Disability as a price for #Jan25

The following are two examples we came across for ordinary young Egyptians who lost the ability to walk in their early twenties as a result of being injured in a peaceful protest against the military leadership after the military coup in 2013. 

As always, we try our best to highlight the voices and perspectives which don't get the same attention in the English and western media which likes to paint a black and white image for what has gone and is going on in Egypt. These two had very normal lives like any other university student in Egypt or the world until they decided to stand up for the truth. The price they paid for this was rather expensive.  

Asmaa Gamal who is pictured above is a young Egyptian woman from Alexandria who lost her leg for the revolution exactly 4 years ago, in November 2013. When he was shooting her, the police office said: "Now you won't be able to march in any protests any more".

Asmaa was shot by an Egyptian police officer during a protest in her leg and went through an amputation operation to remove her leg right after that. 

Asmaa walks on one leg since 2013 but since then she has also continued to be a huge source of hope, inspiration, and faith for so many in her circle as well as for thousands of social media followers. 

                           

Mohammad Yousry a young Egyptian man from Alexandria was badly injured by the Egyptian security forces during the protests which took place as a response to the military coup shortly after it took place in July 2013.

He was paralyzed as a result and lost the ability to move. Like many revolutionary youth who were injured during the revolution, he is now on a wheel chair.

When you feel that your loss was big, when you feel despair and disappointed, remember the heroes who fought for a better future for Egypt!

Remember their sacrifices and the very high price they paid for the revolution and for standing up for justice, freedom, and truth. 

Who pays the price of political imprisonment?

Like everywhere else in the world, the political prisoner isn't the only victim of the trial of imprisonment, his family and loved ones are also victims and they live their pains and different other types of pains.

Some people probably heard about the Egyptian researcher Ismail Al Iskandarani who's been in prison since last year and is targeted mainly for his research and work about Sinai and the people of Sinai in Egypt, something the tyrannical military didn't like. Ismail's work was widely respected and published locally and internationally, and as a result caused his arrest upon returning to Egypt at one of the airport. He's been experiencing indefinite detention since late 2015 until today. 

But this is his wife Kadeega Gaffar, a prominent researcher and writer herself whose work And contribution are very respected and recognized locally and internationally.

You can see the toll of the hardship on her face and her soul.

In late April 2016 it was the first time her husband Ismail appeared to a court since they stopped him at the airport in November 2015. ‪

For more information about Ismail you can check out what we wrote about him here:

http://www.unheardegypt.com/2016/04/Sinai-Egypt-violations.html

And also follow the campaign dedicated to his release on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/FreeAlexandrani/

Posted originally on our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/Unheard.Egypt/posts/1303775592985024

Zainab Al Mahdy: When trauma and revolution kill

This story resonates so much with whatever happened to the Egyptian movement.
I see myself so much in her. I see reflections of my past and present in her.

Her name was Zainab Al Mahdy. Her angelic face looks like so many Egyptian and Muslim young women from the Arab world, but not the ones you see in the media.

Her friends said that she suffered from sever depression and fear due to working for the years post the revolution on female political prisoners cases and reading horrific accounts on what's taking place in the Egyptian prisons specifically the torture, sexual assault, and rape cases against Egyptian female prisoners. 

Zainab Al Mahdy, a young Egyptian revolutionary was found hanged in her apartment in Cairo today (November 2014). She is a survivor of the Rabaa massacre and had done a great effort in establishing all the grassroots work around the post-coup female political detainees that we benefited from. I just found out that Zainab and I have so many mutual friends in common and her death caused quite a stir in the movement here. 

Zainab who looks like many of us went from being a socially and politically active organizer from before 2011 to being a neglected/isolated suicidal depression and PTSD victim in post-coup Egypt, dealing with spiritual/mental confusion and disillusionment on her own, and with very little hope left for bettering this situation, and this is where she ended. 

That's what militarism has been doing here in Egypt in addition to killing and imprisoning, this is not the first case but it's quite shocking given how ordinary Zainab was.

#Jan25 youth committing suicide in apartments and prison cells or living as Zombies half alive half dead as the 4th anniversary approaches is quite a transition now. 

This is her last message to one of our friends before she deactivated her Facebook and stopped doing the work she was doing:

"I'm tired. I'm wasted. There is no use in all of that. It's like we are digging in water. We won't get anybody's right through any laws here, but we are doing what we ought to do. Just saying a word of justice to save our faces and not spit on it when we look at the mirror. 
There is no justice here. And I'm fully aware of this. There is no victory coming.
But we are just fooling ourselves to continue to live"."

Ordinary youth like myself are being killed by police violence in 2010.
Ordinary youth like myself are being imprisoned in 2011. 
Ordinary youth like myself are being killed, imprisoned, and exiled in 2013.
Ordinary youth like myself are committing suicide in 2014. 

Zainab’s end was both a slap on the face and a wake up call. Zainab was too sensitive, innocent, and fragile for all what she had to deal with at this age, at this historical moment, and in this society, where young women and women in general have to fight to survive without expecting too much support. This is happening on a large scale to many young people and young women her age in countries like ours. 

The revolution-or what used to be so- has killed and continues to kill its own children in so many ways besides the police and army's bullets. Things like depression, PTSD, lose of hope, extreme unbearable psychological and emotional stress, and other issues are among the ways young Egyptians are losing their lives-literally. 

Unfortunately, there's very little that has been done to deal with the consequences of the movement on an emotional and psychological levels. People in Egypt either don't have awareness or knowledge of these things, or if they do know, they don't give it enough consideration. 

At the same time, I also believe people in Egypt don't have the privilege or the choice to be taking care of their inner well-being considering the overwhelming amount of tragic events they have to continue to deal with on a regular basis.

5 years is quite a long time, and these 5 years were especially long.

So many youth including myself went through dramatic spiritual and intellectual shifts, and they don't feel very supported or encouraged. I think people need to stick to one another very firmly and stop being judgmental about how their friends and family members might be going through. 

Zainab's story needs to be read and shared. 


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Zainab giving a lecture in 2012 about the definition of "Theocracy" and "The Theocratic State" as a part of a political educational initiative inside Sultan Hassan mosque, Cairo. May her soul rest in peace.