Egyptian state repression: Made in the West
Egypt is a perfect example of how even liberal leaders of the U.S. and EU have exported not democracy, but brutal repression
The release of Alaa Abdel Fattah from an Egyptian prison in late September showed a light again on one of the world’s most brutal regimes, a state that inflicts incarceration and political repression on a wide sector of society.
All revolutionaries celebrate Alaa’s release and express respect for his principled endurance as well as for the social struggles from below that pressured the regime to release him. As revolutionary socialists it is also our duty to keep exposing the horrors of the Egyptian carceral state and to solidarize with the thousands of other political prisoners who continue to languish in its dungeons. A central part of this task, especially for revolutionaries in the imperialist countries, involves exposing the ways that Egyptian state repression is a product of Western imperialism. If that repression did not serve Western imperialist agendas, it would, at the very least, be seriously weakened and offer greater openings for Egyptian revolutionaries to topple it.
Political prisoners in Egypt
Since helping to lead the 2010-2011 Egyptian revolution, Alaa Abdel Fattah was repeatedly targeted by Egyptian state security. In spite of all that he has suffered over the past decade and a half, he continues to be a dedicated pro-democracy activist. He has been jailed numerous times and spent most of the last 12 years in prison, most recently serving a six-year sentence based on trumped up charges of “spreading false news.”
To bring attention not only to his case but that of the thousands of political prisoners in Egypt as well as to the brutal character of the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regime, Alaa courageously undertook a series of hunger strikes. The most notable of these coincided with the COP27 Climate Summit hosted by Egypt in 2022. Imprisoned in the Tora Prison complex, he was subjected to brutal treatment, denied sunlight, fresh air, legal representation, and visitors. His release was the result of years of solidarity work, led by his family and activist comrades, both in Egypt and internationally.
After Alaa’s release, thousands remain in prison. Indeed, the scale of political imprisonment under Sisi dwarfs that of his brutal predecessors, ballooned by transforming the routine administrative procedure of pretrial detention into the machinery of mass detention. The security forces’ methods include widespread use of disappearance of individuals off the street without informing family members or lawyers, along with unfounded, evidence-free accusations of terrorist activities. The imprisoned spend months or even years in jail.
During the same week that Alaa walked free, Egyptian security forces arrested the journalist Ismail Alexandrani, the trade unionist Shady Mohamed, and cartoonist Ashraf Omar. These are only among the most prominent of the tens of thousands of individuals in prison as part of Sisi’s unceasing project to crush dissidents.
According to an Amnesty International’s end of year report for 2024, the Egyptian state arrested 1594 individuals considered political prisoners during that year. The targeted included “journalists, lawyers, protesters, dissidents, opposition politicians and those critical of the government’s human rights record and handling of the economic crisis.” Enforced disappearance and torture are routine and death sentences and executions are common after “grossly unfair trials.”
Further: “Women and girls, religious minorities and LGBTI individuals experienced discrimination, violence and prosecution for exercising their human rights. Authorities failed to protect economic and social rights in the economic crisis, adequately adjust social security measures or ensure private companies complied with the minimum wage requirement. The government introduced new legislation jeopardizing the accessibility and affordability of healthcare. Forced evictions from informal settlements continued. Thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, most from Sudan, were arbitrarily detained and expelled.”
The more well-publicized cases include politician Yehia Hussein Abdelhady, accused of spreading “false news,” arrested July 31, 2024, after making Facebook posts critical of Sisi and the army and in support of regime change; Rasha Azab, a women’s rights activist and journalist who has suffered constant harassment by the regime for her criticism of the state’s response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza; Ashraf Omar, arrested in July after he published a cartoon criticizing the government’s plan to sell state assets; and Khaled Mamdouh, a journalist at the news website Arabic Post. Both Omar and Mamhdouh are accused, like Alaa Abdel Fattah and so many others, of “spreading false news.” These are middle-class, more privileged individuals. It is terrifying to contemplate what brutal treatment the regime visits on working-class people.
Arrests rain down on the those involved in the most innocuous acts. In 2022, The New York Times reported that security forces arrested one politician for “mulling” over running for office in opposition to Sisi. Two women on a Cairo subway, overheard complaining about rising fares: thrown in a prison. A young military conscript who posted a Facebook meme of Sisi with Mickey Mouse ears: grabbed by security goons and flung into a cell.
As reported by Jacobin in 2020, travel bans are also common and easily number in the hundreds, if not thousands. Most activists, according to the report, are no longer allowed to leave Egypt, whether for holidays or professional reasons. Leading activists and journalists Aida Seif al-Dawla, Gamal Eid, and Hossam Bahgat, have been among the most severely targeted.
The aforementioned 2022 Times article gives an idea of the process of disappearance. In 2018, Waleed Salem, a PhD student at University of Washington-Seattle and studying the Egyptian judiciary, was arrested and charged with “joining a terrorist group [and] spreading fake news.” Salem described both charges as “absurd, easy to refute,” and lacking any evidence. However, in reality, “he was trapped.”
