By Omayma Abdel-Latif "An assistant officer told me that the terrorist attacks in the province have remarkably dropped. He was right, for a week has passed since my arrival without a single officer or policeman being killed. However, this did not help in any way allay my wife's fears. When she was informed that I had been assigned to the south, she collapsed and begged me to resign. I understood perfectly how she felt." So wrote police Brig. Gen. Hamdi El-Batran in his novel The Diary of an Officer in the Countryside. But like the terrorist attacks which came to a halt, his career is also likely to be terminated. El-Batran is facing disciplinary action on charges of divulging information he acquired in the course of his work. His trial, before a disciplinary council, was to open on Sunday but hearings were postponed until 20 September. El-Batran is not optimistic about his trial's outcome. His novel was published last February by Dar Al-Hilal, a national publishing house. It is still available on the market; no move was made to confiscate it. Under an amendment introduced to police law in May, all police officers, whether in or out of service, are prohibited from divulging, directly or indirectly, any information they have acquired on the job without written permission from the interior minister. Offenders are punishable by an unspecified jail term and a fine ranging from LE5,000 to LE10,000. The novel is the first ever literary work to profile in detail the confrontation that has been raging since late 1992 between security forces and militant groups in the nation's southern provinces. It exposes serious security lapses, police malpractices and gross violations of human rights. The book also criticises police tactics and suggests that police wrongdoing served to prolong the vicious circle of violence and counter-violence. The indictment accused El-Batran of publishing the novel without the ministry's written approval. It also said that he portrayed relations between security authorities and the prosecutor's office in a way insinuating that they are at odds. The bill further accused El-Batran of ridiculing the way police guarded tourists and alleging that officers committed irregularities and distorted facts. El-Batran denies the charges, but fears that he may be pensioned off at the age of 48. "I still feel strongly about my job. I am committed to it because I continue to belong to the security forces," El-Batran told Al Ahram Weekly by telephone from his headquarters in the southern province of Minya. "Once a nation goes through a crisis, people have to write about it. The novel deals with what went wrong in the police-terrorist confrontation. It is not a political statement. We have to admit that mistakes were made because this is the only way to correct them." El-Batran was approached by a number of human rights organisations seeking to champion his cause, but he turned them down because, in his words, he "did not want to politicise the issue." "I am a member of the Writers' Union and this is a literary work. There is no politics in it," he said. The case has triggered controversy in literary circles, with the union urging President Hosni Mubarak to look into the matter. "The novel is valuable in the sense that it is one of a kind, providing an insight into a period of time and a part of the country about which very little is known," said novelist Sun'allah Ibrahim. Ibrahim criticised the government's attempt to muzzle its officials and recalled that in the 1930s Tawfik El-Hakim published The Diary of a Provincial District Attorney and in the 1960s Saadeddin Wahba, a former police officer, produced Mosquito Bridge. Both works exposed police malpractices. El-Batran wrote two books on the underground Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya but before publishing them, he requested the Interior Ministry's permission. The green light never came and the two books were shelved. He did not seek permission for the publication of his latest novel because, he said, "it was of a different nature." An Interior Ministry official, who requested anonymity, showed sympathy for El-Batran. He said that any reader of the novel could tell that he did not overstep his bounds. "Many things were not said because he sought to protect national security interests. Moreover, he did not divulge any secret information about personnel or equipment." El-Batran is not deterred by all the commotion his book has caused. In fact, he says he will write a sequel if and when he escapes disciplinary action.
