Toward the end of the meal, Osman got up and said to Virta, “Go ahead and finish up, I’ll go vape outside.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. 

When Virta came out of the restaurant a few minutes later, she saw Osman talking to two men. Initially, she thought they were talking about parking spots. Then one of them grabbed his arm and started dragging him into a car.

Virta tried to get to Osman but the car sped away, leaving her standing on the side of the road with his family.

Virta, who is originally from Finland, knew that Osman had been making YouTube videos about human rights violations in Egypt, but it was a part of his life she knew little about. Osman left Egypt in 2004 after becoming frustrated with the corruption he witnessed within the government while serving as an air force captain. He is now considered a deserter. Two years after leaving his home country, he set up a YouTube channel, @SherifOsmanClub, where he routinely criticized the Egyptian government. Today, the channel has more than 40,000 subscribers. 

A few weeks before traveling to Dubai, Osman had posted a video calling for Egyptians to capitalize on COP27, the United Nations climate conference due to be held that month in Sharm El-Sheikh, to protest the state’s dismal human rights record and the rising cost of living.

In the car, Osman’s mind was spinning. When they approached a turn on the highway that leads to the international airport he began to panic, fearful that he was on a one-way trip to his grave.

“I have seen very, very, very high-ranking Egyptians that have lived in Dubai and opened their mouths with a different narrative on Egypt, and they were actually put on a flight and shipped out to Egypt,” he said, referring to former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was deported from the UAE just days after he announced he was running for president in 2017.

Osman soon realized that he was being taken to the Dubai police headquarters.

He was escorted through the back entrance of the building. Osman waited for hours while officers moved frantically around the room, giving him no information. When he asked for clarity, they told him to wait and promised to bring him coffee.

“They actually made me coffee,” he told me, laughing. Osman’s sardonic sense of humor comes out in full force when he recounts the ordeal.

Osman was eventually taken from police headquarters to the Dubai Central Prison where he was made to wait while the authorities decided if he would be deported to Egypt. On November 15, Charles McClellan, an officer in the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, told Virta that Interpol had issued a red notice and extradition case number for Osman.

A few days later, Virta sent an email to Radha Stirling in Windsor, a town in southeast England, pleading for assistance. “Sherif’s deportation to Egypt is a death penalty without a fair trial!” Virta wrote.

Stirling, the CEO of an organization called Detained in Dubai, was no stranger to these kinds of cases. Knowing that the United Arab Emirates could extradite a U.S. citizen to Egypt in the dark of night, Stirling acted quickly. She contacted the American embassy to offer advice, tried to rally support from U.S. politicians and sought media coverage of the case.

And then something strange happened. McClellan told Stirling that he’d gotten new information: According to the UAE, Osman was detained on a “red notice” issued by a less well-known organization: the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Emirati official speaking to The Guardian confirmed the same.

When Osman learned it was not Interpol but rather the Arab Interior Ministers Council pursuing the case, his heart sank. “That’s when I was like, I’m fucked,” he told me.

A body made up of the interior ministries of all 22 Arab League states, the Arab Interior Ministers Council was established in the 1980s to strengthen cooperation between Arab states on internal security and combating crime. In recent years, it has played an increasingly visible role in extradition cases between Arab countries, particularly in cases that appear to be politically-motivated.

Experts I spoke with say that the shift has occurred as some of the Council’s member states, including the UAE and Egypt, have become notorious for abusing Interpol’s system. Although it is often portrayed in the media as an international police force with armed agents and the power to investigate crimes, Interpol is best understood as an electronic bulletin board where states can post “wanted” notices and other information about suspected criminals. Arab League states are increasingly posting red notices via Interpol in an effort to target political opponents, despite Interpol rules expressly prohibiting the practice.

Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks tensions surrounding Interpol may be driving increased cooperation within the Council, especially in politically-motivated cases. “My suspicion is that this Arab Ministers Council is basically a reaction to the fact that Interpol is maybe not quite as compliant or as lax as they used to be,” Bromund told me.

It was around 2018, shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born U.S. resident, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, that Abdelrahman Ayyash first heard of the Council. Ayyash is a case manager at the Freedom Initiative, which advocates for people wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ayyash told me that over the past year he has identified at least nine cases in which the Council was likely involved in the extradition or arrest of political dissidents, with some of them dating as far back as 2016. In one case, Kuwait extradited eight Egyptians to Cairo in 2019 following accusations that they were part of a terrorist cell with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayyash suspects their arrest and deportation stemmed from a notice from the Arab Interior Ministers Council.

In a case highlighted by other advocates from 2019, Morocco extradited activist Hassan al-Rabea to Saudi Arabia after he was arrested on a warrant that The New Arab reported was issued by the Council. Hassan’s brother Munir is wanted by the Saudi government due to his involvement in the country’s 2011 protest movement. Their older brother, Ali, is already in a Saudi prison, where he is facing the death penalty. Another of al-Rabea’s brothers, Ahmed, told me over the phone from Canada that he is now extremely careful about where he travels: “For me, like all my brothers, it is extremely scary to go to any Arab country,” he said.

Agreements enabling more extradition cooperation among Arab states and other nearby countries also are being adopted widely. In 2020, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain signed an agreement with Israel known as the Abraham Accords, which established official relations between the signatories. Since then, Morocco and the UAE in particular have increased their use of repressive technologies developed by Israeli companies when targeting dissidents abroad. Last year, 24% of Israel’s defense exports were to Arab Accords signatories. In 2021, Egypt signed an agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Sudan after years of tensions, including a border dispute. 

Members of the Arab Interior Ministers Council are signatories to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation and the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which prohibit extraditions if the crime is of a “political nature.”

Three U.N. special rapporteurs in June wrote a letter to the Arab League stating that red notices issued by the Council do not comply with member states’ commitments under international law, such as non-refoulement, non-discrimination, due diligence and fair trial.

A few weeks after Osman’s arrest, Virta returned to the U.S. for her job. She adjusted her schedule to work different hours, so she could be awake for part of the night working on his release.

Behind bars in Dubai, Osman was struggling to sleep. “The second I opened my eyes my head would go numb, the exact second my eyes opened, I realized I am in deep shit,” he told me. “I can count the days that I had a full night's sleep on one hand and have left over fingers.”

Virta was certain the UAE was going to extradite him to Egypt. But then, late one night towards the end of December, she got a call.

“I have some good news,” Osman told her. He was going to be released.

Osman was taken to the airport five days later, but it was not until the plane door closed that he allowed himself to believe he was actually going home. When the door clicked shut, he passed out from exhaustion. Osman had spent 46 days in detention.

This past July, Osman filed a lawsuit at the U.S District Court in Washington, D.C. against Interpol and its major general Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, the UAE and its deputy prime minister, Egypt and its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a UAE prosecutor and four other unnamed individuals. The complaint accuses them of international terrorism for their “kidnapping, abduction, imprisonment, prosecution, and threatened extradition” of Osman.

The lawsuit accuses Interpol of colluding to shift the justification for Osman’s detention from an Interpol red notice to one issued by the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Interpol spokesperson said “there is no indication that a notice or diffusion ever existed in Interpol’s databases,” but Osman’s lawyers say otherwise.

Osman hopes that the case will push Interpol to agree to reforms, such as improving its system for reviewing cases in order to determine whether they are politically motivated. If his lawyers can prove that what the Arab Interior Ministers Council did was an act of terrorism, Osman expects this will make it much harder for Arab states to justify their participation in its functions. “Funding it would be very hard at that point,” he said, as it would effectively mean that the Arab league was funding a terrorist organization. One of Osman’s lawyers also is seeking an agreement from the UAE to stop accepting red notices for U.S. citizens by way of the Council.

Osman and Virta now live in a small city in Massachusetts, where they largely keep to themselves. “The speed limit is 35 miles and people don't say hi to each other. It’s New England, so everybody’s an asshole,” said Osman. “There’s even a word for it: ‘Massholes.’”

