I am an Italian, and proud, who has lived and worked in Egypt. Today I worry about the way in which the Italian government is doing about the story involving these two countries: the silence in front of a murder can not bear any stability, indeed, it represents a threat to security. Giulio Regeni, the young Italian researcher brutally murdered in Egypt last month, has been abandoned by his own government. We, who have always tolerated the barbarity of Arab dictators to their people, today we remain silent in front of brutal regimes that torture and kill our citizens. For nearly half a century, the Italian and European policy towards Egypt was inspired by the assumption that totalitarianism is a guarantee of stability.
not only does this policy was unacceptable from the moral but it proved to be anchored on false premises, as that Egyptian prisons were filled with activists and supporters of the opposition parties. The Arab Spring, in his revolutionary fervor, has shown that it is possible to bury forever the rancor of a people. The flagrant violations of human rights at the hands of the Egyptian tyrant, with which Europe has preferred to turn their backs, have produced neither stability nor security. Indeed, the Egyptian regime has become an obstacle – and a growing threat – both for Italy and for the rest of Europe. It is no coincidence that the radical political ideology of Islam, which now inflames movements such as Isis and Al Qaeda, was born in the prison cells and torture rooms of the totalitarian regimes that have taken place in Egypt. The father modern jihadist extremism, Syed Qutb, elaborated his ideas in Nasser’s prisons.
I today the commander of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri , was jailed by Mubarak. Instead of encouraging alternatives to these extremist ideologies, the Italian ally in Cairo continues to fuel Islamic fundamentalism, denying the opposition any political space and freedom of speech. Qutb in 1964 published a book, Milestones, fundamental text for the jihadist movement today, in which he describes his journey to the radicalization, journey punctuated by rapes and torture, sometimes with the use of dogs, which had been subjected to in the jails Egyptian. Qutb left prison inflamed by hatred, decided to do anything to trigger a transnational war to destroy these regimes and their supporters, calling for holy war to destroy those who use these methods against Muslims. Qutb was hanged, but Milestones remains one of the most influential books in the Arab world.
his follower Zawahiri, still a boy at the time , was indignant at the execution of Qutb, and his determination to embrace the ideology of global jihad is even more strengthened under torture in the prisons of Mubarak. Torture continues to be the pillar of the Egyptian regime. President Sisi was head of military intelligence and later interior minister, when they were committed the most outrageous violations of human rights in Egypt, such as the massacre of Rabaa, in which were slaughtered the Muslim Brotherhood, and even before the massacre in Maspero, when the army armored cars were launched against the Coptic Christian demonstrators. Since the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi government, democratically elected in 2013, Sisi – former general and now head of state – he has established a reign of terror even more despotic the Mubarak regime. All roads of political expression or even cultural, independent of the narrative of the regime, have been barred. Today sixty thousand Egyptian citizens languishing in jails for “political crimes”, many of them tortured.
Thousands of unarmed protesters were killed in the streets. The paranoia of the Sisi regime created a wide rift in civil society, where no criticism is tolerated, it may come from any sector, be it journalists, writers or artists. But the blind obsessions of the regime are not accompanied by equal competence, indeed: a Mexican tourist was killed in Sinai by the forces of the Egyptian government who have mistaken for a terrorist. And all Sisi repressive measures were not enough to prevent a terrorist place a bomb on board a Russian passenger plane, killing hundreds of passengers. Yet, despite all the violence unleashed against his opponents of all political stripes, Sisi has not been able to give an answer to the social and economic crisis that triggered the revolt against Mubarak in 2011. Therefore his methods do not get another result that radicalize even more the new generation, who will not be willing to accept passively – as has not been the previous year – to live in a climate of despair, dictatorship, abuses committed by the police and citizens, corruption and rampant unemployment.
Sisi is driving at full speed towards the abyss Egypt , and when the country will be plunged into a abyss of violence, here it will produce another tremendous cataclysm like the one we saw in Syria, and Europe will be the final destination of a new, inevitable exodus of refugees. Whatever our view on the Muslim Brotherhood, they represented the “fire wall” that can curb violent extremism. And the repression of Sisi, that stigma of terrorists all his opponents, has done nothing but off its hinges. The story of Julius Regeni, unfortunately, is not an exception, but the norm in Egypt Sisi. His fate has been to hundreds of Egyptians “disappeared”, whose tortured bodies were found weeks later along the roads or in the desert. We have done everything possible to protect Giulio Regeni? No, we have abandoned to its fate by allowing Sisi to oppress and brutalize the people of Egypt without fear of consequences.
The Sisi Egypt is a police state, whose spy security apparatus every single moment of life, and today would have us believe that he can not identify the murderess of Julius, who died after seven days of torture. The blatant disregard for the Cairo investigations into the death of an Italian citizen, however, is not surprising, because the Egyptian government has no concern to investigate the Egyptians do the same end. Why should it, since the state itself is responsible for their deaths? Instead of asking for justice for Julius, and many Egyptians victim of such abuse, the Italian government is trying to lock his mouth, for fear that these uncomfortable questions could jeopardize the economic interests of Eni in Egypt. It is a very dangerous precedent, because Sisi send the message that the lives of Italians, like that of the Egyptians, it adds nothing to Roma. It is time that the government Renzi calls the Italian ambassador, suspend all diplomatic ties with Egypt and put pressure on the European Union so that the Sisi regime put an end to all violations of human rights, particularly by eliminating torture. So to protect the most precious right, human life. None of us will feel safe as long as our government does not send a clear message to Sisi, and the world: no crime will go unpunished, that the victim is an Italian citizen or an Egyptian citizen.
March 26, 2016 (edited March 26, 2016 | 22:54)
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