Chatoyant Crumbs

Egypt: 18 days that shook the world

2011-02-25T16:57:00.015+02:00

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In the early afternoon of January 25th 2011, I found myself on the Nile corniche north of Qasr El-Nile bridge, alongside about a thousand pro-change protesters. My companions and I had already been watching extraordinary scenes unfold across the city all morning, particularly in the populous northern neighbourhoods of Bulaq and Shubra El-Masr, where small, mobile crowds of demonstrators swept through the streets with astonishing ease, chanting 'down, down Hosni Mubarak' and exposing a simple but explosive truth to nonplussed bystanders: behind the facade of a supposedly-impregnable security apparatus, there really was nothing to stop Egyptians standing up for their rights and making their voices heard.

Mubarak's security forces were taken by surprise that day; thinly-strung and overstretched, they were powerless to stop the dozens of parallel demonstrations erupting all over the capital and beyond. By early afternoon though, they had rallied, and were now stationed in their hundreds across the road in front of the derelict Nile Hilton - rows of amin markazi, helmeted and shielded to the bone. The protesters didn't charge, didn't fight, didn't flinch - they just kept on marching, heads up and eyes forward. And against the sheer weight of human fearlessness, the security forces melted away. At that moment my newspaper called me and asked for an update.

I remember looking around me at the gleeful abandon of demonstrators running from one part of the street to another - revelling in the giddy sensation of having reclaimed their public space from the state. I saw the uncertainty and terpidation etched onto the faces of senior police officers, and at the new columns of protesters streaming in from across the river. And I knew then with absolute certainty that for Mubarak, nothing was left. I didn't know how long it would take, or what horrific violence might unfold in the interim, but a fear barrier had been broken, and for a president whose power rested solely on a bed of fear - fear of the police, fear of the government, fear of extremism, fear of instability - this could only mean the end. 'A revolution has begun,' I told my editors.

18 days later, on February 11th, newly-appointed vice president Omar Suleiman appeared on state television for twenty seconds and announced that Mubarak was stepping down. This is a summary of my writing throughout that period, as our emotions fizzed about like home-made firecrackers and Egyptians took it upon themselves to not just knock something down, but build something new in its stead as well, something that would inspire and amaze well beyond the country's borders. This unfinished revolution has a long and turbulent road ahead, but that only makes the steps taken so far all the more incredible.

Many of the articles below were written with colleagues, including Peter Beaumont and Chris McGreal. Photos are taken from The Atlantic.

--- Before the 25th ---

Sunday 23rd January

Egypt's young wait for their lives to begin - and dream of revolution (The Observer)
In Cairo, as in places all over the country, all eyes are fixed on the drama that is unfolding in Tunisia. Jack Shenker travelled across Egypt and heard people increasingly asking: could it happen here?

Monday 24th January

Egypt braced for 'day of revolution protests (The Guardian)
Youth activists, Islamists, workers and football fans to hold rallies and marches against Mubarak government

--- 18 days ---

Tuesday 25th January

Mubarak regime in crisis as biggest anti-government demonstrations in a generation sweep across Egypt (The Guardian)

Guardian live blog - January 25th

Wednesday 26th January

Bloodied and bruised: An eyewitness account from inside Mubarak's security apparatus (The Guardian)
The Guardian's man in Cairo tells of his beating and arrest at the hands of the security forces

Egypt protesters prepare to return to the streets (The Guardian)

Guardian live blog - January 26th

Thursday 27th January

Egypt braces itself for biggest day of protests yet (The Guardian)
Pressure builds on the president, Hosni Mubarak, as banned Muslim Brotherhood backs protests

Mohamed ElBaradei lands in Cairo: 'There's no going back' (The Guardian)
Supporters insist Egypt's people will make change from below

Guardian live blog - January 27th

Friday 28th January

Egyptian protesters are not just facebook revolutionaries (The Guardian)
The internet has galvanised dissidents, but the key events that fuelled the uprising happened offline

Egyptian government on last legs, says ElBaradei (The Guardian)
Exclusive: Mohamed ElBaradei says he is sending a message 'to the Guardian and to the world'

Hosni Mubarak orders curfew as protests continue (The Guardian)
• Soldiers told to restore order as violent clashes continue • Mohamed ElBaradei placed under house arrest • Many police switching sides and joining protests

