english_edition_issue_no

The Mubarak trial: Justice is blind, but has a guide dog

4

t?

The osmosis of Syria’s strife 9

righ , y p o C

15

Nights in a Bulaq steam room 19

The state has never succeeded in quelling revolutionary waves

Issue no. 4 7 June 2012

14

LE5 ............................................................................................................................................................................................................

Swing votes Presidency hinges on frustrated electorate

News Briefs

Two police killed in South Sinai Two policemen were killed and five police personnel were severely injured Monday by gunfire during the pursuit of a suspected criminal in Wadi Feiran in South Sinai. Mahmoud al-Hefnawy, South Sinai security director, said that the suspect is accused of kidnapping tourists and robbing cars. “A police officer took heavy fire while chasing the suspect. Two police officers were killed and five police personnel were injured, including Captain Mohamed Ahmed Taha and Private Mohamed Ahmed Ameen,” said a security source.

The source added that the injured policemen are currently in critical condition.■

Changing the heat

Ahmed Elmasry

2

7 June 2012

People’s Assembly

Gulf spook scares MP

Mostafa Bakry

Head of Qatari Intelligence Service Ahmed bin Nasser Bin Jassim al-Thani’s visit to Cairo in May sparked controversy in the People’s Assembly Sunday, with MP Mostafa Bakry filing a request for information to the foreign affairs minister over the visit. DPA reported that the Qatari official arrived Cairo on 25 May for discussions with Egyptian officials. News reports said that bin Jassim held meetings with prominent figures from the Muslim Brotherhood, claims that the group denied. Bakry said that “what happened is foreign intervention in the country’s affairs.” Basel Adel, an MP for the Free Egyptians Party, filed similar requests to the interior minister.■

Parliament approved proposed amendments to the Police Corps Act on Monday, aiming to improve the working and financial conditions of low-ranking police officers. “I thank Parliament and the military council, and pledge that the police will continue to fight arms smuggling and drugs,” said Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, for which he received a standing ovation. Some MPs suggested these amendments in response to repeated protests by thousands of low-ranking police officers across the nation demanding better work conditions. The amendments include changing the wage system, creating a rank of “honor officer” and streamlining promotions.■

Jama’a al-Islamiya preps for Shafiq Jama’a al-Islamiya is ready to make “new sacrifices” if Shafiq comes to power, said MP Amer Abdel Rahim, speaker for the movement’s political party in Parliament, the Construction and Development Party. The group was the first to confront exPresident Hosni Mubarak, he added.

Jama’a al-Islamiya engaged in armed

confrontations with government security forces in the 1990s, seeking to overthrow the Mubarak regime and establish an Islamic state. However, in the late 1990s, the group announced it would abandon its violent ideology, and apologized for previous attacks that had killed hundreds.■

To their defense

Hassan Abdel Rahman

Dr. Kamel Diab

Publisher Sherif Wadood

Chief Editor Mohamed Salmawy

Editorial Team Lina Attalah Max Strasser Mohamed Elmeshad Jahd Khalil Lindsay Carroll Mostafa Abdelrazek Ahmed Zaki Osman Dina K. Hussein Louise Sarant Mai El Wakil Nevine El Shabrawy

Design & Layout Hatem Mahmoud Fathy Ibrahim Mahmoud El-Gamasy

Top cop stays in jail Major General Hassan Abdel Rahman, former head of the State Security Intelligence Services on Monday will stay in detention for 15 more days pending investigations over the destruction of state security. Abdel Rahman was among former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly’s top deputies cleared by Cairo Criminal Court Saturday of charges of killing protesters between 28 and 31 January 2011. Judge Mohamed Shawky, whom the justice minister assigned to investigate the damage and destruction of state security documents, accused Abdel Rahman of damaging state security documents based on accusations by former Interior Minister Mahmoud Wagdy.■

Board Chairman

Ahmad Fahmy Hatem Ismael Foreign defendants in the NGOs case leave Cairo

The trial of 43 NGO workers was adjourned on Tuesday until 4 July.

Nineteen US nationals, 14 Egyptians, five Serbians, two Germans and three citizens of other Arab countries are accused of receiving illegal funding from foreign organizations and governments, and operating without permits. Only 17 defendants appeared in the dock Tuesday. Defense lawyers re-

quested that defense witnesses be allowed to give testimony to the court, that the documents seized from Freedom House in a previous raid be translated into Arabic, and that an official from the Social Solidarity Ministry be summoned to give testimony, and presented documents indicating that the ministry had previously approved funding Freedom House.■

PEC: No bad money, yet Maher al-Beheiry, senior vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court and member of the Presidential Elections Commission, said on Monday that the Central Auditing Authority did not report any violations to the commission regarding donations

received by presidential candidates nor their campaign expenses. Beheiry told Al-Masry Al-Youm that even former candidates are “obliged” to deliver the commission statements detailing their campaign spending by the 21 June deadline.■

Editors’ note Egypt Independent is back with its weekly print newspaper after a self-imposed stoppage in response to a censorship controversy.

We return at a time when Egypt’s revolution faces an impasse. A revolution celebrated by everyone is today struggling both to undo the past and reimagine the future. Our focus this week is on disappointing verdicts in the trial of members of the former regime and limited, frustrating options in the presidential race. But these are only manifestations of the larger struggle Egypt faces. Endless possibilities still abound.

Egypt Independent looks to these spaces where we find hope - in Parliament, on the street, on the margins, the places where high politics are contested and new, small but important battles are being fought. Our newspaper examines and criticizes, but it also embraces hope, even when that sentiment is hard to come by.

We invite you to join us on these pages every week, starting with our comeback edition today.■

Ahmed Halawa

Commercial Manager Assem Elbassal

Marketing Manager Yasmine El Gharably

www.egyptindependent.com 11 Gamal Eddin Abou el-Mahassen, Garden City Cairo - Egypt

Tel: +20 (2) 27926440 Fax: +20 (2) 27926332 For subscription and ads: Call our hotline 16533 subscriptions@egyptindependent.com Corporate subscriptions and ads: Ali El Maraghy +201116110697

7 June 2012

News

3

The difficult standoff

Brotherhood utncertain as runoff promises fierce fight

Beyond the Brotherhood’s base Since the announcement of the first round’s results, the Brotherhood has been calling on different political groups to rally behind their candidate in order to defeat “a symbol of the old regime.”

But political players who could help bring skeptical voters over to Morsy’s side are showing a reluctance to endorse the Brotherhood’s candidate without substantive guarantees that the group would be willing to share power once it comes to office.

“So far, there are no clear guarantees,” Ahmed Maher, a leader of the April 6 Youth Movement, said. “So far, we are in the phase of talking and there has been no agreed-upon charter yet.”

Maher argued that any agreement with the Brothers should take the form of a signed document to ensure their commitment.

“The Brothers have to sign. We tried them before. They would agree on something and a week later they would change their minds,” added Maher.

Maher said the Brotherhood must ensure that the Constituent Assembly, the group elected by the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and tasked with writing the next constitution, is representative of all political forces. After Islamists attempted to fill the assembly with their supporters, an administrative court ruling dissolved it after a lawsuit argued that it was not representative of all Egyptians.

Maher wants the next prime minister and all vice presidents to come from outside the Brotherhood and have their authorities clearly stipulated if his group is to back Morsy.

So far, Morsy has vowed to appoint a prime minister from outside his organization and showed no resistance to appointing vice presidents from outside his group.

The Constituent Assembly remains in limbo. As Egypt Independent went to press, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was holding a meeting with 18 political parties to discuss a way out, amid speculations that the generals might bypass Parliament and issue a constitutional declaration with the criteria for the assembly’s membership. The Brotherhood refused to send a delegation to the meeting. In an official statement,

Shafiq receives a Quran from the Tourism Union

the group voiced its opposition to any attempt by the generals to interfere with the process of electing the Constituent Assembly.

According to Sherif Younis, a historian and political commentator, the Brotherhood is reluctant to make any tangible and immediate concessions in return for endorsing Morsy because it must have strong feelings that it is on the edge of losing the presidential race.

“If the Brothers are not sure that they will lose, they must be at least fearful of the high possibility of their defeat,” Younis said. “This is why they do not want to make concessions to anyone.”

Control over the Constituent Assembly because of its dominance in Parliament, Younis believes, is a particularly important card that the Brotherhood can play in the event of a Shafiq presidency.

The Brothers refute this interpretation, insisting that they are determined to reach an agreement with other political groups over contentious matters.

“For us, building consensus is not an electoral tactic but a national principle. We have been keen to do that,” said Hatem Abdel Azim, a lawmaker representing the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

“The Brothers are not responsible for the failure to build a consensus,” he said, putting the blame on other political forces, whose demands “keep changing every hour.”

The Brotherhood’s leadership has also held talks with the thirdand fourth-place candidates, Hamdeen Sabbahi and Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh, hoping they would announce their support of Morsy and bring in the more than 8 million voters who backed the two hopefuls in the first round.

Backers of the defeated candidates have made several demands, including their appointment as vice presidents. Later on, a proposal that both, along with Morsy, form a presidential council was put forward.

If the Brothers are not sure that they will lose, they must be at least fearful of the high possibility of their defeat

Shafiq leads prayers at a campaign conference

Shafiq strives to branch out Shafiq took most observers and politicians by surprise with his results in the first round. The veteran military pilot, striking an aggressive anti-Islamist tone and campaigning on a platform of stability and security, exceeded expectations, garnering 24 percent of the vote, just behind Morsy.

Some of the outrun contenders questioned the integrity of the poll, arguing that it was fixed to ensure Shafiq’s victory. They mobilized protests demanding his exclusion from the second round.

Meanwhile, Shafiq has been seeking to reach out to new constituencies ahead of the runoff.

On Sunday, Shafiq gave a speech in which he voiced a ruthless criticism of the Brotherhood, accusing the group of standing for “sectarianism,” “regression,” “darkness” and “secrecy.” Paradoxically, Mubarak’s former deputy contended that the

Shafiq is trying to widen his support base and to capitalize on the Muslim Brotherhood’s mistakes

Brotherhood belonged to the old regime, invoking deals the group had allegedly struck with the ousted president’s security apparatus ahead of the 2005 parliamentary elections.

The 71-year-old presidential hopeful is banking on rising antiIslamist sentiment that manifested itself in the first round of the presidential poll. After securing more than 40 percent of the votes in the parliamentary poll last fall, the Brotherhood’s candidate could not garner more than 25 percent in the first phase of the presidential race. Some experts attributed this decline to the Brothers’ poor performance in Parliament and fears of the group’s inclinations to hijack the state.

Shafiq has constantly addressed youth-led revolutionary groups, saying that their revolution was hijacked by the Brotherhood. He has also played on the fears of many Egyptians that the Brothers might establish a religious state if they win the presidency.

“I represent the civil state and the Brothers represent sectarianism,” Shafiq said.

Besides negative campaigning, Shafiq announced his support of the so-called “covenant” document, a charter drafted last week

by a group of secular parties and public figures.

The document envisages the establishment of a democratic, civil state with full separation between the three branches of government, respect of individual and public freedoms and an independent judiciary. The document, which seemingly aims at preempting Islamists’ attempts to establish a religious state, stresses a restrained role for Sharia.

In the same speech, Shafiq declared his support for freedom of expression and equality between all citizens.

“Shafiq is trying to widen his support base and to capitalize on the Muslim Brotherhood’s mistakes,” said Maher, hailing Shafiq’s statement as “clever.”

“He made huge promises that can attract some liberal and secular parties that always oppose the Brothers. But a group like April 6 cannot be attracted to him,” Maher said.

Since endorsing a remnant of Mubarak’s regime remains inconceivable, Maher’s group is still

Virginie Nguyen

As the second round of the muchanticipated presidential poll grows nearer, the battle between the Muslim Brotherhood’s nominee and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister intensifies, with the former failing to mobilize a base of support beyond the Islamist constituency and the latter struggling to shake off the stigma of the deposed regime.

The Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsy and Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq are set to compete in the runoff scheduled for 16 and 17 June. In the first round, held on 23 and 24 May, each candidate took about a quarter of the votes, with more than half of voters choosing one of the other 11 candidates.

Virginie Nguyen

By Noha El-Hennawy

weighing its options between backing Morsy in return for certain concessions or boycotting the poll altogether.

Younis said Shafiq’s campaign is bound to victory.

“In the first round, Shafiq was trying to attract the forces related to the old regime. This is why he used to make provocative and violent statements so that he can become the symbol of these forces,” said Younis. “But after he became so sure of the support of these forces, he is now trying to attract other forces from outside this camp.”

He described his view of a successful campaign.

“A successful campaign is the one that guarantees the support of its main constituency, avoids any internal splits within that constituency and then starts playing with other forces,” Younis said.

In the meantime, Younis dismissed Morsy’s campaign as “perplexed” and incapable of widening its base of support.

Abdel Azim, however, disagrees.

“Ahmed Shafiq won’t be president,” the FJP leader contended.

“This [belief] is based on our political forecasts and the majority of views we hear on Egyptian streets from Alexandria to Aswan.”■

4

7 June 2012

News

Transitional injustice

Mubarak’s verdict creates critical judicial battles

By Nadine Marroushi and Ahmed Zaki Osman

Ahmed Elmasry

W

hile a landmark ruling in the history of Arab rulers, toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s sentence to life in prison is marred with legal loopholes and political interference, observers say.

Presiding Judge Ahmed Refaat announced the criminal court was sentencing Mubarak and ex-Interior Minister Habib al-Adly to life in prison, while acquitting Mubarak’s sons, fugitive businessman Hussein Salem and six senior Interior Ministry officials.

Mubarak and Adly were charged with failing to stop the murder of more than 800 protesters across the nation between 28 January and 31 January 2011. Meanwhile, Refaat said the prosecution did not present concrete evidence identifying the perpetrators of the killings, and that contradictory witness testimonies led to the acquittal of the six senior Interior Ministry officials.

For many, the verdicts are contradictory. “[The judge] applied a standard on Mubarak and Adly for failing to prevent the killings, which he then didn’t apply to Adly’s assistants, something I still don’t understand,” said Heba Morayef, the Egypt researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Accordingly, Morayef thinks the verdict lays the foundation for an appeal of Mubarak and Adly’s sentences.

“If you haven’t established where the bullet for the victim came from, then you can’t in-

Mubarak on the day of his verdict

dict someone for failing to prevent the crime.

You have to prove the crime took place first,” she says, suggesting the Court of Cassation would accept the appeal, which would mean a retrial.

Like Refaat, Morayef charges prosecutors with not doing their job properly.

“They had a lack of political will and capacity,” she says, explaining that instead of blaming the Interior Ministry for not cooperating, the prosecution should have prosecuted against the Interior Ministry for failing to collaborate with the prosecution. “If the prosecutors went to the street, for example, saying that the Interior Ministry was refusing to help, they could have gotten a lot of public support, but they

failed to do that,” she says.

During the fifth session of Mubarak’s trial on 9 September, police officer Essam Shawky, the eighth witness in the case, told the court that Adly ordered security officials to quell the anti-government protests by any means.

The ninth witness, Police General Hassan Abdel Hameed, corroborated Shawky’s testimony. He told the court that he attended a meeting on 27 January, during which Adly ordered the implementation of “Plan 100,” a secret plan whereby police would deter protesters from reaching Tahrir Square by any and all means. These two testimonies were believed to incriminate both Adly and First Assistant Interior Minister for the Central Security Forces Sector Major General Ahmed Ramzy, one of the acquitted officers.

But Refaat said that these testimonies contradicted others from police officers investigated by the prosecutors. On the fourth session on 8 September, one witness told the court that neither Mubarak nor Adly gave security forces orders to shoot protesters. Two witnesses said they were told to show self restraint.

Accordingly, Refaat said that the court decided not to Habib al-Adly take all “contradictory” testimonies into account. He added that those who actually killed the protesters were not brought to the court and that prosecutors could not identify them.

The judges did not consider the videos submitted to the court as concrete evidence against the six officials. Shawky, the eighth witness in the trial, had presented a DVD that he said contained scenes showing police firing on demonstrators.

Without providing details, Refaat said the court was suspicious of all the records presented by the Central Security Forces, including records that listed weapons given to security forces on 28 January, dubbed the “Friday of Anger.”

Furthermore, the court said that there was no technical evidence indicating that gunshot wounds killed the victims. Refaat added that medical reports, even if true, did not provide evidence regarding the identity of those who killed the protesters.

