By Sharif
Abdel Kouddous
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The front gate of Abu
Zaabal, a prison north of Cairo where hundreds of protestors are currently
detained (photo by Mosa'ab Elshamy)
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At
first it was the Muslim Brotherhood. Now dozens of journalists, non-Islamist
activists and students have been detained and beaten.
The
Abu Zaabal prison complex lies some twenty miles northeast of Cairo, where the
dense urban cacophony of the capital quickly gives way to rolling fields,
rubbish-strewn canals and small clusters of hastily built red brick buildings.
Outside the main gate—a pair of large metal doors flanked by Pharaonic-themed
columns—sit four army tanks, their long snouts pointed up and out.
Gehad
Khaled, a 20-year-old with an easy laugh and youthful intensity, has been
coming to Abu Zaabal on a regular basis for nearly four months to visit her
imprisoned husband. Abdullah Al-Shamy was among hundreds rounded up on August
14, the day security forces violently stormed two sit-ins in Cairo and Giza
that formed the epicenter of support for the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi,
leaving up to 1,000 people dead.
Abdullah
was at the Rabaa Al-Adeweya sit-in for work. As a correspondent for the
satellite news channel Al Jazeera, the 25-year-old journalist had been
stationed at the pro-Morsi encampment for six weeks, becoming a familiar face
to the channel’s viewers in one of the summer’s biggest international news
stories.
Gehad
would visit Abdullah at the sit-in, where he was working around the clock. The
two had been married in September 2012, though Abdullah spent little time at
home because of regular deployments to countries like Mali, Libya, Ghana and
Turkey for Al Jazeera. “The longest period we spent together since we were
married was in Rabaa,” she says with a smile.
Now,
Gehad sees Abdullah just once every two weeks inside Abu Zaabal, waiting hours
each time for a fifteen-minute visit. She brings him food, water, clothes,
newspapers, books, toiletries and other necessities to alleviate the austere
conditions inside Egypt’s jails.
The
prison waiting room is bustling with other families carrying plastic bags and
suitcases of supplies. Children scamper around their parents, women carry
babies. Over the past few months, thousands of Brotherhood members and Morsi
supporters have been rounded up and thrown in prison.
More than 700 of those arrested
in the August 14 raid on Rabaa were imprisoned at Abu Zaabal, and the walls of
the waiting room bear the signs of the political divisions that have torn Egypt
apart.
Drawings
of a hand holding up four fingers, a symbol for Rabaa (Arabic for “four”), are
scrawled in felt pen alongside slogans such as “Down with military rule” and
“CC the killer,” in reference to army chief Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, who deposed
Morsi on July 3. Some of the graffiti has been angrily crossed out by family
members of prisoners convicted of regular crimes who oppose the Brotherhood.
Similar
divisions exist within Gehad’s own family. Her father is a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood and a staunch supporter of Morsi, yet Gehad, who has began
protesting the regime since 2008, says she doesn’t support the group and
accuses them of abandoning the revolution.
In what has become an increasingly
common phenomenon in Egyptian society, the political cleavages within her
family often spilled over into heated disputes, compelling her to refrain from
discussing politics with her parents and siblings.
Despite
her misgivings about the Brotherhood, Gehad spent a lot of time in the
pro-Morsi Rabaa sit-in, not just to see her husband but to be a part of the
protest.
“We have been standing against the military since 2011, and we still
are now,” she explains. “We didn’t change our position, the Brotherhood did.
Now they stand against the military too. We are continuing, and they have
joined us.”
Her attitude is not shared by other revolutionary activists who
view the Brotherhood not just as political opportunists but as a separate wing
of the counterrevolution. These activists point to abuses the Brotherhood
committed during their time in power as justification for refusing to join even
a tactical alliance with them against the military after the coup.
Abdullah’s
younger brother, 23-year-old Mosa’ab, sits next to Gehad in the waiting room.
Mosa’ab also spent a significant amount of time in Rabaa, but only in his
capacity as a journalist, not as a protester. A talented and intrepid freelance
photographer, one of his photographs, from a police attack on the sit-in on
July 27 that left dozens dead, was selected as one of Time magazine’s Top
Ten Photos of 2013.
Similar
divisions plague the Al-Shamy family as well. Mosa’ab says his father, a
Brotherhood member, and his eldest brother, Anas, are often a united front
arguing vociferously against him, Abdullah and his younger brother, all of whom
were more critical of the Brotherhood and Morsi. “It wasn’t pleasant,” Mosa’ab
says.
On
August 14, the day of the police raids, Mosa’ab was in frequent phone contact
with Abdullah as they both covered the carnage unfolding in Rabaa. Their
youngest brother, 19-year-old Mohammed, a photographer working for the Turkish
news agency Anadolu, was there as well. Mosa’ab and Mohammed left together in
the afternoon, not long before security forces had completely moved in and
cleared the sit-in.
By
nightfall, Mosa’ab found out that Abdullah had been detained, arrested by
security forces as he was walking out of Rabaa with Gehad. Nearly four months
later, he remains imprisoned, and there have been no significant developments
pointing toward his release. Like thousands of protesters arrested over the
past few months, he is accused of inciting violence, disturbing the peace and
destroying public property.
