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Egypt

Like an Occupying Army, Egypt Battles its Own Citizens in the Sinai

From San Francisco

In the satellite pictures, it looks as if someone has taken an eraser to the lines of houses and farms, smearing them over the arid landscape. But it is Egyptian army bulldozers that are blotting Rafah away, block by block. It is the desolation of Sisi, the most shocking and lurid of the many ways that Egypt’s military has gotten everything wrong in Sinai, behaving like an occupying army on its own land, fighting a terrorist insurgency in the most inept way possible.

The last time I visited Northern Sinai, it was a windy winter week in 2008, under a morose sky.

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In Egypt, a Parallel Justice System to Further Oppress Copts

From Al Safir Al Arabi

Periodic outbreaks of mob violence against Egypt’s small Coptic Christian minority have long been an ugly feature of life along the Nile, particularly in the villages and towns in rural upper Egypt. Since the earthquake that was the Arab Spring rolled through Egypt in 2011, writes Ahmed Abdel Alim, Copts seeking justice for murder, arson, and beatings are increasingly forced to accept non-judicial mediation sessions, instead of the prosecution of their attackers.

In rural Egypt, traditional ‘Urfi courts are an ancient way of resolving disputes

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In Sinai, the Arrested Mysteriously Reappear as Dead Terrorists

From Mada Masr

Fighting a remarkably unsuccessful war against Bedouin insurgents in the Sinai, the Egyptian state seems to have given up even pretending to adhere to the rule of law, as Heba Afify’s story from Mada Masr makes clear:

It was dawn on one of the final days of November when Suleiman was awakened to the flashing lights of a police car and then a military armored personnel carrier filling up the street where he lives.

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The War Within: Egypt’s Disintegrating Muslim Brothers

From Noon Post

Since it was driven underground after the coup of the summer of 2013 and the massacres that followed soon after, what has happened to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt? The vast and powerful century-old organization, survivor of so many cycles of repression and rejuvenation, has split and turned against itself, writes Ahmed Al Tellawi in Noon Post.

The conflict began around August, 2014,

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A Seismic Assassination in Cairo

From Noon Post

Massacred and driven underground or into exile following the 2013 coup, Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are nevertheless an extraordinarily resilient organization. But when security forces in Cairo this week killed one of the group’s most important leaders, a widening rupture between two major factions in the Brothers broke to the surface, writes Ahmed Al Tellawi in this very perceptive analysis:

In a Tuesday press release, the Egyptian Interior Ministry announced that it had liquidated Mohamed Kamal.

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Poetry and Pestilence

From Al Safir Al Arabi

How do you avoid plagues of burrowing parasitic mites in an overcrowded prison cell? How do you avoid catching them while you sleep, in the most contaminated wards of Egypt prisons: the “political prisoners” blocks? How do you deal with the itching and with the shame of the itching? With songs, with a mixture of euphemism and bluntness, and with endless endurance, writes poet and novelist Omar Hazek, who walked out of prison in Alexandria recently.

Scratch, Scratch, try just once to quit!

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Torture’s Victory

From El Watan

The local and international press reported this week that Egypt’s military regime was closing Nadim, a prominent center in Cairo that treats victims of torture. Nadim was one of the last lights flickering in the sea of darkness that Egypt under Sisi has become; the history of the center’s creation, the nature of its work, and the personalities of its founders all ordained its closure.

Magda Adly is not the type to be easily intimidated.

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A Fine Journalist Vanishes Into Egypt’s Gulag

From San Francisco

There are not many Egyptian journalists like Ismail Alexandrani. A sociologist by training, he was always drawn as a writer and journalist to those who are marginalized in the excitable hurly burly of Egypt’s press and popular culture: Nubians, disabled people, the Sinai Bedouins. This week, his expertise and erudition have dealt him a grim fate: he has been arrested and is being held incognito on improbable charges of supporting terrorism.

Forced to live abroad since last year, Alexandrani tried to slip into Egypt under the radar this week to visit his ailing mother.

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The Murder Factories of Egypt

From Al Safir Al Arabi

Egypt has filled its prisons with some 40,000 people since the 2013 coup, the vast majority of them young activists of the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood subjected to torture and mistreatment. And so once again the country is turning out a new generation of violent radicals. In this illuminating history of the links between the country’s prisons and violent extremism, the complex history of the Sinai based ISIS affiliate that weeks ago blew up an airliner full of Russian tourists, murdering more than 200 people:

The present wave of arrests and mistreatment of detainees in today’s Egypt is nothing new for the country’s Islamists.

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An Egypt Where Jews are Good, Islamists Bad, and Palestinians Don’t Exist

From Orient XXI

The most talked about Egyptian TV series this summer, a historical drama with Jews as the heroes: hard to imagine a fresher angle than that, right? But as Orient XXI’s Celine Lebrun writes here, Harat al-Yahoud, which explicitly exchanged as ‘bad guys’ Jews and Zionists for the Muslim Brothers, was transparent propaganda for the country’s new military rulers.

With sensationalist title, the subject of the TV series by Egyptian director Medhat el-Adl seemed a risky gamble for this summer’s Ramadan month season.

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