Quelle: New York Times

False News From the Sisi State

[…] Mr. Regeni* was a foreigner whose government seems determined to pursue the truth, a luxury afforded to very few Egyptians like Massouny. Young Egyptians, especially, have been among the most vulnerable to enforced disappearances since Mr. Sisi led an ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. The Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedoms claims to have recorded 1,840 such cases in 2015.

The Interior Ministry’s evasions and lack of transparency are especially galling at a time when the authorities, ever keen to police public morality, are cracking down on those who report “false news.” Last month, a court sentenced a blogger named Taymour el-Sobki to three years in jail with hard labor on such a charge, after he’d said on a TV show that many Egyptian women were ready to cheat on their husbands.

The writer Ahmed Naji is serving a two-year sentence handed down by an appeals court in February for violating “public modesty,” after sexually explicit excerpts from his novel were published in a literary magazine. (Mr. Naji has just been honored with an award from the writers’ organization PEN.)

Why is a military-backed government that is battling an Islamist insurgency in North Sinai, a flailing economy and a hard currency crisis busying itself with prosecutions of bloggers and writers?

Because that’s what a paranoid regime, aware of its failures yet equally cognizant of its Western allies’ reluctance to hold it accountable, does. Human rights groups in Egypt claim that since the appointment of Maj. Gen. Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar as Egypt’s interior minister in March 2015, enforced disappearance has become the de facto security policy of the Sisi government. […]

* Giulio Regeni, von staatlichen Repressionskräften entführt, gefoltert und ermordet