Egyptian doctors protest against escalating police brutality
When a doctor at a Cairo hospital told a police officer that his cut didn’t require stitches, the response was startling and brutal. Police beat up the doctor and a colleague and dragged them off into custody.
The incident spiralled into protests by thousands of doctors in the Egyptian capital on Friday, a rare show of public outrage over police abuses that rights groups say have escalated in the country. Such public demonstrations have become unusual in Egypt, where tens of thousands of political dissidents have been arrested and street protests without prior police permits have been banned since 2013.
While protesters gathered outside the building of the doctors’ union, known as the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, inside members called for the resignation of the health minister – in part because of his lack of support – and threatened to go on partial strike.
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The standoff between policemen and doctors suggested that Egypt’s powerful security forces may have overstepped their limits by clashing with one of the country’s most respected professions. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a prominent local rights group, said the doctors’ assault was “a reflection of the level of police abuse of authority these days”.
The protests were sparked by an assault on January 28 in Cairo’s Matariya hospital, one of the largest in the city, which serves around 2,000 patients a day drawn from one of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods.
The hospital entrance is surrounded by piles of garbage, and the surrounding streets are crowded with hawkers selling everything from used clothes to chickens freshly slaughtered on the pavement. A police office is attached to the hospital building so that officers are on hand to intervene in the regular scuffles.
Around 10 minutes’ walk away is Matariya’s main police station, described by EIPR as a “slaughterhouse” because 14 people have died while in police custody there over the past two years.
