I’ve seen the Hosni Mubarak cage before. Not the same cage we just saw on TV at his trial, but one that was close enough.
It was nearly 10 years ago, not long after 9/11, and I was in Egypt as part of a trip through the Muslim world.
An Egyptian human rights advocate had tipped me to a trial of 94 Islamists who were accused of various acts of jihad, including reading banned books. That was Mubarak justice, and I figured it was worth seeing.
My fixer — the person who gets you where you need to go, who sets up interviews and translates for you — drove me through the desert to an isolated and well-fortified military base.
No one goes there, he told me, unless there’s a very good, or very bad, reason.
And as I explained to the guard the very good reason I was there, another guard, standing in a tower, had his machine gun trained on me. Let me just say it focuses the mind to have a loaded gun pointed at you.
After being thoroughly searched — and watched — I boarded a van with several other journalists, and we headed to the courtroom, where 94 men were being charged as terrorists, seven in absentia.
That’s where I saw the cage.
There were 87 men locked up like, yes, animals. A cage is not what you call subtle. It says everything in a single glance. The defendant’s cage has an ancient history, but one most countries have abandoned. One thing a cage does not say is “innocent until proven guilty.”
Here’s what I wrote at the time in the Rocky Mountain News:
“The cage, set to one side of the courtroom, is a giant mesh affair, with the compartments framed by bars that the men, dressed in prison whites, cling to and sometimes climb on. Although guards surround the cage, it may be an unnecessary precaution. There is the cage and then there is the fact that the trial is on a military base in the middle of the desert north of Cairo . . . .
“I don’t know whether the [defendants] are innocent or guilty, although the longer I sat in the courtroom the less certain I was that truth had any place here.
“The only truth I could be sure of was the cage.”
The Mubarak cage is entirely gratuitous. He’s an old man in a sickbed, wheeled into the courtroom. No one expects him to attack anyone. And though Mubarak hardly elicits sympathy — he grunts his innocence to the judge — the cage tells its own story.
The visual suggests a show trial, with the verdict already decided — which is, of course, the last thing the new Egypt needs.
I don’t doubt that Mubarak is guilty of many things, up to and including murder. But if you really want a democracy — and democracy advocates still crowd Tahrir Square — this is a great opportunity. If you convict Muburak on the evidence, and not on his history, you send an important message about justice, and not revenge. Not a lot of countries can say that.
It’s not an easy thing to do where there’s so much history involved. But there’s also the Arab spring, and what it means in places like Libya and Syria, where they’re busily killing protesters.
At the 2001 trial, Hafez Abo-Seada, who was secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said the trial was just a roundup of the usual suspects to show America that Egypt was serious about terrorism. Egypt didn’t have to prove that. Terrorists had killed Anwar Sadat, after all. The anti-terrorism emergency laws had long been in place and long been abused by the government.
“Where do terrorists come from?” Abo-Seada asked from his office back then. “A lack of democracy. A lack of human rights. A lack of free expression. The lack of a right to form political parties. Democracy is the only way to avoid this kind of danger.”
Abo-Seada has the same job today, still fighting for democracy. He’s even winning. I saw a piece from him praising the fact that Muburak could get a fair trial.
At the trial 10 years ago, I saw two remarkable things. At a break in the action, friends and loved ones crowded around the cage, and the caged men climbed along the mesh wires to touch them.
And when the trial resumed, there were maybe a dozen lawyers, shouting objections and listening to instructions. There was a familiar courtroom feel to it, like justice had been done at some point. It was a strange kind of chaos that suggested the lawyers would actually be listened to — if not necessarily heard.
It’s 10 years later, past time to be rid of the cages, but time still to be heard.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
