CAIRO — For years, leading Egyptian human rights lawyer Gamal Eid had a dream: to open libraries in the capital’s slums. So when mass protests ousted long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Eid gathered the books he’d been collecting and, with the help of donations and a prestigious international award, opened a network of libraries to provide learning spaces in neglected communities.
“This is the revolution,” recalls lawyer Shaima’a Fakry of her motivation to join Eid’s initiative as a part-time librarian and teacher. “It’s not just about the political change or the economic systems, but also in the social conditions and individuals themselves.”
Six years later, however, and Mubarak is now free from jail after a court in March cleared him of killing protesters in the 2011 revolution. The government of General-turned-President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, meanwhile, shut Eid’s libraries in December, banned him from travel and froze his assets.
The plight of Eid’s libraries is symbolic of an alarming crackdown on freedoms of expression and education in Egypt, a country that has long been a leading center of literature, research, academia, and religious students in the Arab world.
As Sisi and President Donald Trump meet on Monday in Washington, the two leaders, who’ve publicly praised each other, likely will discuss Egypt’s efforts to stop an ongoing insurgency and terrorist activities and America’s $1.3 billion annual military aid program. But Egypt’s worsening human rights record under Sisi — which experts argue creates an environment ripe for radicalization — will likely not make the briefing.
Egypt has come under steady international criticism for its rights record. Human Rights Watch notes that public criticism of the government is effectively banned, and last December a group of United Nations observers condemned the government for clamping down on women’s rights.
Nowhere are the dangers of these dynamics clearer, however, than in Egypt’s classrooms and other education spaces, where open discussion and dissent are now treated as a dangerous threat, and can lead to expulsion, detention, and even death.
The atmosphere has become so oppressive that Fakry says she is now looking to leave Egypt — a move she never before envisioned.
“The Mubarak period wasn’t good,” says Mohamed Nagy, a researcher at the Cairo-based Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, or AFTE. “But this time and this period is the worst yet. Now there is no space for students to express their thoughts.”
AFTE released a report in March documenting the rise in violations on Egypt’s university campuses since 2013. That’s when Sisi ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, who was narrowly elected the year before in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential vote, and seized power in a popularly backed military coup. The overthrow of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party sparked a wave of protests and violence. Sisi’s government responded in force, killing and detaining tens of thousands of Egyptians, all while broadly tainting them terrorists to shore up popular support.
Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah of the website Mada Masr says the political repression has trickled down to everyday ways people access information. “People may be turning away from information altogether instead of trying to find other sources.”
That’s also what’s made the right to education so important — and such a target. Security bodies have been interfering in academic life, from monitoring and arresting students and professors, to attacking student unions and associations, banning protests, expelling student activists, and preventing professors and students from traveling abroad for conferences and scholarships.
AFTE’s latest report on higher education documented “2,297 cases of legislative, security, and disciplinary violations on students’ rights from 2013-2016.” The incidents include 1,181 cases of students being arrested while on or next to campus, 1,051 disciplinary sanctions, more than half of which were expulsions, 65 students being referred to military trials, and 21 extrajudicial killings.
Egypt has ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and United Nations Convention against Discrimination in Education, among others, which AFTE argues these cases violate. Egypt’s constitution also enshrines a commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression.
The abduction, torture, and murder of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni in 2016 continues to haunt education circles in Egypt and abroad. Regeni, 28, was researching on independent labor unions, one of the instigators of the revolution, when his mangled body was found on the side of a road in February of 2016. Independent media investigations determined Egyptian authorities were behind his brutal murder. Security bodies, which were monitoring Regeni prior to his death, deny the charges and have insinuated Regeni was a spy.
Since then, many universities abroad have stopped allowing students to study or research in Egypt. Regeni’s murder was so shocking in part because it reflected a widespread fear that foreigners were no longer exempt from the abuses that Egyptian students face.
“They [the government] are afraid of what Mubarak did,” Nagy says. “He opened some spaces for the people to express themselves and their opinions and so they think if they open these spaces what happened to Mubarak will happen to them. So they want to close everything.”
Eid’s libraries, and the independent learning and free expression they fostered, are now government targets. Called the Al Karama [Dignity] libraries, the network of five libraries were spread across Cairo’s neglected communities. Egyptian authorities have still not provided an official reason for or documentation authorizing their closure by police in December. Eid alleges authorities were targeting him and the library’s international funding alongside the assault on independent places of thinking.
“It’s part of their [the government’s] war against democracy, human rights, or hope for tomorrow,” he says.
Eid grew up in a poor and marginalized part of Cairo without good access to education. From a children’s library to college campus, Eid knows a quality education can be life changing. And that community libraries are now a threat exemplifies how bad Egypt’s political situation has gotten, he says.
On a chilly day earlier this year in Boulaq, a Cairo slum, young boys loitering in the uneven street gathered excitedly as Fakry, the lawyer-turned-librarian, approached. “Is the library opening again?” they asked her in lowered voices, eyeing the nondescript shuttered building that used to be a one-room library alive with their playing and learning.
“Inshallah [God willing]” Fakry responds, using a common phrase that can mean both yes and no.
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Egypt’s Crackdown on Dissent Moves Into Classrooms, Libraries originally appeared on usnews.com
