DOI 10.5617/jais.9494
Disappearances
BySTEPHAN GUTH
“Give us our children back!” In a desperate attempt to protest and to do something, a group of parents hold up posters of the sons and daughters they have left to the Islamic State. They have gathered, on their own initiative—the Tunisian authorities could not help them—, in a small provincial town in the south to exchange information and attract public attention so that, perhaps, in some way or another, their call will reach their children or those they have fallen prey to.
The bereaved parents who are “doomed to hope,” as the title of a prize-winning short documentary has it, are the iconic symbol of a social tragedy that has lost nothing of its urgency even two years after the screening of Condamné à l’espoir. Not only is the documentary still shown on international film festivals as representing the present state of affairs; the topic of the disappearance of young men and women with the aim of joining the ranks of the Islamic State also appears in historical overviews like Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs, and it reappears in several productions, documentary as well as fictional, of the current year, among them also “The Flower of Aleppo” (Zahrat Ḥalab), the moving story of a mother who travels to Syria in an attempt to find her beloved son.
Condamné à l’espoir is concluded, as a kind of background appendix, by a statistic of countries where IS combatants are believed to come from, with the estimated number of fighters following the name of the country. Tunisia tops the list: “3000,” followed by Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Jordan. There are much fewer fighters from other countries: 400 from Turkey, 300 from Germany, etc. Egypt is among the latter group: roughly a tenth of the figure given for Tunisia.
Considerable differences notwithstanding, documentaries and fiction alike do not only deplore but also try to understand and explain these disappearances. To this aim they explore the youths’ past and their family history. In Condamné à l’espoir, the parents spend all their time combing the past, but they do not have a clue at all. Their son had always been a
‘normally’ religious-minded boy. Were there indications of his mutation into a radical Islamist? Could they have foreseen and prevented his dropping out? They are at a loss, feel powerless, impotent, paralyzed. The family belongs to the less well-off, struggling for survival on the verge of poverty; so, was perhaps the lack of a perspective of a life in dignity or the impossibility to get out of the circle of misery among the reasons that made him leave?
[↗Affluence vs. Destitution] One cannot know. – In the Egyptian documentary “We have never been kids” (Abadan lam nakun aṭfālan), Khalīl, the eldest son of a hard-working single mother from one of the Cairo slums [↗ʿAshwāʾiyyāt], leaves at least a last message from which one can guess that he must have experienced his situation as absolutely desperate.
While the screen is black, we hear him tell the author on the phone (in a recorded last call) that he, too, is leaving to join the IS forces because, as he says, he is at a point now where he either has to die himself or kill others. Evidently, he cannot bear any longer what he has borne so far: a life in poverty, without a father (the mother had decided to leave the man because he used to beat her), as the eldest male, sharing with his mother the responsibility for the
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family’s survival (and therefore having to take all kinds of jobs from early childhood), but also feeling responsible for the family’s honour, which, in Khalīl’s eyes, has been stained by his younger brother, Nūr, who had made his living as a boy prostitute and become gay [↗LGBT]; Khalīl feels that he has to kill his brother, but before he can do so, Nūr, feeling the contempt and sensing the danger, goes into hiding himself, without anybody knowing anything about his whereabouts. – In contrast, 17-year-old Murād in Zahrat Ḥalab has a middle-class background—the father an artist, the mother an emergency nurse—and he lives in socially much less precarious conditions, can go to school, play the guitar, and (in the beginning) even has a girlfriend. Yet, what, according to the movie, drives him into the arms of the jihadists nevertheless is the fact that he does not get the orientation that parents, especially the father, should provide to an adolescent: the parents have separated, the father is an intellectual, a—as Murād thinks—“lousy” artist-alcoholic, the mother has to work hard for their living, and neither is present when Murād needs them. It seems that he loves his mother, but does not really recognize her as an authority; and he hates his father because he does not care.