“I’m
more afraid now,” Mosa’ab says of continuing his work as a photojournalist in
Egypt. “I think about it 1,000 times over before I go out to cover something.”
*
* *
Abdullah
has spent the past four months struggling to endure the monotony of prison
life.
“People
should appreciate every moment they live in freedom,” he says in an interview
from jail. “I never thought I could stay this long here. The worst thing is
that every day is like the other. You wake up with nothing to do.”
He
spends his days reading, writing and speaking to other prisoners. He shares a
cell with sixty-six other men, in a room approximately forty square meters.
There are no beds; prisoners sleep on the floor, with blankets provided by
their families.
For the first eight weeks, hardly any water was provided, and
prisoners had to structure an equitable sharing system in order to shower. The
cell is open for an hour a day, when prisoners can walk around the building but
are not allowed outside.
Ever
the journalist, Abdullah has spent much of his time in prison interviewing all
of his fellow detainees and documenting their cases. He plans to write a book
once he is released. He says those imprisoned with him include Islamists
spanning different ideologies as well as street vendors, minors and even one
man detained simply for standing near police on the day of the Rabaa raid who
says he is staunchly opposed to Morsi, voted for his rival in the presidential
election and took part in the anti-Morsi protest on June 30 and the
pro-military one on July 26.
Like
many other prisoners, the worst abuse Abdullah suffered occurred when he was
first detained. Officers arrested him as he was walking out of Rabaa with Gehad
past a security checkpoint. They asked for his ID, but all he had was his
passport, which was filled with entry stamps from the countries across Africa
where he had been deployed for Al Jazeera. “They considered me a spy,” he says.
“They thought I was a big catch.”
He
was taken to the nearby Cairo stadium, where prisoners were being mistreated
and harassed by the police. The next morning he was transferred with several
dozen others to a police station, where they were greeted by the notorious
“welcome party”—a common practice of forcing incoming detainees to run through
a gantlet of waiting soldiers, who beat and whip them with sticks and belts.
Once inside, police stole money, watches and IDs from the prisoners while
continuing to beat and humiliate them, Abdullah says.
All
of them were eventually transferred to Abu Zaabal, where they have remained
ever since, relying on regular supplies of food, water and other essentials
from relatives, as is customary in Egypt’s crippled prison system.
“I
do have hope,” he says. “But sometimes I feel down because my wife has to
endure this in the beginning of our marriage. I am lucky she is a very strong
lady and is supporting me when I should be supporting her.”
Abdullah
has received scant backing for his plight from other journalists in Egypt
outside of his friends. The Journalists’ Syndicate has not taken up his case,
and calls for his release are largely absent in the local press. “Some Egyptian
journalists are very happy about it, including people that we know,” says his
brother Mosa’ab. “They think he deserves it.”
Abdullah’s
network, Al Jazeera, has long been criticized as being heavily biased in favor
of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Morsi government’s agenda. After Morsi’s
ouster, authorities raided the offices of Al Jazeera’s local affiliate in Egypt
and briefly detained its staff. In September, a Cairo court ordered the channel
and three other stations to stop broadcasting, saying in its ruling that they
“hurt national security.”
Yet
the criticism did not just come from the military-backed government. Even
Mosa’ab would argue with Abdullah over the channel’s coverage. “I would
criticize Al Jazeera and tell him about my reservations and tell him to keep
his integrity,” Mosa’ab says. “He always took the criticism well but did what
he believed.”
“Every
channel is biased or has its agenda, no channel is completely neutral,”
Abdullah says. “I always challenge people to point to something I said on
air, and I will face any allegations,” he says. “Our job is to help the weak.
But unfortunately, in Egypt most journalists stand with those in power, either
Mubarak or the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or Sisi.”
In
the deepening polarization following Morsi’s overthrow, many pundits on private
media outlets have voiced complete support for the military, adopting its
language of a “war on terror” and vilifying Al Jazeera and demonizing all
Islamists as violent extremists unfit for political life.
“The polarization was a big divide that
resulted in a lack of empathy and solidarity between journalists,” says Sherif
Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa coordinator for the Committee to
Protect Journalists. “This is one of the main reasons we’ve seen these attacks
on journalists increase but also go unpunished.” Seven journalists, including
Abdullah, are currently imprisoned in Egypt, according to Mansour, while dozens
of others have been briefly detained.
Meanwhile,
after months of a vicious crackdown targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi
supporters, the Interior Ministry has turned its attention to the activist
community that first launched and sustained the revolution. Prominent figures,
like blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah and Ahmed Douma, have been arrested in the
middle of the night at their homes and accused of violating a draconian new
anti-protest law.
Dozens of non-Islamist protesters—among them some of the
country’s most notable female activists—have been detained during peaceful
demonstrations and beaten and abused while in police custody. And security
forces have tried to quell a growing firestorm of protest and dissent on
university campuses with brute force, killing at least one student and
arresting scores in mass sweeps.
“I
don’t think the people who stood against Morsi wanted this,” Abdullah says.
“The way things are going, nothing is going to change in Egypt.”
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