AP: Egyptian police clash with dozens of people protesting eviction...

Egyptian police clash with dozens of people protesting eviction from
land, alleged torture death of woman

By PAKINAM AMER,
Associated Press Writer

03-17-2005 13:31
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) _ Riot police clashed with about 40 people who
gathered at the Supreme Court in downtown Cairo on Thursday to protest
the eviction of farmers from their land in the Nile Delta and the death
the day before of a woman they allege was tortured by police.
Nearly 100 policemen pushed the protesters from the gates and at one
point began hitting people with their batons before their officers
ordered them to stop.
"We were so few and they started beating us," said parliament member
Hamdeen Sabahi, who had joined the small protest. He immediately took
his complaint to the prosecutor-general, who agreed to order an
investigation into the farmers' allegations.
The protest followed weeks of clashes between rice and wheat farmers
and police in the Delta province of Damanhur, about 150 kilometers (93
miles) northeast of Cairo.
The farmers claim they were evicted from their land in early January by
a man who claimed to own the property.
According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, 150 families
were "violently" evicted from their homes and "random arrests" were
carried out. Five children under the age of 9 were briefly detained, a
statement said.
Clashes ensued between the farmers and the landlords' supporters,
leading to a number of injuries and destroyed vehicles, according to the
EOHR statement.
At least 22 farmers, including six women, were arrested after the
clashes, and some of them were tortured, EOHR said. One woman, Nafeesa
Zakariya Muhammad Al-Marakbi, 40, died Wednesday of "torture, beating
and ill-treatment," the statement said.
Al-Marakbi's death was the catalyst for the protest in Cairo. The
demonstrators, many of them farmers from the Nile Delta, chanted slogans
against President Hosni Mubarak, calling him a tyrant.
"Let Hosni Mubarak fall!" some yelled. "It's enough! Twenty-four years
of injustice!"
"The land is for the peasants, the land is for the people who plant
these plants!" others shouted.
Three farmers were briefly detained but released after Sabahi spoke to
the prosecutor-general.
"We have the right to demonstrate and express our opinions," Sabahi
said. "We were treated in an uncivilized and unlawful way."
He said the prosecutor-general was "very understanding of the issue"
and would investigate who actually owned the land, as well as the
reports of torture and ill treatment.
"It's the farmers of Egypt who feed us and this is what the authorities
are doing to them," complained human rights activist Suheir Morsi at the
protest. "They (the farmers) have only weak voices."