USAID source, Cairo, 9 March 2000.
44
For examples see Naomi Sakr, Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle
East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 17880.
45
Steve Negus, NGOs under Fire, Middle East International, no. 677, 14 June 2002, p. 16; and Amil Khan,
New NGO Law Worries Egypts Campaigners, Middle East Times, 31 May 2002.
41

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NAOMI SAKR

tions for political and economic development,46 women activists in Egypt had
already tended to operate within closed and relatively disparate groups, with
rivalry sometimes taking precedence over common goals.47 With all NGOs now
forced to agonize over how to respond to the new legislation, further fragmentation was inevitable, as some opted to submit to the new rules on registration
and others tried to tough it out. People in the NGO sector also had other reasons
to be suspicious of each other. July 2000 marked the start of a three-year legal
nightmare for a leading NGO figure, Saadeddin Ibrahim. His case had murky
origins and a chilling effect. His arrest, imprisonment, numerous retrials, and
eventual release were publicized widely, because Ibrahim was an internationally
respected sociologist with dual American and Egyptian nationality. Less attention was paid to the associates incarcerated with him or to the side-effects of
closing the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies, which he ran. By
holding two conferences on women in public life in 1994 and 1995, the Ibn
Khaldun Centre was instrumental in creating a new NGO in 1996, aimed at
helping Egyptian women to overcome the daunting bureaucratic hurdles that
deter them from registering to vote.48 This new NGO, the League of Egyptian
Women Voters, was named HODA for short, after Hoda Shaarawi, a 1920s
leader of the Egyptian womens movement. Amina Shafiq, a veteran journalist
at Al-Ahram, headed HODAs board of trustees and clearly saw the audio-visual
media as an appropriate tool in HODAs voter registration campaign.49 However,
after the Ibn Khaldun Centre was locked and put under police guard in July
2000, HODAs files also were confiscated and its offices closed.50 Allegations
later emerged that a State Security informant working as an employee in HODA
had used her position in the organization and its links with the Ibn Khaldun
Centre to plant evidence to incriminate Ibrahim while on a visit to his house two
days before his arrest.51 Unlike other HODA and Ibn Khaldun staff, this
employee was not detained by State Security.
Antagonism among and toward NGOs was fueled throughout this period by
negative reporting in the mainly government-controlled press and governmentmonopolized broadcasting. Egyptian law prohibits terrestrial broadcasting by
non-government entities and places state broadcasting under Ministry of Infor46

See Mohamed El-Sayed Said, The Roots of Turmoil in the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights:
Dynamics of Civil Institution-building in Egypt, Cairo Papers in Social Science, 17, no. 3 (1994): 74.
47
Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East, p. 172.
48
The principal obstacle to registration and, indeed to a whole range of rights, is womens lack of access to
personal identity cards. This issue was highlighted during the 1980s by another local NGO, the Association
for the Development and Enhancement of Women. See Iman Bibars, Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare
and the Egyptian State (London: Zed Books, 2001), p. 18.
49
When the author interviewed Amina Shafiq at HODAs premises on 27 November 1999, staff were
reviewing a video they had made to disseminate views and information about women registering to vote.
50
www.cnn.com , 13 July 2000.
51
One of the state prosecutions charges against Ibrahim was that he and his associates had forged ballot papers
for the November 2000 general election. Details of how such papers could have been placed in Ibrahims house
and how the arresting officer could have known exactly where to look for evidence were reported by Mona
El-Ghobashy in an article entitled Legal Sandcastles, Cairo Times, 1925 April 2002.

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mation supervision. Government controls on the media were tightened in 1996

