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Imprisoned Egyptian Activist Alaa Abdel Fattah Says He Has Spent Last Decade in ‘Black Abyss’
Alaa Abdel Fattah in Cairo's Tahrir Square in June 2011, during the revolution that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. (Lilian Wagfy via Wikimedia Commons)

Imprisoned Egyptian Activist Alaa Abdel Fattah Says He Has Spent Last Decade in ‘Black Abyss’

Egyptian pro-democracy advocate Alaa Abdel Fattah, a leader in the 2011 revolution that led to the deposing of Hosni Mubarak who has spent much of the last ten years in jail, said in a letter to his sister Mona Seif that he has been living in a “horrific dark space” and that the “black abyss has swallowed me ten years ago.” He wrote: “Mona, I don’t have a home to return to. The last real home I ever had was 10 years ago. Freedom is no longer to ‘return somewhere… All the hope lies with new homes that are being built now, or have not been built yet.” Fattah spent some 200 days on a hunger strike this fall to protest his continued detention and conditions in prison, during which he consumed 100 calories a day in the form of a spoon of honey and a drop of milk in tea. He went on a full hunger strike, including stopping drinking water, on November 6 to coincide with the opening day of the COP27 United Nations climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. Several world leaders raised the Fattah’s case with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during the climate conference. He was sentenced in December 2021– after spending nearly three years in pre-trial detention – to five years in prison, on charges of “spreading false news undermining national security.” Last year, Fattah’s family and his Egyptian lawyers accused prison authorities in Cairo’s Tora Prison of torturing him and denying him basic legal rights.

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