Prosecutors’ failures were also highlighted in the financial corruption charges. Muba-

If you haven’t established where the bullet for the victim came from, then you can’t indict someone for failing to prevent the crime

rak’s sons, Gamal and Alaa, and Salem were accused of purchasing public property at below-market prices. However prosecutors had overlooked a 10-year statute of limitations in the Penal Code for non-state employees being prosecuted on corruption charges.

“I’m shocked that this is something that came up much later. It should have been super obvious,” says Morayef.

The case, the verdict and the prosecution have all been described as political.

“The prosecutors are the very same figures that were taking cases against political activists under Mubarak,” said Omar Ashour, visiting Ahmed Refaat scholar at the Brookings Doha Center.

The makeup of the prosecution and the court is precisely why many believe a case against a deposed dictator should not be tried in an unreformed court, prompting discussions about transitional courts to re-emerge.

“When relying on Interior Ministry investigations, you need a special transitional justice court mechanism to deal with that, but it didn’t happen,” said Karim Ennarah, a researcher on security sector reform at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

However, the current conditions provide little hope for transitional justice.

“There is some probability that [a special tribunal] could happen, but [that is] less likely Ahmed Ramzy because the balance of power is tilted to the status quo, i.e. the generals,” says Ashour, referring to the interim rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which assumed the powers of Mubarak following his ouster.

“The administrators of Mubarak’s regime are still in power at the Interior Ministry, the establishment, and even the Justice Ministry and the judiciary,” Ashour says. “Challenges to the status quo are only among revolutionaries, who are in Tahrir, with some in Parliament.

But the balance of power is not tilted toward them.” ■

When relying on Interior Ministry investigations, you need a special transitional justice court mechanism to deal with that, but it didn’t happen

7 June 2012

News

5

Sins of the father

Mubarak posited himself as Egypt’s patriarch, now he’s in jail

By Ali Abdel Mohsen

If someone tries to feed you that ‘Mubarak is my father’ line, do me a favor and tell them you’re an orphan

Archival

At a small gathering around a kiosk in downtown Cairo, a handful of strangers discuss an unprecedented historical event over soda bottles and cigarettes.

Less than three hours earlier, deposed President Hosni Mubarak had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the killing of protesters during the uprising of 2011. His interior minister at the time, Habib al-Adly, received the same sentence.

Six senior ministry officials who faced the same accusations were acquitted, along with three figures who faced corruption charges: Mubarak’s sons, Gamal and Alaa, and fugitive businessman Hussein Salem .

“How does that make sense?” demands Hassan, one of the sour-faced men. “How can you find Mubarak guilty and his aides innocent?”

“Because the argument can be made that they were just receiving orders,” replies an older, rounder participant.

“This is our fault; we gave them all the chances they needed to issue a sentence like this. We let them shred documents and burn down offices where the evidence we needed was kept.”

“Let who burn what down?” asks Atef, the kiosk owner, with a thin smile. “That was us, we did all that.”

“We were the ones who started the fires and looted and vandalized,” chimes in the kiosk owner’s 14year-old son. The statement leads to another line of argument that concludes on an ominous note.

“The streets will be flooded with weapons and inmates worse than before,” Ahmed says.

“It’s a shame, they haven’t even finished renovating the Sayeda [Zeinab] Police Station,” the kiosk owner laments, nodding toward the nearby building.

Unsurprisingly, the Mubarak verdict, in the immediate hours following its announcement, dominated discussion among his former constituents. A brief walk down Qasr al-Aini Street was met with snippets of frustration and anxiety: “They think we’re idiots,” “It’s all going to burn, you’ll see,” “His kids will avenge him,” “Pulling us back but we’ll drag them forward” and “The

devil himself.” But beyond the feelings of discontent, the verdict has also inspired reflections of a different — and some would say belated — kind.

Political scientists have often delved into theories of patriarchy when trying to understand and explain the Egyptian political system.

But on the ground, the reality is more complex.

“How many people, out of all those you talked to, expressed any kind of sympathy for the man?” asks Hajj Omar Hamdan. “If someone tries to feed you that ‘Mubarak is my father’ line, do me a favor and tell them you’re an orphan.”

The 67-year-old proprietor of a Mawardy Street café remembers the earlier stages of the revolution, when following several days of unrest, Mubarak finally broke his silence with a televised speech meant to tug at the nation’s heartstrings and garner sympathy for an old, apologetic father figure. Hamdan insists that, even then, he wasn’t convinced.

“You fail at killing as many of your children as you were planning on, and then you go on TV and claim to be our father?”

Hamdan ends his question with a stream of insults before recounting the 72 hours of “pure torture” he experienced when his son disappeared

Ahmed Elmasry

Explain to me this enthusiasm for lawlessness that [Egypt’s youth] displayed. That’s because of their ‘father.’ We’re a nation of abused children

in the early chaos of Tahrir.

“A real father roams the street, tearing out his hair in despair over his missing son. My boy was arrested and beaten and let loose only because God knew I wouldn’t have been able to handle losing him,” he says. “When I picked him up, he wasn’t making sense and had 3-dayold blood on his clothes.”

“This is not a sad story I’m telling you,” Hamdan says, interrupting himself. “It’s a happy one, the happiest I’ve known in 30 years.”

“I don’t want to see Mubarak executed, I want to see him humiliated.

I want to see his face rubbed in it,” Hamdan says.

For Hamdan, sentencing Mubarak to death would have been the easy way out.

“Even if they keep him in a fancy cell, even if he’s locked up in a garden — he’s still locked up, and for a creature like him, that’s enough of a disgrace to break his senile brain,” Hamdan says.

It is a far cry, then, from the sympathetic statements heard — particularly among older generations — following Mubarak’s outwardly humble demeanor the night he addressed “a speech from a father to his sons and daughters,” and one that is echoed heavily through the streets of downtown Cairo.

During a wait in line at a sandwich stand that has turned into a political debate, 32-year-old Karim al-Shimy offers his analysis of Mubarak’s true legacy.

“Look at the youth now, how they behave and their affinity for criminal activity. Explain to me this enthusiasm for lawlessness that they displayed. That’s because of their ‘father.’ We’re a nation of abused children,” Shimy says.

Ten years his senior, Akram Ali, a janitor at a children’s hospital, quietly asks, “What is the most valuable thing a person has — what does he owe most to but those who brought him into this world and nurtured him?” He repeats the last two words twice. “I cannot call that man my father. He has never given me a reason to.”

Less quietly, an older man in a galabeya interjects, “My father was [President] Anwar [Sadat].

He was a parent and a friend, and the only man who ever did a thing for this country.” The man proceeds to describe how former President Gamal

Mubarak in bed ahead of his verdict

Abdel Nasser, Sadat’s predecessor, “destroyed” Egypt by “giving land to farmers who barely knew what to do with the four piasters they used to get paid” and, less clearly, by “filling the country with women.”

Hamdan is also glad to call Sadat his father, and remembers his reign fondly. “You wouldn’t have thought this could follow that,” he sighs. He keeps his eyes glued to the tiny television screen, watching the crowd in Tahrir slowly swell.

“My son will be back in the street,” he says. “And I’m terrified of what might happen, but I can’t keep him from going. He’s fighting for his future, so that he doesn’t end up like me, fighting for revenge.”

“The martyrs have been laid to rest,” he says, “from this world and its shit. But we’re still here, wrestling with demons.” ■

6

7 June 2012

News

The need to know

Two freedom of information bills make their way to Parliament

By Sarah Carr

Archival

I

n February 2011, protesters entered the State Security Investigation Services office in Nasr City, Cairo, and found ream upon ream of paperwork, some shredded, some intact. It was testimony to decades of laborious documentation of the activities of Egyptian citizens; some activists found their own files, complete with photographs and telephone conversation transcripts.

The act was highly symbolic. Information is tightly guarded by the Egyptian state, and citizens have historically been regarded as having no business accessing it, even when the information concerns them. Under the 1971 Constitution, only journalists were given the right to access “news and information,” and this right was itself curtailed by the catch-all caveat, “according to the regulations set by the law.”

Egypt has never had legislation enshrining the right to freedom of information, but this looks set to change, at a time when some 90 countries across the world have adopted a freedom of information bill, according to Toby Mendel, executive director of the Canada-based Centre for Law and Democracy.

“The right to information is also essential as an underpinning of democracy. If citizens are to participate in a real way in public decision making, they must have access to the information upon which decisions are being based,” Mendel wrote for Egypt Independent.

In early May, members of the People’s Assembly Human Rights Committee, together with experts, presented a government draft bill

on availing records and information during a discussion at the Information Center for Technology.

The drafting of the 48-article bill was led by consultant Abdel Rahman al-Sawy, who said during the seminar that it was drawn up using United Nations recommendations on the right to information as well as American, British and European legislation as references.

An explanatory note handed out with a copy of the bill lists the principles its authors con-

sidered “fundamental” as they wrote it. They include the right of everyone to access information and limits on this freedom being the exception rather than the rule.

At the other end of the spectrum, the note also mentions the importance of protecting privacy, national security and “higher interests.”

Negotiating a balance between the right to know and the state’s reluctance to divulge its secrets is particularly tough in a country with both an expansive and secretive security apparatus and a monolithic and chaotic bureaucracy.

The tension is apparent even in the language used in the bill’s title; it uses the word etaha in Arabic, meaning availing. Compare this with the draft law submitted by a group of civil society actors that includes the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, simply titled the Freedom of Information Bill.

The idea of access to information being granted rather than constituting a right informs several aspects of the government bill.

In the government’s bill, Article 2 enshrines the right to access information “whenever its disclosure realizes a legitimate interest.” No definition of “legitimate interest” is provided.

In contrast, the civil society bill states that “every individual has the right to access information,” and imposes a duty on government bodies to release information.

The implicit understanding that access to information includes the right to use it freely within the limits of the law is turned on its head in Article 6 of the government’s draft law. The article enjoins that records and information may only be used for the purpose for which they were granted, and must be destroyed upon completion of that purpose.

The civil society bill contains no such restrictions.

In addition to not being in keeping with the spirit of freedom of information, restricting access is costly, says Amr Gharbeia, the director of EIPR’s Civil Liberties Program.

Gharbeia advocates affirmative disclosure: state bodies should periodically and routinely release information rather than require individuals to request it — an expensive and timeconsuming procedure.

To this end, the civil society bill contains a requirement that governmental bodies routinely publish comprehensive information about

Creating an openness culture requires trust and a belief that openness is not harmful

Negotiating a balance between the right to know and the state’s reluctance to divulge its secrets is particularly tough themselves, including all details related to its organizational structure and a guide including the names of all officials in the body, as well as their powers, duties and salaries.

Both bills establish a mechanism by which requests for information refused by state bodies are adjudicated by an ombudsman. The government draft law establishes a 12-member Higher Council for Records and Information appointed by the president and charged with receiving complaints about refused requests for information, among other duties.

Current and former dual nationals, as well as Egyptians who are married to foreign nationals, would be forbidden from being members of the council. Three of its members represent the intelligence services, national security and the Interior Ministry.

The council would only be obliged to meet once a month, making it impossible for it to deal with all the likely complaints it would receive, Gharbeia says. The appointment of its members by the president is also cause for concern about its independence.

Under the civil society bill, the president of the republic would appoint an information commissioner, chosen by a majority of the People’s Assembly members, to monitor the implementation of the law and handle disputes.

Parliament’s choice of the information commissioner is done in the spirit of preserving his independence from the executive branch.

Additionally, a supreme information council would be charged with putting in place public policies relating to disclosure and circulation of information.

Moreover, the civil society bill limits exceptions to access to information by defining them in detail, including the question of national security, which is commonly used as an elusive notion in draft bills, restricting liberties.

Gharbeia suggests that a spirit of openness is missing from the government draft law.

“Creating an openness culture requires trust and a belief that openness is not harmful. The government draft [law] works against this by imposing heavy prison sentences for violations,” Gharbeia says.

However, Gharbeia says the parliamentary Human Rights Committee, headed by Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, is leaning toward combining both bills, taking the best from each of them ■

7 June 2012

News

7

More than cops and robbers

Virginie Nguyen

In Sinai, the tribe comes before the state, the state before Islamists

The Bedouins of Sinai see strength in their tribal tradition

By Lina Attalah

A strong tribal system and representative leadership are the real keys to dealing with external threats long lamented the co-optation of Mohamed believes a strong tribal the sheikh’s position by the ruling system and representative leadership are the real keys to dealing with exterregime.

“In the past, the tribe would be the nal threats.

One much-discussed threat these one choosing its sheikh and it would be an informed choice of who can days is that of the new and revived best serve the tribe,” said Moussa militant Islamist groups operating in Abu Mohamed, a community leader the area.

These groups can generally be diin the village of Mahdeya near the Isvided into the more peaceful, prosraeli border.

But during the Mubarak era, elytizing type and the more violent sheikhs became an entry point for type. According to various tribesthe central government in Cairo into men, these groups are mainly located in the towns of Rafah and Sheikh Sinai’s intricate tribal system.

According to Abu Mohamed and Zuwayed.

Al-Tableegh wal Dawah is one such other North Sinai residents, a sheikh is informally pushed to the post formation, and it’s generally known through the security directorate and for being a peaceful group that was the military intelligence, both active founded in the mid-1980s, followsecurity agencies in North Sinai dur- ing the signing of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. ing the Mubarak era.

Al-Takfeer wal Hijra, a more radi“They report to the police and are loyal to state security. The security cal group that is anti-politics, is also apparatus has mobilized the sheikhs commonly cited.

It was born in the late 1970s, when against the people,” he says.

There are some 150 such sheikhs in former Muslim Brotherhood memNorth Sinai. They would be the typi- ber Shokry Mostafa established it as cal interlocutors of the state when a radical response to President Gaa government or a political party mal Abdel Nasser’s execution of the claims to establish a dialogue with leading Brotherhood figure Sayed Qutb. A reported member of the the people of Sinai.

Abu Mohamed and many other Sinai residents want to see this system changed and a return to the election, or at least the endorsement, of sheikhs by tribe members rather than just the Interior Ministry or the military.

Fear of Islamist militants in Sinai While the government gives the Israelis justification for relies on its sekeeping the peace treaty with curity services and networks of inEgypt unchanged formants to control security threats in Sinai, Abu

Virginie Nguyen

M

anei Mohamed was buying a mobile phone at a kiosk in downtown Arish on the afternoon of 19 May when he suddenly heard gunfire. He looked around and saw a man with his face covered by a scarf run out of a barbershop, hop on a motorbike driven by another masked man, and speed away. When Mohamed entered the barbershop, he found Nayef Abu Qabbal bleeding from his head.

“He was dead by then,” Mohamed says.

Abu Qabbal was a sheikh in the Sawarka tribe, one of North Sinai’s largest and most powerful. Weeks later, who killed the sheikh remains a mystery, but conspiracy theories abound and all come back to the central issues confronting North Sinai: continuing lawlessness, flourishing Islamist militancy, and a precarious and complex relationship between Sinai and the state.

“Talk in the city is that [Abu Qabbal] has a connection with state security and has helped them arrest a lot of people here,” Mohamed says, echoing a view held by many interviewed by Egypt Independent in North Sinai.

The State Security Investigation Services was toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s brutal investigative authority, and was behind the arbitrary arrest of thousands in Sinai on terrorism and smuggling charges.

“We don’t know who killed the sheikh. But the way he was killed shows that it’s probably a vendetta,” says Mohamed al-Menei, a trader from the border town of Rafah, adding that a few of those arbitrarily arrested in Sinai were reportedly identified by security with Abu Qabbal’s help.

Menei purported that it could be a fellow tribesman who killed Abu Qabbal, or a militant Islamist who was arrested and imprisoned thanks to the sheikh’s conspicuous relationship with the security apparatus. He is inclined to believe the second scenario, he says, because “the way the sheikh was killed is not manly.” Citing common tribal practices, Menei says a tribesman would have shot Abu Qabbal in the leg, not the head.

Bedouins of North Sinai have

group in Sinai, Mohamed al-Teehi, was arrested in late 2011 on charges of blowing up the pipeline supplying gas to Israel, but died in prison five months later.

Another group, the Salafiya Jihadiya, includes many of those labeled by the Mubarak regime as “outlaws” and arbitrarily sentenced in absentia to prison on smuggling or terrorism charges, according to many Bedouins. Many of the followers of this group are reportedly less intellectually tied to ideology and more motivated to kill by money.

