1000 leila wa leila Lower Egyptian style

This photo looks like it´s taken from One Thousand and One Nights , but it´s actually taken in lower Egypt around 1885. It´s among a beautiful gallery of Egyptian photos from 1800-2013 collected by the Egyptian Streets website. Go , have a look and enjoy.

We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

UPDATE: According to the Cairo-based journalist Bel Trew the detention of Dr Tarek Loubani and Mr John Greyson has been extended by 45 days. More details to follow.


Two Canadian professors on 12th day of hunger strike in Torah prison describe their ordeal.

Dr Tarek Loubani and Mr John Greyson arrived in Egypt, en route to Gaza, just a day after the Rabaa and Nahda sit-in dispersals that left between 600-1000 killed. They found the Rafah border closed due to security reasons. Instead of going to Gaza the next day, August 16th they got caught in the Ramses Square clashes.

when suddenly calls of “doctor”. A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode…and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

Dr Tarek Loubani and Mr John Greyson then got arrested while asking police for directions to their hotel after curfew had started.

“That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

Then they were taken to Torah prison and they describe the conditions they and other prisoners are facing:


“We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls. The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up.

This gives us an insider look on how not only Dr Loubani and Mr Greyson are treated , but also on their cell mates , presumably , anti-coup (Morsi)supporters , or low level MB´s. Most likely they are being treated slightly better than their fellow cell mates without a foreign passport, and their prospects of getting out of this ordeal is fairly good. Though one senses that having a foreign passport dosen´t automatically help these days. The case of the french Cairo resident getting killed , presumably by his cell mates just 11 days ago being part of that anecdotal feeling. And that says a lot about the current climate since the July 3rd regime change. This is not a regime that are overly scared about bad publicity.

Dr Loubani and Mr Greyson ends their statement with a sentence that the Egyptian authorities and especially interim president Adly Mansour should take to heart, considering their claim that what governs Egypt post July 3rd is the rule of law:

“We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

“Peace, John & Tarek”

Another account of the Torah prison experience post July 3rd, by Mourad Ali the FJP´s (The political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood) spokesperson can be read here.

Dr Tarek Loubani and Mr John Greyson statement in full below. How to help.


September 28/13, 11am

We have held on to this statement out of fear that the Egyptian authorities would harm Tarek and John if we released it. But given the announcement of impending charges in the Toronto Star today, we think that their own words can explain what the “evidence” the Egyptian authorities claim to have is. We believe that the impending charges have much more to do with what Tarek and John witnessed on August 16th, rather than what the Egyptian authorities claim they did.

Statement:

“We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since August 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3m x 10m cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.

“We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.

“Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).

“Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th, our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera. The protest was just starting – peaceful chanting, the faint odour of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead – when suddenly calls of “doctor”. A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode…and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

“We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.

“That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

“We were two of 602 arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.

“We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls. The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.

“We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

“Peace, John & Tarek”

Bassem Youssef wins the CPJ International Press Freedom Award 2013

Bassem Youssef is among for recipients awarded the Committee to protect journalists International Press Freedom Award for 2013 , the other three being Janet Hinostroza from Ecuador, Nedim Şener from Turkey and Nguyen Van Hai from Vietnam.

CPJ describes Bassem Youssef like this:


On his program, Youssef has taken on political conservatives and liberals alike, in a quest to inform and shatter stereotypes. Following a long tradition of satire that blends comedy with hard news, Youssef uses sharp humor to report on and critique government failures to improve the economy, public services, and safety, and its efforts to suppress opinion--whether in the name of religion under Morsi or in the name of security under the current military-backed government. He also addresses controversial topics and the limitations of free speech in a weekly column for independent Egyptian daily Al-Shorouk.

In 2012, the Morsi-led government pursued criminal charges against Youssef for "insulting the president," "insulting Islam," and "reporting false news." In March 2013, an arrest warrant was issued. After voluntarily appearing before prosecutors, Youssef was briefly detained, released on bail, and later fined. The criminal case did nothing to blunt his sarcastic edge. "I will not tone down my criticism," Youssef told CPJ in June 2013, just days before Morsi was ousted. "Freedom of speech is not a gift, it's a birthright."

Bassem Youssef will recieve the award together with the other three on November 26 in New York.

Here is how it all began.

Two months for torturing suspects

Yet another case of policemen tried for torturing suspects in 2011 , this time with the twist of two policemen actually getting a sentence.

So what was the case about:

Investigations had revealed that the two policemen arrested two bearded brothers at an airport in February 2011 and tortured them at Almaza Prison to force them to confess that they belong to terrorist organizations.

And what about the sentence for doing this to the two innocent brothers one might ask? Two months with hard labour with the option of paying L.E. 500 (amounts to 725 USD) bail for a suspended sentence. On top of that , it´s most likely they will also keep their work as policemen.

For sake of not being too onesided in dealing with this story, the tortured brothers will get compensated:

The court also ordered the defendants to pay 10,000 pounds (1,450 US Dollars) as a temporary compensation to the alleged victims.

