The Skeptic الشكاك

34 Midha Ali

33 Aisha Ali and son

32 Sudanese refugees, minutes after release from prison

[tags]Sudanese refugees, Sudan, Egypt, Cairo, Human Rights[/tags]

30 Al-Faqih: 2,000 Saudi Online Forum Contributors Detained

This from an interview with Saad al-Faqih, leader of the Saudi opposition group Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. I’d be wary of this information given the Al-Faqih’s background and agenda, but it strikes me as worth following up on all the same:

SF: Because the only place on earth where the jihadis feel safe is Iraq. The Internet used to be awash with jihadi material but this is becoming less so for two reasons. Firstly, Western intelligence services are now aggressively targeting jihadi websites and are showing a greater determination to close them down completely. In the past they would allow some of the more interesting ones to remain in operation so that they could covertly gather intelligence on the webmasters and the contributors. Dozens of websites have been closed in recent months. Secondly, Western governments have provided software and other expertise to the Saudi regime to trace individual contributors to web forums. But the jihadis in Iraq feel safe and secure because they have satellite Internet connections and they can set up temporary websites and upload files very easily. The invasion of Iraq has boosted the fortunes of jihadis in many respects, and the Internet is no exception.

MA: Are you saying the Americans are providing the Saudi authorities with the requisite technology to trace contributors to jihadi websites?

SF: Precisely! The problem is that the Saudis are using the technology to trace and detain non-jihadi authors and contributors as well. In fact several people connected to our organization have been detained in recent months as a result of the transfer of technological expertise.

MA: What happens to these people after they are detained?

SF: Firstly they conduct a thorough search of their computers to trace all their communications and contacts. The detainees are then subjected to prolonged and tough interrogations.

MA: Are they subsequently released?

SF: No, they remain in detention because the Saudis now consider a wide-range of people as critical security threats.

MA: How many forum users have been arrested?

SF: The figures are no less then 2,000, but this includes both jihadi and non-jihadi forum contributors.

Full Interview

[tags]Internet, Saudi Arabia, Free Expression, Iraq[/tags]

25 ABC News Last Night

Found myself watching ABC News, as rebroadcast on the Saudi satellite network MBC4, last night. I know this is a service the Saudis provide for the expat oil workers, but I was struck again by the money Amrika could save on “public diplomacy” in the Middle East (including the white elephant Al-Hurra) if it would bar the export of the news programs that run on its domestic airwaves.

Middle Eastern viewers were told that “thousands” in Amrika were praying for Sharon. That Bush and Sharon had a special relationship that went beyond work, that they were best friends. That Americans love Sharon and are worried about Israel without him.

“And then there are the Palestinians,” the announcer said, as the video feed hilariously cut to images of masked men with guns fighting in the street. “They’re lobbing missiles at Israel [cut to images of Qassems firing] and attacking their own police forces as the Gaza Strip descends into anarchy. Meanwhile, it looks increasingly likely that they’ll vote against the corrupt Palestinian Authority to bring in the Islamist Hamas party, which has sent suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians.”

Right. Reminds me of Gulf War I, before Al-Jazeera came to Egypt. It was Ramadan. In the old days, Egyptian terrestrial television would show CNN whenever something big enough to overwhelm terrestrial TV’s capacities happened. So as bombs fell on Baghdad that Ramadan, Egyptian viewers saw U.S. soldiers preparing missiles daubed with the words, “Happy Ramadan, Fuckers,” followed immediately by a Christmas-shopping special. Wild-eyed housewives in glistening shopping malls struggled with the weight of 20 paper shopping bags, spoiled children in tow.

So, Messrs. Friedman and Ajami, “Why do ‘they’ hate ‘us?'”

23 Sudanese Refugees, Khaddam

Don’t miss Nora Younis’ excellent and full account of the night when the Sudanese refugees were dispersed. It’s worth reading in full, as are the revealing comments.

Those looking for the backstory behind former Syrian Vice-President Abd al-Halim Khaddam’s recent, explosive comments should check out the two most recent posts on Syria Comment.

So is Khaddam now Syria’s Chalabi? Khaddam’s insistence that he has no relationships with any foreign powers is laughable given his former position. It would be striking if he managed to avoid forming any such relationships before his exile, never mind after he moved to Paris.

