Peter Greste: trapped in a Cairo cell

PETER Greste and his colleagues are innocent pawns in a political game.

PETER Greste and his two jailed Al Jazeera colleagues are doing their best in acutely trying circumstances. Locked in a 4m x 3m cell for 23 hours a day, it’s a good thing they worked as a television crew in the field. There’s no room for argument in their tiny corner of Cairo’s Tora prison.

By local standards, however, their accommodation is probably as good as it gets. Exactly what happens now, after the trio’s sentencing, is anyone’s guess.

In Brisbane yesterday, Greste’s father, Juris, acknowledged his son would likely be moved, either elsewhere in the notoriously crowded prison complex or to another centre altogether. This is just one of the many uncertainties clouding Greste’s future.

His seven-year jail term, announced late Monday Australian time, came like a bolt from the blue. Greste, 48, was convicted of aiding the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and spreading “false news’’ about the military coup that drove the Islamist group from power in Egypt. He was arrested with Al Jazeera English’s Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed when Egyptian police raided their office in a five-star Cairo hotel on December 29.

In fact, they were doing their jobs as journalists, covering a story that has become increasingly fraught for Western and independent media to credibly pursue. This was underlined in and outside the court, amid the general shock at the severity of the sentence. Greste raised a clenched fist in mute defiance. Fahmy was dragged from the defendants’ cage shouting: “They will pay for this, I promise!’’ Mohamed seemed to be too stunned to speak, having had three years added to his seven-year term for illegally possessing ammunition; the offending article was a single spent cartridge he had picked up as a souvenir.

Afterwards, Australian journalists covering the verdict were confronted by police and jostled away from a designated broadcast area outside the Tora prison and court complex. No one protested. The Greste case has sent a powerful message about the limits of press freedom in President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s Egypt.

The international community is mobilising to demand the release of Australian-born Greste and his cellmates. The process, unfortunately, is likely to be drawn out. Were the newly elected Sisi minded to exercise his presidential prerogative and pardon the trio, he could not act until the domestic appeals process was exhausted, and that will surely take months.

Greste’s parents were a picture of anguish when they fronted the media in Brisbane, arm in arm. They had barely slept after news of the sentence broke. Juris Greste said the family’s hopes had been raised in March by a letter from Egypt’s then interim president, Adly Mansour, promising a speedy resolution of the case and “resumption of the family’’ in the near future. “It gave us great confidence,’’ he said yesterday while his wife, Lois, choked back her tears.

The disappointment was crushing. “Peter has been very, very strong,’’ his mother said, her eyes brimming. “This will be a hard time for him, but I know he will get through … he will be OK. I can imagine he is as shocked as we are.’’

The three men have made extraordinary efforts to keep up their spirits. They eat, sleep and use the toilet in a cramped, hot space, barely with room to stand shoulder to shoulder between the walls. They have decorated the cell with plants from the exercise yard. After intervention by Australian embassy officials, the jail authorities relented and allowed them reading material. Greste’s brother, Andrew, recently took in a copy of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet to help him feel “closer to home’’.

The prison wing, known as the farm, houses a who’s who of the deposed Brotherhood government: ex-cabinet ministers, judges and the former prime minister, Mohammed Morsi, a belated casualty of the putsch led last July by Sisi, then chief of the powerful Egyptian military.

From time to time Greste gets to share food with the ex-PM. The irony is exquisitely cruel.

Greste is no novice reporter. He had worked in war zones in the Balkans in the 1990s and in Afghanistan before joining Al Jazeera English as a correspondent covering southern and eastern Africa from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. In 2011 he won a Peabody Award for a documentary on Somalia for the BBC’s showcase Panorama program.

However, he was parachuted into a political minefield in Cairo as “Christmas cover’’ for a holidaying correspondent, far from his home turf. As street demonstrations against Morsi’s detention intensified, the military-backed interim government cracked down not only on the Brotherhood, declaring it banned, but on the media as well.

Al Jazeera’s international English-language news service, produced out of oil-rich Qatar, is used to having doors opened for it in the Arab world, despite presenting as a dulled-down version of CNN. But the local affiliates have a very different reputation. In Egypt, the Arabic-language Al Jazeera Mubasher operation was accused of being pro-Morsi and blacklisted after the military takeover.

Those familiar with the service, spun out of live streaming coverage of the Arab spring uprisings in 2010-11, say its reporting could be unbalanced.

While Al Jazeera English asserted a stand-alone status within the network, the Egyptian authorities failed to see the distinction. During Greste’s shambolic trial, the undercover policeman who arrested the three journalists admitted that he thought they worked for Al Jazeera Mubasher.

