Giza.
Our dear friend Hossam Elzomor cannot contribute to this article because he has been arrested by the reborn Manahith Amn el-Dawla, which had been disbanded under Morsi. We lost contact with Hossam during our aborted demonstration down Ramses street, which we described in our last dispatch. When we called him on his mobile phone, we couldn’t get any reply, although we soon found a post on Facebook from a concerned passer-by who broadcast his arrest. It will be impossible to find Hossam.
There are check points everywhere these days and if the police don’t like the look of you, they refer you ‘up’ to their reinstated super-élite of torturers. We don’t know which is worse, to come across a police check point in the city, or an army check point out of town, where they simply mow you down.
Mabahith Amn ed-Dawla, ever since its inception under Nasser in 1954, has had as its fundamental raison d’être, the rooting out and extermination of ‘Islamists’. If they don’t exist they have to be invented.
After spending his entire career in this organisation, Habib el-Adly, notorious for his suspected involvement in the al-Qiddisin Church bombing, became Mubarak’s longest serving interior minister from 1997 to 2011. Under his watch, hunting-down Islamists reached frenzied heights, where not only were supposed suspects detained without charge, but their extended families as well, and all were subjected to random torture.
The ex-governor of the newest highest security al-‘Aqrab prison build in 1995, where Khairat el-Shater and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders are currently being held, talks to Hayat TV, about Habib el-Adly. He discusses el-Adly’s particular brand of cruelty, as well as the fact that he is absolutely certain that all charges raised against the Muslim Brotherhood in his day without exception, were fabricated.
Mohamed Salim el-Awwa, ex-presidential candidate in the 2012 Presidential Elections in Egypt, who ran against Morsi in the first round, explains here how the new demonisation of the Muslim Brotherhood by General Sissi is a sign of the bankruptcy of the 3rd July coup, and how the Brotherhood has not, to his knowledge, ever broken their pledge not to carry arms since the pledge was given in 1948.
The absolute commitment to peaceful protest and civil disobedience on the part of the people of Egypt who are protesting against the 3rd July coup is clear from this video emailed to protesters far and wide by the Freedom and Justice Party. It insists on continued peaceful protests and the only possible route to success against this bloody régime, and is interspersed with clips from Morsi’s last speech, which also makes it absolutely clear that peaceful protest is the only way forward, warning against the carrying of any arms at all, even under the most extreme circumstances.
Of course the régime will use all means to incite violence and will doctor footage to support accusations that protesters are carrying guns. This is explained in this 20 minute documentary produced by al-Jazeera of the destruction of the Raba’a al-Adawiyya protest camp, which ends with pictures of the burning of the square, before any searching for or removal of any of the corpses under the debris is allowed, and before any of the relatives could get access to the area. Unfortunately, a similar documentary hasn’t been made of our camp at Nahda in Giza due to the lack of quality footage, although clips are available.
The experience in these camps, and during the violent events at the Mohamed Mahmoud mosque and Ramses Street (the Fatah mosque debacle) has led to a much more flexible and much more mobile concept for future demonstrations, which is also explained in the Freedom and Justice Party video.
Meanwhile, life has become cheap in Egypt. The writer Fahmi Huwaidi writes in al-Shark newspaper (translated here) that he mourns the fact that the cold blooded murder of 38 ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ prisoners being transferred to Abu Za’bal prison appears at the bottom of page 3 in the 21st August issue of Al-Ahram Newspaper, while the death of 25 soldiers at the Rafah crossing, which occurred later, makes the front page. Huwaidi notes in the piece that actually the 38 prisoners ‘were not all affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, nor were they all Islamists. One of the victims was an official of the Ghad El-Thawra Party from the Faiyum province’.
But even the identity of the true perpetrators of the killing of the 25 soldiers in the new events at Rafah has to remain in serious doubt, since ex-army General Tahir Ezzedine had questioned the previous violent events of August 2012 at Rafah involving the killing of soldiers. He judged them as having been engineered by Sissi in order to remove Tantawi, and take his place. The circumstances of the murders of the soldiers are murky to say the least, and the fact that parents were not allowed to take their sons’ bodies home for burial, leaves us with a lot of questions.
Meanwhile Sissi has released ‘uncle’ Mubarak from prison. Sissi’s relationship with Mubarak built up of the years he served spying on the army and report to the old dictator daily, and by the way it appears that it was Suzanne Mubarak who found him his wife.
Thank you for all your recent emails of support.
Mohamed Malik can be reached at malektex@hotmail.com.
Mohamad Omar (surgeon), can be reached at m.omar84@yahoo.com).
Also contributing to this report: Badr Mohamad Badr (teacher), Yasser Mahran (lawyer), Ahmad Abdel-Ghafar (businessman , Sayed Khamis (teacher), Mohamad Gheith (pharmacist
