Source: Time
Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is expected to hold talks with presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, in a pair of meetings that illustrate one of America’s more uncomfortable foreign relationships.
Al-Sisi came to power following the July 2013 military coup that overthrew the government of President Mohamed Morsi, who had won the presidential election following the Arab Spring and the overthrow of the longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The former chief of Egypt’s armed forces, al-Sisi led a military takeover that opened a period of political violencethat left more than a thousand people dead, and also presided over a clampdown that jailed an estimated 40,000 peopleincluding protesters, students and journalists. Al-Sisi became President in 2014 in an election that was widely regarded as a fait accompli.
If elected, Clinton is not expected to make drastic changes in U.S. policy toward Egypt. Trump, however, has voiced admiration for a range of authoritarian leaders, hailing Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and praising former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as an effective killer of “terrorists.” Human-rights rights advocates worry that, if elected, Trump would deepen U.S. support for al-Sisi, who casts his regime as a bulwark against extremist groups. “We hear that Trump will be supporting Sisi in the so-called fight against terrorism and this will lead to cracking down more on human rights, leading to a massive deterioration in the human-rights situation in Egypt,” says Mohamed Ahmed, a researcher on Egypt at Amnesty International.
Categories: America, Egypt, The Muslim Times, USA