The prosecution was so weak it would have been laughable in other circumstances. Gaping hole after hole was exposed by the defence lawyers. A committee of technical experts from Egypt’s state television network provided a key report purporting that ­Greste and his team had collected material that endangered Egypt’s national security, aided terrorists and was biased — claims the journalists vehemently denied. To boot, they were alleged to have been operating unlicensed.

Yet all three witnesses backtracked under cross-examination, laying bare glaring contradictions with their written evidence, so neatly tailored to the prosecution case. What was touted as proof of Greste’s culpable reporting in Egypt turned out to be old stories he had cut in Nairobi; at one point the trial judge was presented with holiday snaps the Australian had taken on a family getaway in Europe with his parents. To his credit, Greste kept his cool in the defendants’ cage, his head sunk deep in his hands. Not one shred of credible evidence emerged to show that he had contacted anyone from the Muslim Brotherhood, let alone taken their side.

His parents have also shown remarkable restraint during their dignified media appearances. Like the Australian government, they have stopped short of direct criticism of the Egyptians. Tony Abbott insisted yesterday that “megaphone diplomacy’’ would only make matters worse. He had spoken to Mansour and was on the phone to Sisi last weekend, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had made repeated representations to her counterpart. All of which ­raises the question: what more can Canberra do?

As Don Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University, points out, Egypt is hardly this country’s closest friend in the Middle East. Ranked 35th on our list of trading partners, Egypt was never a foreign policy priority for Australia.

Now that it is, Greste and his family will take heart from the support that is being rallied across the world.

Crucially, the US has bought in, with Secretary of State John Kerry describing the conviction of the Al Jazeera three as “chilling and draconian’’. The White House followed up, demanding that the Egyptian government pardon the foreign journalists, along with the local reporters and students who were sent down with them on similar charges.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry pushed back, strongly rejecting “any comment by any foreign party shedding doubt on the independence of (the) Egyptian judiciary and its fair rulings’’. In the same vein, the Egyptian prosecutors’ office lauded the heavy sentences as an important deterrent.

The politics are poisonous and there’s no way of knowing how this will play out for Greste, who was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong spot when, according to one insider, the “musical chairs stopped’’ and the Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organisation in Egypt.

Qatar is seen to project its growing influence through Al Jazeera, backing the Brotherhood on its Arabic-language channels, in the eyes of critics. The Gulf state certainly knows how to play both sides. It is not only the designated home (for now) to soccer’s corruption-plagued 2022 World Cup but also hosts the US Navy and Air Force, as well as a key US military command centre.

Sisi’s crackdown on the Brotherhood in Egypt was mostly a domestic concern, but the targeting of Al Jazeera was aimed squarely at Qatar. Arguably, Greste was a pawn in a much larger power game.

Dan Nolan, another Australian journalist who worked for Al Jazeera English, was detained by Egyptian security while covering the 2011 revolution that erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir square, bringing down dictator Hosni Mubarak. It’s a mark of the times that he was held for only six hours before being allowed to get back to work. “The climate was completely different,’’ says Nolan, 35, who left Al Jazeera after five years in 2011 and now works for the Nine Network’s A Current Affair . “There was no vendetta from the military.’’

Nolan’s heart goes out to ­Greste and his brave parents, as do those of millions of Australians. Seven years in a grim Egyptian jail is a lot of collateral damage for anyone to endure.

Timeline of injustice

● December 29, 2013: Peter Greste is arrested in Cairo following a raid by Egypt’s National Security service. Qatar-based Al Jazeera English colleagues Mohamed Adel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed are also detained. The journalists are accused of illegally broadcasting news harming Egyptian domestic security.

● March 6, 2014: The trial of Greste, Fahmy and Mohamed begins in Cairo. Greste is denied access to an interpreter.

● March 18: Greste’s family reveals that interim Egyptian president Adly Mansour has written to them, assuring he will “spare no effort to work towards the speedy resolution of the case”.

● March 24: The trial continues as the case against Greste begins to collapse, with prosecution witnesses unable to recall key aspects of the case.

● March 28: Tony Abbott intervenes in the case, making a personal plea to Mansour to secure Greste’s release.

● March 31: Greste tells Egyptian judges the idea that he has a connection with the Muslim Brotherhood is “frankly preposterous”. He is denied bail.

● April 10: The trial descends into farce when the main evidence against Greste is revealed to be his old work from Somalia and Kenya. Greste labels the trial “ludicrous”. “Today of all days the case completely fell apart,” he shouts from his caged dock. “We’re still strong, we still believe that in the end justice will prevail.”

● June 5: Prosecutors demand the maximum penalty of between 15 and 25 years for Greste and 19 other Al Jazeera defendants. “We request that the court, without compassion or mercy, apply the maximum penalty for the abominable crimes they have committed,” prosecutor Mohamed Barakat says.

● June 23: The Egyptian court delivers its sentence. Greste and Fahmy are jailed for seven years, and Mohamed for 10 years, sparking international outrage.