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.

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.

------------------------------------------------------

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.

----------------------------------------------------

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.

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.

What I Will

Since July third i´ve found solace in poetry for the first time in my life.
The following poem was written about another "War on terrorism" but expresses part of my feelings about the Sisi "war on terrorism" and my frustration on what has taken place in the name of the Egyptian people since July 3rd 2013.

“What I Will” by Suheir Hammad

I will not

dance to your war

drum. I will

not lend my soul nor

my bones to your war

drum. I will

not dance to your

beating. I know that beat.

It is lifeless. I know

intimately that skin

you are hitting. It

was alive once

hunted stolen

stretched. I will

not dance to your drummed

up war. I will not pop

spin beak for you. I

will not hate for you or

even hate you. I will

not kill for you. Especially

I will not die

for you. I will not mourn

the dead with murder nor

suicide. I will not side

with you nor dance to bombs

because everyone else is

dancing. Everyone can be

wrong. Life is a right not

collateral or casual. I

will not forget where

I come from. I

will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved

near and our chanting

will be dancing. Our

humming will be drumming. I

will not be played. I

will not lend my name

nor my rhythm to your

beat. I will dance

and resist and dance and

persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than

death. Your war drum ain’t

louder than this breath.

Ladies at the MubarakTrial gives me the laugh of the week

This interview with three ladies that can' t be described as anything but hardcore Mubarakfans (probably a great understatement) at the Police Academy during the fourth court session of the Mubarak trial yesterday really made my day. It's a must see. Comedy at it's best.

Thanks to AJ Misr Mubasher for providing us with this interview that iluminates and enlighten us on what actually took place at Abdel Moneim Riad Square during the January 25th revolution... I would love to be the manager of these three ladies and go on a world tour, i'm convinced they would be an instant success, in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon , Israel and Kafr al Meselha among other places...

يا شعب مصر

Tamim al Barghouti's يا شعب مصر on the January 25th revolution.

Three months and two days have passed since that historic day and the 18 days until February 11 will always be treusured in all our hearts, just as the 846 martyrs who payed the ultimate price for freedom. This post is dedicated to them and their families.

So Eighties

One of my favourite photos from around the world expressing their solidarity with the Egyptian people during these fantastic 17 days is this from Pretoria in South Africa.

A double Espresso

This Alexandrian establishment, the Brazilian Coffee store has been providing the people of Alexandria with the best coffee money can buy since 1929, when inaugerated by the Greek Ambassador to Cairo.

This photo is from their new coffee shop, that played a small part on the morning of two of my best friend´s wedding day on this very day a few years ago. This is my way of wishing them a happy anniversary.

The photo, courtesy of Travel Aficionado, It´s part of a really interesting flickr set of photos on Egypt.

Free Alaa! - Update Alaa released

UPDATE: Alaa has been released and is on his way home.

One is always very ambivalent about this,one is of course happy, but also extremely frustrated, it shouldn´t be happening in the first place... Welcome home Alaa!

Epilogue

This is Alaa´s own words on what happend at Cairo airport, hopefully the end of the story.

Original post - Free Alaa!

Alaa Seif of manalaa.net , blogger extraordinaire and one of the kindest people around in the blogosphere has been detained at cairo Airport, upon arrival from his current home in South Africa.

"Blogger Alaa seif was detained at the airport, & is being transferred to a police station, on charges of evading a sentence over a bad check" (Sandmonkey)

The latest is that he´s still being held at the airport, and not yet transfered to a police station.

Alaa tweeted upon arrival at Cairo Airport and you can follow those tweets, and hopefully he´s tweeting upon release... here

Of course this is not the first time for Alaa to have to deal with this nonsense, the banner used in this blog post, is recycled, it was first used in a campaign to release Alaa and a group of 47 other activists in the early summer of 2006, then he was released after 45 days in Tora prison.

Alaa & Manal and many other bloggers and Human Rights organizations was involved in a marathon case feauturing judge Abdel Fattah Mourad,were the judge tried to block 50 websites after he had been caught with plaugerism of one of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) publications. A case that was more kafkaesque than any other case involving bloggers, perhaps apart from Kareem´s four year prison sentence, and ANHRI opens up for the possibility that this current case might be related to that in some way. If that´s the case i´m not the least surprised.

Here´s an old profile on Youth for Change in the form of an interview with Alaa and Manal.

Free Alaa!

More migrants seek refuge in Egypt

Perhaps the most important refugee ever to have entered Egypt, seeking shelter from Roman oppression was the child Jesus and his family. The four-year old little girl who died in the early hours on December 30th 2005 at the Mustafa Mahmoud Square in front of the UN headquarters was not as lucky, she was among 20 people killed in a stampede when state security tried to storm the camp that was set up by Sudanese migrants staging a sit-in three months earlier protesting UNCHR policy. If the infant Jesus and his parents would have seeked shelter today,chances are that he wouldn´t have been allowed to enter Egypt.

There are about 42 000 refugees living in Egypt, whom are registered with UNHCR(2008)in Cairo, the majority being from Sudan (54 per cent), a quarter from Iraq (24 per cent), 13 per cent from Somalia, refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia also form significant numbers, which are growning. The number of people living in Egypt, but not registered with the UNCHR are believied to be much higher, for example the Iraqis living in Egypt currently are estimated to be at least 17 000. Egypt was one of the major destinations for Iraqis at the hight of the sectarian violence in Iraq 2004-05, and according to Egyptian entry data there would be somewhere between 100 000 and 150 000. Much tougher visa restrictions put in place in late 2006 have minimized the number of Iraqis opting for Egypt. Some may have moved on, trying to secure entry to the EU, some have returned, but most likely, a large number of those entering Egypt in 2004-05 are still residing in Egypt, without official refugee status. That is most likely the case with the other refugee groups as well.

