Middle East activists unable to relocate and survive after Trump's USAID cuts
When Hamza arrived at an Egyptian airport to board a flight to Tunisia, he wasn’t sure if he’d make it on to the plane. He had spent two years in prison for his political activity as a teenager in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution.
He had managed to get onto a programme for "artists at risk" to secure his ticket out of the country, but his bail conditions required him to report daily to a police station.
"It was my good luck it was Ramadan, in the airport people were fasting so they didn’t pay much attention to me," Hamza, who used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisals, told Middle East Eye.
"Security just asked me some questions: 'Where are you going? What will you do? When will you come back?'"
He told them he would return in three months, but he had no intention of coming back.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
In Tunisia, his worries were far from over. Without a residency permit, he was scrambling for survival, piecing together scraps of cash from freelancing gigs to keep himself afloat.
Then, an organisation that provides support for human rights defenders in the region, HuMENA, threw him a lifeline - a modest grant that covered the legal support he needed to secure his residency, as well as medical and psychological treatment for the mental and physical scars he sustained in Egyptian detention.
The money came via the US Agency for International Development (USAID) - the US government’s foreign aid body. Now, after the administration of US President Donald Trump has frozen USAID, slashing its funding as it folds it into the State Department, lifesaving grants for people like Hamza are thin on the ground.
He is one of many who have been cut adrift by the freeze.
Since 1946, the Middle East and North Africa has been the biggest recipient of US financial assistance. Between April 2023 and April 2024, Congress appropriated around $9bn for the region.
While the lion's share of US foreign aid went towards military assistance, a fraction was funnelled into democracy programmes via USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-autonomous agency funded largely by US Congress.
Although modest in scope, the money provided a lifeline for exiled human rights activists, who were almost entirely reliant on small grants from rights organisations that received USAID funding.
'How are we going to continue?'
Shortly after the funding freeze was announced, NED reported that its access to congressionally appropriated funds worth $239m had been "inexplicably cut off," despite it being exempt as it is not considered foreign assistance.
Following a lawsuit, the organisation saw a portion of its back-funding from the fiscal year 2024 that was due, but hundreds of grantees across the region are still left scrambling for survival with the loss of USAID.
HuMENA is among them. The human rights and civic engagement NGO works across the region, providing grants for the relocation and protection of rights defenders, as well as flexible funds for social movements.
The group also ran civic space monitoring projects in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. It was a recipient of USAID and lost 56 percent of its funding.
According to the organisation's director, Mostafa Fouad, HuMena was more flexible in its definition of a human rights defender or activist than other NGOs, meaning its funds were more widely accessible.
"We define anyone participating in a demonstration or protest as an advocate, so we can support them," he told MEE.
Most of HuMENA's grantees are from Egypt. "Last year we awarded 34 grants for human rights defenders at risk, 22 of them were for Egypt," Fouad said. "This number will remain at risk and no one will help them because of the cuts."
With the UK and EU countries also slashing democracy funding, organisations like HuMENA do not have anywhere else to turn.
"Suddenly they've decided not to fund civil society after all these years," Fouad said. "We are trying to think: how are we going to continue? If we can't find a solution in three months we will have to shut down."
'I was not expecting this to happen'
For people like Hamza, there is little alternative to HuMENA's support.
With the UK and EU also stripping back democracy funding, human rights activists in the region will be even more vulnerable to crackdowns.
Hamza was too young to participate in the 2011 revolution, but it sparked a lifelong interest in politics. "I was only 14 then, but I was interested in what was happening," he said.
By the time he was 16, he was regularly attending protests and in 2015 he joined the students' union.
After posting on social media about a wave of random detentions targeting people in Cairo during the 2019 protests, masked and armed security forces raided his home on 25 September 2019.
Hamza was forcibly disappeared for five days, during which time he was interrogated, tortured and denied food and water. He had no idea why he was there.
"Someone said it was because of my social media activity, another person said it was my involvement in the student union or participating in protests," he said.
"They tortured me physically, mentally and emotionally, they threatened to hurt my family," he recalled.
When he was finally brought before the prosecution, he burst into tears: "I was 21 at the time. I was not expecting this to happen."
He was imprisoned for two years without charge. In 2021 he was released on the condition that he reported to a police station for four hours a day for 45 days. This went on for two and a half years, until Hamza decided to flee.
In Tunisia, Hamza was homeless and unable to work without his residency card. His HuMENA grant paid for a lawyer to support him and to enrol in a university, which allowed him to get his residency permit. It also covered his rent and living expenses.
But his situation remains precarious. His residency permit is a student's one, which bars him from work. He applied for another grant, but has heard nothing back.
"My situation in Tunisia is not stable at all, and now everything’s harder because of the USAID cuts, so I'm trying to not put too much hope in it."
I'm simply trying to survive'
Khaled, another Egyptian dissident who also did not wish to be named, never saw his grant.
He left Egypt for Beirut in November 2021, after he was forcibly disappeared and then imprisoned for two years for calling for the release of student prisoners. The Egyptian authorities were threatening to detain him again.
But his life in Beirut was financially precarious, so he applied for asylum in France. He was awarded a grant by HuMENA to fund his move, but days after the cuts were announced, he was informed the grant had been cancelled.
