General matters

What a pleasure it is to follow a speech from a Member on the Government Benches that I would have been honoured and delighted to have made myself. I want to talk a little about the history of the Arab countries, because exactly one year ago a humble vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, protesting at his humiliation by the state. That act set off what we now call the Arab spring, a process of revolutionary change that today remains as unclear as the revolutions of 1789 or 1917 remained unclear 12 months after the storming of the Bastille or the Winter palace. Sadly, we are seeing how history repeats itself, not, as Marx wrote, first as tragedy and then as farce, but as tragedy followed by tragedy. Revolutions devour their children and nowhere is that more true than in the Arab and Maghreb world. Gaddafi is gone but Libya is full of violence. The Syrian people get warm words from the west but nothing more as they are killed daily. The King of Bahrain came for tea at Downing street and the next thing we saw was a helpless woman being dragged away in front of cameras back in Bahrain as if the ruling elites there were sending a message to our Prime Minister that they did not care a fig about human rights. In Tunis today, the Manouba university's faculty of letters, with 8,000 students, is occupied by Islamist ideologues insisting that girls wear the niqab and veil their faces if they want to be students. We are learning, perhaps too late, that Islamism is not a friendly ideology but remains a political construct aimed at destroying human freedoms. We have had to watch Egyptian soldiers faced with a peaceful protest pull a woman from the crowd and drag her painfully along the ground, exposing her breasts, before a brutal soldier stamps his booted foot on her chest. What is our Government's response? Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary issued the blandest of bland statements:"““The unrest of recent days shows the scale of the challenges which Egypt's political system must address including the need to build full respect for human rights.””" That was all the Foreign Secretary could say. ““Unrest”” is putting it uber-mildly, as 13 people have been shot dead by the Egyptian army, acting on orders, and hundreds have been wounded since Friday prayers last week. A military dictatorship is revealing itself in Egypt, aided by Islamists with that ideology's extremely limited concept of freedom and democracy. We do not know the name of the young woman who has been in many newspapers, but we do know the name of the 26-year-old Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil. He is now on the 118th day of a hunger strike that might well claim his life as he is taking only water at the moment. Nabil began earlier this year by blogging that"““the Egyptian army and the people are of one hand””" meaning that the two were working together for democracy. He changed his mind and later wrote that the army and the people were"““no longer of one hand””" when he saw the army repressing protestors. For publishing that incontrovertible journalistic truth, he was charged with ““insulting the Egyptian military”” and a military tribunal convicted him last April in a fake legal process. Last week in a retrial, amid the renewed brutality in Tahrir square, his conviction was upheld. The tribunal's decision has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and by the US State Department. I want to take advantage of this pre-Christmas debate to ask for our Foreign Secretary to add his own—and, I believe, Parliament's—voice in calling for the immediate release of Maikel Nabil, who might well die soon, just as Mohammed Bouazizi died on 4 January this year when he sacrificed his life to call attention to the lack of freedom in Tunisia. Mr Nabil is taking only water now. His sacrifice is also in protest at the fact that Egypt's ruling military council has put on trial 12,000 people in the post-Mubarak era, more civilians than were tried during all of Mubarak's rule. Throughout history military tribunals dealing with civilians who irritate the generals work on the basis of presumption not of innocence but of guilt. There is no right to cross-examine witnesses or evidence, and no consideration of the evidence is permitted. There is no right of appeal. Nabil and the 12,000 Egyptians now in prison had no right to their own lawyer. This is Soviet-style justice, or perhaps could seem even worse if one considers justice in the Nazi era. I hope British lawyers will be able to go to Cairo to help Mr Nabil and other prisoners of conscience. I ask our Foreign Secretary to call in the Egyptian ambassador and demand Nabil's immediate release and British generals who have hosted their Egyptian fellow army officers should place some calls to Cairo and say that the Egyptian military will be covered in shame if Maikel Nabil dies at their hands. The Arab spring is at a crossroads. Britain should speak loud and clear for justice and democracy.