Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt's Cop27 masquerade

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/18/greenwashing-police-state-egypt-cop27-masquerade-naomi-klein-climate-crisis

Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade

Sisi’s Egypt is making a big show of solar panels and biodegradable straws ahead of next month’s climate summit – but in reality the regime imprisons activists and bans research. The climate movement should not play along

by Naomi Klein
Tue 18 Oct 2022 01.00 EDT

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There is also, frankly, something shaming about it. Because while Abd El-Fattah thinks about the world, it’s not at all clear that the world heading to Egypt for the climate summit is thinking much about him. Or about the estimated 60,000 other political prisoners behind bars in Egypt, where barbaric forms of torture reportedly take place on an “assembly line”. Or about the Egyptian human rights and environmental activists, as well as critical journalists and academics, who have been harassed, spied on and barred from travel as part of what Human Rights Watch calls Egypt’s “general atmosphere of fear” and “relentless crackdown on civil society”.

The Egyptian regime is eager to celebrate its official climate “youth leaders”, holding them up as symbols of hope in the battle against warming. But it’s hard not to think of the courageous youth leaders of the Arab spring, many of them now prematurely aged by more than a decade of state violence and harassment from systems that are lavishly bankrolled by military aid from western powers, particularly the US. It’s almost as if those activists have just been substituted by newer, less troublesome models.

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With the upcoming climate summit in Egypt, Arefin tells me, “The usual calculus has changed. The balance has tipped.” In addition to the carbon and the cost, the host government – who will get the chance to preen green before the world – is not your standard double-talking liberal democracy. “It is,” he says, “the most repressive regime in the history of the modern Egyptian state.” Led by Gen Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who seized power in a military coup in 2013 (and has held on to it through sham elections ever since), the regime is, according to human rights organisations, one of the most brutal and repressive in the world. Since taking power less than a decade ago, it has built more than two dozen new prisons.

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While I was watching the video, it struck me that Sisi has decided to use the summit to stage a new kind of reality show, one in which actors “play” activists who look remarkably like the actual activists who are suffering under torture in his rapidly expanding archipelago of prisons. This summit is going far beyond greenwashing a polluting state – it’s greenwashing a police state.

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International delegates can’t even read up much on current pollution and environmental despoliation in Egypt in academic or NGO reports because of a draconian 2019 law that requires researchers to get government permission before releasing information considered “political”. (The whole country is gagged, and hundreds of websites are blocked, including the indispensable and perennially harassed Mada Masr.) Human Rights Watch reports that groups have been forced to rein in and scale back their research under these new constraints, and “one prominent Egyptian environmental group disbanded its research unit because it became impossible to work in the field”. Tellingly, not a single one of the environmentalists who spoke to Human Rights Watch about censorship and repression was willing to use their real name because reprisals are so severe.

Arefin, who conducted extensive research on waste and flooding in Egyptian cities before this latest round of censorious laws, told me that he and other critical academics and journalists “are no longer able to do that work. Egypt’s environmental harms now happen in the dark.” And those who break the rules and try to turn on the lights end up in dark cells – or worse.

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[Magoo48]

1. They've found a way to make COP more irrelevant and embarrassing than it already was.