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Written by Lisa Neff, Staff writer
Feb 10, 2011
The first group of protesters marching under the October 6 Bridge by the Ramses Hilton in Cairo when the anti-government protests began. – Photo: Alisdare Hickson for gayegypt.com
While the world watched and listened to news of the people’s uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, international human rights groups were monitoring government-sanctioned assaults on organizations in Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information reported a “fierce crackdown on human rights organizations,” including several involved in HIV/AIDS and LGBT rights work, such as the Hisham Mabarek Law Center, the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Women’s Group for Human Rights.
At the law center, authorities arrested two activists and seized computers and documents.
Security forces “smashed up the offices of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and stormed the office of the Women’s Group for Human Rights,” according to the ANHR.
Asmaa Soliman, director of the women’s group, said of the raiders: “Some were wearing military clothes, others were special forces of the ministry of interior. The office was completely ruined, all furniture was smashed.”
Representatives from these groups and other rights organizations said in early February that the Egyptian people are united in shared grievances against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak: lack of employment opportunities, inadequate standard of living and infringement on human rights and freedoms.
“There is nothing we want more than an end to the Mubarak era, which has been marred by repression, abuse and injustice,” read a statement from the Egyptian Institute for Personal Rights, which has a record of action on LGBT issues.
GayEgypt, an LGBT Internet forum and website, issued a “call on all to demonstrate peacefully but we deplore the violence by the security services, factional militias, police and government.”
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, which also works on LGBT issues, proclaimed its “deep esteem for the Egyptian people who rose up in governates around the country to loudly proclaim their aspirations for freedom, justice and human dignity, in peaceful demonstrations.”
CIHRS further stated that its leadership “hopes for change and a peaceful end to the monopolization of power, as well as the urgent need for serious measures to achieve social justice and end the blatant monopolization of wealth and spread of corruption.”
Six months before the 2011 demonstrations, Egyptians assembled in a number of cities to demonstrate against the public police beating of Khaled Said. The We Are All Khaled Said movement – coordinated largely on facebook – helped initiate the mass demonstrations that began Jan. 25.
Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog and advocacy group, focused on Khaled Said’s death as it researched allegations of government-sanctioned torture in Egypt for a new report, released just before the recent demonstrations began in Tahrir Square.
In that report, HRW concluded that Mubarak’s government has “used torture and ill-treatment on a widespread, deliberate and systematic basis over the past two decades to glean confessions and information, or to punish detainees.”
“Beatings, electric shocks, suspension in painful positions, forced standing for long periods, waterboarding, as well as rape and threatening to rape victims and their family” are conducted by special security forces and police under the authority of the Egyptian Interior Ministry, according to HRW.
“Egyptians deserve a clean break from the incredibly entrenched practice of torture,” said HRW deputy director Joe Stork. “The Egyptian government’s foul record … is a huge part of what is still bringing crowds into the streets today.”
HRW also has issued several papers specifically on government-sanctioned persecution and torture of gays.
In 2004, HRW’s “In a Time of Torture” documented the routine arbitrary arrest and torture of gay men, or suspected gay men.
Since 2000, coinciding with widespread improvements in communications technologies, HRW has tracked a series of crackdowns and raids resulting in the arrests of gays – at least a thousand between 2001 and 2004 – and the ransacking of offices of groups involved in LGBT campaigns.
The report documented the 2000 arrest of a gay couple charged with “violation of honor by threat” and “practicing immoral and indecent behavior.”
A year later, authorities conducted a series of private party raids, arresting gay men for allegedly violating the Public Order and Public Morals Code. The largest of the raids resulted in the arrest of 52 males, including some youths, who became known as the Cairo 52. The raid and prosecution that followed drew international attention and condemnation. Twenty-three of the men arrested were sentenced to prison with hard labor. Their convictions were overturned by Mubarak, but reinstated in a second trial.
A defendant in the Cairo 52 case told HRW: “I used to think being gay was just part of my life, and now I know it means dark cells and beatings. It is very, very difficult to be gay in Egypt.”
There have been more arrests since then, including the arrests of men using Internet chat rooms and Web-based message boards to connect and police stings concentrated on popular meeting places in Cairo. In one sting in September 2003, police took 62 men into custody. In 2007, a university student received a two-year prison sentence for posting a profile on a gay dating site.
Detainees told HRW about being bound, burned with cigarettes, submerged in icy water and subjected to electroshock. Doctors involved in police interrogations required detainees to strip and then kneel for examinations to determine whether they engaged in “homosexual conduct.”
“Every place we were held, somebody beat us,” one man told HRW. “It was like they weren’t dealing with human beings at all.… Like we weren’t even animals, just mud or something they could kick around.”
Such allegations of torture prompted a coalition of human rights groups to call on Mubarak to establish a cabinet to work on guaranteeing “equal opportunity for all Egyptians in the constitution” and ending the “arbitrary security interference in the freedom” of Egyptian people.
Now, if anti-government demonstrators get their demand met, a government other than that headed by Mubarak will be called upon to take such action.
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