Many connect the group to the Gaza-based Gaysh al-Islam (Islam’s Army), a splinter of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees, which Israel held responsible for the killing of eight citizens in its southern city of Eilat when gunmen crossed over from Sinai last August. Gaysh alIslam’s founder Mumtaz Daghmash is accused by Egypt of perpetrating several terrorist attacks in Sinai between 2004 and 2006, as well as the 2009 bombing in Cairo’s Hussein tourist area. Accordingly, Egypt has been pressuring Hamas, which controls Gaza, to arrest Daghmash.

The other possible Gaza connection in Sinai is the Jaljalat organization, which was cited by Egyptian security as potentially complicit in the Eilat bombing of August 2011.

But while these groups are met with frenzied anxiety in Cairo-based, Israeli and Western media, locals seem far less concerned.

“I can set up a bar in Sheikh Zuwayed and no one will talk to me,” says Menei confidently.

“Radical Islam in Cairo is one thing and in Sinai is another thing,” says Awad Salman, a sheikh in Massoura village. “In tribal societies, it is hard for militant Islamist ideas to diffuse,” he adds, reiterating that a militant group would fear unruly tribal resistance.

The hype around these groups, he says, is exaggerated. According to Salman, fear of Islamist militants in Sinai is in Israel’s interest, because it gives the Israelis justification for keeping the peace treaty with Egypt unchanged. Salman even takes this idea further, suggesting that these groups in Sinai are manufactured by Israel to create a threat. For evidence, Salman points to a rocket reportedly fired from Sinai into Israel last April, which

hit no one. “There are no rockets that can reach that far in Sinai. Plus, why would rockets be launched without targeting anything or anyone?”

Salman’s assessment may sound like a stretch, but many analysts argue that militant groups are often intelligence agencies’ proxies.

“The problem is that we don’t have educated journalists among our sons and daughters to defend us,” he says.

As far as the local following of these groups is concerned, Salman sees an important role for state security, either as a reaction to its arbitrary policies in Sinai or by direct influence.

“When state security [arbitrarily] arrested the men of Sinai and threw them in prisons, we demanded that they would be separated from militant Islamists so that radical thought wouldn’t diffuse. But no one listened,” he says.

Menei, the Rafah trader, has firsthand experience with this phenomenon. His brother was arrested in 2004 and accused of smuggling to Gaza. Those accused of smuggling to Gaza would be put in political prisons alongside terrorism suspects, he says.

“When he came out recently, he grew a beard and joined one of the militant groups,” Menei says, declining to identify which group.

A 26-year-old sympathizer with radical Islamist groups in Sinai who spoke to Egypt Independent on the condition of anonymity shared his experience, as he has just been released from Egyptian political prisons.

“I was randomly arrested in 2006 on smuggling charges and was kept there for four years until charges were dropped following an appeal,” he explains.

In prison, he met several Islamist figures whom he described as “extremely informative.” He came back with this thought: “The Islamists of Sinai are not deeply rooted in one or another ideology. They fluctuate depending on who talks to them.”

He knows one thing for sure: “I just came out and felt unstable. I lost my education and my father died of the pain of losing me.”

Asked whether he would shoot a sheikh accused of working with state security in the foot, according to the tribal tradition, the former prisoner simply says, “Any informer should be liquidated.” ■

World Briefs

Libya’s militias run amok

A group of militiamen took over Libya’s main airport Monday, storming it with machine guns and armored vehicles, and forcing airport authorities to divert flights. The militiamen were angry over the arrest of their commander, according to a Libyan security official. Scores of militias formed during the country’s revolution remain armed and outside the control of the central government in Tripoli. Elections for a 200-member committee to write the country’s new constitution are scheduled to take place on 20 June.■

Disaster in Lagos A plane crashed Sunday night in Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, killing all 146 passengers and six crew members. The plane crashed into an apartment block in a residential suburb, and the number of people killed on the ground remains unknown. The plane, flown by privately owned domestic carrier Dana Air, was manufactured Goodluck Jonathan in 1983. President Goodluck Jonathan visited the crash site on Monday as emergency services sifted through the wreckage. “This particular incident is a major setback for us as a people,” Jonathan said. An investigation is ongoing.■

Assad claims innocence

Anti-African in Israel

AFP

8

7 June 2012

More than 100 killed in Houla Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Sunday that not even “monsters” would carry out a massacre like the one that occurred in the central region of Houla last week. More than 100 people were killed, nearly half of them children. Assad’s regime is struggling to retain power in the face of an armed uprising, and his security forces have shown little regard for human rights norms in their attempt to crush it. “If we don’t feel the pain, the pain that squeezes our hearts, as I felt it,

for the cruel scenes — especially the children — then we are not human beings,” Assad said in a televised address before the Syrian parliament. It was his first public address since January. Assad mocked protesters’ calls for freedom in his speech. “This freedom that they called for has turned into the [human] remains of our sons and this democracy that they talked about is now drowning in our blood,” he said. Some 13,000 people have died in the uprising so far. ■

Algeria’s elections bogus Algeria’s 10 May parliamentary elections were neither credible nor transparent, a multiparty national monitoring commission said Saturday. The National Elections Monitoring Commission reported that there were breaches of the electoral laws “from the beginning of the operation to the end.” President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika’s National Liberation Front (FLN) took 208 of the newly enlarged national assembly’s 462 seats in the election, followed by Prime Minister Ahmed

Ouyahia’s National Rally for Democracy with 68 lawmakers. The moderate Islamist Green Algeria Alliance, which predicted victory ahead of the vote, won only 49 seats.

Bouteflika has been in office since 1999. The monitoring commission was comprised of representatives from the 44 political parties that contested the election. While its report did not accuse the FLN of fraud, it said, “The commission finds that the elections have lost their credibility.”■

Twitter crackdown in Kuwait A Kuwaiti court sentenced a Twitter user to 10 years in jail on Monday on charges of insulting the Prophet Mohamed, his wife Aisha and his companions. Hamad al-Naqi, the 22-year-old tweep, was also accused of insulting the governments of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and for spreading false news that undermines Kuwait’s image abroad. Naqi, who was arrested three months ago, comes from Kuwait’s Shia minority. Sectarian tensions have been on the rise in the Gulf state.

The sentence comes amid a rise in jail terms for activists and social media users. ■

Yemen invades Yemen, with US help Hundreds of Yemeni troops, backed by tanks and with US support, are preparing to attack several towns on Yemen’s south coast that are under the control of Islamist militants. Militant groups have been empowered by the instability caused by the uprising in Yemen over the past year. Longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh resigned in February. The US, which helped engineer Saleh’s replacement by his deputy, is backing the offensive in the south and has stepped up its campaign of drone-strike assassinations of alleged Al-Qaeda members. Washington has also sent dozens of military trainers to help President Abd Rabo Mansour Hadi’s security forces. Militants have staged several suicide bombings in the past months.■

Benjamin Netanyahu

An Israeli government official announced on Sunday that the government would soon be allowed to detain undocumented migrants without charge for up to three years. The issue of unauthorized migration into Israel, primarily of African economic migrants via the Egyptian border, has come to the national fore in recent weeks. Last month, an anti-immigrant protest in Tel Aviv turned violent when demonstrators attacked Africanrun shops and smashed a car driven by two African men. Since then, government officials have called for the arrest and expulsion of tens of thousands of Africans, mostly from Sudan, South Sudan and Eritrea. An Israeli interior ministry official said 2,031 Africans entered the country during May alone.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that unauthorized immigration of Africans “threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity.”■

Pro-choice Turks

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Hundreds of citizens protested in Istanbul on Saturday in opposition to Turkey’s moderate Islamist government introducing a bill limiting abortion to the first four weeks of pregnancy. Currently, single women can legally get an abortion up to 10 weeks into their pregnancy for medical or economic reasons. Married women require their husband’s permission. Women’s rights organizations in Turkey have condemned the proposed change to the law, but Islamic clerics and government officials continue to push for it. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently called abortion murder and said that it hinders Turkey’s economic growth. He has called on Turkish women to have at least three children. Protesters chanted “Abortion is a right” and “It is our body” during the rallies. Health Minister Recep Akdag said last week that the bill would be submitted to the parliament this month.■

7 June 2012

World

9

A war of last resort

In Lebanon, Syrian uprising fuels tremors along social fault lines

By Hicham Safieddine

AFP

B

FSA trains in Qusair

There is a desire by the Free Syrian Army to control the north of Lebanon and turn it into a comfortable base for launching operations His arrest triggered rallies and protests across the region. Tires were burned and snap sit-ins were held in one of the city’s main squares.

Mounting pressure led to the eventual release of Mawlawi, who received a hero’s welcome in Tripoli. Prime Minister Najib Miqati reportedly pushed for the release. Miqati hails from Tripoli and broke off his alliance with former Prime Minister and Future Party head Saad Hariri to form a government with the 8 March Alliance, of which Hizbullah is a member.

“This was a serious mistake that totally undermined state authority and signaled further erosion of security,” argues Fida Itani, an expert on Islamist movements and political commentator.

A week following Mawlawi’s arrest, an Akkar cleric named Ahmed Abdul Wahid was shot dead by the Lebanese army at a checkpoint on his way to an anti-Assad rally. Hariri forces in Beirut responded by launching an all-night battle to kick out a pro-Hizbullah militia leader from their stronghold neighborhood of Tariq al-Jdideh.

Following the killing of Abdel Wahid, Itani says Hariri tried to pose himself as a savior, but this time around people didn’t immediately lend him their ear.

“When Ahmed Hariri [Saad’s cousin] spoke

at the funeral, shooting in the air drowned out his speech,” Itani points out. “The lack of trust by people in Hariri led them to search for alternative forces.”

But the major arena of fighting remains the fault lines separating the poor districts of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen in Tripoli. The former is a bastion of Sunni Islamist forces, the latter home to an Alawi community and armed groups supportive of Assad. The confrontation reached a high point this past weekend, with over a dozen dead and many injured. Lebanese army forces were deployed in the city amid talk of a military operation against the militias, but with little success so far.

Itani says these developments must be understood in the context of the changing nature of the Syrian conflict and the evolving dynamics of Lebanon’s complex political landscape.

After failing to create a buffer zone along the Turkish or Jordanian borders, “there is a desire by the Free Syrian Army to control the north of Lebanon and turn it into a comfortable base for launching operations,” explains Itani. “The Syrian regime in return has no problem turning the situation into a heated one to get rid of elements of the Free Syrian Army in its own territories and export them to Lebanon.”

Akkar is one of the most impoverished regions in the country. During the years following the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, his son and successor Saad whipped up sectarian sentiments to galvanize his Sunni supporters. The poor, conservative population of Akkar was a reservoir for his mass rallies. But Hariri’s liberal discourse and lack of street muscle in the face of pro-Hizbullah forces led many Islamists to start steering an independent course and weave direct links with Saudi Arabia and other gulf patrons.

Itani says many of the emerging Salafi leaders are merely vocal phenomena, with people increasingly flocking to their mosques to hear

Archival

EIRUT - Deeply tucked into the barren hills of Lebanon’s northeastern region of Hermel, the isolated town of Ursal has become a household name in Lebanon thanks to the Syrian uprising.

Like many other towns and villages straddling the border in this region neglected by the state, Ursal’s population has long survived on border smuggling, mostly of diesel, electronics and other consumer goods. Small-sized quarries dotting the snaky road connecting the town to Beqaa Valley provide another hazardous, yet prized, source of income.

But as armed conflict took hold of Syria, weapons became the dominant booty. Tightened border security between the two countries and suspicions of Free Syrian Army movement across the border meant that smugglers risked instant death upon discovery. The risk is hardly worthwhile except in the case of weapons, due to the high sums of cash involved and, in some cases, political convictions. Ursal’s Abdel Ghani Jibbawi might have been the latest player - and victim - of this dangerous game.

Last Tuesday, Jibbawi was shot dead and three others, including a Syrian, were injured after a skirmish with the Syrian army.

“They were hunting rabbits,” says Jibbawi’s angry father Zahri as he stands beside his son’s blood-soaked vehicle and the tent set up to receive condolences following the funeral.

“When the operation happened, we called the [Lebanese] army. Why didn’t the army head there? They didn’t have guts,” he says.

Lebanese army sources and their Syria counterparts scoff at the idea of rabbit hunting in the middle of the night during such times. The men were smuggling weapons, they assert.

The disagreement between the people of Ursal and the authorities is not simply over illicit trade. Ursal’s mayor, like most residents, is a vocal opponent of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has reported links with the Free Syrian Army. Ursal stands out among the mostly Shia villages in Hermel in terms of its anti-Assad politics, particularly given its Sunni formation, but the northern Akkar region is on Ursal’s side, and Lebanese sympathies regarding the Syrian uprising are largely determined along sectarian lines. Since the infamous battle of Baba Amr in Homs, north Lebanon - including its coastal city Tripoli - has increasingly become a haven for the Free Syrian Army, as well as for civilians fleeing the fighting.

In the past month, a series of clashes, arrests, kidnappings and assassinations in the north led to a serious escalation in political rhetoric and violence between pro- and anti-Assad forces while turning Islamists into a force to be reckoned with.

On 12 May, security forces arrested Islamist Shadi al-Mawlawi, accused of belonging to Al-Qaeda. The Tripoli-based young man had allegedly developed links to Al-Qaeda cells while in Syria. In Lebanon’s north, Mawlawi was a well-known backer of the anti-Assad uprising and suspected of supplying weapons to the Free Syrian Army.

The Syrian conflict has not simply seeped into Lebanon. It has awakened and fueled already existing fault lines among different factions

their fiery speeches, with nowhere else to turn.

But armed groups are also gaining currency, and Itani says the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese Shia pilgrims near Aleppo on 22 May was an attempt to drag Hizbullah, which is supportive of the Assad regime, into a confrontation and fuel sectarian tensions.

“We know what weapons Hizbullah has, but we don’t know what the others have amassed so far,” says Itani. It is unlikely that the Islamists are as organized and armed as Hizbullah as of yet, but the situation is prone to blowing up any minute, with pockets of unrest erupting in hot spots like Tripoli and parts of Beirut’s suburbs.

The army remains in a precarious position, and whispers of Syrian army intervention in the north, though unlikely, have begun to surface. The 8 March government has fared no better than its predecessors in terms of improving security and economic conditions. Tire burning has become a regular occurrence due to a wide range of grievances across the country. Miqati’s declared policy of “distancing oneself ” from the Syrian crisis has only served to weaken the state’s grip on the situation.

While Islamists gain the upper hand in the north and security breaches become more frequent, secular and civil society activists in Beirut who support the Syrian uprising may be the biggest losers in this fray.

Beirut-based activist Saad Kurdi says it is now more difficult to visit and aid Syrian refugees in the north, who have been largely brought under the wing of Salafis or international organizations. But Kurdi asserts that political action in solidarity with the uprising has not been totally silenced.

“We held a protest following the Houla massacre and took part in a commemorative rally

by Kurdish activists in Beirut last week,” Kurdi explains. “Some activists have become hesitant to take part after the breakout of violence, but others think that this is the time to be active and support the uprising so other less desirable forces don’t prevail.”

Blogger and activist Khodor Salameh is less optimistic.

“What has happened in the north has exposed the sectarianism and narrow agendas of many people, and the number of activists who are still active and enthusiastic about the Syrian cause is in decline,” he says.

With the logic of arms taking over among many Lebanese, the Syrian conflict has not simply seeped into Lebanon. It has awakened and fueled already existing fault lines among different factions. Contrary to national history taught to schoolchildren in Lebanon, the country does not only excel in food services and tourism, but also in the making of civil wars as a last resort to local and regional conflicts. Many fear the time for a new round could just be around the corner.■

10

7 June 2012

Economy

Money in the bank?

In a new region, European Bank is told to enter with care

By Nadine Marroushi

Courtesy of EBRD

U

nder Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign, “the private sector” and “privatizations” became politically laden terms associated with a circle of businessmen buying state assets for cheap due to their connections with the president and his sons.

Deals were made between the private sector, government and military companies under a veil of secrecy serving to enrich men on top, while laymen grew poorer.

As poverty and unemployment rose, Egypt received praise from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for achieving 7 percent GDP growth, even as workers, the unemployed and millions of others felt the economy was unjustly managed.

News that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is extending its remit and setting up a 1 billion-euro special fund to spend by September in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan — the so-called Southern and Eastern Mediterranean region — is being received with caution and skepticism by central bankers and civil society groups.