He sees a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Osman says it is helping him understand what feels like a “new self.”

Osman is trying to launch a cannabis cultivation business, which missed out on some vital funding when investors heard about his arrest. He stayed quiet for six months after his release, but recently went back to posting about Egypt’s human rights record online. 

“I'm back again, talking and tearing down the president and his regime and military regime without mercy,” he said. “I got the news that they are worried in Egypt about my case.”

CORRECTION (09/29/2023): An earlier version of this article described Jamal Khashoggi as a U.S. citizen. It has been corrected to reflect that Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.

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That was in 2015. A little over seven years later, the Egyptian economy lies in tatters. The canal project, a white elephant, is now a symbol of El-Sisi’s failed economic policies and his inability to deliver on his grand proclamations.

Alongside Egypt’s economic crisis — exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — is an ongoing human rights crisis that is receiving far less attention. 

On March 5, an Egyptian court sentenced over a dozen activists to prison, a decision that human rights groups around the world described as unwarranted and unjust. According to Human Rights Watch, the sentences were the outcome of “an unfair mass trial of 29 men and women solely because of their peaceful activism.” Many of these activists are subject to extended pre-trial detention periods and denied due process.

The Egyptian authorities also routinely go after journalists in these roundups and mass detentions. Reporters Without Borders bluntly describes Egypt as “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists,” ranking the country as 166th out of 180 countries included in the latest edition of its annual World Press Freedom index.

Earlier this week, three journalists, all women, from Mada Masr, arguably the last independent Egyptian news outlet, went on trial for supposedly offending members of parliament. The journalists had reported on serious corruption charges leveled against members of a political party that supports El-Sisi. Lina Attalah, Mada Masr’s editor-in-chief, who has taken full responsibility for the story, said it was “a shame that journalists who do their job in a professional manner should face complaints which could threaten their freedom, at a time when we need to… welcome any work critical to those in or close to power.”

But the opposite is true in El-Sisi’s Egypt. The detention of critics is entirely arbitrary and unpredictable.

One activist, now in France after spending over two years in an Egyptian jail, said that he’d “seen people in their hundreds that were arrested basically because an officer stopped them in the street, checked their mobile and checked their Facebook account and found a joke, or a post, or even a like on a post or a joke.”

Since El-Sisi became president in June 2014, human rights groups say he has imprisoned possibly tens of thousands of dissidents and activists with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared as a terrorist organization. Mohamed Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in the 2012 presidential election, becoming the first ever democratically-elected president of Egypt. He was deposed in 2013 in a coup led by El-Sisi, who was then the defense minister and de facto chief of the Egyptian army. The Muslim Brotherhood has since been declared a terrorist organization in several other countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where it is seen as a threat to authoritarian rule. 

Both countries have long propped up Egypt’s failing economy with loans and bailouts, amounting to tens of billions of dollars over the last decade. Just last month, the Egyptian president acknowledged the importance of his Gulf allies at the World Government Summit in Dubai. “The most important point here,” he said, “is support from our brothers.”

But that support, Saudi Arabia has hinted, will now come with “strings attached.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the Saudi Arabian finance minister said his country was “working with multilateral institutions to actually say we need to see reforms.” Commentators in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have engaged in a flame war of late, with one Saudi academic describing Egypt on Twitter as a “captive of the International Monetary Fund.” The academic’s tweets were later deleted but he blamed the Egyptian army’s chokehold on the economy. 

While El-Sisi has consistently pinned the economic crisis on issues arising from the double whammy of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, experts have long argued that the Egyptian military’s advantage in almost all sectors has made ensuring sustained growth, revenue generation and foreign investment very difficult. The military, said Sarah Saadoun, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, “have a competitive advantage in the market, in both overt ways like tax advantages and less obvious ways like access to permits.” It means that the military is “gobbling up these huge public contracts. But what is the public actually getting from them in return?”  

Addressing the military’s competitive advantage has become a priority for the International Monetary Fund, whose loans to the Egyptian regime — amounting to over $20 billion since 2016 — have helped keep the economy afloat. The IMF, whose stringent conditions have often attracted criticism within developing countries, is intent on forcing El-Sisi to expand Egypt’s private sector. Saadoun says the IMF’s conditions are a step forward. “You need transparency, accountability, and not to be owned by the military,” she told me. 

Military mismanagement of the economy is a running theme through much of the commentary on Egypt’s economic woes. “There's this huge spending spree that's basically been ongoing, since Sisi became president,” Timothy Kaldas, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told me. “And Egypt's external debts have grown by over $100 billion. What has been accomplished in that time?”

Much of El-Sisi’s spending has been on giant infrastructure projects, like the expansion of the Suez Canal. He has funded the building of a new “administrative capital,” of Africa’s tallest tower and of what will, later this year, become the world’s longest driverless monorail system. All this as the Egyptian pound has lost half its value against the dollar in just one year, making imports unaffordable and sending the prices of staples soaring. “None of these mega projects make economic sense,” Kaldas told me. “Why on earth would you build these things except for vanity?” 

Among the “deep structural reforms” that the IMF recommended in January were the reduction of “public debt vulnerabilities” that included investments in such major projects. The Egyptian economist Wael Gamal told Al Jazeera that these Egyptian national projects “eat money.” They have, he added, “a very weak economic rationality and do not create sustainable jobs.”

As Egypt is nudged toward making systemic changes to its economic policies, it appears to continue to get a free pass for its human rights violations. In November 2022, Egypt hosted the COP27 climate conference in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Activists and some media outlets took the opportunity to put El-Sisi’s appalling human rights record under the spotlight, but world leaders ignored the steady drumbeat of condemnation. U.S. President Joe Biden announced a “$500 million package to finance and facilitate Egypt’s transition to clean energy” but made no mention of prominent activists, journalists and writers languishing in Egyptian prisons.

A couple of weeks after Biden’s appearance at COP27, Sherif Osman, who called for protests at the conference, was arrested in Dubai and threatened with extradition to Egypt. Osman, a former officer in the Egyptian army, is an American citizen. He had made videos from his home in the U.S. for his YouTube channel in which he criticized El-Sisi’s regime and urged people to “wake up and take to the streets.” Osman was arrested on the street in Dubai, in accordance with a request from Egyptian authorities, and held for 46 days before being eventually deported to the United States.

Back in 2019, at a summit in France, then-U.S. president Donald Trump was waiting to meet with El-Sisi who was running late. “Where’s my favorite dictator?” Trump was heard asking, to the shock of Egyptian and American officials in earshot. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator’,” tweeted Biden just months before he took office. In truth, though, while the Biden administration has blocked some aid payments to Egypt on account of El-Sisi’s human rights record, it is a fraction of the annual $1.3 billion that the U.S. extends in military aid.

Mohamed Mandour, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told me that the sum blocked by the Biden administration revealed the priority the U.S. placed on human rights in its dealings with Egypt. “Ten percent of their relationship,” Mandour said, “has to do with human rights.” The other 90%, he implied, takes precedence. Amr ElAfifi, a researcher at the Freedom Initiative, an advocacy organization for the rights of political prisoners in the Middle East, told me plainly that the “Egyptian authorities have grown to understand that they can do whatever they want when it comes to human rights and they won’t be held accountable.”

This week, Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, arrived in Egypt as part of a Middle East trip that included scheduled visits to Jordan and Israel. He tweeted that the “U.S.-Egypt defense partnership is an essential pillar of our commitment to this region.”       

Whatever its economic problems, in El-Sisi’s near-decade in charge of Egypt, the country has consistently been among the top global weapons buyers. In January 2022, the Biden administration approved $2.5 billion worth of sales despite human rights concerns. In classified documents, France, another major supplier of weapons to Egypt, revealed it had participated in a secret military operation in 2016, which meant it was complicit in air strikes against Egyptian civilians. 

If El-Sisi’s authoritarian practices, particularly his relationship to the military, is significantly responsible for Egypt’s latest economic collapse, it appears it is those same tendencies that make him acceptable to leaders in the EU and the U.S. as a guarantor of stability. Egypt, for instance, is crucial to Arab negotiations with Israel.