[tags]Sudan, Egypt, Sudanese Refugees, Syria, Khaddam[/tags]

21 Spiraling Sudanese Death Count

From Eric Reeves (full article):

There is no reliable casualty report, in part because Egyptian security forces are not returning the dead to their families. But the Cairo representative of the southern Sudan People?s Liberation Movement has reported, on behalf of the SPLM Committee in Cairo, the results of a canvassing of area hospitals:

180 dead at Giza Hospital
27 dead at Zeinhom Hospital
35 dead at Manshiet Bakry Hospital
23 dead at Kasr El Ein Hospital

This represents a total of 265 dead; the Egyptian regime is cleaving to a figure about a tenth of this. There is no authoritative independent casualty figure, nor will this repressive regime allow for such. Indeed, the first step toward ensuring that the we will never know the full truth is Egypt?s ?preparation to deport some 600 Sudanese [who were] part of a group of nearly 2,000 people detained after police broke up a protest in Cairo, a Sudan official said Monday?

This is getting picked up all over the Egyptian blogs. The bloggy online magazine Misr Digital reports:

Emmanuel Joseph, a southern Sudanese refugee, committed suicide yesterday at the Shebin el-Kom prison where Egyptian authorities is detaining hundreds of refugees due to be deported to the Sudan.

Refugees carrying yellow and blue UNHCR cards are still held at camps.

Security authorities prevents refugees from visiting hospitals. The level of health care provided to refugees has not been ascertained yet.

Visits to a 7-year old girl at the 7th floor of Kasr al-Aini hospital till now. Her family is missing.

Security authorities tried to return corpses of victims to Khartoum via the Sudanese embassy. The corpses were transported in refrigerators from hospitals and there were attempts to convince families to make it difficult or impossible to monitor the number of victims. According to refugee sources, 70 persons are missing, in addition to 28 corpses at the Zeinhom morgue.

So far there is no proof of the fear among refugees that organs were stolen from the corpses of victims.

The results of a canvassing of area hospitals:

180 dead at Giza Hospital
27 dead at Zeinhom Hospital
35 dead at Manshiet Bakry Hospital
23 dead at Kasr El Ein Hospital

This represents a total of 265 dead

See also Wa7da Masrya and the thread at Arabist.net.

I’m wondering how the SPLM managed to canvass the hospitals. I gather that’s been difficult to do. Egyptian journalist Karim al-Fawal was detained by State Security for poking around Qasr al-Aini hospital.

More worrying to me are reports that hundreds of Sudanese could face forced repatriation.

Issandr (still blogging, incredibly, about Egypt from his safari holiday in South Africa) notes the rumors that the UNHCR gave the government the green light to clear the protesters out. It’s possible that the government, after all these months, finally came to UNCHR and said, “Look, guys, we’ve been very patient, but enough is enough,” and that UNHCR found there was nothing they could do. But to suggest that the UNHCR actively asked the government to clear the protesters out seems far-fetched.

In any case, UNHCR is now working around the clock to process applications. On the face of it, that’s a good thing…but not for those who get sent back to Sudan (this, incidentally, is one reason why UNHCR wasn’t processing applications in the first place—they knew many of the applicants’ cases wouldn’t succeed on their individual merits).

In the meantime, can I just note how glad I am to see the sudden interest in the plight of these Sudanese refugees now that the Egyptian government looks bad because of it? It’s a pity more didn’t take interest earlier, before there were clear good guys and bad guys, when there were just a couple thousand Sudanese people freezing to death in the cold protesting their treatment by Egyptians, their government, and the UNHCR. I didn’t hear a lot of sympathy for them then. Just a few cab drivers and guys in coffeeshops saying the Sudanese were lazy, that they didn’t want to work, that they were looking for a shortcut to the West, and what was so bad about their lives in Egypt compared to the lives of Egyptians?

I remember one Sudanese protester asking me why there wasn’t more attention from the international media. He said a few reporters came around early in the protest, but then they stopped. Well, they’re watching now. And, to Egypt’s credit, committees are being formed to help them. People are collecting cash to give them. People have staged a series of protests in their support. Good. Too bad it had to come to this to spur all this positive action. Shame on us all.

[tags]Sudanese refugees, Cairo, Egypt, Sudan[/tags]

19 Ayman Nour, Continued

Back from vacation in Jordan and Upper Egypt now, overwhelmed by work. Since Ayman Nour was sentenced, I’ve had time to reconsider my initial cynical post on the sentence. I’ve asked people to challenge me when I’m being an idiot. They have and now I must confess I may have been an idiot…or at least a tad too cynical for a man who had just eaten a sumptuous Christmas Eve feast. Blame my tone on indigestion.