Apart from shedding light on poverty, the psychological disposition of boys and girls in the age of puberty, and difficult family backgrounds as reasons that combine to let the seductive appeal of IS ideology to succeed, the films also focus on how the bereaved parents cope, or fail to cope, with the disappearance of their children. While Condamné à l’espoir and Abadan lam nakun aṭfālan show desperate parents who feel unable to do anything but bear their fate, Zahrat Ḥalab imagines Murād’s mother as a proactive character, an intelligent and courageous woman [↗Male vs. Female] who manages to track down her disappeared son and get very close to him in Syria. However, the events then escalate, culminating in the son shooting, and killing, his mother without recognizing her because she is wearing the uniform of a male soldier to camouflage herself—a dramatic ending that underlines the tragedy of such cases.
While this type of disappearance seems to prevail in Tunisia, in Egypt “disappearance”
mostly means “forced disappearance” (ikhtifāʾ qasrī), that is, state-sanctioned detention and abduction (TRAFFORD &RAMADHANI):
Security officers kidnap individuals they believe are activists, force them to provide information or testify to wrongdoing, and deny for days, weeks or months that they are keeping them in custody. Some of those kidnapped are then taken to court—or released—while the whereabouts of others remains unknown (MANSOUR).
Advocacy groups like The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF, al- Mufawwaḍiyyah al-miṣriyyah lil-ḥuqūq wa’l-ḥurriyyāt), the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, or the El Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (Markaz al-Nadīm li-taʾhīl ḍaḥāyā ’l-ʿunf wa’l-taʿdhīb) try to keep track of the hundreds of such cases and provide reports. They regularly update the figures on the Internet—202 between December 2015 and March 2016, 86 in April, 93 in May, and so on (ADLY et al., Markaz al-Nadīm)—and also put them in perspective, comparing recent developments with previous years’ statistics [↗Past vs. Present]. For instance, the ECRF recorded 1,840 cases in 2015 (TRAFFORD &RAMADHANI). Most affected are young people, especially students, suspected to be members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood or the IS,
Page | 77 but also civil society activists, journalists, writers, people allegedly belonging to secret
Masonic organizations or spying for a foreign power (ISMAIL & WALSH, MANSOUR).
According to a report published by Amnesty International in July, sometimes even children as young as fourteen “vanish without trace at the hands of the state” (AI, MICHAELSON). After the massive crackdown on the opposition in connection with the fifth anniversary of the January 25 uprisings [↗Commemoration / Memorial Days], activist Mona Seif thinks the regime’s goal is
to strike anyone capable of mobilizing protests. The aim is to silence anyone working from the grassroots. [...] Any platform that allows people to organize must be stopped (Interview with ACCONCIA, February 8).
When kidnapping and arresting, security forces aren’t particularly choosy:
There have been periods when every young person between 15 and 30 years walking around Tahrir Square was arrested (Mona SEIF, ibid.).
In June, a cartoon in al-Maṣrī al-Yawm mocks the State Security’s arbitrariness that seems to be governed by the principle ‘the more the better’:
Policeman: The guy we arrested because he’s not fasting in Ramaḍān — turns out he’s Christian, sir.
His boss: He deserves it. I am sure he doesn’t fast during Lent either.
(Cartoon by ʿAmr SALĪM, al-Maṣrī al-Yawm, reproduced in Middle East Eye) [↗Inferiority = Superiority (Satire)]
People who were arrested themselves or were present when others were, report that they observed “a lot of indecision” on the side of the security forces regarding who actually is the target of their raid and whether or not everyone else present should be arrested (AFIFY).
Again, the regime’s paranoic fear of falling victim to conspiracies and/or terrorism suggests a ‘the more the better’ strategy for the detentions—after all, there are enough prisons in the country, “There is room for everybody,” as the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) service titles its survey about prisons in Egypt in September [↗Prison].
Forced disappearances are all but a new phenomenon, as can be seen, for example, from the fact that Bāsim Yūsuf, the prominent ex-host of the satirical news program il-Barnāmig (suspended and ended in 2014), a week before the fifth anniversary of the uprisings in January expects a new wave of arbitrary detentions in connection with the commemoration of the revolution [↗Commemoration / Memorial Days] and therefore launches a campaign on Twitter, #I_participated_in_the_January_revolution, to publish the stories of those unjustly detained, those who were forcibly disappeared and those detained over strange charges. “It’s our duty to remember all of them whether they are famous or not.” (EgyptIndependent / Al- Masry Al-Youm).
