I was freed but too many others are still wrongfully imprisoned
This week marks the second anniversary since my release from an Egyptian prison.
I still vividly remember standing in the cage in the Cairo Criminal Court looking though the metal bars at the scores of fellow journalists, diplomats and humanitarians who came to witness the announcement of a verdict a year earlier, in June 2014.
Throughout the course of the trial I fought the battle of freedom by applying the mindset of a journalist and exposed both parties responsible for my incarceration — the jailer and my former employer.
The idealist in me died when the judge cemented the accusations and announced that my two colleagues and I were guilty of fabricating news and conspiring with a terrorist group.
Many journalists like me who embraced this difficult craft in the first place aimed at achieving idealistic goals, such as giving a voice to the voiceless, making a difference, relaying the most accurate version of the truth and making sure those leaders in power calling the shots are accountable.
Every good journalist will tell you that they experience that unsettling mindset of being regularly skeptical and at times cynical due to the evil we witness on the front lines of history and the lies spun to us by leaders of the world and public figures who are supposed to be role models.
Once I was freed I became a private citizen on a path of recovery. I embraced activism and connected with good people who saw the lessons from my story — the tragedies and injustices that must be addressed to save others. One of the people I was lucky to connect with was filmmaker David Paperny.
In 1994, during my second year of college, Paperny was already nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his character driven film The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter. His depiction of the life of the late Peter Jepson-Young, a Canadian doctor with AIDS who raised awareness of the disease in the early ’90s, is the best tribute to such a heroic figure.
In 2007, Paperny produced another characterdriven documentary, Confessions of an Innocent Man, based on the story of William Sampson, a British-Canadian arrested in Saudi Arabia on questionable charges of terrorism and espionage before he was released after close to three years in solitary confinement.
When Paperny met with me and expressed interest in telling my story, I knew I had fallen into the hands of a humanist, a storyteller who uses his camera to zone in on the “why?” and “what next?” It’s not easy trusting someone with the message you want to portray to the world through your own complicated political story of injustice.
Paperny’s latest documentary focuses on how finding freedom is only half the story. Paperny got me thinking about my new life when he titled the film: Mohamed Fahmy: Half Free. (CBC, 9 p.m. Sunday.)
Am I still living in Vancouver with the demons of my past in the Middle East, and which past is that? The past I cherished as a journalist, who witnessed the fog of war and revolutions on the front lines in Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon? Could it be the most recent past and the experience of living among Islamic extremists in a prison for a crime I did not commit?
Am I half free because I am experiencing some survivor’s guilt? Does my activism and relaying the stories of the 259 journalists jailed in 2016 or the 25 reporters killed in 2017 make a difference?
Paperny highlights the film with other stories, such as Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known professionally as Shawkan. He has been unjustly detained in the same prison complex where I was detained in Egypt since Aug. 14, 2013.
Paperny’s lens also grabs the pain of Maryam Malekpour, a Vancouver resident seeking to release her brother, web programmer Saeed Malekpour, a permanent resident of Canada and an Iranian national who has been unjustly imprisoned in Iran since 2008 — an innocent man who has received little to no support from our prime minister.
The maddening parallels and injustices are many. One must see through the hypocrisies of some world leaders who read speeches about democracy and combating terrorism at the United Nations General Assembly while doing little to champion press freedom and solve humanitarian crises they themselves helped create in the first place.