Month: May 2006

Egyptian detainees are starting a hunger strike

I was contacted by one of the detainees’ wife, who called me this afternoon to say the incarcerated activists will start a hunger strike as the clock strikes midnight today, demanding: a) the examination of Mohamed el-Sharqawi and Kareem al-Sha’er by the Forensics Medical Authorities, b) an investigation into the torture and abuse incidents the two Youth for Change activists were subject to last Thursday, c) the release of all those detained for their solidarity with the judges.

The six detainees who will start the strike are:

1-Kamal Khalil

2-Saher Gad

3-Ahmad Abdel Gawad

4-Karim Mohamed Redda

5-Ihab Mohamed Idriss

6-Sameh Mohamed Said

Two other detainees will join the strike in 48 hours: Nael and Ahmad Maher.

Gamal Abdel Aziz Eid, the director of the Arab Human Rights Information Network who is representing the detainees, confirmed to me Sharqawi and Sha’er have not been medically examined up till now. Eid’s organization, together with four other rights watchdogs, have issued a statement today calling on the interior ministry to investigate the recent arrests and abuses, and accusing the State Security Prosecutor’s office of “complicity� in leaving those who conduct torture to go unpunished.   

On another front, I was told the Press Syndicate refused to host the Liberties’ Committee press conference scheduled for Sunday. Instead, the press conference has been moved to the Lawyers’ Syndicate, and will be held, tomorrow Sunday, at 1:30pm.

Details of Kifaya protester’s rape with piece of rolled-up cardboard

I should have a copy of Sharqawi’s full testimony later, but the AP is covering the story:

CAIRO, Egypt — Egyptian police allegedly tortured two protesters – sexually assaulting one of them – after a peaceful demonstration in support of pro-reform judges, a lawyer and an opposition group said Friday.

Activist Mohammed el-Sharkawi, 24, was sodomized “using a rolled up piece of cardboard for nearly 15 minutes,” his lawyer Gamal Eid told The Associated Press.

“Almost all of el-Sharkawi’s body is bruised, swollen, or cut,” Eid said. “I haven’t seen such brutality and sadism since 1995,” he added, referring to a period when the state mounted a crackdown on Islamic militants.

The alleged assault occurred Thursday night after el-Sharkawi was taken to a Cairo police station, the lawyer said. The lawyer said El-Sharkawi told him about the incident when Eid was permitted to attend an interrogation session later that night.

Interior Ministry officials were not available for comment.

An Associated Press reporter on Thursday saw more than 15 men in plainclothes grab el-Sharkawi and punch and kick him after he participated in a peaceful protest outside of the Journalists’ Syndicate in downtown Cairo.

A more cautious story is at Middle East Online. I can understand news agencies wanting to be cautious about this, but it has been verified by reputable Egyptian human rights activists and the international rights organizations are working on it. This story needs to get out. See previous posts on Arabist here and here, including a picture of Sharqawi.

Kefaya demo in South Korea!

Forget about Cairo’s Abdel Khaleq Tharwat St. where people are increasingly getting into the bad habbit of “disappearing.” Once again, Kefaya strikes in Seoul..

Socialist activists in South Korea held a demo in front of the Egyptian embassy in Seoul, supporting the Egyptian judges and denouncing the crackdown on pro-reform activists.

Last March, President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea paid Hosni Mubarak a visit in Cairo, where they discussed economic cooperation. My instinct tells me, Moo-hyun was also advised on the use of Korean baltaggiyas against Kefaya demonstrators in Seoul, after the Egyptian experiment proved to be a success by all international standards.

Events planned in solidarity with the Cairo detainees

Activists in Cairo are planning events this week in solidarity with the detainees, and to protest the sexual assault on Youth for Change activist Mohamed el-Sharqawi last Thursday, in Qasr el-Nil Police Station.

A press conference by the Liberties Committee (Lagnet el-Hurriyat) will be held at the Press Syndicate on Sunday, 5:30pm.

There will be also a one-hour stand by activists in front of the Doctors’ Syndicate, Dar el-Hekma, in Qasr el-Eini St. on Tuesday 7pm, followed by a conference inside the syndicate.

Iran would have accepted Beirut Declaration

Did Iran offer recognition of Israel according to the Beirut Declaration in 2003? Some top experts on Iran at no less an establishment institution as Johns Hopkins’ SAIS think so:

WASHINGTON, May 24 (IPS) – Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.

