Some people may know about China’s organ harvesting program, with up to 13,000 forced organ “donations” annually, may have heard about political opponents being murdered in Moscow or concentration camps in North Korea – but not only Russia, China and wacky central African regimes with the lifespan of a one day fly make people disappear. In fact, a country right at the perimeter of Europe that is also an ally of the US has established an atmosphere of fear through profound surveillance, strict censorship and “disappearing” thousands of it’s own citizens: Egypt.
I talked to an Egyptian student who experienced the revolution and what followed first-hand. To prevent unnecessary risk, she will be referred to as “E” in this article. Most of the information, unless otherwise stated, was taken directly from the interview with her, and most of it will be direct quotes.
Many of the stories that “E” talks about were passed on from friends and family. She never witnessed an abduction first hand. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here now. They ‘clean up’ after themselves”.
An atmosphere of fear prevails in Egypt, with surveillance penetrating every level of the people’s lives, forced disappearances and police arbitrarity all the way to rape by officers. Neighbors keep an eye on each other and report back to the secret services, students watch other students in class, the government hires people to go through social media to watch for any anti-state tendencies – everybody watches everyone. “The harshness of surveillance and actions taken against you significantly depends on how much money you have, but especially online there is no differentiation of wealth, age or really any other factor. In general, the entire society is a lot less open to criticism, including “insults” towards, say, your boss. He will find ways to report and/or fire you, or worse. People threaten to report other people, including friends; former alumni from my school posted political stuff online – people said they would report them”, “E” recalls. The atmosphere is supplemented by a lot of propaganda forced onto the people by the state. “The propaganda and brainwashing are very far reaching. Many people voluntarily fight for the regime, both online and even in person.”
The propaganda works hand in hand with strict censorship of all information, and newspapers, even if they are privately owned, can not be trusted on political subjects. As “E” puts it: “freedom of the press is virtually nonexistent.” Almost all publications have the president and his latest “achievements” on the front page. Self-censorship is omnipresent in the private papers, state-owned papers print solely what they are told to print by the authorities.
Even major international news outlets, such as the BBC’s and Al-Jazeera’s offices, frequently experience raids, TV and radio broadcasts from other countries are sometimes jammed beyond recognition. Complete “outages” of the Internet and the cutting of phone lines is also nothing out of the ordinary. Living near the residences of important political figures in the regime, “E” frequently experiences such complete communication blackouts – correlating with whenever high-ranking government officials are passing by. The government also clearly tries to crack down on all possible means for the people to organize an uprising “recently, Google was unavailable for a day in an attempt to block an encrypted messaging service.” “E” also suspects that the government significantly upped its efforts of watching Twitter following its role in the organization of the revolution in 2011.
The most harrowing reality in today’s Egypt, though, are the abductions of supposed enemies of the state, and all that surround them, by state security. People “disappear” on a daily basis – “You get a knock on your door in the middle of the night – and you’re done.” It is a highly effective way for the government to silence dissent. “Often, people’s entire families are there, and the person simply gets dragged out of the house and that’s the last they ever hear of them. It’s not rare for the family to then afterwards claim that the person hadn’t been with them at the time of the abduction, as to not get themselves or others into trouble.”
Amnesty International reports ‘hundreds of students, political activists and protesters, including children as young as 14, vanish without trace at the hands of the state’. Egypt still has the death penalty in place, and according to the BBC, over 1,000 political opponents have been killed since Al-Sisi gained power, with over 40,000 more being imprisoned. Most have, if at all, received ‘grotesquely unfair’ trials. Officially, if there is an explanation, the government cites antiterrorism actions to legitimize its actions. Prisoners are often forced to “confess” to crimes they didn’t commit or sign piles of documents following harsh torture and sometimes months on end of being handcuffed and blindfolded. One person who disappeared and then later reappeared told Amnesty International what one of his interrogators had said to him: “Do you think that you have a price? We can kill you and put you in a blanket and throw you in any trash bin and no one will ask about you.”
People don’t only disappear if they are political enemies, but also due to personal beliefs that clash with the state’s conservative ideas. “E” told me a very striking story about one of her friends, who was sent to a re-education center by his own parents: “He was openly gay. After final exams, his parents told him he would leave for vacation over the summer. But there were no posts of him on vacation on social media. Then he didn’t show up to school after summer break in September, and still wasn’t present anywhere online. Shortly before Christmas, he suddenly reappeared online. He had been told by his parents that he would go on vacation; instead they had sent him to a ‘reeducation center’ for six months.” No outsider knows precisely happened during the time he was being “reeducated”, and he didn’t speak about it himself either.
Conservative ideas are actively propagated by the state, especially hatred against foreigners. With both her parents having both Egyptian and American passports, “E” fears for their safety back home in Cairo. “During the revolution and following it, the hatred towards foreigners surged; my mother was called a “spy” a lot. During the election for Parliament in Fall 2015, she was handed an invalid ballot and I had to go and ask twice to get a stamped, valid, one.”
The human rights, economy and general standard of living have declined to an extent that many people look back at Mubarak’s rule with an almost nostalgic feeling. “I remember talking to my mother – it must have been around 2010 – about how every year we lost more and more of our rights, but now everyone would like to go back to before the revolution; today, it is worse to be a person living in Egypt, the economy is completely devastated, we have even less rights than we used to.” Amnesty International observed an ‘unprecedented spike in enforced disappearances’, and emphasized that the human rights situation is continuing to deteriorate.
Human rights abuses of countries like North Korea, Syria and Russia are being reported on and receive a lot of publicity, reaching millions of people – which is good; those regimes should not simply be left to make hundreds of thousands “vanish” or being murdered simply because they weren’t in full agreement with the regime’s ideas.
But why do we report on them and not on what is happening right on the doorstep of the EU as well? The human rights situation is worsening from day to day, and it is time for the rest of the world to open their eyes towards what is happening in Egypt, a country where “If you vanish due to something political, you don’t come back.”
