Egypt’s 12,001 missing votes - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
The majority of the Egyptian and the interational media are characterising the voting as peaceful and relatively fair. Winners, especially the Islamist parties (at least of the time of writing), are celebrating their victories and losers are generally urging supporters to work with the process.
But many activists, who worked the hardest since January to bring real democracy to Egypt, have been left asking: What does this election mean when thousands are jailed merely for opposing those in power (or, for many, merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time)? What do these elections mean when one of the country’s well-known bloggers, Alaa Abdel Fattah, can be held for weeks on charges surrounding his reporting of the military’s massacre of Coptic protesters in October, when voters are threatened with 500 Egyptian pound fines if they don’t vote, and when the military uses massive amounts of tear-gas, and even bullets on pro-democracy protesters whenever it feels its position threatened?
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