With its one-month anniversary around the corner and attacks on its
participants only increasing, tensions are high at the Rabea al-Adaweya
Muslim Brotherhood sit-in, defiance now sharing the air with paranoia
and suspicion. Reports of the torturing of “infiltrators” by the
sit-in’s members have by this point been confirmed—the same cannot be
said of claimed sightings of bodies being removed from the area.
Meanwhile, another form of escalation seems to be taking place.
Speaking to Mada Masr under condition of anonymity, 40-year-old Tarek
Badr (not his real name) describes how his efforts to renew a driver’s
license last Monday resulted in his temporary detainment and physical
abuse.
“Obviously, that whole area is part of the [pro-Morsi] sit-in, they’ve
occupied the entrance to that building as well,” Badr says of the Nasr
City Traffic/Motor Registry Department, which stands directly adjacent
to the mosque around which the sit-in was formed. “I went down alone but
there were several other people there, trying to get their paperwork
done as well.”
The group attempted to access the building, but “people began to gather
around us, telling us that we had to accept Morsi as our president and
that we were doing Islam a huge disservice by not respecting him enough.
We told them we just wanted to get our paperwork done, and that it
shouldn’t take more than an hour if they’d let us through.”
Meanwhile a side conversation was going on, one which Badr thought
“seemed to have been started by a resident of [the buildings currently
besieged by the sit-in] who had been trying to reason with the
protestors.” Volunteers from the sit-in’s security team then showed up
(“I could tell because of their helmets and padded vests”) and asked
some questions before rounding up 13 of the outsiders and escorting them
from the scene.
“It wasn’t directly forceful, the way they took us,” he says. “But it
didn’t have to be—it’s their sit-in, their territory. The group that
moved the 13 of us consisted of ten or fewer individuals but what are
you going to do?”
As they moved through the sit-in, “none of its members seemed to notice
or care about what was going on, or had any objection about the fact
that we were clearly being lead somewhere.”
The 13 men were then lined up along the wall of a public school across
from the Motor Registry Department, somewhat removed from the heart of
the sit-in. “They made us face the wall as they searched us, and took
our wallets and phones. They struck us on our backs and necks with
sticks and their bare hands. The whole time they were questioning us—not
for anything useful, just to understand how and why we were not
accepting Morsi as our ‘master’—that’s the word they used. They called
us the ‘enemies of Islam’.”
Although some of the men attempted to object to their treatment, Badr
suffered silently. “I could see what happened with the people who spoke
up—they just got struck for it, and harsher insults. And I thought of
what I’ve seen in the news recently—I didn’t want to have my fingers
amputated, or worse. And for what? There is no conversation that could
have been had, no room for any sort of discussion.”
“I did want to ask them, though: Why all this? Why build a so-called
Islamic state in a public square? Aren’t we all Egyptians, and isn’t
this a Muslim country? Why is it that you’re in a country yet all you
can see of it is this square? At the very least, welcome the people who
come to this square, then. Don’t terrorize and antagonize them.”
“But I said nothing,” he admits.
The 13 men—“two of whom seemed under 30, one was definitely over 50,
and the rest in the middle”—were then divided into two groups. “They
took eight of us away from the school, and I could tell the five that
stayed behind were the ones deemed responsible for starting that
conversation earlier.”
“To be honest, I can’t remember the faces of any of the other men,” he
says. “But the older man was among the five kept at the school.”
Away from the school, the men were given LE20 each, told to return to
the sit-in after iftar to reclaim their possessions, and finally
released. “I didn’t want to go back there, obviously,” Badr claims. “I
made some calls, searching for someone who might have a reliable contact
within the Brotherhood to go back with me to Rabaa.”
The following morning he returned to the sit-in with a sympathetic
Brother, he says, and was directed to a “lost items” stand where, from a
plastic bag, a sit-in volunteer returned a wallet minus its money and
one of two cellular phones.
“I thanked them for their courtesy and accommodation, and left,” he
says. “Of course, they tried to apologize, claiming that the whole
situation was just a giant misunderstanding and that this isn’t the way
the Muslim Brotherhood operates, it’s just the pressure they were
under—of course, there was none of this talk the previous day.”
Similar statements were made by the son of a leading Brotherhood figure
who also spoke to Mada Masr under condition of anonymity. “There is
torture that goes on in the sit-in, but I was surprised to find out
about it. I’ve since seen it—the amputations, the electrocution—that
stuff is real. But it is not condoned, nor an official position. There’s
little supervision on the sit-in and things can get out of hand.”
The son—who claims to no longer be a member of the group—feels the need
to point out that “the Brothers who got arrested while taking a torture
victim to the hospital, they were the ones who actually freed that man
from the square—they’re my friends, that’s how I found out about all
this.”
But these claims do little to placate those who survived what can be
considered much milder abuses at the heart of the Islamist sit-in. “I
was called an infidel countless times,” he says. “The enthusiasm
displayed by [those men] for verbal and physical abuse is incredible,
and that’s what upset me the most—that and the fact that there was
nothing to justify their behavior. In fact, it seemed like they wanted
to provoke something from us—to have us give them a reason.”
Between repeated calls by significant segments of the population for
the clearing of the Islamist sit-ins, echoed in ultimatums by the Armed
Forces and proposals by the government—the most recent of which being a
siege to “starve out” the protestors—members of the sit-in likely feel
they already have all the reasons they need to in order to justify their
stance. Others, including Badr, disagree. “A true Islamist state—like
the one they claim to have created in Rabaa—would accept people and
invite conversation,” he suggests. “Instead, they reject both.”
