“Their punches and kicks came one after the other… There were moments of so much pain… targeting all my body. They started repeating one sentence, “What the fuck brought you today?”"
State Security officers had arrested democracy activist Mohamed al-Sharqawi on May 25 after he left a peaceful anti-government demonstration in downtown Cairo.
One of the officers ordered his pants to be removed and began squeezing his left testicle.
“The pain was terrible. He kept doing it for three minutes, during which I was screaming and asking him to stop so I could catch my breath. They ordered me to bend over. I refused, but they forced me.” Al-Sharqawi said officers then sodomized him with a roll of cardboard.
The NDP rules via a culture of fear in Egypt, treating democracy and human rights with contempt. Despite this $2 billion and almost $600 million a year in US and EU aid respectively, augments state funds, much of which is never seen on the ground.
Liberal opposition leader Ayman Nour, 41, is one person paying the price. Three months after becoming leader of Ghad (Tomorrow), in October 2006, he was arrested for forging signatures to register his party. On bail he came a distant second to the incumbent Hosni Mubarak, 78, in September’s Presidential elections, said by monitors to have been rigged. In December he was jailed for 5-years with an appeal declined, despite a key defendant claiming state security forced his statement and a prosecutor’s call for a retrial.
At the same time as Nour’s appeal in May President Mubarak’s son Gamal, 43, thought of as being groomed to replace his father, was spotted by an Al-Jazerra reporter entering the White House on which was later admitted as being a secret visit to Bush, Cheney and Rice.
“We’re all very furious about this,” Gameela Ismali, Newsweek’s Cairo correspondent and Nour’s wife, told me. “While we were being beaten in the street, assaulted, detained, he’s been received there. And then they come out and talk about democracy.”
The West is employing realpolitik rather than humanitarian motives for their alliance with Egypt, preferring a dictatorship to democratically elected Islamists or possibly unstable liberals. Crucial to US and British control in the oil rich Middle East and Islamic Arab world, Egypt is also an authoritative moderate regional force against Iran and Hamas. A bid in the US House of Representatives in June to reduce aid to Cairo by $100 million to show displeasure at democratic setbacks, with that aid to be split between Darfur refugee assistance and fighting the global AIDS epidemic, was narrowly defeated. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a letter to lawmakers called Egypt “a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Middle East.”
During its 25-year reign the NDP has asphyxiated its nation’s people and pluralistic structures. Since April government crackdowns have been harsh. Two judges have been imprisoned for claiming NDP electoral fraud in the 2005 elections; 100s of democratic protestors, journalists and 10 bloggers critical of the government have been detained. Mubarak, who promised a new era of democratic reform last year, has tightened his grip on the judiciary, selecting loyal judges for specific cases such as Nour’s.
Abuses have drawn barely any recognition in Washington, which said it was merely “disappointed” by the 2-year extension in April of a 25-year-old emergency decree, allowing the government to prevent gatherings of more than five individuals and hold people – at present totalling around 15,000 – indefinitely without charge. The major design of Bush’s second term, the radical pushing of democracy internationally, has gone.
“The West’s hypocritical,” says Ahmed Esmat, a 21-year-old electronic engineering student. “They lecture about democracy but help dictators, and it’s citizens here that suffer.”
Isamli is agonized by the “hollow statements” from the West. “[They should] stop backing this dictatorship,” she asserts. “I think Egyptian’s are really furious. Everybody can see clearly that Bush and his administration have other priorities in the Middle East. [Fine] But, then he should stop mentioning anything about freedoms, democracy and reform”
With a repressed liberal movement such anger leads to greater support for Islamists. Officially banned due to their religious links, the US feared Muslim Brotherhood now control almost twenty percent of Parliament after many of its members stood as independents at the elections. Human rights activist Dr Saad Eddin Ibrahim, whose organisation completed election monitoring and exit polls, noted: “The Muslim Brotherhood got 4% of the vote. About half of them are protest votes [overall] giving them 20% of the seats.”
Ibrahim, 67, has felt the emergency law’s effects. He was imprisoned in 2000, until his acquittal in 2003, for criticizing Egypt’s political process despite his having only ever undertaken peaceful human-rights protests. “I was subjected to 45 days of sleep deprivation,” he told me. “Since I became a cause celebre they were careful not to use the crude torture they usually use and that they used with others [from his organization].”
The Muslim Brotherhood are also regularly targeted by the government. They claimed to have had 300 of their members detained at the protest in May that saw Al-Sharqawi’s arrest. The majority of the 15,000 imprisoned without charge are thought to be Islamists.
The Egyptian government is swift to absolve itself of any responsibility for abuses. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif assured that, “We will never use the emergency law other than to protect the citizen and the security of the nation and combat terrorism.”
To Ibrahim, instead of finding an ally in fighting “terrorism” in the NDP, the West should be pushing further for democracy: “To me this is the only way democracy will take place. Or at least the support for the autocrats has to be withdrawn. We can fight them, we have seen that. But when they give them arms and aid it weakens our ability to bring them down, to get them to bargain and compromise.”
The West’s strategic relationship with Egypt, and fear of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, means democracy and human rights can wait for Egyptians. This neglect for a major ally’s use of torture and degradation of pluralistic political belief exposes the lie behind neo-con idealism, Bush’s platform and the Iraqi war.
There leaves little opportunity for redress by Egyptians: “I’m not happy,” says 26-year-old Mahdy Shahine, a communications undergraduate. “In the UK you can say anything about your government. In Egypt nobody can.” The effect, with 25-years of de-politicization of the population by the NDP, is apathy. Few young people are involved in politics of any form and there is little associational behaviour. In a country with a median age of 24 the effect is widespread, ensuring that on asking many young people to tell me their views on their government I receive only a familiar Egyptian tut, a shake of the head and the contact of wrists, suggesting handcuffs, as an answer.
