Yearbook 2010
Egypt. The ruling National Democratic Party under
President Hosni Mubarak took home 420 of the 504 seats in
the parliamentary elections held on November 28 with a
second round of elections a week later. According to
COUNTRYAAH, the largest
opposition party, the formally banned Islamist movement, the
Muslim Brotherhood, which received about 20 percent of the
parliamentary seats in the 2005 elections, received no
mandate in the first round and therefore boycotted the
second. Candidates loyal to the liberal New al-Wafd Party
got six seats. Other mandates were granted to independent
candidates or small parties of various kinds. Human rights
organizations and opposites in all factions accused the
government of widespread electoral fraud since hundreds of
oppositions were arrested before the election, closed TV
channels and images of cheating in connection with the vote
had been published on the Internet.
Two important liberal democracy movements, the National
Coalition for Change under Mohamed ElBaradei and the Al-Ghad
Party under Ayman Nur, boycotted both elections. ElBaradei,
former head of the UN Atomic Energy Agency IAEA, returned in
February after 30 years in exile and was expected to
challenge Hosni Mubarak or possibly his son Gamal Mubarak in
the 2011 presidential election. up, that lawyers would
supervise the election and that the state of emergency that
had prevailed since 1981 would be lifted. The United Nations
Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in March
urged Egypt to put an end to the violence targeting African
migrants trying to get through Egypt to Israel. According to
Pillay, at least 60 migrants had been killed at the border
since 2007.
Christian Copts suffered extensive persecution during the
year. Six Copts and a Muslim Guard were shot dead on January
6 outside a church in the small town of Nag Hammadi in
southern Egypt in connection with the celebration of Coptic
Christmas. And on New Year's Eve 2011, 21 people were killed
in a suicide attack targeting a Coptic church in Alexandria.
10 percent of Egypt's 80 million residents are Copts.
Several cases of suspected police brutality were noted in
Alexandria. A 28-year-old activist who posted on the
Internet a clip where police stole a drug seizure died in
connection with a police raid on June 6. Thousands of
protesters protested against the police in the following
weeks. A 19-year-old was found dead in a canal in the same
city in November, a few days after he was arrested for
theft. The human rights organization Amnesty International
demanded an investigation into the incident.
The Muslim Brotherhood reacted after the military coup
with extensive demonstrations, and in the following months
1,300 were killed and several thousand Morsi supporters
arrested. After a month and a half of demonstrations against
the military coup, the military decided to put a stop to the
protests. On the morning of August 14, the military
conducted a massacre of followers of the Brotherhood at the
Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Cairo. Somewhere between 800 and
1,000 unarmed protesters were killed, at least 4,000 wounded
and the mosque burned down. The Muslim Brotherhood
threatened large-scale demonstrations in protest of the
massacre, and Tamarod urged people to organize themselves in
a self-defense group to counter the Brotherhood. In this
situation, the military introduced a one-month state of
emergency and curfew from 1 p.m. 19-06 in 14 of the
country's 27 regions. Mohammed el-Baradei had been appointed
vice president by the military a month earlier. He now
withdrew from this post.
In December, the dictatorship labeled the Muslim
Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and banned the
party. That same month, al-Jazeera arrested journalists
Mohamed Fahmy, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed. On January
14, they were charged with "broadcasting fake news",
"possessing transmission equipment without their permission"
and "assisting or belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood". In
June, the three journalists were sentenced to 7-10 years in
prison at the Criminal Court in Cairo. In January 2015, an
appeals court ruled that the criminal court had committed
trial errors and that the trial should proceed.
The military dictatorship drafted a new constitution.
Initially, it hired 10 legal experts to review and amend the
constitution from December 2015. Next, it appointed 50
people to write further amendments. This "constitution" was
sent to a referendum in January 2014, according to it. the
military was passed with 98.1% of the vote with a turnout of
38.6%. Opponents of the military coup with the Brotherhood
at the head had stated in advance that they were boycotting
the vote.
|