The bank was set up in 1991 to help postcommunist countries in central and Eastern Europe that demonstrated a commitment to multiparty democracy transition from stateled to private sector-led economies. The EBRD has a mandate for meeting environmental and social sustainability goals set by its 63 government shareholders, of which the European Union and the US are among the largest.

But the bank’s role in central and Eastern Europe, where there was virtually no existing private sector, has been praised for injecting money when most needed but criticized for inadequately helping countries graduate from transition.

With a neoliberal economic agenda that at the outset did not look any different from what the region had seen before, and during transitions that have yet to set up the kind of checks and balances that encourage responsive policies in place, alarm bells are ringing.

Tunisian and Egyptian central bankers have cautioned the EBRD against applying a onesize-fits-all model, advising the bank to be sensitive to the region’s historical economic development.

“One should be very careful about transposing the experiences of Eastern Europe onto our countries. Focusing on liberalization and privatization now might be counterproductive,” Tunisia’s central bank governor, Mustapha Kamel Nabli, told chief ERBD economist Erik Berglöf before a full audience at the bank’s annual meetings in London last month.

“We’ve been doing that already for 30 years, and the fact that it was done badly and the fruits of privatization were taken by a small elite was one of the issues that contributed to last year’s revolution,” Nabli said.

Egypt’s deputy central bank governor, Rania al-Mashat, echoed this, saying that “reforms in Egypt have been taking place for a very long time. Many of them were solid and strong, but many were also partial and to a large extent led to the uprisings and Arab Spring.”

She said coming reforms need to tackle systemic structural impediments, such as allowing for more competition, transparency and accountability.

Civil society groups in Egypt and Eastern Europe have also been active in criticizing the bank for its pro-privatization policies and for approaching the SEMED region so early on in its transition. Most countries have yet to demonstrate a genuine move toward democracy and transparency, despite parliamentary and presidential elections.

In March, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights issued a scathing critique of the EBRD’s technical assessment of Egypt, which praised

external liberalization under the former regime. It encouraged further privatization and public-private partnerships, which EIPR said ignored the processes’ rampant corruption and crony capitalism.

Bankwatch, an organization monitoring lending practices of the EU, European Investment Bank and the EBRD, submitted a letter with a similar message to the European Commission in March last year. The Bankwatch letter was endorsed by 27 central and Eastern European civil society groups.

“It is premature to make commitments for EBRD financing for the Mediterranean region when it is by no means clear what kind of governments will follow the recently overthrown regimes. We also have serious concerns about the abilities of the bank to deliver meaningful development outcomes in the region ... in no way can it be concluded that the EBRD has sufficient expertise in poverty reduction,” the letter states.

A March 2010 report by US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations accused the EBRD and other international finance institutions of suffering from a lack of transparency “regarding loan decisions, environmental impact, inspection panels, project assessment, etc.” The

One should be very careful about transposing the experiences of Eastern Europe onto our countries report criticized the EBRD for allocating 41 percent of its lending to Russia, which maintains illiberal practices.

Its lending program to Russia and other energy-rich countries is also criticized by Bankwatch for focusing heavily on fossil fuels and mining rather than renewable energy.

Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif echoed these words of caution at the EBRD meetings, advising against using “Western-style democracy as the golden grail” by which transitions are measured, saying the Arab world “needs a completely new model.”

Soueif was also critical of the bank pushing the country in a certain direction, especially while it is run by unaccountable institutions such as the military, whose powers are unlikely

to be checked by elections.

“I would advise all funding agencies to stay away and international bodies concerned with human rights to help,” she said.

But it’s not all bad news when it comes to the EBRD. Some Eastern Europeans were happy the bank came into their countries, saying it was needed to create a private sector and to influence public debate.

“The level of intellectual discussion on issues related to the economy went up several steps, and now you feel we live in a more civilized society. There is more discussion about the legal system and corruption,” Ukranian novelist Andrey Kurkov said.

Egypt’s private sector does need a cash injection that boosts job creation. Labor-intensive industries are needed for the 3 million unemployed, the majority of whom are between 15 and 29. It is a restive constituency that no longer fears taking to the streets.

What concerns skeptical voices the most is whether the bank will use its money wisely to support the industries that create jobs, ensuring the 40 percent poverty rate is reduced, and go beyond saying the right things about supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises and renewable energy, but doing the right thing.■

Hildegard Gacek on EBRD’s approach The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development plans to expand and invest in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Region — Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan — starting in September with a 1 billion-euro special fund. Egypt Independent met with Hildegard Gacek, the bank’s SEMED region managing director, to discuss plans for working with the government, private sector and civil society.

Egypt Independent: Given that SEMED countries are starting from a different base than the former communist countries of central and Eastern Europe, the bank’s traditional region of operation, in that they have already been through privatization processes, much of which has been problematic, will you be doing things differently in the region? If so, how?

Hildegard Gacek: Yes and no. Yes, we will approach the region differently, because it has a different history and its countries have existed for a long time. No, because some of the experiences are relevant, such as how to work with the private sector, how to work with the public sector, and how to structure deals to help governments avoid budgetary constraints. We will try to use and share our experience, and work with the four countries, their governments and the private sector.

I know there have been bad examples of privatization — not just in Egypt but in other

Hildegard Gacek

countries, including our traditional region — but we have not been involved in such privatizations. Those we have been involved in we have properly prepared and followed through, sure our money has been invested in a way that has been agreed upon upfront, has created values in the company, created jobs and improved the company.

We don’t privatize and step out, we privatize and stay. If we stay and it’s not properly done, then we’d lose money. If we found it was handled without good corporate governance standards, we withdrew or did not do it. Committing our money is a very important element to ensuring success.

EI: How will you ensure that your investments in the private sector are creating jobs and helping to expand the middle class in a corruption-free way? What benchmarks and

follow-through mechanisms do you have in place?

Gacek: We are applying high standards of due diligence on whom we partner with. We cannot influence markets, but we can influence corporate governance standards, transparency, the proper use of funds and stronger partnership. When we are investing, we are also stricly monitoring. We don’t hand out loans, we finance assets. Proper investment is automatically linked to job creation. If we are financing an agri-business, let’s say a production plant for fruit juice, we finance the plant and its operation needs to create jobs. In making sure our money goes exactly where we have approved it, the job creation comes automatically.

EI: With what sort of relationship, and in what ways will you be cooperating with the Egyptian government?

Gacek: One of the important areas is energy, because the government wants to encourage renewable energy and also look into the energy sector in the future. Together we will also look areas like water, wastewater and treatment. Also, maybe, their infrastructure needs. Over time we would help with technical assistance. So it goes in line — not only financing — but also real support, so that it can be more commercialized. That doesn’t necessarily mean tomorrow everything has to be done. We understand this is a process and during the process we would like to work with the government.■

7 June 2012

Economy Briefs

Restructuring energy

A drop in profits

budget, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm.

A source at the Petroleum Ministry said the options for resolution currently under consideration are either a flat reduction of the current subsidy policy or the introduction of a coupon-system for distributing goods. ■

Egypt’s Elsewedy Electric, the largest cable-producing company in the Arab world, reported a 44 percent drop in its 2012 first-quarter profits compared to last year last Tuesday, 30 May. The company said a bumpy political transition in Egypt and ongoing violence in Syria had dried up demand for electronic cables and reduced production capacities.

An overly French Mobinil

Naguib Sawiris

Trial for execs

It was a larger hit than the company or analysts had expected.

“The results are below our estimates,” said Essam Abdel Aleem, an analyst at Naeem Brokerage.

Elsewedy, which has production plants in Egypt, Syria and nine other countries, also makes equipment for wind farms.■

Pricey wheat Egypt has bought 1.1 million tons of local wheat so far in the 20112012 season despite diesel shortages that have hampered harvesting, an official at the Supply and Domestic Trade Ministry said on 21 May. Egypt, the world’s largest importer of wheat, said in October it had raised the price it pays local farmers for their wheat to LE380 per ardeb (140 kg) from LE350

Petrol pleas

EU pressures

Petrol shortage in Cairo’s Fifth Settlement

An annual European Union report issued on 16 May urged Egypt to reach a fair trade agreement similar to those the bloc has with Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan.

EU Ambassador to Egypt James Moran said during a press conference that discussions could start after the presidential election is finished and a new government is formed, he said, anticipating that it would take up to a year to begin the talks.

The bilateral trade volume between Egypt and the EU is valued at 23 billion euros, Moran said.■

during the last season to give farmers further incentive to sell to the government.

On 30 May, the Finance Ministry also announced that it would provide the Supply and Domestic Trade Ministry with LE1 billion to cover the cost of imported wheat, raising the sum allocated for the same purpose to roughly LE4.5 billion since the beginning of the importing season. ■

Egypt’s most recent diesel and petrol shortages are due to banks’ reluctance to finance and an increasingly strapped government’s appetite for energy imports, half a dozen trade sources and energy suppliers told Reuters.

The payment problems have caused shipping delays and prompted some suppliers to think again before offering oil into a forthcoming US$1 billion import tender.

They said delays of up to two weeks in deliveries were a regular occurrence ahead of peak summer demand for diesel, blaming Egypt’s difficulties in

More fraud

Gamal and Alaa Mubarak behind bars

Hossam Fadl

France Telecom acquired 94 percent of Egyptian mobile phone company Mobinil, Egypt’s stock exchange said, giving the French group control of a top sector player in a volatile but lucrative emerging market.

Mobinil, founded by Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris, vies with Vodafone Egypt for dominance of Egypt’s mobile market, which was buffeted by political headwinds after the uprising last year.

The deal, which was subject to a preliminary agreement struck in February, recasts the terms of its relationship with Sawiris, who had a put option to sell out completely to France Telecom starting in September 2012.

Sawiris agreed to keep a 5 percent stake in Mobinil.■

James Moran

Farouk al-Oqda

Egyptian investment bank EFG Hermes on Thursday said it would defend its two chief executives against accusations of illegal share dealings.

Yasser al-Mallawany and Hassan Heikal were referred to trial on 30 May alongside the two sons of deposed President Hosni Mubarak as part of a probe into the dealings, according to the public prosecutor.

“The firm also confirms in this context that its two chief executive officers have no personal dealings, interests or benefits in any transactions related to the trading on Al-Watany Bank of Egypt’s shares,” EFG Hermes said.

Meanwhile, the bank told Al-Masry Al-Youm that it had received an offer from Planet EP Limited, which includes a group of Arab investors and Egyptian bankers, for a total acquisition after the court referral.

The stock exchange froze trading of EFG Hermes stock until the company responds to inquiries about the details of this acquisition. ■

Ahmed Elmasry

The deputy governor of the Central Bank of Egypt has called for the restructuring of energy subsidies, which pose a LE100 million annual burden on the state budget.

The Cabinet has also demanded that Parliament clarify its stance on reducing petroleum subsidies in the 2012/13 state

11

obtaining letters of credit from banks ahead of a second presidential vote.

An official at the Egyptian General Petroleum Corp denied that the shortage was caused by this.

State news service MENA reported Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Fayza Abouelnaga as saying the fuel crisis would be resolved in a matter of hours on 31 May. Ahmed Mowafy, director of the supply investigation bureau, blamed private companies for the crisis. “Six of those local and foreign companies gave one-third of their production to factories,” he said.■

Egypt’s public prosecutor said in a 30 May statement that Alaa and Gamal Mubarak, along with seven others, were referred to the criminal court on charges of violating stock market and central bank rules to gain unlawful profits through dealings in shares in Al-Watany Bank of Egypt, a listed bank.

Egypt’s investment bank EFG Hermes dipped 2.6 percent after the news. Included in the charges are two board members and joint chief executives officers of the bank, Yasser al-Mallawany and Hassan Heikal.

In the wake of the announcement, Egypt’s stock market lost that day’s gains.

The new charges mean that the two sons of the country’s ousted president will remain in custody even after their acquittal on Saturday of charges of killing protesters in last year’s uprising and embezzling national funds.■

Stock exchange slumps

The stock exchange made its largest one-day decline in two months on 27 May, amid concerns over the presidential election outcome, on top of regional uncertainty over a possible Greek exit from the euro.

Cairo’s index fell 3.5 percent, its biggest one-day drop since 25 March, after two of the most divisive candidates, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsy and ex-air force chief Ahmed Shafiq, emerged as the likely contenders of next month’s runoff vote.

“Some investors are afraid that because we now have the two extreme elements confronting one another, then the coming period will not be calm,” said Osama Mourad, chief executive of Arab Finance Brokerage.■

Gas in the sea International companies will be allowed to explore for gas off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast for the first time, after the Petroleum Ministry obtained approval from the Defense Ministry for the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company.

Petroleum Ministry sources said the Defense Ministry reviewed the four exploration areas near Egypt’s eastern border with Israel in order to protect investments in the gas project, which GASCO has valued at

US$4 billion.

The new areas touch the maritime boundary established between Egypt and Israel under the high seas demarcation treaty that Egypt and most United Nations member states signed in 1983.

The United States Geological Survey estimates the gas reserves of that region at 223 trillion cubic feet, while the Egyptian government official quantities announced are 76 trillion cubic feet.■

12

7 June 2012

Focus File

Virginie Nguyen

The people who revolted against [toppled President Hosni] Mubarak won’t accept his regime again.

Shafiq got to the runoff through the support of the remnants of the old regime. They used illegitimate tactics. The old regime can be creative at fraudulent practices. The Muslim Brotherhood is a partner in the revolution.

My platform provides freedom for everyone, be they Christians, women or anyone outside the Brotherhood, which is followed by many Egyptians despite the former regime’s oppression of the group for decades.

The Brotherhood is committed to political plurality and transferring power. It won’t restrict women’s freedom. Women will be free to choose what to wear. I won’t impose the veil.

The continuation of this revolution is the real guarantee for a free and fair election. The continuation of this revolution is the real guarantee for a power transfer to a civilian-elected authority.

The Egyptian people can’t be fooled. The square is the way to go if the old regime returns.■

By Mohamed Elmeshad and Heba Afify “Tahrir is back. Come and see for yourself!” a woman says over the phone amid a sprawling crowd on Saturday. The background is filled with the sounds of the shouting of flag sellers, the banging of drums and the chanting of ultras, hardcore football fans.

The crowd had quickly gathered after the announcement of the verdict against former President Hosni Mubarak, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, along with former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, on charges of killing protesters during the 25 January revolution that toppled him.

Six top Interior Ministry officials accused in the case, however, were all acquitted. The verdict, deemed easily reversible through an appeal, brought thousands back to the square. While they demanded justice, they also quickly turned their attention to the upcoming presidential runoff vote.

The runoff, slated for 16 and 17 June, will see the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsy compete for the top executive post with former Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq. For many, that doesn’t leave much of a choice and a boycott seems to be the best option.

That’s mainly because in the first round of the election, nearly 9 million, or 40 percent of voters, voted for Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi and ousted Muslim Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh, who came third and fourth respectively. Those who opted for them are perceived as voters whose political appetite is averse to Islamists and remnants of the Mubarak regime, and that’s, by default, termed revolutionary.

Today, proponents of Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh have been attempting to find a way to form what has been recurrently called the “third option.” This third bloc is meant to represent the revolutionary voices aiming for a true departure from the duality of the former military regime and Islamist hegemony over politics.

Whether this bloc is capable of finding a way out of the currently perceived electoral impasse remains a matter of contention.

Along with leftist former candidate Khaled Ali, Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh took to Tahrir Square on Monday night in

Between the sword

Is a third bloc capable of formulating their first joint public appearance to show a unified front for the revolution and against Mubarak-regime figures.

They specifically called for the nullification of an election they see as fraudulent, and demanded that Shafiq is disqualified from the election under the Political Isolation Law, which would take away the political rights of certain officials who served under Mubarak. More importantly, for the first time they showed a willingness to appear as a unified revolutionary front after their camps were fragmented in the first round of the presidential election.

Many rue the fact that Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh did not unite such a bloc before the election, after seeing what they could have potentially won under a unified candidate.

This failure is commonly attributed to the general lack of cohesion that marred the pro-democracy movement throughout the transition.

However, after their strong showing in the election, both camps are wising up to the potential of collective action between the two, despite their ideological differences.

“I feel [the bloc] could be very effective.

It is in total closer to the spirit of the revolution, but it’s not homogeneous,” says Laila Soueif, a Cairo University professor and activist. “It should understand the common ground it shares without distracting itself with the differences within, because we are in a very difficult confrontation.”

Each of the candidate’s campaigns has been hard at work trying to forge a longlasting political structure that represents each group. Abouel Fotouh’s camp is looking at the possibility of forming a political party or civil society organization based on his campaigning platform, “Strong Egypt.”

