CAF Letter Urging Egypt’s Cooperation on Murder Investigation of Italian Student Giulio Regeni

CAF Letter Urging Egypt’s Cooperation on Murder Investigation of Italian Student Giulio Regeni

CAF Letter Urging Egypt’s Cooperation on Murder Investigation of Italian Student Giulio Regeni

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Middle East Studies Association on 11 February 2020 in response to the newly-formed Italian parliamentary investigation of the kidnapping, torture, and killing of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in February 2016.]

His Excellency Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
President, Arab Republic of Egypt
Fax: +20-2-390-1998

His Excellency Sameh Shoukry
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Fax: +20-2-576-7967

Major-General Mahmoud Tawfik
Minister of the Interior
Fax: +20-2-796-0682
center@icsmi.gov.eg

Your Excellencies President al-Sisi and Minister Shoukry, and Major-General Tawfik:

We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to urge you to cooperate with the newly-announced Italian parliamentary investigation of the kidnapping, torture, and killing of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in February 2016. It is hoped that this investigation will finally bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. The leaders of the Italian parliament, joined by a large segment of the Italian media and public, have insisted that 2020 should be the year when the identities of those responsible for Regeni’s murder, as well as the details leading up to and surrounding the crime, are made clear.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has over 2,700 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

The circumstances of Giulio Regeni’s ordeal are well-known. A D.Phil. candidate at the University of Cambridge, he was engaged in research for his dissertation on Egyptian trade unions. His research included oral interviews with Egyptian labor activists. He disappeared from Cairo’s Dokki neighborhood on 25 January 2016; nine days later, on 4 February 2016, his body was found on the side of the Cairo-Alexandria highway, showing signs of extensive and prolonged torture.

From the time that investigation of Mr. Regeni’s murder commenced, in February 2016, Egyptian authorities have failed to cooperate with their Italian counterparts and obstructed a thorough and transparent inquiry. Egyptian forensics experts performed an autopsy on Mr. Regeni’s body with no Italian officials present. In March 2016, the Egyptian government attempted to place blame for the murder on civilian criminal gangs. In September 2016, however, Egypt’s then-Attorney General revealed that Mr. Regeni had been placed under police surveillance in the weeks before his death after a police informant relayed suspicions to the security forces that Mr. Regeni was a spy. In May 2018, after failing for months to respond to Italian requests for closed-circuit television footage of the Cairo metro on the night Mr. Regeni disappeared, Egyptian authorities released footage that inexplicably contained significant gaps.

In November 2018, Italian authorities named five members of the Egyptian security forces whom they suspected of involvement in the murder and launched an official investigation of these men; Egypt’s state information service rejected the investigation and claimed not to recognize “the record of suspects.” In May 2019, the Italian authorities obtained new evidence of the Egyptian security forces’ involvement in Regeni’s murder: an unidentified source testified that he had overheard an Egyptian intelligence agent explaining that the security forces kidnapped Regeni because they believed him to be a British spy. Although Italian authorities reported this finding to the Egyptian government, the Italian prosecution team never received a response to their disclosure.

We wrote to you on 10 July 2019 urging you to investigate both these pieces of new information related to the Regeni case, yet never received a response. On the contrary, the Egyptian government has continued to obstruct a transparent investigation. Indeed, the Non-Governmental Organization known as the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, whose lawyers serve as the legal counsel in Egypt for the Regeni family, reports that its offices have been repeatedly raided and members of its staff detained by Egyptian security forces. The Egyptian authorities’ unresponsiveness, obstruction, and intimidation obviously constitute an obstacle to the conduct of a thorough investigation and increase the possibility that the true perpetrators of this crime will never be identified and brought to justice.

The Committee on Academic Freedom notes that the Regeni murder has had a chilling effect on the efforts of both Egyptian and foreign scholars who seek to conduct research in Egypt, particularly on modern and contemporary subjects, such as labor activism, that have present-day political implications. Thus, the Egyptian government’s refusal, over the past four years, to cooperate with this investigation constitutes a violation of the academic freedom of scholars currently conducting research in Egypt or hoping to do so in the future.

In recent months, the European Parliament has taken up the Regeni case. On 23 October 2019, the Parliament passed a resolution condemning the “lack of a credible investigation” into the Regeni case by the Egyptian government. Roberto Fico, president of the lower house of the Italian parliament, also asked his counterparts in Germany and the United Kingdom to support a new Italian investigation.

We note that in the wake of a visit to Cairo by Italian investigators last month, Egyptian Attorney General Hamada al-Sawi authorized the formation of a new team to oversee Egypt’s investigation of the Regeni case. We urge the Egyptian authorities to cooperate fully with the Italian authorities in bringing the full truth about this horrific tragedy to light as soon as possible. We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Dina Rizk Khoury
MESA President
Professor, George Washington University

Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor, University of Southern California

cc: Dr. Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412