Chasse aux sorcières contre les homosexuels en Egypte

Isabelle Cerboneschi
Jeudi 9 août 2001

www.letemps.ch

Egypt: Pressure mounts as homosexual trial begins

For additional background information see Perversion of Justice; Protest the Cairo Trial!
(http://www.iglhrc.org/world/africa/Egypt2001Aug.html#Background), and additionally http://www.iglhrc.org/world/africa/index.html#Egypt

> International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
> 1360 Mission Street, Suite 200 o San Francisco, CA  94103 USA 
> T: 1.415.255.8680
> F: 1.415.255.8662
> E: http://www.iglhrc.org

For additional information, contact:
Sydney Levy (IGLHRC), +1-415-255-8680 (office), +1-415-577-8680 (cell),

Moscow Mayor Rebuffs Gay Parade

Homophobia is a health hazard

Patricia Dunn, public policy director at the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, said several studies have shown that gay, lesbian and bisexual youths face an increased suicide risk. A Massachusetts survey published this month in the American Journal of Public Health found that gay high school students were about four times more likely to have attempted suicide as heterosexual students. (...)

The AMA proposal also says that teen suicide rates are lower in states that have anti-discrimination laws.

Un maire homosexuel à Berlin

Destruction of an exhibition on Nazi persecution of homosexuals (Compte-rendu en français en bas de colonne.)

HOSI Wien's reply to this message:

'Here a short up-date about  the events. Indeed, the exhibition financed from the Austrian share of the looted nazi gold, was vandalised in the night from Wednesday to Thursday. I could not report to you earlier as yesterday (Thursday) and today were quite busy, dealing with the police, informing the media, discussing with the curators what to do etc.  The exhibition was put up already on Tuesday to allow for an extra day in case it takes more than a day to put the exhibition up (Thursday was a public holiday here so the company did not work on that day). There were no problems from Tuesday to Wednesday. On Wednesday, the main evening news journal on national TV had a report on the exhibition. Maybe that  attracted the hooligans. Anyway, Thursday morning a HOSI Wien member who passed by Heldenplatz saw that almost all 14 exhibition pillars or columns were overthrown and she phoned me. The pillars were not destroyed, so people who have not seen them the day before could think it's still work in progress or even think this is how it should be  - you  can see photos of the exhibit before and after on our web-site at www.hosiwien.at/ns (there are also photos from the panel discussion with Pierre Seel on 11 June), and read the press release on the start page www.hosiwien.at. Anyway, we decided nevertheless to open the exhibition as planned on Thursday evening. Since it was a holiday, there was no way to have it repaired by the evening. It really was a shock for many people, and many wrote us in solidarity, and showed up at the opening. And people spontaneously took the initiative (without telling us) and spend last night there till dawn to have an eye on the exhibit. The media covered the attack, too, including again the main evening news show on national television, and Friday's newspapers. The Vienna City Councillor for cultural affairs phoned us on Friday morning and told us they will pay for repairing the exhibition. Another Councillor offered to pay for the surveillance of the place during nights (which could not be organised during this long weekend here but will be done on Monday), and to order the Vienna fire brigade to fix equipment to light the place during the nights - which will also be organised on Monday. We decided to have the eleven pillars repaired. This was done on Friday, it took the whole day because the iron base which anchored the columns in the soil had to be replaced which meant that the columns had to be disassembled, the new base had to be anchored in the soil, and then the pillars could be assembled again. It is rather strange that there are no eye witnesses to the attack, because this is a place which is never completely deserted, people would pass by there also in the night, there is a disco nearby, and what is most surprising, the police did not take notice of the attack although the place of the exhibit is only 200 m walking distance from the Federal Chancellery and the office of the Federal President which we assumed would be especially police-protected. But maybe not because everybody had left for the long weekend...'
Kurt Krickler

Compte-rendu tiré du bulletin d'information de Têtu du 18 juin 2001 :

Europride: la ville de Vienne va dédommager  une exposition vandalisée. (Autriche)  