Egypt on the brink as the tanks roll in (The Guardian)
• At least 25 killed on day of violent protest • Mubarak stays but dismisses government • Demonstrators defy nationwide curfew

Guardian live blog - January 28th

Saturday 29th January

Egypt's day of fury: Cairo in flames as cities become battlegrounds (The Guardian)

Guardian live blog - January 29th

Sunday 30th January

Hosni Mubarak in frantic bid to cling on to power (The Observer)
President appoints intelligence chief to vice-president post as streets ring out to cry of 'Mubarak, your plane is ready'

'Mubarak must fall' - across Cairo, the protesters' message is the same (The Observer)
Sacrificing government ministers is not enough: for the people to be satisfied, the president must be deposed

From the young to the old, the voices of the Egyptian rebellion rise (The Observer)
'The youth are motivated to keep going, and the old political leaders have been left behind'

Change is coming, says Mohamed ElBaradei (The Guardian)
Thousands rally in Cairo to defy curfew as Hillary Clinton calls on Hosni Mubarak to allow 'orderly transition'

The mosque that became a hospital (The Guardian)

Egyptians form makeshift militias as police stay off the streets (The Guardian)

Friend or foe? Egypt's army keeps protesters guessing (The Guardian)

Guardian live blog - January 30th

Monday 31st January

Egypt set for mass protest as army rules out force (The Guardian)
Military issues statement via state-run agency on a dramatic seventh consecutive day of unrest

The Muslim Brotherhood: protesters play down Islamist party's role (The Guardian)
Opposition movement vows to 'respect the will of the people' if Mubarak's regime falls

Guardian live blog - January 31st

Tuesday 1st February

Protesters refuse to leave the streets until Mubarak steps down (The Guardian)
Emboldened by the army's support, people pour on to the streets to demand the president's departure

Hosni Mubarak vows to step aside - but not until next election (The Guardian)
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's announcement that he will serve out remaining term immediately rejected by angry crowds

Protesters react angrily to Mubarak's televised address (The Guardian)

Opposition parties reject talks with government in effort to shore up credibility (The Guardian)

The president vs the people (Monocle)

Guardian live blog - 1st February

Wednesday 2nd February

Protests show signs of division as Mubarak drives a wedge (The Guardian)

Bloodshed in Tahrir: Mubarak supporters stage brutal bid to crush Cairo uprising (The Guardian)
Egyptian president's regime orchestrates bloody battles in Tahrir Square against protesters seeking his removal from power

Egypt's revolution turns ugly as Mubarak fights back (The Guardian)
Extraordinary scenes in central Cairo and violent battles in cities across the country

Mubarak's thugs fight for Tahrir Square (The Guardian)
Claims that plainclothes police hidden in ranks as battles take place in the symbolic epicentre of the revolution

ElBaradei urges world leaders to abandon Mubarak (The Guardian)
Criminal acts by government-backed thugs and a regime killing its own people make negotiations impossible, says Nobel laureate

Guardian live blog - February 2nd

Thursday 3rd February

Cairo protesters face more gunfire (The Guardian)
Death toll rises as violent clashes continue in Egypt between anti-government and pro-Mubarak supporters

Egyptian army disperses Mubarak supporters from key bridge (The Guardian)

Tahrir Square battleground: 'These people tried to slaughter us last night' (The Guardian)
Anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo fight to hold square littered with bricks and burnt-out vehicles after night of bloodshed

Guardian live blog - February 3rd

Friday 4th February

US hatches Mubarak exit strategy as Egypt death toll mounts (The Guardian)
White House involved in discussions to remove Egyptian president, in spite of Mubarak claims that he is on staying on

'You come near Tahrir again and things won't be so good' (The Guardian - written by Peter Beaumont)
Guardian reporters have hair-raising encounters with the Egyptian security forces and an angry mob

Cairo's biggest protest yet demands Mubarak's immediate departure (The Guardian)
Egyptian president clings to power as hundreds of thousands stage 'day of departure' demonstration in Tahrir Square

Guardian live blog - February 4th

Saturday 5th February

Mubarak's departure will not be enough to quell uprising (The Guardian)

Egypt protests: government will meet key opposition figures (The Guardian)
Talks to begin with newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman as protests run into 12th day

Guardian live blog - February 5th

Sunday 6th February

The Tahrir Square medic (The Guardian)
Cardiologist Dina Omar shares her experience of treating injured protesters in makeshift medical camp as rocks and petrol bombs were thrown at them