What is clear is that the world appears to have little interest in stopping arbitrary detention in Egypt. And that El-Sisi, as Sherif Osman might attest, is increasingly emboldened to repress critics beyond Egyptian borders.

“Yes, in the U.S. you are kind of free,” Mandour from the Tahrir Institute told me. “You can speak your mind, you can advocate in Congress. But, on the other hand, the Egyptian regime will arrest your family members in Egypt and the U.S. government will not do enough to help release them.”

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The post Egypt jails its critics as the economy crumbles appeared first on Coda Story.

This kind of control is present in the courts, but it’s playing out online too, with help from Big Tech. At the end of 2022, tech experts noticed that the open source code repository GitLab was being blocked on Apple’s Safari browser in Hong Kong. When they dug into it, they found that Apple was taking its censorship cues from none other than Tencent, the Shenzhen-based tech behemoth and owner of WeChat that has little choice but to follow state orders. This is nothing new coming from Apple — the company has a long history of deference to Beijing — but it is yet another setback for Hong Kongers. The Intercept has more details on the tech and politics of Apple’s blunder.

While headlines from mainland China remain focused on the Covid outbreak, I’m keeping my eyes peeled for news of how certain “White Paper” protesters, who demonstrated last year against zero-Covid policies, have been detained for spreading their messages online. My old colleague Oiwan Lam, an intrepid Hong Konger herself, has a terrific round-up of for Global Voices this week, in which she notes that many of those arrested are “either feminists or are connected to the Chinese feminist social circles.”

TikTok parodies are no laughing matter for Egyptian authorities. At least three Egyptian TikTokers are in pre-trial detention this week over a video in which they parodied a visit to a state prison. Even before I found this English-language summary of the video on Middle East Eye, I found it pretty engaging. These people are actual actors, and it shows. The fact that it resonated with their followers — it has 255K likes so far — should be little wonder, considering that an estimated 60,000 people are currently jailed in Egypt over political speech and activities. The three main actors in the video, Basma Hegazi, Mohamed Hosam and Ahmed Tarek, are now facing charges of spreading false news and belonging to a terror organization.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS: SPYWARE IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Journalists at the Salvadoran independent news outlet El Faro published hard evidence this week that the administration of president Nayib “world’s coolest dictator” Bukele appears to have paid just over $2.2 million in 2020 for a year-long contract to Eyetech Solutions, a third-party distributor of surveillance software that works mainly for Israeli manufacturers.  

The story hits close to home for El Faro, where several reporters have been targeted with Pegasus, the notoriously invasive spyware made by NSO Group. They are now taking NSO to court in the U.S. 

But it’s not just El Salvador. Spyware is a pervasive issue across Central America. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s spies have been using Israeli surveillance tech for years. In Honduras, it has been a boon to political power and the drug trade for much of the past decade. On Tuesday, we published an in-depth investigation of surveillance tech and its effects on public life in Honduras by our Bruno Reporting Fellow, Anna-Catherine Brigida. 

A key character in the story is Juan Orlando Hernández, or “JOH” as he was often known. The president of Honduras from 2014 until 2022, JOH is currently sitting in jail in the Southern District of New York, awaiting trial on drug trafficking and weapons charges. Although he had a chummy relationship with the U.S. while in office, he was swiftly extradited and brought to the U.S. when his last term ended. And he was just one of 11 officials who were arrested on extradition orders from the U.S. at the end of his administration. Surveillance tech was a critical tool for this government. As one police source told Coda: “Nothing moved in Honduras without JOH finding out.”

It would be easy to paint a portrait of Honduran officials as a homogeneous group of narco thugs. But this story instead takes on the complex institutions of law enforcement and defense in Honduras, breaking them down into organizations made up of real people. Brigida worked for months to build trust with former police officers and officers still on the force and to capture their voices. 

We also elected to focus on what happened and continues to happen to people in Honduras itself, rather than panning to the transnational power dynamics that are in the background here. Honduras has a historically close relationship with the U.S. military and industry, and with Israel. Palantir, a tech company with relatively little public visibility, but big contracts with the U.S. and other governments, has a role in the story too. I commend Anna-Catherine for focusing on regular people who were caught up in this system. We need more stories that do this. On that note, if you have tips or pitches in this vein, don’t hesitate to send them my way. My inbox is open.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• An estimated 200,000 people work at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, where half of the world’s iPhones are made. What’s it like to work there? Rest of World’s Viola Zhou has an exclusive on the grueling conditions of work in “iPhone City.”
  
• In another chilling story on Egypt via the BBC, veteran tech-and-society journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin dug into the threats that people face — from police and criminal gangs — when using LGBTQ-friendly dating apps.
  
• And finally, amid all the AI razzle dazzle of late, The Markup founder Julia Angwin put out a refreshing interview with Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan who calls Chat GPT a “bullshit generator.” Skip the hype and read this instead.

The post Hong Kongers fear a great firewall, TikTokers arrested in Egypt, spyware in Central America appeared first on Coda Story.

Like many people of my generation (I am apparently a “cusper,” having characteristics in common with both Gen X and millennials, so make of that what you will), I was very influenced by Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “Shock Doctrine.” If you haven’t read it, she argued forcefully that the then-ongoing U.S.-led Iraq takeover was part of a neoliberal ploy to exploit crises to force through unpopular policies so as to benefit big business and immiserate ordinary people. The book has many villains: Milton Friedman, the U.S. and British governments, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund among them. 

Part of the reason I found the book so compelling (leaving aside the fact that it confirmed everything I already thought about the 2003 Iraq War) was that her analysis of the 1990s in Russia supported what my Russian friends told me: greedy Western advisers turned up and forced the Russian government to pass laws that ruined the country. The oligarchs were our fault.

So why am I talking about this now? In what looks like a classic example of her thesis, those villains at the IMF have faced down the Egyptian government and forced it to do all the things the IMF always demands — liberalize the exchange rate, expand the private sector, cut spending, balance the budget, blah blah. So presumably I’m furious about it? Hmmmmm, perhaps not.

Egypt may not be the most depressing example of how the Arab Spring turned wintry, but it is depressing enough. The hopes of democratic transformation were extinguished by a coup in 2013, and since then military officers have gradually cemented their hold on pretty much everything.

• “In addition to launching a massive campaign of repression against the opposition and political parties, the regime has been re-structuring the state apparatus in a manner that has affected the nature of the state. In other words, it is a process that transforms the state into an appendage of the military institution. The classic role of the state as a mediator of social conflict disappears, as it is transformed into a blunt instrument of repression, and a way for a parasitic form of military capitalism to thrive, through the appropriation of public funds,” noted political analyst Maged Mandour, who’s currently writing a book about Egypt under President (and former field marshal) Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Egypt’s military is even following that classic example of modern kleptocratic practice (see also: Neom, Ciudad de la Paz, Naypyidaw and whatever the capital of Kazakhstan is called this week) by building a new city, which gives the prospect of almost unlimited kickbacks.

• “The military will see huge financial returns once the new capital is completed. Moreover, these gains will not be inspected by a civilian authority, as the government has little oversight over the military’s finances,” as Mustafa Menshawy wrote.

The Carnegie Middle East Center produced a very detailed report on the military takeover of Egypt (which was built on decades of creeping klepto-militarization) back in 2019, and it was prescient about the consequences.

• “The potential consequences of the present policy course for the Egyptian economy are portentous. The World Bank estimated in December 2018 that Egypt needs $675 billion to cover infrastructure needs and financing gaps over the coming twenty years, but faces a shortfall of $230 billion that only private investment or commercial financing can meet. This is wholly dependent on creating an enabling environment, but highly unlikely on current trends,” its author Yezid Sayigh stated.

And then the twin shocks of Covid-19 and the Russian assault on Ukraine happened, the latter was particularly serious for Egypt because it is heavily reliant both on Russian tourists and on imported grain and thus vulnerable to price spikes (in fact, high food prices helped trigger the Arab Spring). And the government in Cairo had to ask the IMF for help. In October, the two sides announced a staff-level agreement, and a full report was released last week.