Observers, activists, and analysts hold that security forces have increasingly resorted to kidnapping ever since emergency law was lifted in 2012 (Mansour) and that forced disappearances have become “unofficial security policy” as a response to economic instability and an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai (TRAFFORD &RAMADHANI). However,
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early in the year, many people still seem to experience these practices as a relatively new phenomenon, something that has increased only during the last few months—many think it began to surge in particular after Magdī ʿAbd al-Ghaffār took office as interior minister in March 2015 (ISMAIL & WALSH). But when the government widens its crackdown on opponents, real or imagined, and hundreds vanish again on the 25th of January and during the following days, among them also Italian student Giulio Regeni whose body is found, on the 3rd of February, with signs of torture on it, a new level seems to be reached, and it soon becomes commonplace that “the risk of being snatched from the street and forcibly disappeared by the country’s security forces has never been greater” than now (MICHAELSON).
All arbitrariness notwithstanding, and irrespective also of the great deal of indecision displayed by the security forces during their operations, public opinion nevertheless begins to think of forced disappearances as a systematic strategy and “a key instrument of state policy in Egypt” (ibid.). For many, it becomes obvious that the regime’s main goal is “to establish a state of fear” (MANSOUR). They do not believe what the government always claims in defence of the actions of security bodies, namely that the citizens who were detained
“have harmed national security, threatened public order, offended public decency, or insulted religion” (Mansour) [↗Freedom vs. Constraint, ↗Security vs. Fear]. Rather, the critics are convinced that the main objective of forced disappearances is to demonstrate “that anyone who dares criticize the government will face a similar fate” (Mohamed Elmissiry, in Amnesty International) [↗“The System” vs. “The People”]. Some feel reminded of Chile or Argentina of the 1970s “when a military junta [...] kidnapped thousands of dissidents, students and other innocent citizens—most of whom were disappeared forever” (Mansour);
others think the Egyptian case, though similar, is different, at least in scale: people are tortured in the police stations, still not in stadiums (two interlocutors in an interview with one of the members of the “In 2016” project core group, February). In reality, it is a sign of the System’s weakness and its hysterical obsession and paranoia: because it has no control over its citizens and fears them, it resorts to power and terror (Mona SEIF, interview with ACCONCIA).
What, according to those critics, makes things even worse is that
this hysterical environment feeds on and breeds theories of conspiracy [↗True vs.
False] and xenophobia [↗The Suspect Foreigner], in which all opponents of the government and those calling for reform and accountability have been labeled foreign agents and traitors, or naïve, brainwashed youth (MANSOUR).
Moreover, the regime’s way of dealing with opponents and its de facto neglect of civic and human rights reinforces the prevailing conviction that “security forces are above the law,”
enjoy impunity (Mansour), have a “‘carte blanche to discourage dissent’ in the struggle for stability” (TRAFFORD &RAMADHANI). In this way, violence becomes normalized.
Nevertheless, there is also a lot of popular support for the regime’s measures. “A significant number of Egyptians accept, and even cheer, a wide array of rights violations,”
especially if they can be convinced that the victim is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Pro-government talk-show hosts and columnists also play a role in forming public opinion when they follow the official discourse and
Page | 79 describe these violations as isolated incidents that should be treated as misconduct.
They claim Egypt is in the midst of a “war on terror,” in which security forces should be empowered, not criticized (MANSOUR) [↗Security = Fear (Police State)].
