It was more annoying than intimidating, more bureaucratic than bullying. But what happened to me and several journalistic colleagues Sunday night was a clear window into the type of petty harassment the regime routinely employs in order to shrink the local political playing field and limit the activities of foreign journalists. At the invitation of Dr. Mohammed Beltagui, a Muslim Brotherhood MP, I traveled to the industrial Cairo suburb of Shubra al-Kheima, to observe his campaign to defend his parliamentary seat. The Brotherhood is illegal in Egypt and officially banned from forming a political party. Nevertheless in the 2005 parliamentary elections, Beltagui and 87 other Brotherhood members won seats running as nominal independents--instantly establishing the Brotherhood as the country's largest opposition bloc. This time around the government seems determined to cut the Islamist group down to size. Hundreds of Brotherhood supporters were arrested over the past week, often after police moved in to break up Brotherhood rallies. At first there was no sign of any crackdown on Sunday night. My colleagues and I walked along with Beltagui's sign-carrying supporters, recording their chants and watching the candidate give several brief campaign speeches over a portable loudspeaker. After about two hours, I got into a taxi along with Ursula Lindsey, a correspondent for the BBC radio program The World, and prepared to head home. Suddenly the taxi was stopped by a crowd of plain-clothed men, obviously officers of Egypt's ubiquitous State Security Investigations force. They removed us from the taxi, and demanded our IDs and credentials. They aggressively asked us for our tasreeh (permission) to work as journalists in this neighborhood. I explained several times that my press card issued by the Ministry of Information WAS my permission. It became very quickly apparent that our official state press cards were worth almost nothing. What followed was a half-hour of surreal tedium--standing on a darkened street with ten plain-clothed officers who apparently thought they were protecting the country from us. The officers kept explaining that they were “following orders” but refused to explain just what those orders were. There were several comments implying that as foreign journalists, we were hopelessly biased against the Egyptian government and only gave attention to opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point, one of them laughed and said, “Welcome to Shubra al-Kheima. Now don't ever come back. Shubra al-Kheima is hazardous to your health.” Finally I was handed a mobile phone. On the other end was a man identifying himself only as “General Ahmed.” He came off as the nicest guy in the world, and told me I was welcome to return to the neighborhood any time I wanted. But there was a catch. “To prevent problems like this in the future,” he told me, it would be best if I first stopped by the local police station to inform them of my presence. That way, he said, they could arrange a police escort, “for your protection.” Fortunately, I restrained the urge to point out that the only protection I needed was from his men. Finally we were allowed to leave. But it felt like we had been given a clear window into the methods that a police state uses to control, intimidate and generally confuse journalists. On Monday morning came a surreal post-script. The government held a press conference to discuss their electoral preparations. The head of the state-sponsored National Council for Human Rights issued several assurances that this electoral round would be clean, transparent and free of the violations that marred previous votes. Attending the conference, I mentioned that several journalists, including myself, were detained the previous night simply for doing our jobs. The responses were genuinely shocking. Several government officials told me that it was my fault for being there. If I wished to interview a candidate, I was told, I should meet them in their office. To walk alongside a campaign rally constitutes “political activity,” they said--which apparently makes me and other journalists fair game in the eyes of the state.
