Revolutie in Egypte #190: Waar Mubarak berecht wordt.

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Op vrijdag 14 oktober 2011 06:40 schreef SemperSenseo het volgende:

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Jouw conclusie is niet wat ik geheel lees in het artikel, alhoewel die een beetje warrig is opgeschreven. Wat ik lees is:

• De Kopten verafschuwen weliswaar het voormalig Mubarak’s regime en het leger nu nog, maar zijn nog banger zijn voor het oprukkende extremisme, de machtige Moslimbroederschap en de groeiende zichtbaarheid van de Salafisten.
• De Kopten rekenden op bescherming door het leger tegen het oprukkende moslimextremisme, maar kregen die niet. Eerder het tegenovergestelde.
• Bij steeds meer Egyptenaren ontstaat het gevoel dat het leger het op een akkoordje heeft gegooid met de machtigste oppositiegroep in Egypte, de Il-Ikwan al-Muslimin.
• Het leger staat aan de kant van de moslim fundamentalisten en behandelt de christenen meer en meer als tweederangs burgers.
• Egypte stevent af op een islamitische staat waarbij het leger de islamitische waarden van het land zal beschermen.

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Authorities began accepting candidates’ applications on Wednesday in advance of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the February ouster of longstanding president Hosni Mubarak.
The day witnessed a large turnout of candidates competing for individual seats. There was also a large turnout of former members of Mubarak’s now-defunct National Democratic Party (NDP) running for individual seats in several governorates.

A total of 1325 candidates have so far registered, both for the upper and lower houses of parliament. According to new elections laws, one third of the seats in parliament will be reserved for individual candidates, while two thirds will be based on electoral lists.

The Cairo-based Egyptian Organization for Human Rights estimated that no less than 50 per cent of the candidates that registered for candidacy on Wednesday were former NDP members.

Political parties and activists have repeatedly called on the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to implement a “treason law” aimed at banning former NDP members from participating in any political activity for at least a five-year period.

According to an agreement hammered out two weeks ago between the SCAF and 13 political parties, the council would “study” the possibility of applying such a law.

At a public conference earlier this month, former NDP members from Upper Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula threatened to mobilize some 15 million supporters if such a law was applied.

Ex-NDP members have reportedly applied for both individual candidacies and as members of party lists. Several licensed parties have been accused of including ex-NDP members on their lists, including the Al-Hurreya Party and the Union Party.

The socialist Popular Alliance party announced its withdrawal from the Egyptian Bloc electoral list because others parties in the coalition insisted on including ex-NDP members on their electoral lists.

The Democratic Alliance, which groups together 25 political parties including the influential Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and Freedom Party (JFP), has not yet announced its final plan for elections.

Meanwhile, the Salafist Asala Party has announced its withdrawal from the Democratic Alliance because only four of its 50 proposed candidates were chosen for inclusion in the alliance’s electoral lists.

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In a large press conference held Thursday afternoon, multiple civilian eyewitnesses recounted to reporters what they saw on the night of 9 October, when a peaceful march of thousands of Coptic and Muslims protesters, which was headed towards the TV headquarters at Maspero near Tahrir square to demand equal rights for Egypt’s 8 million Christians, turned into deadly clashes with the military police, leaving behind 24 protesters dead, 329 injured and a divided and confused public.
The headquarters of Tahrir daily newspaper in the Dokki district of Cairo, where the press conference was held, bustled since the morning hours with press members and activists trying to squeeze into the event to hear first-hand testimonies from survivors of "Bloody Sunday".

In order to resolve the congestion, organizers set up two simultaneous press conferences in adjacent offices at the paper’s headquarters, with different eyewitnesses speaking in each.

The conference was organized byThe Revolution Youth Coalition, the Workers Democratic Party, The Popular Committees to defend the revolution, Revolutionary Socialists, the Popular Socialist Alliance Party, No to Military Trials Campaign, and the National Front for Freedom and Justice.