The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.

Parsi says the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal which he learned about in 2003 from the U.S. intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in late April or early May 2003. The intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified, according to Parsi.

The Iranian negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to U.S. hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.

Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had attacked Arab governments which had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration”, which it also referred to as the “Saudi initiative, two-states approach.”

The Beirut Declaration, which when you think about it was a really landmark proposal from the Arab League, was always ignored by Israel. Why? Because Israel wants to annex part of the West Bank, against all UN resolutions and principles of international law. And this is why we risk another war in the Middle East rather than a solution to the crisis. I’m sure the Iranian proposal probably included other demand, and perhaps negotiations would have led nowhere, but the point was that they were ready to talk before the recent election brought back that nutcase Ahmedinejad. The article makes for good reading to put things in perspective — the Iran regime may be nasty, but it is neither automatically belligerent nor unwilling to negotiate on something as fundamental as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process according to the generous terms of the Beirut Declaration. If there is no partner for peace, it’s on the Israeli side.

What fatwas are most often about

Here’s what happens when you get a (presumably) Arab-American journalist to do a story about something to do with Islam: a balanced, nuanced story that shows the full complexity of the question at hand for an audience not familiar with the topic. And it reads well and has a saucy lead.

Fatwas: Muslim religious edicts are rarely about violence, war

Monday, May 22, 2006

By Moustafa Ayad, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Imagine the latest videotaped message from Osama bin Laden. He’s scowling and raising a finger, but instead of taking aim at Americans he’s holding forth on the bleaching of Muslim women’s eyebrows.

While most Westerners think of religious edicts — or fatwas — as orders to fight Americans and infidels, Muslim scholars, evangelists and spiritual leaders across the globe issue them on a daily basis — on eyebrow bleaching and hundreds of other mundane topics.

Read on… Although the article doesn’t dwell on it, it’s interesting to contrast of how both Osama bin Laden and the various fatwa internet sites represent the globalization of fatwa-issuing — you don’t have to ask your local imam anymore. So what happens when an eminent sheikh with a website disagrees with your local imam, or even your country’s Mufti?

Osama is not the Arab everyman

So Egyptian media moguls the Adib brothers are talking to Robert de Niro on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival, where they are presenting the Yacoubian Building, about making a movie about Osama Bin Laden:

The pipeline movie about Osama bin Laden, head of the Al-Qaeda network and the world’s most wanted man, has also caught the eye of Robert de Niro, one of the world’s most respected actor/directors and co-founder of the Tribeca festival.

De Niro wants to see the script when it is completed next month, Adel Adeeb, Emad’s brother and head of group’s GN4 Film and Music arm, said.

But though De Niro is interested in the project, which will start shooting next year, he is not planning on playing one of the characters, he emphasised.

The movie will revolve around an imaginary meeting between an American journalist and bin Laden in which both men explore their completely opposing views of world politics.

“Our aim is not defend bin Laden” but to help create a dialogue between the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, leading to a better understanding between them, underlined both brothers.

Great — a movie about civilizational dialogue and the Westerner is a journalist while Osama stands in for the Arabs. Very representative.

Abu-Assad and Paradise Now

Hany Abu-Assad, director of Paradise Now, responds to the Angry Arab’s critique of his film:

I attempted to repaint the story no longer from the mythological point of view but from that of current reality. To kill yourself with your enemy is a Biblical story. The story of Samson already tells us that people prefer to kill themselves together with their enemies rather than accept humiliation. I believe the story of Samson never happened, but was written as a fable in order to tell us something about human beings and humiliation. Unfortunately, the same story is now happening on the same land, with different people. It’s no longer a fable, but a reality. If I wanted to repaint it, I had to take it beyond its subject. Instead of concluding that people choose to kill themselves with others rather than accept humiliation, which has already been done, I began with this point and then tried to open the discussion about morality and its relevance. To be or not to be. The Last Supper also happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine, not in Italy. Leonardo Da Vinci painted as if the light came from God. I tried to repaint it in a new medium in a place not far from where it happened, but with the light coming from a neon lamp.