A forced disappearance usually starts with police or plaincloth security forces breaking into the suspected opponent’s home at night, or raiding his or her place of work or studies, or picking him/her on the way (as in Giulio Regeni’s case). It also happens that youth are abducted from a football match (to frame an attack on a police officer! – MadàMaṣr), and almost 150 arrestations are reported to have taken place during the wave of protests, demonstrations, and agitation on Facebook—the il-Ṭullāb mish ha-tbīʿ (“The students will not sell”) campaign—in connection with the Tīrān and Ṣanāfīr case (FAHMĪ) [↗Red Sea Islands]. People are then brought to, and detained in, one of the more than 500 official/legal prisons or police stations or one of the illegal/secretive “detention centres, run by the security forces” (ISMAIL &WALSH, ANHRI). Arrestations are not made formally, and people are held incommunicado for an average period of two to four weeks, but sometimes also months (MANSOUR), during which their families cannot determine where they are held, or by whom.
Typically, the suspected culprits are not told what they are accused of, and they are denied access to a lawyer. During the period of detention, relatives and friends are of course worried that people may be dead—which they sometimes indeed are: they “turn up dead, their bodies dumped in morgues” (the desperate search for disappeared beloved ones in morgues is an impressive event in Muḥammad Rabīʿ’s IPAF-shortlisted dystopian novel ʿUṭārid!) or along a road in the desert, as not only the Regeni case shows:
The family of Ahmed Galal received a phone call in January asking them to receive his body 10 days after he had been abducted from his house and held at an unknown location (AFIFY).
Critics of these practices repeatedly underline that all this is against the law [↗True vs.
False]: Article 54 of the Egyptian Constitution stipulates,
Every person whose freedom is restricted shall be immediately notified of the reasons, shall be informed of his/her rights in writing, shall be immediately allowed to contact his/her relatives and lawyer and shall be brought before an investigation authority within 24 hours of the restriction of freedom. Investigations may not start with such individuals unless his/her lawyer is present (MANSOUR).
Those who ‘only’ are abducted and detained may count themselves lucky. Others have to undergo harsh interrogations in which they are forced, often by way of torture, to mention names of friends and “collaborators.” When, and if, they finally emerge, weeks or months after their abduction, somewhere in the country, they look as dirty and emaciated as Islām Khalīl, an electronics sales agent whose case is still well remembered: he was arrested from his house last May and spent four months in detention, accused of joining a terrorist organization. Like him, victim of abduction often report that their interrogators suspended them from their arms and legs, and administered electric shocks to their genitals. When Islām returned, “he didn’t look like the Islam I know,” his brother remembers. Others, like student Esraa al-Taweel (Isrāʾ al-Ṭawīl) who was arrested accidentally in summer 2015 and whose case has become equally iconic because it received media attention for two weeks (AFIFY),
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say interrogating officers threatened to detain their relatives if they didn’t cooperate, or they were made to hear the screams of their friends who were “apparently being tortured nearby”
(MANSOUR).
For a long time, authorities are eager to deny that forced disappearances actually happen.
Still in March, Interior Minister Magdī ʿAbd al-Ghaffār keeps repeating what he has been saying ever since last November, namely that there is “not even a single case” of ikhtifāʾ qasrī in Egypt (BARAKĀT, MICHAELSON, al-Taḥrīr), adding that “we are 90 million citizens—the disappearance of 200 is normal” (TRAFFORD &RAMADHANI). Consequently, protests and complaints at first simply end up ignored. Even when Egypt’s human rights record comes under fresh scrutiny due to heightened international attention after the Regeni affair (ISMAIL
&NOURELDIN), the Ministry still issues statements saying that all these cases are false allegations [↗True vs. False]: most of those missing seem to have left the country to join the ranks of Dāʿish (the IS). Such declarations are made despite the fact that many of the alleged IS fighters resurface in prisons of the police or State Security (FAHMĪ).
Gradually, however, with the number of forced disappearances and both external and internal pressure increasing, the silence barrier is broken—at least partly:
In less than a year, Egypt’s Ministry of Interior went from outright denial in the face of accusations that it increasingly carries out forced disappearances to addressing the issue in several statements and engaging with the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) [al-Majlis al-qawmī li-ḥuqūq al-insān] to locate those reported as victims, writes Hibah ʿAfīfī in madàMaṣr already in mid-February (AFIFY). Though the Interior Minister himself still prefers to deny, authorities seem to begin, by and by, to publish lists of detained citizens so that at least some of the disappeared can be identified and spotted—now you know that they are detained, and where. Afify attributes this change to the “ongoing back-and-forth between the Interior Ministry and the NCHR” (ibid.). But there are many other factors that contribute to a slow, if reluctant and always unreliable, precarious opening:
– After the disappearance and death of Giulio Regeni, the world’s eyes are looking at Egypt and the human rights situation in the country is in the focus of international attention.
