Why troubles in egypt

Meanwhile, independent political parties, youth movements, media, and civil society organizations have been crushed, with the few courageous survivors being continually hounded.

The military now controls much of government contracting and has moved aggressively into profitable sectors previously dominated by private companies including cement, steel, and media. This very week, privately owned cement companies in Egypt are collapsing after a military company began flooding the market with cement.

As to the policy and spending priorities of this military-dominated regime, are they related to the life-and-death challenges facing the Egyptian people: population, water, food, jobs? Not really. A quick look at how Sisi has expended resources over the past five years shows that his attention has been fixed on megaprojects and arms purchases that build his stature and enrich his fellow officers.

Not only did Egypt not need a new capital, but the site makes it inaccessible to most citizens as well as extremely problematic from a water consumption point of view.

The city is being built by a military company with significant Chinese investment. Egypt was the third largest importer of weapons in the world from , more than doubling its percentage of imports compared to the previous five year period.

Egypt also received Apache attack helicopters and other advanced weaponry from the United States during the same period. While Egypt has legitimate security concerns—a long border with Libya as well as a terrorist insurgency in the Sinai—it is not at war.

While spending lavishly on megaprojects and weapons, Egypt under Sisi has also borrowed extensively at home and abroad. The combination of a rapidly growing, youthful Egyptian population whose needs are constantly frustrated with a small military elite that enriches itself while treating civilian concerns with contempt is combustible.

There have been several small outbursts of anti-Sisi popular protests, as well as signs of dissent within the military. It is a matter of time before there will be a large one. What the Congress perhaps did not foresee was how distorted the Egyptian system would eventually become and how the United States would become complicit in a military leadership crushing civilian freedoms and running the country strictly for its own benefit. There is also growing awareness that while Washington has serious and legitimate differences on a number of domestic and regional issues with almost all of its Middle Eastern allies, the United States cannot face regional challenges on its own, and must negotiate partnerships and burden-sharing with the allies it has in the region.

Egypt is indeed too big to fail, and while Cairo has a long way to go on essential economic and political reforms, it is strategically important to prevent a terrorist victory or an economic collapse in the country.

Egypt faces daunting challenges, and the United States has a keen interest in helping the most populous Arab nation overcome them. The Egyptian armed forces have denied the militant jihadist group their signature goal of setting up an independent polity in northern Sinai, as ISIS has done in other countries, but this has come at a very high cost to civilians. ISIS has reverted to al-Qaeda tactics of guerilla war, but is exacting a heavy price on Egyptian military and police forces.

Al-Qaeda, in the meantime, in its ambition to compete with ISIS for jihadist primacy, is urging cells and sympathizers in Egypt to take more action. This includes AH Apache helicopters and most recently a consignment of mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. This cooperation needs to continue. That is higher than the projected growth rates in Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, but still well below the growth needed to bring down high unemployment and poverty.

Low oil prices have meant that Suez Canal revenue is down, as are remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf. And as in Tunisia, terrorist attacks have reduced tourism to a trickle.

From January to late October, authorities executed at least 83 persons, 25 of whom were charged in cases involving political violence, according to numbers compiled by Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Front for Human Rights. Authorities continued to severely curtail space for civil society groups and target human rights defenders. At time of writing, the government has not issued implementing regulations for the draconian NGO law al-Sisi approved in August despite the requirement that it do so within six months of approving the law, and the stipulation in the new law that existing organizations must re-register within one year.

In December , persons believed to be working under the direction of the National Security Agency physically assaulted human rights lawyer Gamal Eid for the second time in two months.

Authorities failed to hold anyone accountable. On February 7, Egyptian authorities detained Patrick George Zaki , a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights EIPR , and held him incommunicado for 24 hours, during which time he was allegedly tortured, including with electric shocks. Security agencies had forcibly disappeared Ezz el-Din for over five months before the Supreme State Security Prosecution issued his official detention order.

ECRF lawyers told Human Rights Watch that officers physically and psychologically tortured him, including with electric shocks, while questioning him about his activism. In August, an Egyptian court sentenced veteran human rights defender Baheyeddin Hassan to 15 years in prison in absentia for tweets criticizing the government. In July, a Cairo criminal court rejected a request to lift the five-year-long travel bans imposed on 14 leading human rights defenders including Mohamed Zarea, Hossam Bahgat, and Mozn Hassan, winner of the Hrant Dink Award.

Under international pressure, authorities released them in early December but did not drop the charges, including for alleged terrorism-related offences, and a terrorism court ordered their personal assets frozen. The government continued to criminalize peaceful assembly and punish peaceful critics. In late September and early October, authorities arrested nearly 1, protesters and bystanders before and after scattered anti-government protests in towns and villages in 21 governorates, according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms.

Arrests included at least 71 children, some as young as In March, authorities arrested the academic and activist Laila Soueif, her sister, the novelist Ahdaf Soueif, her daughter, the prominent activist Mona Seif, and political scientist Rabab el-Mahdi for protesting peacefully for the release of unjustly detained prisoners over coronavirus fears. Authorities arrested at least 10 healthcare professionals who challenged the official narrative on the pandemic or criticized the lack of equipment at work.

Authorities continued to silence journalists, bloggers, and critics on social media amid escalating use of the repressive cybercrimes law and have blocked hundreds of news and human rights websites without judicial authorization since According to international groups monitoring press freedoms, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Press Institute, the number of journalists behind bars in Egypt at a given time in was between 30 and 60, one of the highest in the world.

State Security court decisions cannot be appealed. Restrictions on church building remain largely in place. Four years after the issuance of Law 80 of on the construction of churches , the government has only conditionally legalized 1, churches that were operating without official permits, roughly 25 percent of church buildings that applied for legal status.

Egyptian authorities carried out an extensive campaign of arrests and prosecutions against women social media influencers, in violation of their rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and non-discrimination. The prosecutions are based on videos and photos the women shared on social media apps showing themselves dancing and singing. Security forces arrested the year-old girl after she published a video saying she was raped and assaulted by a group of men.

Three witnesses were shortly released but continued to face prosecution. These are cruel and degrading practices that can rise to the level of torture. Pro-government media subjected them to a coordinated smear campaign. The Egyptian MeToo movement became re-energized in , as victims and survivors of sexual violence posted their accounts online, leading to a few arrests by authorities.