• “Egypt's reform program, supported by the new IMF arrangement, includes an extensive package of structural reforms to support greater private sector activity and to facilitate trade. For example, the state ownership policy sets out ambitious plans to reduce the footprint of the state and catalyze private sector investment. It establishes a clear framework to inform which sectors the state will reduce its presence in and how such divestments will be implemented,” said the IMF’s Ivana Vladkova-Hollar.

On one level, you could see this as a classic Shock Doctrine example of the IMF bullying the Egyptian government into following the Washington Consensus. But on another level, you could see this as a priceless opportunity to force thieving military officers to submit to some basic transparency about what they’re up to, to stop awarding themselves state contracts and to withdraw from bits of the economy that they have no right to be in, which the IMF has quite rightly seized and which leading human rights groups have been asking it to do for months, if not years. Who else can face down the Egyptian military? No one in Egypt can do it. For kleptocrats, bigger money is the only thing that beats big money.

So, what do I think about Klein’s Shock Doctrine idea now? I increasingly think that just blaming the IMF or Western economists for what happened in, say, Russia, is wrong. Yes, Westerners earned healthy sums advising ministries in Moscow on how to sell state assets to insiders, but they could only do that if politicians and oligarchs in Russia were up for it too. You can’t really make a distinction between the developed and developing worlds in terms of who’s to blame for the spread of kleptocracy: people from both sides grabbed the money, and they all deserve criticism.

(I think everyone, however, can agree that the IMF setting conditions before offering loans is better than the 19th century equivalent, which was the British government offering funds in exchange for Egypt giving it the Suez Canal.)

The solution is, as ever for me, more oversight of everyone’s behavior (both the IMF’s and the recipient governments’) and more enforcement of the rules. And if some kleptocrats somewhere run out of money, there is nothing wrong with demanding they stop being so kleptocratic if they want a loan. The question of course is: will it transform Egypt in the long run?

• “Past experience suggests that the government will exploit every loophole to delay implementation of provisions of the IMF agreement, and prevaricate across the board. Neither the presidency nor the government have done the kind of intensive political preparation needed to push through something as wide-ranging and far-reaching as the State Ownership Policy. The agreement with the IMF will certainly suffer significant delays and watering down, potentially making it more aspirational than operational,” said the Carnegie Center’s Sayigh.

If it does work, however, there could be lessons to be learned in how to transform the Russian economy when it inevitably collapses under the weight of Vladimir Putin’s mismanagement. Interestingly, on current trends, Egypt's population is due to overtake Russia’s within 15 years so the comparison is not as outlandish as it perhaps appears.

GOLDEN VISAS

After Putin sent two assassins to the English city of Salisbury to kill defector Sergei Skripal in 2018, the British government began to wonder if it hadn’t perhaps been a little foolish in selling Russian oligarchs anything they wanted. As part of this rethinking process, it said it would review whether the United Kingdom should keep selling so-called Tier One (Investor) visas to anyone able to pony up two million pounds (of whom many had been Russian).

And now, five years later, with all the urgency of an underperforming slug, the results of that review have slithered over the finish line. Or a self-justifying summary of those results has anyway, which is kind of the same thing as long as you don’t take more than three seconds to think about it.

• “The review of cases identified a small minority of individuals connected to the Tier 1 (Investor) visa route that were potentially at high risk of having obtained wealth through corruption or other illicit financial activity, and/or being engaged in serious and organized crime. I should stress that the work carried out only implies that a particular individual potentially poses a risk of having connections to criminality; it does not mean guilt has been proven,” said Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

The review showed that, of the 6,312 people awarded one of these visas, 10 have since been sanctioned. Braverman conceded there had been a problem in the past but said it was now solved, because this kind of visa would no longer be issued. We should sit back and trust the law enforcement agencies to take care of things from now on.

That is not good enough, and here are four questions we urgently need answers to:

• The review only looked at visas issued between 2008 and 2015. The program began in 1994 and continued until February 2022. We know that more than 5,000 visas were issued between 2015 and 2022 but have no idea how many were issued from 1996 to 2008. It certainly looks like the review covers less than half of all the golden visas sold since the early 1990s, and possibly much less. What about them? How many of those applicants are questionable?
• Only Russians have been sanctioned since February, and yet Russians made up less than half of applicants: What about the others? How many of them have been credibly accused of corruption but haven’t been sanctioned because their president hasn’t launched a major and totally unprovoked war?
• The law enforcement agencies are already flat-out researching sanctions violations, so how would they have time to investigate historic visa violations? Will they get extra funding?
• How many of these applicants have become British citizens? Will they be stripped of their passports if shown to have bought their visas with dirty money?

And that’s just to start with.

• “It is critical that the Home Office urgently develops specialist financial and economic crime expertise in its immigration function to make sure the other schemes and future schemes do not allow dirty money to enter the U.K.,” noted Spotlight on Corruption.

TAX THE RICH

It’s Davos time, which means it’s also time for Oxfam’s Inequality Report. Take a look.

• “Over the last 10 years, the richest 1% of humanity has captured more than half of all new global wealth. Since 2020, according to Oxfam analysis of Credit Suisse Data, this wealth grab by the super-rich has accelerated, and the richest one percent have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth. This is six times more than the bottom 90% of humanity. Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90 percent, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million.”

Since the weekend, my wife and I have been slightly obsessed with the person in Maine who won $1.35 billion in the lottery. We decided to win the jackpot too and began by happily spending our winnings on various joint ideas, but then we started to squabble over our respective projects before viciously cutting each other out and pledging to do our utmost to block the other’s plans. Anyway, I don’t know why we were so excited about it since it was clearly peanuts.

• “Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7bn a day, even as inflation outpaces the wages of at least 1.7 billion workers, more than the population of India.”

WHAT I’M READING

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of “Chasing Shadows” by Miles Johnson, an investigative reporter from the Financial Times, and zoomed through it. It’s a deep and engrossing voyage into the heart of South American cartels, Italian organized crime, Middle Eastern money launderers and more. Look out for it!

The post Building new capital cities is a sop for kleptocracy appeared first on Coda Story.

The only comic relief I’ve found in this whole nightmare so far has come from The Verge’s Nilay Patel, whose searing smackdown of Musk covers basically everything that experts are worrying about, but with more zeal than anyone else can muster. Don’t miss it. 

After months of fearmongering and unsubstantiated online rumors of voter fraud fueled by incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, Brazilian voters elected Lula da Silva in last Sunday’s runoff election. Meanwhile up north, the fearmongering and lies are ongoing as we approach midterm elections in the US. Far-right groups are using fringe platforms like Truth Social (and less fringey platforms like Telegram) to organize everything from vigilante surveillance of ballot drop boxes to all-out civil war in the lead-up to U.S. midterm elections. In a departure from what we saw in the lead-up to the 2021 attack on the U.S. capitol, it seems like at least some of these groups have moved to smaller platforms that don’t have the kinds of content moderation rules that Facebook and Twitter are known for. This doesn’t mean that their efforts won’t have dangerous real-life consequences, but by using these smaller, niche platforms, they simply will not reach as many people as they would on Facebook or Twitter. Media Matters has put together a list of prominent groups, most of which go by deceptively mainstream-sounding names like “Honest Elections Project” and “Audit the Vote PA.” Dig into it if you dare.

After Myanmar’s military junta-led government bombed a civilian gathering in Kachin state on October 24, killing 80 people, authorities instituted a communication blackout, leaving residents without access to Wi-Fi, in a state where mobile internet connections have been shut down for more than a year. “When the bombs dropped on Sunday evening, the mostly-civilian crowd was left isolated, unable to contact friends and family to seek help and urgent medical attention,” said Wai Phyo Myint, Asia Pacific Policy Analyst at Access Now. 

