Dear Mada Masr,
This week we read the updates as they flooded in: New Cairo Misdemeanor Court had ordered the closure of your website. On top of this, the court handed down a maximum fine of LE3 million, and ordered the confiscation of your property. The news came just days after Lina Attalah was summoned by the Supreme State Security Prosecution, charged with managing an unlicensed website and publishing false news, reportedly in connection with your coverage of protests at several prisons across the country. While attacks on independent journalism in Egypt are far from new, we saw how the proceedings exhibited new levels of disregard for due process.
Your targeting illustrates the threat posed to state narratives by independent journalism. The coverage of prison conditions undermined the state’s branding of its new giant prison complex as more humane, its Prisons Authority now dubbed the “Social Protection Authority”. The targeting also came after you stood up against the detention of Matsadaash journalists. You came together with eight outlets across different countries in a joint newsroom to fact-check a state-sponsored conference with the title of Achievements. This governmental conference is part of what we have labelled a ‘rebranding strategy’, a set of communication and PR initiatives used to project an image of progress and modernity, to attract foreign investment and trade, while deflecting scrutiny of states’ human rights abuses.
Uncovering what is behind those rebranding myths is one of the most efficient ways to counter them. This factual rigor and understanding of what people are actually experiencing matters because this is how we, collectively, can make sense of things in a “post-truth” world. This is exactly what you and Matsadaash journalists are being punished for. Without independent journalism, it is easier to reconstruct our realities with euphemisms - prisons become ‘protection’, privatization is progress, repression is security. Mada Masr is also being punished for solidarity itself. You and the other outlets stood up for your Matsadaash colleagues - who are still detained as we write these lines - and your show of togetherness was intolerable to the state.
We read your editorial, Maybe, tomorrow and we have been sitting with it across countries. What is it that hasn’t been said yet that could make the state recognize that transparent and independent journalism is one of the most honest forms of loving one’s home and one’s people? To offer them your skills, your knowledge, and your genuine attempt to make the sense of the world with them?
Maybe tomorrow, we will find more words to explain to future generations the darkness of this moment, not just in Egypt, but across the region and the world. For now, we offer our love letter - to you Mada Masr and to independent journalists.
The first thing we want to say is how much your work matters. As you so beautifully put it, it is part of “the bigger we.” You may feel like a singular stone dropped into an ocean of competing information. But even small stones have vast ripples. There are those we know about - the narratives changed by the lesser-heard voices you platformed, the projects and books blooming from the seeds planted a decade ago when you gave burgeoning writers a space. Then there are those we may never know about - how someone read a story or saw a political cartoon that sparked a new perspective in their mind, which they went home and told a loved one.
By now it might have become a cliché to say that journalism is history’s first draft. But it is true that today’s commitment to truth is part of tomorrow’s struggle for memory. Never more strongly than the last three years have we witnessed the power of a pen, a laptop, and a smartphone in the face of crushing injustice and attempts to write history from the perspective of those in power.
As AWID and RESURJ we stand with you and join you as “people united in their desire to know, to think together and to defend and protect that space from closure.” As you and others creatively stood with Matsadaash, today it is our turn to stand with you. Because none of us is free until all of us are free. Our only way out towards collective liberation is through solidarity, practiced one day after another.
In solidarity,
RESURJ and AWID