We the Palestinians are a human phenomenon facing a gigantic colonizer, and we refuse to give up. What’s more, our colonizer doesn’t simply want to pillage our resources under the guise of “civilizing” us, it wants us off the land altogether. We are facing a project of ethnic cleansing. Our only weapons are persistence, knowledge, culture and art. The role of art in this case is to be so creative as to change our specific case into a universal one without losing authenticity or the differences of details. It must feel real without generalizing or stereotyping. Oppression necessitates a militarily strong, organized group, but art necessitates talented individuals whose conscience is not for sale. A superior book or a beautiful painting will persist throughout history as a metaphor for humanity in all times and all places. Let the Israelis put all their energy into the science of oppression, serving the interests of a civilization that not long ago made them into soap in order to protect the narrow idea of a Jewish state. Let the Palestinians instead put all of their energy into the science of the human….

Sexual abuse as a tool against dissidents

It’s not the first time that Egyptian police rape people they arrest — it happened several times a few years ago when the security services were conducting a pogrom against homosexuals. But the sheer barbarity of using sticks to sodomize dissidents (a claim now verified by several rights activists) tells you a lot about the nature of this regime and how it has gotten completely out of control. Here’s a statement from a Kifaya on the matter:

A horrid torture festival in the Mubaraks’ Abu Ghraib
Torture and Sodomizing

A new crime reveals Mubarak Jr’s “New Thought” to continue his father’s approach and to revive the memory of sexually attacking Egyptian women during last year’s constitutional referendum that was enacted to extend the Mubarak dictatorship. State Security officers sodomized Mohammed El-Sharkawi, a young activist, using rolled cartoon paper for nearly 15 minutes. They tore his underwear and threatened to rape him. This came as part of the horrid torture festival that Karim Al-Shae’r, another activist, was exposed to in Kasr El Nil Police Station.

This is the peak of the crime that was recorded during interrogations in the State Security Prosecutor Bureau in Misr Al-Gadida. The crime started when they dragged El-Sharkawi on the ground from Ma’rouf st. to the entrance of a building at the cross road of Ma’rouf and Talat Harb streets, where he was brutally beaten. Lawyers who have seen him recalled torture perpetrated against Islamists. Afterwards, El-Sharkawi was blindfolded and taken in a blue microbus to what is thought to be Kasr El Nil Police Station where he was detained for 24 hours. There he was exposed to more torture.

According to lawyers, there is nearly no area on El-Sharkawi’s body that is void of bruises, swells, or injury. This insinuates as stated by the lawyer and human rights activist, Gamal Eid, that the torture was perpetrated with extreme “spitefulness”.

A few minutes after El-Sharkawi was kidnapped, State Security officers were dragging journalist Jihan Shaaban on the ground simply because she was accompanying Karim Al-Sha’er, each going to their home. Dina Samak and Dina Gameel were also dragged on the ground because they were present there. Dina Samak was injured and bruised. The fact that she is six months pregnant did not act as a deterrent to such attacks.

No respect to women and no respect to pregnant women is the slogan of the father and the son. No respect to honor. Both sexes are treated equally when it comes to sexual and physical assaults. Lawyers could not maintain their calmness when they saw the beastly marks of torture all over the activists’ bodies. It was as if they were in Abu Ghraib-Mubarak.

According to the activists, the torture festival lasted for four hours before news spread that they are on their way to the prosecutor where the crime of the Mubarak Sr. and Jr. was revealed at around 11:30 pm.

The audacity of Mubarak’s regime will not stop. It has found the boldness to harass lawyers and attempt to stop them from attending interrogations. After a verbal quarrel, authorities agreed for one lawyer to attend, then two, then three.

Before the prosecutor, El-Shrakawi and Al-Sha’er insisted that the torture that they have been exposed to should be registered in the interrogation files. They refused to make any statements until they are put before a delegated investigative judge. They demanded that they are sent to the forensic department. Until 1:00 a.m. the prosecutor continued to interrogate them, to decided, at the end, to detain the two activists for 15 days. They are accused of violating emergency law codes that prohibits more than five persons assembling. The prosecutor ordered that they are sent to the forensic department, if possible. This means that we will have to wait until Saturday at the least.

The prosecutor refused to allow a doctor who volunteered to make first aid treatment. There are doubts that El-Sharkawi’s ribs are broken. The prosecutor also refused to transfer them to a hospital for treatment.