through legislative changes that stiffened penalties for vaguely defined offences
such as disseminating false news.52 It is fair to say that the press is mainly
government controlled because the leading national dailies are owned by the
government. Most newspapers produced by opposition parties are not issued
daily, are printed and distributed by one of the government-owned publishing
houses (which may disrupt their circulation), andfor both these reasonsare
disadvantaged in terms of attracting advertising revenue. Meanwhile, Al-Usboua,
a weekly paper describing itself as independent, came on the scene in 1997 after
obtaining a license from the Ministry of Information with surprising ease.53
Al-Usboua proceeded to campaign ferociously against the NGOs. In late 1998,
it mysteriously obtained and printed a copy of a check belonging to the Egyptian
Organization for Human Rights (EOHR). It accused the EOHR of accepting the
check from a hostile country as payment for fabricating a report alleging police
brutality in Upper Egypt. One week later the EOHRs secretary-general, Hafez
Abu Seada, was detained by prosecutors of the Supreme State Security Court,
pending investigation into charges of receiving unauthorized foreign funds. It
transpired that the check in fact had been contributed by the British embassy in
Cairo toward the EOHRs Womens Legal Aid Project, which had been funded
by the Dutch government until 1996.54 Yet Al-Usboua accused Egypts human
rights groups of betraying their country for foreign money and described them
as the means by which the West penetrates and weakens the nation.55 A
Ministry of Social Affairs spokesperson was conveniently on hand to endorse
this claim, saying: Some irresponsible groups have smeared Egypt They are
hired. They are in the pay of foreign countries.56 Al-Usbouas line of attack was
pursued in the government-controlled media. Within a week, two regular slots on
Egyptian state televisionFace to Face and Editor-in-Chiefhad been devoted
to the issue of foreign funding for NGOs. These programs overlooked the fact
that billions of dollars of foreign funding received by the Egyptian government
dwarfed the few thousand dollars given to NGOs. Awkward comparisons like
this were left to Egypts English-language publications, such as Al-Ahram
Weekly, geared to a small elite readership and allowed a relatively free rein so
as to show Egypt in a moderate and tolerant light abroad.57 State television, in
contrast, was aimed at the masses and kept up the campaign against NGOs after
the arrest of Ibrahim. An episode of the weekly Breakthrough program implied
that he was a spy.58 Editor-in-Chief reported uncorroborated allegations con52

Article 19, The Egyptian Predicament: Islamists, the State and Censorship (London: Article 19, 1997), p. 37.
Dina El Khawaga, Sisyphe ou les avatars du nouveau journalisme egyptien, Egypte/Monde Arabe, 3, no.
1 (2000): 16263.
54
Simon Apiku, Government Jails Human Rights Leader Over Cash, Middle East Times, 7 December 1998;
and Mark Huband, Egypts Human Rights Group Leader Arrested, Financial Times, 3 December 1998.
55
Cited in Paul Schemm, EOHR Leader Gets Out with a Haircut, Middle East Times, 13 December 1998.
56
Ibid.
57
Hussein Abdel-Razeq, Human Rights and the Numbers Game, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2128 January 1999.
58
Andrew Hammond, Egyptian TV Fights Arab Rivals with Tepid Glasnost, Middle East Times, 8 June 2001.
53

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NAOMI SAKR

tained in the government-owned dailies Al-Akhbar and Al-Ahram to the effect

that the Israeli government had tried to come to Ibrahims defense.59
Significantly, the portrayal of human rights advocates as enemy sympathizers
deterred Egyptian nationals from funding human rights groups. By adamantly
refusing public acknowledgement of their donations, local donors declined to
provide crucial encouragement to others.60 Groups campaigning for improvements in womens legal status were sucked into this vicious circle. Media
coverage of such campaigns often implied that women highlighting concerns
about inequality were somehow damaging the national interest. Nawla Darwiche,
founder member of the New Woman Research Centre, expressed frustration at
this practice in March 2000. She told an international conference:
Media discourse presents women first and foremost as dependants and relatives and
their role as caring for poor exhausted men. In a situation of high unemployment, women
are seen as taking jobs from men When we raise issues, such as violence against
women, we are accused of presenting a false and distorted image of women to the
country and the rest of the world.61

Darwiche was speaking in the wake of media excitement about a change in

Egypts divorce law in January 2000. By legalizing the practice of khula,
entitling a woman to divorce her husband unilaterally and without delay,
provided she returns her dowry and surrenders all financial rights, the law moved
in the direction of redressing inequality between men and women in Egypt in the
field of divorce. The mainstream media did not see things this way, however. A
headline in Al-Usboua screamed Mens Era is Over. A drama serial screened
at prime time on state television was entitled O Men, Unite! Newspaper
cartoons depicted scenes in which traditional male and female roles were
reversed, presenting such reversal as the object of ridicule. Women were drawn
with moustaches while men pushed baby carriages.62 Within weeks, government
embarrassment at such media excesses was reflected in the appointment of two
media women to a newly created 30-member National Council for Women
(NCW). Established in February 2000 under the auspices of Suzanne Mubarak,
wife of the Egyptian president, the Council was set up to advise the presidency
and the government on the effect of public policies on women. Mervat Tellawi,
former Minister of Social Affairs and CEDAW Committee Chair, was appointed
NCW secretary-general.
NCW members saw their role as building bridges to national institutions,
59

