Alaa AbdelFattah isn’t fighting to die.. He fights so that he and all of us can live

Her dark curls dance around her face as we both shake with laughter, as we relive memories of prison tales and what had been happening in the world beyond our prison bars, for the first time face to face. Do the decorations hanging on the wall above our heads, see what I see? Do they also feel the greatness of this long-awaited miracle?

We’re both here, out of confinement, and out of the country that had oppressed us. We’re both here, safe and free, sitting on the steps of the hotel stairs in Washington, D.C., at last meeting in safety, following years that never saw our paths intersect outside prison walls.

Sanaa pulls the sleeves of her jacket and tucks her fingers inside, even though we’re inside the hotel’s warm lobby. I watch her repeat the same habit every time with an absent look. I think of all the reasons and things that chill her, the weather not being one — the cold that touches Sanaa’s soul.. This is a cold that stems from within.

https://raseef22.net/article/1090496-alaa-abdelfattah-isnt-fighting-to-die-hee-he-fights-so-that-he-and-all-of-us-can

 

How Prisoners In Egypt Get Trapped In the System

When the University of Washington Ph.D. student was arrested in Cairo while researching the Egyptian judiciary, he asked the prosecutor for the accusations against him. Joining a terrorist group, he was told, and spreading fake news.

“I was pleased for a second, because these are so absurd, there’s absolutely no evidence, it’s very, very easy to refute,” said the student, Waleed K. Salem, 42. But as he found out, “Once you’re slapped with these labels, you go into the black box.”

He was now trapped. Held in pretrial detention, Mr. Salem was never tried or formally charged with a crime. Instead, every time he maxed out the legal detention period, a prosecutor extended his imprisonment in a hearing that usually lasted about 90 seconds.

“The first five months, you’re trying to convince yourself it’s just five months,” Mr. Salem said. “But after five months come and go and you’re still there, now you start to fear the worst.”

President Biden’s meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia on Friday was a conspicuous U-turn for the president, who once pledged to ostracize the prince over human rights atrocities.

But Mr. Biden will meet another Arab leader in Jeddah on Saturday whose human rights record he has also denounced: Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Egypt holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, according to rights groups and researchers, their ranks swelled by Mr. el-Sisi’s crushing campaign against dissent.

 

L’icône de la révolution Alaa Abdel Fattah en grève de la faim depuis 85 jours

Ses jours sont comptés. Détenu de manière quasi continue depuis 2013, l’icône de la révolution égyptienne Alaa Abdel Fattah en est à son 85e jour de grève de la faim pour protester contre ses conditions d’incarcération. « Il a décidé d’aller jusqu’au bout. Jusqu’à sa libération ou… la fin de sa vie », souffle l’une de ses deux sœurs, Mona Seif, au bout du fil. Il ne peut tout simplement pas endurer une année supplémentaire en prison. Depuis 14 jours, Mona Seif mène en signe de solidarité le même acte de protestation. « Alors que le régime égyptien garde Alaa hors de vue pour dissimuler sa grève de la faim, il fallait que moi, qui suis libre et amenée à rencontrer les officiels britanniques, rende visible son action à travers la mienne », confie-t-elle.

La semaine dernière, les autorités britanniques ont exprimé leur inquiétude concernant la grève de la faim du prisonnier politique ayant obtenu en avril la nationalité britannique, dont bénéficiait déjà sa mère. Interrogée mardi par une députée, la secrétaire d’État au Foreign Office, Liz Truss, a en outre indiqué qu’elle « travaillait très dur » pour obtenir la libération de Alaa Abdel Fattah et qu’elle prévoyait de porter prochainement son cas devant ses homologues égyptiens.

https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1303757/licone-de-la-revolution-alaa-abdel-fattah-en-greve-de-la-faim-depuis-85-jours.html

 

In Egypt, Indie Music Finds an Outlet Despite Repression

Ask almost any musician about the Egypt of 2011 to 2013, the couple of years following the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, and they’re likely to describe it as “euphoric,” a time of bursting, seemingly limitless possibilities, where visual arts, graffiti, theater and various creative forms blossomed to voice a historical moment. A slew of indie musicians, once at the fringes of an industry dominated by pop icons with little relevance to ordinary people’s lives, came up with anthems that shook the most populous Arab country’s youth at the height of its “spring.”