– “Detainees have devised a system whereby whoever is released, or gets access to the outside world through lawyers, reports on the other disappeared people they have met”
(AFIFY).
– Facebook campaigns like “Freedom for the Brave” or “Stop Forced Disappearance,”
and Twitter hashtags such as #il-shabāb_fēn /
#Where_Have_All_the_Young_Ones_Gone, #Remember_them, #al-Ḥurriyyah lil- muʿtaqalīn (Freedom for the Arrested) or #Stop_the_torture_in_Alexandria (MadàMaṣr, Feb 10) provide important platforms for the parties involved to document, exchange information and experience, publish reports and spread stories, protest, call for action, etc. [↗Social Media]. They are particularly effective when they are initiated or backed by celebrities like Bassem Youssef (who launches the Twitter campaigns #I_participated_in_the_January_revolution in mid-January and
#Remember_them) (EgyptIndependent / Al-Masry Al-Youm).
Page | 81 – Very helpful in keeping track of the disappeared is also a series of warning apps such
as I Protect, created by the Egyptian Council for Rights and Freedoms. It “allows Android phone users to key in a code when they are being detained, which sends three text messages to contacts and an email containing the location of their arrest to the ECRF. The group hopes the messages will aid a quick reaction during the first 24 hours of an arrest, key to stopping people being transferred from a police station to a larger facility, making them harder to find,” which in turn “prevents [...] forced disappearance, and therefore reduces the risks of being subjected to torture or other ill treatment” (MICHAELSON).
– More and more, social media campaigns that circulate widely also attract the attention of the mainstream media, so that several forcibly disappeared become quasi-iconic figures via the discussion of their stories by popular TV show hosts like Wael el- Ebrashy (Wāʾil al-Ibrāshī) or Amr Adeeb (ʿAmr Adīb). Even TV channels that are normally supportive of the regime start to highlight the plight of people seeking news of missing relatives, and urge the authorities to respond sympathetically to their pleas for help. Eventually even official newspapers start to cover such issues (Ismail &
Walsh). In this way, the cases of Islām Khalīl and Isrāʾ al-Ṭawīl have become “sagas”
(Mansour) that are remembered and referred to, time and again, also a year after the two disappeared and resurfaced.
Public awareness and disquiet over forced disappearances also grow steadily after policemen of the Maṭariyya qism in northeast Cairo reportedly assaulted two doctors at a nearby hospital in January—they refused to falsify medical reports in favour of the police. The incident becomes a “high-profile case” (madàMaṣr Feb. 12) when several thousand doctors solidarize with their colleagues and follow the Doctors Syndicate’s call for an extraordinary general assembly, which then declares a partial nationwide strike and demands the sacking of the Health Minister—a really “unprecedented protest” (Mansour).
As a consequence, by February/March there are almost daily reports of new detentions—
so many that people start to get used to them. “Like the immune system grows accustomed to drinking tainted water, the mind adapts to and normalizes ever-greater levels of horror—
violence, torture, mass killings” (Esterman). When people aren’t able to metabolize all this any longer many become “somewhat inured” to it (Ismail & Walsh).