“Held in pretrial detention, Mr. Salem was never tried or formally charged with a crime. Instead, every time he maxed out the legal detention period, a prosecutor extended his imprisonment in a hearing that usually lasted about 90 seconds. ‘The first five months, you’re trying to convince yourself it’s just five months,’ Mr. Salem said. ‘But after five months come and go and you’re still there, now you start to fear the worst.’”
The role of Western imperialism
President Biden, right after the 2020 election and after vowing on the campaign trail to “ostracize” dictators over human rights abuses, normalized relations with both Muhammad Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, along with Sisi. State repression in Egypt not only serves to crush domestic opposition to a brutal bourgeois regime; it serves Western imperialism. The services the Egyptian state offers the West include purchasing weaponry and “homeland security” technology, providing a cost-effective sub-imperial force to ensure “stability” (i.e., smashing progressive movements from below across the MENA), and creating a buffer for a colonial and genocidal Israel.
The history of Egypt’s client status in relation to Western imperialism goes back to the end of the Nasser era in the late 1960s. When the United States joined the USSR in putting an unceremonious end to the British-French-Israeli attempt to invade the Suez Canal after Nasser’s attempt to nationalize it in 1956 (the so-called Suez Crisis), the two “superpowers” announced their arrival as the new global hegemons. It wasn’t, however, until the Israelis smashed the Nasser-led Arab armies in the 1967 “Six Day” War that the U.S. started to see Israel as useful in the project of Western imperialist hegemony in the MENA. By the 1973 “October” War, Israel was firmly within the U.S. camp.
It was during the 1970s as well that Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, began to shift Egypt away from Nasserism’s anticolonial politics, seeing the benefits—at least for the Egyptian bourgeoisie—of a pro-Western orientation. It was during this time that Sadat initiated the so-called Infitah (“opening”), a neoliberal turn that still continues to eviscerate Egyptian society today. The 1979 Camp David agreement with Israel, under U.S. tutelage—seen by the Global South, particularly Palestine, as a treacherous separate peace—was the culmination of Sadat’s politics. Egypt was now consolidated as a client of the U.S. The flood of Western financial aid and the consequent ballooning of state domestic surveillance, under the control of the odious Mubarak, would now darken Egypt’s horizons.
Workers and refugees can “eat hay”
The Egyptian state can count on dependable Western financial support. As Amnesty’s 2024 annual report discusses, to stave off economic and financial crisis in Egypt during that year, the International Monetary Fund, the EU, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged around USD 57 billion in investment, loans, and financial assistance. In March of the same year, the EU announced a 7.4 billion euro (USD 8 billion) funding package to Egypt and in September, the U.S. furnished Sisi regime with USD 1.3 billion in aid.
Both the U.S. and EU packages came with human rights waivers. This was all for the benefit of the Egyptian repressive state apparatus. Meanwhile, workers in Egypt, like their U.S. and European counterparts, can “eat hay” as the Arabic saying goes. Egyptian workers, for example, contended with a runaway cost-of-living crisis, with annual inflation by fall 2024 reaching a whopping 24.9 percent.
While the EU rationalizes its deals with the Egyptian state as promoting “democracy, fundamental freedoms, human rights, and gender equality,” the actual details are telling. Most EU assistance is for “fortifying borders,” in which Egypt, along with Tunisia and Mauritania, is tasked with policing migrants to Europe, especially those from Libya and Sudan. The 2023 EU-Egypt deal, carrying the Orwellian name “Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument” (NDICI), was justified as contributing to “the eradication of poverty and the promotion of sustainable development, prosperity, peace and stability” but in reality was another border security deal. As the MENA-based Revolutionary Socialists have pointed out, keeping refugees out of the EU is what these deals are really about.
U.S. funds the explosion of the Egyptian carceral state
U.S. support of the Egyptian state has been, as is nearly everything under the U.S. bourgeois regime, a bipartisan commitment. While Trump has referred to Sisi as “my favorite dictator,” it was Obama who oversaw the shift to the increased repression of domestic dissent.
It was right after the 2013 coup that brought Sisi and the military into dictatorial power that the U.S. shifted this support away from military hardware toward technologies of domestic repression—for example, surveillance software, drones, and border security. This has been a boon for the U.S. “homeland security” industry. This has also meant an explosion of domestic surveillance and repression: Egypt has built almost a third of its sixty-two prisons since 2011. These are prisons in which more than 60,000 political prisoners are incarcerated, accounting for around 60 percent of the total imprisoned.
Egypt’s collaboration with Israel during Gaza genocide
Meanwhile, the very same U.S. and EU, especially Germany, account for the vast majority of arms deliveries to Israel. Collaboration with Israel is another essential service provided by reactionary Arab regimes. Egypt takes a leading role here—for example, policing the border with Rafah, ensuring that the starvation of Gazans and Israel’s impunity remain unchallenged, and simultaneously contributing to the Israeli economy as a major importer of the latter’s natural gas.