"I now feel more lost and hopeless due to the scarcity of job opportunities in writing, editing, research and human rights organisations," Khaled, who is currently awaiting a decision on his French asylum application, told MEE.
"The grant would have helped me cover living expenses. At this point, I'm simply trying to survive, nothing more. There are no other available grants or support," he said. "Now I live alone and bear all the costs of my living expenses."
Mostafa Al'Asar, an Egyptian human rights defender and journalist, was abducted by security forces in 2018.
'It has affected me on many levels. I assumed that for one year at least I would be OK. But suddenly everything changed'
- Mostafa Al’Asar, activist and journalist
Around the time of his arrest, he had been working on a documentary about Egypt's attempt at a democratic transition following the 2011 revolution.
"Egyptian security forces tapped my phone and recorded my calls with investors," Al'Asar said.
He was forcibly disappeared for 16 days and then imprisoned and charged with "joining a terrorist group" and "spreading false news." The same charges were recycled in a fresh case to prolong his detention.
He was finally released in 2021. He tried to resume his work, but he didn’t feel safe. He had two investigations hanging over him, which would slap him with a 15-year sentence if charged. In October 2022, he fled the country.
"I fled to Lebanon without any plan," he said. He was forced to exit and re-enter the country every three months to renew his visa. He kept this up for over a year, before leaving for Canada in 2023 via a Canadian programme to resettle human rights defenders at risk.
In Canada, Al'Asar established his own rights organisation, depending on grants to keep it and himself afloat.
Days after Trump announced the cuts, he received an email informing him that a grant he’d been awarded by HuMENA to cover his living expenses and university tuition costs had been cancelled.
"I'm trying to apply for jobs, but it's not easy," Al'Asar said. He is just about keeping his organisation afloat. Unable to pay for staff, he is trying to man it single-handedly.
He is trying to reach out to potential EU donors, but they have shifted their funding priorities to support older, more established, organisations that are struggling to survive in the wake of US cuts.
"It has affected me on many levels. I assumed that for one year at least I would be OK. But suddenly everything changed," he said.
"I'm in a new country and I need support. I'm not sure I can continue working."
Billions versus pennies
Critics have pointed to the glaring contradictions in US support for rights groups and activists in the region and the uninterrupted flow of military assistance to the autocratic governments that stifle them.
The amount of US foreign assistance earmarked for democracy and human rights in the region was dwarfed by funding for military assistance.
In the fiscal year 2024, the US government had $7.7bn in obligations for "security aid", and just $250m for democracy projects in the region.
In its analysis of Biden's 2022 request of $7.6bn for Middle East and North Africa aid, which saw 76 percent funnelled towards security, and just six percent for democracy aid, Middle East Democracy Centre (Medc) noted that “no other region in the request has more than 41 percent of its funding dedicated to security assistance."
'The billions in military aid compared to the pennies in democracy assistance really puts into perspective the priority of US governments'
- Seth Binder, Middle East Democracy Centre
Despite Biden's declaration that he would end "blank cheques" for Egypt, partially withholding military assistance for the first three years of his presidency, in 2024 his administration greenlit $1.3bn in military assistance to Cairo overriding human rights conditions attached to the payout.
"That contradiction has existed for decades and it's been overwhelmingly in favour of supporting autocrats," Seth Binder, the director of advocacy at Medc, told Middle East Eye.
"The billions in military aid compared to the pennies in democracy assistance really puts into perspective the priority of US governments, not just this administration who have eliminated even the pennies."
"Even previous administrations - Biden, Obama, Bush - who have touted democracy assistance and touted democracy promotion as key pillars of US foreign policy have never matched this rhetoric with actual policy and the actual implementation of that policy," Binder said.
Furthermore, US regional democracy funding was shifted to projects that were less antagonistic to governments in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings.
"My critique in the past has often been that, where decades previously, US governments may have been more willing to provide programming directly to those that could potentially cause tension with the government, they have in recent decades, especially since the Arab Spring, turned away from that," Binder said.
An existential moment
For Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, the funding freeze is compounding existing trends in the region, as donors are gradually withdrawing financial support.
"The cuts have made matters worse, but I don't think they created the problem from scratch," Callamard told MEE.
"Within the human rights world, we have been experiencing a reluctance by governments to invest as much as they used to, and by governments of the country where they operate, a determination to make their work much more difficult."
Prior to the removal of USAID, organisations had already been grappling with $17.2bn in cuts in 2024 alone to official development assistance (ODA) announced by the EU, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, with countries diverting money towards efforts to curb migration and military spending.
In March 2024, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that deep cuts to the country’s international aid budget would fund a surge in defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2027.
"You could almost see the cuts from USAID, particularly in their direct impact, or indirect impact, on NGOs as amounting to an existential moment for civil society globally and in the Middle East in particular," Callamard said.
"It is part of trends that have accelerated over the past two years, trends that signify the globalisation of authoritarian practices."
For Khaled, the fault also lies with the NGOs who he says are not set up to protect people like him. "Human rights organisations do not design programmes that genuinely support exiled journalists and writers. International institutions also do not truly care about assisting at-risk writers," he said.
His experience has also highlighted the ephemeral nature of help from wealthy countries in the Global North.
"The support is unstable, it can disappear suddenly for many reasons," Khaled said.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