The coverage appeared during and after Ibrahims sentencing in May 2001. Copies of his familys strongly
worded protests at the coverage were accessed on the Ibn Khaldun Website (www.ibnkhaldun.org) on 2
January 2002.
60
An EOHR source told the author in Alexandria on 27 May 2003 that an Egyptian donor had broken off
relations with the EOHR after it thanked him publicly in an annual report.
61
Authors transcript of Nawla Darwiches presentation to the Amnesty International UK conference on
Womens Human Rights in the Middle East, London, 11 March 2000.
62
Mona Eltahawy, Egypts Sexist Divorce Laws Blamed Not on Islam, but on Men, The Guardian, 23
February 2000.

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including the media, to combat negative stereotyping and, among other things,
to increase the chances of women being elected to parliament in the general
election due in November 2000.63 The Council also served another less obvious
purpose. It provided a vehicle for co-opting women who hitherto had channeled
their efforts into NGOs. Amina Shafiq, protagonist of HODA, later was appointed to a subcommittee of the NCW. Activists who remained outside the new
body were far from complimentary about it. One dismissed it as a propaganda
machine that would be deployed to legitimize policies already drawn up,
leaving NGOs to carry the real burden of defending womens rights.64 Others
regarded it as a means for usurping NGO activities in the field.65
Events marking International Womens Day in March 2000 provided a sign of
things to come. Tellawi represented the NCW at a meeting held at the American
University in Cairo that also was attended by NGOs. Tellawi, along with
Moushira Khattab, secretary-general of the National Council for Motherhood
and Childhood, left immediately after giving their presentations and did not hear
what the NGOs had to say.66 No government officials turned up for another
meeting at the Cairo Library, at which Iman Bibars of the non-governmental
Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women pointed out flaws
in government statistics and policies on female poverty.67 NGO fears about a
lack of dialogue with officialdom surfaced again at the Beijing 5 special
session of the UN General Assembly in June 2000, called to review progress on
the Beijing Platform for Action five years on. Several NGO activists described
Egyptian preparations for Beijing 5 as a process dominated by the government,
based on exclusion and selection, not inclusion, of NGOs.68 These activists
claimed that most programs set up to raise awareness of womens rights had
been initiated by NGOs, not the government, and that government policies in
areas such as microcredit and support for female heads of households were
dangerously narrow. There was a consensus that NGOs had been left to work in
areas deemed too sensitive for government involvement but had been denied the
tools to do the job.69
Before and after Egypts CEDAW Report
It was against the background described above that Egyptian NGOs prepared
their parallel report on discrimination against women in readiness for the
CEDAW Committee working session in January 2001. Despite the divisiveness
of recent events, 22 NGOs formed a coalition, with support from the UN
63

CMF-MENA/Sakr, Womens Rights and the Arab Media, p. 29.

Farida Naqqash (Head of the Progressive Womens Union), writing in Al-Arab, 3 April 2000.
65
Nicola Pratt, Egypt Harasses Human Rights Activists, MERIP Press Information Note 28 (17 August
2000).
66
Mariz Tadros, Celebrating in Diversity, Seeking Unity, Al-Ahram Weekly, 1622 March 2000.
67
Tadros, Celebrating in Diversity.
68
Mariz Tadros, No Time to Talk, Al-Ahram Weekly, 814 June 2000.
69
Ibid.
64

