Another Black Day For Egypt

Please do whatever you can to stand in solidarity with Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed of the Qatar based Al-Jazeera broadcasting network to protest their innocence and their seven year prison sentences handed down by a discredited Cairo court today. It found them guilty of trumped up charges based on ridiculous 'evidence'. And if you know anyone who thinks that 'there is no smoke without fire', please disabuse them of that notion in this particular case entirely and ask them to simply accept that we are dealing with an authoritarian regime determined on making a political point against its sworn enemies at the cost of human rights.

And that abuse includes the horrors of putting men into a tight cell for seven years with only an hour's exercise per day and the near certainty of them being abused in some way. Such is life in a Cairo prison at the moment.

Shortly after the verdicts were announced, perhaps coincidentally, my area of the city became alive with police sirens and rushing vehicles with flashing blue lights atop. The traffic into Zamalek was at a near standstill later in the day, and a sense of a paranoid state bearing down on its citizens, at least for me, was greatly enhanced.

This sense was deepened by the government taking over two nationwide supermarket chains at the weekend as they are/were in the private ownership of individuals who belonged to the now illegal Muslim Brotherhood. It's basically as if Morrisons in the UK or Wallmart in the USA were requisitioned...they re-opened today with the same mangers in place but under direct government direction. My recent allusion here to Kristallnacht does not seem at all exaggerated now.

In other, almost irrelevant, news, today I drafted the prologue to the book I am hoping to write on Egypt during these turbulent times. It seems strange not to be sharing it here, like the other pieces I have written on the country over the last three years but I have drawn a time boundary around the journal entries I am going to draw on, so you will have to wait and see the finished product before reading today's piece, if I find a publisher, that is! It may have to be me!!

I liked this particular shot for today's blip, it was the last of the day.