Egyptian blogger Rami Siyam, a.k.a. Ayoub, posted a testimony about his four-day odyssey spent recently in detention.
Tag: pigs
Pharmacists protest police abuses
Thousands of pharmacists from Cairo and the provinces gathered yesterday at the Pharmacists’ Syndicate’s general assembly, to discuss measures to confront police hassles against them.
The pharmacists have been complaining from inhumane treatment on the hands of both the ordinary police force and State Security police across the country. Security raids against pharmacies have become regular, under the claim of search for drugs or illegal substances. Security agents frequently smash the contents of the pharmacies, and drag the pharmacists in the street in front of everybody in their neighborhoods, handcuffed, and beaten up, the pharmacists said yesterday.
The pharmacists decided yesterday to boycott buying any medicine or products from pharmaceutical companies for a week, and file a complaint to President Mubarak asking him to hold the police accountable for its actions.
The pharmacists are also discussing a general strike and a march over the parliament if the raids and detentions do not stop.
Sarando peasants trial postponed
The High State Security Court postponed Thursday the trial of the 27 Sarando peasants till 22 January 2007, on charges of illegal assembly, arson and sabotage.
In March 2005, police troops in the village located in the Beheira Governorate raided the homes of the farmers, detaining and torturing men and women–part of an attempt to enforce the eviction of the peasants from the land in favor of Salah Nawar, a landowning aristocrat and a member of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. One of the detained women peasants who were tortured and sexually abused, 38-year-old Nafissa el-Marakbi died shortly after her release from police custody.
For more background details on the case, check this HRW letter to the Egyptian Interior Minister.
I was part of a delegation of human rights activists and journalists who managed to visit the village 10 March 2005, while still under security siege. The place was then a ghost village. As virtually all the men were either under arrest or on the run. All the remaining women stayed home with their children. When they saw us–the “Cairenes”–arriving, they rushed towards us, weeping, asking us (total strangers) to take their kids with us back to Cairo since they were not safe. For those of you who don’t know Egypt, it’s a conservative country in general. The countryside is even ten times more conservative. And here were those peasants asking total strangers to take away their children, including their teenage daughters, for fear of what might happen to them on the hands of the police.