Activists called the event and prepared for it in less than 24 hours of an international press conference the ruling military council (SCAF) held on Wednesday to present the army’s side of what happened on 9 October in front of the TV building to a divided public opinion.

SCAF members who spoke at the press conference on Wednesday read statements and showed reporters photos and videos that allegedly prove the military did not fire at the peaceful protest, and that military vehicles could not have "intentionally" run over the protesters that night as survivors and eyewitnesses have said.

SCAF generals at their press conference also charged that protesters were armed, and asserted that the military police only carried anti-riot gear, and no live ammunition, at Maspero.

Rights lawyer Rajia Omran, one of the conference organizers and a member of No to Military Trials campaign, opened the conference by reading a press release signed by 17 political parties and movements, as well as 12 public figures.

The statement strongly rejected the violence used by security and military forces in the protest, describing the incident as a "full-fledged conspiracy" by SCAF against peaceful protesters.

The press statement called for an end to SCAF's rule of Egypt, and the formation of a new transitional government with "absolute jurisdiction".

It also called for the immediate prosecution of the perpetrators of the Maspero massacre, the elimination of state control over the media, and the resolution of longstanding Coptic grievances by issuing laws that grant them equal rights.

First to speak was Magda Adly, head of El-Nadeem Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Torture.

Adly had attended the autopsy of eight of the bodies of those killed on “Bloody Sunday” at the Coptic Hospital on the night of the protest.

Describing the autopsy results, Adly saidsix of the eight corpses were run over by "heavyweight vehicles", and two received "excessive" gunshots.’

"The autopsy report was written in front of me. I just hope that would be the same report that will be submitted to the Prosecutor General at the end of the day," Adly added.

Tony Sabry, a friend of Mina Danial, a Copt and a well-known Tahrir revolutionary, who was killed in the clashes, gave his account.

Sabry said he personally saw a body being thrown into the water of Nile by military police soldiers.

Sabry said he also witnessed the moment Mina was killed.

"He received a bullet from the front and one from the back", he said.

The following speaker, Assem Kandil, one of the lawyers of some of January 25th revolution martyrs in the Mubarak murder trial underway in Egyptian courts, said he and a number of his coworkers were in their office in a building next to Maspero when the clashes began.

"We heard the gunfire from our office at the sixth floor, so I called the emergency police, and they said they were already informed of the incident," Kandil recalled.

"A number of soldiers, or people dressed as soldiers of the central security forces and the military police, stormed the building and started breaking the glass on the floor windows, then they proceeded to break doors.

“They asked residents in other apartments for ID in order to find out their religion," he added.

"After they left, we started seeing dead bodies being transferred into the building by protesters," he concluded.

Max Soliman, another witnesses, started his testimony by showing a number of videos on a laptop screen, and explained where and when he shot the footage.

The first video showed military soldiers penetrating the protest, firing what he said he could confirm as live ammunition at the unarmed protesters.

The second video showed one of the military soldiers boasting to a group of people who were aiding the military police on the ground: "I killed two of those infidels" referring to Copts who were in the protest. The helpers responded victoriously with the chant "Allah Akbar" or God is great.

None of the videos that Soliman showed revealed any protesters carrying weapons as SCAF claimed in its press conference on Wednesday.

Soliman asserted that the footage was recorded off television with a cell-phone camera.

“No one can claim they were edited" he insisted.

An anchor in one of two Satellite TV channels located adjacent to the state TV building, which were stormed by the security and military police during the hours of the clashes on Sunday attended the conference to give his testimony.

Hossam Haddad of 25 January Channel said a central security officers accompanied by military police, stormed his station’s offices and told the crew they were looking for rioters.

"They asked for our IDs, and a central security officer kicked one of our cameramen in the face as soon as he read on his ID card that he was Christian."

"They raised their guns on our anchor, an eight-months pregnant woman, who was in the midst of presenting live coverage of the protests and clashes and ordered live coverage must be immediately halted.”

