CAIRO: Thirty-five more students were arrested in what has been described as a “hostile and aggressive crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated students. The arrests provoked different reactions among students, and many have risen in rowdy protests while others have chosen to be less vocal in their anger.
“No to the emergency law, one banner read at a Helwan University protest, where hundreds of students staged a demonstration in reaction to last Sunday’s wave of arrests targeting at least 43 of their fellow students at Assiut University “in the absence of charges, students claim.
However on Monday, the same day of their protest, 35 others were arrested, raising the toll to around 78 in only a few days.
According to press reports, many of the students were arrested at their homes at dawn when security units searched houses and confiscated books and documents.
According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), around 14 were caught “as they gathered outside an Assiut court awaiting news regarding the cases of other Muslim Brotherhood members who had been arrested and interrogated since Sunday morning.
Also according to DPA, detained students come from different disciplines including the colleges of engineering, commerce, law, agriculture and even Al-Azhar University.
As much as these arrests have inflamed anger among students of the “Muslim Brotherhood trend, many others said a crackdown was “somehow expected.
“The Muslim Brotherhood has always been targeted by the [government], therefore such arrests are not new to us, said Seif Mohammed, an engineering student and a Brotherhood student leader at Ain Shams University. “However, I have to acknowledge that the timing is strange and the number of those arrested is the most shocking. Never has such a big number of students been arrested in a short period.
According to Mohammed, each academic year “begins with a minor wave of arrests targeting Brotherhood students. However, the group was almost never approached at any other time. “We have finals coming up in the next few weeks . the students who were arrested were not taken from Brotherhood camps, but from their own houses, from the streets. It is unusual.
“Clearly, it is the security units’ way to silence the Brotherhood at a time when we are most active. The [government] can’t eliminate our influence so they start detaining us.
“However, we will not let such arrests prevent us from activity, Mohammed told The Daily Star Egypt, adding that most of the students in Cairo have decided not to respond with demonstrations.
According to the young leader, Brotherhood students around Cairo are at a critical moment.
“We will never cease to talk to the press, said Mohammed. “But our activities as Brothers will continue as always. We have a reform project at Ain Shams and a plan that we intend to follow to the end . the threat of the arrests will not deter or distract us.
According to Mohammed, most of the younger Brotherhood members realize they are threatened. “We are afraid. But the fear will not paralyze us. We will not even stop protesting and we will concentrate more on our work as a group.
Brotherhood student arrests were immediately preceded by detentions of some senior members in Alexandria and Cairo, including some Brotherhood leaders. The detentions sparked wide criticism of the government by Brotherhood members.
The arrests are but an escalation by the Egyptian government [against the Brothers] in response to the Islamist movement s activities in parliament, said their official Web site.
The banned-but-tolerated group scored a recent success in upper-house elections, where 88 seats out of the assembly’s 454 are claimed by the Brotherhood; who now constitute the bulk of the opposition. In many instances, the members have challenged the government and criticized the National Democratic Party (NDP) policies.
In previous upper-house sessions, the movement’s representatives had exerted pressure on the government on issues like freedom of the press, the release of prisoners of conscience – especially those held without proper trials – and the elimination of the decades-long emergency law.
Emergency law has governed the country since the assassination of former president Anwar El-Sadat in 1981. The NDP had initially endorsed the law during the 1967 war with Israel. However, since 1981, the law has been renewed and extended a reported 13 times.
According to the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, “the state of emergency was due to expire [many times] . However, faced with growing opposition to the law, the government prematurely rushed the extension through [parliament]. The government utilized the international and regional context as justifications for renewing the state of emergency.
Under the emergency law, cases involving terrorism and threats to national security are usually taken to military or state security emergency courts, “in which the accused do not receive all the constitutional protections of the civilian judicial system, according to the organization’s Web site. Arrests and detentions are also allowed, without pressing immediate charges.
The government has recently announced its intention of removing the long-criticized emergency law, promising to enact an anti-terror bill to replace it. Critics have said that the new law fighting terrorism is “the emergency law with a new name. Many have also expressed the opinion that it would be used for the same purpose as its predecessor; to silence or quash government opposition.