The first hint that I may have been a bit too arch came from expat Tunisian blogger Zied, who pointed out that I had failed to condemn the trial as unfair or politically motivated. Then I took off for Jordan and had a series of conversations with apolitical Jordanians who, soon after they caught my Egyptian accent, told me that Nour’s imprisonment was all they were talking about. Then there was a memorable conversation with three brothers from a successful merchant family in Aswan. In the course of running through the examples of how rotten the Egyptian government is and how the United States is not after democracy but its own interests in the Middle East, they brought up Ayman Nour’s imprisonment. “Fine,” I interjected, “but he doesn’t have any real support inside the country.” Except, that is, from the people I was talking to. All of them were Al-Ghad supporters. Finally, Baheyya weighed in, striking, as usual, the perfect tone and hitting the nail right on the head.

She and Issandr over at Arabist.net were struck, as I was, by the similarities to Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s case. But Baheyya (correctly, I think) identifies “the key difference:”

Whereas Ibrahim could count his domestic supporters on the fingers of one and maybe two hands, Nour has quickly amassed a sizeable following of sympathisers and supporters. Whereas Ibrahim?s trial sessions featured a who?s who of the Cairo diplomatic set, Nour?s trial had more Egyptians than foreigners, with his young partisans filling the courtroom with fiery anti-regime slogans. Whereas Ibrahim?s sentencing was met with domestic indifference and even schadenfreude in some quarters, supporters and sympathisers of Nour immediately took to the streets to condemn his phony trial and conviction.

Not because Nour is some genuinely popular national hero, but because the presidential will to extinguish him was crystal-clear from the outset. Just as voting for the Ikhwan for many people was a satisfying slap in the face to the ruling regime, so supporting Nour for many people is a token of resistance to Mubarak senior?s abuse of power and Mubarak junior?s lust for power. No doubt there are some true believers in Ayman Nour, but there are many others pulled by the enduring allure of the protest vote, made more alluring by the fact of a stalwart regime refusing to share or otherwise redistribute its power in any way.

Well said, Baheyya.

In the same recondite spirit, let me pull my Dec. 25 response to Zied up out of the comments and into a proper post:

Particularly so soon after the parliamentary elections, the idea of the Hizb al-Watani government bringing anyone up on charges of electoral fraud is patently hilarious.

I have no idea whether Nour forged those signatures. Given that 400 people turned out in front of the Hizb al-Watani headquarters today to protest his detention, I doubt he would need to resort to fraud to register the party. Second, from everything I hear, the trail was not fairly conducted. It was clearly politically motivated. That seems so clear as to not bear mention.

So let’s get past that. What were the political motivations? The common wisdom, as articulated by Baheyya and others, is that Nour was a threat because he represented competition for the role Gamal Mubarak is supposed to occupy on the political scene. If that’s true, imprisoning Nour was a miscalculation. Throwing Nour in prison will not bolster Jimmy’s chances of finding acceptance from the Egyptian people. If anything, it will have the opposite effect.

This wouldn’t be the first time a government had miscalculated. Say what you like about them, but I don’t think the people running this country are stupid. No, I still think they correctly calculated that they could get away with summarily removing this irritant from the scene now that he was no longer useful, that he didn’t enjoy sufficient support to bring anyone but the usual suspects out into the streets, that they could absorb whatever diplomatic flak the decision caused and carry on governing.

Ultimately, I fear this will be one more thing for people here to brood about.

Ayman Nour’s freedom may not matter much to your average villager. But Nour’s imprisonment, together with the fact that when your villager’s son asks for candy, he has to buy potatoes and sweeten them with free cough syrup from the local government health clinic because he can’t afford sweets, that one reason he can’t afford sweets is because he has to bribe the police or other representatives of government authority to make his living, that he probably knows a few people who have been tortured in police custody, that the sun hasn’t shone in his village for decades because of the smog from the nearby, unregulated sugar-cane factory, and that the guy who owns that factory has someone drive his daughter around Agouna in a Mercedes while the people who supply the cane couldn’t afford to buy the sugar off the shelf—all these things might just contribute to a general impression that the government isn’t out for his interests.

Better to remove the irritants that could contribute to this kind of unrest than to try to quash any sign of unrest. These attempts in themselves only create new grievances.

[tags]Ayman Nour, Egypt[/tags]

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