It has been revealed that despite nearing bankruptcy, the Egyptian government last month spent £1.7 million GB Pounds on 140,000 U.S. sourced tear-gas canisters; amid a wave of police brutality that 21 human rights groups this week labelled a return to Mubarak-era state repression.
The emergency order was made at the end of January by Egypt’s interior ministry, according to records retrieved by Egyptian newspaper al-Masry al-Youm. It came at the start of a week of civil unrest sparked by protests against President Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood party, and severe police malpractice.
At a time when Egypt’s foreign reserves have halved since 2011, with the government now unable to pay for fuel subsidies and much feet dragging about a much delayed $4.8 billion IMF loan, opposition activists in Egypt are questioning whether this is the best use for the money.
The opposition also see it as another example of the government’s unwillingness to rein in the police force, whose brutality was a major cause of the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, and whose behaviour has come under renewed scrutiny this year.
Hussein Abdel Ghany, a spokesman for the National Salvation Front, a disparate collection of non-Islamist opposition parties told the media “It’s the same tactics the Mubarak regime used – spending taxpayers’ money to kill the sons of taxpayers and at the same time they’re cutting gas subsidies and raising taxes on cigarettes, which the only way some people get any joy.”
Tear-gas has been repeatedly used during protests this year, at times so much has been used that it has made parts of Cairo unsafe to travel through. At one point in January, Tahrir Doctors – a group of volunteer medics who treat protesters hurt in clashes – warned that teargas in Tahrir Square had reached dangerous levels.
But the teargas is just one part of a wave of violence that led 21 Egyptian rights groups to claim on Thursday that police brutality is as serious – or in some cases worse – than it was the dictatorship of Mubarak. Since the start of the current unrest, sparked by the two-year anniversary of Mubarak’s toppling on 25 January, activists say at least 70 protesters have been tortured, with hundreds more detained without trial. In some cases, protesters have been murdered and raped.
The number of male activists raped in custody is higher than it has been for at least a decade according to the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Hossam Bahgat..
Mohamed el-Guindy, a left-wing activist, was abducted for four days before being found at a hospital in a coma. Authorities claimed he had died in a car crash, but rights activists said they found torture marks on his tongue, as well as signs of strangulation and electrocution. Lawyers said he was abducted by police after a protest in late January before being held in a police camp outside Cairo. “You couldn’t recognise his face from a photograph, it was so swollen,” said Islam Khalifa, a human rights lawyer investigating Guindy’s death, who had visited him in hospital before he died.
Despicably, hundreds of children are also being targeted. At least 200 have been arrested, and many beaten, according to Amr Imam, a lawyer at the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre. “The government thinks these children hold the torch of the revolution,”. The government views many of them as potential revolutionaries that must be destroyed. In one particularly abhorrent report, a 13-year-old cancer patient from Alexandria, Mahmoud Adel, was detained in an adult penal facility for more than a week without access to his cancer treatment.
Allies of Morsi argue that it is unreasonable to blame the president for police malpractice, arguing that it will take 15 years to reform institutions so powerful and self-serving as the interior ministry and the police. ”If it took them 60 years to build a system that corrupt, imagine how long it will take to reform it,” said the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gehad al-Haddad last month.
But Heba Morayef, head of the Egypt branch of Human Rights Watch, said Morsi has shown little inclination for police reform so far. “It’s not just that he hasn’t delivered on any changes, it’s that he hasn’t publicly acknowledged that there is a serious problem of police abuse,” Morayef has said.
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