Buried alive in Egypt: Egyptian gay men are still being entrapped and jailed by the hundreds. One imprisoned man and his American partner tell their story. (World).

For four months a dank Cairo cell measuring just 8 by 14 feet has been home to Wissam Toufic Abyad, 26. The only daylight he gets comes through a small window so near the ceiling that it's impossible to see out. The concrete cell has no running water and no toilet. Abyad is given a plastic bowl to defecate in. He and his five cell mates urinate in a small bathtub that has no drain. The men "pay" two cigarettes a day to the prisoner on cleanup duty to wash away as much stench as a single bucket of water can.

This "hell," as Abyad called it in a handwritten statement passed to a family member in February, will be his home for another year unless he finds a way to navigate the unpredictable and famously corrupt appeals system of Egypt's courts. The crime that he and the five other men crammed into his jail cell allegedly committed: "habitual debauchery," the latest code for homosexuality in Egyptian policespeak.

Government officials insist that homosexuality is not a crime in Egypt, but in the past two years police there have stepped up a choreographed crackdown on gay men--including arresting 52 men on a floating gay disco known as the Queen Boat; entrapping dozens through Internet stings; busting up parties; tapping phones of known gay men in order to trace their friends; and using threats, allegedly even torture, to turn cornered gay men into informants.

The most publicized of the cases, the arrest in May 2001 of 52 men on or near the Queen Boat disco, garnered international attention and condemnation. In addition to the particularly large number of men rounded up at one time, the incident was noteworthy because the defendants were tried in Egypt's special "security court" system--originally set up to try Islamists attempting to topple President Hosni Mubarak's government. The court operates much like a military court and has no provision for appeals.

Last year Mubarak ordered that 50 of the original 52 cases be retried in Egypt's civilian court system. Of those 50 cases, 21 men had been found guilty by the security court and sentenced to one to two years in prison.

For a short time, Mubarak's order was seen as a hopeful sign that the men would get a fairer hearing and perhaps even be released. Those hopes were dashed in mid March, however, when the judge overseeing the retrials not only rubber-stamped the security court decision--finding the same 21 men guilty--but also handed down even tougher jail terms: The judge imposed the maximum three-year sentence on all 21 defendants. Furthermore, in the civilian court the government has the right to appeal the cases of the 29 originally found not guilty--and it has indicated that it intends to do so.

An appeals date for the 21 defendants found guilty has been set for June 4, but Scott Long, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has been in Egypt since January, believes that many of the men--none of whom are in custody at the moment--will simply flee and become fugitives rather than risk being captured again.

Abyad's case appears typical, according to accounts documented by Long.

In his written statement, Abyad says he chatted online several times with a man who identified himself as "Raoul," a Spanish expatriate in Cairo. The two agreed to meet January 16 at 1 P.M. at a McDonald's in Heliopolis, an affluent section of Cairo. But according to Abyad's statement, when he arrived, "I found four big guys surrounding me. One holding each arm, one holding my back by gripping my jacket and pants. The fourth was just blocking my view from the front." Despite his screams for help, the four men muscled Abyad into a police car, confiscated his wallet, passport, and mobile phone, and pushed him down the path of entrapment, at the end of which lay a 15-month prison sentence.

Though Internet stings like the one that snared Abyad have been less publicized than the Queen Boat case, human rights observers say those operations have actually resulted in most of the detentions. "Over the past year, arrests from the Internet have averaged one or two a week," Long says. Amnesty International's Michael Heflin says his group has had reports of about 80 such arrests.

Since being arrested, Abyad has lost about 20 pounds, sleeps only sporadically, has been subjected to repeated verbal assaults and humiliation by his captors, and has plunged several times into despair, says "Josh," Abyad's American boyfriend of two years, who lives in Cairo. "When Wissam lost his appeal, he went back to his cell and thought about smothering himself with a pillow because he can't imagine being in an Egyptian jail another year," says Josh, who asked that his real name not be used for fear it could prevent him from visiting Abyad.

Though Abyad is officially allowed visitors only once every three weeks, Josh gets to see him once a week, thanks to connections with officials. When the two men meet, they exchange piles of letters that they've written to each other daily during the week. Abyad's letters average three handwritten pages each. He generally writes two a day, even reading them out loud as he scribbles his thoughts down on paper. "That makes him feel like he's talking to me," Josh says. "Sometimes he pretends we are chatting online and he is typing me notes. He uses any mental crutch he can to survive."

Though other prisoners have reported physical abuse---including rape and torture--Abyad has so far been spared, probably because he gets a fair number of Western visitors, says Josh, whose efforts to free his boyfriend have included repeated meetings with officials at the American embassy: "I approached this from the standpoint, 'Hey, I'm an American and this is my partner. What are you going to do to help me? '"

Josh says the embassy officials are sympathetic and supportive. "Still, I feel a little bit like a second-class citizen," he adds. "I can't help but feel if this was my wife, things would be different."

Embassy officials assure him they are exerting pressure on Egypt behind the scenes. "And I am sure that they are. The question is, how much?" he asks. "The U.S. government is not likely to intervene by threatening to withhold millions of dollars in foreign aid over a bunch of gay guys," as it did recently on behalf of a prominent Egyptian dissident, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was finally released after 14 months in jail. Josh admits, however, that "the U.S. is walking a thin line." (Abyad is not an American citizen. His father is Lebanese, and his mother is Egyptian. He has lived in Cairo for 12 years but holds a Lebanese passport.)

Furthermore, says Hani, a gay Egyptian living in New York City who returned from a visit to Cairo in late March and who has two friends among the dozens jailed, "the U.S. views the Egyptian government as an ally" against terrorism "and isn't about to alienate them." And Hani believes that behind-the-scenes diplomacy may be in the best interest of the detainees too, because "the Egyptian government can't look like it's succumbing to foreign influence."

Meanwhile, the resulting fear from the sweep of arrests has meant "gay life has been deserted" in Cairo, Hani says. Bars once known as gay hangouts are now empty. Gay sites on the Internet are largely dead. People are afraid to throw the once-popular private parties. Because it is widely believed that the police must be operating through informants, gay people even hesitate to talk to one another on the phone.

"It's like living in the Soviet Union during the Cold War," Long says. "Everyone fears they're the next one to be targeted."

Dahir has also written for Time, Good Housekeeping, and Business Traveler.