After a Dark Decade, What Is Behind the Calls for the Release of the Muslim Brotherhood's Members in Egypt?

After 10 harsh years of military coup rule in Egypt, new calls have bubbled on the surface for the release of leaders and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, as happens with opponents from other parties.

The coup, on July 3, 2013, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was a warning of a harsh decade that Egypt might pass through. Rights and freedoms were crushed, and tens of thousands of citizens were imprisoned, in addition to executions and extrajudicial killings.

The retaliatory operation, led by Sisi and his security apparatus, targeted the Muslim Brotherhood, one of whose members was the overthrown President, Mohamed Morsi, in addition to a large number of government ministers and political and executive leaders.

The tragedy of the Brotherhood and the opposition in their various sects topped the human rights and social situation over the years to the extent that Sisi abused some members of the regime and army commanders who confronted him.

Among them are Lieutenant General Sami Hafez Anan, the former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, who was imprisoned, and also Hisham Genena, head of the Central Auditing Organization, who has just been released from prison, in addition to Lieutenant General Ahmed Shafik, the former Prime Minister, and the former candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, as well as the symbols of the Civil Movement and others persecuted and imprisoned.

 

Sisi’s Strategy

On September 11, 2021, the President of the Egyptian regime, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, launched the National Strategy for Human Rights to develop prisons, release some political detainees, and ease the security grip.

A section of the civil current and parties and personalities supporting the authority was involved, but Sisi’s move soon unfolded; it was nothing but a message to other countries.

The most prominent evidence of this is that the one who assumed the committee’s chairmanship is Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry—an indication of a government policy to address foreign countries.

The real face of the regime remained, and only the afflicted and the detainees could see it in the hell of the prisons, such as the notorious Badr Prison, Wadi el-Natrun, Kafr el-Sheikh, and Minya.

This strategy seemed to prove the regime’s failure in dealing with the complex Egyptian situation and was not effective for huge political movements that were burdened with violations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other movements.

This prompted Amnesty International to comment on the human rights situation in Egypt on September 21, 2022, saying: “Egyptian authorities have created the National Human Rights Strategy as a shiny cover-up to their unrelenting violations of human rights, thinking they would fool the world ahead of COP27. But the grim reality of their notorious human rights record cannot be rebranded in a PR stunt.”

 

Release Everyone

This situation prompted patriotic voices inside Egypt to try to resolve the crisis and create a new atmosphere able to remove the repercussions of the period after the military coup.

Among these voices was the Egyptian politician Yahya Hussein Abdel Hadi, who wrote an article published on his personal Facebook account on February 7, 2023, calling the authority to release everyone, including the Brotherhood.

Abdel Hadi sent a direct message to what he called “friends in the civil democratic movement,” telling them: “Since the authority singled you out to call for dialogue, you have become the only opposition entity recognized by the authority internally and in front of the world.”

He added: “You may agree with me that, as is the case, we must elevate our positions from the level of expressing our movement only to the level of being the voice of everyone.”

“Fighting injustice does not need a mandate, and I am talking about the Brotherhood specifically, knowing that merciful talk about them brings problems.”

He said: “Why were the demands limited to the release of certain names—I was one of them—and did not come close to names whose utterance is no longer permitted except with curses and obscenities.”

He concluded his call with a set of demands, the most important of which is the release of all those who have been convicted or imprisoned by state security courts and prosecutors, the restoration of Egyptian citizenship, in addition to guaranteeing the return of all Egyptians from exile without prosecution.

Abdel Hadi’s call met with great resonance in the Egyptian political parties, as he is a prominent figure. Abdel Hadi is the founder of the civil democratic movement and the founder of the Leaders Preparation Center, which was affiliated with the prime minister at the time of former President Hosni Mubarak. He is also a former officer, graduating from the Military Technical College in 1977, and also worked as an engineer officer in the Armed Forces.

He was previously arrested by the Sisi regime on January 29, 2019, due to his positions against the policy of power, then he was released in 2022, and he is now trying “to heal the rift” in society and return to a state of consensus during the revolution of January 25, 2011.

 

Political Sectarianism

Mohammed Esmat Seif al-Dawla, a researcher specializing in Arab national affairs and head of the Revolutionaries Against Zionism movement, did the same.

He posted a video on his Facebook account on February 16, 2023, entitled Political Sectarianism in Egypt, in which he talked about the petition submitted by the opposition Civil Democratic Movement to the Egyptian authorities, demanding the release of a list that includes 1,074 detainees.

He began with thanks and appreciation to everyone seeking to liberate any political prisoner, describing the effort as brave and praiseworthy.

However, he criticized the criteria on which the list of 1,074 detainees was selected, ignoring thousands of other prisoners.

Seif al-Dawla asked: “Are they the standards of the constitution, law, justice, equality, and human rights, or the standards of the authority that forbade and banned demands for the release of figures affiliated with the Islamist movement, including the Muslim Brotherhood?”

He asked again: “Is it right to accept the description adopted by the authority and the new legislation it issued, considering the majority of Islamists as terrorists and belonging to terrorist groups?”

Commenting on his dissertation, he said: “Have we become like the Lebanese sects, in which each sect defends the life, security, and interests of its members and not other sects?

“We have also become like the Israeli Occupation, giving all rights to the Zionist Jews and taking them away from the Palestinians.”

He concluded: “Can history forget or respect the positions of all those who bartered their freedoms for the freedoms of their political opponents? and if we accept that, how will we live after that?

 

Defeat Condition

Egyptian human rights activist Mustafa Ezz el-Din responded to the calls of Yahya Hussein Abdel Hadi and Seif al-Dawla, and said in his interview with Al-Estiklal: “These rational voices, which represent the Egyptian national conscience, are important to listen to at the time of collapse and defeat.”

He explained: “Egypt is now experiencing a state of political, social, and economic defeat in the full sense of the word, and the Egyptian nation is in dire need of redefining itself again.”

He referred here to what happened in Turkiye after the 1980 coup, in Argentina after the era of Jorge Videla, in Chile after the era of Augusto Pinochet, and in Iran after the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh and during the era of the last Shah.

He stressed that “exclusion and continuation of the policy that brought us to where we are now mean the inevitable end and the exclusion of Egyptians from history for many years.”

He added: “After that, we will return to the same point as well, societal consensus and starting from scratch, but at that time, future generations are the ones that will pay the price.

“In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood reached the presidency in 2012 with more than 13 million electoral votes, and the number of its members is in the millions, and the Islamic movement in general as well.”

He wondered here: “How will this number be excluded from the scene with its ideas, dissertations, and broad masses that entered every Egyptian country and village?”

He continued: “Therefore, any scholar of political affairs is aware of the seriousness of what we have reached and that history will write that Egypt’s dark decade is more powerful than the dark decade of Algeria.”