Interview: Al-Dostour leader Hala Shukrallah

Hala Shukrallah is a hard woman to track down. Since she became the new leader of the al-Dostour or Constitution Party back in February, her days have been a blur of activity: media interviews, policy meetings, strategy sessions and constant consultation with her 18,000 plus membership have meant 14 hour days and seven day weeks.

Not to mention the backdrop of human rights violations, illegal detentions and seemingly arbitrary death sentences for opponents of the current regime, gangs/militias of young men imposing their own brand of thuggism and ongoing attacks against Egyptian police and military by militants.

And yet Shukrallah continues to speak calmly and eloquently about issues like raising the minimum wage, improving public health and education and changing the political culture in Egypt from one of cronyism to functional parliamentarian democracy. It is issues like these that Shukrallah insists Egypt must solve if it is to ever truly move forward.

Her insistence on human rights, gender equality and grass roots organising seems almost quaint in the current political climate, but her voice in the wilderness strikes a chord with young Egyptians. The majority of her party are under 35 and its this youth contingent who courted Shukrallah for three months before she agreed to take on the leadership role, left open by the departure of Mohamed El-Baradei. The Nobel Peace Prize and former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency Nobel Peace stepped down from his post of acting vice president in protest over the 14 August crackdown on protesters.

It’s this “lost generation” of Egyptians, who came of age in a climate of corruption and fear but also of revolutionary ideals, that are Shukrallah’s main constituency and greatest supporters.

When I finally track her down for an interview, she has just finished organising a “democratic marathon” where hundreds of young Dostour members jog through the streets of Cairo. In these runs they hold banners calling for the lifting of the current anti-demonstration laws in place since last November, which have been used to crack down on dissent and landed scores of Muslim Brotherhood, as well as secular and liberal opponents in jail.

Shukrallah, a 59-year-old Coptic Christian who was a student activist in the 70s and a grass roots organizer for decades, has been running this race for a long time, but has remained committed to her slow and steady approach.

“I was hesitant at first when they [her youthful supporters] asked me to take on the party leadership,” said Shukrallah, while explaining that Egypt was undergoing a “critical” time and lurching from one crisis to the next. “But they told me, ‘everyone promises to help us, but they all leave in the end. We have been abandoned so many times - we need you,” she added.

Shukrallah, who came of age in Ottawa, Canada where her father represented the Arab League between 1965 and 1970, returned to Egypt in the early 70s. When her two brothers were jailed by the Sadat regime, she became involved in organising with the families of the detained and has never looked back.

“We [the student movement] were very idealistic in those days- we thought we could change the whole system in a few months,” says Shukrallah.

Since then her goals have become more realistic, she says, and her four decades of grass roots organising and her job since 1997 as director of the Development Support Centre for Training and Consultancy, a NGO promoting social justice, have helped ground her idealism in a grittier, on the ground reality.

But a key challenge in building her party remains bridging the gap between “those who are skilled at analysing and implementing policies and those who are affected by them” she says in a veiled reference to an often discussed disconnect between political elites and some voters.

While this remains a challenge for many parties in Egypt and elsewhere, Shukrallah notes that her party boasts membership across all 26 Egyptian governorates.

Shukrallah sees her role as head of Doustour primarily as a caretaker one, to be relinquished as soon as the right young leaders emerge to take over. She has always refused to stand as a presidential candidate and instead insists her only ambition is to create a strong foundation for a future Doustour candidate. But the torch she is passing is from a different era.

The reality is more brutal now, she contends, and the stakes are higher.

“There’s really no comparison to the Sadat era,” she says. “In many ways it’s worse but in ways it’s also better.

“When we were imprisoned for our activism in the 70s, no one knew about it. There was no social media of course and no state media would cover such things.”

Now, in spite of ongoing media clampdowns by the current regime, “there’s still more knowledge of what’s going on. Before we were very isolated but now people can more easily glean the truth of the situation,” she added.

Today, however, “the security forces are much more vicious” and Shukrallah blames this on the crackdown on Islamists in the 80s that “normalised” a culture of violence.

“That’s what happens when a political force uses violence - like the Brotherhood. They did it in a way that marginalised the democratic opposition movements - they were against democracy and against the state.” Although she notes that “Sadat supported them as a foil to democratic opposition.”

According to Shukrallah, the Islamist movement was and still is a “red herring that deviates completely from the real struggle.” Its ongoing violence, most recently felt by a string of bombs in Cairo and in the Sinai, are also used justify repression.

“[This violence] justifies in the eyes of the people the violent measures being implemented against the revolutionaries of 20 January, who actually employed non-violent resistance,” says Shakralla.

With various Dostour members still in prison, Shukrallah recounts the tale of one young man, whom a party lawyer managed to liberate recently. He’d spent four months in jail “for both allegedly belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and at the same time allegedly attacking the Muslim Brotherhood.” With Shukrallah’s help, all charges were eventually dropped.

There is now a shift in tactics, since outright street protest have become dangerous and, she says, “almost suicidal.” There’s been a renewed emphasis on media exposure and grass roots activities like regular “I am an Egyptian citizen” events, where young people visit slums and villages and speak about human rights issues while painting walls, picking up garbage or fixing train signals.

Meanwhile party policy is being constantly crafted by ongoing consultation. Dostour finds common ground with the Social Democratic Party on the need for better-funded public health and education, and has worked with trade unions around minimum wage issues as well as the lifting of fuel subsidies for corporations rather than workers. Shukrallah is also passionate about ending multinational grain monopolies saying “it’s ridiculous that Egyptians now have to buy seeds for molekhaya from a Japanese company.”

What Shukrallah and her party represent, beyond the hopes of young Egyptians, is a departure from the politics of personality driven cronyism and a bridging of the “huge gap between the Egyptian citizen and the state” partly through the creation of “independent monitoring groups.”

The real challenge now, says Shukrallah is the “actual legislation of the human rights enshrined in the new constitution - and their implementation”

She admits that her positions may not be popular with the Egyptian public.

“We are standing in the middle between two polarized forces and we refuse to accept either.” On the other hand, she insists there is still “so much potential” which continues to encourage her that change will come.

“The last few years have broken through a certain wall. People feel now that they have rights that have to be taken, not given- and that’s the hope that drives me forward,” she added.