Activist Ahmed Maher is half imprisoned in his country, Egypt. According to a report by Reuters, the 38-year-old has spent his nights in a police cell every day for the past two years since he was freed from a three-year prison sentence in early 2017. Maher is currently under three-year probation for breaking anti-protest laws, and as a result, spends 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily under police watch.
Like many Egyptians who protested the reign of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and celebrated the topple of Muhamed Morsi in 2013, Maher had hoped that these revolutions would pave the way for more freedom in Egypt. He was wrong. Repression has gotten worse under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. “No one imagined that the situation would be this bad. Even the right to gather in a crowd or to express an opinion is not available,” Maher told Reuters. Still, he considers himself luckier than other activists.
Photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, popularly known as Shawkan, is another individual serving a probationary sentence in Egypt. Shawkan was simply doing his job of taking photos when he was arrested by Egyptian authorities, convicted for being a ‘member of a terrorist group’ and sentenced to five years in prison. Having already been imprisoned since 2013, Shawkan is now obligated to appear at a police station every day at sunset, spend the night and leave by morning. He will do this for another five years.
Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi assumed power in 2014, democracy in Egypt has been on a steady decline. Public criticism and opposition of the government remain banned in the north African country. In the last five years, Sisi’s government has given ample room for increased human rights violations. Journalists, activists, and political opponents are harassed, arrested, tortured and imprisoned without trial. And in cases where they are tried, it is not in any way, fair.
“In democracies governed by the rule of law, trials are fair and prompt; in Egypt, the survivors of a massacre can be detained for five years before trial, and then tried in huge groups, with no chance of a proper defence,” reads an editorial by The Guardian. One instance of such an unfair trial happened last September when an Egyptian court conducted a mass trial of 739 people. They were allegedly among those who protested the military coup that propelled Sisi to power in 2013. 75 of them were sentenced to death, a judgement Amnesty International condemned as a grotesque parody of justice.
According to a September 2018 report by Amnesty International titled Egypt: An Open-Air Prison For Critics, Egyptian security forces arbitrarily arrested and detained at least 111 people from January up until when the report was released, solely for peacefully expressing critical opinions about the authorities or for participating in protests or political gatherings. At least 70 of them remain imprisoned, facing charges that carry prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Arresting, imprisoning, and ‘disappearing’ people for criticising his government is not the only way President Sisi represses Egyptians. He has devised other ways like shutting down human rights organizations and blocking their source or channel of foreign funding. In September 2016, a criminal court in Cairo approved a request to freeze the assets of three human rights groups and the personal assets of the founders, leaders, and staff members of these groups. These individuals were also banned from travelling outside Egypt.
There is no logical explanation for Sisi’s obsession to silence opposing voices other than the fact that his government is working really hard to eliminate the liberal secular opposition as they had done the Islamic opposition, and thus prevent any future uprising to bring him down like Mubarak. Little wonder he has been described as Mubarak on steroids.
Worse still, Sisi’s supporters are seeking ways to amend the constitution to allow him to extend his stay in office beyond the two four-year terms stipulated. If they succeed, it is difficult to ascertain what will happen, especially as the government is actively working to block any chance of a revolution. Is another uprising foreseeable in Egypt’s future? Will the country ever get the messiah it seeks or just a continuous change of leadership with a similar pattern of politics and varying degrees of repression?
