The Americans were allowed to go after nearly $5 million in bail was posted and they agreed to return for their trial. American officials are pressing to have the case dropped before then.
The United States provided a chartered plane, but a diplomat traveling with the Americans suggested some of the people leaving may have gone on other aircraft.
The State Department welcomed the departure of the Americans and other foreigners, but said that it would continue to press the Egyptian authorities not only to resolve the criminal charges, but to license the organizations.
“The departure of our people doesn’t resolve the legal case or the larger issues concerning the NGO’s,” the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said, referring to non-governmental organizations. “We remain deeply concerned about the prosecution of NGO’s in Egypt and the ultimate outcomes of the legal process. And we will keep working with the Egyptian government on these issues.”
The news followed several hours of confusion.
Egyptian officials had said on Wednesday night that the travel ban would be lifted in an apparent effort to resolve a crisis that has threatened the country’s 30-year alliance with Washington. But by late afternoon Thursday, the ban remained in place without explanation. The Americans remained holed up in the American Embassy for fear of arrest and imprisonment.
A domestic political backlash against the capitulation to American pressure had picked up steam throughout the day. It was unclear whether the delay in lifting the ban reflected bureaucratic sluggishness or a fear of the backlash.
The Americans involved in the case include the son of the Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who said in a statement that he was “pleased the court has lifted the travel ban and am looking forward to my son’s arrival in the U.S.”
The departure of the Americans had been expected to cool the escalating crisis, which could have regional implications. The United States had threatened to cut off the $1.3 billion in annual aid to Egypt’s military, and the Egyptians had retaliated by warning that they would reconsider the American-brokered peace treaty with Israel.
The lifting of the ban does not resolve charges against the nonprofit groups or their roughly dozen Egyptian employees, nor does it erase the fear among the many advocacy groups that have come under the same investigation.
At a time when Egyptians are demanding a new independence for their judiciary after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian courts appear instead to have bent to political pressure.
“To those who talk about sovereignty and independence: no matter what the circumstances surrounding the judicial indictment were, interfering in its work is a fatal strike to democracy,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former diplomat who is a leading liberal here, wrote Thursday in an online commentary.
His comments reflected the growing political backlash, fueled in part by inflammatory accusations from officials pressing the case that the American nonprofits were collaborating with spies to weaken Egypt for the benefit of the United States and Israel. On Wednesday, the office of the Egyptian public prosecutor issued a statement distancing him from the decision, and by Thursday the judges who had begun hearing the case had disavowed the decision as well.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that now leads the Egyptian Parliament, called for an investigation into who authorized the lifting of the travel ban and who allowed planes to land to fetch the defendants. In a statement to a morning television program and posted on the group’s Web site, Akram el Shaer, a Brotherhood member of parliament, said he felt “sad and disappointed” by the news.
The order to lift the travel ban follows weeks of increasingly tense diplomatic wrangling as American officials confronted what they came to describe as a vacuum of authority in the final months before the military council is to hand power to an elected president. Until the last moment before the announcement, the military leaders, top diplomats and senior judicial officials all professed that they could not interfere until the investigation had run its course.
“One of our problems is we don’t really have an Egyptian government to have a conversation with,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “And I keep reminding myself of that, because it is an uncertain situation for all the different players.”
The case could hardly have been better designed to infuriate American officials. All of the Americans who were under the travel ban work at groups known for their close ties to the Congressional leadership: the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. The latter is directed by Sam LaHood, son of Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.
The groups, which are chartered by Congress to promote democracy abroad and forbidden by law from seeking to influence election results, operated at some level in Egypt for several years though they faced heavy restrictions under Mr. Mubarak as well. Both were formally invited to observe the parliamentary elections last fall. They are best known for offering how-to training programs for political campaigns, and community organizing. Parties across the political spectrum — leftists, liberals, the mainstream Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservatives of the Salafi movement — have all participated.
The groups were charged under Mubarak-era restrictions requiring permission from security agencies to form a nonprofit group or receive money from abroad. Although no one disputes that the groups violated those rules, most observers here expected the rules to end with Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, and almost all independent advocacy groups here — dozens — violate the same rules.
The investigation was initiated last spring by a cabinet minister held over from the Mubarak government, Fayza Abul Naga, who had battled American officials for years to control the flow of American aid to Egypt and stamp out any efforts to support independent political, organizing or advocacy groups.
The case was accompanied by a steady escalation of anti-American statements in the state news media suggesting that the United States was paying nonprofit or activist groups to stir unrest in the Egyptian streets. And in December it culminated in raids by squads of heavily armed riot police officers that shut down a handful of foreign-financed nonprofit organizations, including the four American groups, seizing money, files and computers.
Soon President Obama was on the phone to Egypt’s top military officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, warning him of the gravity of the American threat to end its $1.3 billion in military aid. But despite the mounting pressure, Egyptian officials continued to defer to the prosecutors and courts, increasingly wary of the domestic political price of appearing to bow to America’s demands.
As recently as Saturday, American officials said they believed they were close to a deal to end the travel ban by the time the trial began the next day. But then on Sunday the Egyptian judges hearing the case surprised the American officials by quickly adjourning for two months, until April 26.
Then, Tuesday night, the judges abruptly recused themselves with no public explanation. Behind the scenes, a more senior judge had asked them to reconsider the ban, the judges wrote in a letter requesting their recusal. They wrote that the suggestion from above amounted to political pressure and had compromised their position, according to the letter, which was reported Wednesday afternoon in the Egyptian state media.
Their recusal, however, put the matter back in the hands of the top judiciary officials pending a new court assignment, and late Wednesday night they began putting out word that the ban would be lifted.
The American officials said Wednesday that they would continue to fight the case in court. Freedom House, another American group chartered to promote democracy, was also singled out in the investigation, but none of its American employees were caught by the travel ban.
Its director, Nancy Okail, is Egyptian and unaffected by the American deal. In the cage that served as a docket during the hearing on Sunday, she read a book by George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia.”
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David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo. New York Times. March 1, 2012
