My latest for The Nation:
On March 28, Egypt’s former trade minister, Rachid Mohamed Rachid, was removed from an arrest list after he paid back a total of 15 million Egyptian pounds (approximately $2.2 million) to the state as part of a reconciliation program under President Mohamed Morsi. Rachid, who served as minister from 2004 to 2011, fled just before the toppling of former president Hosni Mubarak and was tried in absentia for profiteering and squandering public funds during his time in office. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined over 1.4 billion Egyptian pounds (approximately $202 million).
The deal struck between Rachid and the Morsi government came amid accelerated efforts by Egyptian authorities to reach out-of-court settlements with former regime officials and businessmen accused of corruption and cronyism. “We will reconcile through a legal process with anyone who did not corrupt or was somewhat corrupt but did not spill blood,” Hatem Saleh, the current trade minister said in January.
The sale of state assets, mainly land for housing and tourism developments, to crony businessmen at prices below market value became a hallmark of the Mubarak regime, particularly during its last decade in power. In the wake of Mubarak’s ouster, cases were brought against numerous businessmen and regime officials. But in January 2012, just days before Egypt’s newly elected parliament was to hold its opening session, the military council that ruled in the interim period issued a decree amending an existing investment law to allow charges to be dropped if the accused paid back their illicit gains. In an attempt to reinvigorate the process, this year the Muslim Brotherhood–led cabinet voted to allow defense lawyers to plea bargain for clients convicted in absentia.
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While on a trip to the US I had the pleasure of being on Democracy Now! today with Lina Attalah, a remarkable journalist and chief editor of the Egypt Independent. Watch the episode:
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I had the pleasure of delivering the annual McGill lecture at Trinity College in Hartford, CT today where I spoke about Egypt’s ongoing revolution:
My second article on Bahrain has been published in The Nation after some delay:
The second anniversary of Bahrain’s uprising on February 14 was marked by street protests, tear gas, shotguns and Molotov cocktails. Two protesters and a policeman were killed and dozens of people arrested. The scenes were not unfamiliar in Bahrain, which has gone through two years of upheaval since demonstrators first took to the streets in early 2011 to call for major political reforms.
Since the uprising began, more than eighty people have been killed and hundreds more wounded. Scores of people have been arrested and sentenced before military courts—many of them human rights advocates, political opposition figures and physicians who treated wounded protesters. Reports of systematic prisoner abuse and torture are widespread.
The Obama administration has been relatively low-key in condemning human rights violations by the Bahraini government over the past two years and has largely looked the other way as the monarchy has sought to quash the uprising. Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which patrols the Persian Gulf, through which much of the world’s oil passes.
In January, ProPublica revealed new details of the weaponry sold to the Bahraini government by the US over the past two years, including ammunition, Black Hawk helicopters and a missile system.
“The US says they support democracy but under the table they do something else entirely. This is America’s politics, they look to their interests and that’s it,” says Taimoor Karimi, a 55 year-old lawyer who was arrested in March 2011 and spent nearly six months in jail—where he says he was tortured—on charges of “spreading false news” and “participating in [an] illegal gathering.”
“Our hope is in the American people. They can pressure their government to pull their hand away from under dictatorship,” he says.
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My first of two pieces in The Nation on Bahrain:
Ali Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Jaziri helps lower his son’s shrouded body into a grave as dozens of mourners crowd around. Many cover their noses and mouths to ward off the sting of tear gas wafting nearby. On the outskirts of the graveyard, hundreds of young men and boys armed with rocks and molotov cocktails are confronted by a phalanx of security forces in full riot gear, backed by armored cars and SUVs. The booms of firing shotguns and tear gas canisters punctuate the buzzing of a police helicopter surveilling the scene below. This is a Bahraini burial.
“I want retribution for my son,” Al-Jaziri says calmly. “We want real accountability, not like what happened with the other martyrs.”
Sixteen year-old Hussein Al-Jaziri was killed on February 14, the day marking the second anniversary of Bahrain’s 2011 uprising. Eyewitnesses told The Nation a police officer shot him twice from a distance of just three or four yards at a street corner in Daih, a village west of the capital. The claims are supported by photographs taken at the morgue showing birdshot wounds clustered tightly together on Hussein’s upper right abdomen—proof of the shooter’s close range. The Bahraini government says it has launched an investigation.
The circumstances of Hussein’s death are especially poignant. On the same date two years earlier, 21 year-old Ali Abdulhadi Mushaima suffered a strikingly similar fate in the same village, where he was fatally shot in the back by police. He would become the first martyr of Bahrain’s uprising; since then, nearly ninety people have killed in Bahrain according to local human rights groups, though some put the number at more than 120, a high toll in a population numbering just 600,000.
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I was interviewed on Democracy Now today about the second anniversary of the uprising in Bahrain:
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I just returned from a reporting trip to Bahrain where I covered the two year anniversary of the February 14 uprising. I was one of the few foreign reporters on the ground. Click on the photo to see the full slideshow:
My report for The Nation from Port Said, where more than 40 people were killed and some 1,000 wounded over the span of four days:
Port Said has become a city of numbers, its narrative punctuated by a grim arithmetic: twenty-one sentenced to death in a trial for seventy-two killed in a soccer riot, thirty-two killed after the verdict was announced. Seven killed in a funeral march the next day. Four more shot dead the night after that.
In a struggle to make sense of the toll, residents resort to macabre calculations. “Maybe when the number of dead reaches seventy-two, like in the stadium last year, the shooting will stop in Port Said,” says Adel Shehata.
Shehata’s 21-year-old son, Mohammed—known to friends and family as ‘Hommos’—is one of twenty-one men, all of them local soccer fans, who were sentenced to death by a judge in a Cairo court on January 26 on charges relating to the deaths of seventy-two people in Port Said’s soccer stadium last year. Fans of Port Said’s Masry club stormed the field after a match on February 1, 2012, and attacked the vastly outnumbered visiting supporters of Cairo’s Ahly club. The majority of those killed were crushed to death in a stampede. As the massacre unfolded, security forces and riot police looked on and did nothing to intervene.
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I reported for Democracy Now! from Port Said today where some 45 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since Jan. 26th:
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My latest for The Nation:
The second anniversary of Egypt’s revolution has been marked by rocks, firebombs, tear gas and bullets. More than fifty people have been killed and over a thousand wounded across the country. The army has been granted arrest powers, and military troops have been deployed to the three cities where President Mohamed Morsi has declared a state of emergency and ordered a curfew.
This outbreak of rage has laid bare the precarious state of a country plagued by a disfigured transition process, a lingering sense of injustice and the repeated failures of an entire political class that has forsaken a host of popular grievances in its scuffle for power.
Much of the vitriol has been directed toward Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. Using a highly contentious decree that granted him near-dictatorial powers, Morsi forced a controversial constitution through a referendum process last month. The move sparked mass protests and deadly clashes and left a deep national rift in its wake. It also bolstered fears of the “Brotherhood-ization” of the state, namely that the group was asserting control over the regime left behind by Hosni Mubarak rather than reforming state institutions.
In the weeks since, the economy has edged closer to the precipice with the Egyptian pound plummeting to record lows against the US dollar causing a rise in the price of staple goods like sugar, rice and cooking oil and exacerbating the economic burdens of the poor.
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