Above: John Greyson is a filmmaker who is a Gaza flotilla activist. He was en route to Gaza when he was arrested in Egypt.
I have never met John Greyson. We were supposed to meet this week at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. But he is in Cairo. In Tora prison. Where Mubarak used to be.
John is a filmmaker. A daring, funny, experimental, activist filmmaker. His films fuse politics, humor and music in a way that manages to be eclectic, populist and erudite all at once. His charming agitprop pieces have been some of the key mainstreamers against the occupation of Palestine. His last major film, Fig Trees, is a documentary opera about AIDS activists, sung in part by an albino squirrel puppet. It’s totally brilliant.
And now he’s in jail. He’s in jail because he was trying to get to Gaza, with his friend, Dr. Tarek Loubani. Tarek travels to Gaza every year to train emergency physicians at Shifa hospital – the main trauma center of our besieged neighbors. He and John met at last year’s Toronto Palestine Film Festival. They hit it off and hatched a plan to travel to Gaza together, John with his camera, Tarek to his medical students.
John and Tarek landed in Cairo on August 15. They had a permit to travel on to Gaza. He called me from the airport. He was in arrivals and I was in departures. We agreed that if he got stuck in Cairo waiting for Rafah to open that he should stay in my flat and that we were looking forward to our panel together in Toronto. By the end of the next day John and Tarek were in jail. This is what happened, in their own words:
Our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera. The protest was just starting – peaceful chanting, the faint odor of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead – when suddenly calls of “doctor”. A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode…and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding.
We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a checkpoint.
That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries.
They’ve been in jail for 50 days now.
I spent the last week in Toronto and I have never heard so many people speak with such love for one person. Everyone I met knows him, has worked with him, has been helped by him. His absence hangs over the city. Pink badges with the hashtag #freetarekandjohn hang on the lapels of the young and old. The lives of his hundreds of friends and colleagues and students are on hold. Every event is punctuated with sadness and worry.
This is the new Egypt’s gift to Canada.
50 days. And John and Tarek still have not been before a judge. They still do not know what their charges are. And on the 45thday, their detention was extended by a further 45. No reasons have been given. No credible accusations have been made.
What is the advantage of this for the government? The police have a long history of arbitrary arrests in the areas surrounding protests while the military can comfortably court martial thousands of civilians in a month. But being randomly arrested and held for 50 days without once appearing before a judge, without having any idea of what you may be charged with is beyond even the absurdities of the current Egyptian judicial system. What is going on?
In these days of military fanfare and popular bloodlust it is no surprise that John and Tarek’s case has not been taken up by the Egyptian media. There is no room for mistakes in our new War on Terror. There is no room for doubt. This has to change. As was the case in 2011, criticism of the military began with the people, with activists and with citizen media. People’s insistence on blunt speech and action forced the independent media to take a stronger position on the military. We must behave the same way again now.
John and Tarek’s case is not exceptional. There are thousands of Egyptians who do not have international petitions calling for their release. Injustice runs deep here. But John and Tarek did not come to Egypt for our politics – they were simply passing through. Are they being made an example of? Are they being punished in order to dissuade other activists from trying to get to Gaza? Since John and Tarek were arrested the Egyptian army has been bulldozing houses and trees and flooding tunnels to create a ‘buffer zone’ between Egypt and Gaza. This act of solidarity has reinforced the army’s position as Israel’s most trusted ally in the region. Is John and Tarek’s imprisonment a message to the world that Gaza is now well and truly closed? That the crack in the border we managed to open after the revolution is sealed?
We cannot know. What we know is that John and Tarek have been in jail now for 50 days. What we know is that a regime that randomly arrests people, that detains foreign guests, that strangles Gaza, that brutalizes everyone that comes in contact is a regime that we will never accept.
Freedom for John, for Tarek, for Gaza, for all of us.