Egypt's Campaign Against Islamists, And Human Rights Concerns, Heat Up

By James J. Napoli

With apparent faith in the old saw that the best defense is a good offense, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa was heading for an international conference in Vienna in June to talk up his government's concern for human rights. Human rights in Bosnia and in the Israeli-occupied territories, that is.

In Egypt, concern for human rights is beginning to look increasingly like a luxury the government has decided it cannot afford. Evidence of indiscriminate arrests, incommunicado detentions without charge, beatings and torture is piling up.

The latest addition to the file was a report from Amnesty International, based in London, that exhaustively documents cases of such human rights violations.

But, even as Moussa was preparing a working paper for Vienna arguing that a single standard of human rights should be applied throughout the world, the Foreign Ministry was arguing at home that any assessment of the human rights situation in a given country should take into account its social, economic, cultural and political circumstances.

Naela Gabr, director of the Foreign Ministry's human rights department, said in a letter to the organization that the Amnesty report was only a collection of "extraordinary cases" that did not reflect a pattern.

But, Gabr added, no one could deny the impact that militant religious extremism was having on legal systems, particularly in the Middle East. Egypt retains its emergency laws and has passed sweeping legislation to deal with terrorism.

"It's getting much worse," said one Egyptian university professor. "The government is obviously afraid and insecure. Of course there are human rights violations. Dealing with the Islamic movement requires patience and moderation. The government wants shortcuts, so there are mass arrests and torture."

In fact, human rights violations are something of a tradition in Egypt, and were certainly commonplace under presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.

In an interview with the Washington Report, the venerable journalist Mustapha Amin recounted the torture he underwent shortly after his arrest during the Nasser era. He claimed that Egypt's then-president even came down to the prison to watch him being tortured, maintaining that his torturers became particularly animated in their work when they knew the president was in the next room.

Nasser also made a special target of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had infiltrated every sector of society and was seen as a threat to his own power. Brotherhood leaders were arrested and tortured. The Islamists only recovered some of their power under Sadat, who found them useful for strengthening his own position. Although instances of torture and ill-treatment of political detainees declined under Sadat, large-scale political arrests did take place.

In recent years, report after report sustains the allegation that widespread and systematic human rights abuses persist, and seem to be growing in number. This is despite the fact that in 1986 Egypt became the first Arab country to ratify the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Here's a brief sampling of reports:

In October 1991, Amnesty International released a report entitled "Ten Years of Torture" to mark the decade that President Mubarak had ruled since Sadat was assassinated by religious extremists during a military parade.

The report documents how political detainees—often alleged members or sympathizers of Islamist organizations—have been tortured at the State Security Intelligence headquarters in Lazoghly Square in central Cairo, in another Cairo SSI branch in Dokki, and in other locations from coastal Alexandria to the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut.

"Political detainees have been blindfolded, stripped of their clothes and suspended from their wrists, bound and handcuffed together, sometimes in contorted positions, from the tops of doors or from barred windows," the report says. "Victims have described how they have been forced to lie on their backs, their hands and feet bound together, a chair forced up their armpits, another keeping their knees apart to restrict the body's involuntary spasms as electric shocks were applied repeatedly to their nipples and genitals. . . Some have been sexually abused."

In December 1991, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights launched a yearlong campaign to stop torture, which, according to the group, continued under Egyptian security and police forces despite its prohibition by Egyptian law and the Constitution.

In the preceding two years, EOHR had issued three reports on torture in Egypt, and another 13 brief reports and appeals centered on specific cases.

A report released by EOHR in January of last year focused on rape and sexual abuse, as well as the application of electric shocks, as methods of torture. In one case, a woman being held by police in Zagazig in Sharkyia Governorate to testify against an alleged car thief was beaten and sexually abused by an officer "by introducing an iron rod through her anus," the report said. This and similar cases in the report were dismissed by the government as fabrications.

In July 1992, Middle East Watch, a division of the international group Human Rights Watch, published its report on torture and detention in Egypt, "Behind Closed Doors." Although the study focuses on the SSI, it notes that "a subculture of violence has pervaded ordinary police work." It provides several hundred pages of grisly reading.

The report contends that numerous accounts of torture from residents, many of them suspected Islamic extremists, in cities and towns throughout Egypt between 1989 and early 1992 reveal a "pattern of abuse, not isolated cases of aberrant behavior."

Old Middle East hands generally respond that the human rights situation in Egypt is far better than that in such Arab countries as Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. And it's arguably better than in Israel and the occupied territories, where abuses are systematically applied to one segment of the population.

It's also true that one reason that Egypt has been getting such bad publicity is that, unlike some other offending Arab states, it permits non-governmental human rights organizations to operate in the country.

But the growing number of extremist bombings and attacks against police, officials, Coptic Christians, tourists and others is driving the government to increasingly extreme countermeasures. In just one week in May, some 700 people were arrested in connection with fundamentalist violence.

Instead of quelling the Islamists, such mass arrests, especially if followed by torture and mistreatment at the hands of the police, could have the opposite effect. They could play to extremists who already revel in martyrdom and feed the antigovernment resentment of pious, ordinary citizens caught in the dragnets, as well as their families and friends.

Police, not much trusted by average Egyptians in the best of times, are now widely considered the enemy. "People don't feel that the police are their protectore," said columnist Hassan Ragab. "They are more like an occupation army." In the meantime, government paranoia, which seems to be the motivating force behind the increase in human rights violations, has plenty to feed on.

Interior Minister Hassan Al-Alfi announced in early June that a guerrilla plot to assassinate a number of senior officials and public figures, as well as to plant explosives in public squares and on railway lines, had been foiled. Thirty suspected terrorists had been arrested in the plot, allegedly designed to destabilize Egypt. Al-Alfi linked the plan with Egyptian Islamic militants living abroad, including the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who in turn has been associated with some suspects in last February's bombing of the New York World Trade Center, and who is a frequent critic of the Mubarak regime.