Opinion | The Most Eloquent Speaker at the Climate Summit Is Alaa Abd El Fattah - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/opinion/alaa-hunger-strike-egypt-cop.html
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/11/14/opinion/12elrifae-image/12elrifae-image-facebookJumbo.jpg By refusing to even drink water during the climate summit — an event dedicated to thinking about our planet and its future — Alaa is intervening in this global conversation by staking his fragile, incarcerated body as the argument. From his prison cell, he is arguing what environmental activists have long known: Our planet and its future are not separate from us, from how we treat one another’s bodies, from whether we are able to live and think and speak safely and freely.
A few weeks earlier, Alaa’s sister Mona Seif visited him in prison. Like all his monthly visits, it was 20 minutes long and took place with a glass barrier between them. “I am going to die in here,” he told her. “You have to get over the notion that you’re going to rescue me. Focus on achieving the highest political price for my death.”
Alaa’s words point to a greater democratic concern beyond his self: that vaunted liberal democracies prioritize maintaining relations with dictatorships to safeguard strategic interests over the lives of their citizens — celebrated or ordinary — incarcerated and pushed to the brink of death by their authoritarian clients. Against these shortsighted politics, Alaa understands that our crises and our fates are interconnected.
Alaa’s radical decision to stop drinking water as diplomats, journalists, politicians, scholars and activists arrived in Sharm el Sheikh is galvanizing all of this. International government and grass-roots attendees have spoken out for him at the climate summit. Solidarity has poured in from everywhere: People in Egypt, New York, Palestine and around the world are writing, protesting, reading his work and going on hunger strikes in solidarity with him.
Because of his activism and his prolific writings, and because of how long he has been in prison, Alaa has become a symbol of the 2011 revolution, which Mr. el-Sisi, who came to power following a coup in 2013, has tried very hard to erase and prevent from recurring.
And yet, it seems that Mr. el-Sisi and his security state cannot stop people from embracing a renewed spirit of solidarity and calls for justice, which are reverberating throughout the climate summit. Alaa is on his sixth day of refusing water, after more than seven months without food. In response to pressure about his case, the Egyptian government has asked people to not get distracted, to focus on climate issues.
After months of denying that he was on a hunger strike, Egyptian authorities told the family that he is receiving medical intervention to prevent him from dying in prison. Alaa is not on strike because he wants to die; he is on strike because he wants to truly live. Any unwanted bodily intervention will only become a new front in his fight for his life.
In Sharm el Sheikh, the heads of the German, British and French governments said they raised Alaa’s case in their meetings with Mr. el-Sisi this week.
Alaa’s hunger strike has exposed the limitations of business-as-usual diplomacy and energized our capacities to create change. That goes for all of us: his loved ones and supporters, and the governments that are supposed to represent and protect him.
Yasmin El-Rifae is the author of “Radius,” a history of a feminist group that fought mass sexual assaults at Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring protests in Egypt.