A year ago, the Freedoms Committee of Cairo’s Journalists’ Syndicate was one of the few venues available to rights and political groups. Its conference halls witnessed a constant stream of victims of the Mubarak regime – journalists, workers, and relatives of political prisoners.
Its halls are quieter since 25 January. Public space has been reclaimed for protests and the injustices that sparked the revolution are ostensibly being addressed.
But on Saturday, victims of state injustice were back at the syndicate in a conference organized by members of the advocacy group No Military Trials for Civilians.
Groups of women swathed in black filled the hall, clutching small children or pictures of the family they lost to Egypt’s military courts over the last six months.
A girl held up a piece of paper that said simply, “I want Dad.”
One woman spoke to the conference about her imprisoned husband while a tiny baby slept fitfully on her shoulder and a toddler son stood next to her. Another woman spoke about her brother who was taken by the army. Meantime, his smiling blue-eyed daughter sat on the table in front of her and played with the microphone.
Some of the speakers were well known, like Asmaa Mahfouz, an activist who was summoned for questioning by the military prosecution office last week for criticizing the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) on television and writing on Twitter that if people do not see justice, armed groups will take it by force.
Mahfouz, together with activist Loai Nagati, was pardoned in a SCAF statement on Thursday. The other 18 people, who were being tried with Nagati on the same charges, have not yet been pardoned.
Mahfouz’s questioning follows the summoning of activist and journalists Hossam al-Hamalawy and Rasha Azab by the military prosecution in May and June respectively, after both activists publicly criticized the army.
Neither activist was charged, but some observers interpreted the incidents as an attempt to send a message that red lines still exist.
It is not only activists who have been tried in military courts since the military assumed power in February.
The men and women at the press conference on Saturday are the relatives of the more than 10,000 people who have been sucked into the military justice system on ordinary criminal charges since Mubarak resigned.
Khaled Sayed Hassan is one of the 10,000. The driver and father of five from Beni Suef is currently serving a three-year prison sentence in Damanhour Prison.
His brother Hassan explained that in April, Khaled found a bag of ammunition outside a mosque. A retired army officer encouraged him to hand the ammunition in to the police rather than leave it and risk the possibility that someone with nefarious intentions would find it.
Khaled was 100 metres away from the Beni Suef Security Directorate when an army officer stopped him, his brother says.
“He was arrested on the 16th, interrogated on the 17th and sentenced on the 19th,” Sayed Hassan said. “Nothing has changed. The poor still take it on the head – people who don’t have contacts are arrested and tried in four days.”
Khaled was found guilty despite the army officer’s testimony in court that he had told him to hand in the ammunition. They have had no response to the appeal filed on 22 April 2011.
Khaled’s family now sees him once every 15 days. Prison visit days began at 5 am and can go on till 6 pm when they leave prison for the long journey back home.
The family waits outside the prison until they are admitted inside for a 10-minute visit conducted through a wire mesh amid the cacophony of prisoners’ relatives shouting over each other to be heard.
Hassan Sayed says that he estimates the family spends LE700 per month on transport, food and bribes. “Nothing’s changed in the Interior Ministry. If you want to send food to a prisoner you have to pay the guard. Nothing happens without money.”
Khaled’s father entreated SCAF head Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawy to release his son. “We are in Ramadan, the month of generosity and mercy. How are [Khaled’s] children meant to live when his salary has stopped? I’m on a pension. How am I meant to support them?”
Soheir Ibrahim Mohamed from Sayeda Zeinab in Cairo is the mother of 20-year-old student Mohamed Ahmed who was taken in March during a police raid on the building in which she lives.
“They were looking for someone else, a convicted criminal. When they arrived I got scared and locked the apartment door. They broke it down and took Mohamed,” Soheir Mohamed said.
Mohamed Ahmed was handed over to the army and taken to its C28 facility in Nasr City, where the military prosecutor is based, before being detained in the military prison, while his mother scrambled between government buildings trying to find out where her son was and why he had been taken.
She was eventually told that he would be tried in a military court.
“Three days later he was given a 25-year-prison sentence for possession of Molotov cocktails,” Soheir Mohamed said, breaking down in tears.
Soheir Mohamed said that when she protested the sentence army officers told her that her son was a “baltagy,” a thug – an elastic term that SCAF and the media have used variously to describe criminals and protesters.
The question remains, however, why Mohamed Ahmed and thousands like him were tried in exceptional courts – a continuation of former President Hosni Mubarak’s use of exceptional state security courts – and why civilians appear before a military prosecution when the crimes impugned against them have nothing to do with the military.
Neither the families nor human rights groups have been able to get answers.
Soheir Mohamed is pessimistic about the chances of achieving justice.
“He doesn’t want to talk about conditions inside the prison. And if he talked what would he say? And if he talked, what could we do? To whom should we go to get justice? We don’t have anyone except God.”
SCAF insists that its courts dispense fair justice. Rights groups disagree, saying that military trial procedures do not fulfill international standards for a fair trial.
Heba Morayef, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, even went as far as saying during the press conference that in some instances, lawyers are informed of court verdicts before the trial session begins.
