12/25/2023 0 Comments Mona and the sea of squaresHis jailers have so far refused, and so Alaa continues to waste away. Alaa’s mother was born in England, so he was able to get British citizenship at the end of last year. With his strike, Alaa is attempting to pressure his jailers to grant important concessions, including access to the British consulate. Everyone knows, however, that he is imprisoned to send a message to any future young revolutionaries who get democratic dreams in their heads. Alaa’s strike is a protest against his outrageous imprisonment for the crime of “spreading false news” - ostensibly because he shared a Facebook post about the torture of another prisoner. Especially since April 2, when he started a hunger strike, ingesting only water and salt at first, and then just 100 calories a day (the body needs closer to 2,000). Earlier this year, a collection of his poetic and prophetic prison writings was published as the widely celebrated book, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.”Īlaa’s family and friends live for those weekly letters. Behind bars almost continuously for the past decade, Alaa is able to send and receive letters once a week. It was, he explained later, “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan.” He was concerned about the epic floods that displaced 33 million people at their peak, and what that cataclysm foretold about climate hardships and paltry state responses to come.Ī visionary technologist and searching intellectual, Abd El Fattah’s first name - along with the hashtag #FreeAlaa - have become synonymous with the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo’s Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people that ended the three-decade rule of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak. All that is known is this: Alaa Abd El Fattah, arguably Egypt’s highest profile political prisoner, wrote it while on a hunger strike in his Cairo prison cell last month. No one knows what happened to the lost climate letter.
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