CECILY AND MAHIENOUR—WHEN THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL OVERLAP

An incident in high-profile civil disobedience in Egypt, where court actions and death sentences against citizen protests have been the focus of international controversy, this week struck a new parallel with the case of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan in a New York court, which I commented on in my previous blog post. http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2014/05/the-american-pussy-riot.html 

The incident that I refer to is the sentencing of Mahienour El-Massry—sometimes dubbed “the voice of the Egyptian revolution” and a renowned defender of the rights of Egypt’s women—to two years in prison for protesting against recent violations of human and civil rights. A 28-year-old lawyer, Mahienour was tried and convicted of taking part in an unauthorized demonstration and of violating the country’s so-called Protest Law. The conviction refers to a December 3, 2013 protest demonstration in Alexandria that was broken up by police using tear gas and baton charges. It was organized to call for justice and retribution in the case of Khaled Saeed, a man who was beaten to death by Egyptian police toward the end of 2010.

Khaled Saeed

It was Saeed’s death at the hands of the Egyptian authorities that sparked what has come to be known as “The January 25 Revolution” of 2011, which played out in the form of demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, non-violent civil resistance, civil disobedience and labor strikes that eventually brought the fall of the 30-year-long Hosni Mubarak regime, but its replacement—after a period of instability and an eventual military coup to allegedly “protect democracy”—with a system that is arguably of even greater brutality and repression. The casualty list in clashes between security forces and protesters that followed the January 25, 2011 uprising tallied 846 dead and another 6,000 injured, with Alexandria and Cairo at times resembling war zones. The demonstrators were from a broad social and religious spectrum and their demands included an end to police brutality, corruption and martial law, and respect for freedom of expression, as well as the establishment of a fair and unbiased justice system. But despite the cost to those who have stepped forward in the face of tyranny, few if any such demands have been enduringly met.

Mahienour has lost her freedom to new and increasingly repressive laws that the Egyptian government is introducing to still the voices and dampen the enthusiasm of those seeking a fully democratic future for Egypt. The Protest Law under which she was charged forms part of this kind of rights-restrictive legislation but is more recently being bolstered by proposed laws that will define just about anything as “terrorism” for which the maximum punishment will be death. The definition will include a grab bag of so-called “terrorist crimes” such as “harming or intimidating individuals, putting their lives, freedom or security at risk, harming national security, and hindering the work of the authorities, judicial bodies, houses of worship, educational facilities, or diplomatic and consular missions.” Middle East human rights groups have joined each other in criticizing such legislation, especially the exceptionally loose definition of “terrorism” so as to include just about anyone who challenges the actions of the government or security forces.

A pre-sentencing poster from the Justice for Cecily website decrying the

harshness of charges brought against the Occupy Wall Street activist.  

And this is where, with little imagination at all, one can draw a political parallel between the Mahienour El-Massry case in Alexandria and that of Cecily McMillan in New York, who elbowed a policeman in the face when he grabbed her from behind by the breast while trying to detain her during police action against an Occupy Wall Street protest on March 17, 2012, after which the young woman was beaten up by police and was at first denied medical attention when she suffered a seizure that officers accused her of “faking”. Last Monday, May 19, Cecily—a pioneer in the Occupy Wall Street social protest movement—was sentenced in the Manhattan court of Judge Ronald Zweibel for assaulting a police officer who was in the process of discharging his law enforcement duties (second-degree assault, the maximum charge that the prosecution and the court could bring against her), in a case in which it was not at all clear who assaulted whom and in which the court also carefully avoided permitting the defense to introduce evidence to clarify the confusing circumstances under which both the officer and Cecily were injured (she much more severely that he) or bearing witness to the brutal riot control tactics repeatedly used by the New York Police Department or earlier cases of alleged police brutality in which the officer in question was involved. While the jail time handed down by the judge (90 days) was seen by many as “lenient”—given the severe charges brought against her, the court could have sentenced Cecily to anywhere from two to seven years in prison—human rights defenders and the young woman’s attorneys argue that, under the circumstances, the defendant could just as easily (and more fairly) have been brought up on a lesser charge in which no jail time at all would have been involved. Furthermore, the true severity of the sentence lies in the fact that in addition to three months in jail at Riker’s Island, the judge’s decision also involves five years of probation time. The harshness of both the charges and the sentence mean that the young social protester and human and civil rights activist has been marked by American justice as a felon, a dubious distinction that, if her appeal against the court’s decision should fail, will remain with her for the rest of her life.

While in both the case of Mahienour El-Massry in Egypt and that of Cecily McMillan in New York it might be argued that the courts merely enforced and upheld the current laws governing the charges brought against the two women, one must, nevertheless, exercise a certain level of intentionality in justifying the punishments meted out in both cases in order to accept such a black and white interpretation of truth or justice. A more liberal view can’t help but draw attention to how the expanding definition of “terrorism” not only in the troubled Middle East, but also in post-9/11 New York City is radicalizing to an ever greater extent the parallel definition of “public authority” and “public security” to the detriment of individual liberties and to the protection, above all, of the democratic principles of human and civil rights. In both women’s cases, their sentences transmit a tacit underlying message to the public about what happens to activists who take to the street their struggle for the protection of social justice and human and civil rights.

Cecily McMillan's attorney, Martin Stolar, said in a TV interview  that

protesters in the United States are increasingly being treated as "terrorists

or potential terrorists."   

To those who would claim that comparing a case tried in a non-democratic system like that of Egypt with one tried in New York is something of a stretch, suffice it to say that this is precisely the point. It should be the difference between night and day. But in the case of Cecily McMillan, it clearly isn’t, because, as human rights supporters have pointed out, the officer who attacked Cecily from the rear and grabbed her by the breast could just as easily have been charged with sexual assault as she was with “assaulting” an officer, and his fellow officers who beat her up even once she was subdued could also have been charged with using excessive force. Instead, Cecily was the only one taken to trial and she was brought up on the maximum felony charge possible, with mitigating circumstances being intentionally ignored. 

This case is not of minor significance with regard to how protesters are perceived in the post-9/11 United States and should provide a wake-up call about the increasing precedence of security over respect for the rights of the individual since the 2001 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center in which some three thousand people were killed. In a television interview prior to sentencing last week, Cecily’s chief counsel, Martin Stolar, said that to an increasing extent, protesters are being perceived by the authorities as “terrorists or potential terrorists” rather than as people exercising their rights to free expression and freedom of assembly. Is this (increasingly restricted civil rights and a perception of wrongdoing in exercising them), then, to be the ultimate price that Americans will end up paying for the power that the post-9/11 US national security policy has ended up placing in the hands of the authorities? And if so, shouldn’t the undermining of some of the most precious principles of American-style democracy be considered a victory for international terrorism?