Political Foes Tortured in Egypt, Groups Charge : Mideast: Rights organizations will urge U.S. to condition aid to Cairo on improvement in record.

Dr. Mohammed Mandour, head of the psychiatric unit at Cairo’s Palestine Hospital, was at home late one night with his elderly mother when security officers knocked. They poked politely through his belongings and asked him to come with them to headquarters. In the car, the officers chatted and lit his cigarette.

He was escorted to a detention room, and, apologetically, one officer blindfolded and handcuffed him. That was standard procedure and he should try to sleep until morning, the young psychiatrist was told, before he was left alone in the room with a guard.

“You are a respectable person,” the sentry whispered. “Why are you here?”

“Aren’t others who come here also respectable?” Mandour replied.

This, in the early hours of Feb. 8, 1991, as the Gulf War raged in distant Kuwait and Iraq, was the beginning of his own personal war: 10 days of beatings, hanging, threats and electric shocks aimed at gleaning information about his work at the Palestinian hospital and the Palestinians’ activities in Egypt during the war.

“They said they would squeeze me to find what information is inside,” Mandour said in an interview last week. “Like an abdominal surgeon without any (advance) investigation, to just go inside your stomach and see what is there--this they tried to do with my mind.”

This is a face of Egypt that few see--a pervasive system of torture and hidden detention of opponents of the regime that is America’s closest ally in the Middle East, human rights groups say.

In Egypt, a country popularly known as the Arab world’s most advanced democracy, human rights groups have documented hundreds of cases of torture and extrajudicial detention of political opponents.

A wave of Islamic unrest in the country has threatened to intensify the situation. In recent months, Islamic extremist violence and clashes with security forces have killed at least 48 people; human rights activists say that at least 2,000 Islamic extremists have been swept up in a corresponding wave of arrests.

The official arrest figure is 78. But most analysts and diplomats believe that figure is extremely low. The government itself said in the official press that it has dispatched 5,000 officers to quell recent unrest in southern Egypt.

Sweeping, new anti-terrorism amendments to the penal code adopted earlier this summer have raised further alarms among intellectuals and political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. They fear the government now has the means to stifle political dissent with tough criminal penalties, even harsher than those in effect under a stringent emergency law that has governed the country almost continuously since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

“Egyptians are living now between two hammers: the hammers of extremists, who are violating human rights, and the hammer of the government, which is also violating human rights, and democracy is suffering from both sides,” said Rifaat Said, secretary general of the leftist Progressive Unionist Party.

With a new report released last month documenting widespread torture and incommunicado detention in Egypt, the New York-based Middle East Watch is attempting for the first time to carry the debate to Washington. There it will urge that the $2.26 billion in American aid proposed for Egypt next year--the second-largest package of U.S. foreign aid in the world, topped only by assistance given to Israel--be conditioned on improvement in Cairo’s human rights record.

“We found in our investigation that torture in Egypt is not an aberration, that it is not the act of isolated individuals, but rather it is systematically carried out by state security (officers) against those who are regarded as security threats,” said Kenneth Roth, deputy director of Middle East Watch’s parent organization, Human Rights Watch.

In findings supported by interviews with defense lawyers, human rights activists, torture victims and Western diplomats, Middle East Watch concluded that prisoners viewed as security threats are often held for more than a week at a time at offices of Egypt’s elite paramilitary State Security Investigations.

There they are often left blindfolded and handcuffed for days. They are beaten, threatened, sexually assaulted and suffer electrical shocks. In most cases, there are no records of their detention until they are transferred from security headquarters and camps to regular prisons; detainees are unable to identify who held them because they were blindfolded.

The victims for the most part have been those accused of being Islamic extremists. But they have also included opponents of Egypt’s involvement in the Gulf War against Iraq; labor activists; Christians accused of proselytizing, and journalists for Islamic and leftist opposition newspapers.

On March 1, 1991, Mohammed Afifi Mattar, a well-known poet, was sipping tea at a coffee shop frequented by artists in downtown Cairo when he mentioned to colleagues that he felt sympathetic toward Iraq. At 2:30 the next morning, officers with machine guns, clubs and shields burst into his bedroom and carried him off to a local police station, then to security headquarters, where he was accused of being an agent for Iraq’s Arab Baath Socialist Party.

In a report, Mattar described being hung “like a slaughtered animal” for long periods; he says he was beaten with sticks and fists until the cartilage in his nose was exposed; he was forced to take a hallucinogen. After 10 days, he was transferred to a regular prison and released more than two months later without ever having appeared in court to face official charges. He was released, authorities later said, after having allegedly “expressed awareness of the need for his national and ideological rehabilitation. . . .”

“In words and descriptions, as far as language is concerned, this is the abbreviated panorama of 10 days of continuous torture,” Mattar wrote. “But it is an experience that cannot be conveyed as far as endurance and personal suffering is concerned--in this respect it is an unforgettable lifetime agony of darkness and the apprehension of being alone in front of the powerful.”

Amgad Shinawi, a 16-year-old Alexandria student suspected of being an Islamic activist, disappeared after he was arrested and released by security officials in 1989. Before he vanished, he told his parents that he had been blindfolded, prodded in the genitals, burned with cigarettes and beaten. His head was tied between his legs and he was suspended off the floor until he fainted. Shinawi told his mother that one officer said to him: “You talk about God, let God save you from this.”

The Egyptian government historically has denied that torture occurs, except in isolated instances, for which individuals are punished.

In response to the Middle East Watch report, the Interior Ministry said that it had volunteered prisoners for interviews on which the human rights group based its report; the ministry also said it had opened Egypt’s prisons to Middle East Watch earlier this year. Those who claimed to have suffered unwarranted injuries “have an interest in saying that torture has occurred, because this is their strongest means of defense and of canceling their confessions by claiming that they were extracted under force,” the ministry said.

Many prisoners had injuries but those occurred during their arrests, often after violent battles with police, the ministry said.

But Middle East Watch said it had interviewed individuals from all over the country whose detailed stories were so similar that they could only have come from a systematic application of torture as a law enforcement tool.

The U.S. government’s human rights report on Egypt has documented instances of torture; foreign diplomats say their independent investigations have backed up the findings of Middle East Watch, Amnesty International and the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.

The Egyptian public has been supportive of the government crackdown on Islamic extremists, and the Middle East Watch report elicited criticism from those who said it failed to take into account the threat posed by the fundamentalists. Implicit in those criticisms was a feeling that much of the public is not necessarily opposed to torture, if it is designed to punish or obtain information about dangerous suspects, said several observers, Western and Egyptian.

“I think most Egyptians from most walks of life approve of torture because they assume the victim deserves it,” one foreign diplomat said.

Even Said of the Progressive Unionist Party, who describes himself as “a bloody opposition element,” complained that human rights investigators critical of the Egyptian government fail to take into account the threat posed by Islamic extremists.

Egypt’s leftist opposition and much of the intelligentsia was behind the government when it first proposed new anti-terrorist amendments, which imposed life imprisonment or death to members of terrorist organizations or anyone who supplies such groups with money, weapons or information. It also permits detention of up to six months before suspects are brought before a judge to face charges, and 11 days before they are allowed to see a lawyer.

But the coalition fell apart when the government at the last minute introduced more amendments imposing criminal penalties for such vague crimes as belonging to organizations, making statements or writing articles that threaten “national unity” or “public order.”

“What is civil order? What is national unity? To consider such things terrorism threatens groups even like the human rights organization whose protests can be considered an act of protest against the government,” said Hisham Mubarak, an official of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights who lost part of his hearing when he was boxed in the ears by security officials in 1989 for his role in a labor sit-in.