A few weeks ago Mohammed Wadeia, a young Egyptian army captain being held in solitary confinement in a military prison for the „crime“ of joining protests in Tahrir Square against President Hosni Mubarak, complained that an old injury was troubling him.

Deprived of a pen and paper, his real aim, when he reached hospital to be x-rayed, was something else. He wanted to write up the poems he had composed in his head and then slip them into an envelope to be delivered to his father, a retired colonel.