Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Amelia Smith
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Egypt’s air strikes on Sinai good timing for $1.3bn US military aid package
On Tuesday Egyptian warplanes launched airstrikes on North Sinai in response to the death of a senior army brigadier who was killed after Wilayat Sinai targeted his vehicle. Local sources told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that fighter planes hit the city of Sheikh Zuweid and west of the town of Rafah. Rafah...
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Extortionate bail and official bribery: How Egypt formalised its rashwah culture
On 1 June Abeer Hassan’s brother left the house to deliver some cash to a colleague, a short trip around the block that should have taken a maximum of 15 minutes. Abeer’s brother takes a wide range of medication for a defect in his gland and is weak as a...
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Tunisia: Journalists contend against Saudi, UAE bots to warn against crushing hard won civil liberties
On Sunday Tunisia’s President, Kais Saeid assumed emergency powers to sack the prime minister, suspend parliament and the immunity of parliamentarians, and assume authority of the government. The birthplace of the Arab Spring has made headlines since the weekend as the head of state announced a month-long curfew and placed...
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Egypt and Ethiopia at war, virtually, over the Renaissance Dam
Opposing Arabic hashtags “Renaissance Dam” and “fill the dam” are trending in Egypt and Ethiopia following the news that Addis Ababa has begun the second phase of filling the dam, a reflection of how polarised the issue has become between the two Nile basin countries. The downstream states Egypt and...
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Biden writes another blank cheque for Sisi
This week Abbas Kamel, Egypt’s notorious intelligence chief, is visiting Washington to meet with US intelligence officials and several senators. The upcoming trip coincides with news that Egypt may well have played a key role in the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, after Yahoo News reported that the hit squad stopped off...
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Egypt continues execution spree, with impunity
On 15 July 2013 four men left the Rabaa sit-in, got into a car and drove away from the protests. On their way out of the square they saw another man who had been wounded and they picked him up, planning to take him to the nearest hospital. As they...
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‘Most of them died whilst they were sleeping’, Gaza doctor recalls the destruction
For the 11 days Israeli air strikes pummelled Gaza, Dr Khamis would try to take a two-hour nap around 8am, the only time he could catch some much needed rest. Israel would carpet bomb different areas of the Strip at roughly 11pm every night when there was no electricity...
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Egypt will never be an honest broker for Palestine until facts really change on the ground
One week into the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, at least 192 people had been killed including 58 children and the AP and Al Jazeera offices were razed to the ground. In Egypt authorities issued instructions to the media to turn their spotlight on Israeli violence in Jerusalem and Gaza, to...
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Egypt on the brink as third covid wave engulfs the country
Earlier this week, Egypt’s Ministry of Health denied the news that covid cases had spiralled out of control in Sohag Governorate and reassured the public that there were enough hospital beds for everyone. The announcement sparked outrage on social media – 14 people had died in one day according to one...
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How women in Egypt are defeating the government’s archaic legislation
In February the Egyptian government tried to sell its draft personal status law on a clause that would see men who did not inform their first wife they were marrying a second, fined up to EGP 50,000. On the surface it seemed a fairly reasonable suggestion, a closer look showed...
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‘Women of my generation viewed freedom fighters as similar to Guevara, Castro and Mandela’
When Sahar Khalifeh was young, her family didn’t support her dream of becoming a writer. They regarded art as a sin that would ultimately destroy the family’s reputation. “The word ‘art’ means to uneducated people, and to most semi-educated people in the Arab world, singing, acting and belly dancing,” Sahar...
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When I spoke out about my brothers’ arrest the torture stopped, says Egypt opposition member abroad
On 22 August 2020 Mona Alshazly received a devastating phone call from her mother. “They’ve taken everything,” she told Mona, screaming and crying. “Our documentation and all of our electronic devices, including the broken ones.” Mona’s family house, which is in the Muharram Bey neighbourhood in the city of Alexandria,...
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‘Writing saved me from my demons,’ says Palestinian author Huzama Habayeb
Amidst the harsh, rugged environment of Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan a Palestinian apprentice seamstress runs her hands across rolls of velvet. Hands that speak of a decaying spirit and up until now have only witnessed the collective loss of the past. “You cannot imagine anything beautiful in this camp,”...
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I want to go back to my cell, says released child detainee in Egypt
On 20 February 2021 Manar Abouelnaga and her son appeared in front of Egypt’s state security prosecution two years after their forcible disappearance. Al-Baraa was just three-years-old. The house Manar, her husband Omar and their son shared in the northern city of Alexandria had been raided two years ago. They...
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Ghada Oueiss: ‘Saudi has based its rule on the suppression of women’
On a warm evening in April 2020, an image of Al Jazeera anchor Ghada Oueiss nude in a hot tub lit up the internet. It was captured in the private residence of the network’s Chairman, Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad Bin Thamer Al Thani, claimed the caption. The Arabic hashtag ‘Ghada...
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Egypt’s Arctic Spring
Demonstrators who joined the millions of people in downtown Cairo a decade ago, 25 January 2011, navigated the shifting sands of the regime’s shock, conciliatory tone and anger and steered Mubarak towards his capitulation in what is still today one of the most momentous days in Egypt’s modern history. Revolutionaries...
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Caught between covid and settlers: How a West Bank school is struggling to survive
Across Palestine, schools are closed to try and stem the spread of the virus, but Al-Maleh Elementary has struggled to offer remote learning, because of the lack of internet and electricity in the village....
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Against the Loveless World
The Nahr we meet some way into Susan Abdulhawa’s “Against the Loveless World” is a different one we imagine to the figure who sits in an Israeli jail cuffing her own hands to the wall and staring up at the black camera built into the roof of her cell. The Nahr who...
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PTSD. Anxiety. Nightmares: Life after prison for Egypt’s child detainees
On 27 September, Egypt’s public prosecution ordered that 79 children detained since the start of the demonstrations be released. All the children were aged between 10 and 15 and most were from Upper Egypt. It raised a pressing question: What happened to them during the seven days they were in...
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‘I was thinking about Khashoggi,’ says ex-Egypt political prisoner as consul lures him inside consulate
On Friday 25 September Amr Abn Hashad went to the Egyptian consulate in Istanbul for his tawkeel, or power of attorney. They gave him a receipt and asked him to come back and get his documents the following Monday at 12pm. Amr remembers thinking that was strange, because many people are...
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In northwest Syria camps brace for covid catastrophe. In Aleppo, locals bribe hospitals for beds
On 10 September 2020 Dr Adnan Al-Jasem became the first doctor in northern Syria to die from coronavirus. Al-Jasem had fled the bombings in Deir Ezzor in the east of the country and tended to the wounded throughout Syria’s nine-year long war. Yet it was the virus he died of...
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They risked their lives to show the horrors of war. Where are Syria’s journalists now?
Just before Marie Colvin died, she was looking for her shoes. Rockets had already hit the top floors of the makeshift press centre where she was holed up, in the Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs in mid-west Syria. Another landed and she was killed before she made it out. Her...
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Twitter ignites as Egypt ‘terror’ court hands 15-year term to human rights defender
A so-called terrorism court in Egypt has sentenced the President of the Cairo Institute of Human Rights Studies, Bahey El-Din Hassan, to 15 years in prison in absentia. The charges levelled against Bahey Hassan, who has been described as the spiritual father of the human rights movement, are familiar. They...
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Egypt’s medical aid diplomacy extends to Lebanon
On 4 August 2020, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in Beirut Port, sending a mushroom cloud above the city, and lighting a touch paper at one end of the region’s web of alliances. As part of efforts to tend to the aftermath of the explosion, on Saturday Egypt sent...
