Pressure key to win release for jailed Canadians: Fahmy
Mohamed Fahmy speaks out because so many people can’t.
He’s speaking for the 1,400 Canadian prisoners behind bars in foreign countries. Men and women who suffer countless indignities by regimes who routinely lock up and torture dissidents in their country’s deep, dark corners.
He understands their plight because, for 438 days, he was one of them.
Fahmy, an award-winning Canadian journalist, was at Concordia University on Thursday to talk about his ordeal in an Egyptian prison but also about what the government can do to help citizens trapped in foreign jails.
“These Canadian prisoners, they are clinging to any hope for release,” said Fahmy, in an interview with the Montreal Gazette. “They are being subjected to different kinds of psychological torture, they are living day by day, they are drowning and hoping that anything or anyone can save them.”
The 42-year-old reporter was arrested in 2013 and jailed in Cairo’s maximum security Tora Prison. He was charged with airing “false news” that was biased toward the Muslim Brotherhood — a political party banned by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Critics say the charges were trumped up and amounted to little more than an attack on the free press and Fahmy’s employer, Al-Jazeera News.
Fahmy’s lecture Thursday seems especially relevant given that Homa Hoodfar, a 65-year-old Concordia professor, is being held in an Iranian jail cell on “unknown” charges, according to Iranian media. He says a key to freeing people like Hoodfar is for the Canadian government and international media to apply a concerted pressure on foreign regimes.
“Everything we are doing for them, even if they’re in solitary confinement, as I was for a month and a half, they still get the news somehow,” said Fahmy. “Through a guard who is sympathetic to them or other means, I guarantee you that somehow it gets to them. And that keeps their morale high and actually keeps them living, fighting to survive this horrific ordeal.”
Some of the darkest times for Fahmy came when he was placed alone in a four-foot by three-foot cell for nearly two months.
“I tried to walk from side to side in my cell, jog on the spot, read anything I could get my hands on, even if it was just a little scrap of paper,” said Fahmy. “Your worst enemy, in that cell, is your mind. If you don’t gather yourself, you can end up dying in there.”
There were little victories — securing more food, extra time out of his cell, a note smuggled to his wife Marwa — that kept him going.
He believes his release could have been expedited had the Harper government fought harder on his behalf.
“The ambassadors on the ground were doing a very good job — but they were shackled by the (Canadian government),” said Fahmy. “The prime minister was not speaking loudly about this, he was not calling (President Sisi) because some of their interests were aligned and he was willing to overlook human rights violations.
“It took the Canadian media to make an issue out of this, to put it out there and they did, they did a great job at that.”
Since his release last October, Fahmy has set up a charity that fights for Canadians locked up by tyrannical regimes. He also met with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau before the 2015 election and discussed ways for Canada to better advocate for its citizens.
Though it’s been about a year since he secured his freedom through a presidential pardon, Fahmy says it took him a while leave the cell behind.
“When I was writing about the experience, it was like reliving it, like being back in that terrible place for months,” said Fahmy, whose autobiographical book The Marriot Cell will be released this fall.
“Now that the book is off to the printers, I feel like I’m free.
“I guess what’s next is I want to get back in the saddle, continue being a journalist, speaking for those who have no voice, who are oppressed. I’m a journalist, it’s what we do.”
It took the Canadian media to make an issue out of this, to put it out there and they did, they did a great job at that.