Shortly before 10 I am On August 22, 2019, Alaa Abdel -Fateh, an Egyptian blogger and activist with heavy hair, who woke up in that morning at a police station in Cairo, shared a Facebook post with one hundred and seventy thousand followers. Al -Fateh, who was thirty -seven years old, became a national figure in Egypt in 2011 revolution. It was part of a generation believed that open source and free internet programming would turn societies in the Middle East. The publication, which was shared by Al -Fateh, the death, nine days ago, to Hosam Hamid, a prisoner in Tora Prison, the maximum security 2, on the outskirts of Cairo. Al-Fateh attached six words to the account-“the second killing in the cells of discipline”-and sent them.
Five months ago, Al -Fateh was released on the conditional release of the same facility, which carries hundreds of opponents of President Abdel Fahia Al -Sisi, who ruled Egypt since he took power after a military coup twelve years ago. Al -Fahia spent a five -year prison sentence to help her organize a protest outside the Egyptian Parliament in 2013. As a condition for his experience, the girl, who had a seven -year -old son, had to present himself at six o’clock every evening at the local police station, in Docke Province, and spending tonight in a forest stones at the stage.
Al -Fateh called the cake of isolation. “I am trying to get used to ignoring the details of life at a police station,” he wrote in an article in August. Try to avoid going to the bathroom. He kept his bed in his car. It was frank in the form of disarmament from the failure of the Egyptian revolution and its role in that. Al -Fateh often referred to himself as a ghost, whose future failed to achieve. “I don’t want to know what is happening around me,” he wrote. “I have completely lost my curiosity about the work of the Egyptian state, especially the members that govern our bodies.”
A little more than a month after the participation of a Facebook post about hamed, the girl was arrested by Plainclothes officers and took to Tora Prison, where he was stripped and beaten. Many Egyptian cities have recently witnessed street protests against government corruption. The disturbances were not particularly dangerous, but it was the most prevalent since Sisi took power. About five hundred activists have been detained, and the Al -Fahia family assumed that he had signed a routine sweeping the voices of the opposition. “I thought, This is a moment of panic who have. Laila Suef, his mother, recently told me, I didn’t think he would keep this length. “
Al -Fateh Imprisoned. (In 2021, he officially obtained a five -year prison sentence for “publishing wrong news” in the addition of six words to Facebook.) In this process, he became a well -known political prisoner in Egypt, while Soueif, a dark humorous math world, has become a more satisfactory role in the country’s conscience: the unacceptable mother. Suef, who was sixty -nine, was a professor of mathematics at Cairo University, where she published papers on the characteristics of the SKEW Group collection. She joined her first protest-from the military regime of Anwar Sadat-a high school student, in 1972. “I would have been expelled from school, for example, ten times, if I was not a high mathematics student.”
Al -Fateh’s father, Ahmed Saif Al -Islam Hamad, was a lawyer for human rights, who was imprisoned during his eighties because of his activity. The history of the private births of the family, wedding parties and deaths is intersect with an official record of cases numbers, experiments, arrests and detention. Al -Fateh and his sister Sana were behind bars when their father died, in 2014. When I met Suef in London a few weeks ago, with SANA, I remembered the girl’s explanation of why his father was in prison. She said, “I said there was a good police and a bad police.” “The good police were to put out fires, direct traffic and arrest thieves, and the bad police were preventing people from trying to change the government.” Suef tone turned into one of the amazing regret. “Now we only have a bad police,” I went. “The good police diminished and diminished.”
Last September, Al -Fateh completed another five -year prison. But instead of launching, the Egyptian authorities announced that his detention before the trial was not considered part of his punishment, and that he would be held until 2027. (In 2022, Al -Fateh had carried out his hunger strike, whose family believed that he ended up being fed to power.) “I am very close to him,” Suef told me. “In many things, we click the same way. And even when we don’t think the same way, we understand how we click.” When Sana told Al -Fateh that their mother was planning to go a hunger strike, he knew better than trying to ethn. He asked me, “Is this a resolution resolution?’ SANA said: “He knows me well,” Ghumfal Suef.
