Nearly 10 years ago, in February 2011, British prime minister David Cameron set out on a tour of the Gulf states, all close UK allies, with a bevy of representatives of the UK defence industry in tow.
Occurring in the middle of the Arab Spring, when repressive regimes were being toppled in popular uprisings, the government feared its lucrative cosiness with Gulf autocrats could send the wrong message and it tacked a last-minute stopover on to the itinerary: Egypt, where veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for 30 years, had just been overthrown. Cameron briefly descended upon Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the site of protests against Mubarak – for some photo opportunities, and then it was back to business.
It was soon revealed that British-manufactured tear gas had been used by the Egyptian authorities on the protesters in the square. But a decade on, UK arms firms continue to count Egypt as a major client.
The country is now presided over by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former director of military intelligence and defence minister who took power in 2014 after leading the previous year’s coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president.
The aftermath of the coup was characterised by massive bloodshed. The August 2013 Rabaa Square massacre, supervised by Sisi, saw the Egyptian police and army kill more than 1,000 overwhelmingly peaceful protesters.
Since Sisi’s assumption to the presidency, Egypt has witnessed its worst human rights crisis in modern history. Arbitrary arrests are rampant, tens of thousands of political prisoners have accumulated in jails under appalling and often lethal conditions, and the United Nations Committee against Torture has arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that torture is a systematic practice in Egypt”. READ MORE AT DAILY MAVERICK.