La ville de Vienne s'est engagée vendredi 15 juin à  réparer et surveiller une exposition sur les persécutions des homosexuels sous le nazisme présentée dans le cadre de l'Europride et qui a été vandalisée dans la nuit de jeudi à  vendredi. La municipalité "s'est engagée à soutenir cette exposition en signe de solidarité" avec les homosexuels, a affirmé à l'AFP Daniel Loecker du bureau du conseil municipal. Le conseiller municipal aux affaires culturelles,  Andreas Mailath-Pokorny s'est déclaré "profondément choqué" par l'acte de vandalisme par lequel 11 des 14 colonnes d'informations sur les persécutions des homosexuels sous le  nazisme ont été renversées. L'exposition, présentée sur la  place des Héros, où Adolf Hitler a proclamé l'annexion de l'Autriche par le Troisième Reich en 1938, a été saccagée avant même son inauguration jeudi. "Il s'agit certainement d'un acte de haine envers les homosexuels commis par des homophobes ou des néonazis", a déclaré à l'AFP Kurt Krickler de la plus vieille et plus importante association d'homosexuels à Vienne, HOSI. "La ville a promis de payer les réparations et de faire surveiller l'exposition" présentée dans le cadre du programme de la grande manifestation homosexuelle européenne, l'Europride, et qui s'achève le 12 juillet, a-t-il ajouté (avec AFP).

Castro, le grand castrateur
Du livre de souvenirs de Reinaldo Arenas, poète cubain persécuté par le régime castriste à cause de son homosexualité, le peintre Julian Schnabel a tiré un film magnifique. Extrait...

Toute une vie vécue juste « avant la nuit » : le titre vient de ces moments où Arenas, recherché par la police à Cuba, se terre dans les bois pour jeter sur le papier quelques phrases avant l'obscurité, comme un bandit. Dès sa naissance, en 1943, les choses sont mal engagées : quand l'instituteur du village vient voir le grand-père Arenas pour lui dire que le gamin a des dons de poésie, le vieillard sort de la ferme, saisit une hache, agrippe le gamin et abat un arbre sur l'écorce duquel un poème est gravé. Peu à peu, le jeune Reinaldo prend conscience de son homosexualité - et de son talent. Quand Fidel Castro prend le pouvoir, Arenas est de tout coeur avec la revolucion : mais, très vite, le régime montre son vrai visage. Tandis que Reinaldo s'amuse sur les plages avec ses copains, passe ses nuits dans des amours de rencontre, n'hésite pas à mettre un masque de plongée pour vérifier, sous l'eau, le contenu des slips des baigneurs, une nuit épaisse tombe sur le pays. Ses livres sont interdits ? Il les fait sortir grâce à des touristes complaisants. Ses vers sont contre-révolutionnaires ? Il les transcrit sur du papier à cigarettes. Pour Julian Schnabel, « Reinaldo Arenas est le Walt Whitman latino ».

Très vite, la répression antigay va devenir épouvantable : jeté dans la cellule d'une forteresse, dépouillé de tout, Arenas vit les derniers jours de son calvaire cubain dans une fosse abjecte. Ses amis sont là, dans ce cloaque, essayant de survivre malgré la chaleur, la crasse, la maladie. Quand Reinaldo Arenas entendra parler des vagues de marielitos, ces laissés-pour-compte de la société cubaine dont Castro voudra se débarrasser, il se glissera dans la fournée. Assassins, fous, asociaux : tous seront débarqués, par milliers, sur les côtes de Floride. Castro voulait gangrener la société américaine en expédiant tous ses rebuts : il ne fit que libérer des tire-laine et des malheureux. Plus tard, en entendant un universitaire new-yorkais faire l'éloge de Castro lors d'un buffet luxueux, Arenas laissera libre cours à sa colère. « Aucun Cubain n'a une assiette aussi bien remplie que la vôtre », dira-t-il au professeur médusé, avant d'écraser cette assiette sur un mur. La mort viendra peu après : lèvres blanchies, yeux agrandis par la maladie, Arenas se laissera glisser dans l'obscurité devant son amant, Lazaro. La nuit, alors, finit. (...)

« Avant la nuit », de Julian Schnabel. Sortie en salles le 13 juin.
(1) Réédité dans la collection « Babel », chez Actes Sud, 444 p., 57 F.

François FORESTIER

Nouvel Observateur - N°1909 - www.nouvelobs.com

U.S. gives $500,000 to Nazis' Gay victims

Egypte : arrestation massive d'homosexuels

Article du Cairo Times in extenso :

A vice-squad dragnet snares gay revelers on the Queen Boat

Hossam Bahgat

Fifty-five Egyptian men were arrested on 10 May after police raided the Queen Boat, a tourist boat moored on the Nile across from the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek. After spending the night at the vice-squad headquarters in Abdin station, the men were questioned for two days by High State Security Prosecution on charges of "exploiting religion to promote extreme ideas to create strife and belittling revealed religions." If found guilty. the defendants could face up to five years in prison. The prosecution ordered the men to be detained for 15 days pending an investigation.

