Congress loosens pressure on Egypt just as new anti-Sisi protests emerge
Key senators have abandoned efforts to cut Egyptian military aid just as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government clamps down on new protests.
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none; color: #0463c1; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #0463c1} Egyptian security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas at hundreds of protesters in the Red Sea city of Suez on Saturday, one day after anti-corruption protests targeting President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government sprung up in Cairo and several other cities. Police have since arrested more than 365 protesters as well as Mahienour el-Massry, a human rights lawyer who had sought to represent several of the anti-corruption demonstrators.
Despite Sisi’s crackdown on dissent, President Donald Trump greeted him at the UN General Assembly with effusive praise, calling him a “real leader” and dismissing the demonstrations against him. But the crackdown comes days after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally who’s typically more skeptical of Sisi, walked back his multiyear effort to cut Egyptian military aid in a bid to pressure Cairo on its human rights record.
Graham chairs the Senate’s foreign aid panel, which allocated $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt in its 2020 appropriations bill, released on Wednesday. Graham and the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, had previously sought to cut Egypt’s annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) by $300 million in 2017 and 2018.
Their efforts were unsuccessful and ran afoul of House appropriators, who preferred to give Egypt the full $1.3 billion in FMF, roughly the same amount Cairo has received every year since the 1980s as a reward for its 1979 peace treaty with Israel. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Calibri; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} This year, Graham is siding with the House even as Leahy argues for military aid cuts.
