Mick Hartley

Soha Abdelaty writes about the culture of impunity enjoyed by the Egyptian authorities, with the recent renewal of the three-decades-long state of emergency that allows them to get away, literally, with murder:

On June 6, a pair of police officers entered an Alexandria Internet cafe and began asking for the identification documents of everyone present. When 28-year-old Khaled Said objected to being searched without a warrant, the officers began to attack him, beating his head against a table and kicking him in the chest. They tied his hands behind his back and dragged him to a nearby building where they continued to smash his head, first against an iron door and then against the building's marble steps. Witnesses heard Khaled begging them to stop, screaming "I'm going to die," to which the officers responded: "You're going to die anyway." The officers dragged Said into their police car and drove him away, only to return several minutes later to leave his lifeless corpse in the street.

The Ministry of Interior immediately attempted to blame the gruesome incident on "drugs": The young man had died when he choked on a joint he was trying to hide as he was approached by the police. Any injuries sustained — his fractured skull, dislocated jaw, mangled face — were the result of his resisting arrest, they claimed.  The bloodied pictures of the victim from the morgue, widely circulated on Facebook and through other networks, were likewise dismissed. Outrage has built across Egyptian political society, culminating in today's [last Friday's – MH] massive demonstrations in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Protesters were assaulted and "kidnapped" by security officers in plainclothes from amongst the crowds in a well-orchestrated but unsuccessful attempt on the part of Ministry of Interior officials to make the incident go away.

The Khaled Said case has offered a graphic demonstration of the emptiness of the pledge by the government of Egypt when it renewed the country's decades-long period of emergency 'aw that it would limit its application to terrorism and drug-related crimes. Khaled Said's brutal murder is a chilling reminder of what emergency law — and Interior Ministry impunity — means for Egyptians. Frustration with that impunity is what leads protesters to take to the streets.  […]

Ironically, as Said was being beaten to death in Alexandria, a high-level Egyptian delegation was in Geneva defending Egypt's human rights record before the U.N. Human Rights Council. One could hardly ask for a better example of how the new presidential decree offers no guarantee for the respect of human rights, but also of how flagrantly the Ministry of Interior acts in violation of any law. Said did not have any political affiliations, nor was he an activist — and he was hardly a terrorist. That the ministry claimed in its defense that he was an ex-con, apart from being false, raises the harrowing possibility that it believes it justifiable for a man to be beaten to death by security forces, with no judicial recourse, for being a suspected criminal.

More here, from Khaled Diab:

Last Friday, large protests took place in a number of major Egyptian cities, with opposition figurehead and the main challenger to President Hosni Mubarak in next year's elections, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former IAEA chief, joining the Alexandria sit-in.

Despite this concerted show of public anger, the two officers allegedly behind Said's death remain on active duty.

"The nation is on the verge of social explosion, and amid all this, you'd expect the regime to act very cautiously regarding issues of political freedom and human rights to contain public anger, but they are just doing the exact opposite," my brother, Osama, tells me in disbelief. "It feels bad to be ruled by authoritarianism, but it feels even worse to be ruled by stupid authoritarianism that is unable to think before it acts."

Although Said's death is a huge tragedy for his family, if it helps to ram the final nail in the coffin of Egypt's emergency law, then this tragedy will not have been in vain. Three decades old, this draconian legislation has hung over the heads of Said's generation their entire lives and has effectively transformed Egypt into a police state.