A chess set: orange for one team, black for the other. They are carefully carved, perhaps not perfectly, but the attempt at accuracy is evident: he made them in prison, using the pieces of soap that the family had sent him over the months, Patrick Zaky. A way to use the time, so as not to lose his head, to tell his loved ones that he thinks them, that the student of the University of Bologna handed over two days ago to family members who were able to meet him in the Tora prison, where he is locked up since March 2020, after a month of waiting.
Chess is now in the hall of the George Zaky family home in Cairo, where mother father and sister have lived permanently since Patrick was arrested. Next to a photo of the student as a child and one of the last shots before his arrest: a sort of altar, which this religious family created for their son. “We were impressed by his talent – says Marise, his sister – he once sculpted a church. He told us that in this period he plays a lot of chess”, he says. In addition to chess, Patrick also carved a gift in soap for Marise, who celebrated her birthday on June 12 and was unable to celebrate for the second time with her brother, to whom she is very attached. But that gift remained in the cell, a surprise for the next visit.
My brother Patrick Zaky
Francesca Caferri
Sculpting, playing chess and reading are the ways that Patrick gave himself in his cell to chase away ghosts and not to live only in dreams: “In our worst nightmares – he wrote to his girlfriend in a letter delivered to the family – we never could imagine a scenario like this Since I left for Bologna we have made so many projects that you came to visit me to travel around Italy together.
In the cell Patrick is not well: he is very thin and the asthma problems he suffers from do not leave him alone. He has long hair and his mood is very bleak. To help him, in addition to the hope of coming out soon, the books: The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, the story of the difficult love between an English noblewoman and an Arab nationalist in Cairo in the early 1900s is the one she has just finished, and returned to her family to keep it safe. A text of the Egyptian Nobel Prize Nagib Mahfuz what he asked to have on his next visit. A reading pending the trial, which after a year and a half of preventive detention still has not taken place.
Ahdaf Soueif: “It’s not an isolated case, I admire the courage of Giulio Regeni’s mother”
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But that in recent weeks – with the release of several prominent activists on the occasion of the Eid feast, and the hearing for the most famous of the human rights cases in Egypt, the 173/2011 case that is about to end – seems closer. For Patrick’s lawyers it is impossible to know whether this is good or bad.
Meanwhile, the positions taken by those asking the Italian government to do more are multiplying: “The Italian government must ask itself a simple question: is it really doing everything necessary to obtain his release? I don’t think so”, says a note from Pierfrancesco Majorino, MEP of the Democratic Party.
Egypt, the offensive against the human rights front grows
by Francesca Caferri
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