Political uncertainty pushes the government to roll recent free speech gains and muzzle independent voices. Ashraf Khalil asks, will Facebook be next?
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It’s not going well for maverick, boundary-pushing journalists this month.
In Morocco edgy magazine Nichane closed its doors, with the publisher claiming it was the victim of an advertising boycott ordered by the royal palace.
In Syria, a young female blogger who was mysteriously arrested 10 months ago, has officially been accused of being a spy for an unnamed foreign power. It remains unclear whether Tal al-Mallohi’s arrest or the espionage accusation has anything to do with her blogging activity.
Several journalists are facing jail time in Turkey, and the murder of a prominent journalist three years ago remains unresolved with no convictions.
In Saudi Arabia, the religious police have ominously started training on how to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other digital forms of social media. The Saudis, along with fellow Gulf monarchy the United Arab Emirates, continue to block the Blackberry messaging service.
Finally in Egypt Al-Dostour newspaper publisher Ibrahim Eissa, Egypt’s best and most provocative political columnist, was abruptly pushed out of his job and potentially blackballed.
There are two national Egyptian elections on the horizon — parliamentary next month and a crucial presidential vote next year. The authorities seem to be tightening the screws in preparation. The latest sign: new restrictions on SMS text messaging, which is frequently used as a mobilisation tool by activists. Independent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm (disclosure, I work for its English language edition) speculated that the new restrictions would,
hinder the logistical capabilities of Egypt’s political opposition, which has come to depend on SMS messaging to mobilise supporters for public protests and demonstrations.
A government spokesman’s priceless response? “We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all.”
The very next day, the exact same telecommunications regulatory agency struck again. This time it moved to establish firmer control over all live television news broadcasts from Egypt.
Ibrahim Eissa, the iconic editor-in-chief of Egypt’s al Dostour daily newspaper, practically telegraphed his own professional demise. In a column last week, discussing the recent shutdown of a satellite news programme, Eissa made ominous predictions about a looming press crackdown.
Parliamentary elections are coming this autumn with a presidential vote next year. President Hosni Mubarak is 82 and frail, with no clear successor in place. With both elections widely expected to be marred by vote-rigging and intimidation tactics, Eissa predicted that the government would move to suppress the country’s independent media voices.
“The Egyptian regime cannot give up cheating in elections, so the only solution for the authorities is to stop any talk about rigging, rather than stopping the rigging itself,” Eissa wrote. He wrapped up by saying that the government was only starting with the satellite channels, “and then the turn of the newspapers will come.”
On Tuesday, according to Eissa’s supporters, his turn came. He was abruptly fired by al Dostour’s new owners, prompting protest sit-ins by his staff and predictions of a widening media crackdown.
Known as a talented writer and savagely witty government critic, Eissa’s al Dostour was one of the main players in a crowded independent newspaper scene. The paper has displayed a passion for uncovering government scandal and offered lavish coverage of Mohammed ElBaradei’s campaign for domestic political reform.
But al Dostour’s real trademark has been Eissa’s own front-page columns, where he gleefully made a regular habit of targeting the government’s sacred cows. Last year, when Mubarak’s son, and rumoured successor, Gamal was giving a high-profile string of speeches and interviews, Eissa responded with a column bearing the simple headline: “Mr Gamal Mubarak, sir, would you please shut up?”
Not surprisingly, Eissa has been in trouble before. He was al Dostour’s first editor-in-chief when the independent paper was launched in 1995. Three years later, the paper was forcibly shut down and Eissa was essentially blackballed after publishing a letter allegedly from an Islamist terrorist group threatening attacks on Christian businessmen.
In 2005, al Dostour was allowed to return with the same ownership and with Eissa at the editorial helm again. The country’s political dynamics had changed by then, thanks partially to the emergence of the feisty Kefaya movement–which directly challenged the taboo on criticising the president or his family.
In 2006, he was sentenced to a year in prison for writing about a lawsuit personally accusing Mubarak of corruption. That sentence was reduced to a fine. In 2007, he was sentenced to two months in jail for crossing a major red line by writing that Mubarak’s health was deteriorating. His sentence was eventually commuted by presidential decree.
