Follow us on social

Anti-coup_sit-in_at_rabaa_adiweya_mosque_2013

Nine years after Rabaa massacre, US still turns blind eye to Egyptian abuses

Washington continues to treat el-Sisi with kid gloves, supplying the despotic regime with aid, hurting its own credibility in the process.

Analysis | Africa

On August 6th, 2013, almost one week before Egyptian security forces would massacre over 800 civilians protesting in and around Rabaa Square, U.S. Senator John McCain stood in Cairo and publicly called the regime change in Egypt what it was: a military coup.

The U.S. government did not follow suit and officially label the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president a coup, a move that would have required it to cut off $1.3 billion in military aid. Rather, successive administrations have taken meager and halting steps to condemn the consequent waves of repression.

In the years since, Egyptian officials have counted on Washington officially mischaracterizing, or ignoring, the severity of the challenges, which has had serious ramifications both on Egypt’s human rights situation and on American democracy.

Nine years later, Egypt’s repression has not only claimed the freedom of an estimated 60,000 political prisoners, but its reach has extended to U.S. soil. And yet, Egypt continues to enjoy its status as a Washington ally: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the same man who presided over the massacre at Raba’a al Adaweya, is planning to travel to the U.S. twice this year. This is, in part, because the current regime in Egypt has continuously counted on Washington's willful ignorance of faux reforms as meaningful steps. 

Most recently, for instance, el-Sisi has called for national dialogue and for the re-constitution of a dormant presidential pardon committee to release political detainees. In the months since these calls, the dialogue was relegated from the supervision of the presidency to a little-known training academy, where its steering committee included none of the names put forward by the opposition.

Even more discouraging, when a former parliamentarian and head of the opposition Alkarama Party wrote several opinion pieces criticizing the dialogue, the regime blocked the news site. Most damning of all, while 443 people have been released since el-Sisi’s remarks, at least 716 have been arrested. For every detainee they have released, they have detained almost two. Beyond new detainments, over 7,000 people have seen their pretrial detentions renewed in the same time period.

Egyptian civil society sees a very different country than what the current regime markets abroad. Whereas Egypt plans to host the COP27 meetings in Sharm ElShiekh this November, environmental activists such as Ahmed Amasha, who has been subjected to enforced disappearance and torture, and Seif Fateen, a former professor director of environmental engineering program at Zewail University, remain behind bars. 

Others like prominent British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdelfatah, human rights lawyer Hoda Abdelmoniem, and former member of parliament Ziad El-Elimy continue to endure increasingly harsh prison conditions. All of these, and tens of thousands of others, have worked and dreamed about an Egypt for all Egyptians. Issues like climate change and sustainable development are what pushed them to Tahrir square in 2011. An agenda of accountability and change, on climate or otherwise, is impossible without an active civil society. A civil society behind bars or threatened in exile is tremendously less effective at securing either.

The administration’s failure to take serious measures to combat these human rights abuses, and call things for what they are, is increasingly a threat not just to Egyptian democracy, but to our own.

Egypt’s reach into American democracy has been through consistent threats to activists, defamation campaigns, and travel bans against the families of dissidents. A recent report by Freedom House found Egypt to be the third-largest aggressor of transnational repression. At the Freedom Initiative, we have documented instances in which US citizens were denied travel back home from Egypt because of their parents’ political activism. 

We have also documented incidents in which citizens were surveilled by foreign security operatives and threatened to be physically harmed on U.S. soil. Activists who engage U.S. civil society are also defamed on state-owned channels and, perhaps more urgently, have their family members arrested.

By failing to use its leverage and undermining campaign promises, the Biden admin is harming its credibility. Days after President Biden’s meeting with el-Sisi, a notable columnist, and member of the steering committee for National Dialogue, wrote an op-ed mocking activism in the U.S. saying that Washington will always choose interests over human rights, and that the meeting was a case in point.

One way to combat this notion is to ensure that upcoming meetings with Washington officials are done on the condition that U.S. persons behind bars and under travel bans are released and allowed to come back home. Meetings without these measures are read as implicit endorsements of the regime's policies. This includes people like Salah Soltan, a legal permanent resident, Hussien Mahdy, the father of a US asylum seeker, and Seif Fateen, the father of three US citizens.

Nine years ago on August 14, 2013, over 800 people were killed in one day in Rabaa square. The U.S. administration at the time stood against calling the regime change what it was and we have continued to pay the price of de facto endorsements of these policies. 

These endorsements have only contributed to a worsening human rights condition in Egypt and has manifested as a security threat for America and Americans. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi and recent arrest tied to attempted assassination of John Bolton speak to a fact that autocracies have grown to see their borders as reaching till the doorsteps of their most fierce critics. 

This administration's promise of “no more blank checks to dictators” has manifested itself in lackluster efforts that have been read as implicit endorsements of bad global practices. Holding Egypt more accountable and calling faux reforms for what they are is a good first step towards rectifying this.


Muslim Brotherhood supporters engage in a month-long sit-in at the Rabaa Adiweya mosque against President Morsi arrest and coup. This photo was taken 12 days before the el-Sisi government massacre, which killed more than protesters, according to estimates by human rights organizations. (H. Elrasam for VOA/public domain/wikimedia commons)
Analysis | Africa
Elbridge Colby
Top image credit: Elbridge Colby is seen at Senate Committee on Armed Services Hearings to examine his nomination to be Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Dirksen Senate office building in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Photo by Mattie Neretin/Sipa USA).

Elbridge Colby: I won't be 'cavalier' with U.S. forces

QiOSK

In his senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Elbridge Colby, nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, stood out as one of the few people auditioning for a Pentagon job who say they may want to deploy fewer U.S. troops across the globe, not more.

“If we’re going to put American forces into action, we’re gonna have a clear goal. It’s going to have a clear exit strategy when plausible,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

keep readingShow less
Trump Zelensky
Top image credit: Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock.com

Ukraine aid freeze: Trump's diplomatic tightrope path to peace

Europe

Transatlanticism’s sternest critics all too often fail to reckon with the paradox that this ideology has commanded fervent devotion since the mid-20th century not because it correctly reflects the substance of U.S.-European relations or U.S. grand strategy but precisely because it exists in a permanent state of unreality.

We were told that America’s alliances have “never been stronger” even as the Ukraine war stretched them to a breaking point. Meanwhile, Europeans gladly, if not jubilantly, accepted the fact that Europe has been rendered poorer and less safe than at any time since the end of WWII as the price of “stopping Putin,” telling themselves and their American counterparts that Russia’s military or economic collapse is just around the corner if only we keep the war going for one more year, month, week, or day.

keep readingShow less
Nigerian soldier Boko Haram
Top Image Credit: A Nigerien soldier walks out of a house that residents say a Boko Haram militant had forcefully seized and occupied in Damasak March 24, 2015 (Reuters/Joe Penny)

Nigeria’s war on Boko Haram has more than a USAID problem

Africa

Insinuations by a U.S. member of Congress that American taxpayers’ money may have been used to fund terrorist groups around the world, including Boko Haram, have prompted Nigeria’s federal lawmakers to order a probe into the activities of USAID in the country’s North East.

Despite assurances by the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Richard Mills, who said in a statement that “there was no evidence that the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was funding Boko Haram or any terrorist group in Nigeria,” Nigeria’s lawmakers appear intent on investigating.

keep readingShow less

Trump transition

Latest

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.