“We thought he was an English spy, we took him, I went and after loading him in the car we had to beat him”, this was overheard by an Italian witness in the case of the abduction and murder of Giulio Regeni, during a Police conference in an unnamed African country in 2017.
An Egyptian security official, who attended the conference, made the statement. This statement illustrates the logic that is currently used to justify the mass repression of opposition to the regime, regardless whether this opposition is violent or not, and regardless of its ideological orientation. All opposition to the regime is seen as an existential threat, treated with a similar level of repression, with similar charges and sentences levelled against its members. For example, there is the case of Ismail El Eskandarani, an Egyptian researcher specialized in the affairs of Sinai, who was sentenced on the 22nd of May 2018, to 10 years in jail by a military court, under terror charges. On the other hand, there is Abdel Moneim Abou El Fotouh, the head of the ‘Strong Egypt’ party, detained in February 2018, accused of leading a terror organization.
This wave of repression has an ideological undertone of fear of imminent state collapse, driven by foreign agents, non- state actors, and other forms of ideological and cultural warfare. For example in May 2015, President Sissi warned of the possibility of state collapse in Egypt. A warning he would later repeat in in July 2018, when he warned of state collapse through internal acts of sabotage, and linked state and societal collapse with internal protest, driven by “rumours” aiming at spreading instability. He claimed that the Egyptian state has countered 21,000 rumours in the period of three month. In another statement in March 2019, referring directly to the mass protests of 2011, El-Sissi stated that the mass protests from 2011 to 2104 were “precisely planned” to overthrow the state, linking this to what he termed, fourth and fifth generation wars that aim at spreading instability through rumours.
