Cairo citizens caught between
Isis violence and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s
draconian security crackdown with journalists and activists jailed and a new terrorism
law in effect, a culture of fear is growing in Egypt
Egyptian riot police stand in front of a damaged national
security building following a bomb blast in northern Cairo’s district of Shubra. Photograph: Ahmed
Abd El Fattah/ ahmed abd el fattah/Demotix/Corbis
Jared
Malsin in Cairo
Sunday 23 August 2015 00.05 BST
The blast shook buildings for miles around. Sleeping
residents awoke, called each other, then stared at glowing screens, seeking an
explanation for the explosion and the sirens wailing in the distance.
Egyptian activist, writer, and engineer Wael Eskandar.
Last Thursday a massive car bomb had detonated outside a
security building in Shubra Al-Khaima, a working-class district on Cairo’s northern edge.
Chunks of concrete had been blasted off the building, shards of glass were
sprinkled across the pavement. The windows of the neighbouring apartment
building had been blown out, the private spaces of the families within flung
open to the street.
In response, the government drafted a draconian counter-terrorism law that establishes
special courts and imposes fines on journalists who stray from the government’s
account of an attack. Critics say the law grants sweeping powers to the
president and could lead to an expansion of the government’s two-year-old
campaign against political opponents.
Ordinary Egyptians find themselves wedged between the
violence of the insurgents and a security state that wields unprecedented
power.
“I refer to it as the terror law because it’s not really
anti-terror. It’s legitimising state terror,” said Wael Eskandar, an Egyptian
journalist. “It’s a replacement for the emergency law, trumping the
constitution and trumping people’s right to freedom of expression, and granting
legalised impunity to police forces who are already very brutal.”
Egypt’s
president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, signed the new measure into law last Sunday.
Sisi is the former military commander who led the forced removal of the elected
Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. Egypt currently has no
parliament, and as a result legislative power rests in Sisi’s hands.
The legislation comes in the context of the two-year
clampdown. Since Morsi’s removal, the state has accelerated the use of lethal
force to suppress demonstrations, killing some 1,000 people in a single day in
August 2013. In the crackdown, more than 40,000 people have been arrested,
according to the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights.
Eskandar identifies with a generation of Egyptians who
participated in the 2011 uprising that ended three decades of dictatorship
under President Hosni Mubarak. It ejected Mubarak and his coterie from power
and dismantled his political apparatus.
Millions of Egyptians hoped the revolution would go beyond
merely a change of personnel to end the practices of authoritarian rule that
characterised Mubarak’s regime: torture, corruption, electoral fraud. But since
the 2013 military take- over, many of those same practices have returned and
increased. Beyond the raw data of the political clampdown, activists say fear
has crept back into Egyptian political life, a result of the re-emergence of a
Mubarak-era security state.
“There was this culture of fear of criticising the
government even under Mubarak, but now it feels even more real, where you know
they might act upon it,” said Eskandar. “It feels like I’m under threat all the
time. People I know are being threatened, being assaulted.”
The fear is a result of the possible consequences of running
foul of the security services. Egyptian human rights defenders and activists
have been jailed after farcical trials. Others have been banned from
travelling. Still others face murkier fates. Esraa El-Taweel, a 23-year-old
photojournalist, and two friends were reportedly arrested walking along the
Nile cornice in Cairo’s
Maadi neighbourhood on 1 June. For at least two weeks the authorities denied
the three were in custody. Two weeks later Taweel was reportedly spotted in a
prison.
Jailed Egyptian photographer and activist Esraa el-Taweel
Taweel is just one of dozens of people who have been
“disappeared” recently by Egypt’s
security forces, according to human rights groups. In early June a group called
Freedom for the Brave identified 163 people who went missing over two months.
The list included 64 people who were eventually located after spending more
than 24 hours in undisclosed detention, 66 who were still missing, and other
cases that were unverified.
In the new reality of a violent struggle between state and
insurgents, journalists also face harassment and worse at the hands of the
authorities. Reporting on the militants’ attacks has become a risky prospect,
not least because of police who have come to regard people with cameras as
suspect. After a bombing that destroyed part of the Italian consulate in Cairo in July, police
held four journalists for arriving on the scene “too fast”.
In reporters’ encounters with police, the stakes are high.
At least 18 journalists are in Egypt’s
prisons, according to a tally released in June by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. On
29 August, a verdict is expected in a retrial of three journalists – Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed
and Peter Greste – who spent more than 400 days in prison over their work with
Al Jazeera English. Another, photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known by the
nickname Shawkan,has now been in prison for more than two years after
attempting to document the August 2013 massacre in Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square.
“Their entire quest for power is built on a lie and they
want to maintain that lie, so it’s really important for them that they’re not
challenged,” said Eskandar. “So, for example, for international recognition
they need to counter journalists who are reporting out of Egypt.”
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