On Sunday, the first day of COP27, the U.N. climate change conference in Egypt, Alaa Abd El Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist and writer whose seven-month hunger strike began as an effort to force the Egyptian authorities to permit British consular access to him in prison, escalated his protest by refusing water and all liquids.
Alaa, who has been in prison for most of the past nine years, was a popular, independent voice during the 2011 revolution, known for his fierce commitments to human rights and, above all, to bodily integrity. He insists that freedom from physical threat, violence and precarity must belong to everybody, be they a marginalized group, a political opponent or a prisoner, and that otherwise we are all in danger.… Seguir leyendo »
In early 2011, after huge protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square ended Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade autocracy, many activists who had taken to the streets found themselves in high demand. They were guests on “The Daily Show”. Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, visited the square, remarking it was “extraordinary” to be “where the revolution happened”, and met with some of the activists.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the Egyptian activist, intellectual and blogger described as “synonymous with Egypt’s 25 Jan. Revolution” knew the world’s attention would soon move on.
“They’ll soon forget about us”, he told me more than a decade ago.… Seguir leyendo »
Standing outside the Tora prison complex, where my son is held, a mother asks me: What’s your son in for?
“Politics”, I say.
She looks surprised, not because you can be imprisoned for politics — there’s nothing strange about that in Egypt — but because most political prisoners are Islamists, and she doesn’t think I look like the mother of an Islamist. “He was one of shabab al-thawra, ” I add, the young people of the revolution.
No further explanation is needed.
Why is my son, Alaa Abd El Fattah, in prison? He is one of tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt.… Seguir leyendo »
In the six years since Abdel Fatah al-Sissi assumed the presidency in Egypt, the country has devolved into the deepest human rights crisis it has experienced in decades. In the face of this downward spiral, it’s not surprising that many in the West have stopped paying attention. As more and more activists are exiled or jailed, human rights abuses in Egypt have become a dog-bites-man story.
But last week, the government crossed a dangerous new threshold in its crackdown on peaceful dissent, one that all who care about the global struggle against authoritarianism should note and condemn.
On Tuesday, for the first time since their creation, Egypt’s special counterterrorism courts sentenced a prominent human rights activist to the maximum penalty under provisions of a draconian new cybercrime law: 15 years in prison for criticizing the Sissi regime.… Seguir leyendo »
We woke to the news last Friday: The 37-year-old software-developer and pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd El Fattah had finally been released from prison, after completing a five-year sentence for having called for street protests in defiance of the law. “Alaa is out. Yes, I swear,” tweeted his sister, Mona Seif, in Arabic. Not long after, she shared a blurry photo of him, sitting on a rattan chair at their family home, playing with their dog. Next came a photo of Alaa sitting with his now seven-year-old-son and holding the boy’s little feet.
It wasn’t Alaa’s first arrest, but his seventh, and longest, under four governments.… Seguir leyendo »
I’ll never forget the words I read scribbled on the wall when I was first put into a cage in a Cairo courtroom, on Feb. 26, 2012: “If defending justice is a crime, then long live criminality.”
That was the first day of my trial, Case No. 173/2011. (In Egyptian courtrooms, defendants are kept in cages.) Along with 42 other defendants, 17 of them Americans, who worked for international nongovernmental organizations in Egypt, I was charged with operating an organization without a license (not true) and receiving illegal foreign funds (also not true). All of us worked for organizations promoting the rule of law, transparency and democracy.… Seguir leyendo »
For the past three Tuesdays, Egypt has hanged civilians sentenced to death by military tribunals:
Jan. 9: Three men were hanged. They had been convicted of rape and sentenced to die by a military tribunal in 2011.
Jan. 2: Four men accused of being Islamic militants were hanged. They had been tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal for an attack in 2015 outside a stadium that killed three military academy students.
Dec. 26: Fifteen men accused of being militants were hanged. A military tribunal had convicted them in November and sentenced them to death for an attack on a military checkpoint in the Sinai Peninsula in 2013 in which one officer and eight soldiers were killed.… Seguir leyendo »
In October, Alaa Abed, a former police investigator, became the chairman of the human rights committee in Egypt’s Parliament. The majority bloc that supports President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to which Mr. Abed belongs, ensured his victory by flooding the committee with loyalist members, a show of strength that led Mr. Abed’s rivals to drop out.
His victory, technically within the Parliament’s rules, demonstrated Egypt’s take on “managed democracy,” a term experts often use to describe Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin and other countries ruled by strongmen. It’s a system in which elections and other formal trappings of democracy persist but lose their meaning; in reality, authority is centralized, often in the hands of security agencies.… Seguir leyendo »
For some reason, I always had a feeling that I would end up in prison.
Somewhere at the edge of my awareness, I thought I would end up being a prisoner of conscience for speaking against injustice in some part of the world. I remember reading prison memoirs, etching in my mind the ways prisoners said they survived their torture, just in case I would need these strategies myself. This bizarre fear turned out to come true, but not for myself; my younger sister Aya is the one who is imprisoned in Egypt.
Today is the 900th day that Aya has been held in illegal pretrial detention over absurd and unfounded charges.… Seguir leyendo »
On Wednesday, three judges in Cairo will decide whether to allow prosecutors to pursue their case against me and my co-defendant, the journalist and human rights advocate Hossam Bahgat, in the government’s continuing attack on nongovernmental organizations in Egypt. The case against me has centered on my role in founding the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, which aims to educate the Egyptian public about their civil and human rights.
As for Mr. Bahgat, it is widely known that his investigative reporting has rattled the government. But the case against him has focused on the activities of the organization he founded, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.… Seguir leyendo »
My friend Mostafa Massouny has one of the most eclectic music collections of anyone I know. I initially typed “had” and “knew,” because I fear Mostafa is dead.