The regime, in its turn, does not really seem to be impressed by the public’s increased awareness about forced disappearances, and they are not more than a bit annoyed about international attention in the wake of Regeni’s death. To a certain degree, they fulfil NGOs’
demands for more transparency; at the same time, however, the NCHR is still frustrated: in summer, its head resigns over what he describes as “a lack of cooperation” from the state (Michaelson). And when the “EU Parliament passes a resolution to suspend military cooperation with Egypt following Regeni’s murder” (madàMaṣr, March 10), ‘Egyptian Regenis’ are found to relativize the own Regeni case. In an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica, al-Sīsī points to the disappearance of a young Egyptian citizen named ʿĀdil Muʿawwaḍ Haykal in Italy: he is believed to have ‘vanished’ five months ago and hasn’t been found yet, despite all efforts (Ṣabrī). Another young Egyptian, a student in California, “was reportedly found in custody of the FBI after disappearing without a trace for several days”
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(Egyptian Streets). The similarity of his fate with that of Egyptian cases of forced disappearance is striking: Allegedly,
Emad El-Din Ali Mohamed Nasr El Sayed (Emad El Sayed) disappeared on the morning of 12 February 2016 without anyone knowing why [...]. For more than a week, family members and friends were left perplexed and worried about the 23-year- old. However, it was soon revealed by some family members that El Sayed was apprehended by the FBI ‘for sharing a post’ against U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump [...]. [...] the USA’s ‘paranoia’ with terrorism and the fact El Sayed was studying aviation contributed to why he was arrested (Egyptian Streets).
These cases are used to demonstrate that in a global perspective, Regeni’s disappearance wasn’t something that Egypt in particular should be reproached for—the likes of it happen to Egyptian citizens in Italy or the U.S. as well. It doesn’t take long until Haykal becomes “the Egyptian Regeni” in the media. But some people wonder: Given that Haykal disappeared already in October 2015 why is it only now that we get to know about him? One may get the impression “that it was not primarily the destiny of Egyptian citizens abroad that mattered, but the possibility to use a citizen’s name as an argument to counter attacks,” an article in al- Manaṣṣah concludes in March (Ṣabrī) [↗Inferiority vs. Superiority (Maṣr vs. Barrah)].
This is not the only time that comments on the regime’s almost cynical attitude towards forced disappearances take a sarcastic undertone [↗Inferiority = Superiority (Satire)].
When Shaffāf, the online magazine of the Egyptian Universities Network (Shabakat al- jāmiʿāt al-miṣriyyah), publishes a review of the year in December, it does so under a heading that highlights the contrast between ‘fact and fiction’: What Sisi had solemnly proclaimed the “Year of the Youth” (ʿām al-shabāb) on a celebration at the Opera in January, actually turned out to mean, at the Egyptian universities, the “annullation of the elections, arrests, and the forced disappearance of more than 140 students.” Is this the way Sisi shows his pride of the youth which he was so eager to underline at the Youth Conference in Sharm al-Shaykh in spring? (FAHMĪ) [↗True vs. False].
Related Entries
ARRAYS – ʿAshwāʾiyyāt ♦ Commemoration / Memorial Days ♦ LGBT ♦ Prison ♦ Red Sea Islands ♦ Self- help ♦ Social Media ♦ The Suspect Foreigner
CODES – Affluence vs. Destitution ♦ Freedom vs. Security/Stability ♦ Male vs. Female ♦ Past vs. Present
♦ “The System” vs. “The People” ♦ Inferiority vs. Superiority (Maṣr vs. Barrah) ♦ True vs. False CODES COLLAPSED – Inferiority = Superiority (Satire) ♦ Security = Fear (Police State) ♦ True = False
(Life in Limbo)
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Page | 85 Movies
ʾAbadan lam nakun ʾaṭfālan (We have never been kids). Documentary by Maḥmūd Sulaymān
(Mahmood Soliman). Egypt, U.A.E., Qatar, Lebanon 2016.
Condamné à l’espoir (Doomed to hope). Short documentary by Youssef Ben Ammar. Tunisia 2014.
Among the winners of the short film competition 2016.
Corps étranger (Foreign body). By Raja Amari. Tunisia, France 2016.
Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs. Documentary trilogy by Jīhān al-Ṭāhirī (Jihan El-Tahri). Egypt, France, USA, Qatar 2015/2016.
Nḥibbik, Hādī / Hédi (Hedi). By Muḥammad Bin ʿAṭiyyah (Mohamed Ben Attia). Tunisia, Belgium, France 2016.
Zahrat Ḥalab (The Flower of Aleppo). By Riḍà Bāhī (Ridha Behi). Tunisia 2016.
