Leader of 2011 revolution latest victim of Egypt's crackdown
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Their faces pale with grief, wearing white prison uniforms, Alaa Abdel-Fattah and his sister Sanaa Seif were pictured by the press in a Cairo cemetry late last year.
They had been let out of jail for a day to bury their father, veteran rights activist Ahmed Seif al-Islam. Abdel-Fattah was facing trial for organising an unauthorised demonstration a year earlier.
His 20-year-old sister was charged with taking part in a later march against the restrictive protest law under which he had been arrested. She would receive a three-year jail sentence, later reduced to two years on appeal. Monday saw Abdel-Fattah sentenced to five years imprisonment for organising the November 2013 protest and attacking a police officer. He was convicted despite protest organisers in the No Military Trials group saying that they, not he, had been responsible for the demonstration in question. He is the latest in a succession of high-profile activists from the 2011 revolution against Hosny Mubarak who have returned to Egypt’s jails under former army chief Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi.
At vanguard of social media
Abdel-Fattah and his wife Manal were at the vanguard of social media in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. They set up one of Egypt’s first blogs, plugging the open source software movement – their shared obsession. But it was also one of the first online sources documenting the stirrings of protest as early as 2004.They shared accounts and pictures of demonstrations against torture, against the US-led war in Iraq, and against Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. In 2005, they won the Deutsche Welle Reporters Without Borders weblog award. Arrested in 2006 for opposition activities, Abdel-Fattah and Manal later moved to South Africa to work in the technology sector. But when Egyptians took to the streets against Mubarak in January 2011, they returned home. Alaa was soon tweeting prolifically from the heart of the revolution in Tahrir Square. In the heady months following Mubarak’s resignation, he hosted tweet-ups where tech and democracy were both under discussion.
But in October that year, he ended up behind bars again, accused of attacking security forces at a protest where troops killed some 27 Coptic Christian demonstrators – running over some of them with armoured cars. Abdel-Fattah recounted going to the hospital where the bodies were taken and persuading their families to agree to autopsies so that those responsible could be prosecuted.
“My God, why do most of our martyrs belong to the poor? How were they discerned by the tank and the gun?” he wrote in the aftermath of the massacre.He was released after two months, but was questioned again after being accused – along with his other sister, Mona Seif – of setting the headquarters of failed conservative presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq alight in 2012. In 2013, the prosecutor general controversially appointed by Islamist president Mohammed Morsi accused him of inciting an attack on the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters.
It seemed to many that his high profile as an activist had made him a convenient target for any Egyptian government.
After the then army chief Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi ousted Morsi in the wake of mass protests, Alaa Abdel-Fattah denounced violence by the authorities – but also by Morsi’s supporters.
After his arrest in November 2013, he slammed the liberal politicians who backed the military crackdown on the Islamists.
“They could have deactivated the jailer and the torturer if they had threatened the authorities that they would resign with the first bullet,” he charged in a letter from jail.
“But they insisted on dealing with the killing and torture and detention of their party members, of their children’s comrades and their colleagues’ students and the children of their relatives as slips and mistakes.”