Another protester, Safeya Abdallah, a Muslim girl who was in the protest, said some protesters did beat up an army driver who was commandeering a military Armoured Personal Carrier (APC) and burned the vehicle, as SCAF said, but only after demonstrators saw that APC run over a fellow unarmed protester twice.

As she spoke, Safeya held in her hand a live bullet that she said was taken from the ammunition belt of one of the military soldiers.

"We saw the military soldiers smash those private cars SCAF said we smashed. We did not smash them. However, we did burn them after the soldiers had smashed them in order to prevent APC’s from getting to us," she said.

“The Copts did not burn down the army’s vehicles. Muslim supporters did it to protect everyone," she added.

An elderly woman, who is known among activists as one of the "revolutionary mothers", also gave a testimony of what she witnessed.

“We were sitting at a café near Tahrir with a group of young activists when we heard of the clashes taking place at Maspero. On our way to Maspero, we saw central security trucks loaded with bricks and stones,” she said.

Mohamed El-Zayatt, a Muslim who joined the protest, said a fellow protester who found him marching alone at the beginning of the peaceful march held his hand in a comradely gesture and the two strolled together demanding equality for Copts.

“ When the shooting started the man took a bullet in his head. Two or Three people helped me attempt to carry my companion away, but then we saw an APC charging at us at a very high speed, as if it was being driven by a drunkard, so we had to drop the wounded man and run to protect our own lives" El-Zayatt said with a guilty tone.

The last speaker at the conference was Gamila Ismail, a journalist and former state TV presenter, who focused on slamming state TV for its bias against Copts and uncritical support for SCAF.

Ismail told the crowd said she believes the government brought back the post of the minister of information last July after it was abolished in March in order to put state media at the service of SCAF.

She added that one of the State TV presenters, who was accused of inciting people against Copts during the live coverage of the protest, confessed after a wave of public criticism that news bulletins covering the clashes that night were actually written by a military official from SCAF.

Gamila also charged that former state security officers might have been providing paid thugs to back up military police at clashes with peaceful protesters, as they, she asserted, did on "Bloody Sunday"..

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Doctors’ Syndicate elections on Friday ended the Muslim Brotherhood’s nearly three decade-long monopoly of the syndicate, with candidates opposing the Islamist group doing especially well in the syndicate’s provincial branches.

Election results showed that the Doctors for Egypt list, representing the Brotherhood, lost control of the national syndicate’s board. The Brotherhood-backed list took 18 of the board’s 24 seats.

Doctors went to the polls on Friday to elect the syndicate’s, general and provincial syndicates seats in 27 governorates.

Khairy Abdel Dayem, a Brotherhood candidate, defeated 22 candidates to become head of the syndicate. He will replace Hamdy al-Sayed, who held the position since 1978. Abdel Dayem is not a member of the Islamist group.

Nonetheless, representatives of the Independence list, which opposed the Brotherhood, say they are happy with the results, especially their performance in the governorate branches, where they took control of the boards in 14 of Egypt’s 27 governorates.

“This not a small victory, since the newly formed Independence list has won a landslide victory in half Egypt’s governorate,” said Mona Mina, a leading member of the Independence list who was elected to the syndicate’s board on Friday.

The Independence list is made up of members of the reformist groups Doctors Without Rights (DWR) and the Tahrir Square Doctors group, as well as independent figures.

Mohamed Hisham, a judge and the head of the judicial committee supervising the Syndicate election, said in a press conference Sunday that the polls were fair despite some irregularities.

This is the syndicate’s first free election in 19 years after the judicial custody froze all electoral action within the syndicate. The incumbent syndicate board had served since activity within the syndicate was frozen.

“Before these elections, the Brotherhood used to have full monopoly over the syndicate. They used it as a platform for religious propaganda. The results, especially in the provincial syndicate seats, have proven that they’ve suffered a great lost in this election,” said Iman Yehia, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Suez University.

Unofficial figures suggest that Christians constitute 20 to 25 percent of the total doctors in Egypt.

The Brotherhood, according to Yahiya, managed to keep Christian doctors away from the syndicate and turn it into a preaching center.

