An open letter to Macron reminiscent of the terrible oppression of the Egyptians

The French website L'Orion 21 published an open letter to President Emmanuel Macaron, who visited Egypt, highlighting Paris' position on the deteriorating human rights situation under President Abdel Fattah.

The letter, written by the director of the Center for Human Rights Studies in Cairo, Bahaauddin Hassan, and published by the translated website, said that during his current visit to Egypt, Macron is unlikely to deal with the phenomenon of enforced disappearance, which took an unprecedented dimension in disregard of countries claiming to defend human rights.

The author of the letter said he was certain that the French president was aware of the condemnation of Egyptian and international human rights organizations in his partnership with the Egyptian government, which supports its bloody suppression of its people, especially when he met in Paris with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

He said he did not know if Macron had said so out of the conviction that the Egyptians were not worthy of exercising these rights as the French, or because he felt guilty about this shameful partnership in the crimes committed against the Egyptians.

He added that Macron may not realize the similarity between what is happening in Egypt and what Latin American military dictatorships have done over the last three decades of the horrors of their people.

He was killed outside the law
The French website compared the phenomenon of "false positives" that took place in Colombia - where security is disguised as a civilian combatant and extrajudicially kills them - and what is happening in Egypt, but in larger numbers, pointing out that the number of fighters of the Islamic State Organization in the Sinai does not exceed 1500 According to experts, security officials boast of killing 6,000 by mid-2013.

Unlike in Colombia, where civilians are executed immediately upon arrest, Egypt executes them even months after they have disappeared, expecting them to have lived during that period as animals in harsh conditions.

The report said the Egyptian government announced last month that it had killed 40 suspected militants across the country, a day after a bus carrying tourists had crashed near the pyramids without revealing their names or terrorist groups.

Police have contacted the family of two of the 40 dead and invited them to claim the bodies of their captors, but the families said their sons had been detained for two years and were missing while being held by police, although the prosecution ordered their release.

A total of 167 people were killed in similar circumstances between September and December 2018, with security officials revealing only the names of three of them, according to the Laurion 21 report.

These cases have increased since the military coup of July 3, 2013 by then-defense minister Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, before becoming president a year later.

The report also said that Sisi, although his priority was to grind his peaceful political opponents, did not exclude any party from the ongoing crackdown he called "fighting terrorism."

He pointed out that he occasionally resorted to "some positive results" even if they were "counterfeit" to silence the objections of the Egyptian public and the international community to this bloody campaign, unprecedented in modern Egyptian history.

In May 2015, Egyptians discovered the first clear example of this method when the Interior Ministry announced that it had killed a 22-year-old student named Islam Attito for shooting at the police, while official documents and certificates from professors and university staff confirmed that the victim had taken the final exam The night before the announcement of his death, as the security video footage showed that two men chased him after leaving the university.

The officer is not tried
In January 2017, the Interior Ministry announced that it had killed 10 members of the organization in a shootout, but some of the families of the deceased revealed that at least six of them were missing after security forces abducted them from the house or from the street and that they were held incommunicado The outside world for up to three months.

After analyzing security footage of the incident, technical experts concluded that victims may be victims of extrajudicial executions.

After the coup, al-Sisi strengthened his authority and intimidated public institutions. He organized the judiciary, the parliament and the media to make it impossible for any citizen or institution to hold him accountable for his crimes against human rights.

Those who try to do so would risk paying an intolerable price. This gave Sisi the audacity to publicly pledge to his officers that "if an officer is killed or the demonstrators killed, he will not be sentenced."

Julio Regini
The letter addressed the subject of the Italian academic Julio Reggini, whose country accuses Egyptian security of killing him. He said that his family had not received any explanation from Egypt about his abduction, torture and murder after three years of mobilizing the Italian government, the parliament, the prosecutor, media and civil society.

The message, however, is that the Reggini family, whose body is found in the desert, is much better than the families of more than 1,200 Egyptians missing since 2013, and the Sisi government refuses to reveal the fate of any of them.

For this reason, Sisi adopted early on the policy of intolerance to independent human rights organizations and defenders of freedoms and subjected them to prosecution, arrest, concealment, closure and defamation of them as "foreign agents", as well as freezing their assets or banning travel or threatening to kill them. .

The message published by the French website also considers the United Nations morally responsible before its legal responsibility for an international investigation into the atrocities that unfold in Egypt for five years, especially in the absence of a reliable way to prove the truth and hold the perpetrators of the horrific events accountable.

She said that such an investigation would not be possible without the support of major powers such as France, noting that Macaron will meet with human rights defenders for several minutes during his visit to Egypt, and that he imagined that this will cleanse his hands of his partnership with Egypt in the assassination and repression of the Egyptian people.