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On Hunger Strike: Repression in Egypt
After the shock and awe tactics of the Rabaa massacre last summer, when Egypt’s military regime murdered around a thousand supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, the rolling counter-revolution has played out mostly within the justice system, between police stations, prisons and courtrooms. The system is self-contained and unaccountable: graduates of the Police Academy are automatically granted a law degree and can move fluidly from police station to prosecutor’s office to judge’s bench. It is inconsistent and unpredictable: judges hand down idiosyncratic sentences, or drag cases out for paralysing periods of time. It is bound to the executive: judges routinely wait for ‘the phone call’ before ruling.
The Emergency Law which was introduced after Sadat’s assassination and remained in force throughout Mubarak’s presidency allowed the police to arrest people arbitrarily and then detain them indefinitely. Ending that law was one of the clearest demands of the uprising that forced Mubarak from power in February 2011. The law expired in May 2012 and although the military regime revived it briefly after the Rabaa massacre, it could not be reinstated permanently because it remained such a powerful symbol of the Mubarak era. Instead the regime devised a new Protest Law, which came into effect on 25 November 2013. A 1914 British law which banned mobilisation against the colonial administration was dusted off and the Muslim Brotherhood outlawed as terrorists.
This set the legal framework for the present assault on the traditional incubators of dissent: universities, independent media, the internet, NGOs, legal aid organisations, cafés, football matches, unions, street protests. One by one these spaces are being shut down. The streets of central Cairo are lined with APCs and riot police 24 hours a day. The internet is to be monitored by a new ‘electronic grip’, as the Interior Ministry has been calling it in leaked internal memos. NGOs are being told to choose between close oversight or closing down. Students have been expelled for criticising the government and killed for protesting. The last reliable figures, released in May, put the number of arrests since the coup at 41,000, of which 36,000 were at or following ‘political events’.
Some activists have been quickly tried and sentenced. Others are being kept in limbo. My cousin Alaa Abd El-Fattah is one of the best known. He has been imprisoned or charged under every Egyptian regime to rule in his lifetime (he was born in November 1981, a month after Sadat’s assassination); most recently he’s been accused of organising a protest on 26 November 2013. Three hundred people gathered outside the Shura Council, Egypt’s upper house, to protest against a provision in the draft constitution that would allow civilians to be tried in military courts. Police in plainclothes and balaclavas attacked them with tear gas and water cannon: 46 people were arrested, of whom 24 were held in custody. Two nights later, a squadron of armed and masked police raided Alaa’s home, beat him and his wife while their child slept in the next room, and dragged Alaa off, blindfolded and barefoot, his hands tied behind his back.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/omar-robert-hamilton/on-hunger-strike
The Emergency Law which was introduced after Sadat’s assassination and remained in force throughout Mubarak’s presidency allowed the police to arrest people arbitrarily and then detain them indefinitely. Ending that law was one of the clearest demands of the uprising that forced Mubarak from power in February 2011. The law expired in May 2012 and although the military regime revived it briefly after the Rabaa massacre, it could not be reinstated permanently because it remained such a powerful symbol of the Mubarak era. Instead the regime devised a new Protest Law, which came into effect on 25 November 2013. A 1914 British law which banned mobilisation against the colonial administration was dusted off and the Muslim Brotherhood outlawed as terrorists.
This set the legal framework for the present assault on the traditional incubators of dissent: universities, independent media, the internet, NGOs, legal aid organisations, cafés, football matches, unions, street protests. One by one these spaces are being shut down. The streets of central Cairo are lined with APCs and riot police 24 hours a day. The internet is to be monitored by a new ‘electronic grip’, as the Interior Ministry has been calling it in leaked internal memos. NGOs are being told to choose between close oversight or closing down. Students have been expelled for criticising the government and killed for protesting. The last reliable figures, released in May, put the number of arrests since the coup at 41,000, of which 36,000 were at or following ‘political events’.
Some activists have been quickly tried and sentenced. Others are being kept in limbo. My cousin Alaa Abd El-Fattah is one of the best known. He has been imprisoned or charged under every Egyptian regime to rule in his lifetime (he was born in November 1981, a month after Sadat’s assassination); most recently he’s been accused of organising a protest on 26 November 2013. Three hundred people gathered outside the Shura Council, Egypt’s upper house, to protest against a provision in the draft constitution that would allow civilians to be tried in military courts. Police in plainclothes and balaclavas attacked them with tear gas and water cannon: 46 people were arrested, of whom 24 were held in custody. Two nights later, a squadron of armed and masked police raided Alaa’s home, beat him and his wife while their child slept in the next room, and dragged Alaa off, blindfolded and barefoot, his hands tied behind his back.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/omar-robert-hamilton/on-hunger-strike