10 Feb 2014 | Egypt, News and features
With much anticipation, Egyptians huddled around their television sets on Friday night to watch their favourite comedian, Bassem Youssef, make his debut appearance on the Saudi-funded MBC Misr Channel after a three-month absence from the small screen.
Youssef’s fans were not disappointed: They were treated to a full hour of non-stop laughter as the satirist, often compared to US comedian John Stewart, took jibes at the current state of the media and at the Egyptian public’s infatuation with defence minister field marshall Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Youssef cracked jokes about how everything in the country revolves around El Sisi whose name crops up on practically every TV show including cookery and sports programmes.
Youssef opened the show with a pledge not to talk about “sensitive political issues” that had previously caused his satirical show Al Bernameg, The Programme, to be pulled off the air by the management of the privately-owned Egyptian CBC satellite channel. Minutes later, he reversed his decision. “What are we going to talk about?” he asked his studio audience before throwing caution to the wind and starting to poke fun at the Sisi-mania gripping the country. He stopped short however, of taking aim at El Sisi himself, making no secret of the fact that such action would provoke a negative response from the censors.
” It’s better we don’t mention him,” he said as a silhouette- image of the military chief appeared on the screen . “Not out of fear but out of respect,” he sarcastically retorted.
Youssef’s show Al Bernameg was suspended last October following a controversial episode that CBC administrators said had “violated editorial policies and caused discontent among viewers.” In that episode–his first appearance since Islamist president Mohamed Morsi was toppled by military-backed protests in July– Youssef had poked fun at the Egyptian public’s blind idolisation of General El Sisi, widely expected to become the country’s next president. That had been enough to land him in trouble.
Not only was the show pulled off the air, but Youssef was also lambasted mercilessly by pro-military supporters in both the traditional media and social media. The attacks on Youssef did not stop there: Criminal charges were brought against him by angry citizens who accused him of “insulting the military.”
The legal complaints lodged against Youssef in November were not the first time the popular satirist had been indicted. In March 2013, he was investigated by the public prosecutor on a set of charges ranging from “insulting Pakistan” to “spreading atheism” and “insulting Islam and the president.” The accusations against him were triggered by his persistent ridiculing of then-president Mohamed Morsi. In an episode of the show early last year, he appeared on the set wearing a gigantic hat similar to one worn by Morsi when he received an honorary doctorate from a Pakistani university. Youssef’s unabashed lampooning of the former president delighted the former president’s opponents while earning Youssef the wrath of his Islamist supporters.
Youssef was not convicted. After an investigation lasting five-hours, he was released on $2,200 bail and went right back to mocking Morsi.
His indictment triggered an international outcry, raising concerns over regression on the country’s hard won freedom of expression and press freedom. Little did anyone –let alone Youssef himself who later joined the June 30 protests demanding the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime—suspect at the time that those freedoms would be further undermined and eroded by the military-backed regime that would replace Morsi three months later.
Since Morsi’s ouster, restrictions on the press have been even “greater than those imposed by either Morsi or his predecessor, autocrat Hosni Mubarak”, lament press freedom advocates and media analysts. The intimidation and harassment of journalists including increased physical assaults on them by security forces and by ordinary Egyptians supportive of the military, have raised concerns about the safety of journalists working in Egypt and press freedom in the country.
The indictment of 20 journalists – four of them foreign correspondents—has fuelled fears of a widening crackdown on journalists critical of the military-backed government. Eight of the defendants are journalists working with the Al Jazeera network –four of whom languish in prison on charges of “spreading false news and assisting or belonging to a terrorist organization.” Similar charges have been leveled against the sixteen other defendants in the case including Dutch journalist Rena Nejtes who last week, managed to flee the country, escaping arrest.
Sue Turton, one of two British defendants in what has come to be known as the “Al Jazeera case” told CNN on Friday that “the crackdown by the Egyptian authorities was targeting all journalists who do not tow the government line. ” She and fellow British defendant Dominic Kane are safely out of the country unlike Australian award-winning journalist Peter Greste who has been behind bars for six weeks. On Sunday, his parents made an impassioned appeal to Egyptian authorities for his release. Speaking to journalists in a press conference in Cairo, they described the accusations against him as “bizarre” and “ludicrous.” Juris Greste , Peter’s father, insisted his son’s detention was ” unfair and unjustifiable,” and urged prosecutors to release him immediately.
In a worldwide campaign to press for the release of the four Al Jazeera journalists, fellow-journalists from different countries across the globe have expressed solidarity with the defendants. They posted their own pictures on social media networks—with their mouths plastered ” to symbolize the Egyptian regime’s gagging of the press,” one campaigner explained via her Twitter account.
The detention of the Al Jazeera journalists is having a chilling effect on journalists working in Egypt, forcing many local journalists to practice self- censorship for fear of potential government reprisals. Others have fallen silent.
