An open letter to The Hon Kevin Rudd MP

Mr. Rudd

Australia's Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd

PO Box 6022
House of Representatives
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

Let be begin by saying that I have no reason to believe you are anything other than a humane and decent man. I am not an Australian citizen, nor have I had any great exposure to your country’s domestic politics. I have no opinion either way on your stances concerning divisive issues such as the Iraq war and gay marriage.

This letter is motivated neither by a will to embarrass or discredit. I simply desire action.

As a user of social media and, no doubt, as a keen upholder of tasks mandated under your position as Australia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, I am sure you are aware of the case of Australian citizen Austin G. Mackell, who was arrested in Egypt last weekend and charged with incitement at a protest rally in the Nile basin city of Mahalla.

Austin is a journalist, and in case his ordeal has not registered on your agenda, details of his bogus arrest and incarceration can be perused here.

Given your previous declarations on Egypt’s transition to democracy, I can only assume you are aware of the climate in which foreign journalists operate in and around Cairo, and that you take a keen interest in it. You yourself last year stressed the need for reform and progress to “ensure the opportunity and freedoms that ordinary Egyptians have been calling for.” One such call, Mr. Rudd, was for a free press.

As I have already confessed relative ignorance over Australian realpolitik, I am compelled to assume that when you took the opportunity to inform the world of your hope over Egypt’s future, you did so out of genuine concern for its inhabitants, and not from a perspective of grandstanding or opportunism. We are all proud of what the Egyptian people have achieved Mr. Rudd, and I believe we can all agree that sharing in their revolutionary euphoria is legitimate so long as words are corroborated with action.

I referred to you as something of a social media aficionado; I see now you have more than 1 million followers on Twitter. You (or, more likely, a member of staff) tweet with pleasing regularity. The problem that myself and many other users have encountered in recent days is that our messages about Austin’s predicament seem to be passing you by. I have no evidence to suggest your engagement with micro-blogging is a misguided attempt to stay relevant to a younger electorate and continue the slow dissemination of 140 characters of valedictory spin, but you will – I hope – forgive the thought having crossed my mind these past few days.

I know that your schedule as the Foreign Minister of Australia is extremely taxing on the time and concentration of yourself and your team, and for that I sympathise. There are surely complicated diplomatic considerations at play, out of the view of the general public, which need to be taken into account before the Foreign Minister can utter so much as a word on the situation. But to have successive requests for assistance ignored, and to see your country’s mission in Egypt respond in so underwhelming a manner to the plight of one of its citizens has, I am afraid to say, sapped most of our patience with the quiet diplomacy approach.

While I appreciate that there must be a fair amount of hysterical requests bombarding you at the time of writing, I am fortunate enough to be a trained and qualified journalist. So, Mr. Rudd, for your guidance, the facts:

Austin Mackell is being wrongly investigated for crimes that could carry a significant punishment. His passport has been confiscated and a travel ban is in place. He has been threatened on the street and propaganda insinuating to the public that such treatment is tacitly approved by the state has appeared in newspapers and on television. His accommodation has been raided and he is currently homeless. He is a journalist and an Australian citizen. You are the Foreign Minister of Australia. You can do something about this.

There is no need for me to point out Austin’s total innocence; the courts will, I have faith, eventually determine this truth in an official capacity. Nor do I need to mention the thousands of human rights abuses and unlawful arrests that continue within Egypt, for they are not my concern within this letter (and you follow Egyptian affairs closely as it is).

I do hope my take on your silence on the matter so far has been accurate and received in the hopeful manner it was conceived. I would hate to think that a politician of your standing and gravitas would be so pusillanimous as to deliberately ignore requests for assistance.

I remain firmly convinced the former is the case. But I think it is only fair to tell you, Mr. Rudd, that we will not let this drop; that the case of Austin Mackell is not something you will be able to avoid or ignore indefinitely. We will keep up the noise, and you will have to listen. If you do so voluntarily, then I shall be pleased for Austin and pleased that my initial assessment of your compassion and professionalism was correct after all.

Yours Sincerely

Patrick Galey

Tags: Austin Mackell, Cairo, Egypt, freealiya, freeaustin, freederek, freekamel, Kevin Rudd, press freedom, SCAF

Egypt’s football riots

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It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories. As soon as the news broke that dozens of fans had been killed during a football match in Port Said, Twitter became flooded with people trying to rationalise the horrific violence. The incident had, variously, all the hallmarks of Mubarak, SCAF, the Ministry of Interior, the ultras, foreigners.

I took a trip up to Port Said this afternoon, and the mood was among the tensest I’ve experienced. It’s not unusual to be accused of being a spy here by people in the street, but there was sustained and genuine hostility towards me and other members of the media. The most striking thing, as was the case watching footage of the killings last night, was the absence of anything resembling law enforcement or security activity.

Tags: Alhy, Cairo, Egypt, Feb2, football, Masry, Mohammed Mahmoud, Port Said, riots, Tahrir, ultras

Pictures from last week

A busy week here. I realised that I took a helluva lot of photos, so here’s some of them from the week that Egypt marked its anniversary.

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Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, revolution, Tahrir

Friday of anger turns irritable

Jan. 25 is the date that the revolution began, and hundreds of thousands of Egyptians marked its anniversary this week. But ask anyone who participated in the uprising and they will likely tell you than Jan. 28 was when Egypt changed irrevocably. It was a violent and damaging day, but one full of significant and tangible gains for the revolutionaries.

