536 Number of Islamist Detainees ‘Exaggerated’

Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adli disputed human-rights organizations’ estimates of the number of Islamist detainees in comments carried by Al-Misri al-Youm today. He said no more than 1,800 are in prison. This, incidentally, did not include Brothers, an equal number of whom have been arrested and released in the past year. We’re talking mostly about people still in detention after the mass arrests of the 1990s.

Egyptian human rights NGOs and academics put the number much higher—I’ve heard one respected researcher say as high as 10,000, though that was before a mass amnesty. I’ve heard Islamist lawyers say lower and higher, with varying degrees of credibility.

Of course, the government could put the dispute over numbers to rest by releasing records of all police and State Security actions against suspected Islamists in the ’90s, along with full dossiers on what happened to each detainee. Names and information that could put informants or future operations at risk could be redacted. And then Egyptians could sing “Kumbaya” and have a national discussion about the best way to confront the people who want to kill them….

1 Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. National dialogue in Egypt that is just blasphemous! Next thing you are going to tell me is to write a new social contract???

    Comment by MemZ — January 29, 2008 #

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

40 queries. 0.130 seconds. CMS: WordPress. Design: modified Hiperminimalist Theme.
RSS for posts and comments. Valid XHTML and CSS.