Alwaght- The United Arab Emirates has reportedly been spending millions to cover-up human rights violations by Egyptian regime, leaked emails of, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to Washington show.
Emails allegedly belonging to al-Otaiba, released on Wednesday in The Intercept, revealed that the UAE has been essentially covering the costs of a campaign to establish credibility for the regime of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
After Sis's power grab in 2013, Egypt enlisted the Glover Park Group, a top D.C. public relations and lobbying firm founded by former Clinton White House and Democratic Party officials, to be one of its public faces in the US capital.
According to correspondences dated to 2015, the UAE paid the firm $2.7 million out a total bill of $3 million for its lobbying on behalf of Egypt.
Other emails show al-Otaiba attempted to influence journalists critical of the Sisi regime.
“Labelling Sisi a harsh authoritarian dictator, without explaining the security threats that he’s up against, is simply an incomplete argument,” he told Politico‘s Michael Crowley after he wrote an article slamming Sisi’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sisi has led a brutal crackdown on political dissidents since he came into power in 2013 in a military coup that overthrew the country’s first freely elected President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
As many as 60,000 political prisoners are languishing in jails after a clampdown on Morsi’s supporters.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been chief backers of the military takeover, providing billions of dollars in support to Cairo.
The UAE has also joined Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain imposing an all-out blockade on neighboring Qatar which is among other things accused of backing Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
