By Rania Al Malky
CAIRO: Last Monday was the first anniversary commemorating the brutal killing of 28-year-old Khaled Saeid in Alexandria. The photo of the young man whose badly disfigured face galvanized a critical mass of Egyptians against police brutality, transporting their virtual activism to the real world and who has yet to be avenged in the courtroom, still reminds us of how different Egypt is now to what it was like a year ago.
It’s been a tumultuous four months to the day since ousted president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and while many of the developments inside Egypt have been positive, many incidents still remain an enigma.
This week kicked off with a violent confrontation between citizens who tried to storm the notorious Azbakeya police station (which was burnt down by protesters on Jan. 29) and central security police attempting to protect it, following rumors that a microbus driver was killed inside while in police custody. Another version of the story was that an altercation between the driver and a policeman escalated to verbal abuse which led random onlookers to beat the microbus driver to death.
A similar confrontation took place in Omraneya between a policeman and a tok-tok driver’s brother who was shot by the policeman three times in the stomach allegedly for demanding a receipt for the LE 200 he paid for a traffic offence, which the latter refused to give. The policeman obviously had a completely different version of the story, saying that the man was about to assault him with a knife when he was “forced to shoot” in self-defense.
Notwithstanding the truth of what precisely happened in both cases — even for the media it is very difficult to figure out the exact truth amid such conflicting reports — the result is that one man was killed and a second was not only shot three times, but was also inhumanly handcuffed to a hospital bed following a six-hour surgery and less than two weeks later was thrown on the floor of a cramped jail cell with an indefinite number of other “criminals” pending investigation. Somehow he had become the culprit not the victim.
It’s a mystery how such incidents are still taking place four months on. There is no question that the police has been targeted in many revenge-inspired assaults by individuals who may have broken the law, and that with the collapse of the former police state, the lawlessness and chaos in which we lived has become more prominent. What is not justifiable, however, is the speed with which the Ministry of Interior comes up with statements denying any wrongdoing even before the most preliminary investigation is undertaken.
Worse still is the persistent lack of respect for basic human rights that the police system in general continues to exhibit in situations which do not require the restructuring of the entire institution before implementation. Treating an injured person humanely does not need a human rights charter, neither does it require a sovereign decree by the interior minister to realize that a man who was shot in the stomach three times should not be thrown in a communal cell; even if he did engage in criminal behavior, he is still innocent until proven guilty.
The Ministry of Interior must undergo a complete paradigm shift to erase the residues of the past, deep-seated animosity between the people and the police force. The need to appear tough on crime does not justify resorting to old tactics and playing into the real, but somewhat exaggerated sense of insecurity that has pervaded every home and every neighborhood in Egypt. A zero tolerance policy for any kind of police aggression, whether verbal or physical must become the mantra of the interior ministry effective now.
The fact that Egypt is still operating under emergency law and that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is still subjecting civilians to military trials is no doubt encouraging this setback in the attitude of the police towards citizens.
Our next challenge? An end to emergency law and the implementation of the legal ban on military trials for civilians without delay.
Rania Al Malky is the Chief Editor of Daily News Egypt.
