"I relinquish any awards from an authority that oppresses Egyptian people and links its foreign policy to Israel," said Ibrahim

By Ayman Sharaf, IOl Correspondent

CAIRO, October 23 (IslamOnline.net) – A renowned Egyptian novelist adamantly refused Wednesday, October 23, to receive a prestigious award protesting "the regime’s political oppression of the Egyptian people and its reaction to Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people."

"I relinquish any awards from an authority that oppresses Egyptian people and links its foreign policy to Israel," firebrand Sonallah Ibrahim addressed a dumbfounded audience of Egyptian, Arab and foreign intelligentsia in Cairo Opera House.

With Egyptian Culture Minister Farouq Hosni standing ready to award him the LE 100,000 (16,000 dollars) prize, Ibrahim opened his salvoes at the government.

"While Israeli occupation forces press on with incursions into Palestinian areas, killing pregnant women and children and displacing thousands in a well-sketched scheme for annihilating Palestinians, Arab capitals still open their arms to Israeli leaders," said the traumatized novelist.

"Few meters from here stays the Israeli ambassador in comfort, and a few others his U.S. counterpart whose country’s soldiers sprout up across what has been the Arab world," he said at the ceremony marking the end of the second Cairo forum on Arab novel.

He echoed a demand by hundreds of Egyptians who had called for the expulsion of the Israeli diplomat in a demonstration marking the Palestinian Intifada to Israeli occupation on September 28.

The famous novelist also lashed out at the U.S. military presence in Arab countries as well as the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, which hit a nerve with many Arabs also jeered by the U.S. bias towards Israel in the long-standing Middle Eats crisis.

The Israeli health minister had recently came to Cairo to visit a jailed Israeli spy while an Israeli delegation attended an inter-culture conference in Bibliotheca Alexandrina, organized under the auspices of the Egyptian First Lady.

Along with the Israeli threats to Egypt’s eastern borders and U.S. dictations, Ibrahim specially said the government is also to blame for "the incapacity of its foreign policy."

"So, I reject the award. I never sought such honoring," Ibrahim said defiantly, to the surprise of Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture Jaber Asfour and the head of the jury famous Sudanese novelist Tayeb Saleh.

In his latest novel, now translated into French, the outspoken Ibrahim scathed at the American hegemony on the Arab world.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Egypt Wednesday for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. 

‘Freedom’

Embarrassed by the salvoes, the stunned Hosni retracted that the scene is in itself a demonstration of "freedom" provided by the regime.

While Asfour said that Ibrahim did not rejected the award from the government " but rather from the Arab nation".

The Cairo forum is organized every two years by Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture with the participation of leading novelists and writers from Arab and foreign countries.

The prize awarded by the forum is considered to be one of the most prestigious across the Arab world.