For as long as anyone can remember the culture of impunity towards the endemic human rights violations taking place in police stations , prisons and security camps , this was the case during the Mubarak years and the case of Khaled Said , whom was tortured to death by policemen in Ibrahimiyya, Alexandria in June 2010 was one key trigger of the January 25th revolution 2011 , Jan 25th being police day in Egypt.

The years since the Jan 25 revolution in 2011 has not changed that in any way. The lack of reform within the police is one of the most frustrating and disapointing aspects of the last 30 months.

For more on torture in Egypt since 2005 , including the case of Emad al Kebir. read here.

Photo chronicler of the Egyptian revolution Mosa´ab Elshamy website

One of my absolute favourite photo chroniclers of the Egyptian revolution, Mosa´ab ElShamy has a new website up showcasing his great work. The photos from Rabaa shows the determination , the devastation , grief , chaos and absolute horror that will forever be connected to that place and time in history.

The website is found here and you can also follow him on twitter.

La Moneda and al Ittihadiyya - 9/11 and July 3rd

40 years ago this month , the military coup against president Salvador Allende occured , starting with the attack by the Chilean air force on the presidential palace La Moneda. Salvador Allende took his own life defending the constitution and the presidency rather than surrender to the Junta. The date 9/11 has been a commemoration for Chilean democracy , freedom and also opposition to General Pinochet´s rule during the seventeen long years of autocratic rule.

There has been a lot of comparison between what happend in 1973 and the July third coup in Egypt , some have bearing , and some not. Ellis Goldberg has written a long and thoughtful piece on the two coups and i can´t help but love the way he begins the blog post and i´m wondering if someone in forty years time will have a framed picture of Morsi on his wall and get the same reaction of why and whom this man is. Surely there are still people having Nasser on their walls , even in their shops , but a man like the first president and July 23rd army coup figure head Muhammed Naguib is almost forgotten by the large public , or at least was until Jan25 2011.

Here is how Ellis Goldberg starts off his Tale of Two Coups:

I keep a black and white photograph on the wall. It’s a grainy old black and white photo, poorly mounted and inexpertly framed. Very few people who mount the stairs from the door to my living room recognize the faces in the picture. Usually they ignore it completely but sometimes their attention is drawn by the large hammer and sickle in the center foreground. It has been years since any visitors recognized that the unsmiling, somber figure just above and behind the Communist emblem is the former President of Chile, Salvador Allende. He is, appropriately perhaps, surrounded by members of the Popular Unity government and yet appears to be abstracted and isolated. Only the Minister of Labor, Luis Figueroa, is looking directly at Allende who lay dead in Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, a week after the photograph was taken. General Augusto Pinochet had seized power in a military coup and the Chilean Air Force had bombed Chile's own government center.

The rest of the long and well written piece that pose many important questions can be read here.

Cairo University Hospital staff banned from talking politics

Dr. Alaa Maher, general manager of Cairo University Hospitals, issued a decree banning doctors, nurses and workers of the university hospitals from discussing politics.

One indication of how divided Egypt has become. You´re either for or against and nothing in between...

Curfew dosen´t suit Cairo

This is a must read by Sarah Carr on Egypt during the last month or so.

On curfew in a city that normally never sleeps , never shuts down , and never ever turns silent..

Life in Egypt has mostly shrunk, politically, geographically, socially. For two long weeks, Egyptians in governorates affected by the unrest were under a curfew from 7 pm till 6 am. A frenzied scuttling began in Cairo around 5 pm, as shop shutters were banged shut and commuters began to head home. Daredevils who left too late faced the wrath of unpredictable army officers at checkpoints.
And then, from 7 pm, the terrible stillness. Curfew doesn’t suit Cairo, a city whose élan derives principally from its inhabitants and which is used to stretching and coming alive after the sun has set, in the cool of the evening. Without them there is nothing to see but the city’s decline, an ordinary face without the disguise of transformative makeup, the clear blue eyes of the river its only untouched feature.

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On going back to old tactics , on how to make the situation much worse than it could have been. Simply put the Rabaa massacare , the blood , the people , their cause and the chaos , and aftermath , the effectiveness of how to clean away , a place that until August 14th was full of life. The effectiveness of cleaning away evidence , restoring normallness and earie empty silence.


A principal reason Egypt is in its current political mess is that successive regimes—like regimes of poor governance everywhere—have equated shutting down the physicality of dissent with addressing this dissent. The best example of this was the August 14 dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-ins in Cairo. Conservative figures put the death toll at nearly a thousand, with many more injured.
I went to the Rabaa El-Adaweya area of Nasr City in Cairo, the site of the biggest sit-in, the next morning. It was a post-apocalyptic scene. Bulldozers roared up and down the street carrying away debris at great speed. The air was filled with the dust from their tracks. Donkey carts trundled between them and the smoldering remains of fires. Waste pickers worked over what was left: clothes, medicine, shoes belonging to the dead and to those who had fled. The image of deposed President Mohamed Morsi peeked out from posters trapped in the piles of waste that the pickers could not convert into profit.
In less than twenty-four hours, it was as if the sit-in—which had acquired the proportions of a small but developed village, with barbers, a children’s playground and even two-tier housing—had never been. It is the same story with the smaller Nahda Square sit-in in Giza, another patch of land that had been appropriated by supporters of deposed president Morsi. I went through an army checkpoint there after curfew a week after it was attacked, and all that remained was some graffiti and scorched land where tents—including the people inside them—had been set on fire.