“The Brotherhood also, benefiting from their control over the syndicate, managed to allocate even the administrative posts in the syndicate to their sympathizers,” said Yahiya.

In Cairo provincial syndicate, the Brotherhood lost 14 out of 16 seats to the Independence list but the head of the provincial syndicate will still come from the group.

The results were more dramatic in Alexandria, where the Independence list achieved a landslide victory, wining ten out of 12 seats and won the election for provincial syndicate head.

In Suez, where the Muslim Brotherhood has long played a strong role, the group failed to garner a single seat. In Ismailia, the Brotherhood lost the majority of seats.

Earlier on Sunday, Egypt’s papers claimed that the Brotherhood won a landslide victory in the elections but the Independence list said in a statement that the coverage was biased.

“We’re observing an organized propaganda campaign that wants to overlook the truth and show that the Brotherhood achieved an absolute victory in the elections. The Brotherhood lost 70 percent of provincial syndicate seats,” said the statement.

Verbal clashes erupted between candidates in the press conference. They contested the formal result issued by Judge Mohamed Hisham.

The judge confirmed that the elections were fair, even though some contested electoral boxes were deemed invalid. “But this cancelation didn’t affect the total results,” said Hisham.

However, Khaled Samir, a candidate of the Independence list said that he would file a complaint against the committee supervising the elections because of the irregularities that dominated some provincial syndicate elections.

“We [the Independence list] have won 70 percent of the provincial syndicates seats. How come this percent didn’t affect seats the syndicate general counsel, where the Brotherhood controlled 75 percent of its seats?” Samir said.

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A little more than a month before voting is set to begin and five days after candidates began registering their campaigns, the High Election Committee clarified some of the laws governing the upcoming parliamentary elections, but still left some important questions unanswered.

Local NGOs will be allowed to monitor the election after submitting a request to the National Council for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, Abdel Moez Ibrahim, the head of the committee said. The registered NGOs will be allowed to inspect ballot boxes inside polling stations.

International NGOs that wish to monitor the election however must submit their requests to unspecified “sovereign entities,” according to Ibrahim. Before backtracking, the ruling military council announced in July that it would not allow foreign election monitors.

Judges will also monitor the election, as they have in the past, Ibrahim said.

“Judicial monitoring is a revolutionary request,” he said.

“I trust SCAF and the Ministry of Interior in terms of the security of the elections,” said Ibrahim.

Many analysts and political forces worry that the elections could be marred by violence. Previous elections saw clashes between supporters of opposing candidates, particularly in areas dominated by tribal affiliations. The recent violence at Maspero, in which at least 28 people died, has raised additional fears about safety during the elections.

Ibrahim failed to clarify whether or not Egyptians living out of the country will be allowed to vote, dismissing this issue as beyond the scope of his committee. He also said the cabinet must ask for the committee's opinion about the Treachery Law, a law that could be used to keep members of the former ruling party from being in the next government. However, the cabinet does not need to take the High Election Committee's opinion into account when deciding whether or not it will enforce the law.

The committee, which is responsible for coordinating logistics during the election as well as enforcing electoral laws, also announced a set of rules governing how candidates will campaign.

Candidates cannot spend more than LE500,000 on campaigning in their districts, Ibrahim said, and are limited to LE250,000 during any run-off elections. All candidates will have equal air time on state TV, Ibrahim said.

Candidates will not be able to use universities, places of worship, public spaces, public money or religious slogans for their campaigns.

These regulations will apply to candidates running for the list-based seats as well as those running for the seats open to individual candidates. Ibrahim also announced that the deadline for application of candidacy has been extended until 22 October. Submissions were previously set to end on 19 October.

Ibrahim also announced that the High Electoral Committee plans to enforce the electoral participation law as amended by SCAF earlier this month. This includes an LE500 fine for anyone eligible to vote who fails to show up at the polls. Ibrahim said their names will be passed on to the general prosecutor.

