African refugee women report surge in sexual attacks in Egypt

REUTERS

A female refugee who says she was a victim of violent sexual assault rests her hands on a balcony in Cairo Wednesday. | REUTERS

CAIRO – The 17-year-old South Sudanese refugee finally managed to escape after three months as a prisoner in a Cairo apartment where she was repeatedly gang raped, only to realize that she had become pregnant by one of her attackers.

She is one of a growing number of African migrant and refugee women in the Egyptian capital who report abuse, in what rights groups say has become an epidemic of sexual violence that has worsened in recent months.

Reuters met five women, from Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, at a community center in Cairo, each of whom said she was a victim of violent sexual assault.

The 17-year old South Sudanese woman said she was snatched by strangers in a poor neighborhood and brought by a taxi to another area, where a man locked her up in an apartment for three months and repeatedly raped her with friends.

“I tried several times to escape,” she said, adding that she finally managed to flee when her captor left a key in the house. She asked not to be identified but agreed to be filmed provided that her face was not visible.

A Sudanese woman who gave her name as Bakhtia said she was assaulted by a stranger on the street in what then became a gang attack.

“He touched me, after which I slapped him on the face,” she said. “Immediately, around four other people (came over), each one grabbing me from a different body part. I tried to defend myself, but how can I defend myself?”

Three other women who spoke to Reuters said they were attacked while cleaning houses as domestic workers. Two were raped and one sexually assaulted. They asked not to be filmed or quoted directly.

The United Nations estimates around 500,000 migrants, half of them refugees, live in Egypt. Many arrived aiming to reach Europe via Israel or by boat to Turkey, routes that have been largely closed by tougher security measures.

Jobs are scarce. With austerity measures having driven up inflation since last year, many have found it more difficult to pay rent. Increasingly they have become homeless or are forced to share rooms with strangers, making them more vulnerable to sexual assault.

Cairo was named the most dangerous megacity for women in an international perception poll carried out by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2017.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered a crackdown on sexual harassment after seven men were arrested for attacking women near Cairo’s Tahrir Square during his inauguration celebrations in 2014. Tougher sentences have been imposed for sex crimes.

But rights groups say such measures have done little to deter attacks against African migrants, who often have no recourse to the police or family to protect them.

“From two to three (complaints of abuse) a week they were going to seven a week,” said Laurent De Boeck, head of the International Organization for Migration in Egypt, who blamed the surging cost of renting a room.

“The situation of them not having protection of a house, made them more vulnerable to the situation because they were basically in families in the street.”

Fatma Abdelkader, who works with local aid group Tadamon, which runs the community center, said cases of sex abuse had increased in the past six months, with attackers seeming to seek out African women as prey.

“The darker the skin tone, the more susceptible the women are to violence,” she said.

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Repression Risks Fueling Egypt Instability, Analysts Warn

By Agence France-Presse

An Egyptian police van blocks a street leading to Cairo's Tahrir square, Sept. 27, 2019, in anticipation of anti-government protests.

CAIRO - Egypt is reeling after a tense weekend of sparse anti-government protests for the second week in a row, which analysts say could bring more repression under President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

Despite a heavy security presence in the capital, small-scale protests erupted in Cairo's Warraq island district after Friday prayers and in southern Egypt.

But the crowds were much thinner than the week before, when viral videos by an exiled disgruntled businessman accusing Sissi and the military of deep-seated corruption tapped into simmering discontent at people's economic woes.

"I doubt the Sissi administration is in any serious trouble, even if the protests show that high levels of repression have not been sufficient to deter open dissent," said Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Yet he cautioned that current uncertainty is riddled with challenges for Sissi.

"The real problem for the administration ... is that it has emptied the political arena so completely of interlocutors (such as political parties or business groups) that it lacks social allies outside the state apparatus," he told AFP.

"This makes it brittle. Its dependence on repression will produce diminishing returns over time, as Egypt's social problems worsen," he added.

Following the first wave of protests on September 20, Sissi — who has already overseen a crackdown since the start of his rule in 2013 — moved quickly to quash dissent.

Around 2,000 people were rounded up in just seven days.

"The unprecedented wave of arrests of activists, intellectuals, and also ordinary protesters... made a lot of people re-think what might happen to them if they did participate," said Youssef el-Chazli, a fellow at Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East Studies.

Calls for a "million-march" on Friday from the businessman and actor Mohamed Aly failed to materialize on the ground.

Egyptian social media — an active virtual turf war between Sissi detractors and supporters, has gone back to focusing on soccer and other mundane topics.

Cairo's Tahrir Square, the flashpoint of the 2011 revolution, has returned to its ordinary, hectic pace with traffic milling around.

But a police presence is visible throughout the capital.

As the crackdown continued, AFP journalists on Friday saw police stopping and frisking citizen

randomly, detaining some, searching phones and impounding vehicles.

The state has learned since 2011 that any group or protest can pose a threat and should be monitored, Chazli said.

"Obviously, this doesn't bode necessarily well for the future of democratic development and protection of civil and political rights in the country."

Pro-Sissi rallies

In another show of force, pro-Sissi supporters were out in large numbers on Friday.

Returning from the UN General Assembly in New York, Sissi greeted a crowd of enthusiastic supporters at Cairo Airport telling them there was "no reason for concern".

In eastern Cairo, more than 1,000 people were bused to a stage where a concert took place in support of Sissi waving flags and carrying placards with nationalistic slogans near the tomb of the former president Anwar Sadat.