Can Elon help? I had no intention of bringing this full circle, but I can’t seem to escape Elon Musk. In late September, civilian politicians and activists in Myanmar asked Musk to deploy Starlink, his satellite-based internet service company, to circumvent shutdowns like the one in Kachin state. Magical though it might sound, Starlink needs on-the-ground infrastructure in order to work effectively, and this can easily become a target. We need look no further than Ukraine to see how this could go wrong.

EGYPTIAN STATE’S PARANOIA ON SHOW AT COP27

In a recent letter to his mother, written from inside Wadi el Natrun prison, Egyptian political activist Alaa Abd El Fattah speculated on the effects of floods in Pakistan, the demise of global ice cover, and the future of energy production in Africa.

But unlike his usual weekly letters, this one never reached her. When he learned of this, he summarized it for her in his next message, which his cousin translated for me. He noted that he’d said nothing about the “upcoming conference,” referring to the COP27 climate summit starting on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh. “It was probably well written, flowing, lucid, so maybe they felt it was dangerous,” he wrote.

Only agents of a state as paranoid as Egypt would rush to dispose of such a letter, lest it cause a stir or bring about some unwanted change.

This paranoia will likely be on full display next week as delegates from around the world descend on Sharm, the seaside resort city in Egypt’s heavily militarized Sinai Peninsula. Of course, the event itself will be tightly controlled. The streets of Sharm will likely remain orderly, with no throngs of scrappy activists like we saw in Glasgow last year. Rather, there will be a designated area where authorized demonstrations will take place and undoubtedly be watched closely. Local residents say day-to-day surveillance feels higher than ever, with new military checkpoints and plainclothes police officers stationed across the city. 

Even the UN is anxious. A group of UN human rights experts issued a statement last month pointing to the arrests of human rights defenders, NGO asset freezes and travel restrictions that have created “a climate of fear for Egyptian civil society organizations to engage visibly at the COP27.” Just this week, hundreds were arrested over plans to stage protests in cities across Egypt on November 11.

What does it mean that major decisions affecting our climate will be hashed out in Egypt, which many of us see as an “early adopter” authoritarian tech state?

Abd El Fattah is no doubt thinking about this question. Jailed or investigated under every Egyptian head of state who has served during his lifetime, the 40-year-old activist and technologist has been a central figure in pushing for democratic change in Egypt — and using technology to drive these efforts — since the early 2000s. He is currently serving a five-year sentence for allegedly spreading false news about prison conditions in Egypt, which he knows all too well.

The British-UK citizen has been on a hunger strike since last April, eating 100 calories per day — just enough to stay alive. With the summit fast approaching, Abd El Fattah has stopped eating once again and has vowed to stop drinking water on November 6, the first day of the summit.

“If @AlsisiOfficial @RishiSunak don't resolve this he will die,” wrote his sister, Mona Seif, on Twitter.

In a recent piece for The Intercept, Naomi Klein asked “If international solidarity is too weak to save Alaa — an iconic symbol of a generation’s liberatory dreams — what hope do we have of saving a habitable home?” 

WHAT WE’RE READING: 

• The Intercept: Iranians are now well into the second month of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody, and internet and mobile shutdowns have been part and parcel of the state’s response to protests. A new report from The Intercept features documents obtained from Iranian mobile provider Ariantel, that describe a web program for remotely manipulating mobile connections.

• Mada Masr: If you want to do some deep thinking on tech and the relationship between authoritarianism and energy, read this June 2022 piece for Mada Masr by Omar Hamilton. “A rapid transition away from fossil fuels could collapse authoritarian regimes from Angola to Algeria to Azerbaijan,” he writes. “Or, it could be the foundation of an era of plentiful, centrally controlled, domestic, renewable power for the governments and corporations that are fast enough to adapt.”

• Election Integrity Partnership: Researchers from Stanford’s Internet Observatory and the Digital Forensic Research Lab analyzed a data set released by Twitter itself (in an arrangement that may not survive the Musk transition) showing the activities of “inauthentic” networks of users who were tweeting and promoting discussions favoring the interests of the Iranian and Chinese governments in the lead-up to U.S. midterm elections. The relevant accounts have been suspended from Twitter, but the data is here for anyone to peruse.

The post Hate speech spikes on Musk’s watch; another internet blackout in Myanmar; Egypt’s paranoia on show at COP27 appeared first on Coda Story.

USA

By Rebekah Robinson

Curriculum standards and content have been subject to tense debate in the U.S. for decades. These standards vary from state to state, even down to the granular level from school district to school district.

Often these debates are pedagogical. In times of change or upheaval, though, the school curriculum reflects the divisions in society and in its politics and culture.

In July, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect, limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about gender and sexual orientation all the way up to the 12th grade. Additionally, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (ruled by a Florida judge last week to be unconstitutional) went into effect ahead of the new school year, blocking conversations around race deemed to be “critical race theory.”

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said, “This deeply disturbing legislation aims to censor educators and prevent them from valuing, affirming and supporting our students,” and that “politicians are manufacturing false narratives about young people — and then proposing unconstitutional, discriminatory and just plain harmful ‘solutions’ to nonexistent problems.”

Earlier this year, several thousand math textbooks were recalled in Florida. Not because of mathematical errors but because they had been flagged for containing material that could be considered “critical race theory.” The books were returned to the publisher to address the content contravening the restrictive legislation.

Parents also now have more control in some Florida counties to contest material they believe to be inappropriate for their children, enabling additional and arbitrary censorship of educational content. Books in Florida counties are being censored in libraries and now carry warning labels for LGBTQ content. Stories that feature characters of color are being flagged as “unsuitable for students.”

Florida’s legislative activism has catalyzed conservative lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia, among others, to also attempt to prohibit teaching “divisive topics.” The answer to alleged “cultural indoctrination,” these legislators appear to be arguing, is more indoctrination.

Hungary

By Katia Patin 

Amid the turmoil of Hungary’s Covid-19 crisis in September 2020, the government rolled out a new curriculum with a mandate for schools to stick close to the new centralized teaching recommendations. The biggest changes were made to literature and history instruction, with the updates aligning with the ruling party Fidesz’s rehabilitation of nationalist figures with anti-Semitic pasts. 

For example, assigned reading included the work of Hungarian writers such as Jozsef Nyiro and Albert Wass. In addition to his short stories and novels, Nyiro was known for being an admirer of Joseph Goebbels and in 1940 he joined parliament as a member of an ultra-right, anti-semitic party. Wass, a novelist and poet whose work was banned until the fall of communism in 1989, was a convicted war criminal. Both men have had statues and streets named after them in recent years and were introduced into curriculum at the expense of authors such as Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature.

In history textbooks, medieval wars got more page time with critics saying myth and legends were being presented as fact and history. There is now greater emphasis placed on victories won in the 10-14th centuries and the idea that Hungarians are the descendants of Turkic speaking people, rather than the previously established consensus of Finno-Ugric roots (shared by Finns, Estonians and some indigenous groups in Russia). These new changes highlighted that the established narrative of Hungary’s ancient past taught under communism was up for reinterpretation. 

Following the changes, protesters across social media used the slogan #noNAT to organize against the teaching of fascist writers with some teachers banding together to voice their opposition to having to revise their lessons.

India

By Shougat Dasgupta

Students in Indian schools are being provided with new, slimmed down textbooks for classes such as history, political science and sociology. It is, says the government, an exercise in "rationalization." The pandemic has meant that Indian schoolchildren, like many around the world, have fallen behind. So, the government wants to lighten the load.

This means — a national newspaper revealed — removing chapters from textbooks on the Gujarat riots of 2002 in which nearly a 1,000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands displaced over three days of violence. The state authorities, led at the time by current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stood by, seemingly twiddling its thumbs. 

"The approach I gather is in conformity with the theories of Hindutva," Romila Thapar, the nonagenarian professor emeritus, and arguably the world's preeminent expert on ancient India, wrote archly to me about the proposed revisions. These include eliminating, diluting, and changing the wording of sections to do with Mughal history, caste discrimination, democratic functions and even periods of authoritarian rule in India such as Indira Gandhi’s infamous “Emergency” in the 1970s.

