US first lady Melania Trump (L) meets with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Egyptian first lady Entissar Mohameed Amer at the Presidential Palace. Picture by Egyptian Presidency/dpa/PA Images. All rights reserved. Mass repression in Egypt and the use of state violence has been growing since the coup of 2013. It was inaugurated with a series of massacres committed by the Egyptian security forces against the supporters of the deposed President, Mohamed Morsi, the most infamous of which is the Rabaa massacres, where , at least, 817 protestors were killed in the worst incident of state violence in modern Egyptian history.
This wave of repression would later expand to include members of all different parts of the political spectrum, including liberal, leftist and secular activists and bloggers, as well as, non-political citizens that happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time. This has swelled the prison population to almost 60,000 political prisoners. This is coupled with mass forced disappearances, and what appears to be clear evidence of extra-judicial killings in Sinai and the use of heavy weaponry in civilian areas, which leads to heavy casualties among the local population.
Interestingly, even though state violence has becomes a permanent feature of the lives of many Egyptians, the government and many of its urban middle class supporters have gone to considerable length to deny the existence of this phenomenon.
