Egypt’s long nightmare
Mohamed Fahmy is free today, and not a moment too soon. After a 21-month ordeal at the hands of the Egyptian courts, the Canadian journalist was finally pardoned on Wednesday thanks to a vocal international campaign for his release.
It was no accident that Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, pardoned Fahmy on the eve of his scheduled departure for New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. By freeing Fahmy and his fellow journalist Basher Mohamed, along with 98 other prisoners, el-Sissi clearly wanted to appear magnanimous on the world stage.
No one who cares about democracy in Egypt and the wider Arab world should be fooled, however. Since taking power in 2013, el-Sissi’s military-backed government has instituted a level of repression that actually goes beyond the restrictions on freedom imposed by the old regime of Hosni Mubarak.
In fact, things are getting worse, not better, despite the welcome release of Fahmy and the others. In its campaign to crush the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist militants in northern Sinai, Egypt is tossing democratic and human rights aside.
Since the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government two years ago, some 40,000 people have been arrested and more than 1,400 have been killed. Many hundreds of prisoners without international profile or foreign governments to speak out on their behalf languish in Egypt’s jails.
Hundreds of others — a total of 1,250, according to an Egyptian organization called Freedom for the Brave — are simply “disappeared” for days or weeks at a time by the country’s security forces. They may never face charges, but the chill on dissent is no less effective.
Journalists have also been targeted. In June, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 18 imprisoned simply because their reporting went counter to the government’s approved version of events. Fahmy and his colleagues from the Al Jazeera network were far from alone.
The world has noticed, but evidently prefers the repressive stability of Egypt to the bloody civil war in Syria or the chaos in Libya. The U.S. State Department reported to Congress in Maythat Egypt was failing to hold its security forces responsible for “arbitrary or unlawful killings.” But, it concluded, the country is too important to put in doubt the massive aid (most of it military) that Washington sends to Cairo.
Just last month, in response to the assassination of a top official, Egypt codified this repression by bringing in a new anti-terror law that strengthens the power of the security state and imposes fines on journalists who depart from government-approved views. The danger, of course, is that in the long run it will backfire by breeding more opposition — and ultimately more terrorism.
Canadians should keep all this in mind as they prepare to welcome Fahmy back to this country. His nightmare may be ending, but Egypt remains trapped in a long darkness that betrays the long-ago promise of the “Arab Spring.”