Bearing red flowers, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Wednesday apologized in person to one of several women hospitalized during a series of mass sexual assaults at a rally to mark his inauguration on Sunday, in an attempt to show his willingness to tackle Egypt’s sexual violence epidemic.
“I have come to tell you and every Egyptian woman that I am sorry. I am apologizing to every Egyptian woman,” al-Sisi said as he stood by the woman’s bed.
“Don’t be upset,” he told her.
It is highly unusual for any senior official, let alone the president, to offer a public apology and the gesture is likely to bolster the former army chief’s popularity.
He followed the hospital visit up with the creation of a top-level committee tasked with tackling sexual crime, with that move coming 24 hours after he told Egypt’s top policeman to prioritize the policing of sexual violence.
Since footage emerged of one of Sunday’s assaults, Egypt has been gripped by a furious debate about sexual violence and harassment, which was banned for the first time in Egypt on Thursday last week.
Al-Sisi’s positive intervention in this debate contrasts sharply with his comments as a top general in 2012, when he defended the act of forcing women detained by soldiers at protests to take virginity tests.
The Egyptian Ministry of the Interior on Monday said it has arrested seven suspects aged 15 to 49 in connection with Sunday’s events. Three have been charged with sexual assault under the threat of force and attempted rape, according to a statement issued by Egyptian chief prosecutor Hesham Barakat.
The statement also gave graphic details of the assault, saying the attackers formed a circle around a woman and her teenage daughter, stripped the mother of her clothes and assaulted her. Later, the mother fell on a pot of hot water used by a tea maker, sustaining burns on 25 percent of her body.
In a statement on Wednesday, al-Sisi said: “Our honor is being assaulted in the streets. This is unacceptable and we can’t allow one more incident like this to happen.”
However, other simultaneous interventions by state institutions laid bare the country’s cultural forces that have exacerbated sexual crime in the past.
Egypt’s state-run National Council for Women announced plans to sue the al-Jazeera television network for reporting on the assaults, journalism which they claimed was a politically motivated attempt to besmirch the reputation of both al-Sisi and Egyptian women.
Al-Jazeera reported on “harassment and the recent rape incident to tarnish the image of Egyptian women,” council head Mervat el-Tallawy said.
In an earlier statement, the council condemned Sunday’s assaults as “gruesome,” but implied that the had been carried out by al-Sisi’s opponents, the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than being the natural result of the failure of all sections of society to take harassment seriously.
The council added that the attacks were “politically oriented crimes” intended to “kill [women’s] joy regarding the success of the roadmap,” a reference to the political process that brought the new president to power.
For its part, the Islamist Brotherhood’s political wing also sought to make political capital from the assaults, claiming that they were caused by a decline in morals following the overthrow of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi.
However, UN research completed before Morsi’s overthrow shows how sexual violence and harassment has long affected all parts of Egyptian society, with their polling suggesting that more than 99 percent of Egyptian women have experienced public harassment.
A group of 25 independent rights groups this week said they have documented at least 250 sexual assaults at mass gatherings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square since the 2011 uprising that toppled former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, including 80 on one day last June.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was