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Release Tarek Loubani and John Greyson


Detained without charge in Cairo

Since August 16, 2013, thousands of people internationally start their days by checking the website tarekandjohn.com, hoping for news of the release of physician Tarek Loubani and filmmaker and scholar John Greyson, two Canadians arrested and detained without charge at the Tora prison in Cairo, Egypt. Loubani’s and Greyson’s friend and colleague Justin Podur and their family members—especially Cecilia Greyson, John’s sister—have worked tirelessly alongside Canadian consular and government officials and a privately-appointed attorney in Cairo for their release. Change.org hosts a petition with 115,000 signatures from all over the world demanding their safe return to Canada. As befits both Greyson’s and Loubani’s work, social and traditional media have been broadly and creatively deployed to build the release campaign.

On September 16, we were greeted with the disturbing news that after an arbitrary extension of their detention without charge, Loubani and Greyson have begun a hunger strike. Until now, they have been in good health but in overcrowded conditions, which Loubani and Greyson have gamely described as “like camping”—one cell, one tap, and one toilet for thirty-eight detainees. Until this week, the maximum period of emergency detention was forty-five days, but the regime has revised that to two years, which is to say any period they want. Loubani and Greyson were recently moved to a less crowded cell, but news of the extension has prompted them to deploy the strongest form of personal power they have. They will accept fruit juice, but that’s all.

Tarek Loubani is a physician who teaches and practices emergency medicine at Western University and the London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario. The University joined with Al Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, to train emergency physicians in Advanced Cardiac Life Support. Loubani is Kuwait-born of Palestinian parents, and relocated to Canada as a refugee when he was ten. Greyson is a distinguished and openly gay Canadian documentary and fiction filmmaker and a faculty member at York University. He is loved and revered by artists and audiences in Canada and around the world, including in South Africa, where his most recent film (Fig Trees) traced the AIDS pandemic through the work of South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat and Canadian AIDS activist Tim McCaskell. They were en route to Gaza where Loubani was to do the essential work of medical training and treatment. Greyson, a long-time collaborator with Palestinian activists against the Israeli blockade, accompanied Loubani with the hopes of making a film about his work. Greyson, too, is from London, Ontario, though lives and works in Toronto.

Reports from the US, UK and Canadian press describe Loubani’s and Greyson’s detention as a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The two arrived in Cairo at the height of volatility in response to the military ouster of elected President Mohamed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The land border with Gaza—the only point of entry to Gaza outside of Israel—was closed, so Loubani and Greyson had to wait in Cairo until the border reopened. On their second night in Cairo, lost in the vicinity of their hotel and fearful of not making it back before curfew, they reportedly stopped at a police station to ask for directions. The police response was to first arrest Greyson, leaving Loubani just a couple of moments to call Podur, his emergency contact, to let him know about the arrest. Greyson and Loubani have been held since then at the Tora prison in the Azbakiya district of Cairo with hundreds of other un-charged detainees, most Egyptian, seven international. For “security reasons” they and others have been permitted to go to the prison courtyard for light, air, and exercise just once since the start of their detention. No individual arrested that day has been named in a charge, though the prosecution has made general attributions about incitement in support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Greyson and Loubani have answered all questions, accounted for themselves and their travel, provided documents, and responded through consular officials and their Cairo attorney to the prosecutors’ questions, to no avail. They and those who know them acknowledge that they are not part of the Muslim Brotherhood, indeed at least two commentators at tarekandjohn.com (one at Al Jazeera America) note that for reasons of religious exclusion the Brotherhood is unlikely to draw gay activist support.

For the first twenty-nine days, statements and press releases issued by Podur and Cecilia Greyson were terse, temperate, and descriptive, recognizing a slow legal process amid an enormous backlog of cases; dozens of lawyers show up at Tora prison on the prosecutor’s schedule, but the prosecutor, Mohamed Heta, doesn’t appear. Or, Heta meets with one attorney on behalf of one client and then leaves. On day 29, however, when Heta renewed Loubani’s and Greyson’s emergency detention for another fifteen days and the maximum was extended from forty-five days to two years, Podur’s blog post was more forceful, demanding accountability from the prosecutor and the Egyptian government.

I have not met Loubani, though all available accounts reveal him to be skilled, engaged, brave, and humane, using his medical training to intervene in some of the most volatile environments in Canada and internationally, especially in Gaza. John Greyson is a colleague and personal friend of mine—not an intimate friend, but someone I have come to know affectionately after our introduction through a mutual old friend some fifteen years ago. I was already a fan of Greyson’s filmmaking, and it was sweet to discover the gentle incandescence, humor, and fun of someone whose fierce intelligence, commitment, and exuberant creativity as filmmaker and scholar I so admired. I am not alone. Despite personal modesty, Greyson draws tribute and regard from a broad swath of citizens the world over. Last Spring, McGill-Queen’s University Press published a five-hundred-page collection on his work aptly titled The Perils of Pedagogy. Last week, marshalling their connections to public figures and celebrities during the Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian artists, friends and colleagues Sarah Polley, Atom Egoyan, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Gibney, and TIFF director Noah Cowan held a press conference to heighten international attention to Loubani’s and Greyson’s detention.

Given the Egyptian military government’s disregard for Loubani’s and Greyson’s freedom and well-being, and the freedom and well-being of many other protestors—most of them Egyptians who don’t have 115,000 signatures on a petition at change.org—I understand John’s and Tarek’s resolve to begin a hunger strike as a gauntlet thrown down to a capricious and abusive absence of due process. It terrifies me, and each morning on tarekandjohn.com I will be looking with new fervor and concern for word of their release.

“We have been overwhelmed by all of the support we have received in our campaign to bring Tarek and John back home,” said Mohammed Loubani, Tarek’s father and himself a community physician in New Brunswick. Recognizing her brother’s and Tarek’s anguish, Cecilia Greyson said “we know [Tarek and John] did not take the decision to begin a hunger strike lightly, and we want them to know we will do everything we can to support them and get them home soon.”

The detention is reprehensible. The military leadership has demonstrated that Egypt isn’t safe, legally or otherwise, for Egyptians or seasoned international travellers doing essential work. It is also chilling to consider what kind of political capital in Egypt the detention might represent for General al-Sisi and interim president Adly Mansour.  John’s and Tarek’s status as public artist, public physician, and public citizens is amplified with every signature on the petition and every passing hour that the interim military government continues an indefensible tactic (and as the war in Syria displaces international attention away from Egypt).
 
Fury is predictable, but discouragement is not an option. To Egyptian detainees who share John’s and Tarek’s circumstance, my support. To John, Tarek, Cecilia, Mohammed Loubani, and loved ones in Toronto, London, New Brunswick, and elsewhere, my love, solidarity, and commitment to pay attention and contribute however and wherever I can.

As an early tweet from Polley asked, “what have you done today to help free Tarek and John?”

Lisa Henderson is a professor in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts
 

All urls mentioned above are linked at tarekandjohn.com

For how to help, click here. Amnesty International has issued an urgent action about Tarek and John, asking for letters and phone calls directly to Interim President Adly Mahmoud Mansour, Minister of Defense General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Public Prosecutor Hesham Mohamed Zaki Barakat.

To make your own #FreeTarekandJohn button, click here.


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