The State Security Supreme Criminal Court will issue its ruling in the Hizbullah cell case in April. Amira Howeidy attended the hearings Mohamed Selim El-Awwa, lawyer, secretary- general of the Union of Islamic Scholars and head of the defence team in the Hizbullah cell case, which is being heard by the Supreme State Security Court, opened the defence of his clients -- accused of espionage and plotting terrorist operations in Egypt -- last Saturday with a rhetorical flourish. "This is what we were. What have we become? And how?" His questions alluded to the sensitive subject of Egypt's position towards armed resistance to foreign occupation. He went on to recall, at length and in detail, that under president Gamal Abdel-Nasser Egypt actively supported liberation movements. In the process Egyptian Intelligence established an Arab World Unit that regularly violated the land borders, regional waters and airspace of other countries to provide logistical support for the Algerian revolution and freedom fighters in Tunisia, Morocco and several African countries. The Hizbullah cell, he argued, was guilty only of copying actions that the Egyptian state repeatedly undertook. After a brief pause El-Awwa answered his own inquiry, albeit in a roundabout way, as the packed courtroom -- filled with media representatives, dozens of lawyers and the families of the 22 defendants behind bars -- listened in silence. "I shall stop here," said El-Awwa. "The hand and the pen shall refrain from expressing what is best voiced by silence." In other words, and as he made clear in later comments, State Security Criminal Court case number 66 for the year 2009, known as the Hizbullah cell, is, in the defence team's view, entirely political. During the three-hour long hearing devoted to Lebanese Hizbullah member Mohamed Sami Mansour, El-Awwa insisted on the political context of the case. He highlighted Egypt's past and present stands towards resistance and disparaged the prosecution for "criminalising" armed struggle as a means of securing liberation from occupation and presenting it to the Egyptian public as "terrorism". El-Awwa, one of Egypt's most respected lawyers, took on the case in May 2009 after being approached by Emile Rahma, a Lebanese Maronite Christian lawyer and MP, who asked him to defend Mansour, the only Lebanese national detained in the case. The first defendant, Mohamed Qablan, also Lebanese, remains free. He is being tried in absentia, along with three others. The defendants in the Hizbullah cell case were arrested in November 2008, a little over a month before Israel launched its 22-day war on Gaza. The detentions were not reported in the local press until Hizbullah's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech on 28 December 2008 -- 10 days into the war -- in which he criticised Egypt. He urged the Egyptian army to pressure its "political leadership" to open the Rafah border with Gaza to allow Palestinians to escape Israel's war machine. It was a red line that Egyptian officials insisted Nasrallah should not have crossed. It resulted in a concerted media and diplomatic attack on Hizbullah's leader. In April 2008 the security apparatus announced the arrest of approximately 50 members of the so-called Hizbullah cell, five months after their incarceration. Three months later, in July, the Supreme State Security Prosecution referred the case to an "emergency" State Security Court. The prosecution accused 26 defendants -- two Lebanese, five Palestinians, one Sudanese and 18 Egyptians -- of espionage on Hizbullah's behalf and of plotting "terrorist operations" against vessels in the Suez Canal and foreign tourists. It also accused them of attempting to facilitate the departure of Egyptian nationals "to receive military training, and training in espionage, the monitoring and collecting of information" which they would employ on their return to Egypt to facilitate terrorist operations. The hearings before the Emergency Criminal State Security Court opened in December 2008, with early sessions devoted to the prosecution's case against the defendants. On 26 January 2009 the prosecution demanded the "utmost penalty" for the main defendants whom it said were "traitors" in the service of Hizbullah and a "country that seeks to control the region and destabilise Egypt", in a not-too-subtle reference to Iran. At the time the media incorrectly reported that the prosecution had demanded the "death penalty" whereas life imprisonment is the severest penalty for espionage. The hearings resumed this week for four days, with the court listening to oral statements from defence teams that are not necessarily working together. On Tuesday, following the completion of the oral statements, the court announced that it would issue a ruling on 28 April. Contrary to expectations the prosecution did not seek to refute the defence. El-Awwa told Al-Ahram Weekly this was "a positive thing". According to Essam Sultan, a lawyer in Al-Awwa's team, it "could mean that the prosecution is conceding that our defence is based on solid foundations which it would be difficult to refute". The 22-member "cell" -- as the prosecution insists of calling it -- consists of die-hard Hizbullah militants -- the first and second defendant -- who have been operating in Egypt since 2005. Since the first defendant is on the run it fell to the second, Mansour, to confess at length of his objectives: aiding the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the occupied territories with ammunition and arms smuggled from Sudan and Eritrea. With the help of others he managed to smuggle some weapons via tunnels and was studying the option of shipping arms through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Mansour and Qablan (the first defendant) contacted fishermen, drivers, merchants, workers and students, amongst others, to assist in their endeavour. This meant employing people to smuggle funds without letting them know that it was to provide the Palestinian resistance with arms; hiring someone to conduct a study on the costs of purchasing or building a sailing ship (to use for smuggling weapons); monitoring traffic along the Suez Canal and Port Said for the same purpose and establishing contact with a tunnel-owner on the Egyptian side of the border to smuggle weapons and facilitate the entry and exit of Palestinians. In last Saturday's hearing Mansour's defence team paused at defendants 24, Nidal Fathi Hassan Gouda, and 25, Mohamed Ramadan Abdel-Raouf Bakr, both Palestinians. The two men entered Egypt through a 300-metre long tunnel from Gaza and confessed under interrogation that they were dispatched by the leadership of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah. The men met with Mansour upon the orders of their leadership, to arrange a way to send them to Lebanon in order to receive military training from Hizbullah. They were then expected to return to the Palestinian territories and share the training with their comrades. Said El-Awwa: "I was dumbfounded when the prosecution concealed the identity of these two and failed to reveal to the court that they had been sent to Egypt, via a tunnel, by Fatah." In fact the prosecution "only accuses them of illegal entry to Egypt". "What happened to their confessions regarding training and the resistance? Why should the prosecution refrain from mentioning this?" Even more important, he asked, "why is the prosecution accusing Hizbullah alone of terrorism and not Fatah? Is this because Fatah now forms a government [in Ramallah]?" El-Awwa went on to refute the prosecution's accusations and terminology. Hizbullah, he said, is "not a secret and illegal organisation that seeks to destabilise Egypt" but, "and I quote the Lebanese premier himself Saad El-Hariri, a 'political partner and a political force'". The organisation is represented in parliament and the Lebanese cabinet. Moreover, he argued, resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law, the UN Charter and the Arab Defence Agreement, to which Egypt remains committed. In a bid to drive his point on Egypt's "official" position home, El-Awwa presented excerpts from two speeches by President Hosni Mubarak, dated February and March 2009 respectively. In the first, delivered on Police Day on 4 February, Mubarak justified the smuggling of goods via tunnels from Egypt to Gaza as the "outcome of the blockade" imposed on Gaza. In his March speech, Mubarak described the resistance as "legitimate" and declared that "occupation shall end". "This is international law and this is what Mubarak is saying," El-Awwa told the court. "The rest is up to you."