When governments change in India, it  is not unusual that textbooks change. But since Narendra Modi came to power eight years ago, the changes to textbooks, dozens of public intellectuals like Thapar have asserted in an open letter, reflect a "Hindu first" worldview.

Modi leads the BJP, a political party that is ideologically committed to a Hindu India — like a number of affiliated cultural and political organizations known collectively as the Sangh Parivar — rather than the secular country India chose to become in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned.

As Thapar put it in her email to me, "since the political aim of the Sangh Parivar is to establish a Hindu Rashtra (nation) then the attempt will be to project history as a support for this political change." A history that must necessarily avoid India’s complexities, its many wafer-thin layers, each bleeding into the other.

It is, wrote historian S. Irfan Habib in June, "a historical fact that India has been a palimpsest." The BJP, though, appears to want to scrawl over and obscure centuries of text with a permanent marker.

Egypt

By Masho Lomashvili

Truth in Egypt has long been under attack. Deception and manipulation have been part of Egyptian politics long before the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, organized a coup d'état and seized power eight years ago.  

But the Arab Spring in 2011 offered hope of an end to authoritarian rule, and the real possibility of democracy. El-Sisi plunged Egypt back into the strongman era it had hoped to escape. He is in the process of completing the job by reducing the Arab Spring to a footnote in revised textbooks.

Will schoolchildren in Egypt no longer be made aware that Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the iconic heart of the protests that swept through North Africa and the Arab world?

Pupils in Egyptian schools once had a full chapter in their textbooks devoted to the events of the Arab Spring. Under el-Sisi, that chapter has become a deliberately misleading, confusing paragraph.

The “Modern Egyptian and Arab history” curriculum taught to secondary level students significantly underplays the Arab Spring. It was a people’s revolution, an outpouring of anger at decades of authoritarian rule in which corruption was rife and dissent was brutally crushed.

There is no mention in these textbooks of the nearly 1,000 protestors who died in 2011 as a result of police brutality. Anwar, now 31, remembers the events of 2011 very well. “It was the first time people felt their power,” he told me. “And Sisi wants them to forget this feeling.” 

According to Anwar, the Arab Spring had set an example that revolution was possible. “During Mubarak’s time,” he says, referring to the 30 years Egypt spent under the thumb of Hosni Mubarak culminating in the events of 2011, “when people talked about protests, it wasn't really seen as a threat to the government. It was because a successful revolt hadn't happened before.” Now, though, he adds, “the government knows that the people are capable of succeeding and they're scared that it might happen again.”

Serbia

By Frankie Vetch

In July 1995, Serbian paramilitaries and Bosnian Serbs from the Army of Republika Srpska marched into the town of Srebrenica and massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The event was the pinnacle of a bloody war that split apart the former Yugoslavia. 

In 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that what happened in Srebernica qualified as genocide. But, as recently as in 2020, textbooks in Serbia, while containing an acknowledgement that war crimes had happened in Srebrenica, stopped short of describing the massacres as genocide and questioned the accuracy of the death toll.

According to Marko Milosavljević, Programme Coordinator at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, “there is still a big policy of denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.” Years ago, he told me, “they used to say that Srebrenica didn’t happen at all. Now over the last decade, the authorities don’t say ‘nothing happened,’ they just deny the implications of the genocide.”

In 2017, Milorad Dodik, who was at the time the President of the Republic of Srpska, stated that no textbooks should ever teach students about the Srebrenica genocide, nor the siege of Sarajevo. Textbooks only briefly mention Srebrenica as a place where Bosnian Serbs conquered. The textbooks also only refer to Serbs and not Croats or Muslims as victims of ethnic cleansing.

Serbian textbooks have also failed to mention the state’s role in committing war crimes in the 1990s against Kosovans. Dodik, now the Serb member of the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which serves as the collective head of state), has repeatedly called for the Republic of Srpska to secede from the rest of the country. 

With tensions rising in the region, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with a new generation of ethnic-Serbs in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska being taught little to nothing about war crimes committed against Muslims and Kosovans in the 1990s, there is an ever-present danger of history repeating itself.

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Mawada Eladhm and Hanin Hossam are just two of at least nine young women in the country to have recently received prison terms and heavy fines for posting videos on platforms including TikTok and Instagram.

All were charged with “violating family values” and inciting debauchery under a controversial cybercrime bill passed by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in August 2018. This week, the Egyptian state went one step further, passing an order from the prosecutor general and a Cairo criminal court to freeze Eladhm and Hossam’s funds.

“When it comes to Egypt, the issue is the cybercrime law that is extending and legalizing the oppression of the state towards its own citizens from the physical space to online,” said Mohamad Najem, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa digital rights NGO SMEX.

Najem explained via WhatsApp that the law is notoriously vague, including provisions related to the “protection of family values” and “breaching public morals.” He added that such clauses “are being mainly applied against women.”

Eladhm and Hossam’s videos of themselves dancing and lip-syncing to pop songs may seem simple and innocent, but they attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. These large audiences are easy to monetize, allowing influencers to earn large sums from their content. The Egyptian authorities, however, consider that such online activities attack the fabric of traditional society, promoting immorality and encouraging prostitution.

This position is consistent with a wider effort to tighten the state’s grip on social media. In addition to accusing TikTok of spreading immorality, some politicians have called for it to be blocked entirely. A Cairo administrative court will also decide on September 20 whether to ban YouTube, one of the country’s most popular online platforms. 

Najem explained that while nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also use broad legislation to censor and criminalize the online activities of residents, Egypt’s TikTok trials stand out because of the large number of cases and the apparent focus on one gender. 

“Having single women controlling their own bodies outside the usual norm and definition might be challenging for the system, therefore it’s easier to criminalize them than to accept them as part of society,” he said.

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The next month, the nation’s Ministry of Interior issued a warrant for the 22-year-old’s arrest, accusing her of publishing videos and photographs that violated family values. Eladhm, who is the daughter of a retired policeman, fled her home in Cairo, but officers eventually found her in a suburb of the city by tracking her cellphone. She was sentenced in late July to two years in prison and fined nearly $19,000. 

Even Eladhm’s lawyer believes her to be guilty. “The police only arrested girls that misused apps,” Ahmed al-Bokheir told me during a telephone interview. “For example, girls are now using TikTok for online prostitution. These are the kind of girls that are being arrested.” 

Most of Eladhm’s videos feature her mouthing the words to pop songs or dancing to Arabic electronic music in fashionable dresses and crop tops. That wouldn’t be a crime in most countries, but in conservative Egypt she has become one of at least nine female TikTok users prosecuted in recent months on charges related to inciting debauchery and prostitution. 

The girls are all from middle or working-class backgrounds, and some monetized their followings to earn thousands of dollars. While their content did not violate the app’s community standards, Egyptian authorities have enforced their own red lines, without clearly demarcating them. 

Like Eladhm, the other women have been charged with “violating family values” – a vaguely defined clause from a controversial cybercrime bill that was passed in August 2018. Reporters Without Borders warned that the bill would legalize President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s broader war against online dissent, which has resulted in the blocking of at least 500 news websites and the jailing of numerous Egyptians for posts on Twitter and Facebook. 

Culture wars

Since toppling the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi — Egypt’s only democratically elected leader — in July 2013, Sisi’s regime has cracked down on individuals who challenge the nation’s deeply entrenched social norms. In recent years, women have been jailed for speaking out against sexual harassment online, and the LGBTQ community has been targeted with raids on public gatherings, arrests and the torture of detainees. 

Now, the government is tightening its control of social media. Just last month, a Cairo administrative court said that it will decide on September 20 whether to block YouTube, the second-most-used social media platform in Egypt. The reason for these deliberations have not been disclosed to the public. In June, the nation’s Supreme Administrative Court ordered authorities to block the site for one month over its refusal to remove a video it deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammad. 