The site was pointedly just meters from the site of the largest massacre in modern Egyptian history at Rabaa Mosque in 2013 when Egyptian troops killed around 800 Muslim Brotherhood supporters in a single day.

"The post-2013 regime has been, since its inception, very reliant on 'popular legitimacy' and scenes of chanting and dancing crowds," said Chazli.

"It was important to have people in the street supporting the president, in bigger numbers than those protesting him."

In state-media such as the Al-Ahram newspaper on Sunday, the message was about the government's complete control, with one article headlined "Stability encourages investment".

Across the dailies, plenty of ink was dedicated to lambasting the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood movement of Islamist former president Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the military in 2013.

Samir Ragheb, a retired brigadier-general and head of the Arab Foundation for Development and Strategic Studies, told AFP the protests "were designed to foment chaos only for a few minutes".

Authorities had been initially surprised, but they have learnt from previous security lapses, when millions went out in 2011 to topple long-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak, he noted.

Ragheb dismissed the idea protests may break out again but highlighted there is a general sense of frustration among Egyptians mostly with the severe government-imposed austerity measures.

"There's a difference between suffering economically and being angry about it. You can't just protest outside the law," he added.

If the most impoverished classes rise up then "no one will be able to stop them, even the military and
police," he said.

Daily life has slowly resumed with the start of the working week on Sunday, although police forces are out on the streets in parts of the capital.

But with the continued political clampdown and the economic squeeze "it's hard to imagine protests will completely stop, unless maybe for a short while," Chazli said.

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Egypt Arrests 16 Suspected Muslim Brotherhood Members

By Associated Press

Egyptian police escorts stand by vehicles for general prisoner transport at Tora prison, Cairo, August 22, 2013.

CAIRO - Egypt says police have arrested 16 suspected Muslim Brotherhood members for allegedly smuggling currency out of the country and plotting militant attacks in Egypt.

The Interior Ministry said Tuesday the suspects were collaborating with wanted Brotherhood members in Turkey to help smuggle wanted Islamists from Egypt to Europe.

It says in a statement the suspects also provided funds for Brotherhood members to carry out militant attacks in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood won a series of elections after the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. U.S.-educated engineer Mohamed Morsi, a senior Brotherhood figure, became Egypt's first freely-elected president the following year.
 
The military, led by then defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, overthrew Morsi in 2013 amid massive protests against his brief one-year rule. Authorities have since branded the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization and arrested thousands of its members. Morsi collapsed in a courtroom and died in June. 

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GERMAN REPORTER UNDER FIRE COMPARING ISRAEL'S HUMAN RIGHT'S RECORD TO EGYPT'S

BY BENJAMIN WEINTHAL

2018 American Music Awards – Show – Los Angeles, California, U.S., 09/10/2018 – Jennifer Lopez performs. (photo credit: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS)

The Cairo correspondent for a German publicly-funded radio station on Thursday equated the Jewish state’s human rights record with Egypt’s in connection with the concert appearances of the US singer Jennifer Lopez in both countries, sparking outrage in the media. 

Germany’s top-selling paper Bild reported that Cornelia Wegerhoff from the Deutschlandfunk radio program declared that “Human rights are equally disregarded in Israel and Egypt.”
Bild wrote that “In Israel free elections take place, in which Jewish and Arab citizens of the country take part – as voters and candidates. Tens of thousands of government critics are imprisoned in Egypt. Freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate are also severely restricted” in the world’s largest Arab country. 

The Bild article tore into Wegerhoff ‘s contention, writing that while Israel holds the Middle East’s “largest LGBT parade each year in Tel Aviv, homosexuals are arrested in Egypt.” 

The paper took Wegerhoff to task for ignoring Egypt’s flawed women’s rights record in contrast to Israel. “Women’s rights activists are being persecuted by the authorities in Egypt” and the prosecution of sexual harassment and rape of women are not being legally pursued. 

In response to the article, a spokesman for the public radio station regretted the impression that Israel’s human right’s record is comparable to Egypt’s. 

“This was neither intended by the editors nor by the correspondent herself. We regret this error and have corrected our website accordingly and deleted the audio,” said the spokesman.
The German journalist Stefan Frank, who has written extensively about German bias against Israel in the media and antisemitism in press, wrote on Twitter: “Cornelia Wegerhoff, Cairo correspondent of @dlfkultur, has lost her mind.”

Wegerhoff used the concert appearances of singer Jennifer Lopez in the Middle East to launch her attack against Israel. 

She said that Lopez is “consistently making her way through all of the embarrassments of the region.” 

The US superstar singer and actress held a concert in Tel Aviv on August 1 that attracted over 50,000 people. 

A week later, she performed north of Cairo in El Alamein, where 2,000 fans showed up. Lopez defied calls from the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign, including the Egyptian branch, to not perform in Israel and Egypt. 

BDS Egypt said Lopez showed “clear support for the state of occupation and its racist policies towards Palestinians.” 

BDS Egypt had called on Orsacom Development, who organized the concert, to cancel the show. Eygpt’s Minister of Investment and International Cooperation, Sahar Nasr, the Minister of Social Solidarity Ghada Wali, and the Minister of Planning and Administrative Reform Hala Al-Saeed attended Lopez’s concert. 

Germany’s parliament classified BDS as antisemitic in May. Lopez tweeted after her Tel Aviv concert: “Amazing energy in Tel Aviv last night!! Over 50,000 strong!!! I love you so much.”

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