Sabbahi’s camp formed what they describe as being a “revolutionary current” called “the Egyptian Dream.”

Currently an unorganized group, Soueif says that to have the ability to mobilize the millions that constitute the third bloc, the presidential candidates who won their votes have to find a way to organize.

But while the thought of merging the two groups resonated with many activists and

revolutionaries, there are some structural and ideological disparities.

“In terms of a firm, unified, intellectual political discourse, this is also not there. In terms of a political leader, it’s also not there. With all due respect to Hamdeen Sabbahi, he doesn’t have the skills to lead the third bloc,” says Ashraf El Sherif, a political science lecturer at the American University in Cairo.

But the verdict is out on whether the elements Sherif alludes to are critical to the functioning of the bloc.

“It doesn’t have to take the form of an organization. If there’s consensus within this bloc I think it will help [with] developing a new road map and

7 June 2012

Focus File

13

Virginie Nguyen

Who will rule Egypt? The Brotherhood supreme guide or Khairat al-Shater?

Will the president of Egypt be the elected president, or will he be a president from behind the curtain?

People will elect a president. People won’t elect a puppet president who is manipulated by others. I represent the civil state.

The Brothers represent the sectarian state, the Brotherhood state.

I represent progress. They represent regress. I represent transparency and light.

Everyone knows me. The Brothers only represent darkness and secrecy. No one knows who they are and what they are doing.

I represent Egypt, all of Egypt. They represent a minority, closed on itself — a minority that doesn’t accept anyone from outside. I represent the national interest.

The Brothers represent revenge. I represent dialogue and tolerance. The Brothers represent exclusion, marginalization and sectarianism.

My history is clear and disclosed to everyone. The history of their candidate is obscure. I represent stability. They represent chaos.■

d and the tank

Virginie Nguyen

g an alternative path?

starting something new that will save this country,” Manar al-Shorbagy, an AUC political science professor, says.

Just like the revolution, Shorbagy says that, acting as a movement, the third bloc would disprove the myth propagated by the Brotherhood and the old regime that they are the only two alternatives.

Looking at the example of the Kefaya movement, Shorbagy says that ideological differences within the third bloc are not necessarily a weakness. Those who founded Kefaya in 2005 include Islamists, Nasserists, leftists, liberals and nationalists.

“Sometimes the fluidity of an organization is the main source

of its power,” says Shorbagy.

But this is not an easily successful model, as Soueif explains.

“We’ve seen from past experiences that without a unified ideology, as soon as the entity is formed, the clashes start,” she says.

Soueif says that, in the long term, the third bloc could be effective by being broken down into more than one entity that can work separately but cooperatively.

However, in this phase, she says acting as one unified front is the only way out of the current crisis.

Some, like Soueif, believe the third bloc must incorporate all anti-Shafiq, pro-revolution forces to stave off the possible return of Mubarak’s corrupt regime, which would also be a coup for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

“If this bloc unites on something with serious resolve, and not just talk, they can enforce anything because they represent 75 percent of the vote,” she says.

This means working with the Brotherhood as an integral component of an antiMubarak regime movement. Sabbahi, Abouel Fotouh and others have been meeting with Morsy to convince him of the need to form a “presidential council” to rule the country in the interim period.

There is little clarity, however, on the basis on which the Presidential Council demand is articulated, given the fact that an actual electoral process is ongoing, with the participation of the very revolutionaries who seek to reverse it.

In another track, activists and revolutionary groups have put together the so-called “covenant” document, which looks to extract certain promises from Morsy that guarantee his willingness to be inclusive of other major revolutionary political players in the Constituent Assembly, the presidency and the Cabinet of Ministers if he is to garner their support in the election.

Hoping to still find a role for Abouel Fotouh and Sabbahi, the document would like for them to be two vice presidents, “or someone they would nominate,” who have a set of preset, clearly defined roles.

Morsy himself is expected to sever all

organizational ties to the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, to ensure the “independence of the presidency.” One of the main issues of contention surrounding Morsy among revolutionaries is his allegiance to the Brotherhood Guidance Bureau, which is believed to be the ultimate political actor in the movement.

But not everyone is optimistic about these initiatives.

“Without political discourse and a shift from the same concept of ‘we got X amount of votes, so we are a bloc’ to something that addresses the issues more concretely, the whole phenomenon is in danger of becoming obsolete soon. They need to invest these votes into true political capital. I haven’t seen them do that,” says Wael Khalil, cofounder of the political group Masrena.

“We have a problem with creating a movement around specific people. Without real substance to weigh down the movements they helped start, these people, such as Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh, are in danger of becoming perennial floating activists.”

Similarly, Sherif sees a gap between the euphoria around the identification of a third bloc and its ability to formulate viable political propositions.

“Honestly I’m not very optimistic regarding the ability of the third bloc to express itself as a strong political actor in the current moment because it comes from the failure of others and lives on their margins,” said Sherif.

Sherif also believes that proponents of the third bloc might have overestimated the number of Sabbahi or Abouel Fotouh voters who were non-revolutionaries or pure swing voters who made their decision at the last second.

He called the notion of a third bloc an exercise in “political absolutism,” since it takes for granted that all the votes for the two candidates could be incorporated as part of a post-election revolutionary current.

Still, for some, having such a group in the current phase may seem like a desperate expression of last resort, before facing the harsh reality of a coming second republic that looks all too similar to the previous one.

“It’s all we have,” Sherif said. “This is the existential battle that we have left, to create this bloc.”■

14

7 June 2012

Opinion

The third way T

By Khaled Fahmy

The modern Egyptian state was founded with blood. While the state succeeded in eradicating the nobility and monopolizing political power by relying on the army, it never succeeded in quelling the revolutionary waves that had swept the country

here is no doubt that the trial of former President Hosni Mubarak is a turning point in the history of the Egyptian revolution. While, to wit, the jury is still out on the meaning and significance of the extraordinary verdict that the court issued, this article tries to read the verdict by placing it within a larger historical context.

The immediate significance of Mubarak’s trial is hard to miss. Unlike other countries of the so-called Arab Spring, we did not lynch our former president, nor did we try him in absentia after he had fled the country. Further still, we did not try him in a special tribunal formed by a foreign occupying power. Rather, we tried our him in a normal court using ordinary civilian legislation. Mubarak’s trial thus reflects the degree to which the Egyptian legal system has evolved over the past two centuries. Together with numerous other institutions the Egyptian judiciary has been a bulwark for our modern statebuilding efforts.

However, the inconsistent verdict rendered in this trial reflects the serious defects from which Egyptian institutions have been suffering for a long time. In the speech he delivered before reading the verdict, the judge gave an account of the trial proceedings that depicted the court and the prosecution at loggerheads with each other. On its part, the prosecution had earlier accused the security forces of not cooperating with the investigations.

To overcome this hurdle, the judge summoned “senior state officials” to hear their testimony, but during four closed sessions, the court accepted these testimonies without giving the lawyers the chance to cross-examine them. In addition to partially explaining the self-contradictory verdict, these tensions within the Egyptian judiciary are also indicative of the grave dangers facing one of the pillars of the modern Egyptian state.

Mubarak’s trial gains further significance for its ramifications on the current political scene, for the verdict came at a time of increased polarization between the two flanks of Egypt’s political life over the past 60 years, namely the security state and the Muslim Brotherhood. It also came at a time when Egyptians were still trying to make sense of the results of the first round of the presidential election, and when it is gradually being realized that those who voted for the revolution outnumber those who voted for either of the two front-runners. Moreover, the verdict prompted large numbers of demonstrators to take to the streets demanding not only a retrial of Mubarak, his sons and his henchmen, but also asking for a suspension of the second round of the presidential election.

A third way?

There is no doubt that we are now witnessing a revealing moment in the history of the revolution.

More and more people are realizing that the gloves are now off and that the political landscape that has been shaped by the revolution has acquired a new shape. The huge multitudes who took to the streets following the verdict indicate the strong repulsion for the institutions of the deep state and suggest a growing belief that a third alternative, one that is neither the security state nor the religious state, may hold the key to getting us out of the current impasse.

It is too soon to figure out what this third alternative looks like, and only the following few days will reveal which form it will take. Soon we will be able to find out whether or not this third alternative can avoid the trap choosing between the military fascism that former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq is offering us and the religious populism that Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsy represents. But a short detour to modern Egyptian history might shed light on the harbingers of this third way, and show how it has become nearly inevitable.

Upper Egyptian Revolt of 1863, to the Oraby Revolt of 1881 to 1882, to the 1919 revolution, to the student uprisings in the 1930s, 1940s, and again in 1968 and 1970, to the Bread Riots of January 1977 and finally to the rebellion of state security officers in 1986.

ie Virgin

yen Ngu

A history of the 25 January revolution The court over which Judge Ahmed Refaat was presiding is part of a venerable legal establishment that dates back to the 19th century. This legal establishment was, in turn, part of a constellation of modern institutions whose foundations had been laid down two centuries ago that included the press, schools, modern hospitals, the civil service, the police and the army.

As Egyptians, we have every right to be proud of these institutions, for it is these institutions that gave Egypt an edge over its neighbors in the region.

However, we also have to remember that founding these institutions was not easy, nor did it come freely. We also have to remember the questions that earlier generations of Egyptians have raised about the manner in which these institutions have been founded.

More than 100 years ago, the great Muslim reformer Mohamed Abdu, reflecting on the manner in which Mehmed Ali had founded the modern Egyptian state, said, “Mehmed Ali had the army on his side, and with instinctive shrewdness he managed to get rid of all his rivals and ended up massacring the heads of the prominent households in the country. At the end, not a single head was left that could say ‘I,’ and anyone who knew his own worth either had his head chopped off or found himself exiled in the Sudan.”

Similarly, when commenting on the Massacre of the Mamluks that happened in 1811, Salama Moussa wrote in 1955 saying, “Those Mamluks were Egypt’s nobility. Had they survived, they would have formed a center of opposition to Mehmed Ali, just as the English nobility had challenged King John of England and forced him to agree to the Magna Carta in 1215.”

The modern Egyptian state, therefore, was founded with blood. While the state succeeded in eradicating the nobility and monopolizing political power by relying on the army, it never succeeded in quelling the revolutionary waves that had swept the country. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Egyptian history has witnessed a string of small rebellions, and hardly a decade passed without the country witnessing some large revolt. One can easily trace this spate of revolutions, starting from 1821 in Upper Egypt against Mehmed Ali’s agricultural policies when 4,000 people were killed, to the following year when the whole Delta erupted, to the big revolt in Monufiya in 1844, to the second

The Revolution, the Officers and the Brothers The 25 January revolution has a long history, as it belongs to a long chain of protest movements in which average Egyptians expressed their frustration and anger at their government and in which they posed some basic questions: To whom do these institutions belong? Who do they serve? And how can we make this modern state serve us instead of we serving it?

As for the social and economic elites, after they had succeeded in regrouping from within the state institutions in the mid-19th century, they tried hard to curb the power of the modern Egyptian state. However, three factors stood in the way of controlling this leviathan. First was the British occupation, which dissipated nationalist efforts between struggling for independence and striving for constitutionalism. Then there was the Arab-Israeli conflict, used by some to postpone necessary domestic political reforms.

Third was the curse of oil-bolstered reactionary regimes in the region, including Mubarak’s regime, and allowed them ample breathing space and extended their lives far beyond their expiry dates.

The significance of the 25 January revolution, therefore, does not derive from being the brainchild of the Facebook generation, but rather from being an extension of a long and venerable revolutionary tradition. As for the current moment, its significance lies in its ability to reveal many of the contours of the current political landscape. The successive acquittal verdicts for police officers clearly show how keen the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is on keeping the corrupt police force intact and how adamant it is in not restructuring the entire security sector. In contrast to their ability and willingness to sacrifice the head of state, SCAF’s support of the institutions of the deep state is revealing of where its true interests lie. Given its low popularity on the streets, its lackluster military record and, above all, its lack of a political partner who can do its bidding, the SCAF generals realize their survival depends on strengthening the deep state. It is no accident, then, that their candidate is promising security, and nothing but.

As for the second flank that formed Egypt’s political scene over the past 60 years, the Muslim Brotherhood, the group was equally caught offguard by the Mubarak trial verdict. It is true that the verdict has increased the chances of the Brotherhood’s candidate winning the second round of the presidential election, but it is not the first time since the revolution that the Brotherhood has found itself winning tactically but losing strategically.

For what is the ultimate goal of acquiring posts and controlling institutions if you lack vision, if you cannot deliver and if you lose supporters?

The Brotherhood, like the military, is facing an existential crisis stemming from its realization that its long historical experience has not proved useful in dealing with the current revolutionary moment.

The only force that is capable of extracting us from the present crisis is this third way whose history can be traced all the way back to the 19 century, which has ignited the 25 January revolution, and which is gaining self-confidence day after day. In contrast to other political forces that bask in past glories or that are mired licking their own wounds, this third way, which does not even have a name, face or shape, is the only force that has a vision. And as politically savvy this third way appears to be, it is its poetry not its politics - that promises a salvation.■ Khaled Fahmy is a historian and chair of the history department at the American University in Cairo.

7 June 2012

Opinion

15

The presidential poll, unpacked

By Dina K. Hussein and Hesham Sallam

While there was no agreement on whether the 40 percent who opted for revolutionary choices do in fact represent an emerging third bloc, there is certainly at least a thirst for it

On 29 May, Egypt Independent, in collaboration with Jadaliyya, hosted a round-table discussion on the Egyptian presidential election. The discussion featured a group of our columnists and commentators. Moderated by Ahmad Shokr, the discussion featured American University in Cairo political science lecturers Ashraf El Sherif and Mohamed Menza; columnist Akram Ismail; human rights activist Heba Morayef; independent analysts Mohamed Naiem and Mohamed Said Ezzeldin, in addition to historian Zeinab Abul-Magd.

The advancement of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsy and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq to the presidential runoff scheduled for 16 and 17 June has created a serious dilemma for many Egyptians. Voters’ choices have become limited between choosing a figure who represents the Hosni Mubarak regime during its most brutal days, or supporting the head of the Brotherhood’s political arm at a time when the group’s seriousness about power sharing with other members of the community seems uncertain.

Indeed, the results of the first round of voting has raised numerous pressing questions regarding the future of the revolution and the choices facing revolutionary forces, often dubbed the “third bloc” in reference to its autonomy from both traditional Islamist political trends and remnants of the Mubarak regime.

The surprising results of the ongoing election have forced Egypt’s opinion shapers and intellectuals to re-evaluate their own reading of the country’s political map. As one participant remarked, the election offers a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding of Egypt’s political society. Similarly, another participant noted that elite-led prescriptions are meaningless if detached from the public pulse, which can be detected by understanding the election’s results.

Besides institutionalizing political Islam and the regime as two main poles of political life, participants noted that Shafiq’s and Morsy’s initial victories underscore the importance of organization in winning elections. Shafiq, one participant stated, is in fact the candidate of the “state,” and has evidently enjoyed the support of many bureaucratic interests allied with the previous regime. Shafiq, we were reminded, had succeeded in gathering 70,000 signatures in order to get his name on the ballot, thus amounting to the second-highest number of signatures, following Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, the ultraconservative preacher who was ultimately disqualified from the race.

Surpassing the other candidates in terms of qualifying signatures was the first indicator that pro-regime forces had embarked on mobilizing their resources on behalf of Shafiq. Thus, the first round shows that the regime may in fact possess the organizational resources to secure a win for its candidate in a free and fair election.

After it was dissolved by court order in April 2011, Mubarak’s National Democratic Party seems to be recreating itself in rural areas, especially Upper Egypt, where Shafiq secured the second-highest number of votes. One participant alluded to how members of the security apparatus lobbied influential families in the south to mobilize support for Shafiq. NDP efforts to re-establish itself suggest that the party may return to the political scene if Shafiq wins the presidency.

Unlike the parliamentary elections, in which fragmented Mubarak regime affiliates performed poorly, the presidential race offered pro-regime forces an opportunity to rally around a leading figure like Shafiq and organize more cohesively to secure representation.

On the other hand, despite Morsy’s success in advancing to the runoff, many participants

argued that the group’s performance was disappointing and highlights a drop in its popularity. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party claimed more than 40 percent of seats in Parliament, but its candidate secured a mere 25 percent in the presidential election’s first round. Morsy came fourth in Alexandria, second in Cairo and lagged behind in traditional Brotherhood strongholds in the Nile Delta.