Guardian live blog - February 6th

Monday 7th February

Business as usual for Egypt's rich - but their children are out protesting (The Guardian)
In New Cairo – a satellite city to the east of the capital – life, on the surface at least, seems to have barely changed

Guardian live blog - February 7th

Tuesday 8th February

The Muslim Brotherhood uncovered (The Guardian)
In an exclusive Guardian interview, Egypt's Islamist opposition group sets out its demands

Guardian live blog - February 8th

Wednesday 9th February

Egyptian talks near collapse as unions back protesters (The Guardian)
Government refuses transition plan as demonstrations are joined by strikes – and vice-president's coup ultimatum raises tensions

Guardian live blog - February 9th

Thursday 10th February

Egypt's economy suffers as strikes intensify (The Guardian)
Thousands of workers walked out from their jobs, piling pressure on a political leadership already rocked by protests

Egypt: Day of rumour and expectation ends in anger and confusion (The Guardian)
Vast crowds in Tahrir Square expected a victory party after the departure of Mubarak – but it was not to be

Guardian live blog - February 10th

Friday 11th February

Protesters surround state TV building (The Guardian)
Opposition protest blocks streets around pro-Mubarak symbol of power in bid to stop journalists inside 'spreading more deception'

Hosni Mubarak resigns - and Egypt celebrates a new dawn (The Guardian)
President Mubarak surrenders power to army and flies out of Cairo as 18 days of mass protest in Egypt end in revolution

Tahrir: In Cairo's liberation square, the victory party begins (The Guardian)
Jubilant Egyptians push aside fear of future and celebrate Hosni Mubarak's resignation

Guardian live blog - February 11th
Guardian live blog - Mubarak resigns

--- Aftermath ---

Sunday 13th February

Egypt: How the wheel of history turned (The Observer)
By overcoming their fears and defying the man whose regime had terrorised them for 30 years, Cairo's protesters not only drove out Hosni Mubarak, they have changed the Arab world

Monday 14th February

Young Arabs throwing off the shackles of tradition (The Guardian)
The frustrated generation at the heart of the protests tell how their progress is being stifled by unemployment, corruption and cronyism

Egyptian protester: Tunisia shows us something different was possible (The Guardian)
Frustrated Cairo graduate Shady Alaa El Din wanted to leave Egypt because of the lack of freedom and opportunity, but protests in Tahrir Square have made him feel capable of bringing change

Tuesday 15th February

Egypt's army hijacking revolution, activists fear (The Guardian)
Military ruling council begins to roll out reform plans while civilian groups struggle to form united front

Wednesday 16th February

Egyptian activists condemn brutal attack on CBS reporter in Tahrir Square (The Guardian)
Serious assault on Lara Logan of CBS took place in middle of crowd at height of celebrations after Hosni Mubarak resigned

Monday 21st February

Egypt's press undergoes its own revolution (Media Guardian)
Does the political upheaval in Egypt spell the end of state-controlled media?

The revolution, violence and KFC: In conversation with Abdel Latif Al Menawy
Transcript from interview with the head of Egyptian state news

Tuesday 22nd February

Arab League urged to condemn Gaddafi by angry protesters in Egypt (The Guardian)
Demonstrators outside Arab League headquarters in Cairo accuse members of being out of touch

Thursday 24th February

Mubarak's cronies face corruption charges in Cairo court (The Guardian)
Three stalwarts of the deposed Egyptian president are greeted by angry crowd at courthouse

Saudi king accused of misjudged bribery in attempt to stave off unrest (The Guardian)
King Abdullah needs to implement political reform, scholars claim, as students plan 'day of rage'

Sunday 27th February

Egypt general's unveil reform package (The Guardian)
Interim government's committee of experts proposes eight changes to constitution

Monday 28th February

Hosni Mubarak barred from leaving Egypt (The Guardian)
Attorney general announces travel ban and freeze on Hosni Mubarak's domestic assets in possible prelude to prosecution

Wednesday 2nd March

Egypt's revolution: The T-shirts, the tat, and the tremendous struggle that continues (Monocle)

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State media, the revolution and violence: In conversation with Abdel Latif Al-Menawy

2011-02-21T11:44:00.006+02:00

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Abdel Latif Al Menawy is Head of News at ERTU - Egypt's state broadcaster. The coverage of Egypt's revolution by the country's state media complex has been widely criticised for its initial dismissal of pro-change protests and suggestions that foreign agents were fomenting unrest in Tahrir and elsewhere; following Hosni Mubarak's resignation, Al Menawy was one of those targeted by staff at Maspero, the state broadcasting headquarters, and had to be protected by the army - an incident captured on video.