Singing from makeshift stages at protests and lamenting political oppression, a new generation of socially engaged artists was born. And with the rise in digital audio streaming platforms, such as SoundCloud, YouTube and Anghami in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it wasn’t long before this music scene attracted a wider audience and cemented the popularity of these artists.

But this heyday wouldn’t last; when military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in 2014, controlling the music industry that once served as a unifying voice for the opposition topped his agenda. From last-minute concert cancellations on alleged “security measures” to forcing venues to obtain various permits and imprisoning artists under supposed terrorism charges, Sisi’s regime has been waging a war against the indie music industry. The free theater, concerts, film screenings and art exhibitions, like Al-Fan Midan, that typified the cultural activism of the time are a thing of the past.

https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-egypt-indie-music-finds-an-outlet-despite-repression/

 

Putin’s war is helping Egypt’s army

Seven weeks in, the Middle East continues to practice the art of neutrality over the war in Ukraine, unwilling to openly take sides in a conflict many do not consider to be their war.

Yet the war is still affecting countries in the region, particularly those reliant on relations with or imports from Russia. None more so than Egypt, the Middle East’s biggest country, which is facing a combined food security and economic crisis, exacerbated by the war.

Egypt has suffered two painful blows from the conflict. The country is the world’s largest importer of wheat, getting 80 percent of its supply from Russia and Ukraine and is preparing for possible severe disruption. Alongside that uncertainty are prices; Egypt provides subsidised bread for approximately two thirds of its population, or around 70 million people. That is an enormous expenditure.

https://thearabweekly.com/putins-war-helping-egypts-army

 

Egypt’s sexual revolutionaries tackling the tyranny within

This January, just days after Egypt celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 2011 revolution, a 14-year-old girl died south of Cairo while undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM). Two months later, three men stormed into their female neighbour’s home armed with sticks and chains because they suspected her of having an extramarital affair. They subjected her to such torture that she threw herself from her balcony and died.

A decade after people across the region took to the streets to remove authoritarian leaders, a zealous determination to control female sexuality continues to kill women and girls in Egypt. Shortly after Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, I predicted that the military’s sexual assault of female activists in the form of “virginity tests” would spark a feminist revolution. I was ten years off, but it is now happening! Women and queer people are rising up against a form of tyranny even more stubborn than dictators in presidential palaces: patriarchy and its stranglehold on their bodies and sexualities.

The barricades of today’s sexual revolution are not to be found in the squares that reverberated with chants ten years ago. They are, instead, to be found on social media accounts that can be accessed by millions from the privacy of home, that place from which all tyrants spring and that is most in need of a revolution.

https://africanarguments.org/2021/10/egypts-sexual-revolutionaries-tackling-the-tyranny-within/

 

Le militant égyptien Patrick Zaki libéré, en attendant son procès

C’est le dernier cas en date. Depuis plusieurs mois, instruction semble avoir été donnée aux juges égyptiens de se pencher sur un certain nombre de dossiers ultramédiatisés de détenus politiques bénéficiant d’une large visibilité à l’international. Khaled Daoud, Hossam el-Sayed, Solafa Magdy, Hossam Bahgat et, aujourd’hui, Patrick Zaki : ces noms de détenus connus du grand public faisaient jusque-là tache dans l’entreprise de lifting du régime de Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, qui œuvre afin de redorer son blason après la multiplication de critiques portant sur la dégradation des libertés fondamentales en Égypte. La série de verdicts rendus depuis le printemps dernier a permis d’envoyer un nouveau signal en direction des partenaires étrangers, Washington en tête : celui d’un régime prêt à tourner la page des « années d’exception »… du moins en apparence.

