Explaining
Egypt's Targeting of Gays
Hossam Bahgat
Note:
Hossam Bahgat, author of this article, was
dismissed from his position at the Egyptian Organization for Human
Rights two days after it was published. EOHR's secretary-general
has commented in the Egyptian press that he won't defend the 52
men arrested on the Queen Boat because he doesn't "like the
subject of homosexuality." MERIP urges EOHR to respect and
defend the rights of all people, in accordance with international
standards and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
July 23, 2001
The
trial of 52 suspected gay men on charges of immorality, which opened
in Cairo on July 18, signaled an end to long years of discreet and
quietly tolerated public activity by the Egyptian gay community.
Standing in a cage in a small, crowded courtroom, the defendants
were testament to a deep political crisis faced by an insecure regime,
a threatened gay community, a mediocre press and a shattered rights
movement.
The 52 men,
along with three others who were released without being officially
charged, were arrested May 11 on the Queen Boat, a tourist boat
moored on the Nile in Cairo. The boat has long been a known gathering
place for the Egyptian gay community. What motivated the sudden
crackdown? Although the Egyptian regime has been utterly unpredictable
lately -- most notably with the strangely harsh sentence for human
rights advocate and dual Egyptian-US citizen Saad Eddin Ibrahim
-- observers agree that something must have impelled state security
forces to raid a tourist discotheque at a time when Egypt's economy,
which depends heavily on tourism revenue, is still struggling to
overcome the fallout from the 1997 Luxor massacre.
DISTRACTING
THE PUBLIC
One motive
is certainly to divert public attention from economic recession
and the government's liquidity crisis. According to official statistics,
at least 23 million of Egypt's 65 million people live under the
poverty line. Last year, poor Egyptians watched their purchasing
power sink due to devaluation of the Egyptian pound. The huge media
frenzy over the Queen Boat case has distracted people while the
government introduces additional sales taxes, despite private sector
complaints about a severe drop in sales. Two other sensational cases
have also crowded out economic issues. Days after the Queen Boat
raid, a businessman was referred to the criminal court for having
been married to 17 women. Shortly afterwards, a banned videotape
that shows a former Coptic priest having sex with women who came
to his monastery to seek healing was leaked, many think by state
security, to the press, leading to Coptic demonstrations, clashes
with security forces and a series of newspaper articles and state
security trials.
According
to lawyers for the 52 detainees, state security arbitrarily arrested
many men who were not on the Queen Boat on May 11, to inflate the
numbers arrested for the press. After the July 18 court session,
a beleaguered mother screamed: "He went out to buy me medicine
when [the police] arrested him." This would explain the almost
identical news reports published in the two weeks that followed
the raid. The reports, probably issued by state security sources,
described rituals of a Satan-worshipping cult and public orgies
allegedly taking place on the Queen Boat every Thursday night. By
the time the public prosecutor issued a statement denying these
reports, the goal had been achieved: the public was attentive. "The
case involves religious beliefs and morality, two elements that
have always succeeded in keeping people engaged for a long time,"
says Taher Abul Nasr, a lawyer from the Hisham Mubarak Law Center,
which represents four of the defendants.
FLASHING
CAMERAS
The semi-official
Egyptian media has always shown willingness to be used by the security
services in their fight for publicity. The heavy coverage of the
Queen Boat case brings to mind a similar case in 1997, when 78 teenage
men were arrested on charges of establishing a Satanic cult. They
were released after two months of detention, and the case was never
brought to the courts. Newspapers came under harsh criticism for
printing the names and pictures of the suspected devil-worshippers,
tarnishing their images despite their release. But in May, official,
opposition and independent newspapers published the names and professions
of the 55 Queen Boat defendants; some front pages carried their
pictures with the eyes crossed over in black.
On July 18,
families of the defendants punched and kicked photographers who
tried desperately to take pictures of the men before, during and
after the court session. "Filthy press. You fabricated the
whole story," relatives shouted at journalists. Fathers and
mothers who came to see their sons could not, since the handcuffed
defendants were covering their heads with scraps of newspaper, plastic
bags and towels to avoid the flashing cameras. Publishing details
concerning an ongoing investigation or trial that might influence
the course of the proceedings is prohibited by both the Press Law
96/1996 and the Code of Ethics issued by the Egyptian Journalists'
Syndicate.