However, even that decision failed to generate the same level of attention as the TikTok trials, which have become a key battleground in a wider culture war. In addition to the courts, Egypt’s parliament has also accused TikTok of spreading immorality with some lawmakers demanding that the government suspend the app.

TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, has come under intense scrutiny in a number of countries over concerns that the Chinese government could use it to spy on users. On August 6, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning any U.S. transactions with ByteDance. 

In Egypt, controversy flared up around social media platforms in April, when influencer Hanin Hossam uploaded a video on Instagram from her Cairo bedroom. In the clip, Hossam, 20, wore a red headscarf, matching lipstick and a grey sweater. With her phone held casually in front of her, she told her 746,000 followers that she was recruiting young women to work as influencers for a new video app named Likee, a rival to TikTok. 

The clip circulated online for three weeks before it was seen by Nashaat al-Dihy, an anchor for the popular satellite channel TeN TV. During his broadcast on April 19, Dihy played snippets of the footage before accusing Hossam of encouraging prostitution. Two nights later, intelligence officers showed up at Hossam’s home and arrested her in front of her family. She too was found guilty of violating family values and sentenced in late July to two years in prison and a fine of nearly $19,000. 

“May God punish Dihy,” said a close relative, who asked that her name not be published, for fear of reprisals from authorities. “He manipulated her video to make it look like she promoted immoral behavior.” 

Neither the Ministry of Interior nor police authorities responded to requests for comment for this story. Emails sent to TikTok and Likee also received no reply.

Hossam’s lawyer, Mahmoud Heidar, places the bulk of the blame on celebrities like Dihy for encouraging the state to pursue such cases. He added that Egypt’s countrywide coronavirus lockdown, which came into effect in mid-March and was lifted in late June, prompted people to spend much more time on social media than they had previously.

According to Heidar, many newcomers followed men who had criticized and bullied Hossam online for singing along to Egyptian pop songs and posing in fashionable outfits while wearing a traditional Muslim headscarf. 

One, who goes by the name of Naser Hekaia, told his 447,000 YouTube subscribers that “Hossam disrespects the veil she wears.” 

During a telephone conversation about the verdict against his client, Heidar complained that “our society convicted Hossam before the court did.” 

Double Standard 

The current clampdown on TikTok and other social media platforms highlights the Egyptian government’s inconsistent attitude towards digital spaces. Last month, dozens of women used Instagram to post detailed accounts of sexual assaults allegedly carried out by a 21-year-old Cairo student. Within days, police had arrested a man named Ahmed Bassam Zaki and launched an investigation into the allegations. This swift action prompted a brief wave of optimism that the authorities were finally ready to take such cases seriously. 

However, these hopes stand in sharp contrast to the arrest of the young women on TikTok. The most troubling case of all, though, has been the state’s reaction to a video posted on TikTok in May by 17-year-old Menna Abdel Aziz from Cairo. In it, she appeared with a swollen face and accused Mazen Ibrahim, 25, and three female accomplices of assault and rape. 

“If the government is watching this video, then get me justice,” she said. 

Police later confirmed that one of the alleged accomplices filmed and uploaded footage of the attack online. The most widely shared video, viewed tens of thousands of times on YouTube and TikTok, shows Aziz being slapped across the face while attempting to put on her trousers. But, rather than support Aziz, police arrested her and the alleged attackers on charges of inciting debauchery.  

Women’s rights advocates succeeded in lobbying for Aziz to be transferred from prison to a rehabilitation center, following a police investigation that confirmed her assault and rape. However, the charges against her remain. 

A number of activists have come together to launch campaigns to raise awareness about the ordeal facing women accused of promoting immorality on social media. 

“The government has created a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women,” said Mozen Hassan, founder of the non-profit women’s rights group Nazra for Feminist Studies. In 2016, Hassan and her NGO were charged with receiving foreign funds for the purpose of “harming national security.” Her assets were frozen and she was banned from traveling. 

Hassan now believes that Sisi’s regime is targeting women online because the internet has become the last public space available to them. “The bad women are activists, human rights defenders and the TikTok girls,” she said. 

Mohammad Hamarsha contributed additional reporting.

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Since we published our story, the forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests of healthcare workers have increased, according to Haitham Ghonim, a co-founder of the international rights group WeRecord. Doctors and pharmacists have been targeted in retaliation for speaking out about the government’s response to Covid-19, which has been criticized for its inadequate testing and underreporting of infections.

When we spoke last week, Ghonim said he knew of two health workers currently missing and suspected to be under arrest.

On Tuesday, Egypt’s top medical union, the Egyptian Medical Syndicate posted a letter on Facebook to the prosecutor general demanding the release of five doctors who were arrested on various charges ranging from fake news to membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned political organization, after posting criticism of the government on social media.

Samar el Hussieny, executive director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies, an Egyptian and Estonian human rights organization, said the government and the health ministry are “trying to limit the amount of information that is exposed to the public as much as they can.” It is nevertheless an open secret that the pandemic is much worse than publicly acknowledged, added el Hussieny. “There is a huge problem in Egypt, you could say. Doctors know it, the ministry knows it, the government knows it, the president for sure knows it, but they don’t want to tell the world.”

She described a climate of fear and self-censorship among health workers she knew, some of whom preemptively deleted their own social media posts for fear of government reprisal.

No fewer than 68 health workers have died of Covid-19 in Egypt, including three on Tuesday.

The post In Egypt, medics fear raising the alarm on Covid-19 appeared first on Coda Story.

While the nation has introduced a series of strict lockdown measures to curb the spread of Covid-19, authorities have reported more than 5,000 cases and more than 350 deaths.

But health professionals worry that criticizing the government could land them in jail for “spreading false news” — a charge commonly brought against those who defy Egyptian state narratives.

Doctors “are working in very stressful circumstances without protection,” said Nayla, a general practitioner who is refusing to work due to the acute lack of resources in public hospitals. “I believe that we’re going to lose many doctors in the coming days.”

Nayla requested that her real name not be used, fearing reprisals by the authorities. She is just one of many Egyptian medical professionals who say that the government has failed to acknowledge the severity of the country’s coronavirus outbreak. 

In late March, one doctor was arrested for uploading a video to Facebook and so was a pharmacist for writing a post. Both complained about a shortage of protective masks, according to the U.N Human Rights Commission. 

Since then, 43 doctors have been infected with Covid-19. According to the Egyptian Doctors’ Syndicate, three have died from the disease. The U.N has urged Egyptian authorities to stop muzzling dissenting voices and to address false news by providing “reliable and fact-based information to the public.” 

In response to the pandemic, Egypt has enforced a nationwide curfew, closed all street markets and launched a hotline that offers instructions to anyone experiencing symptoms. The Ministry of Health has also sponsored ads on television instructing Egyptians to wash their hands frequently and stay indoors. 

But some popular talk show hosts and religious leaders have undermined the state’s campaign by propagating damaging quackery. One theory claims that Egyptians have developed a natural immunity to the virus from drinking poor-quality tap water. Others contend that Egyptians are immune because they’re protected by God.

According to healthcare professionals, the biggest issue is a lack of testing across the country. As of April 22, Egypt — a country of 98 million people — has only confirmed 3,032 infections. The real figure is widely believed to be far higher. A recent study by the University of Toronto estimated that at least 19,310 people in Egypt had been infected with Covid-19 by mid-March. The estimate was based on infection rates and flight data. Egypt later expelled a Guardian journalist for citing this research. 

Many Egyptian medical staff are ambivalent about the study, but a large number also agree that restrictive testing protocols are concealing the severity of the crisis. For now, only patients with symptoms who have either returned from an infected country or encountered an infected person are eligible for testing. Owing to these rules, the Ministry of Health performed tests on just 25,000 people by the end of March, despite having the capacity for 200,000, according to a technical commission from the World Health Organization.

“The current protocol assumes that the virus hasn’t already spread in our communities,” said Nora, an Egyptian public health specialist, who works for an international NGO in Cairo. She too declined to use her real name. 