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NAOMI SAKR

Childrens Fund (UNICEF), and together organized meetings around the country
to raise awareness about CEDAW and gather comments from voluntary associations.70 The issue of womens portrayal in books and the media featured quite
prominently in these events. For example, Women and Society, a member of the
NGO coalition, joined forces with UNICEF and the Al-Ahram Regional Institute
for Journalism in late 2000 to organize a seminar under the title Towards Fair
Media Coverage of Womens Issues. Participants were given the results of
several academic studies that showed how the press reports rape as the victims
fault; how female experts rarely are asked to comment on matters of public
interest; how news stories and caricatures frequently present negative stereotypes
of women; and how rural and illiterate women rarely receive any kind of media
attention at all.71 Another event was organized jointly by the Cairo Institute for
Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), the New Woman Research Centre and the
Association for the Development of Women and Society. It consisted of a
one-day seminar in Cairo in which academics discussed the evolution of
feminism in Egypt and the image of women presented in educational material.
Participants recommended, among other things, that stereotypes and negative
images of women should be eliminated from textbooks and the mass media and
that all restrictions be removed from postgraduate research on women.72 If these
two seminars seemed to be oriented more toward research than activism, it
should be remembered that the activities of NGOs are circumscribed by the
government registration requirements described above. CIHRS and the New
Woman Research Centre identify themselves as being engaged in studies and
research rather than advocacy or political work. Indeed, as pointed out in the
NGOs parallel report to the CEDAW Committee, Egypts Political Parties Law
prohibits work on behalf of women from being combined with party political
work.73 Research, the main activity still permitted to human rights NGOs in
Egypt, is not an activity on which to build a strong or diverse following, let
alone a mass movement.
In summary, the NGOs parallel report acknowledged that the Egyptian
government had made some headway in removing discrimination in laws and
educational programs, had opened up more space within the media to deal with
women-related issues and had set up the NCW. But, it said, there was plenty
still to do. The report highlighted inequalities in laws on prostitution, the killing
of spouses, and the passing of nationality to children. It noted that, despite being
amended in 2000, the law on divorce remained unfair because it requires any
woman who files for divorce without going through the courts to surrender all
70

The process is described in two undated issues of Sawasiah (a newsletter of the Cairo Institute for Human
Rights Studies): NGOs Coalition for CEDAW, no. 36, p. 10; and Discrimination Against Women, no. 39,
pp. 1012. The latter article lists the 22 participating NGOs.
71
Amina Elbendary, The Word is Not Enough, Al-Ahram Weekly, 28 November 2000. Some 55 percent of
Egyptian women are illiterate, according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2003, p. 312.
72
For insight into some restrictions, see Hania Sholkamy, Why is Anthropology so Hard in Egypt?, Cairo
Papers in Social Science, 22, no. 2 (1999): 12729.
73
As set out in Sawasiah, no. 39 (n.d.): 11.

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financial rights. The report drew attention to the Egyptian governments commitment to structural adjustment and its likely adverse implications for women in
the workplace. It explained that the state was withdrawing from its previous
practice of finding jobs for university graduates but meanwhile had drafted a
new labor law with less generous maternity leave and childcare provisions than
hitherto. The report gave a list of exceedingly low percentages for womens
representation on various political and trade union bodies. On the subject of
violence against women, it discussed rape, female circumcision, domestic
violence, and mistreatment of women detained by the state. Stating that the
media in general were still portraying a prejudiced image of women, the report
addressed the issues of media and freedom of expression in three of its
recommendations. In one it urged lifting restrictions on the freedom of assembly
and freedom of expression of NGOs in general, and womens organizations in
particular. In another it called for people working in the mass media, education,
and religion to receive training in gender awareness. In a third, it called for more
attention to be paid to the contribution the media could make to promoting
equality and respect for human rights.
The governments report was presented to the CEDAW Committee in Geneva
on 19 January 2001, by a delegation led by Mervat Tellawi, as secretary-general
of the NCW. With her were Fawzia Abdel-Sattar, a Cairo University law
professor, Sana Khalil, a counselor at the Ministry of Justice, and Mona
Zulfiqar, a human rights advocate and member of the NCWs legislative
committee. A literal reading of the report submitted by this delegation would
suggest that the NCW had been in regular consultation with local NGOs. The
Council itself was described as including NGO representatives and as eager to
work with NGOs, especially to reduce poverty arising from privatization and
structural adjustment programs.74 A forward-looking paragraph in the report
spoke of the NCWs intention to join with governmental and non-governmental
organizations in raising gender awareness and clarifying misinterpretations of
religious concepts.75 Yet the foregoing analysis of governmentNGO relations in
the present study shows that the term non-governmental in this context is at
best imprecise. Registered NGOs can operate legally in Egypt only if they accept
government supervision as a condition of registration. Registered NGOs at this
stage did not include groups such as the Egyptian Organization for Human
Rights or the New Woman Research Centre. That Tellawi herself regarded such
unregistered groups as qualifying for the term NGO could be inferred from a
comment she made to the press to the effect that her delegation had intended
to have a dialogue with NGOs but it had not been possible.76 Nevertheless,
imprecision in the reports use of the word non-governmental was mirrored in
74

Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women: Egypt.
02/02/2001, A/56/38, paragraph 313.
75
Concluding Observations, paragraph 318.
76
Tariq Hassan-Gordon, UN Recommends Steps to Improve the Lot of Egyptian Women, Middle East Times,
9 March 2001.

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the CEDAW Committees comments, which commended representation of

non-governmental organizations on the NCW.77 It perhaps also should be noted
that, while governments may be deliberately vague about the meaning of
non-governmental, the meaning of the word independent as applied to experts
on the CEDAW Committee sometimes is used in a similarly vague manner.
Membership of UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies is remunerated with
such a small honorarium that it is feasible only for those officials or academics
paid by governments to participate. This situation leads to what Clapham,
writing from an NGO perspective, has termed governmentalization of treaty
bodies.78 Tellawi, in heading the Egyptian government delegation to Geneva,
was facing the Committee she herself had chaired a decade before. By the same
token, Naela Gabr, a member of the Committee Tellawi faced, was a permanent
representative of Egypt at the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Geneva. These
circumstances underline the need for input from Egypts unregistered womens
NGOs.
It is beyond the scope of this article to examine in detail the CEDAW
Committees feedback on Egypts compliance with its obligations under
CEDAW. What matters for the current study is how NGO activism on womens
media representation fared in the aftermath of the report. In fact, the CEDAW
Committee had strong words to say about women and media. It expressed
concern at the continuing stereotypical portrayal of women in the media, saying
this encourages discrimination. It recommended that:
opportunities should be created for the portrayal of positive, non-traditional images of
women and that the number of women in decision-making positions in the media should
be increased. It also recommends that the Government establish, within the National
Council for Women, a monitoring body on the representation of women in the media.79

If media coverage of the NCW could be deemed to meet the CEDAW

Committees requirements on media portrayal of women, then Egypt would
score highly in the period after the Committee delivered its comments. Even
before the end of January 2001, the NCW had brought representatives of
government-controlled media outlets together to tell them that it was high time
they started promoting a positive and progressive image of women.80 In March
2001, it was reported that the NCW had drawn up a five-year plan for 200207
in which it would prioritize the involvement of women in public and political
life.81 An entire section of the plan was devoted to tackling the mass media,
through training women to use new communication technologies and creating a
central archive of statistics and documents about relevant issues for media use.
In its five-year plan, the NCW formally adopted the CEDAW Committees
recommendation on the subject of media monitoring. It pledged to set up a
77

Concluding Observations, paragraph 322.

Clapham, UN Human Rights Reporting Procedures, pp. 19596.
79
Concluding Observations, paragraphs 33335.
80
Amany Abdel-Moneim, Stop the Press!, Al-Ahram Weekly, 17 February 2001.
81
Reem Leila, Critical Tools, Wise Investments, Al-Ahram Weekly, 17 March 2001.
78

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Media Watch body to evaluate Egyptian media coverage of Egyptian women.

