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.
