Regeni: victim of a regime of fear
Giulio Regeni“We ask to write with a pseudonym
for security reasons”. This is one of the emails a friend of Giulio Regeni sent
to il manifesto last December 2015. The
circle of friends of the Italian researcher is a key to disentangling this
apparently irresolvable mystery on the arrest and torture of Giulio Regeni.
Let’s try to keep these two moments
as distinct. It is almost sure that at least six days passed between his
disappearance, on January 25 2016 downtown Cairo, and his death. Six days of
torture, a “slow death”, as confirmed by the Italian autopsy.
Moreover, the Italian public
prosecutor, Mr. Sergio Colaiocco, added two points germane to reaching the
truth on Giulio’s murder: firstly, on his body there are evident signs of torture
made by “professional hands”, in other words this is a work that only the
Egyptian Amn el-Dawla (National Security) could have perpetrated, as it does so
often with Egyptian political prisoners; secondly, Giulio Regeni was not being
monitored before January 25 2016, and the reasons for his death are related to
the fieldwork research he was carrying out in Egypt. These two points
terminally refute the most ignominious allegations, often advanced of late by many
Egyptians regarding any foreigner sitting in a Cairo café with local people:
“you are a spy”. On the contrary, Giulio Regeni was a dedicated and meticulous researcher,
an “avant-guarde for Europe”, as the Italian writer Erri De Luca described him
in an interview with us. Nothing that could prompt suspicion emerged from searches
of his laptop and of his contacts in Egypt.
So
why was Giulio Regeni arrested on the night of January 25 2016?
From initial inquiries within the circle of friends of the Italian researcher it is clear that all of them felt a generic fear: they might have come to the authorities' attention during their participation in trade union meetings last December 11, 2015 or in gatherings with other trade unionists – for example Fatima Ramadan and Amr Assad who were among Giulio Regeni's usual interlocutors for his research. The young Italian was working
on independent trade unions in Egypt, but he was particularly concentrated on participatory
research, approved by the University of Cambridge, into the tax collectors'
unions.
It is very unlikely that these
elements, together with the almost certain absence of his phone calls as recorded
by the Egyptian Security apparatus before January 25 2016, will yield sufficient evidence to justify the
suspicion that the arrest of Giulio Regeni was not random, as argued by the first
witnesses to give statements. On the contrary, we are still not sure if, that
night, Giulio Regeni was arrested outside his house in Dokki, not far from the
Nile, or close to the metro station Mohammed Naguib, closer to El Falaki Square:
his social network profile passwords and call records are not yet in the hands
of the Italian prosecutors.
“Giulio was an excellent Arabic
speaker who could have been confused with an Egyptian”, one friend confirmed to
us. So it is plausible that Giulio Regeni was arrested on January 25 2016 in a
general crackdown of police control. During the same hours, 5 thousand homes were
searched in downtown Cairo because the Security forces were worried about
possible demonstrations that finally never took place.
At
that stage, why was Giulio Regeni tortured to death?
Giulio
Regeni and his friends were scared of coming under surveillance. For this
reason, a random arrest could have made the researcher even more tense given
the feeling of responsibility to conceal the identities of all the people
involved in his research, including many Egyptians engaged in anti-regime
political activities or simply in the ordinary participation in trade union
assemblies.
When
Giulio Regeni disappeared, some of his Egyptian friends began to tweet Where is Giulio? But after a few minutes all these
tweets were deleted because his friends decided, together with the Italian
Embassy in Cairo, to proceed according to the usual custom in Egypt of not announcing
publicly the enforced disappearance of a relative, but beginning with informal
enquiries in the local hospitals while negotiating with the Egyptian authorities
to gain information about his fate. This decision is clear evidence of the mood
of fear and suspicion in the lives of his circle of friends and Giulio himself,
under the Egyptian military regime.
The
Italian citizenship that surfaced at some point during the detention, the reticence
to involve his colleagues and activists' friends might have triggered the
passage of Giulio to different branches of the Egyptian State Security’
apparatuses and headlong to the place of his torture and murder. Or it might even
be the case that if Giulio Regeni was never identified as a foreign national, they
might calculate that he could be involved in an exchange of persons with some
of his friends, if they were considered more likely to be active in the political
opposition.
The
outrage that the death of the doctoral student elicited in Italy together with
the sit-in asking «Verità per Giulio» (Truth for Giulio), organized on February
25 2016, in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Rome by Amnesty International, triggered
the first reactions, forcing the reluctant Egyptian investigators into minimal
cooperation with the Italian team (Ros, Sco and Interpol), working in Cairo
since last month in order to clear up his murder.
The
Egyptian role in the conflict in Libya, in which the Italian authorities are
willing to take part, and the commercial agreements on the use of Zohr IX gas-field
by the Italian ENI company with their Egyptian counterparts, must not get in
the way of the demands for truth and justice regarding the murder of a
brilliant researcher and the forthright denunciation of the violations of human
rights currently taking place in Egypt.
Pressure,
as applied by many Egyptian political activists, brought about the rare and temporary
arrest of a police officer, Yassin Mohammed Hatem, responsible for the murder
of the Egyptian Socialist, Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, who was taking a rose to Tahrir
Square last year. Only this unrelenting, continuous monitoring of the Egyptian
authorities will reveal the names of the killers and the reasons behind the murder
of Giulio Regeni.