According to eyewitnesses, ten undercover officers from both state security and the vice squad entered the boats discotheque, known as a gay hang-out on Thursday nights, around 2am. After ten minutes of watching the dancing crowd, they started arresting the Egyptian men present and loading them onto three vans parked outside. The boats manager, Mamdouh Eleiwa, told the Cairo Times that a surgeon and professor at Cairo Universitys Faculty of Medicine was slapped on the face several times by a police officer and called a derogatory slang word for homosexual when he refused to go. Neither the boats staff nor its owner, business woman and retired fashion model Madiha Hassan Dergham, were summoned for questioning.

Although several foreign men were present when the raid took place, none were arrested. Neither were any of the four Egyptian women who were present. "The fact that Egyptian men were exclusively arrested is just disgusting," said a British eyewitness who asked for anonymity. "Westerners should not be immune from the law," he added. At the time of the raid, he was dancing with his Egyptian friend and flatmate, who is currently in jail.

A source in the prosecutors office told reporters on 12 May that the defendants were "practicing deviant rituals and holding parties were they practiced group sex and abnormal activities." While there is no mention of homosexuality in the Egyptian penal code, some statutes criminalizing obscenity and public indecency have been used against gay men in the past. The Queen Boat has been raided before, but detainees have been released after 3 to 10 days of detention in police stations. This is the first time that the arrested men have been transferred to the prosecutors office to face charges. If officially charged, the defendants will stand before a state security court, whose rulings are final and incontestable.

The morning after the prosecutors statement, different versions of the story were all over the local press. The state-owned Al Ahram published in its crime page that the defendants were members of a new devil worshipping cult that included students, doctors and other professionals. "The defendants considered themselves to be of the people of the Prophet Lot and took [the 8th-century Abbasid poet] Abu Nuwas as their prophet...They tried to recruit new members to their cult and called on them to go to swim in the Dead Sea in Jordan to be blessed by its water," the paper added. Al Ahrams coverage of state security cases is widely considered to reflect the prosecutions views.

Other papers added that the cult held weekly male wedding parties on the boat and were in the middle of one when they were arrested. The boats staff denied these claims and complained about inaccurate media coverage. "Journalists come to me and listen to what happened and then make up completely different stories," Eleiwa said bitterly.

The heavy press coverage of the case is reminiscent of a case in 1997, when 78 teenage men were arrested and accused of establishing a satanic cult. They were released after two months of detention, and the case was never brought to the court, but the some segments of the press later criticized the papers who had printed the names and pictures of the defendants, thus tarnishing their image in society. This week, official, opposition and independent newspapers published the names of the 55 defendants and some front pages carried their pictures with their eyes crossed over in black.

"We have learned from the states behavior to be skeptical about official statements. But if it is true that these charges were fabricated to prosecute homosexuals due to the absence of laws that criminalize homosexuality, then the state is way out of line," said Gasser Abdel Razeq of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law. A lawyer from the center tried to meet one of the defendants at the prosecution, but was prohibited. Although Abdel Razeq told the Cairo Times that the center will follow up the case, he added that their interest in this particular case is only documentation, with no intention to provide legal service for any of the defendants. The reaction of other local human rights group was similar. "We generally defend liberties but there are red lines that we should stop at," said Samir Al Bagouri of the Association for Human Rights Legal Aid. Secretary-General of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights Hafez Abu Saada said that defending gay rights was not part of his groups mandate. "Personally, I dont like the subject of homosexuality, and I dont want to defend them," Abu Saada said.

"When we started campaigning against female genital mutilation people said we wanted all of Egyptian society to work in prostitution," said Mohammed Zari of the Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners (HRCAP). "We live in a conservative society that condemns homosexuality and we have to keep that in mind." Homosexuality is a big taboo in Egypt, and local human rights groups are often criticized for following a Western agenda.

However, Zari said his center is willing to provide legal aid for defendants who were subject to torture or assault during detention. Although the HRCAP has reported on previous violations of prisoners rights in Tora prison, where the defendants are detained, Zari said that it is mainly political prisoners who are subject to such violations. "Defendants in cases which receive heavy media coverage are less likely to be subject to torture," he added. Al Wafd of 14 May said the defendants will be subject to forensic exams to ascertain if they have ever engaged in homosexual sex.

The London-based Human Rights Watch had not issued a statement as of press time, but the London office director of the Middle East and North Africa Division, Hania Mufti, told the Cairo Times that her office would take up the issue with the interior ministry and the state security prosecutor as soon as possible.

Although the Queen Boat was not closed down, their is a heavy police presence at its entrance and a corresponding lack of guests.

http://CairoTimes.com

Allemagne : les homosexuels réclament un monument en mémoire des déportés

Communiqué de M. Bujardet