Deaths without dignity

21 August 2013, Mada Masr By Sherief Gaber   “You want to see the bodies? Ok then, here!” the man working at the morgue said, holding me and a friend by the arm and practically pushing us into a humid room filled with bodies, lying on slabs or on the floor and in various states of decay. We had been

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The Writing on Egypt’s Walls

14 August 2013, The New Yorker By Jonathan Guyer   n Egypt, political cartoons leap off the page and into public places, from street art to high-class galleries, on leaflets and TV programs. At the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya, in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo, where protesters spent more than a month protesting the ouster of President

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Egypt: 'I hold both the army and Brotherhood responsible'

Channel 4 News, 14 August 2013 Actor and director Khalid Abdalla gives his personal response to the deadly violence gripping Egypt following operations to clear pro-Morsi camps in Cairo.   I’m disgusted by the blood, and resisting falling prey to a polarised narrative. I don’t believe the sit-in should have been cleared, but I’m against what the sit-in stands for.

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The news website that’s keeping press freedom alive in Egypt

Mada Masr was formed just before military coup of 2013. Amid growing censorship, its staff have risked their lives to continue reporting. Can they stay true to their mission? Leslie T Chang Tuesday 27 January 2015 On the afternoon of 17 June 2013, a group of friends gathered in a fourth-floor apartment in downtown Cairo. They sat on the floor

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On Hunger Strike

Omar Robert Hamilton London Review of Books Vol. 36 No 19 · 9 October 2014 page 30 | 1717 words After the shock and awe tactics of the Rabaa massacre last summer, when Egypt’s military regime murdered around a thousand supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, the rolling counter-revolution has played out mostly within the justice system, between police stations,

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The Road Not Taken

By Amira Howeidy | SEP 02, 2014 Within four months of the military’s ouster of Mohamed Morsi, one of the icons of liberalism serving in the new cabinet, Ziad Bahaa-Eldin, admitted to CNN that those who called for political reconciliation, like himself, were alienated by the political mood, where the very concept of reconciliation has become “a dirty word” in Egypt. Yet when

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Egypt's Rabaa massacre: one year on

The killing of 817 protesters last August was this week judged a crime against humanity equal to, or worse, than Tiananmen Square. But feelings on the ground are mixed   Patrick Kingsley The Guardian, Saturday 16 August 2014 “To this day, I can’t believe it happened. I reached a point where I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t talk to

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Breakfast with Mada: Mosaab Elshamy on Rabea, photography and memory

  By: Lina Attalah Thursday, August 14, 2014 – 14:42 In her seminal work On Photography, Susan Sontag spoke of making photographs as an event in and of itself, which, simultaneously with the events they capture, work on creating “a tiny element of another world: the image world that bids to outlast us all.” Mosaab Elshamy, a photojournalist trained as a

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On August 14, a belated obituary for Bassem Mohsen

  Philip Rizk Thursday, August 14, 2014 – 18:33 I met Bassem Mohsen for a few moments in July 2013. He was upbeat and hopeful that the army had taken hold of power from the Muslim Brotherhood. I remember being surprised by his quick optimism. He believed that these generals were different than those who had ruled during the period

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The Air Was Hot with Hysterical Nationalism

  August 14, 2014 A year after the Raba’a massacre in Cairo, one writer struggles to redraw her relationship to the city By Yasmin El-Rifae A year ago I woke up in Cairo to the news of a massacre, the second of the summer. I was subletting a friend’s apartment downtown, a beautiful place that gave me solitude above the

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