Dalia Malek points out the protection gap facing those entering Egypt illegally, obstructing or denying them access to UNCHR, among other things. Showing another side of the plentiful problems that refugees can face in Egypt.

One of the things that has bothered me the most in the last couple of years is how reckless our border guards are with their guns, with a policy that seems to be shoot first, and ask later, especially when it comes to migrants/refugees trying to cross the border to Israel. I´m not going to dwell on the subject much further at this point, but to stress the urgency of this pattern, the latest chapter in this tragic saga being the two killed last Sunday.

For those who wants further reading on this, the Human Rights watch report from November 2008, Sinai Perils provides a good start.

For those keen on knowing more about the situation for Iraqi refugees living in Egypt, a topic also raised in the Al Jazeera-English clip above, could start at the Iraqis in Egypt site.

In June 2009, the first Cairo Refugee film festival was held, you can find the website here.

Wael Abbas on BBC´s Hardtalk

The Egyptan blogger Wael Abbas was interviewed by Zeinab Badawi on BBC´s flagship show Hardtalk , for those who wants to see the full 23 minutes interview, it can be found here.

Fares Barakat thrown from 4th floor when asking for search warrant

At 7 P.M on May 17th, SSI officer Nagi al Gammal and asssistent Gamal el Taye'e was conducting an arrest on Ahmed Ali Hussin Eid in his apartment in Damanhour, Beheira, while the family was celebrating a birthday party for their daughter, together with friends.

One of the friends present, Fares Barakat asked for the search warrant, when he was pushed towards the balcony by SSI officer Nagi al Gammal, when resisting the assistent Gamal el Taye´e held him , and the officer ordered el Tayeé to "To throw this man from the balcony".

Fares Barakat fell from the fourth floor,unconscious and with these injuries:

Fracture of the right leg, hip and shoulder, three pelvic fractures, fracture nose, facial injuries, fracture of three vertebrae, blood accumulation in the stomach and around the liver, post concussion syndrome and difficulty breathing to upward pressure of abdominal blood collections.

In the photos , Fares Barakat is handcuffed while at the intensive care unit, reminding us of photos of hospitalized kids, in the wake of Mahalla al Kubra. He´s being treated like a criminal , while his requests for an investigation has been rejected by the Attorney General in Beheira. Unfortunately this is not the first time something like this occurs.

Sorry for the sloppy writing, but at times, the story is much more important , than the language.

In other news, blogger Diaá eddin Gad has been harassed by the State Security phoning him on numerous occasions , asking him to come see them, ¨for his own good¨

al Jazeera English Cairo Special

(Via the Arabist)

During the last forthnight al Jazeera English inside story has been airing three instalments about Egypt focusing on Ramadan, Youth and Political reform.

The first installment focuses on the food banquets for the poor during Ramadan.


Ramadan



Part II of the first installment can be found here

Youth


Part II of the second installment can be found here

Political Reform


Part II of the third installment can be found here

Umm ad Dunya

The Picture is Nasa´s image of the day the 21st of September 2008.

Living in Washington?

If i was living in Washington, this is what i would be doing today!

The Project on Middle East Democracy(POMED) is hosting an event with the headline - Egypt Today: The State of Human Rights and Rule of Law

It´s a panel made out of Michele Dunne - Editor of Arab Reform Bulletin, at Carnegie Endovment, Neil Hicks from Human Rights first, Marc Lynch(A.K.A Abu Aardvark) and Ambassador Nicholas Veliotes, among other things a former Ambassodor to Egypt.The whole event is moderated by Stephen McInerney, Director of Advocacy, Project on Middle East Democracy.

For me , the star without a shadow of a doubt is Michele Dunne, her knowledge of Egypt is profound,on a level few western scholars can compete with. Marc Lynch, for me is more of a specialist on Islamic political movements than Human Rights and Rule of Law, being a very able blogger, he has found a niche for himself in describing blogging in a political context and perhaps especially so when writing about the Ikhwhan bloggers. In terms of Egypt his field has been Ikhwan,modernity and democratization. He´s been focusing more on Iraq lately, the Awakenings and other Sunni political movements, correct me if i am wrong. To end my presentation of Abu Aardwark, i must say that i miss the times when he used to spend plenty of time disecting the relationship between popdivas, the Arabic pop equivalent of the three Tenors, except for the fact that hate each other, or so goes the myth - Nancy, Haife and Ruby used to be the hottest topic over at Abu Aardvark, nowadays, one has to make due with the occasional hip-hop lyric namedropping.... please ya Marc, write about the Divas once in a while...

To set you in the right frame of mood for this serious topic, after me losing my way, humming ¨Ana Haifa ana¨ you should read Michele Dunne´s newly penned piece in the American Interest - A Post-Pharaonic Egypt You could also read something from the other aisle of Think tank Washington, Jeffrey Azarwa from the American Enterprize Institute and judge for yourself, his piece is called - The Autumn of Mubarak , the article was just published in the Weekly Standard. Least but not last i throw in an article by Scott Carpenter on the highly politisized queston on the future of U.S Aid to Egypt, the Military part of it was something current U.S Ambassador Margaret Scobey to Egypt commented on only yesterday.

It begins at 14:00 eastern time(in about an hour) - i´m sure there will be a transcript as well.

UPDATE: Here is Marc Lynch´s part of the opening discussion, focusing on describing the political scene in Egypt.

UPDATE II: Here is a link to the full discussion, unfortunately Neil Hicks couldn´t take part in it.