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She goes on to describe the way the general public has reacted to the clampdown on the MB and their media outlets , with silence , but clapping hands to the march of al Sissi and Muhammed Ibrahim in their fight against "Terrorism" Almost all media goes in the same direction. She ends like this:

In one of Cairo’s public squares, there are badly produced posters for sale depicting Sisi holding a knife slaughtering a sheep with Morsi’s head. “This is what happens to those that don’t do as the people say,” the poster warns grimly. The general public, in its desire to see the Brotherhood destroyed, agrees with this sentiment, and it is this that is most dangerous about the current state of affairs. The regime has succeeded in hoodwinking citizens into believing that by physically removing the Brotherhood from the picture, it has neutralized the threat, real and imagined, from Islamists. The attack last week on the interior minister’s convoy, and the simmering insurgency in the Sinai, shows that they have failed. What is even more problematic is that the general public has once again accepted, so uncritically, exactly the tactics that it took to the streets to oppose on that dreamy day of January 25, 2011, so long ago.

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Are we back at square one ? The contours of a Mubarakesque state without Mubarak is right in front of us, and the only way out of it is to snap out of this collective amnesia and turn back to the togetherness of the 18 dreamy days of #Jan25.

Arab Spring: Women, Music and Revolutions

We could have defeated the Brotherhood on our own.

“This is what the Muslim Brotherhood boils down to,” Fahmy told me. “They don’t have a project—it’s empty, flaky, vacuous.” The Brotherhood could have been defeated with time, Fahmy felt; calling in the military was a premature, and ultimately more reckless, choice. “I still believe that the Army takeover was the wrong thing to do,” he said. “We didn’t need the Army to do this for us. We could have defeated the Brotherhood on our own.” Joshua Hersh´s text in the The New Yorker in full can be read here. This is AUC history professor Khaled Fahmy´s view and i share it , in the sense that Egypt would have been much better off had not SCAF decided to oust President Morsi. In my view the MB and the Presidency was so weakend on 30 June , that it would have payed the political prize for it at the ballot box had only the then opposition and the Army held their guns.. We are now crawling nearer and nearer the political system we had on the eve of Jan25. The security state seems to be back. No real politics. The state of the media in terms of restrictions and (un)freedom and in terms of following in the footsteps of the state (read Army)reminds of the mood in America just after 9/11.. The killings can never be justified , forgiven or forgotten. Just as Mubarak lost his legitimacy on 28 of February 2011, Morsi on 22 November 2012 , so did Sisi and company on August 14 , in my view even before that. The fact is that during the 62 days since Morsi´s ousting, there has been more killed than during the 18 days of al Tahrir in January-February 2011. The current regime are doing the same mistake as the two previous ones. Aiming for "Winner takes all" strategy. Excluding at least 1/3 of the population. Instead of a constitution of "Consensus" that the then opposition had on top of their agenda , while still belonging to the opposition". Now when they have the chance , they opt for the same strategy as they accused Morsi for , the winner takes all scenario... It will come back to haunt them , and not only for the constitution. For more on how Khaled Fahmy views 3 July: How do you describe what happened on 3 July? KF: I can’t give a clear answer, but what I can say is that we had an overpowering move by the people. It sent a clear message to the regime that "your legitimacy has fallen." This is a very hard message because those who were in power were elected; their legitimacy was built upon the ballot box. What the message implied is that the legitimacy of a regime couldn’t be merely reduced to a set of formal electoral procedures. The legitimacy of this regime fell because it violated the constitution and the state institutions, eventually building resistance against them. The huge political vacuum, as the regime lost the support of the institutions of the state, signaled the army to take action to save the entity of the state. The hard question now is on the legitimacy of the army’s intervention. If we took 'legitimacy' in its literal and lawful terms, this would be considered a coup d’état. However, if we questioned this procedural understanding of legitimacy, taking into account the profound message the people sent, then a new legitimacy has been constituted. We can say that the army had to move and bow to the popular will. The legitimacy of this intervention derived from the will of the people. This raises another question: Will this army bow to the demands of the people or will it take advantage of the current political vacuum to impose its own agenda? I’m aware that the army did not only move to defend the national security and freedoms but also to defend its own interests and aims. The challenge we face now is how to insist on our demand to have the right to control and observe all of the state institutions, including the military and the presidency, but this is still unmarked territory. Joshua Hersh´s text in the The New Yorker in full can be read here.