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Mahmoud Salem, a loud, sarcastic character who self-identifies as a "new media douchebag," is best known by his Twitter handle: Sandmonkey.

On Monday he announced he's running for Egypt's parliament as an independent candidate. His mission: Finish the revolution he and other Egyptians started.

Candidate registration for the first parliamentary election in Egypt after the January uprising is now in full swing. The election is scheduled for Nov. 28.

The future Parliament will produce a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution, and Salem says this is a main driver of his campaign.

"We need people in there to fight and make sure it doesn't become another piece of paper," he said.

Salem has used blog, "Rantings of a Sandmonkey," to advance concrete policy proposals, including his own draft for a Bill of Rights and a slew of ideas for the economy.

As might be expected from someone who spends a lot of his time blogging policy proposals and analysis, Salem's platform is clear.

He says he wants the government to actually work for the people, citing a long history of corruption. Furthermore, he's critical of the interim government's handling of the economy.

"Not a single economic plan has been put forward in nine months," Salem said.

The seat Salem is running for represents the Cairo neighborhood of Heliopolis, where liberal politician and analyst Amr Hamzawy is also running. But Salem thinks his toughest competition will be the former ruling party candidate Magdy Mahrous.

His strategy: Expose past corruption by the National Democratic Party and run an innovative campaign focusing on getting young people involved.

Gloomy outlooks by analysts including Salem's election rival Hamzawy predict that the future parliament might very well have a similar makeup to those under the Mubarak regime. But a handful of youth have announced their candidacy and Salem hopes more will follow his lead.

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Neima Atta knew her 24-year-old son, Essam, was being tortured in Tora prison. He rang home on Wednesday evening to let his mother and family know that an officer called Nour was giving him trouble.

His father, Ali, told him to try and withstand it, so that the situation – their court appeals against him being tried as a civilian by a military court - doesn’t become any worse than it already was, his father said. Essam had been in prison for eight months by then.

On Wednesday evening, Essam also asked his sister Iman for a sim card, so that he could keep in touch using a mobile phone. The attempt to smuggle this into his cell the next day was apparently caught by Nour, who said that he would teach Essam a lesson.

“I tried to call his mobile at around 7pm on Thursday, and his friend picked up,” Iman told Al-Masry Al-Youm. It was then that she found out that after a two-hour attempt to get his cell door opened, her brother’s body was found laying dead.

“He was taken from us with the blink of an eye, without a reason,” Iman said.

The police officer taught his lesson by inserting hoses into Essam’s mouth and anus, which led to bleeding and subsequently his death, Mona Seif, lead campaigner of the No Military Trials for Civilians group, said.

He was also made to drink water that was intoxicated with cleaning chemicals, Iman, his sister, said.

Saif, the campaigner, spoke to Al-Masry Al-Youm on Friday outside Zainhom, where the official autopsy report was being waited for by around 200 supporters, including members of the April 6 Youth Movement.

His mother, Neima, was in shock and wailing constantly as were his two sisters. His father tried to go into the area where the autopsy was being conducted, but would not be admitted.

His supporters’ version of events is, however, contested by the police. They say there was no evidence of torture on his body, and he died from taking drugs, Malek Adly, the lawyer dealing with Essam’s case said. They also tried to say he chemically intoxicated himself and that is what caused his heart to stop.

But Adly also took a testimony from the doctor who admitted Essam at Qasr al-Aini hospital, who suspected foul play and said his face had severe injuries with liquid secretions from the mouth.

Adly said that there had been attempts to cover up the case by the police. There were no admissions papers for his body at the hospital, for example. Adly then approached the head of a police department to file a complaint, and put in a request with the prosecutor general for an autopsy report.

According to Sayed Fathi, a lawyer following the case, the autopsy was conducted on Atta's intestines and a small rolled package with pills in it was found and taken for testing.

“It is unclear yet how the pills got into his body, but either way, they could not have caused his death. This is very much like the Khaled Saeed case when they found a rolled package with weed in his body. And given what I know about the history of these cases it is a technique the police often use to get themselves acquitted."