For a comprehensive coverage of Thursday’s event:
Torture and Sodomizing

A new crime reveals Mubarak Jr’s “New Thought” to continue his father’s approach and to revive the memory of sexually attacking Egyptian women during last year’s constitutional referendum that was enacted to extend the Mubarak dictatorship. State Security officers sodomized Mohammed El-Sharkawi, a young activist, using rolled cartoon paper for nearly 15 minutes. They tore his underwear and threatened to rape him. This came as part of the horrid torture festival that Karim Al-Shae’r, another activist, was exposed to in Kasr El Nil Police Station.

This is the peak of the crime that was recorded during interrogations in the State Security Prosecutor Bureau in Misr Al-Gadida. The crime started when they dragged El-Sharkawi on the ground from Ma’rouf st. to the entrance of a building at the cross road of Ma’rouf and Talat Harb streets, where he was brutally beaten. Lawyers who have seen him recalled torture perpetrated against Islamists. Afterwards, El-Sharkawi was blindfolded and taken in a blue microbus to what is thought to be Kasr El Nil Police Station where he was detained for 24 hours. There he was exposed to more torture.

According to lawyers, there is nearly no area on El-Sharkawi’s body that is void of bruises, swells, or injury. This insinuates as stated by the lawyer and human rights activist, Gamal Eid, that the torture was perpetrated with extreme “spitefulness”.

A few minutes after El-Sharkawi was kidnapped, State Security officers were dragging journalist Jihan Shaaban on the ground simply because she was accompanying Karim Al-Sha’er, each going to their home. Dina Samak and Dina Gameel were also dragged on the ground because they were present there. Dina Samak was injured and bruised. The fact that she is six months pregnant did not act as a deterrent to such attacks.

No respect to women and no respect to pregnant women is the slogan of the father and the son. No respect to honor. Both sexes are treated equally when it comes to sexual and physical assaults. Lawyers could not maintain their calmness when they saw the beastly marks of torture all over the activists’ bodies. It was as if they were in Abu Ghraib-Mubarak.

According to the activists, the torture festival lasted for four hours before news spread that they are on their way to the prosecutor where the crime of the Mubarak Sr. and Jr. was revealed at around 11:30 pm.

The audacity of Mubarak’s regime will not stop. It has found the boldness to harass lawyers and attempt to stop them from attending interrogations. After a verbal quarrel, authorities agreed for one lawyer to attend, then two, then three.

Before the prosecutor, El-Shrakawi and Al-Sha’er insisted that the torture that they have been exposed to should be registered in the interrogation files. They refused to make any statements until they are put before a delegated investigative judge. They demanded that they are sent to the forensic department. Until 1:00 a.m. the prosecutor continued to interrogate them, to decided, at the end, to detain the two activists for 15 days. They are accused of violating emergency law codes that prohibits more than five persons assembling. The prosecutor ordered that they are sent to the forensic department, if possible. This means that we will have to wait until Saturday at the least.

The prosecutor refused to allow a doctor who volunteered to make first aid treatment. There are doubts that El-Sharkawi’s ribs are broken. The prosecutor also refused to transfer them to a hospital for treatment.

Here’s a picture of Sharqawi from a recent demo:

Img 2280

Impressions from Washington

Sumita Pahwa, one of the organizers of the Washington, DC, 25 May demo, writes about the day:

Ustaz Ibrahim and I got there a bit early to set things up, and within a few minutes there were two police-type cars there, which read “United States Secret Service – Uniformed Division” and the cops asked us what we were protesting about. Then a few minutes later a State Department security/secret service guy came up, introduced himself and asked lots of questions about why we were protesting, chatted about the time he had spent in the Middle East, and mentioned that the Embassy was “concerned” about our protest. He asked us to stay within a small perimeter and said that they didn’t want to create an uncomfortable situation because the Egyptian government provided a lot of security for the American embassy in Cairo so out of reciprocity and courtesy they had to address the Egyptian security demands in Washington…Ibrahim quipped that it was already starting to look like a Cairo rally, with more security than protestors present. There were official and security type Egyptian men coming up near the entrance and chatting and looking at us. Perhaps they were a bit flustered to not have their reassuring rows of amn al-markazi there.

Continue reading Impressions from Washington