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Babylon & Beyond

EGYPT: Stop that dissident mail

By Jeffrey FleishmanStaff Writer 
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No more letters home for Ayman Nour. An Egyptian court has ruled that the jailed political dissident and leader of the Tomorrow Party can no longer write to his wife. The reason: Nour has angered officials by mailing home essays critical of the government that ended up in the nation’s independent newspapers.

‘This decision shows a determination to deny him every right as a prisoner,’ Nour’s wife, Gamila Ismail, told AFP.

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The ruling is the latest attempt to silence Nour, a lawyer who ran against President Hosni Mubarak in 2005 and was later sentenced to five years in prison for forging political documents. His cause was quickly taken up by human rights organizations that frequently criticize Egypt for political repression, torture and the jailing of activists, especially members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Nour was on the minds Egyptians on Sunday, when President Bush, speaking in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, criticized Middle East governments for silencing their opponents: ‘Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail,’ he said.

—Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

(AFP)
Babylon & Beyond
Jeffrey Fleishman

Jeffrey Fleishman is a senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was the foreign and national editor. A 2002 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Fleishman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. A longtime foreign correspondent, he served as bureau chief for The Times in Cairo and Berlin, and was previously based in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also was a writer on film, art and culture. Fleishman has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a finalist for the Center for Public Integrity’s Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. He is the author of five novels, including “Good Night, Forever” and “Last Dance.”

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