Over recent years, despite symbolic protestations against Israel’s genocide, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—along with Israel—have deepened their participation in U.S.-led “security” structures. One example is the so-called Regional Security Construct, modeled on the imperialist intelligence-sharing “Five Eyes” alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S.). Along with sharing radar and sensor data amongst each, a key goal of the construct is the search for and destruction of Hamas’s subterranean tunnels, a key element of Gazans’ survival during years of genocide and decades of Israeli-U.S.-imposed demodernization of the Gaza Strip. All of this simply builds upon Egypt’s role before the genocide, providing a buffer zone for Israeli impunity in the Strip. Domestically, Sisi’s government, like that of its security construct allies, crushes any spontaneous protests for Palestine, utilizing many of the aforementioned practices of repression.
The importance of struggles from below
The repression of Egyptian dissidents and even of many everyday non-political people is largely made in the West. The United States and the EU fund the repression, supply the tools to execute it, and look the other way. As in other parts of the postcolonial Global South, this repression serves both the interests of imperialism and of the domestic bourgeoisie.
In the United States, the gargantuan recent “No Kings Protests” offer an important opportunity for constructing a mass movement for radical change. While these protests are an important temperature check on the mood of the masses, they are also marked by political confusions. In particular, many of the slogans at the protests demanded a restoration to the pre-Trump liberal order. Many protest signs celebrated the “founding fathers” or denounced how Trump, Miller et al. supposedly contradict “American values.” Trump, we’re told, is borrowing from “an authoritarian playbook.”
All of this obfuscates both the material dynamics of the authoritarian turns from the U.S. to Germany, the UK, France and beyond, and erases the role of Western imperialism in boosting the far right. Moreover, it normalizes liberal democracy as the limit of class struggles: the boldest demand that it allows our movements is for the restoration of the bourgeois democracy that was itself fertile soil for the far right. “America is already great,” as Hillary Clinton said.
The notion that U.S. presidents, the CIA and FBI, etc. need lessons in authoritarianism from semi-colonial countries is laughable. As socialists, we must educate our movements in the fact that the West has an abiding interest in authoritarianism and that the United States and the EU make an outsize contribution to far-right tendencies and repression on an international scale, particularly in the semi-colonial and imperial periphery.
The kinds of authoritarianism and fascistic tactics used “abroad” have a long history in the imperial core, particularly in the U.S. As many Black revolutionaries have long recognized, there was and is a deep connection between Jim Crow segregation, European and American colonial Indigenous genocides, and the methods of Nazis and fascist regimes.
Moreover, what else other than superb examples of “Western values” are the white and European settler colonies of apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, Israel, the Portuguese colonies in Africa, etc.? As the ex-Israeli PM Ehud Barak, whom liberals refer to as a “dove,” said of Israel: It’s a civilized villa in the “jungle” of Arab “savagery.” Listen to the words of any Portuguese settler, Afrikaaner, or Rhodesian talking about what they were up to in southern Africa, and how drenched they were in the arrogance of bringing European “civilization” to the “violent, backward African barbarians.”
Most importantly, what is obscured is the dialectical relationship between capitalism, authoritarianism, and fascism. Capitalism is inherently authoritarian even in times of “normal” functioning: anti-union, hostile to direct democracy and any working-class independence, wholly comfortable turning to racism and other forms of oppression to entrench the disorganization of the working class. The capitalist class will turn to fascism when capitalism, as it inevitably will, falls into crisis and if such crisis moments are allowed to metastasize. When the capitalist class has no alternative for reviving profitability other than the total smashing of working class capacities for social reproduction, such as unions and all other arenas of independent working class life, it will turn fascist.
Far from being utopian, the emphasis of revolutionary socialists on working-class independence and militancy from below is the only way our movements can both effectively defend ourselves against the attacks of the right and offer any hope for the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This is emphasized by our comrades in the MENA Solidarity Network, who write of Alaa’s release from jail: “From trade unions and conferences to protests and vigils outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, collective pressure kept his case alive … Sisi’s pardon is not an act of goodwill. It’s a constitutional right forced by international solidarity and fear of renewed revolt. The regime still rules by repression, trying to erase the spirit of 2011.”
The spirit of 2011 is, ultimately, what frightens the Egyptian state and its imperialist sponsors. Mass movements from Egypt to Syria to the Gulf and Yemen to North Africa dared to storm the heavens then. They have paid dearly for their courage and while that revolutionary spirit may be at an ebb, its embers still flicker. To adapt a metaphor from Marx, capitalism generates radical powers, which are like an old mole, burrowing “often undetected, beneath the surface.” The mole knows well how to work underground, “suddenly to appear: the revolution.”
Photo: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
