About seven months ago, I was waiting for an appointment in an empty cafè in The Hague, the Netherlands. My interviewee was delayed, so I started reading the newspaper and the cleaner asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. When she came back, we started talking. She was a middle-aged woman who turned out to be an Egyptian that immigrated to the Netherlands about twenty years ago. Her husband was a journalist and I showed her the front page of that day. It was about Rena Netjes, a Dutch journalist who would hear her sentence by the Egyptian court that day for working at Al-Jazeera English. Which is the same as financing the Muslim Brotherhood. Which is the same as being a terrorist. At least, according to the Egyptian secret service logic. Rena was expected to get a ten-year prison sentence. Later that day I would interview Rena – who fled Egypt before she was arrested – over the phone, and I asked the Egyptian woman how she felt about this entire process and how it reflected upon press freedom in her homeland. I told her there was…
#FreeAJStaff: an ode to Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed
December 30, 2014