Saeed, a young Alexandrian man, was tortured to death by two policemen in July 2010, in unclear circumstances. The two policemen were sentenced to seven years imprisonment each last week.

“There was no evidence of torture on his body. His face was swollen, it had a bluish colour and blood was coming out of his mouth suggesting that there was something internally wrong. The story of the water hose came from his friends who were at the prison, and they called his family to alert them of his death,” Fathi added.

Fathi and others are waiting for the test results of the package found in Atta's intestines. “This case is very similar to Khaled Saeed, in which the initial forensic report was a cover up for what really happened.”

Following the autopsy, Atta's body was taken for a funeral procession in Tahrir Square where thousands congregated, chanting against torture and military rule.
Atta was arrested and given a two-year prison sentence by military police in Moqattam on 25 February, simply for being a bystander as a fight broke out, his sister told Al-Masry Al-Youm. The official version, however, is that he was occupying an apartment illegally with his friends.

“Even if he was a thug or a criminal, he doesn’t deserve to die, and in this way,” a member of the April 6 Youth Movement said.

Before being imprisoned, he worked with his father in a small shop making leather shoes.

There are 12,000 civilians being tried by military courts, according to human rights watchdogs' reports.

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The April 6 Youth Movement on Wednesday rejected the government's draft constitutional principles document, saying it gives far-reaching powers to the military.

During his meeting with several political powers on Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Selmy proposed a draft constitutional principles document as well as criteria for electing members of the constituent assembly which will be tasked with writing a new constitution.

The document proposes that a 100-member constituent assembly be comprised of 80 non-parliamentary members and 20 members from political parties represented in parliament, with a maximum of five members from each party.

The draft also calls for the establishment of a national defense council to be headed by the president. This council would examine national security measures and be responsible for approving all legislation related to the military.

The document also exclusively grants the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) the right to examine military affairs, including the armed forces budget. Military budget allocations would be listed as the first item in the national budget without detailed figures on proposed expenditures, the document suggests.

"Principles that lead the armed forces to control the state and escape accountability are totally rejected," Injy Hamdy, a spokesperson for the April 6 Youth Movement, said in a statement released Wednesday.

Hamdy criticized the document, calling the broad powers it grants to the SCAF a farce. The movement also said the nation should be allowed to monitor the military's budget.

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Elections and Eid celebrations preoccupy most of today’s newspapers, with independent Al-Tahrir describing on its front page the festivities inside the hospital room where deposed President Hosni Mubarak is being held.

Mubarak, dressed in a khaki tracksuit, requested ostrich meat as his Eid meal but was overruled by his wife Suzanne for health reasons. The ex-president received numerous phone calls from well-wishers during the day, Al-Tahrir tells us. “While it is normal that figures from the former regime would call, what is strange is that currently serving government figures called him, such as the current Environment Minister Maged George ... Current Electricity and Energy Minister Hassan Younis left a message of greetings.”

Mubarak also received a half hour call from Tora prison, during which former People’s Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour is reported to have said, “Don’t worry president, the elections are a complete mess and will explode.”

Al-Tahrir quotes an unnamed source as saying that is evidence that “a huge catastrophe” will happen during the elections.

In Upper Egypt, meanwhile, is witnessing a “war of destructive election propaganda,” particularly between figures with connections to the dissolved National Democratic Party (NDP) and Islamist candidates.

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Op zaterdag 12 november 2011 12:04 schreef johnnylove het volgende:
Rakotto ga je stemmen? En vooral kom je er een beetje uit met al die mogelijkheden?

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Op zaterdag 12 november 2011 15:20 schreef Drifter__ het volgende:

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Ja zeker via het internet. Je hebt tot 19 november om jezelf te registreren.
http://www.elections2011.eg/index.php/2011-11-09-20-01-43

En het Youtube kanaal met vids om het verkiezingssysteem te begrijpen:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Elections2011Eg

Vind het maar erg ingewikkeld.