Egypt steps up its assault on academic freedom

At dawn last Sunday, Alia Mosallam, an Egyptian historian, had just landed in Cairo with her husband and three children from Berlin, where she works on a scholarship at a prestigious foundation, when she was arrested at the capital's airport.

The authorities held her there for 17 hours, some of them incommunicado and during which she was interrogated several times, her spouse explained to the independent media

Mada Masr

.

The news of the arrest of Mosallam, who investigates the revolutionary songs of Egyptian history, was greeted with a wave of denunciations and solidarity on social media, followed by relative relief when, the following afternoon, the Security Prosecutor's Office of the The State decided to release her after posting bail and pending further investigations, a lawyer announced.

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His arrest is part of an escalation of repression by the Egyptian authorities against the country's academics, particularly those who study and work abroad, as part of the systematic degradation of academic freedom, according to analysts and human rights groups. The case of Mosallam, an example of intellectual brilliance, has also been interpreted as part of the will of the authorities to promote ignorance in a country that has suffered a huge brain drain in recent years. And the last sign that, for those who are leaving, the doors are closed.

"It is a way for the state to control the narrative and the production of knowledge of what happens in Egypt," considers Mohamed Mandour, a researcher at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (

TIMEP

), based in Washington.

As of 2014, and with the current president of Egypt, Abdelfatá Al Sisi, seated in power, the advances in autonomy and academic freedom achieved since the 2011 revolution were nipped in the bud.

The country then entered a spiral of control, repression, surveillance and censorship that led to an unprecedented regression in this area, according to analysts and human rights organizations have documented and denounced.

The week before Mosallam's arrest, vague statements by Egyptian Emigration Minister Nabila Makram about young people studying abroad had already generated controversy. Makram said that these Egyptians abroad, and those of the second and third generation, are at greater risk of exposing themselves to the influence of negative ideas about Egypt and losing their ties with the country, after a news story about alleged statements in which initially he had actually called them the "most dangerous" immigrants.

Be that as it may, Mosallam was not the first young woman abroad to be arrested upon returning to Egypt. On February 1, Ahmed Samir Santawy, a researcher on women's reproductive rights who is studying a master's degree at the Central European University of Vienna (Austria), was arrested while he was in Egypt to visit his family. On June 22, and after a speedy trial, Santawy was sentenced to four years in prison for "spreading false news," according to an advocacy group. And since then he has been on a hunger strike that has rapidly deteriorated his health.

Before them, Patrick George Zaki, a gender rights researcher studying for a master's degree at the University of Bologna (Italy), was also detained at Cairo airport in February 2020 and is still in pre-trial detention.

The fact that none of them was investigating a sensitive political issue and that, in the case of Mosallam, their work is widely praised abroad has caused particular distress, as some believe that precisely these elements reinforce the deterrent effect that the authorities they seek to generate with their arrests.

In this sense, the Egyptian authorities resort to numerous tactics to monitor and control Egyptians abroad, says Mandour, who is currently preparing a study on these types of practices. These include detaining or intimidating their families in Egypt, recruiting spies, resorting to Interpol, using their relationship with other countries or through cyberattacks and their embassies, he details. "Transnational repression has become one of the most important components of Egypt's foreign policy," he says.

Mosallam's arrest also comes at a time of general resurgence of repression.

"In a single week we have witnessed judicial harassment, indictment, arrests and maintenance of the designations on the so-called terrorist list of various human rights defenders, academics and politicians," says

Hussein Baoumi

, researcher for North Africa. in Amnesty International (AI).

The arrest of the historian, like those of Zaki and Santawy, has also been interpreted as a reflection of the consequences of international permissiveness in the face of the systematic violation of human rights in Egypt, even when those affected are targeted. from the authorities for their activities abroad, in the latter case Germany.

“The international community must take a public stance and reject the deterioration of the human rights situation in Egypt, publicly denouncing the repression and adopting a coordinated approach that includes the establishment of a monitoring mechanism and the presentation of reports on the situation of human rights in the United Nations Human Rights Council ”, considers Baoumi.

Other previous cases that also attracted special attention, and that have been remembered in recent days, are that of the journalist and researcher Ismail Alexandrani, specializing in Islamist groups and in the Sinai Peninsula. Alexandrani was arrested in late 2015 at an Egyptian airport upon arrival from Berlin, where he had attended a conference, and in mid-2018 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a military court. On these last dates, Walid Salem, a doctoral student from the University of Washington who had returned to Egypt to carry out his field work on judicial independence, was arrested and spent several months in preventive detention before being provisionally released pending more investigations and a travel ban.