Torture for a healer
Reidy, Jennifer
REPORT FROM EGYPT TORTURE FOR A HEALER MUBARAK & A 'DISSIDENT' Dr. Mohammed Mandour, a forty-two-year-old Egyptian psychiatrist, was arrested without charge, then blindfolded, beaten, hung by...
...Mandour was a respected doctor with only one minor political offense on his record, that from his student activist days nearly two decades before...
...They slapped me and beat me in the head...
...During the Gulf War, such links with the Iraqi-supporting Palestinians led to harassment, torture, death threats, and the paranoid actions of a repressive government against its own citizens...
...As a student I had a few Palestinian friends, and I was already very aware of the situation...
...He was also a member of the board of directors for the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) and a long-time critic of the lack of Palestinian rights in Egypt...
...He took off all my clothes, except my underwear, laid me down on a cold, smooth table, and tied down my hands and feet...
...At 11:30 P.M...
...They sold their country, their homeland...
...When I opened the door, they told me I was being arrested under 'administrative detention.' I was shocked...
...After a day they took me down and started to question me again, this time even more brutally...
...The only time they removed my handcuffs was when I had to defecate...
...They would sell their wives for a pack of Marlboros...
...They hung me by my wrists with iron handcuffs for twentyCommonweal 14 February 1992: 5 four hours," Mandour told me...
...Mandour doesn't expect him to...
...His work led him to a number of refugee camps, including Shatila, which was decimated with the Sabra camp in the 1982 massacre...
...I feel free...
...For ten days the questioning, beating, and electric torture continued...
...As a student at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Mandour had been involved with a movement to create opposition parties in Egypt's one-party system...
...I felt sick and nauseous and I passed out a few times...
...Now I know firsthand how my government operates...
...Now when I walk down the street I am happy...
...After a few hours, Mandour heard a man's voice, the only voice he would hear, over and over, during his ordeal...
...The blood was draining from my head...
...A military unit escorted him downtown to the State Security Intelligence Building, known as "Lazoghly" after its location in Cairo...
...I tried to be calm...
...You need a good dose of torture...
...Several weeks later the minister told Mandour and the EOHR that he would look into Mandour's torture and punish those responsible...
...I haven't been arrested since 1972...
...They won't arrest me again...
...You're going to die slowly...
...Pressure and condemnation from the world community convinced Mandour's captors to release him from Lazoghly...
...In 1981 Mandour went to Lebanon to work in mental health services for a government hospital...
...In Beirut, Mandour met Fathi Arafat, brother of PLO head Yasir Arafat...
...Mandour still hasn't heard from the government...
...During one protest, President Anwar el-Sadat sent troops to storm the university and arrest thousands of radical students...
...But Mandour's experience with the police as a young man hadn't prepared him for the abuse that awaited him...
...Mandour was one of them...
...His friends aren't just anybody: they are the well-organized, dedicated team of EOHR and they have powerful friends around the world...
...He was chief of the Palestine Red Crescent Society...
...For the first time during the interview, Mandour, a relaxed, confident, amiable man, trembled as he recounted his story...
...He asked me, 'Why are you with these dirty people?'—meaning the Palestinians...
...Meanwhile, on the outside, Mandour's family and friends were pressuring the government to release him...
...After a flurry of media attention in Egypt's opposition newspapers, word spread about Mandour's case...
...REPORT FROM EGYPT TORTURE FOR A HEALER MUBARAK & A 'DISSIDENT' Dr...
...But I was thinking I wanted him to shoot me," Mandour said quietly...
...But I won't forget—the memory makes me strong...
...When I moved my head I felt my mouth hit an iron bar above me...
...The soldiers blindfolded and cuffed Manour before he entered the building...
...Soon letters demanding his release poured into President Hosni Mubarak 's office from Amnesty International, Middle East Watch, Article 19, Physicians for Human Rights, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, among others...
...I tried to sit up or raise myself off the table...
...After his arrest, the Egyptian government at first denied that Mandour was in Lazoghly, even though his friends and family knew where he was...
...They arrested me because they thought I was a PLO spy looking to help Saddam Hussein terrorize Egypt...
...JENNIFER REIDY Jennifer Reidy, a former editor of Cairo Today, is a reporter and free-lance writer now living in Connecticut...
...No one will ever find out what happened to you...
...Mohammed Mandour, a forty-two-year-old Egyptian psychiatrist, was arrested without charge, then blindfolded, beaten, hung by his wrists, interrogated, and tortured with electric jolts by Egyptian officials for ten days last February...
...The EOHR reports at least fourteen others suffered the same fate as Mandour during the Gulf War...
...Then he moved it down to my chest, my arms, my stomach, my legs and feet...
...His voice was full of hatred...
...on February 8, 1991, six police officers arrived at Mandour's home...
...Although President Mubarak has received hundreds of angry letters from around the world, he hasn't acknowledged the case...
...After six days, on February 23, Minister of the Interior Mohammad Abdel-Halim Moussa ordered Mandour's release saying his interrogation had proved "negative...
...Every day I feel better and better," he told me...
...By then, your arms start to separate from your shoulders...
...I didn't support Iraq during the war, and I thought it was a mistake for the Palestinians to side with them...
...Lazoghly is infamous as the government's torture chamber and slaughterhouse...
...He took his electric instrument and put it all over my body, starting at my face and neck...
...Not once did they remove the blindfold...
...His interrogator—who became his torturer— told him he was going to die...
...However, "since Egypt is a 'friend' of the United States, you'd never know it...
...I am a psychiatrist, and I see they are starving for an identity...
...Then he added: "The publicity surrounding my arrest was very embarrassing for the Egyptian government...
...6: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...
...They put me in a room for ten days," he says...
...They aren't human beings,' he said...
...I don't have nightmares...
...I told him that I work with Palestinians because I understand them more than most Egyptians do...
...He concentrated on my testicles, and put the thing inside my penis...
...After eight weeks Mandour returned full time to his job at the Palestine Hospital, but his own post-traumatic stress wouldn't allow him to see patients for some time after that...
...Their meeting, Mandour says, "sealed my feelings about the Palestinians and gave me a chance to work alongside them...
...He first developed a bond with the Palestinian people when he worked at a public hospital in Kuwait from 1978 to 1981...
...The reason: Mandour had worked for the Palestine Red Crescent Society—the medical, humanitarian branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization that serves anyone, regardless of nationality, religious, or political affiliation— and was in charge of the psychiatric ward at Cairo's Palestine Hospital where he cared for patients suffering from the psychological stress of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising...
...I feel the experience has made me stronger as a person and as a professional working with the Palestinians...
...You're a doctor,' they said, 'you know how these kinds of beatings will make you lose your vision forever.' "I think it was the next day when my interrogator started to use electricity...
...He was next sent to the crowded Abu Za'bal Prison in northeast Cairo...
...I watched them search my house, go through my desk, bookcases, drawers, everything...
...I help them because I understand," Mandour explained...
...I knew I was in big trouble, but I didn't know why...
...But when I went to Kuwait, I saw how Egyptians and Palestinians alike were discriminated against in the Gulf states, mostly because of Sadat's policies with Israel...
...I was terrified when I saw where we were going," he recalls...
...Mubarak is as cruel and ruthless as Saddam is against his own people," Mandour asserts...
...I couldn't tell if there was anyone else in the room with me...
...But while his torture had ended, his detention had not...
...I didn't want to cry in front of him...
...I know my government...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
