A New Generation of Dissenters Dies in Egyptian Prison

He should have been released last month. In Egypt, pretrial detention can last a maximum of two years, and the photographer and director Shady Habash had his order renewed every 24 days since his arrest in 2018. It was all for producing a music video that had insulted the president.

But the law was flouted.

Habash had started his own photography studio at age 14. He went to every concert he could across Egypt, taking pictures of rock stars and singer-songwriters. When he was 15, the Egyptian revolution overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, and he took to the streets to chronicle the faces of exhausted demonstrators. He was self-taught and could never afford the gear he wanted, but that didn’t stop him from producing music videos for big acts.

At age 24, Shady Habash died in prison. On Friday, his fellow inmates banged on the walls and cried out for medical help for hours as he collapsed in front of them in the cellblock. The prisoners were ignored by prison staff. The cause of death is being investigated and is not yet known.

More from Jonathan Guyer

For a scruffy guy with a hipster aesthetic, the charges were absurd—joining a terrorist group, spreading false news, misuse of social media, contempt of religion, and insulting the military. Under the tyrannical and paranoid regime of former General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, there is no space for creatives like Habash. And now, as the Egyptian government has run out of people to repress, it is cracking down on apolitical online personalities and Instagram influencers.

To understand Habash’s tragic and untimely death, one first has to consider why El-Sisi feared being called balaha, or the fruit of a date tree. No one is quite sure who started calling El-Sisi a date—was it because he is short and stout, or a reference to a popular 1989 film in which a mental patient named Balaha makes up grandiose lies? Or was it just silly to call the country’s most powerful man a little fruit? Whatever it is, “many people seem to get it without the need to an explanation, which is the beauty of it, I guess,” said the satirist and cartoonist Andeel, who is now based in Paris. “[It’s] like memes that make sense without knowing the reference.” After eliminating dissent from most of the press, the government has done everything it can to ban the nickname, which is why Habash had landed in the country’s worst supermax facility.

Habash worked with Egyptian rocker Ramy Essam on his music video “Balaha” in 2018.

Essam was one of the loudest voices chanting for the overthrow of Mubarak in the January 2011 revolution. In Tahrir Square, he adapted Egyptian protest songs for a new generation—and as a result, authorities tortured him in the Egyptian Museum’s basement during the uprising. But he emerged from there as an advocate for freedom, continuing to produce agitpop ’n’ roll against the regime, even after he left Egypt in 2014, seeking asylum in Sweden. He continued to collaborate with Habash.

“He was like my little brother. It was not just work relation,” Essam told me. He recalled meeting a 15-year-old Habash at one of his concerts. “I remember his eyes that were full of energy. He was always so looking into the future.” Habash became a regular presence backstage, snapping away. Says Essam, “He was always like in his own world. Like the band is there, the audience is there, but Shady is in a different dimension.”

Essam’s 2018 song was a direct attack on Egypt’s military president. Even though El-Sisi’s name is never mentioned outwardly, the lyrics, by the poet Galal El-Behiery, were not subtle. “Oh shiny, brown Mr. Date, four years have finally passed in disgrace,” Essam intoned while dancing through the streets of Bentonville, Arkansas, in the music video, where he was serving as a fellow at the House of Songs, an international music forum. “May the Lord take you as you pray / With your gang boys to the darkest jail / I wish that you may rot in such a place.” Shady Habash, who did the postproduction, was arrested in March 2018, as was El-Behiery the lyricist, who endured torture and beatings in prison.

When you crush a song, it just keeps catching on, and “Balaha” got millions of hits on YouTube. But digital activism isn’t enough to stop the regime’s cruelty.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians are in prison on dubious, politicized charges. Now, as COVID-19 spreads through the country, jails are on lockdown. Habash’s family had not been able to visit him since March 10. There is very little information available about the coronavirus’s presence in the Egyptian prison system, but the authorities are clearly using the disease as a pretext for further isolating prisoners from the outside world, while not taking any precautionary measures for their well-being. According to human rights activist Mona Seif, social-distancing methods are not being implemented in cells, prison staff are not following any health regulations even as they go in and out, and neither medical nor sanitary supplies are being allowed inside. It’s rare to see guards wearing a mask.

In Egypt, it seems, there is nothing left to crack down upon. The Egyptian General Prosecution’s office issued a rare statement this week saying that protecting “the cyber border” is a new front in deterring enemies. With so many journalists, activists, and politically active young people already incarcerated, anyone with any influence is a potential challenge to the El-Sisi regime. Lately, Instagram influencers who have large followings for their innocuous content, romance blogs and makeup tutorials, have been arrested. Any space not heavily monitored by the regime poses a threat.

The coronavirus crisis has been an opportunity for the Egyptian government to get away with more brazen infringements. There has been no amnesty for nonviolent Egyptians in the country’s overcrowded prisons, and those who by law have been cleared are still being tormented. The prominent organizer and web programmer Alaa Abdel-Fattah, who has been in and out of prison since the Egyptian revolution of 2011, remains in Tora Prison, where Habash was being held. The family of Alaa has visited him 14 times since mid-March, trying to get him medical supplies as well as rehydration tablets, since he has been on hunger strike for three weeks. This is in response to the illegality of his continued arrest; Alaa has not appeared before a judge even though his detention period had expired.

“The Ministry of Interior is using the global corona crisis as an excuse to expand their suppression tactics,” said Mona Seif, the activist and the sister of Alaa. In one summary court hearing yesterday, over 700 prisoners’ expired detentions were extended without their presence in court, an attempt to legalize the status quo of arbitrary imprisonment. “We also have new waves of arrest every couple of days, activists taken from their homes, from their street, and from their work,” Seif added.

The poet El-Behiery, who wrote “Balaha” and whose case was dismissed last year, is also still imprisoned, even though he had been conditionally released.

“Egyptians must know that there is no successful revolution without many sacrifices,” Shady Habash wrote on Facebook in February 2013. As the musician Ramy Essam told me, “He always thought of the world as a better place and he usually talked about it, and using his camera was his tool of finding the world he was wishing for.”