This plunge could be attributed to the Brothers’ poor performance in Parliament, and its attempts to dominate the assembly that will be tasked with drafting the country’s constitution, among other factors. After they were willing to give the Brotherhood a chance to prove itself in Parliament, the reasoning goes, Egyptian voters ultimately withdrew their support after the group’s failure to live up to public expectations.

This crisis is not confined only to the Brotherhood and its party, but encompasses Egypt’s Islamist current in general, including Salafis.

Islamist forces succeeded in mobilizing support for the constitutional amendments during the 19 March 2011 referendum, in which 77 percent of voters supported the Islamists’ position of approving the amendments, which led to the holding of elections in which Islamists were sure of their win, before the writing of the constitution. Subsequently, Islamists secured about 68 percent of seats in Parliament. In the presidential election’s first round, on the other hand, Islamist candidates — namely Morsy, Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh and Mohamed Selim al-Awa — were only able to garner 40 percent of the votes.

Salafis, one participant noted, seem to be having a “soul-searching” crisis. While Salafi leaders had endorsed Abouel Fotouh, there is evidence they were unable to persuade their supporters to vote for him against Morsy, who adopted firmer stances on the question of applying Sharia.

The success of Morsy and Shafiq in securing about a quarter of the votes each could also be attributed to the polarization of the political field in such a way that crowded out centrist candidates. All candidates who adopted centrist, conciliatory positions failed to advance to

the runoff. This could mean that almost half of the voters were searching for a firm president with decisive, even if extreme, positions.

Rhetoric oriented toward compromise and moderation seems to have failed to secure the same level of support, hence the elimination of candidates such as Abouel Fotouh and, to a lesser extent, Nasserist hopeful Hamdeen Sabbahi.

Forty percent of the vote went to Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh, who came third and fourth, respectively, and were seen by many as prorevolution candidates. Some discussion participants interpreted this 40 percent as an emergent “third bloc” that is more embracing of revolutionary forces.

Many intellectuals had supported Abouel Fotouh based on the belief that the revolution would not succeed in the electoral arena without an Islamist candidate. In this respect, some of Abouel Fotouh’s supporters perceived him as the most viable pro-revolution candidate in that he had sufficient Islamist credentials to compete against the Brotherhood in winning over a presumably pro-Islamist electorate that voted overwhelmingly for Islamist candidates in the parliamentary elections.

The presidential election results, however, may have broken the myth that Egypt’s electorate is largely Islamist, suggesting that there is a great number of swing voters whose voting patterns are unpredictable. For example, many regions commonly known in the past as hubs for pro-Islamist voters, such as Alexandria, showed overwhelming support for Sabbahi.

The unexpected success of Sabbahi, who closely trailed Shafiq, came as a surprise to many analysts. The concentration of Sabbahi’s votes in important urban centers such as Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said is consistent with the claim that support for the revolution is primarily urban. Some analysts see in Sabbahi’s success an opportunity to frame him as a popular leader of the revolution, in an attempt to replace the rather elitist profile of Mohamed ElBaradei, the reform advocate who inspired revolutionaries but failed to garner popular support. At the same time, round-table participants disagreed on whether the voting bloc that went to Sabbahi does in fact reflect a cohesive, powerful “democratic street” that could compete with the electoral savvy of Islamist and old regime political forces.

While there was no agreement on whether the 40 percent who opted for revolutionary choices do in fact represent an emerging “third bloc,” there is certainly at least a “thirst” for it, as one participant put it.

The discussions surrounding the runoff and the choices facing revolutionary forces in this battle seemed less conclusive, reflecting the uncertainty permeating Egypt’s political arena.

Some participants believed that the runoff is a battle between the Brotherhood and the old political order, and that it is futile for revolutionary forces to support either camp.

One participant assessed the problem in the Islamist-Mubarak regime binary by saying that the Brotherhood is battling the regime using its very same logic, a legacy of the 1952 regime.

It is here where an alternative logic, a revolutionary one, emerges as a separate path. Many acknowledged that it is difficult to imagine that this revolutionary logic, primarily adopted by the multitudes who took to the streets on 25 January 2011, can rule the country.

Yet it is within this third bloc that hope lies to open up the political arena and help it transcend the classic military-Islamist duality inherited from the 1952 regime. In this context, the presidential election becomes one of many other battles that the revolutionary forces should face.■

16

7 June 2012

Environment

Seeds of discontent

Egypt imports genetically modified maize amid poor regulation

By Louise Sarant

Asuncion Molinos-Gordo

E

forth the property of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s seeds, since their initial marketing in 1995, have spread all over the world.

Although the US remains the largest producer of genetically modified foods, other countries have heavily invested in genetically engineered crops, such as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, China and South Africa, all of whom grow 99 percent of GM crops. Monsanto’s success is explained by its powerful marketing strategy, which advertises higher crop yields and reduced use of chemical fertilizers.

“Monsanto could not ignore Egypt,” says Tayyeb. “Apart from the fact that Egypt has an expanding population of 80 million, with South Africa it is one of the top two African countries in science and technology. You penetrate them and then use them as examples.”

In 2008, Egypt agreed to import 70 tons of Monsanto’s GM maize. Saad Nassar, an adviser to the agriculture minister and head of the seed certification committee, wrote a letter to customs to accept the shipment of the GM maize seeds to Egypt. This letter was also approved by Ayman Farid Abu Hadid, the head of the Agricultural Research Center.

“The 70 tons came with no restriction on planting, no previous risk assessment, no labeling and exempted of any monitoring or traceability,” says Tayyeb. An additional 40 tons were imported in January 2012. It was planted in Monufiya, Qalyubiya, Daqahlia, Sharqiya, Fayoum and Minya governorates, Tayyeb adds.

The seeds were imported by Fine Seeds International, a Cairo-based company that partnered with Monsanto to distribute the GM maize variety in Egypt. The company’s chairman and managing director is businessman Adel Yaseen, who described himself as the most enthusiastic supporter of GM food during a debate broadcasted on ONtv, a privately owned TV channel. During the debate, he declared: “If anyone should be blamed for importing GM seeds, it should be me, but I’m sure it’s safe and the country needs it.”

The other participant in the debate was Mohamed Fathy, a professor of genetic resources and plant pathologist at Monufiya University.

His stance against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is as strong as Yaseen’s absolute faith in them.

“There is a real danger of cross-pollination, especially with maize,” explains Fathy. “This is how maize reproduces: It pollinates. And carried by the wind, the pollen can be deposited in other non-GMO maize fields within a 50-kilometer radius,” he explains. If the non-modified maize plant is in contact with AJEEB-YG, Monsanto’s hybrid seed, the GMOs will take over and corrupt the entire field.

“GMOs don’t coexist, they colonize and spread,” he adds, explaining that local varieties of maize - or other crops - that had been perfected by farmers over centuries risk disappearing.

Fathy highlights another danger that faces farmers who opt to grow GM crops.

“AJEEB-YG is a hybrid of Monsanto’s MON810 maize seed and a variety of Egyptian maize. The problem with hybrids is that if you grow them for more than one harvest, the traits of the variety get diluted and the second harvest will be bad. It forces farmers to buy new seeds every year, exposing them to the risk of the company deciding not to sell any one year,” he says.

The seed companies work with traders who are in charge of visiting villages in all governorates to sell GM seeds, using the same channels as traditional non-genetically modified seeds.

Mahmoud al-Mansy, who works for the Sons of the Soil farmers’ union, explains that the farmers know the names of local companies and traders but nothing about international companies such as Monsanto.

“Their biggest fear is that, as seeds are now in the hands of a few powerful companies, they can decide all of a sudden that one season they won’t sell any [seeds],” Mansy explains.

He adds that although farmers in Egypt “consider their seeds as valuable as gold, they have resorted to GM seeds when the government advertised for the better-yielding GMOs.” Tayyeb is also worried that companies can control the market and use this power as a political tool.

He explains that despite the rather recent import of GMOs to Egypt in 2008, GM crops have been growing, unlabeled and unmonitored, for at least 12 years in the country.

Twelve years ago, a group of German and Egyptian scientists teamed up to survey some commodities on the Egyptian market that are often genetically modified, specifically maize,

Asuncion Molinos-Gordo

gypt is no stranger to biotechnology, a technique that uses living organisms or substances to modify or improve the quality and yield of crops and food.

Indeed, since its inception in 1990, the Cairo-based Agricultural Research Center has attempted to genetically modify crops. The goal is to produce plants that tolerate high-salinity soil and an arid environment, toward moving agriculture away from the over-exploited banks of the Nile, and to grow enough food for an ever-growing population.

But these crops, engineered in Egypt, have never been made available on the market.

The reason why these crops never left the enclosed land of the research center can be attributed to two main factors. Growing genetically modified (GM) food would cut fresh Egyptian products’ exports to European markets that were, until recently, extremely suspicious of all types of genetically engineered food products.

Also, the Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute, an Egyptian biotechnology research program created in partnership between the Agriculture Ministry and USAID, is almost entirely funded by the US. “This is why Egyptian genetically modified crops have never hit the market,” explains Osama al-Tayyeb, a professor emeritus of microbiology and immunology at 6th of October University and an adviser to the Egyptian Biosafety Clearing-House. The researchers, who were trained in American universities, could only work on genetically modifying crops that have no international market, such as squash, he says. Tayyeb also points out that the USbased multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto Company would never allow AGERI to develop crops that would steal their market share.

Monsanto genetically modifies standard seeds’ DNA to have desired agronomical traits.

The DNA sequence of the seed is broken down to include an herbicide-resistant gene and another that can withstand insect pests. The The GM maize latter is achieved by incorporating came with no Bacillus thuringi- restriction on enis (Bt) toxin, a soil-dwelling planting bacterium that is commonly used as a biological pesticide.

Monsanto’s flagship product is the broadspectrum “Roundup” herbicide, which kills all insects and all plants except the genetically modified ones, known as “Roundup Ready” crops. The genes that had been modified and injected into the plant are patented by Monsanto and protected by intellectual property rights.

Today, Monsanto owns about 11,000 patents on living organisms, including world-famous Egyptian cotton. Egyptian cotton varieties that have been developed over 2,000 years by Egyptian farmers were transferred to Monsanto laboratories about 10 years ago, Tayyeb says.

“Monsanto injected the Bt gene into these varieties, which became the property of Monsanto. This is scandalous, especially because there is a law in Egypt that grants free access to all of the country’s genetic resources except cotton,” he adds, explaining that Egypt sent some cotton seeds to Monsanto laboratories through an agreement signed personally by former Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali.

“We have a lot of Bt genes in Egypt. One of them was even discovered at AGERI and handed over to Monsanto, which is ridiculous,” Tayyeb says. “Egyptian cotton is a political asset and should have never been passed to a private company.”

Because the Egyptian cotton seed has been genetically modified by Monsanto, Egypt is no longer the owner of its seed, which is hence-

Farmers cultivating wheat in Minya

soybeans and canola. According to Tayyeb, they found that 15 percent of their sample contained GMOs, and since there was no legal requirement to label GMOs, the US exported GM seeds to Egypt without any notification on the seed bags.

Unlike Fathy, who is extremely worried by the impact on people’s health if they consume GMOs, Tayyeb considers regulation to be the most important step to be taken at this point.

“GMOs must be regulated because we don’t know how they will behave in the environment, we don’t know how they will deal with GMOs don’t the human body, coexist, they and the level of toxicity or the colonize and damage it can spread cause to humans is still unknown,” he says. “They should be regulated, labeled, monitored for traceability and so on.”

More tests should have been conducted before the US started marketing its GMO products there to determine whether they would be harmful for human consumption. But large agro-industrial companies refused because they had heavily invested in developing these products. They pushed for GM foods to be regulated within the existing American framework that deals with foods developed by traditional plant breeding.

The companies coined the concept of “substantial equivalence,” which means that GM plants are more or less equivalent to non-GM plants. This enabled biotech companies to put their product on the market quickly.

Tayyeb is fiercely opposed to substantial equivalence.

“I’m in favor of GMOs under two conditions,” he says. “There has to be full regulation and appreciation that they are not substantially equivalent to other plants. Once you introduce the idea of substantial equivalence, you take GMOs out of regulation.”

But it seems that things are finally moving toward regulation. The new environment minister, Mostafa Hussein Kamel, took interest in a draft for a biodiversity framework presented to him, according to Tayyeb. This legal framework meant to regulate Egypt’s biodiversity, titled “Support for Egypt’s Biosafety Framework,” was funded by the Global Environment Facility and supervised by the United Nations Development Programme. Adel Soliman, the project manager of St. Catherine Egypt’s Medicinal Plants Conservation Project was part of the drafting team.

“This is what the law pushes for: safety on dealing with the environment and socioeconomic issues,” Soliman explains. “It also pushes for the creation of GMO reference laboratories that will be responsible for detecting the type of genetic modification in any product.”

Both specialists hope the law will be passed

by Parliament and that the issue of GMOs will be taken seriously by the next elected government.■

7 June 2012

Science & Technology

17

A boost for research

High-speed internet network could enhance global scientific collaboration

By Louise Sarant

Courtesy of Gloriad.org

E

gypt’s research is currently experiencing a technological breakthrough with the recent introduction of a high-speed internet network that offers research institutes and universities access to a data transfer speed of up to 10 gigabits per second, to exchange data and promote collaboration between researchers all over the world.

The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development, linked research institutes and universities in the US and Russia when it was first created in 1998, before expanding to India, Europe and Egypt, the first African link.

Ola Wageih Laurence is the director of the Egyptian National Scientific and Technical Information Network who has spearheaded the introduction of GLORIAD in Egypt.

“The US National Science Foundation gave Egypt a grant to be linked to GLORIAD in 2010, and the Telecommunications Ministry was the body charged with implementing and financing GLORIAD in Egypt,” Laurence explains to Egypt Independent.

“But the upheaval of 2011 disrupted the project, and the ministry no longer wished to fund GLORIAD,” she explains. “So the ministry of scientific research took over and funded the project, which cost LE3 million the first year and to LE6 million for the second.”

The money, paid to Telecom Egypt, was used to finance the high-speed submarine fiber optic line that links Egypt to Amsterdam, while the Amsterdam-US portion of the underwater cable was paid by the National Science Foundation. The new link is designed to intelligently direct internet traffic between the ordinary internet and GLORIAD. GLORIAD was distributed to some research centers and institutes — the National Research Centre, the Agricultural Research

The global GLORIAD network Center and the National Authority for Remote Sensing — in 2010 as a trial version, and is now continuing its expansion to other institutes. A major training course on GLORIAD will be given to the various users in September according to Laurence.

GLORIAD, by boosting the speed of data transfer between universities and research institutes worldwide, is pushing for a new model of global cooperation, access and exposure. National Science Foundation director Adren L. Bement Jr. explained that, “GLORIAD provides advanced tools for active collaboration on common problems, spanning climate change, cyber security, early warning systems, global public health and renewable and alternative energy.”

Ayman Dessouky, a professor emeritus at the Egyptian Electronic Institute who has retired from the National Authority for

Scientific work cannot be done in isolation Remote Sensing, explains how much this tool can be beneficial to young researchers in Egypt: “The research conducted at [the authority] requires the use of environment modeling applications coming from the entire world, and relies heavily on data and files exchanged between [the authority] and the United States,” he says, adding that the Egyptian scientific research is not the most advanced and needs to rely on state-of-theart technology from the US.

Dessouky says that having such access to global research would immerse young researchers into a dynamic environment and spur collaboration with institutes in India, Europe or the US, while giving their work exposure.

“Scientific work cannot be done in isolation,” Dessouky insists. “In order to model an environmental application, you need data from the entire region and the world, and thus need active collaboration.”

By being the first country to have access to GLORIAD on the continent, Egypt has become an entry point for the rest of Africa, and a node from which the link will expand.

Laurence says GLORIAD will expand in the region via two rings: one ring will cover North Africa, including Libya, and the second will expand southeast to Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan.■

Fresh veggies at your doorstep, with a digital Offah “Offah” is the traditional Egyptian basket made out of palm leaves used to carry food gifts.

It is also the name of a website — offah.com — launched last year during Ramadan. It is a new consumer-goods website that delivers fresh vegetables, fruit and homemade frozen meals.

“For a year, we have been lying low to perfect the door-to-door service and make sure we deliver perfect-quality products,” says Giancarolo Rispoli, the founder of Offah.

The website’s main goal is to cater to busy women who juggle work and household responsibilities, prioritize healthy food and care about the quality of their consumer goods and the well-being of the environment.