I interviewed Mr Al Menawy for a general story about the state media in post-Mubarak Egypt, which can be read here. Unfortunately there wasn't room in the article to include all of Mr Al Menawy's comments, which were made over a back-and-forth email exchange on the 17th-18th February 2011, so I have published the full unedited exchange here, copied and pasted from the emails.

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Jack Shenker: How do you think the state media, and in particular state television, performed in its initial coverage of the recent anti-government protests?

Abdel Latif Al-Menawy: The state media tried as much as possible not to be part of any demonstrations but to be neutral. We were very keen to only put the accurate news and at the same time show our audience the two different points of views. But to do so we had to investigate every piece of news we received from both parties’ which affected our fast pace of putting the news on air. We gave as much time to the youth of the revolution to explain and criticize and at many times answer back to the government officials who also presented their own points of view. We can only be held responsible for the
material we broadcast as news.

JS: Why did we see the tone of coverage changing in the final week before Hosni Mubarak's departure, becoming more critical of the regime and supportive of demonstrators?

AM: A changing point in our coverage happened Wednesday night the 2nd of February. During that day we received news that we thoroughly checked with our sources then of fireballs being thrown at demonstrators in Tahrir Square. The army even asked us to warn people of the fireballs as they must evacuate the square. At this point when we saw what happened we had to review our position and the accuracy of the news we are getting from our sources. This is where everyone thought we changed our tone.

JS: Does the state media still have credibility in the eyes of the Egyptian people following recent events?

AM: The famous media school of BBC says credibility comes before the scoop. So we had to check every news item before we use it on air. Egypt’s Television played this role very well. We were the main source of news to all the national and international news channels and we were quoted on Alarabyia,CNN,BBC. So we needed to be accurate and as fast as possible. We did not want to reach the point where we start denying our own news, which happened in other channels. These channels were trying to direct the Public opinion regardless of credibility. Credibility was our main aim here.

JS: What is the short-term future now for those holding senior positions in the state media complex, who are facing calls for their resignation by some members of staff?

AM: The great revolution in Tahrir Square which caused the stepping down of the president turned into small revolutions in every Egyptian institution. Any head, starting from the prime minister to the head of any small district is asked to step down too. It is not just the media. Officials who are supposed to resign are the ones who did not work according to the ethics of professionalism and did not play their role in keeping this country united. I believe that we at Egypt’s TV had worked very professionally, and were keen to keep the unity of this country at a time when all the institutions were collapsing.

JS: What is the long term future of the state media if liberalisation of the media market continues and more private competitors begin to emerge? What reforms need to take place to keep state media at the cutting edge?

AM: I always use the term public media when I speak about Egypt’s TV not the state or the government TV, because we are working for the public and not state or the government. The required changes now means that this television needs to keep playing its role in maintaining the unity of the country. And I believe public media will always be there as long as it serves the public. I believe the form and content will change but it will always be the eye of the public and its connection to the state.

JS: Mr Al Menawy - I am a British journalist based in Cairo, and hence part of a group identified by Egyptian state television news as being a 'foreign agent', with alleged links to Hamas, Israel, Iran and the USA. I was also accused of having received free meals from KFC (Kentucky) and of being part of a deliberate plot to stabilise Egypt. Both myself and my colleagues suffered exceptional violence in the streets which I believe was the direct result of these very statements that were put out on your channels. Will you please offer me a personal apology for the part you played in disseminating those lies, and an expression of regret for the violence that arose from them?

AM: Dear Sir - There is nothing personal when it comes to journalism. If you are speaking about the coverage of Egypt's TV during the days of the revolution it is all recorded. After reviewing the tapes I did not find your name, photo, video of you or association of your profession in our coverage. So obviously you were misinformed. You were not the only one who was subjected to violence during the demonstrations. One of our Arabic reporters was stabbed during a phone call on air and another was attacked. Also two of our English reporters were attacked in the demonstrations. We received calls asking for help from foreign reporters on Thursday the 3rd of February. They were being attacked by mob and rounded in Tahrir square and we informed the army right way we even sent some of our security people to help keep them safe they escaped and took cover at Ramses Hilton Hotel and our security and army kept them safe.