In the current hostile environment , it is not surprising that Youssef too is uncertain if he will be allowed to continue broadcasting his show. Wrapping up Friday’s episode, he asked “Second episode ?” before bursting out laughing. In the country’s repressive climate, no one can predict what might happen next.
This article was posted on 10 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
27 Jan 2014 | Comment, Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
Supporters of General Sisi in December 2013 (Photo: Sharron Ward / Demotix)
National Police Day, 25 January 2011. Years of police brutality is being challenged by activists in Tahrir Square. Volleys of tear gas mark the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, even if nobody knows it yet.
“The police were in control of everything that day,” journalist Muhammad Mansour remembers. “But it was a sign. I remember feeling like that day was a test for the police…it was a difficult fight.”
But three years on and Egypt looks a very different place. On Friday at least 64 people were killed nationwide – most of them with live ammunition – and 1,076 people arrested, according to official figures. Informal counts put the number of deaths closer to 100.
While revolutionary protesters were shot dead in downtown Cairo, including an April 6 activist – Sayed Wezza – who campaigned for the Tamarod movement against former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, over 40 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were gunned down in the north-east of the capital. In both cases, authorities allegedly resorted to using near-immediate lethal force to disperse protests and, activists claim, silence dissent.
One revolutionary march from Mostafa Mahmoud square was dispersed quickly, another outside the Journalists’ Syndicate faced a similar reaction. In both cases, police reacted minutes after marches started moving. A statement from an April 6 Youth Movement organiser, texted minutes after the dispersal started, alleged the police had used live ammunition to disperse peaceful protests. “This is not the Egypt we are looking for,” it said.
“We didn’t even reach three blocks from the syndicate before we came under attack,” Revolutionary Socialist activist Tarek Shalaby says. After the tear gas started, he ran into a side-street as police vans hurtled round corners firing off tear gas and bullets. Shalaby then picked up a poster of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and got out. Not far from the clashes, Shalaby was then questioned by a Sisi supporter who was keen to know why his poster of the general was ripped.
National Police Day was once a stage-managed celebration of state authority. This year’s 25 January felt like that and more. Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square to the ubiquitous sounds of pro-army anthem ‘Teslam al-Ayadi.’ Crowds roared as military helicopters breezed over rooftops dropping Egyptian flags and vouchers for basic goods. For many, it was a stage-managed endorsement of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s expected bid for the presidency – but one a majority of Egyptians wholeheartedly support.
While police attacked revolutionary and Brotherhood protests, the Saturday celebrations also revealed a street-level willingness to act side by side with the police.
It’s a role encouraged by state and independent media, Shalaby claims, referring to calls by Egyptian news channels for members of the public to citizen’s arrest potential Brotherhood supporters, or people looking to disrupt the day. Given Egypt’s currently hyper-nationalist state narrative, that leaves activists, Brotherhood members as well as journalists and foreigners privy to abuses.
An Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) report recorded 36 violations against journalists and photojournalists on January 25. Vigilante justice, and impunity for those carrying it out, is a growing problem.
“I was interviewing the ‘Bride of Sisi’, as she called herself, when a crowd gathered around me and another journalist and accused us of working for a ‘terrorist’ news channel,” journalist Nadine Marroushi wrote in a London Review of Books blog. While interviewing inside the square, Marroushi and Daily News Egypt journalist Basil al-Dabh were accused of working for Al-Jazeera, insulted and physically assaulted. The police intervened and detained them for their own safety. “They took us away to a building just off the square and told us to hide there for an hour until the crowd calmed down.”
A video from a nearby street also showed a police officer telling a MBC Egypt camera camera to “move that camera…or I’ll tell the crowds you’re from Al-Jazeera.” The Qatari broadcaster has become deeply unpopular with many Egyptians, seen as one arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself identified as a terrorist organization in late December. Five Al-Jazeera journalists are currently in prison on charges of spreading false news and membership of a terrorist organization.
In a separate incident Matthew Stender, who went down to Tahrir to photograph the celebrations, was assaulted after running over to see where two Spanish journalists were being mobbed. Stender in turn was attacked. This time the army intervened and held him in a nearby room for an hour. While the Spanish journalists looked “quite roughed up,” Stender says, two other Egyptian journalists also accused of working for Al-Jazeera showed signs of “substantial injuries… [one] had a gash in the back of his head.”
In the run-up to January 25 this year, interim President Adly Mansour declared the “end of the police state in Egypt”. Meanwhile a damning report by Amnesty International last week condemned post-Morsi “state violence unseen even during the first 18 days of the ‘January 25 Revolution’,” expressing concerns that authorities are “utilizing all branches of the state apparatus to trample on human rights and quash dissent.” And the growing trend of violent protest dispersals, politicized detentions and home arrests suggest that Egypt is actually witnessing a return to old practices, only today they are dressed up in a fresh narrative indelibly stained red, white and black.