We met at a party where I was impressed by a playlist of Nubian musicians he played. Since then, he shared some of that collection with me, often via Facebook or Twitter messages sent at the oddest of hours, accompanied with a simple “listen.” The two most recent gifts I got from him, last year: Chet Baker and Paul Desmond’s “Autumn Leaves,” followed by Hugo Díaz’s “Guitarra Mia.” It was always a delight to receive a YouTube or SoundCloud link from him.… Seguir leyendo »
These are grim times in Egypt. The country is still absorbing the news of the downing of the Russian airliner that killed 224 people last month. But to many, the tears of 23-year-old Esraa el-Taweel most poignantly captured the grinding misery of life under the military-backed regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Ms. Taweel, a photojournalist and student, was shot in the back in 2014 when police dispersed a protest to mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 25 revolution, which she was photographing. Still partially disabled, she uses a crutch to get around.
On June 1, after dining out with friends, she was bundled into a van and taken to a national security facility.… Seguir leyendo »
Together with two colleagues from the cable news channel Al Jazeera English, I have spent more than a year in jail. We were accused of joining a terrorist group conspiring against the Egyptian state and reporting “false news.” In reality, we were simply doing our job as journalists.
Then, on Jan. 1, Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed and I learned that our appeal had succeeded and that our case would be retried. We had hoped for more: to be released on bail pending the new trial, which will take months to convene. But we took heart from the court’s ruling. It was official confirmation that our original trial was seriously flawed and that our convictions, in June, were erroneous.… Seguir leyendo »
The Pyramids are face-lift flawless, the grass is almost neon bright and even the air itself appears to have been retouched. This portrait of perfection, an ad introducing a “New Egypt: Peace, Prosperity & Growth,” was posted last month in Times Square.
What, exactly, is the “New Egypt”? Three very different answers appeared on three different billboards over three recent weeks.
On Sept. 24, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. To coincide with his visit, advertisements like the one in Times Square went up across the city.
But if you look closer, the “New Egypt” in these ads is as much an illusion as Mr.… Seguir leyendo »
In 2011, they stood united against tyranny and for freedom. Today, though divided by politics and locked up in separate prisons, Egypt’s dissenters still fight, this time to survive. At 26, Mohamed Soltan may be dying. After more than 240 days of a hunger strike in which he allows himself only fluids, he recently made his second visit to an intensive care unit in three months.
A graduate of Ohio State University and the son of a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, he was arrested in August 2013 during a crackdown on Brotherhood sympathizers following the ouster of Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s elected president; the security forces were looking for his father, who wasn’t home, and arrested him instead, eventually charging him with funding a demonstration and spreading “false information” to destabilize Egypt.… Seguir leyendo »
In Egypt last month, three journalists were found guilty of doing their jobs and given seven- and 10-year jail terms. Apparently, little has changed. A little more than a year earlier, I and 42 other employees of international human rights groups were similarly convicted at a Cairo trial that the U.S. and European governments have condemned as politically motivated. I was sentenced to five years in prison with hard labor after being found guilty in absentia of a trumped-up felony.
In my case, appointees held over from the regime of Hosni Mubarak used repressive laws to target our groups for providing democracy assistance, manipulating the bureaucratic machinery for their own ends.… Seguir leyendo »
After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, I sometimes wondered how things would have looked if his generals had tried to defend his 30-year regime.
Now I know.
Cairo is a city under the military gun. Soldiers man checkpoints scattered on main streets. Police vans and riot squads hide in back streets. Supporters of the new order run rampant, in organized — if you can call it that — groups seemingly under the command of teenagers who appear to have an excessive affection for swords.
State television runs endless loops of patriotic videos featuring the national anthem and fresh-faced preteen kids frolicking in weirdly litter-free streets, a rarity in Cairo.… Seguir leyendo »
As Egyptians prepare for their milestone presidential election this week, thousands of activist youths who spearheaded the revolution -- the very ones who made the election possible -- will not be casting a vote. Instead, they are in prison, facing military trials.
On May 4, more than 350 protesters, including 16 women and 10 children, were arrested near Defense Ministry in the Abbaseya neighborhood of Cairo, adding to the approximately 12,000 political prisoners detained since the Revolution.
The Abbaseya protesters fortunate enough to be released from detention have revealed horrific stories of torture and abuse at the hands of military officers.… Seguir leyendo »
As Egypt marks the first anniversary of the Jan. 25 civilian revolt that eventually toppled the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, there's no agreement — on how to celebrate or even whether rejoicing is in order.
The current military rulers — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF — want to hold parades and aerial jet exhibitions to exult in the revolution, of which their main part was to ease Mubarak out of power. Youth groups and democracy activists who originally engineered the uprising are carrying on a campaign called "The Generals are Liars," with mini-demonstrations and audiovisual presentations in the streets documenting police and military abuses.… Seguir leyendo »
A months-long campaign against civil-society groups by Egypt’s military leadership came to a head Thursday when Egyptian security forces raided the Cairo offices of Freedom House and several other international and local nongovernmental organizations. These attacks were a major setback to the hopes that emerged this year with the revolution in Tahrir Square. If corrective measures are not taken, the attacks will severely damage Egypt’s long-term stability and prospects for a more democratic future.
The protests in January and February that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak offered hope to the Egyptian people for the first time in decades. Coming on the heels of the movement that brought down Tunisia’s longtime ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben-Ali, the revolution reflected Egyptians’ pent-up frustration with endless human rights abuses, rigged elections and lack of real economic opportunity.… Seguir leyendo »
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