In theory, O.N. is now a free man. Arrested nine months ago in Cairo on suspicion of currency laundering and spying for Israel, and sentenced to three years in prison, O.N. was officially released at the end of April when an appeal court threw out the verdict for lack of evidence, and ordered the police to free him.
However, actually being freed is a long process in Egypt, and O.N. has spent the last three weeks being shunted around various governmental departments and police services to ensure that no one any longer wants to keep him behind bars on any other charges. Last week, he was in a police lock-up in Cairos suburbs, between the desert and the City of the Dead. Held in a cell with between forty and fifty other detainees, he could be visited briefly and given food, for in Egypt no food is provided to those in police detention. But since prisoners are held behind a solid iron gate, all that can be seen of them is the very top of the heads, their eyes, and half their noses, as they pull themselves up to peer over the top. Certain now of his release, O.N. is a changed man. For the long months of uncertainty he was frightened and miserable. Like many other detainees in Egypt, he was tortured with electric shocks and beatings to make him confess to charges he knew nothing about.
The broken past
O.N.s life was wretched long before his arrest. As a Liberian refugee in Cairo, waiting for news of possible resettlement in Australia or the United States, he has spent the last three years on the streets of the city, forbidden as a refugee under Egyptian law to work or to attend school or college. Though only just twenty-three, he is a married man, with two young daughters, the smallest of whom he has never seen: his wife and children are still in Liberia. Only resettlement will enable him to apply for them to join him wherever he is sent.
O.N. was sixteen when Liberias civil war reached his home in the Bomi Hills, some 80 kilometres from the capital, Monrovia. The war had been spreading around the country for several years, but O.N.s village and surrounding countryside had so far been spared. His father was a farmer, with a plantation of rubber trees and palms. O.N. had an elder sister, Mariam, and a younger brother, Ali. When fighting began not far from the farm, O.N., his mother, Mariam and Ali fled to Monrovia, leaving his father at the farm. Their plan was to live with relations.
O.N. remembers what they found in Monrovia. My uncles house has been looted and burned down, and one of my cousins had been killed. Another had disappeared. We went to stay with friends, and I went on with my schooling, though with the war so near it was hard to attend to lessons. When I was seventeen I became engaged to the daughter of family friends. In the winter of 1996 I walked back to the Bomi Hills to find out what had happened to my father. I discovered that the rebels had taken him away and we have had no news of him since that day.
While in his village, O.N. was caught by rebels and injured. Rescued by an army patrol, he was taken to a Swedish mission hospital and treated for cuts and broken ribs. He returned to Monrovia, finished his schooling, and was at home one night when government forces attacked the part of Monrovia in which he and his family were living, believing the area to have been overrun by rebels. Several neighbours were rounded up and taken away. O.N. and his family fled. By this time his wife had one daughter, and was expecting her second child.
O.N. and his family are Mandingos. By the mid 1990s Liberia had become unsafe for the Mandingos, as Charles Taylor, leader of the forces that would soon come to power, had let it be known that he held the Mandingos responsible for the rebel uprisings. O.N. was now in some danger. The Egyptian Consul in Monrovia was a friend of his fathers and he offered to help O.N. escape to Egypt. From there, it was thought he would be able to apply to have his family join him. Unable to work, in a three-year queue to find out whether he would be recognised as a refugee, O.N. has simply spent his time waiting.
Egypts perpetual emergency
A state of emergency has been in effect in Egypt since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Under it, the president can impose restrictions on freedoms of assembly, movement, residence and speech; he can arrest and detain those suspected of endangering security and public order; individuals and places can be searched without warrants. Correspondence, newspapers, drawings and all other means of expression are liable to censorship before publication. Civil society is subject to innumerable laws. There are believed to be some 15 000 suspected members of extremist Islamic groups in detention, many of them held in closed prisons. They do not know if, whether or when they might hope for release.
Though Egypts constitution expressly forbids torture, maltreatment of prisoners has become routine in the countrys prisons and police stations, where electric shocks are used to extract confessions. Within the jails, prisoners are beaten, bullied and tortured by guards and long-term detainees alike. Bribes are extracted from them to secure court hearings and eventual release. When O.N. was first taken to court, his face was seen to be bruised and cut, and he appeared dazed and confused. It is now known that he owed his detention to his friendship with a small group of Guineans, who have since gone into hiding and who are believed by the police to have been laundering currency. The police apparently believed that O.N., if tortured and held long enough, would lead them to his friends.
