Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the grassroots peace and social justice organization CODEPINK, was detained by border police in the Cairo airport on Monday.
Benjamin, an American citizen and peace activist, was on her way to join an international delegation of women traveling to Gaza for International Women’s Day 2014 to show solidarity with the women of Gaza.
Held overnight in a detention cell in the airport, Egyptian police reportedly used excessive force when detaining and handcuffing Benjamin. She sustained injuries that include a fractured arm, a dislocated shoulder and torn ligaments in her shoulder.
During her time in detention, Benjamin had access to a cellphone. She used it to contact colleagues at CODEPINK about the poor conditions of the cell and chronicled her ordeal on Twitter.
Her first tweet around 8 p.m. CST on March 3 said, “I’m being held in a jail at Cairo airport!!!”
She later tweeted what her cell looked like, the food she and her other four cellmates had been given — dirty stale bread and dirty water — and shared how one woman she was sharing the detention cell with was moaning all night in pain, but the guards refused to let her see a doctor.
Around 3 a.m. CST on March 4, Benjamin tweeted, “Help. They broke my arm. Egypt police.”
According to CODEPINK, doctors in the Cairo airport said Benjamin was not fit to travel because of her injury, but authorities forced her to board an airplane anyway. She was sent back to Istanbul, Turkey, where she departed from on Monday, when she flew to Egypt.
In Istanbul, Benjamin called her colleagues at CODEPINK, with whom she was attempting to update via Twitter while in her Cairo cell.
“I was brutally assaulted by Egyptian police, who never said what I was being accused of,” Benjamin told MintPress News. “When the authorities came into the cell to deport me, two men threw me to the ground, stomped on my back, pulled my shoulder out of its socket and handcuffed me so that my injured arm was twisted around and my wrists began to bleed.
“I was then forced to sit between the two men who attacked me on the plane ride from Cairo to Istanbul, and I was (and still am) in terrible pain the whole time.”
Alli McCracken, national coordinator for CODEPINK, said she recently spoke to Benjamin. She said the peace activist was not in great condition, and was waiting to be seen by a doctor at a hospital in Turkey. She said that although Benjamin is in “excruciating pain,” the doctors in Turkey are giving her a hard time.
Benjamin has seen a doctor, who gave her another shot of painkiller to relieve her pain, and said they plan to take an MRI of her arm as well.
The orders to deport Benjamin back to the U.S. are still in effect, but the next flight to the U.S. from Turkey doesn’t leave until Wednesday, March 5. Benjamin is expected to return around 6:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday. Until then, Benjamin said she will be at the airport hospital in Istanbul.
McCracken said it’s not known why Benjamin was immediately detained when she arrived at the Cairo airport or why she was deported. Though Benjamin has experienced a fair share of intense political situations, McCracken said the peace activist has never encountered a situation quite like this and called the Egyptian authorities’ treatment of Benjamin “unacceptable.”
Benjamin said she wasn’t detained by the Egyptian authorities until she gave them her passport. “I was taken aside and brought into separate room,” where she was held for seven hours, she said. “I was then put into a jail cell where I was held overnight.”
Throughout the ordeal, no one ever explained why Benjamin had been detained.
After spending the night in a cold cell, Benjamin said “five scary-looking men” tried to take her away. She told them that personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo were coming for her, which is what Embassy officials had told her colleagues. Despite this claim, authorities dragged Benjamin out of the cell and aggressively tackled her to the ground, which is when she sustained her injuries.
Shouting and screaming as she was escorted through the Cairo airport because of the excruciating pain she was experiencing, Benjamin said an Egyptian doctor told the police that she needed to go to the hospital and shouldn’t travel, but says her security escorts refused.
Luckily, Benjamin said, there was an orthopedic surgeon on her plane from Egypt to Turkey, who gave her a shot of painkiller and put her arm back in place.
Several members of CODEPINK contacted the U.S. Embassy in Cairo several times about Benjamin’s case, but McCracken stressed that no U.S. official has done anything, and questioned how helpful anyone at the U.S. Embassy is.
Benjamin agreed that the U.S. Embassy was less than helpful, given that she was asking for assistance getting to a hospital, and said that although she was held from 8:30 p.m. until around 11 a.m. the next day, and experienced an hour-long delay on the tarmac, officials from the U.S. Embassy were “missing in action the entire time.”
Benjamin was traveling to Egypt to meet up with 99 other women who were attempting to travel to Gaza for International Women’s Day 2014. Their trip was meant to bring attention to the unbearable suffering caused by the Israeli blockade, educate people, push for the opening of the Gaza borders and deliver solar lamps to help with the electricity shortage.
The group was scheduled to meet in Cairo on March 5 and attempt to enter Gaza on March 6. Due to political and security issues, the delegates were aware that they may not be allowed to travel to Gaza. Still, 100 women, including Benjamin, felt it was worthwhile to at least try to visit Gaza in order to witness the hardships facing the 1.7 million residents, deliver humanitarian aid and call attention to the need for a more long-term strategy to achieve peace and justice for Palestinians.
As of the writing of this article, the other 99 delegates who were scheduled to go to Gaza with Benjamin still planned to do so.
McCracken said she and others at CODEPINK hope no one else from the delegation is stopped in Cairo. The ordeal has been a Catch-22 for the organization, she said, because while they want everyone to know what the Egyptian authorities did and how they treated Benjamin, they don’t want to negatively affect the delegates’ ability to travel through Egypt.