https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1284174/le-militant-egyptien-patrick-zaki-libere-en-attendant-son-proces.html

 

Sisi’s New Cairo: Pharaonic Ambition in Ferro-Concrete

I have the sense, on many days, that my city is at war with itself. Not in the visibly armed meaning of battle, but an insidious crusade of ideology and will. Such is President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s plan to make over Egypt’s capital, a neo-pharaonic campaign so ludicrous it would be dismissible if it didn’t actually involve the pillaging of Cairo as it has existed, in parts, for centuries, erasing whole swaths of the city’s urban heritage and ravaging everything in its path, from the living to the dead.

This might sound like an exaggeration for effect, but the destruction is that dire, and that extensive. Thousands of buildings have been bulldozed, most of them residential, people’s homes. Across the city, several thousand acres of apartment blocks—representing lifetimes of people’s savings, family history, and memories—reduced to rubble. One of the first neighborhoods to go, a district dating in part back to the 1400s known as Maspero, only minutes from Tahrir Square, comprises some eighty-five acres of land that was once home to 18,000 residents; it was razed on the pretext of being an “informal settlement,” the modern planners’ euphemism for slum. Yet, anyone surveying the site before its buildings were demolished would have observed that even though some of them were in fact illegally built in more recent years, the majority were well-preserved, opulent art deco buildings dating back to the 1920s, with finely carved stone corbels on their facades and grand marble staircases that led to palazzo-style apartments with stucco-molded ceilings more than twelve feet high.

Neighborhoods are still being demolished with wrecking balls all over the city. I regularly drive on the “ring road,” a forty-mile highway that encircles Cairo, and over the past year have witnessed the disembowelment of the buildings on either side—the interiors of sitting rooms, bathrooms, kitchens exposed to the air as they are brought down. Although these buildings were hastily constructed on agricultural land, likely enabled by bribes to local municipalities to turn a blind eye to their zoning violations, these blocks nevertheless provided homes to tens of thousands of Cairenes. If I am stuck in traffic, there’s time to take in their cross-sections; hardest to look at are what must be children’s bedrooms, painted in bright shades of pink or green and blue. In these crowded poorer neighborhoods, those rooms rarely had much of a view—the polka dots and Disney characters on the walls were often all those kids had to enjoy.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/10/16/sisis-new-cairo-pharaonic-ambition-in-ferro-concrete/

 

Italian judge is asked to put Egyptian officers on trial over Giulio Regeni death

Italian prosecutors have asked a judge to put four senior members of Egypt’s powerful security services on trial over their suspected role in the disappearance and murder of Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016, as the case finally reached a courtroom five years after his death.

The 28-year-old doctoral student went missing in Cairo on 25 January 2016 while researching Egypt’s unions. His body was discovered on an outlying Cairo highway nine days later, displaying signs of extreme torture and abuse.

The Rome prosecutors have accused Gen Tariq Saber, Col Aser Ibrahim, Capt Hesham Helmi, and Maj Magdi Abd al-Sharif of the “aggravated kidnapping” of Regeni. Sharif, they say, should also be charged with “conspiracy to commit aggravated murder”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/29/italian-judge-is-asked-to-put-egyptian-officers-on-trial-over-giulio-regeni-death

 

Suez Canal: Sisi is a danger not only to Egypt, but to the world

When a 35km expansion of the Suez Canal was opened six years ago, banners appeared on the streets of Cairo proclaiming it to be Egypt’s “gift to the world“.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi welcomed foreign leaders on a yacht. Helicopters and jets performed a fly-by. The expansion was hailed as a national triumph and a turning point after years of instability.When the Suez Canal was closed unceremoniously by a 400-metre container ship hitting the bank in a dust storm on Tuesday, there was silence. For 26 hours, there was not a word about the closed canal, the shipping backing up in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, or of the Ever Given itself.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/suez-canal-sisi-danger-not-only-egypt-world