“The idea came along when my partner, Omar Hegab, and I wanted to establish an e-commerce business that is service-oriented and targets women,” says Rispoli.

The website includes rare vegetables that are hard to find in regular Egyptian markets, such as black and red tomatoes, bok choy and white cabbage.

The website operates only in

Dominic Mauri

By Amany Aly Shawky

Our principle is simple and efficient: from Egypt to Egypt

English. Rispoli says the use of the English language was on purpose to constrain the demand and give the growing business the time to perfect its service and the quality of its products.

“Fifteen days from now, the site will operate in both English and Arabic to broaden the range of our customers and be more quantifiable,” Rispoli says.

“We deal only with reliable agribusinesses that monitor their use of pesticide, irrigation, water sources and drainage processes,” says Rispoli, who is half Italian.

Offah deals with large and medium agribusinesses that have niches in the market in a certain product.

“Our principle is simple and efficient: from Egypt to Egypt,” he says.

He says it’s the combination of innovation, technology and imagination that makes the company’s products unique and accessible.

But Offah steers away from calling its products organic.

“We do not use the appellation ‘organic’ due to the use of pesticides in Egyptian farms and the old irrigation systems, but we aim to have pesticide-free products,” Rispoli says.

Rispoli says Offah uses the prod-

ucts with the longest elapsed time between pesticide application and cropping, which guarantees the natural quality of the product and makes it pesticide-free.

Offah also seeks to carry its social responsibility toward the small farmers of Egypt.

“We are very aware of our social responsibility as a growing business and envision our project as a provider of superior quality products and an alleviator of poverty among small Egyptian farmers as long as they abide to our quality guidelines,” Rispoli says.

The aim of the e-business, he adds, is to provide a pesticide-free product that respects the environment.

The website is attractive, and the layout is clear and user-friendly.

Orders are delivered within 24 hours, either between 2 pm and 6 pm or 6 pm and 9 pm, according to the customer’s preference.

Aside from being a provider of certified, natural fruits and vegetables, Offah also offers a catering service that provide homemade Oriental foods such as kobeba, hawawshi, sambousak, quail and vine leaves.

The company also offers an array of recipes for international and Oriental cuisine.■

18

7 June 2012

Culture

Copy, right?

Defining property: Authors, publishers and the public

By M. Lynx Qualey

Andeel

C

It is a waste of resources to continue to deal with [copyright infringement] from a policing perspective

Andeel

opyright, as first envisioned, was a way to balance the rights of authors with the rights of their audiences.

The public has a right to read both creative and academic works, and authors have a right to control aspects of their work and, perhaps, to earn a living.

But as others populated the space between author and reader, this relationship grew more complex. Publishers and other middlemen often took over managing authors’ rights.

More books were well-produced, well-edited and attractive, but they were also priced out of the reach of many ordinary consumers. A parallel economy of illegal books sprang up, and powerful global coalitions were formed to stop them.

This has become a particularly thorny battle in Egypt, where public libraries are chronically understocked and in very short supply. In most cases, those who want to read a book must try to buy, borrow or copy it. Struggles have thus ensued between legal and “illegal” publishers.

Illegal copying is nothing new: It’s been a part of the Egyptian landscape ever since distinctions were made between legal and illegal book copying. But in the last year, with a combination of economic difficulties and the ease of digital copying, the issue has come more forcefully to Egyptian publishers’ doorsteps.

In recent months, the Egyptian Publishers Association has been working hard to promote its vision of copyright. During a two-day event that it called “Book Piracy and Author Copyright,” the association kicked off a highprofile attack on illegal book copying. Less than a week later, it announced that 18,900 illegal books had been seized.

The informal copying of books, as with other informal economic sectors, has grown rapidly in the last year. Photocopies of books can be found anywhere from universities to metro cars. For readers and authors, this has both ups and downs: For readers, it means flimsier products but better prices. For authors, it means smaller revenues but larger audiences.

For “legal” publishers, meanwhile, this has appeared to be a lose-lose situation. Their response has been to ask the government to clamp down on illegally copied books and on those who publish them.

However, Nagla Rizk, author of “Access to Knowledge in Egypt,” is urging publishers, authors and audiences to see things from a different angle.

“It is a waste of resources to continue to deal with [copyright infringement] from a policing perspective,” Rizk, who also heads the Access to Knowledge for Development Centre at the American University in Cairo, says.

The publishers’ association wants to convince the public that, for the good of writers and readers, illegal copying should not be tolerated. Association head Mohamed Rashad has called for greater penalties for copiers. Mohamed Salmawy, head of the Egyptian writers’

union, says the state needs to undertake raids on locations known to sell illegal books.

Rizk, on the other hand, says these efforts are a waste of both time and money.

“These resources would be better exercised in finding creative ways of remunerating the authors,” she says.

Rizk’s own book is “versioned.” The book, co-written with Lea Shaver, is available on Amazon for US$75 and in local bookstores

for LE120. But, she says, it’s “also available free, legally free online.”

After all, Rizk says, books are expensive, and most Egyptian students are not wealthy.

Also, new knowledge can only be created when there is access to existing works.

If Rizk were an Egyptian student, she says, and needed access to her research, “I can assure you that I would go and photocopy the whole book.”

This is not just an issue in Egypt. Around the world, authors, publishers and readers are working to define and redefine their rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights tries to address the needs of authors and readers. Article 27 states: “(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

This right is for all readers worldwide, regardless of their ability to pay. Article 27 also adds: “(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”

Lebanese writer and publisher Rania Zaghir, author of “Youmayyat Fikra Who should Masrooka” (Dipay for an ary of a Stolen addresses author’s work, Idea), the formulation when and how of authors’ moral rights. much?

“Moral rights,” Zaghir says, are such that “no one, including the publisher, has the right to change, alter [or] modify your work without your written approval.”

Rizk says no one really contests an author’s moral rights to his or her text. Authors should neither be plagiarized nor have their visions compromised. However, the landscape of material rights is more open to question. Who should pay for an author’s work, when and how much?

“Egypt is a special case, because quite a bit of Egypt’s culture relies on informality,” Rizk adds. Sharing and gift giving are very important in Egypt, she says. “If someone asks me to make a copy of my CD, which may by law be illegal, I will be happy to do it.”

Rizk advocates an approach to copyright law that takes into account the “needs and realities of the culture” rather than the topdown, one-size-fits-all approach of the internationally observed Berne Convention.

Zaghir, meanwhile, says she believes in a “middle ground” between traditional and new approaches to copyright.

“The real problem is that authors and illustrators, especially the novice ones ... do not know their [existing legal] rights,” Zaghir says. “Only after this awareness is created, authors and illustrators can move on to more creative ways of publishing.”

These new methods are needed soon.

Sharply restricting access to creative and intellectual works — whatever its benefits — has fed into an unhealthy cycle of less knowledge, fewer new works and fewer interested readers. New ways of sharing art and knowledge are needed in Egypt, now. ■

Critic’s pick: Haris Epaminonda’s ‘Tarahi II’

By Helen Stuhr-Rommereim At the end of October, Haris Epaminonda’s video “Tarahi II” screened during the Arab Shorts Festival at the Goethe Institute in Cairo. It was part of a program of supremely quiet, largely nonnarrative films compiled by artist Maha Maamoun and curator Sarah Rifky. Epaminonda’s work, running only three and a half minutes, was entrancing despite its brevity,

and seemed somehow to linger in the air after the program finished.

The film is composed of footage of a hotel room television, captured when Epaminonda visited Cairo. The screen moves from take to take, each shot closed tightly around the face of famous Egyptian actress Samira Ahmed. The woman is beautiful and sad, and abstractly intriguing. As a quiet piano score underlines the images, the actress’s disembodied expres-

sions appear like memories, simultaneously personal and collective.

Since watching “Tarahi II” months ago, the woman’s image and her mysterious sorrow haven’t left my mind. Epaminonda, a native of Cyprus who now lives in Berlin, creates haunting assemblages of mostly found footage, her carefully combined images and sounds constructing new emotional landscapes of memory and experience. ■

Egyptian actress Samira Ahmed

7 June 2012

Culture

19

Paper trail celebrations

Wedding invitations of the ‘50s showed printed prestige

By Ahmed Abdel Hafez

Virginie Nguyen

S

Since the ‘50s, wedding invitation designs have developed significantly as new printing techniques have been introduced in Egypt

upper and middle classes used these printed cards to evoke a particular image of themselves and their families,” says Ahmed, adding that “wedding cards were a luxury at the time, and the careful choice of wording on the invites further helped emphasize this desired image.”

This class mostly comprised senior civil servants, large-business men and landlords, researcher Mahmoud Gad writes in his book “The Middle Class in Upper Egypt.”

Safy Sayed Ali Salem fondly remembers her elder sister’s wedding.

“Mahassen was wearing a medium-length white dress. A band with a singer, a dancer and six musicians performed. They were paid LE20 per day,” she said, smiling. “Those were times when LE1 could buy enough meat to feed the family for a whole week.”

The groom, Ali, says he always remembers how his father insisted that his sons finish school.

“He used to give me

The elite of the upper and middle classes used these printed cards to evoke a particular image of themselves and their families LE1 as an allowance. That was the equivalent of a civil servant’s monthly salary, only it was spread out throughout the month — 25 piasters every week. Every weekend, I would get out of boarding school and spend it,” he recalls.

When Ali went to ask for Ma-

hassen’s hand in marriage, he highlighted that he had completed his schooling, and that his father, “the well-known cotton merchant in Assiut, helped me join the Faculty of Arts at the King Fouad I University,” which is now Cairo University.

Mahassen was also well-educated.

Although few families sent their girls to school back in the ‘50s, Sayed Effendi, unlike Mahmoud, insisted that all four daughters complete their schooling. He also insisted that he get Mahassen’s approval before giving Ali his word, although he had of course heard of the groom’s well-to-do family. That was the way the social elite did it.

Sayed Effendi asked his wife, Sayeda, how Mahassen felt about the marriage. The mother of the bride-to-be did not seem too happy, though. She approached Mahassen as she sat with her three sisters and suddenly burst out, “The groom is not good-looking.” To her surprise, the young

Virginie Nguyen

ayed Ali Salem Effendi, head of the Nile Cotton Ginning Company, set up a huge colorful pavilion in the garden of his villa for the wedding ceremony of his eldest daughter, Mahassen. For three whole days, the many guests would come in to congratulate him. The mood was festive, and the invitees were served the most delicious of foods and drinks as they watched the live band perform.

But that was not the average wedding for residents of the Tamyet region in Fayoum Governorate. The whole town was invited, particularly the well-to-do families. Many of the invites also came all the way from Eastern Dayrout in Assiut, the groom’s hometown. They had all received the beautiful invitations sent

by Sayed Effendi and Mahmoud Mohamed, the groom’s father.

On the inside, the cards read: “Mahmoud Mohamed, the trader in Eastern Dayrout, has the honor of inviting you to attend the wedding ceremony of his son, Mr. Ali, and Miss Mahassen, daughter of Mr. Sayed Ali Salem, head of the Nile Cotton Ginning Company. The ceremony will take place on Thursday 14 April 1955 at the residence of the father of the bride in Tamyet, Fayoum. Wishing you happy returns.”

“Printing wedding cards, back in the ‘50s, was a sign of social prestige as it was expensive, rather unaffordable for most social segments,” says Essam Ahmed, a printing professor from the Faculty of Applied Arts at Helwan University. The design options were few because typewriters had not yet been introduced in the country. Embossed printing was the only type of printing available. It gave the beautiful effect of a calligrapher’s work, Ahmed adds.

Examining the peach-colored wedding cards, Ahmed notes that the printed address was quite brief.

In 1955, the residents of Fayoum did not exceed a few thousand, and those who belonged to the uppermiddle class were even fewer, and well known across various social circles. Both Sayyed Effendi and Mahmoud Mohamed were among the main exporters of Egyptian cotton to Europe, well-known to everyone in their hometowns. They also represent their social class, which at the time aspired to blend European lifestyles with those of the royalty, while also maintaining the customs and traditions of rural Egypt.

“These two families, like most of the upper-middle class, aspired to bourgeois lifestyles. The elite of the

With these peach-colored cards, Ali and Mahassen’s families invited guests to their wedding ceremony

A dash of culture

■ The Egyptian National Archives will request the Justice Ministry to hand over documents related to Mubarak’s trial after appeals are completed and a final verdict is announced, said Abdel Wahid al-Nabawy, the institution’s director, on Monday.

The current law stipulates that the National Archives has the right to ask any government organization to submit documents that archivists see as important for documenting Egyptian history, Nabawy added. ■

Arab music records

■ About 50 paintings and a rare collection of photographs and music records from the early 20th century were found on Sunday at the Arab Music Institute.

The cache was hidden under the stage of the institute, Inas Abdel Dayem, the director of the Cairo Opera House, announced.

The collection included photographs of composer and singer Sheikh Salama Hegazy, munshid (religious singer) and composer Yousef al-Manyalawy,

Mahassen responded with a smile and hummed, “I like his bad looks, I like them,” the famous 1954 song by Egyptian singer Shadia. So the mother went to inform Sayed Effendi of his daughter’s approval. They had to start preparing for the wedding right away, and the first step was making the wedding invitations.

Everyone was excited, Safy remembers.

“Mahassen’s wedding dress was made of tulle and had lace lining. It took a whole week to be made,” she recounts.

Mahassen also carried a white fan that matched the dress. “It was en vogue at the time. The bouquets were not that common yet,” adds Safy. For the henna night — the Egyptian equivalent of a bachelorette party, when the women would gather the day before the wedding to sing, dance and have henna tattoos painted — she wore a pink dress.

“We helped Mahassen pack her bags and prepare for the wedding day, while the aunts and older family friends would weep along with the mother of the bride, as it was custom,” Safy says.

But the mother of the bride also had to carefully instruct her daughter on how to behave on the wedding day. Safy remembers their mother telling Mahassen: “You have to sit shyly during the ceremony. Only the dancer and the bride’s friends can dance. It’s inappropriate that the bride would dance.”

That is how my family remembers the wedding of my grandfather, Mr. Ali Kamel, to my grandmother, Mrs. Mahassen Ali, in April 1955. ■

and violinist Mahmoud Hassan Sakr.

Some of the photos also showed leading Western composers such as Mozart and Verdi, while others documented rare folk musical instruments and the building of the institute in the 1920s.

The highlight of the cache, according to Abdel Dayem, is a rare collection of gramophone records of leading Arab singers, including Om Kalthoum’s 1928 monologue “If I were to forgive, and forget cruelty.” ■

Endless Ways to Feel at Home

Hurghada SUNRISE Select Garden Beach Resort & Spa SUNRISE Select Mamlouk Palace Resort & Spa SUNRISE Select Royal Makadi Resort SUNRISE Holidays Resort SENTIDO Crystal Bay Resort &ĞƐƟǀĂů >Ğ :ĂƌĚŝŶ ZĞƐŽƌƚ &ĞƐƟǀĂů ZŝǀŝĞƌĂ ZĞƐŽƌƚ &ĞƐƟǀĂů ^ŚĞĚǁĂŶ 'ŽůĚĞŶ ĞĂĐŚ ZĞƐŽƌƚ Sharm El Sheikh SUNRISE Select Diamond Beach Resort SUNRISE Tirana Aqua Park Resort SUNRISE Grand Select Arabian Beach Resort SUNRISE Grand Select Montemare Resort Marsa Alam SENTIDO Oriental Dream Resort

Aswan SUNRISE Grand Select M/S African Dreams Luxor SUNRISE Select M/S Semiramis I & II SUNRISE Select M/S Semiramis III SUNRISE Select M/S Terramar SENTIDO M/S Mahrousa SENTIDO M/S Nile Saray

www.sunrisehotels-egypt.com ǁǁǁ͘ƐĞŶƟĚŽŚŽƚĞůƐ͘ĐŽŵ ǁǁǁ͘ĨĞƐƟǀĂůŚŽƚĞůƐͲĞŐLJƉƚ͘ĐŽŵ

7 June 2012

Life & Society

21

Cogs in the wheel

Marcus Benigno

A day in the life of a hammam attendant

Mohamed Khams sits in the reception of Hammam al-Arbaa before the night shift starts

Since Arbaa turned on its faucets 12 years ago, Khams has spent 360 days of every year in the damp confines of the baths with only the first five days of Ramadan off, when Arbaa is closed

Marcus Benigno

F

or Mohamed Khams, working as a masseur on the night shift at a Cairo hammam was not easy at first.