Suef was born in London, where her mother was studying for a doctorate. In English literature. As a child, Suef used to visit England regularly. I read residents, in English and Arabic. Her mother began on Jane Austin when she was nine or ten. “I may have thought he was the safest,” said Suef. “There is no violence.”
In 2021, he received British nationality, through the nationality of Suef. He was held in Tora Prison at the time, with strict conditions in his contact. His family reported his naturalization news in the form of an empty postcard for the queen, which he kept in his cell, her only image. His imprisonment has become a test of British diplomacy in Egypt – a test that Britain has largely failed. In 2017, the President Donald Trump I negotiated the launch of Aya Hijazi, the American -Egyptian charitable factor, was arrested on charges of children’s use by SISI. (An Egyptian court dropped the charges against Al -Hijazi.) In contrast, no UK official has visited the Fta since he became a British citizen. It was the only improvement in his circumstances in May 2022, when he was transferred to Wadi Al -Natton prison, a relatively low and low -security facility, south of Cairo. Explicit, at least, the British government was not unwilling to exert significant pressure on the Egyptian authorities, although the United Kingdom is the third largest foreign investor in Egypt and a major system of training and military equipment. “I really think the British are weak,” SANA said. “They don’t know how to do this.”
Last winter, Suef stood for an hour in most of the morning outside the British Foreign Ministry headquarters, in London. She lost more than a third of her body weight. On February 24, she was transferred to the hospital after a breakdown in blood sugar levels. After four days, Care StarmerThe British Prime Minister called on President Sisi to discuss the issue of Al -Fatta. The call led to a wave of the diplomatic movement. Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser in Britain, who helped mediate the great Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, played a pioneering role in the negotiations, and there were subsequent meetings between the two sides in March and April. Soueif increased its eating to three hundred calories per day, in the form of one bottle of Fortisip, which are nutritional supplements.
But, then, the progress stopped. “There is a strange silence at this moment,” SANA said. Everyone agrees that Al -Fateh case is complicated. It has family quality, similar to the dispute. Sisi, the former director of military intelligence in Egypt, was a critical of Al -Fateh’s mother when he was arrested during the revolution. “I think it is a very personal issue for Egyptian adults,” said Lee John Casson, British ambassador to the country between 2014 and 2018. Meanwhile, there is an indelible feeling that successive British foreign trustees and prime ministers have been afraid of paying a sensation. “I thought the challenges we face would be geographical or actual causes. Then, if my mother dies, I can say that this was a very big challenge for me to fight,” Sana said. “But if it is, like, mediocrity, this is really sad.”
When I stopped seeing Soueif and Sanaa earlier this month, their bags were crowded. The family was abandoning an apartment they were renting in southern London and flying to Cairo the next day. Soueif sat at the end of the sofa, next to a large window, under the afternoon sun. She was scheduled to see her son in two days, her first visit since January. It was so thin that there is no material. She compared herself to Ramis II’s mummy. When she got up to make herself a cup of tea, she stood up on kitchen cabinets, like a marionte on the wall. It was concerned that Al -Fateh would feel anxious when he saw her. (In March, after Suef was hospitalized, another hunger strike began.) The family is usually able to see it once a month, but the authorities gave an additional visit, due to a national holiday. Family members are usually separated by glass, so Suef’s main hope was that she would be able to touch her son. (After a few days, on her second visit, Suef sat on the sofa together for the first time in years.) “Sometimes, as you know, even in the middle of all, we get these five minutes of talking about a book, for example, or something funny that happened in the news,” Suef said. “From five to ten minutes of regular conversation.”
We talked about the origins of Al -Fateh’s activity. When he was a teenager, he found a picture in the family apartment. He was a suspect thief, who was wounded by chrossine and set fire by the police – one of his father’s cases. Al -Fateh and a friend copied it and handed them over to the amazing passengers on the trains in Cairo. “One of the reasons that makes me know is that it is not a result to try to withdraw it is that my mother tried to withdraw me several times,” said Suef. “It was completely useless.” Al -Fateh is a lyric writer, a grave, funny. In 2021, “It is not defeated yet“A group of his work was published in English, and necessarily shake – and madness – from standing to authoritarian rule.” If despair is betrayal, what is hope? “Al -Fateh writes. Hope left.”