“My opinion is that the government is intentionally trying to keep numbers down, because it can’t tell people to stay home and stop working for long,” Nora added. 

Medics and the general public also view the government’s recent soft-power initiatives of sending aid to other countries as detrimental to Egypt’s own efforts to control the coronavirus. Widespread anger erupted on social media when Cairo airlifted medical supplies to Rome, for the second time in three weeks, on April 3. 

Many Egyptians suspect that President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi sent the aid to improve ties with Rome after the 2016 abduction and murder of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni in Cairo — a crime perpetrated by Egyptian security forces, according to U.S intelligence. 

“When we saw the government take our resources to Italy, it made us angry and unmotivated,” said Magdi, a frontline doctor in Cairo, who also declined to disclose his real name. “It was clear that the government didn’t care about protecting us.”

A recent incident at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Cairo also raised alarms about the spread of the pandemic. Most of the institution’s staff demanded tests after a nurse exhibited symptoms of the virus last month. “We tried to tell the university that medical staff could kill our cancer patients if we infect them, but they wouldn’t listen,” said Hagar Essam Ashmawy, an NCI pharmacist.

The incident prompted President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to order the Ministry of Health to test all NCI staff — a move that revealed 17 employees were infected with Covid-19. Sisi’s intervention was celebrated by Ashmawy and her colleagues, many of whom lauded the president as a hero on social media. 

But Magdi believes that the government is still woefully underprepared. “If our response proceeds in the same way, then Egypt will face a disaster in the weeks ahead. We’ll be much worse off than Italy, thanks to our corrupted health care service.”

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The country’s so-called “Facebook law” has already led to the arrest of Egyptian journalist Ahmed Gamal Ziada. Ziada was taken into custody on January 29 at Cairo Airport while returning from Tunisia to finish applying to join the for semi-governmental Journalist Syndicate, an organization which provides official accreditation and legal support to journalists.

Ziada was first arrested in 2013 and charged with spreading false news while filming police violence against protesters in Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was accused of a number of crimes, including joining a banned group and “engaging in violent protests” while he was working as a photojournalist for the online news network Yaqeen. He was acquitted and released 16 months later after being subjected to physical violence and torture during his detention.

After being detained on January 29, Ziada was charged with “spreading false news via social media” and placed in pretrial detention at the Giza Central Prison, Last month, he was granted release on bail, pending further investigation.

According to watchdogs and activists, the new law—which places all social media accounts with over 5,000 followers under the supervision of the country’s top media authority—is part of a broader campaign by the Egyptian government to monitor the web and social media and codify the repression the media, protest groups and dissenting voices.

According to journalists, activists who took part in protests in Tahrir Square in 2001, during what was dubbed the “Facebook revolution” to topple then president Hosni Mubarak are among those who are paying the highest price with the new laws. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed activists and ordinary civilians to organise and disseminate news about Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and denounce the violence used by Egyptian security forces against the protesters. Many have since left the country, while others are in jail.

The new law, passed by two-thirds of the Egyptian parliament last summer and ratified by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in early September, increases the Egyptian government’s already sweeping powers to monitor, censor and block social media websites and blogs. The law also empowers the government to criminalize any content that violates vaguely defined political, social or religious norms.

“During the Arab revolutions and now, social media remains a primary platform for the dissemination of information, ideas and debates that the regimes do not welcome and fear,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a prominent journalist, activist and blogger whose website covered Egypt's revolution, including strikes by workers.”On occasions it was also used as a means of organizing and connecting dissidents here and there.”

El-Hamalawy has nearly 300,000 Twitter followers; he left Egypt in 2015 and now lives in Berlin. “Of course, the new law affects me, since my followers on social media platforms exceed 5,000,” he said. “I can be subject to fines and prison sentences. I'm in a better position than others, however, since I already left the country three years ago. But the security services have already sent threats to my family. Moreover almost every dissident and journalist detained in the last few years has been accused of a set of charges, including ‘spreading fake news’. The charge was already used before the new law which now includes draconian punishments for it.”

The law also enables the Supreme Council of Media to file criminal complaints against digital media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs and individuals on the basis of vaguely worded offences such as "inciting people to violate laws" and "defamation against the individuals and state institutions". Equally significantly, the legislation treats private individuals and social media companies in the same way. For example, establishing an online video channel on a website requires individuals to form a company with at least $140,000 in capital.

Supporters of the Egyptian regime say the law was approved after consultation with judicial experts and journalists and that it represents another step towards safeguarding freedom of expression in the country.

But several human rights organizations have said the law provide the legal means for the government to jail critical voices. "The law is extremely problematic, because it empowers the executive authorities to determine what is free speech and what is not in a manner that is in gross violation of the Egyptian constitution and international law," said Hussein Baoumi, a researcher at Amnesty International Egypt. "The law governs the establishment of private media platforms and the behavior of private and public media, and regulates newspapers, news websites, TV channels and radio stations owned and run by the state."

Egyptian authorities have grown increasingly adept at jailing online activists in recent years. A 2015 law made it a crime to publish or promote any news about terrorist incidents contradicting official statements. In January 2016, three people were arrested on charges of using Facebook pages to spread false information political detainees and to incite criticism of national institutions. In 2016, Egypt also blocked Facebook’s "Free Basics" Internet service in 2016 after the company refused to give authorities access to user accounts.

The latest law was passed in the wake of a number of arrests linked to criticism of President Sisi’s government. Last July, a Lebanese tourist, Mona el-Mazbouh, was sentenced to eight years in jail for insulting Egyptians and their country after she posted a video on Facebook claiming she had been sexual harassed in Egypt. According to authorities, the charge was "deliberately broadcasting false rumors which aim to undermine society and attack religions."

The case followed the arrest of the former activist and actress Amal Fahty. She was sentenced to two years in prison for sharing a video on the Internet accusing the government of not defending women against sexual harassment.

According to human rights groups, Egypt has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of political prisoners who have been jailed. The country currently has more than 60,000 political prisoners—in comparison, at the end of Mubarak's rule, who served as president from 1981 to 2011, the number of political prisoners was between 5,000-10,000.

Zeinab Mohamed is an Egyptian activist followed by about 235,000 people on Twitter. Using the nickname Zeinobia, she also writes on her blog, Egyptian Chronicles and is one of the few activists still writing about Egyptian affairs on social media.

"The Egyptian government says that this law is a way to combat rumors and organize media to the end of that talk whereas the real goal is to control the last open space left for people to express their opinion freely,” she said. "It is clear that it represents an attempt by the Egyptian government to tame down social media as an alternative media and another way for censorship. For us now using social media is more dangerous than before."

Another example of Egypt’s crackdown on the Internet can be found in the so-called "cybercrime law”, signed on 18 August 2018, which empowers authorities to order the blocking of websites that publish content considered a threat to “national security” and the "national economy". Every citizen discovered visiting a banned site can be sentenced to one year in prison, while those who create a website that is subsequently banned are punishable with a two-year sentence. According to Reporters Without Borders, "this law just legalizes the Internet censorship that is already practiced in Egypt."

Since the Egyptian government declared a state of emergency in April 2017 following two deadly attacks on Christian Coptic churches which left 44 dead, authorities have assumed the power to monitor and control all forms of communication. Hundreds of websites have been blocked, including Mada Masr, the country’s leading independent media outlet and Al Jazeera. Egyptian authorities have also used tools like reset packages (RST) to disrupt sites by preventing communication with servers. The same technique was also used in Egypt last year to disable Signal, the encrypted instant messaging service.

"The Egyptian government was already able to contain well known activists, but until today Egyptian social media and web sites were still full of satire and full of posts that make a mockery of the government,” said Wael Iskandar, a prominent political blogger. “Some of these contents are posted by accounts whose identity is completely obscure. The purpose is to repress legally all the critics on social media and to do this the government needs a legal background. We can say that we are witnessing a strategy shift. The repression is not anymore against the dissidents but directly against any space of possible dissent."

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