“Well, let me tell you something,” Khams says, starting a recent interview with Egypt Independent at the meslakh, or reception area, of the garishly decorated Hammam al-Arbaa in Bulaq Abul Ela, a neighborhood in downtown Cairo. “It’s the same for anyone who works at night. At the beginning it was difficult, but eventually I got used to it.”

Amid the kitsch, including but not limited to a collection of taxidermic farm animals, faux brick walls, plastic foliage, red lights and a life-sized Baba Noël, the stubby Khams donned a collared shirt over his usual get-up of an undershirt and boxer shorts. He spoke about his life and profession as Arbaa’s chief attendant and masseur.

Like others with a nocturnal occupation, Khams ends the day when most Cairenes begin it. Just after 6 am, he walks home, a few meters away from the hammam, and heads straight to bed. By 2 pm, Khams is up again and spends a few moments with his family before going back to work.

“After I have breakfast and see my children, I spend a while on the street. Sometimes I drink tea in a local cafe. Then I go to the hammam and wait for the ladies to finish their shift,” he says.

Arbaa is open daily to women from 9 am to 5 pm and to men from 6 pm to 6 am. Between shifts, the staff hoses down the chambers of the steam room, or hararah, and then replaces the pools with fresh water.

A typical visit to Arbaa is bookended by a shower. In between, for only LE30, customers soak themselves in the hot and cold pools and undergo a brisk, intense treatment by three different sets of hands.

“Our customers come to spend time with their friends, not just to

wash their bodies. It’s very healthy after a day of work. They’re tired, so they come here and rest,” Khams says. “I make the massage and the others make the scrubbing and loofah. Scrubbing takes out the dead skin and cleans it. And with the massage, I relax the body.”

Hammam culture in Bulaq dates back to the 16th century when Egypt was under Ottoman rule.

Khams’ cousin Mohamed al-Mesry, also known as Okal, purchased and renovated the frowzy 500year-old digs in 1999.

Set off on an industrial alley, Arbaa caters mostly to local laborers and residents in the area. But with only three functional hammams in Cairo today, according to our count, Arbaa is gaining traction beyond Bulaq.

“There are regulars who come every two days and some who come every week and others every month from all over Cairo. And a lot of tourists, too,” Khams says.

All over the hammam, tall posters of Okal’s face mark his territory, including a blown-up US$100 bill above his desk with his image imposed upon it and a picture of him with his children on pilgrimage to Mecca.

But inside the stuccoed chambers, the vain tributes to Okal double as dividers for a makeshift changing area, maintaining decency in an establishment where shorts are mandatory.

Every half hour, Khams puts on a

The gaudy meslakh of Hammam al-Arbaa

pair of white galoshes and sanitizes the central, octagonal slab with a blast of steaming water before each massage.

First, he focuses on the neck and shoulders, then the spinal cord down to the calves. He kneads into pressure points, culminating at the most painful point of the heel.

The rubdown lasts only for a few minutes before the customer gets a thorough scrubbing and soaping by two other younger attendants.

“The hardest thing is when there’s an older guy,” Khams ex-

Marcus Benigno

By Marcus Benigno

Galoshes worn by the hammam’s attendants

plains. “His movement is slow and heavy. And we’re worried about their bodies. So we work on them softly.”

At 43, Khams is the most senior and oldest worker at the hammam.

Since Arbaa turned on its faucets 12 years ago, Khams has spent 360 days of every year in the damp confines of the baths with only the first five days of Ramadan off, when Arbaa is closed. Even during the early days of the revolution last year, the hammam defied the curfews and remained open.

Hamasa, 21, who has been working at Arbaa since he was 13, chimed in.

“We don’t know how the world is outside. It’s like we’re in a prison or a military camp. But that’s the nature of our job,” he says.

With their world limited to the hammam and the few streets outside, the four-member male staff at Arbaa has grown into a band of brothers and is exceedingly hospitable to its customers. Between maintaining the facilities and servicing the clients, Khams and the attendants take intermittent breaks to relax, watch television,

eat, drink tea and entertain each other.

“When we are working, we get so tired. So sometimes during breaks, Hamasa scrubs me and then I scrub him. We comfort each other and help each other stay up through the night,” he says.

During the interview, a regular client at the hammam sat by and joined in asking Khams a few questions.

“What do you think you are, a journalist?” Khams teased the man and then, turning to us, continued, “Is this guy with you?”

But the light-hearted jokes at Arbaa are tinged with a palpable mix of resignation and synthetic happiness.

Quoting the Egyptian actor Adel Imam, Hamasa said, “Life is sweet for those who live it.”

“For those who appreciate it,” Khams rejoined.

For Khams, Hamasa and the other attendants, Arbaa is more than just a business — it’s home.

When a customer offered Khams a tip, he refused it outright.

“If the customer really enjoys the massage and our service and asks for another session, we don’t take extra money. If the place is not crowded or busy, we massage and scrub again. Why shouldn’t we?”

Khams says.

“We don’t have friends except each other and our customers,” Hamasa effusively adds. “We look at you once and we never forget you. Even if years pass and you travel all the countries in the world and come back, we will never forget you. I take a picture of you in my mind. We love you.”

Egypt is a massive living organism — a web of ticking clocks, each set to a slightly different millisecond. Doctors, valets, belly dancers and beggars ... Cairo keeps 18 million cogs in one of the world’s busiest wheels.

The “Cogs in the wheel” series takes a magnifying glass to one person, a representative of a job that keeps the city ticking. For more stories in the series, visit www.egyptindependent. com/taxonomy/term/261161. ■

22

7 June 2012

Travel

Go ride a kite

The latest water sports trend takes the coasts by storm

By Maha ElNabawi

Maha ElNabawi

W

A kiteboard on the beach dangers faced by the original handful of fringe athletes. But since 2002, safety regulations were implemented, namely sailing shackles that allow the rider to detach from the kite.

“Egypt holds many of the best kiteboarding platforms in the world,” says Mohamed Hossam Helmy, a local kiteboarding instructor and general manager of Red Sea Diving Safari Company in Marsa Alam.

Egypt can most certainly reach international competition levels in the future “Whether you are in Gouna, Sharm elSheikh, Marsa Alam, Ras Sudr or elsewhere, the consistent temperature, wind [speeds] between 10 and 24 knots and shallow water platforms make Egypt the perfect training ground for new and experienced kiteboarders,” he adds.

Helmy says Marsa Alam holds many ideal locations and centers for kiteboarding. For a more intimate one-on-one beginner training, Red Sea Diving Safari offers a course in its Wadi Lahami location.

In neighboring Hamata, Kite Village features one of the largest, unobstructed, shallow water platforms in the country. The brainchild of local entrepreneur Harbi Rashed, Kite Village hosts two massive platforms. Beginners are welcome to surf through the standing-range channel, which extends over 500 meters of open space. Advanced riders can go on excursions between the two islands on the lagoon.

“One of the best things about kiteboarding in the South Sinai region is the exotic nature that surrounds the platforms — the mangrove forest along the beaches in combination with the crystal water is remarkable,” says Helmy.

“Not only are you kiting, but you also experience a sort of seaside safari.”

“Kiteboarding is a way of life,” says Mohamed Hosny, the manager of KitePower kiteboarding center on Mangroovy Beach in Gouna. “You can see this by the number of repeat customers we receive in Gouna each week.”

Hosny says the facility sees between 50 and 90 kites in the water each week.

Since being founded in 2005, KitePower has become one of the premier kiteboarding destinations and is considered the leading kite center in Gouna. Due to the town’s self-contained infrastructure, KitePower is ideal for tourists interested in kiting at a luxury resort.

The sport has become more accessible to those in Cairo since several facilities opened two and a half hours away in Ras Sudr.

Known for its epic 95-kilometer stretch of sandy beaches, pristine water, and spiritual Sinai-like aura, Ras Sudr has become the leading weekend getaway for Cairo-based kiteboarders. It boasts several impeccable kiteboarding centers; chief among them are Kiteloop Egypt Experience, Soul Kitesurfing Center and Fly Kitesurf, also known as “The Island.”

Kiteloop is the brainchild of avid kite surf-

ers Karim al-Khashab, Ahmed Amer, Chady Marwan and Mostafa Shaker. The camp offers 10 spacious bungalows and a dining lounge where guests can enjoy Bedouin-style dining.

“In Ras Sudr, ‘The Island’ has the largest platform for kiteboarding. We often start the day here at Kiteloop and shift over to the other locations through out the day,” says Khashab.

“We are about to see an even greater increase in the number of kiteboarders now that the sport has been added to the 2016 Olympics,” says Ismail Farid, a local kiteboarder and cofounder of Egypt’s only online community portal for kiteboarders, Kiteology. “One of our main missions at Kiteology is to organize a regulatory body for the sport within Egypt.

Once the governmental groundwork is in place, Egypt can most certainly reach international competition levels in the future.”

Earlier this month, the International Sailing Federation — the world governing body for sailing recognized by the International Olympic Committee — announced it would replace windsurfing with men’s and women’s kiteboarding medal-winning divisions in the 2016 Olympics.

A recent report by the federation estimated there are 1.5 million kiteboarders worldwide, with 60,000 people starting kiteboarding each year.

“The sport’s increasing numbers speak for themselves — and as it continues to grow in popularity, we are certain that Egypt will become a leading destination for kiteboarding training,” says Farid. “This alone will inevitably make a positive impression on tourism, something we greatly need in our country.”■

Maha ElNabawi

hen visiting Egypt’s many beachside towns along the Red Sea coastline, it is difficult to look past the recent outbreak of colorful kites that adorn the blue skies.

Kiteboarding has taken Egypt and the international water sports community by storm, becoming one of the fastest growing new sports, both locally and abroad. After kiteboarding’s addition to the 2016 Olympics, kiters from around the globe are gearing up to represent their country in the coveted competition.

The sport combines elements of windsurfing, wakeboarding, surfing, paragliding, and gymnastics — imagine skimming along the water on a wakeboard at full speed, then getting ripped off the sea, and gliding through the air for five to six seconds. Managing the kite, the board and water requires a complete integration of speed, action and adrenaline, giving boarders a floating feeling of freedom.

Sherif Abu Zeid, an avid local kiteboarder and co-founder of Fly Kitesurfing in the Red Sea towns of Ras Sudr and Ain Sokhna, describes the trend.

“In the early years, you only saw a couple kites popping up at windsurfing centers in Hurghada and Gouna. Now, most of windsurfing centers have been converted into kitesurfing centers,” he says.

Kiteboarding is still in its infancy but has continued increase in popularity since its inception about 15 years ago. Then, kiteboarding was recognized as an extreme sport due to the

Kiteboarders hit the waves and the wind in Ras Sudr

7 June 2012

Listings

23

Music

Zeid Hamdan and Maryam Saleh An Arabic Trip-Hop project collaborates, with Lebanese indie pop/electro artist Zeid Hamdan and Egyptian indie star Maryam Saleh set to perform at Dar 1718.

7 June, 8 pm Darb 1718 Kasr al-Shamaa Street, Old Cairo 022-361-0511 0100-002-2590 0100-146-7544

Syrian virtuso performs in Cairo

Darb 1718 Kasr al-Shamaa Street, Old Cairo 022-361-0511, 0100-002-2590, 0100-146-7544 In “The Missing Pieces,” Bakry showcases a collection of photographs and an installation that uses shipping boxes and crates as literal representations of the transport of an idea. Bakry likens the boxes to the Egyptian political state, suggesting they hold inside them solidarity and the will to change.

The exhibition runs until 18 June.

Picasso Gallery is offering a group exhibition,“The Holy Family in Egypt,” parallel to the festival, including the works of artists Georges Bahgory, Susan Amer, Nathan Doss and Reda Abdel Rahman. “The Holy Family in Egypt” runs until 3 July.

Picasso Gallery 30 Hassan Assem St., Zamalek, Cairo 022-736-7544

Mashrabia Gallery 8 Champollion St., Downtown, Cairo 022-578-4494

Curated by Amira Hanafi, “Carry On” is a group exhibition that comes out of the Arab Collaboration Project. The 10-week residency program brought together six artists and writers from countries of the Arab uprisings to work collaboratively at Artellewa.

“Carry On” runs until 26 June.

Artellewa 10 Mohamed Ali al-Eseary St., Ard al-Lewa, Giza 0128-810-7770

The month long festival opens at the Saad Zaghloul Cultural Center on 10 June, with an exhibition of the works of 25 artists tracing the places visited by the holy family in Egypt. The opening night will also include a screening of the “Jesus in Egypt” film by the iconic Khairy Beshara.

10 June, 7:30 pm Saad Zaghloul Cultural Center 2 Saad Zaghloul St., Mounira, Cairo 022-795-6864

‘The Missing Pieces’

‘Carry On’

The Holy Family’s trip to Egypt

Zeid Hamdan

‘Bad Day for Fishing’

Film

For this exhibition, 11 Egyptian artists were invited to express their reactions to the state of politics in Egypt in the context of the ongoing presidential election. “Elections” runs until 12 June.

Visual Arts

Last chance to see ‘Elections’

7 June, 8:30 pm Al-Genaina Theater Azhar Park, Salah Salem Road, Darassa, Cairo 02-362-5057 DJ Animal Strabisme will perform for the second time in Egypt on 7 June in Alexandria.

After great success at the Disco Cairo last December, the French duo will perform a range of neo-punk, Egyptian Shaabi, Parisienne pop and Zoughlou dance music.

Reflect, evolve, create The 12th Formula Mundi Festival will be held in Cairo for the first time. The official selection will be followed by an award ceremony.

12 June Screenings: 2 pm to 7 pm Award Ceremony: 8 pm to 9:30 pm The German Academic Exchange Service 11 Al-Saleh Ayoub St., Zamalek, Cairo 0128-456-5234

7 June, 9 pm The French Cultural Center in Alexandria 30 Nabi Daniel St., Downtown, Alexandria 034-391-8952 034-392-0804, 034-392-5580 For the launch of “Salafis Also Go to Hell,” author Walid Toughan will hold a discussion with former Culture Minister Emad Abu Ghazi, along with journalist Saad Hagrass.

The manager of a former wrestling champion organizes illegal fights, and offers him a chance to regain a major title. This film was selected by Uruguay as Oscarnominated 2010 in the category of non-English language film.

11 June, 7 pm Cervantes Institute 20 Boulos Hanna St., Dokki, Giza 023-760-1746, 023-337-1962

French Touch hosts Animal Strabisme

‘Salafis Also Go to Hell’ at Alef

Books

Visual Arts

Elections exhibition at Darb 1718

Kinan Azmeh, one of Syria’s rising clarinet players, will perform along with City Band. Azmeh has developed a unique sound across different musical genres, garnering international recognition. The New York Times recently hailed him as a “virtuoso” and “intensely soulful.”

7 June, 7 pm Alef Bookstore 2 Taha Hussien St., Zamalek, Cairo 022-736-5180, 0100-022-7007

‘Translating Egypt’s revolution’ at AUC The AUC Center for Translation Studies is hosting a panel discussion about “Translating Egypt’s revolution, the language of Tahrir.” The book interprets Egypt’s revolution by analyzing language used during protests.

‘Holy of the Holies’

This photography book, which explores Sufi heritage with its different sources, Islamic and pharaonic, will be launched at the Sufi Bookstore.

9 June, 7 pm The American University in Cairo Campus, Oriental Hall 113 Qasr al-Aini St., Downtown, Cairo 022-794-2964 9 June, 7 pm Sufi Bookstore 12 Sayed al-Bakry St., Zamalek, Cairo 0100-569-6878

24

Issue no.4 7 June 2012

............................................................................................................................................................................................................

WORD ON THE STREET

Stebn

Printed by Al-Masry Media Corp

[Stebn] noun, singular Translation: spare; replacement Idioms: ’Agala stebn (spare tire) 1. An extra tire in place of the original in case of a rupture.

2. The second-best option (in any context) in case something happens to disqualify your first option, such as an act of God. Example: My tire is no longer usable ... good thing I didn’t leave my house without a stebn!

Shafsha’

[Shaf-shaa’] noun, singular Translation: Jug Idioms: Shafshaq al-Khallat ( Jar of a blender) Shafshaq ’asseer ( Juice jug) 1. Something to contain a liquid that would otherwise spill and make a mess.

2. A container that makes an otherwise uncontainable mass suddenly acceptable for consumption.

Example: Wael milked the cow dry. Quick, grab your shafsha’ and steal his milk!