This article was published 0n 27 January at www.indexoncensorship.org
27 Jan 2014 | Egypt, News and features, Politics and Society
Thousands of Egyptians celebrated the 25th of January 2011 revolution anniversary at Al Etihadia Palace Square. Demonstrators chanted for the army and police and raised flags and banners bearing images of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. (Photo: Adham Khorshed / Demotix)
As thousands of Egyptians demonstrated in support of the country’s military, journalists were attacked, 49 people were killed and 247 others were injured in anti-government marches across Egypt on Saturday on the third anniversary of the uprising that led to the overthrow of autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
The figures were announced by Egypt’s Health Ministry but Al Nadeem Center, a Cairo-based rights organization, gave an even higher death toll, adding that more than 1,000 people had been arrested in a day of violent clashes between protesters and security forces.
Still, a significant number of Egyptians refused to let the violence dampen their celebratory mood. Thousands of flag-bearing revellers flocked to Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on Saturday to rally in support of the army. Raising pictures of Defense Minister General Abdel Fattah El Sisi , they called on him to run for the presidency, chanting “El Sisi is our president” and “the people, the army and the police are one hand”.
Three years after the mass protests demanding an end to Mubarak’s police state system, the revelry and nationalistic fervour demonstrated a reversal in public sentiment towards the military and the police, which were perceived in a negative light during the transitional period that followed the ouster of Mubarak. It also underlined the bitter polarisation in the country.
“The people want the execution of the Muslim Brotherhood!”, the Tahrir crowd chanted over and over.
Security was intensified after a series of bombings rocked Cairo the previous day — the largest of them a remote-controlled car bombing targeting the security directorate near the centre of the city. At least six people were killed in the bomb attacks and scores of others were injured. Ansar Beit al Maqdis — an al Qaeda-affiliated jihadi group — claimed responsibility for the bombings. The group threatened more violence and warned people to stay off the streets. Many Egyptians dismiss the persistent denials by the Muslim Brotherhood — recently designated by Egypt’s military-backed authorities as a terrorist organization — that the Brotherhood was behind the violence. The Brotherhood insists its struggle is peaceful and has issued a statement on its official website condemning the terrorist attacks. Tens of thousands of riot police and armoured personnel carriers were deployed to try to maintain order and Tahrir Square was ringed by barbed wire to prevent pro-Muslim Brotherhood marchers entering the square.
Supporters of toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi staged marches in 34 Cairo neighbourhoods , protesting his overthrow. In a statement published on their website Ikhwanweb the previous day, they vowed to continue their protests until they topple “the fascist coup regime”. Security forces fired volleys of tear gas and gunshots in the air to disperse the protesters. Scores were killed or injured in ensuing clashes with riot police and pro-military residents who hurled stones and bottles at the protesters. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested.
Pro-democracy activists meanwhile, staged a protest rally outside the Journalists Syndicate in downtown Cairo to express their opposition to authoritarian rule. “Down with military rule and down with the Muslim Brotherhood,” they chanted before being violently attacked by security forces and pro-military residents. The protesters ran for cover amid thick clouds of choking tear gas.
In the mayhem that followed, leftist activist Tarek Shalaby who was among the opposition protesters, sent a message on Twitter advising his comrades to “grab posters of El Sisi to avoid being targeted by riot police.” He also warned others to steer clear of the downtown area, describing it as “extremely dangerous.” For Sayed Elwez, a young member of the April Six group that played a key role in mobilising protesters ahead of the January 2011 uprising, the warnings were too little, too late. He was shot in the neck and chest by security forces while trying to escape. Ironically, Elwez had been among the thousands of secular volunteers in the Tamarod campaign, collecting signatures for a petition calling for Islamist President Mohamed Morsi’s resignation.
In recent weeks, the military-backed government’s brutal crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters has widened, targeting dissenters of all stripes including liberal activists, journalists and prominent academics. Paradoxically, many of those targeted had previously opposed the Muslim Brotherhood president, aligning themselves with the country’s notorious security apparatus to remove him from office.
Two prominent Egyptian political scientists are the latest targets of the crackdown which rights activists say, is aimed at silencing all critics of the military-led authorities. Emad Shahin, an internationally-acclaimed and widely respected academic who has taught at Harvard and Notre Dame has been charged with “espionage and conspiring with foreign organizations to undermine Egypt’s national security”. His name has been added to a list of majority-Brotherhood defendants (which also includes the former President Mohamed Morsi) facing trial on similar charges that some rights activists believe are “politically motivated”. Shahin has denied the charges , insisting that his true offence “was criticism of the political events in Egypt since Morsi’s ouster”.