Special attention would be given, it said, to womens issues in drama and
entertainment programs. Given the governments control over terrestrial broadcasting and presidential sponsorship of the NCW, the NCWs Media Watch
operation seemed liable to become a rather closed affair.
Meanwhile, the New Woman Research Centre proceeded with the independent media-monitoring project it had first considered in the mid-1990s.82 In May
2003 it released the results of monitoring carried out during the fasting month
of Ramadan in 2002. Ramadan was chosen because program ratings soar in the
evening as families gather to watch television together after the evening meal.
The monitors followed 18 dramas shown on Egyptian national television during
the month, including serials and films. They found that 67 percent of characters
portrayed in these dramas were men; that the majority of female characters were
either housewives or students; and that illiteracy barely featured, despite its
prevalence in Egyptian society. Where physical aggression was shown, 42
percent of all incidents involved men beating women, while 13 percent involved
men killing women. Announcing these results, Nawla Darwiche of the New
Woman Research Centre said that not a single television series of those
monitored was free of violence against women. It was not the portrayal of
violence that was wrong, the researchers said, but the implication that such
violence could be condoned.83 In June 2003, after releasing the results of its
media monitoring exercise, members of the New Woman Research Centre
received some disturbing news. Under the terms of the new NGO law passed in
2002, the Centre had applied for registration with the Ministry of Social Affairs
ahead of the deadline on 4 June 2003. After the deadline passed it was informed
that approval for registration had been denied.84
Conclusion
Evidence in this article suggests that criticisms of NGOs for reinforcing dependency and diverting attention away from structural inequalities themselves may be
a diversionary tactic. The NGO activism examined here, by focusing on women
and the media in Egypt, could succeed only if conducted by means of direct
collaboration with the chief player in Egyptian media, namely the state. In fact,
local NGOs interested not only in media but also in health, poverty reduction, and
legal statutes tried repeatedly to share their research and policy advice with
government representatives. The latter, however, did not reciprocate. Far from it:
the government passed laws to limit NGOs freedom of action, cut off their
foreign funding, and, by discrediting them in the eyes of the public, prevented
them from becoming self-sustaining through reliance on local funds. It obstructed
efforts to promote cooperation among NGOs by blocking the creation of a union
82

Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East, pp. 17882.
Lina Mahmoud, Alarming Portrayals, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2228 May 2003.
84
NGOs Banned, Al-Ahram Weekly, 1218 June 2003. The Centre appealed against the decision.
83

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NAOMI SAKR

of womens groups and by sowing mutual distrust. Meanwhile, a government

body was established to take over the field to the exclusion of NGOs. Government-controlled media were deployed to portray human rights NGOs as traitors to
the national interest and security forces worked behind the scenes to facilitate this
process. If NGOs were infiltrated by interest groups with questionable agendas, it
seems more likely on the evidence presented here that they were infiltrated by
State Security informants than by neo-imperialists from the West.
If NGOs in a given country gather data on their governments compliance with
its own international treaty obligations, this activity would seem to be distinct
from the practice of reinforcing dependency by invoking foreign pressure on the
government. The latter practice would be at work only if the state in question was
coerced into signing the relevant UN treaty in the first place. To suggest that the
obligations of UN membership foster dependency would be to put the validity of
the whole UN human rights apparatus in doubt and to overlook its application to
all signatories, in the global North and global South. The reporting process, which
forms part of the overall apparatus, provides opportunities for local NGOs and
local media to generate internal national debates about human rights issues. These
opportunities are curtailed, however, if governments place restrictions on both the
media and NGOs. At the same time, governmentalization of UN treaty monitoring bodies makes non-governmental participation in monitoring essential. The
quality of non-governmental reporting to the CEDAW Committee can mark the
beginning of either a virtuous or a vicious circle. NGO input into the monitoring
process influences the CEDAW Committees input into its Concluding Observations. These observations in turn determine how much ammunition NGOs will
take away with them to lobby the government at home on compliance with
CEDAW pending the next periodic report.
Finally, it emerged clearly from this study that women in government and
NGOs in Egypt agreed in 200203 that their countrys media still had a major
blind spot where Egyptian women are concerned. It was also clear that scholars
and activists in both government and NGOs had conducted illuminating research
and needed no outside prompting to present a persuasive case for steps to end
an unsatisfactory state of affairs. However, while NGOs were accused of failing
to get their message across to a wide audience or failing to coordinate efficiently,
much less was said about the multiple obstacles confronting them, or about the
governments failure to allow the country to benefit from NGOs enthusiasm,
experience, and expertise. Pending a move toward a more pluralistic approach,
in which both government and NGO contributions would be valued, it seems
perverse to suggest that NGOs were more to blame than the government for
prolonging dependency on foreign powers.

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