EGYPT: Egypt between the Hammer and the Anvil...

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.

Such incidents have become almost routine in Cairo. The Egyptian state is locked in battle with an accelerating insurgency. In June, Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, was assassinated in a bombing in an elite Cairo neighbourhood. Days later, insurgents staged a brazen attack on the military’s positions in north Sinai. Last week, Islamic State militants claimed to have beheaded a Croatian man who was abducted from a desert highway outside Cairo.

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.”

EGYPT: Egypt's attacks on press freedom unprecedented, says watchdog

Mahmoud Abou-Zeid, an Egyptian photojournalist known by his nickname Shawkan, appears before a judge in May for the first time after spending more than 600 days in prison in Cairo. Photograph: Lobna Tarek/AP

Journalists face unprecedented threats in Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi’s Egypt, a watchdog has said, with the highest number behind bars in the country since it began keeping records in 1990.

In a report detailing the incarceration of 18 Egyptians, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said on Thursday that most were accused of affiliation with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood of the ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

It said the threat of imprisonment in Egypt is part of a stifling atmosphere in which authorities pressure media outlets to censor critical voices and issue gag orders on sensitive topics. It said the president, Sisi, had invoked national security to trample on liberties.

“CPJ spoke to high-level officials, including the prosecutor general and the minister of transitional justice, who denied that Egypt was holding any journalists in jail in relation to their work,” the group said in the report, which was based on a census, taken on 1 June, of Egyptian prisons. “But CPJ research shows that the government of al-Sisi … has used the pretext of national security to crack down on human rights, including press freedom.”

As army chief, Sisi overthrew Morsi in 2013 during protests against his rule, before winning a landslide election last year. Since the overthrow, authorities have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents, killing hundreds, jailing thousands and sparking a backlash of attacks against security forces, mostly in the restive Sinai peninsula. Activists say dozens more journalists have been detained.

Ahmed Mansour, an al-Jazeera journalist, speaks to the press on Monday after leaving jail in Berlin, where he was detained on an Egyptian warrant. Photograph: Michael Sohn/AP

Cases detailed in the report show that most were jailed for covering protests, airing views contrary to the government or reporting on injustices committed against people affiliated with the Brotherhood, which Egypt considers a terrorist organisation. Several stand accused of “spreading chaos”, while others are charged with disseminating “false news” or anti-government messages.

In one case highlighted in the report, Mahmoud Abou-Zeid was arrested in August 2013 while taking photographs of the violent dispersal of a pro-Morsi sitin, in which hundreds of Islamists were killed. He has been in pre-trial detention since then and has not been formally charged.

“I spoke with him last week and he was tired and depressed,” said his brother, Mohamed. “We don’t know what will happen next and have no information regarding the future of the case. It is a very difficult situation for all of us.”

In another case, a photographer, Omar Abdel-Maksoud, was arrested in 2014 while covering a baby shower for a woman who had been detained and forced to give birth in a hospital in handcuffs. Police launched a violent raid on the gathering, the report said, citing local media.

CPJ cited cases of journalists disappearing into Egypt’s labyrinth of detention facilities without lawyers or family members knowing where they were, with court hearings sometimes taking place without their knowledge.

It said the heavy restrictions meant that scarce information emerged from entire regions, especially Sinai, where militant groups are fighting security forces and little was known about the conflict’s toll on civilians. One journalist from the area, Saeed Abuhaj, was arrested for carrying a leaflet bearing Brotherhood slogans, his lawyer said. He has been charged with inciting violence and using weapons against police.

Several high-profile cases involving the state’s campaign against journalists have attracted international attention, most recently that of Ahmed Mansour, a journalist for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera, who was stopped in Germany when officers there acted on an Egyptian arrest warrant. After detaining him last weekend, German prosecutors decided on Monday to free him and not pursue his extradition to Egypt, where he was convicted in 2011 on torture charges he denies. CPJ and France’s Reporters Without Borders criticised the detention.

Al-Jazeera has been a particular focus for Egypt following Morsi’s overthrow, since the current government sees it as a mouthpiece for the Brotherhood. Three journalists from its English-language channel are being retried on charges of being part of a terrorist group and airing falsified footage. One of the three, Australian journalist Peter Greste, has been deported.

An Egyptian journalist at a protest in Cairo last year calling for the release of Mahmoud Abou-Zeid (Shawkan). Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP

In the US, the administration of Barack Obama has criticised Egypt’s restrictions on free speech and the arrests of political dissidents, citing a “steadily shrinking space for political dissent”. But Washington has continued to provide Cairo with $1.3bn (£830m) in annual military aid after briefly suspending it following Morsi’s ousting.

Egypt’s first freely elected president, Morsi was recently sentenced to death in connection with a mass prison break during the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

An Egyptian journalist not cited in the report said he and others, especially videographers and photographers, are regularly targeted when they cover Brotherhood-affiliated protests. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

“They raided my family’s apartment looking for me six times since 2013, and this month they smashed up a lot of furniture,” he said, adding that he has been staying with friends. “My work is a blessing and a curse – I’m living on the run.”