Today was again dubbed the Friday of Rage, and saw protestors convene in their thousands in Tahrir and outside Maspero after coordinating several marches across Cairo.

I mentioned in my Jan. 25 post that the various motivations of the million or so people in Tahrir had produced tension, and today I saw a continuation – indeed, an escalation – of that.

Tags: Cairo, Egypt, FridayofRage, Jan25, Muslim Brotherhood, revolution, Tahrir

“This is a revolution, not a party”

One of the most frequently stressed aspects of Egypt’s fractious and flawed transition to democracy is that Islamist parties have gained the most from the revolution. With two-thirds of the People’s Assembly vote going their way, governments and commentators from the  Western Hemisphere have been vocal in the need for administrations across the world to support a Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Noor led parliament. We will support the Islamists, the caveat always runs, as long as their power is representative of public opinion. It has been an awkward shift for major players such as the US to undertake, with the realisation that Islamism is not diametrically opposed to democracy. Islamists love democracy in Egypt; they win.

Tags: Al-Noor, Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, Mubarak, Muslim Brotherhood, revolution, SCAF, Tahrir

The Revolution Continues

It has been a year since the revolution. 365 days have passed since civilians across Egypt took advantage of a national holiday (Police Day, ironically) to take to the streets with a simple, triple-pronged demand: Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.

I went down to Tahrir Square – the spiritual home of the revolution – twice, once in the morning for Fagr prayers and once as part of a mass march from Mustafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandaseen, accompanied by (@austingmackell) and (@aliyaalwi). I will post a longer piece soon, but for now, here are some shots of today.

Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, Mubarak, revolution, Tahrir, Tantawi

Mad graffiti week: Azooz in Heliopolis

Heading in to the first anniversary of #Jan25, artists in Cairo have called for a “Mad Graffiti Week”. The idea is to intensify the graffiti work that has been daubed in downtown Cairo for the past year, and to spread the images outside of Tahrir. It is partly display of solidarity with protestors who have been killed or wounded in the ongoing unrest, and partly a riposte to the security services for painting over large swathes of stencilling that had appeared in the areas surrounding the square. Mad Graffiti Week is so mad, in fact, that it lasts a whole 10 days.

I went to meet an artist participating in MGW, in Heliopolis, close to Cairo Airport. He is a student at a nearby university, but since the revolution has taken up graffiti. The surrounding area is lit up with stencils of everything from Jim Morrison to lizards. Most are the work of Azooz.

Most of his work is light-hearted; he mainly focusses on music, but his pieces, somewhat unavoidably, have a political frisson. The work above, which he allowed me to film being painted, reads “We need tear gas with flavours,” a reference to the use by security forces on protestors at recent clashes in Tahrir.

Azooz doesn’t class himself in the same league as other artist/activist hybrids, some of whom have received stiff jail sentence for inflammatory or subversive work. He and his flatmate, Mahmoud, operate happily in broad daylight, without so much as look over the shoulder at nearby police officers.

The pair claim they are going to intensify their work over the coming few days, and hope to make it into town proper to graffiti close to Tahrir Square. There are many others like Azooz, and I will try and document some of their works leading up to the anniversary.

Some of Azooz's handiwork. The Arabic reads: "The people need tear gas in flavours"

Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, mad graffiti week, tear gas

Tahrir Square, Jan 13, 2012 (video and images)

With just two more Fridays left before Egypt marks the one year anniversary of its Jan 25 revolution, I headed down to Tahrir Square, where supporters of imprisoned army officers were demonstrating, demanding their release. Far more people there than this time last week. I’m still following up on their cases.

Some pics from today:

Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, protest, Tahrir

Kazeboon in Sphinx Square, Cairo (photos)

You’ve probably all heard about Kazeboon, an initiative aimed at getting activism operative outside of Tahrir Square. The organisers display films of army violence against protestors in the past year. Here are some pictures I took at the one held this evening, in Sphinx Square, Mohandaseen.

For more photos go to: http://www.flickr.com/people/patrickgaley/

For more on Kazeboon go to: www.facebook.com/pages/Kazeboon-كاذبون/249589071773470

Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Jan25, Kazeboon, Tahrir

Jimmy Carter comes to Shubra

Former US President Jimmy Carter at voting station in Shubra

Former US President and long-time monitor of elections in fledgling democracies Jimmy Carter is in town for a couple of days to take a look at voting for the People’s Assembly run offs. His group, the Carter Centre, has had 40 election monitors in Egypt since the first round of voting in November.

The Carter Centre organised press access to a voting station today at an all girls school in Shubra. Carter himself looked a little exasperated at the media scrum, even telling one reporter that all he’d been able so see so far were “cameras in my face.”

Carter has an obvious tie with Egypt, given his mediation between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that led to the signing of the Camp David Accords and the eventual peace treaty between the states.

I asked him about the peace treaty. He responded:

I believe the treaty will be observed no matter who gets elected.

Which is probably true – it at least seems like the majority won by the FJP is unlikely to renege.

Carter will unveil his official findings on the PA elections on Friday.

Tags: Cairo, Camp David, Egypt, Jan25, Jimmy Carter, Tahrir