Al Dostour was purchased last month by a group led by business tycoon Sayyed al Badawi, who also heads the liberal Wafd party. Eissa’s problems with the new ownership appear to have begun almost immediately. In a series of interviews, Eissa said the final conflict with the new owners surrounded an editorial written by ElBaradei and timed to run this week on the anniversary of Egypt’s 1973 attack on entrenched Israeli positions in the Sinai, known as the October war or the Yom Kippur war. Eissa said the owners felt it would be disrespectful to run such a critical article on a patriotic national holiday.
“They wanted me to remove the article written by ElBaradei… I objected, they asked me to refrain from publishing it for a few days but then a few hours later I was informed of (my dismissal),” said Eissa.
Al Badawy, the head of the new ownership group, denied that the ElBaradei article was the source of the conflict, and indeed the editorial ran on the front page of the Wednesday edition.
For what it’s worth, it’s hard to see why this particular editorial prompted Eissa’s sacking. ElBaradei’s article hails the 1973 Egyptian assault as “a victory for precision and planning. It was the opposite example of the chaos and randomness that Egyptian society has known since then”.
Whatever the reasons, Eissa appears to be on the verge of his second major blackballing. His regular satellite television show was pulled by the government less than a month ago.
“I do not know what to call this, except a systematic removal from the media,” wrote Zenobia, a prominent local blogger who has closely tracked the case. In a series of interviews, he pointed to a systematic effort to muzzle the independent media before what could be an unstable and messy election/succession cycle.
“There’s a silencing of many of the independent voices present,” Eissa told the Shorouk daily newspaper. “It’s another return to the atmosphere before 2004 when the Kefaya movement appeared on the Egyptian street.”
Ashraf Khalil is senior reporter for Al Masry Al Youm English Edition
Protests in Egypt tend to follow a familiar rhythm. As a veteran observer of more public demonstrations than I can remember, you get a sense of the routine.
There’s usually a few hundred activists, most of them familiar faces from the last eight protests, inevitably surrounded by twice as many black-clad Central Security riot cops. The activists chant their slogans, the police use overwhelming force and well-practised crowd control techniques to keep them penned in one spot, and eventually everybody goes home.
But the protest I covered on Friday in Alexandria felt different and not just because it was attended by Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear watchdog who has become an opposition figurehead. The case of Khaled Saeed – a young man beaten to death in public by police, according to multiple witnesses — has tapped into long-simmering tensions that could take Egypt into uncharted territory.
For starters, there was the sheer size of the protest – at least 3,000 people according to organisers. Beyond that, what was striking was the raw anger on display and the number of ordinary, normally apolitical citizens who turned out to protest against what they claim is endemic brutality among Egypt’s police and security forces.
Saeed, 28, was dragged out of an Alexandria internet café on June 6 by two plain-clothed police officers. Several witnesses and the café’s owner have given interviews saying they saw the officers brutally beat Saeed in an alleyway. He was pronounced dead on the scene.
Public anger spiked when pictures of Saeed’s badly mangled face circulated on the internet. Protests in multiple cities intensified when the Interior Ministry claimed the young man had choked to death when swallowing a packet of marijuana as police approached him. The ministry’s version of events was backed by two separate coroner’s reports, prompting claims of a coordinated cover-up.
Saeed’s case is hardly the first publicised incident of Egyptian police brutality. Local and international human right organizations have long documented what they claim is a systemic pattern of torture and intimidation in Egypt’s police stations. But this case has touched a deep and powerful nerve, resonating among ordinary citizens who had probably never considered attending a demonstration before.
When I pulled out my notebook at Friday’s protest, I was engulfed by people clamouring to tell me their own personal tales of injustice and mistreatment at the hands of the police. I could have written down a dozen examples, ranging from harassment and intimidation of political activists to Mafia-style shakedowns.
The framework for all this police misbehaviour is the Emergency Law — a regularly renewed piece of legislation which has placed Egypt under defacto martial law for President Hosni Mubarak’s entire 29-year reign. Saeed has already come to be known as the “Emergency Law Martyr” and activists are hoping to channel the current explosion of popular anger into a genuine push to finally get the law repealed.
Ashraf Khalil is senior reporter for Al Masry Al Youm English Edition