Evan Hill

Evan Hill's picture
Evan Hill
Online Producer | Qatar
Biography
Evan joined Al Jazeera from San Francisco, where he covered criminal justice and politics for the Recorder newspaper. He was also a co-founder of The Majlis, a news and analysis website focused on the Middle East.

Latest posts by Evan Hill

By Evan Hill in Middle East on May 24th, 2012

For every experience in Egypt that confirms settled beliefs, there is one that frustrates.

So it was on Wednesday, when Egyptians went to the polls in their first-ever democratic presidential election.

The election's question - who will succeed Hosni Mubarak - lies atop multitude of complicated and emotional undercurrents: Who represents the revolution, whose economic policies will bring the country out of crisis, who will deal correctly with Israel and the United States?

That debate has sparked more than a year of contentious politics, but when they came to a head on Wednesday, the result was a surprising display of national camaraderie and fractured stereotypes.

The Muslim Brotherhood's dominating campaign machinery, omnipresent during last year's parliamentary elections, when Brotherhood representatives could be found illegally campaigning at nearly every polling station, was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

By Evan Hill in Middle East on November 28th, 2011
Judge Mohamed Aboul Ela sealing ballot boxes as polls close [Evan Hill / Al Jazeera]

Alexandria, Egypt’s coastal second city, was swept with rain on Monday, but that didn't dampen turnout on the first day of Egypt’s marathon elections for both houses of parliament.

The city is a contradiction, a Mediterranean enclave of creaking pensions-turned-hotels, with stocks of Stella beer in the back rooms, but whose new political face is likely to be thoroughly Islamist.

The Muslim Brotherhood has traditionally enjoyed strength here, and the most prominent of the post-revolution Salafi groups, the Nour Party, was born in Alexandria.

These forces were on display on Monday, as the brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) flexed its organisational muscles street by street, and Salafis expressed calm confidence in their chances.

By Evan Hill in Africa on July 13th, 2011
Rebels broke into and looted a hospital in the town of Rayayinah in mid-June [Sidney Kwiram/HRW]

Rebels in Libya's western Nafusa Mountains have burned and damaged homes, looted hospitals and shops and beaten suspected regime loyalists during fighting over the past month, according to a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) released on Wednesday.

The rebel military commander in the Nafusa, Colonel El-Moktar Firnana, admitted to HRW that his forces were responsible for the abuses but said the lootings and beatings had gone against orders and that some rebels had been punished as a result.

But he also sought to explain the attacks, saying they were a consequence of local residents' loyalty to the embattled regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

By Evan Hill in Africa on April 15th, 2011
Photo: Evan Hill/Al Jazeera

Down the dusty, bumpy road from Tobruk, along which every few miles upended chairs and thick ropes strung across the pavement stand as mute checkpoints – many of them abandoned by their one-time rebel guards – lies Benghazi, the seat of the Libyan uprising, still brave, still mad, incredulous of the predictions of its own demise.

Nearly a month after the onset of foreign air strikes – and my first abrupt departure from free east Libya –the rebel stronghold still stands, logic be damned.

By Evan Hill in Middle East on March 26th, 2011
Radwan with a birdshot pellet injury on January 29, during the protests in Egypt [Hossam el-Hamalawy]

Syrian authorities have arrested an Egyptian-American man and accused him of selling photos and videos of events in Syria and visiting Israel “in secret”.

Muhammad Bakr Radwan, 32, was shown on Syrian state television on Saturday making what the government called “preliminary confessions”. An article posted on the Syrian Arab News Agency website did not mention whether he was being charged with any crimes but said he had been in touch with a “Colombian person” who offered to pay 100 Egyptian pounds per photo and a price that “must have been higher” for videos.

Radwan holds both Egyptian and US citizenship, and a security officer reached at the US embassy in Damascus on Saturday night told Al Jazeera that the embassy was aware of Radwan’s situation and was “dealing with it through the proper channels”.

By Evan Hill in Africa on March 6th, 2011

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[Photo by Evan Hill/Al Jazeera]

Libyan rebels are moving westward with surprising speed and meeting little resistance, raising questions about the training and dedication – perhaps even the very presence – of troops loyal to longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi.

It was long understood here in Benghazi, the rebellion’s capital, that loyalist military units had entrenched themselves around Ras Lanuf, the country’s largest oil refinery, around half an hour west of the rebel-held town of Brega.

But on Friday night, Gaddafi troops withdrew from Ras Lanuf under pressure from advancing rebels. By Saturday afternoon, there were reports of fighting dozens of kilometers farther west, and opposition fighters spoke of attacking Sirte, Gaddafi’s birthplace and another reputed site of heavy defences.

By Evan Hill in Middle East on January 8th, 2011
[Photo by Evan Hill]

By Evan Hill in Middle East on November 29th, 2010
Photo by Evan Hill

While police officers used batons and tear gas to disperse a group of more than 1,000 people trying to observe the vote-counting process in the working-class Nile Delta town of Mahalla an hour down the road, election day in Mansoura reflected the government’s slightly more subtle but equally effective methods of manipulating the vote in Egypt.

Representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, a technically banned Islamist group that is nothing if not media savvy, had told us repeatedly that Mansoura would be "hot,” so we arrived the night before to get an early start.

By Evan Hill in Middle East on November 26th, 2010
Photo by Evan Hill

When we got word that Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed el-Beltagy would be campaigning on the northern outskirts of Cairo, in a neighbourhood called Shobra el-Khaima, and that he'd be staging a sit-in at the local police station, visions of classic Egyptian political street battles began filling our heads.

There have already been street clashes between police and Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the run-up to Sunday's vote for the lower house of parliament.

Instead, we got a chance to see first hand what it looks like when an Islamist movement that has been technically banned since 1954 campaigns in broad daylight, participating vigorously in an electoral process that some of its allies in the opposition have chosen to boycott in the

By Evan Hill in Middle East on November 25th, 2010

The mood inside a packed fifth-floor room in a rundown apartment building in central Cairo on Wednesday was expectant and upbeat. 

At least two dozen journalists and activists stood elbow to elbow with mobile phone cameras rolling as Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, the first blogger ever imprisoned by the Egyptian state for his writings, made his first public remarks since being recently released from an unprecedented four-year sentence.

The soft-spoken Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, prompted ripples of friendly laughter as he spoke and even allowed himself an occasional smile. 

But the story Suleiman told undermined the happiness of his release, depicting an Egyptian government and society where laws and customs still punish what would pass as free