"ISLAMIC
VALUES"
But the state's
motivations to raid the Queen Boat may run deeper than the pursuit
of photo opportunities for the police. The May 11 assault on gay
men fits into the regime's efforts to present an image as the guardian
of public virtue, to deflate an Islamist opposition movement that
appears to be gaining support every day. Last November, the outlawed
Muslim Brotherhood sent 17 new members to parliament, outnumbering
the representatives of all the official opposition parties put together.
Earlier this year, the Brotherhood's list of candidates swept the
elections for the Bar Association's board. To counter this ascending
power, the state resorts to sensational prosecutions, in which the
regime steps in to protect Islam from evil apostates. Article 98
of the Penal Code, which criminalizes "contempt of heavenly
religions," was used by the state prosecutor twice last year,
against writer Salaheddin Mohsen and female preacher Manal Manea.
This June, prominent feminist writer Nawal Al Saadawi was interrogated
by the public prosecutor under the same law, regarding views she
expressed in a press interview. The charge was dropped, though a
maverick Islamist lawyer is still trying to divorce Al Saadawi from
her husband.
Last month,
the front pages of official local newspapers carried headlines hailing
Egypt's position "in defense of Islamic values" at the
UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS. At the session,
Egypt led several other Islamic countries in a failed attempt to
ban the only representative from a gay and lesbian organization,
the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, from
taking part in the official roundtable on HIV/AIDS and human rights.
Later, the Egyptian delegation to the UN succeeded in deleting a
sentence from the final declaration of the session, which mentioned
gay men and lesbians as a vulnerable population at high risk for
HIV infection. These "Islamic" positions raised the eyebrows
of Egyptians accustomed to a foreign policy which had only stressed
"Islamic values" at the low-profile, and mostly meaningless,
meetings of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The regime
seems to have realized that suppression and persecution of Islamists
will not uproot the Islamist threat unless it is combined with actions
that bolster the state's religious legitimacy.
GOING WITH
THE FLOW
Egyptian human
rights organizations have found themselves in an awkward position
during the Queen Boat case. Activists felt bound to take a stand,
especially after international groups like Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch issued statements condemning the Queen Boat
arrests. But instead of playing the vanguard role in explaining
the rights dimension of the case, most of them chose to go with
the flow to avoid being attacked in the local press. Moreover, many
human rights activists volunteered to express homophobic views to
the press, and attacked the international organizations who took
more positive positions (one has even decided to write a book about
how gay rights are not really human rights). They deliberately chose
to ignore reports that the suspects were tortured and ill-treated
to extract confessions that they were homosexuals and were on the
Queen Boat at the time of the raid. Even the fact that police officers
broke into a public place and arrested all the Egyptian men inside,
while pointedly leaving foreigners and women alone, did not bring
any response from local rights groups.
Most human
rights activists in Egypt are former political activists, who took
up human rights work when it became clear that legal and illegal
opposition groups would not shake the powerful state. Since human
rights groups are accused by the state of following a Western agenda,
they are often more anxious to gain popular support than to take
up controversial rights cases. Asked about his position on the Queen
Boat case, a leader of one legal aid association spoke of "red
lines" that human rights groups should not cross in their defense
of civil liberties. By toeing these self-imposed "red lines,"
some human rights groups try to send a message to the regime that
the rights movement will stand by the state against foreign pressures.
MORE MONITORING
AHEAD
When asked
for an explanation of the May 11 assault, members of the local gay
community refer to the recent establishment of the Internet Crimes
Unit at the Interior Ministry. Gay men recount several incidents
that took place in the two months preceding the Queen Boat event,
in which gay men were set up for arrest through fake dates from
the Internet. Several gay websites were closed down, and most Egyptian
gays now avoid gay chat rooms and matchmaking websites. Gay men
believe that the government has decided to step in after months
of monitoring their sites and clubs. The cyber-interaction of Egyptian
gay men with their Western peers seems to have led the former to
become more vocal about their rights. Given that any potential for
citizen organization is considered a threat to national security
by the government, the Queen Boat case could presage greater surveillance
of the mounting number of young Egyptians who use the Internet --
now more than 1.5 million.
Lawyers for
the defense sound optimistic as they wait for the next session to
begin on August 15. But the local gay community has chosen to keep
an even lower profile until the storm passes overhead. Initial speculations
that the Queen Boat incident would turn into the Egyptian Stonewall
have proven unwarranted. Egyptian gay men lack the motivation to
challenge a societal and religious taboo, at the risk of losing
their jobs, families, friends and social status, as well as spending
up to five years in prison, knowing that nobody will support their
struggle.
|