Latest Articles

10/09/18

Persecuted at home, denied asylum in South Korea: the Egyptians with nowhere to go

In December 2012 Abdelrahman Zaid became one of the thousands of civilians to be incarcerated in Mubarak’s sweep to end the Arab Spring. At the time of his arrest he was holding documents to say he was a Palestinian refugee due to his father’s origin and the media used this to depict him as a foreigner who had come to Egypt to make trouble. He was sentenced to five years in prison and left Egypt in six days. As he searched for somewhere to go Abdelrahman found that unlike the US and Europe South Korea offered Egyptians visa-free travel. He had the impression that South Korea was “a nice country with a good economy” and on top of this, in 1994 it had become a signatory of the UN refugee convention. He landed in Seoul on 4 April 2016. [ read more ]

20/08/18

Mystery shrouds extradition of Egypt imam from Spain

On 1 June Spanish police injected Dr. Alaa Mohamed Said with anesthetic, beat him and bundled him onto a plane bound for Egypt. For two days his wife Iman, who was then two months pregnant with their sixth child, had no contact with her husband: “I kept calling when he disappeared,” she tells me. “Once the authorities said he was there, another time that there was a problem with the phone.” Eventually Iman learnt that her husband was in Tora Prison, the notorious maximum security jail in Cairo whose degrading conditions, brutal treatment of inmates and lack of independent oversight have earned a wing within the complex the nickname Scorpion. She hasn’t spoken to her husband since the end of May. [ read more ]

22/06/18

In London, theatre is helping four young refugees process trauma

The first time Talal Hasan met Omar Almahel they slept side by side on a piece of cardboard at a train station in Brussels. Not long after this the pair climbed a bridge, jumped onto a fence below and manoeuvred themselves between carriages on a London bound Eurostar, hiding beneath the seats when ticket inspectors came down the aisle. At just 17 and 18-years-old the two young men had already undertaken an incredible journey from Darfur, a region in western Sudan that has been rocked by war since 2003. Omar paid a smuggler to take him to Libya but woke up in Chad. He was then sent back to Sudan then onto Egypt where he travelled through the desert to get to Tripoli before taking a boat to France and eventually Belgium. [ read more ]

18/05/18

It took 116 dead Palestinians for Egypt to ease its siege on Gaza for a month

Yesterday Egyptian military strongman Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced on Twitter that the Rafah border crossing to Gaza would remain open throughout the entire month of Ramadan. Al-Sisi’s tweet came at the end of a long and bloody week for Palestinians. On Monday, as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner inaugurated the American embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli forces massacred 62 Palestinians and injured over 3,000. The youngest victim was an eight-month-old baby girl, Layla Al-Ghandoor. Al-Sisi’s goodwill promise to “alleviate the burdens of our brothers in Gaza” during the Muslim holy month will be believed by few who see his actions against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip as less than brotherly. [ read more ]

10/05/18

Welcome to Sinai, where soldiers shoot children then boast on Facebook

Even by the standards of Egypt’s dirty war the video circulating this week of a young boy pleading for his mother moments before he was shot in central Sinai was heartbreaking. When it comes to Egypt we hear a lot of figures – 60,000 political prisoners, 1,000 protesters massacred in a single day, 378 enforced disappearances in a year – but as the numbers climb we have become desensitised to the scale of oppression taking place in this North African country, once celebrated for its Arab Spring uprising. The video of the young boy reminds us how horribly wrong it all went, and that behind each and every extrajudicial killing carried out by Egyptian authorities there is a person with a family, a life, a world. [ read more ]

21/04/18

‘Syrians are not cockroaches to be exterminated’

Early on in the Syrian revolution activist Hammam Yousef met the German minister of foreign affairs in Berlin and told him it was his chance to change the course of history and start a new page of understanding between the West and the Arab world. There had been six months of peaceful protests and Yousef was not asking for military intervention, simply for UN observers to be embedded with the demonstrators to put pressure on the regime to stop shooting into the crowds. “Syria is a very important country in the Arab world, it can influence the rest of the region,” says Yousef. “But it didn’t happen. If it had, it would have cost a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that need to be spent now.” [ read more ]