Amr Hamzawy, another political scientist and former lawmaker has meanwhile, been accused of “insulting the judiciary”. The legal complaint against him stems from a message he posted on his Twitter account in June, in which he criticized a court verdict sentencing 43 NGO workers to one to five year jail terms. The NGO staffers were accused of “working for unlicensed institutions and receiving illegal foreign funding”. Hamzawy described the verdict as “shocking and lacking in evidence and transparency”. The highly-publicised NGO case, also widely criticised by international rights activists, was seen by many as symbolising “a severe crackdown on civil society in Egypt”.
Amnesty International has criticized the widening crackdown on rights activists in Egypt, expressing concern that the Egyptian authorities were “tightening the noose on freedom of expression and assembly”. In a statement released soon after the charges were levelled against Shahin and Hamzawy, Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director at Amnesty International said “repressive legislation” was “making it easier for the government to silence its critics”. She warned that “with such measures in place” Egypt was “headed firmly down the path toward further repression and confrontation”.
Several prominent pro-democracy activists languish in jail for taking part in ”illegal protests”. Rights advocates say their imprisonment signals the return of Mubarak’s police state and that counter- revolutionary forces are back with a vengeance. In letters of despair leaked from their solitary prison cells, Ahmed Maher and Alaa Abdel Fattah (two symbols of the uprising against Mubarak) speak of a “failed revolution” that has been hijacked first by a religious group, then by the military.
In a letter to his two sisters written earlier this month, activist Alaa Abdel Fattah also wrote: “What adds to my feeling of oppression is that I feel this particular lock up has no value. This is not struggle, and there is no revolution.”
Journalists too have not been spared; in recent months they have continued to face physical assaults, intimidation and detentions. At least five journalists are currently behind bars for reporting on the ongoing political crisis. Three members of an Al Jazeera English TV crew have been in custody for nearly a month pending investigations on charges of “spreading lies harmful to Egypt’s national security and and joining a terrorist group”. In a letter recently smuggled out of his Torah prison cell, Al Jazeera correspondent Peter Greste recounts the ordeal of his two Egyptian colleagues who are being accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation and are held in a high security prison.
“Fahmy has been denied the hospital treatment he badly needs for a shoulder injury he sustained shortly before our arrest. Both he and Baher spend 24 hours a day in their mosquito-infested cells, sleeping on the floor with no books or writing materials to break the soul- destroying tedium,” Greste lamented in his note published on the Al Jazeera English website.
Several journalists covering Saturday’s pro-military Tahrir rallies meanwhile, reported coming under attack from mobs who suspected them of working for Al Jazeera. The Qatari-based network is highly unpopular in Egypt because of what many Egyptians perceive as a pro- Muslim Brotherhood bias in its coverage of the political crisis in Egypt. Meanwhile , the state-run and state-influenced media alike are awash with conspiracy theories and talk of foreign plots to divide and destroy Egypt. This has fuelled the xenophobia in Egypt, posing a serious security challenge for foreign journalists covering the protest rallies. Journalist Nadine Maroushi who was attacked in Tahrir Square on Saturday has shared her traumatic experience on her blog:
“In Tahrir Square yesterday a man suggested we worked for Al Jazeera. An angry crowd quickly formed around us. ‘You traitor, you pig,’ a veiled woman shouted at me. She pulled my hair and grabbed at my scarf, choking me. The police intervened; I showed my press pass. They took us away to a building just off the square and told us to hide there for an hour until the crowd calmed down.”
A message posted by freelance journalist Bel Trew on Twitter on Saturday also warned that Tahrir was not safe for journalists. Trew’s tweet was retweeted more than a hundred times within minutes, triggering a frenzied exchange of telephone numbers to report assault and harassment of journalists. Egyptian photojournalist Mosa’ab El Shamy, meanwhile described it as “horrible day for journalists in Cairo. At least 5 (including a foreigner) were arrested, 2 are in hospital and 7 cameras have been seized by the police and confiscated,” he tweeted.
Three years on, the revolutionary activists’ hopes for dramatic change have all but faded. With the demands for freedom of speech, equality , dignity and an end to police brutality and corruption unfulfilled, the political turmoil and instability of the past three years have forced many Egyptians to drastically lower their expectations. Forsaking their ambitions for freedom and democracy — at least for now — many in Egypt have settled instead for the lesser hope of restoring stability in the country gripped by violence. Stability can only be guaranteed with a return to military rule , they say. But not all Egyptians have given up their revolutionary dream of a free and democratic society. A small but resilient group of young activists that refuses to bow under repression is keeping the dream alive. They are the country’s hope for change. “Today was a harsh defeat on a long and bumpy road,” Tarek Shalaby wrote on Twitter, but there is no going back.
This article was posted on 27 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
