WASHINGTON — “Last year I put my hands up like #Mike Brown did and the Egyptian police shot me twice with bullets my US gov’t paid for!” wrote Mohamed Soltan, 26, in a letter from a prison cell in Egypt.
“It pains me that this type of injustice is still taking place in America, and I wholeheartedly declare my solidarity with #Ferguson from my Egyptian solitary confinement dungeon,” he continues in the letter, posted to Twitter on Aug. 30.
Soltan, a dual U.S.-Egyptian national and a graduate of the Ohio State University, is currently imprisoned and on hunger strike in Cairo, Egypt, where his life is in danger because authorities have denied him continued medical care and put him in solitary confinement, according to Amnesty International. He was arrested on Aug. 25, 2013 for participating in a sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in Cairo, where he acted as an unofficial media spokesperson for the protesters.
He was not charged with any crime until a hearing in January. He is officially charged with “forming an operations room to direct the Muslim Brotherhood group to defy the government during the Rabaa sit-in dispersal,” according the Egyptian prosecutor general’s office, as reported by the Daily News Egypt. He is being charged along with 52 other defendants, and no evidence has been presented against him.
The Rabaa Square Massacre
The Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in was part of a series of protests that started following the ouster of Egypt’s democratically-elected President Mohammed Morsi on July 3, 2013. It culminated in the Egyptian military killing over 1,150 people, including protesters at a sit-in at Al-Nahda Square in Giza and smaller protests throughout the country, according to Human Rights Watch.
HRW concluded that “the killings not only constituted serious violations of international human rights law, but likely amounted to crimes against humanity, given both their widespread and systematic nature and the evidence suggesting the killings were part of a policy to attack unarmed persons on political grounds.”
“Our main concern is the political nature of the charges laid against him and his deteriorating situation, which the United States government doesn’t seem to be very vocal about,” said Charles Dunne, director of Middle East and North Africa programs at Freedom House, in an interview with MintPress News.
“This is part of the government’s overall vendetta against the Muslim Brotherhood after the coup last year in July.”
In a video posted to YouTube of Soltan, shot in January and addressed to President Barack Obama, Soltan says that before getting arrested he was documenting crimes against justice and humanity. He explains that he was trying to share his American values with “young Egyptians, hoping to build bridges between the two free generations, the very same youth that President Obama publicly praised following the January 25th [2011] revolution.”
“Essentially, my crime is doing exactly what I thought my president wanted me to do: learning from the Egyptian youth and sharing with them my experience of freedom,” he says.
Some Americans are more important than others
In 2012, 19 Americans working at non-governmental organizations in Egypt were accused of “manipulating the Egyptian political process and improperly collecting information to send home to the United States,” according to The New York Times. The groups included Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, where Sam LaHood was the country director. At the time, LaHood’s father, Ray Lahood, was the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. As a result of the groups’ federal connections, both financially and politically, the U.S. government became involved with the case, going so far as to threaten the $1.5 billion in annual aid disbursed to Egypt every year since 1979.
In a letter to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, 41 members of Congress wrote: “The absence of a quick and satisfactory resolution to this issue will make it increasingly difficult for congressional supporters of a strong U.S.-Egypt bilateral relationship to defend current levels of assistance to Egypt.”
It is also important to note that the organizations were illegal entities under Egyptian law at the time. The New York Times reported that year that “almost every independent human rights or advocacy group is unlicensed, foreign financed and therefore illegal.” Despite this, the United States was able to evacuate the Americans, who were taking refuge at the U.S. Embassy, before they were prosecuted.
Soltan references this incident in his video letter to Obama: “Your government moved mountains and sent a chartered plane to evacuate my fellow blond-haired, blue-eyed Americans, who were being detained by the same Egyptian military back in 2012, so why am I any different?”
Dunne said that the case for Freedom House was different because they were “operating with U.S. government funds to work on pro-democracy and pro-human rights activity.” While Soltan may have been conducting similar work, he was doing so without official sanction of the U.S. government. Dunne said that several of his people were interrogated by the authorities and the charges put against them were political, just like Soltan, but “[o]ur people were very fortunate not to be imprisoned, and not on the verge of a major health crisis.”
Soltan has been held for over one year without any evidence presented against him. In his video letter to Obama, he alludes to why he believes his case is different. He asks, “Is my life not worth anything to you? Has the life of American citizens become worthless? Or is it because my name is Mohamed?”
“With your continued silence, you, sir [Obama], are saying there are in fact different variations of American. And my type in this period and this time just happens to be the one that matters less or not at all,” he continues.
Soltan has political connections, too, but of a different nature. His father is a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, the political party deposed in the 2013 coup. The group was responsible for the sit-ins around the country and was banned after Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi took power. However, Mohamed Soltan is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Freedom House and The Washington Post.
On Sept. 19, the U.S. State Department said in a daily press briefing, “We continue to provide appropriate consular services to Mr. Soltan, including monitoring his health, pressing Egyptian authorities to ensure he has access to appropriate care, and maintaining regular access. We routinely seek consular visits with him and we arranged for him to be seen by an outside physician to assess his condition, and we continue to closely monitor this case and to raise it with Egyptian officials, urging the Egyptian Government to speedily present its evidence against him or to release him.”
His brother, Omar Soltan, tweeted a message to Obama on Wednesday saying Obama asked Egyptian President Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to release Soltan “on medical grounds and [the U.S.] embassy submitted [a] request to [the] prosecutors office that he be released, [the] court refuses.”
Life-threatening condition
Amnesty International issued a press release last month, stating that Egyptian authorities are putting Soltan’s life in danger “after more than 230 days on hunger strike, by denying him sustained medical care and placing him in solitary confinement.” He is reportedly only given medical care when he passes out, and then he is returned to his cell.
“Denying medical care to someone who is critically ill is not just callous and cruel, but blatantly unlawful,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa program.
Fatma Bayad, a physician with the U.S. Embassy, visited Soltan this spring. She said that he had lost about 70 pounds since beginning his hunger strike, according to a solidarity committee report in support of Soltan. She added that he was unable to walk.
Further, prior to going to Egypt, Soltan experienced two strokes due to a birth defect, explained the report, and so doctors have advised him to take anti-stroke medicine. “Bayad’s report stated that Soltan’s condition could be life-threatening due to his ongoing hunger strike,” it said.
Dunne told MintPress that “there’s about 41,000 people in prison, many of them supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were swept up in the protests and demonstrations after the events of the overthrow of Mohammed Morsi, and these people deserve full attention, too.”
He continued, “The difference here that I think should matter to the United States is that he is an American citizen. … The U.S. government has not been very vocal in demands for release of Mohamed Soltan.”
“If he dies, that’s going to be a major blot on the U.S.-Egyptian relationship,” said Dunne.
Soltan appeared in court on Wednesday, but the hearing was adjourned until Nov. 22.