Egypt

Yesterday, the prison department sent me a delegate to inform me about the ratification of the sentence against me of the military court to 3 years, charged with offending the military establishment reputation.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWpKuSWkNqc width:160 height:98 align:right]

Interview with Maikel Nabal Sanad, recorded shortly before his arrest on 28 March 2011

Maikel Nabil is jailed in the Magr prison, in a small cell. The cell is called a reformatory, and is know as "the trial," where he stays for days without seeing sunlight. He is also not allowed to get out of
the cell for any exercise. The guard interacts with Maikel only once in 24 hours, when he opens the cell at 12pm to hand Maikel his one daily meal. Then he locks 6 metal doors on the way out.

Maikel is then left in that cell with three extremely dangerous criminals. He has been threatened explicitly by one of his cellmates that "one of these days, I will cut your face with a razor."

Dear WRI supporter,

As authoritarian rulers are finally toppled after decades in power, we have all been reminded of the power a united population can wield through nonviolent action. And again we have seen that the cynical support for dictatorship in the name of stability is a recipe for repression and injustice.

At the same time, there are two grave challenges arising from the events in North Africa and the Middle East for those of us who advocate nonviolent action and campaign against government policies that pursue unprincipled alliances of convenience and arms trading.

Repression in (post)-revolutionary Egypt

On 7 March, a few weeks after the resignation of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, Maikel Nabil Sanad wrote this sentence in a detailed article on his blog [1]. In this article he analysed in detail the role of the Egyptian military during and after the revolution, and came to the conclusion that the people and the military never “were one hand” - as people said so often during the revolution.

An Egyptian military court sentenced pacifist blogger and conscientious objector Maikel Nabil Sanad on 10 April to three years' imprisonment on charges of "insulting the military". Maikel Nabil Sanad was arrested at his home by military police on 28 March 2011, The military court ordered his detention for 15 days, pending the investigation.

On 28 March 2011 Maikel Nabil Sanad, a blogger, pacifist, and conscientious objector, was arrested by military police at his home, on charges of “insulting the military”, “spreading false information”, and “obstructing public security”. Less than two weeks later – on 10 April 2011 – he was convicted by a military court and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

The trial against Egyptian pacifist Maikel Nabil Sanad, who was arrested on 28 March 2011, and who appeared in front of the military court in Nasr City in Cairo on charges of "insulting the military by publishing false news about it" and "obstructing public security", came to a close on Sunday, 10 April 2011, with a sentence of three years' imprisonment. In an outrageous move by the military, family and friends waiting in front of the military court were told the trial was postponed, while in fact Maikel Nabil Sanad was being sentenced at the same time - alone.

War Resisters' International - an international network of more than 80 antimilitarist groups in more than 40 countries - declares:

We are sick and tired of military interventions that shield behind false "humanitarian motives" - be that in Libya or elsewhere.
We are sick and tired of the logic of violence as a form of resolving social and political conflicts.
Yet once again we have to address these themes as if nothing has been learnt in the last hundred years.

We absolutely reject foreign military intervention in Libya, whatever the excuse.

Its author, Maikel Nabil Sanad, arrested after publicizing his findings on the net.

Below is a summary of some of the main findings of his report. For the full report go to the War Resisters International website at: www.wri-irg.org

Note: Maikel Nabil Sanad, 25, lives in Cairo, and is a political activist and blogger. In April 2009 he founded the "No to Compulsory Military Service Movement". As a pacifist, he declared his conscientious objection to military service and demanded to be exempted from it. He was arrested on 12 November 2010, by military police, but released two days later, and finally exempted from military service on medical grounds. He participated in the Tahrir demonstrations from the start.

Activists tortured and killed by the army, even after Mubarak’s resignation (A study supported with documents)
Does the Egyptian Army stand alongside the revolution?

On 11 February 2011, after the President’s stepping-down speech that was delivered by Omar Suliman (Vice-President of the Republic, and the former head of the Egyptian intelligence), many Egyptians rushed to declaring victory and the completion of the revolution….

I regret having to say the following, mostly because many of those who spoke out are my friends, but people have the right to know the truth.

Some people wanted to take advantage of the presence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to get political positions by making deals with the Supreme Council. They knew that they could not achieve such positions through a regular democratic process. And some of them had connections with the secret service before the revolution, and supported the secret service by default (I don’t want to describe them as the Secret Service’s agents) and some others thought that the army was not a part of the July Military Regime! And people were therefore misled by the army declarations (Press Releases) and have accepted the army’s role in the transitional phase.

In the case of the detained Egyptian pacifist and conscientious objector Maikel Nabil Sanad, who is being tried on charged of "insulting the military by spreading false information" and "disturbing public security" [1], War Resisters' International has now sent an observer to Cairo, to attend the hearing at the military court on Sunday, 3 April 2011.