Concerning the foreign agents who took free meals from KFC that was not part of our news that came as an opinion in a phone call by viewer and as we believe in free speech we could not cut the caller on air. On the other hand, we gave other callers from Tahrir square the chance to disagree right after and on air also. I hate to tell you that most journalists who have worked in dangerous zones were subjected to violence and if that came as a surprise for you I think you should contact your administration.
Best of luck

JS: Dear Mr Al Menawy - I was not suggesting that I was ever identified personally - to my knowledge neither my name nor organisation was ever specifically referenced on state television, although on the night of the 25th January I was detained and beaten by state security officers and I believe there was some coverage of this in the Egyptian media (this is by no means the fault of state TV though - I mention it merely in passing).

What I am talking about is the general narrative adopted by the state media, including state television news, which in the first week of the revolution (before the baltagiyya attacks in early February) presented the view that foreigners were behind the pro-democracy protests, and that foreign journalists in particular were among the 'foreign agents' inciting unrest. Respectfully sir, I am not misinformed on this point. As you are well aware, the editorial stance of most of the state media, including the television news channels, was initially that foreigners were responsible for the street demonstrations, and were trying to disrupt Egypt - a view that was put forward by the Mubarak government and echoed uncritically in the state media.

The KFC claim may have come from a caller, but it was never investigated or discredited by your journalists and the general tone of state TV news coverage maintained the line that there was outside influence fomenting the anti-government uprising - there were even reports of Israelis being arrested by vigilante groups on the streets of Egypt, a claim that I do not believe has ever been verified as accurate. Nor did you initially give Tahrir square demonstrators the right to air their views in the early days following January 25th, nor did you offer the anti-Mubarak protests anything like the coverage afforded to the pro-Mubarak protests the following week - if you have recordings that indicate the contrary, I would be interested in seeing them.

Within the atmosphere of general uncertainty, uncritically following the government's 'foreign agents' line on the protests without investigating and verifying these claims was, as you must have been aware, certain to create a very dangerous climate for all foreigners in Egypt, journalists or not. I have lived in Egypt for three years and consider this my home - I did not 'fly in' here to cover a war zone. As a matter of fact I have reported from many violent locations, including Gaza during the last Israeli assault there, so I am hardly surprised at or unaccustomed to violence in my work. But this is irrelevant: once the police left the streets on January 28th, Cairo was not a warzone - that is until the government, supported by the state media, began to accuse the protesters of being backed by foreign powers. The result was that foreigners (and many more Egyptians) were attacked, some very seriously.

It is not unreasonable to expect the government of the country you live in not to fabricate misinformation about people from certain countries and people who do certain jobs, nor is it unreasonable to question why any responsible media professional would repeat those fabrications in the knowledge that violent retribution could be a consequence. If you don't wish to acknowledge or apologise for the role played in this by the news output on your channels then so be it, I merely wished to offer you the opportunity. I commend you for the help you offered foreign reporters on the 3rd February, although by that stage the damage had been done, and I stand in solidarity with all those journalists and Egyptians who were killed and wounded in the uprising - please don't ever question me on that.

Kind regards, Jack

At this point, Mr Al Menawy stopped responding.

Egypt: How the wheel of history turned

2011-02-13T12:10:00.001+02:00

By overcoming their fears and defying the man whose regime had terrorised them for 30 years, Cairo's protesters not only drove out Hosni Mubarak, they have changed the Arab world

-Taken from the Observer (with David Sharrock and Paul Harris)
-Cairo - February 2011

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, says Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as he urges his comrades to seize the moment to overthrow the ruler they see as a tyrant. It has taken decades for the storm surge to break over Egypt, but when it finally did the forces of change proved irresistible, sweeping away Hosni Mubarak in just 18 days of popular and peaceful street protests.

A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.

Known locally as Basboosa, Mohamed, aged 26, was a street fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, where unemployment is conservatively estimated at 30%. He earned around £87 a month, the money going to support his six siblings, including one sister in university. He was regularly stopped by police, who expected him to pay them bribes to allow him to sell his wares from a wheelbarrow. On the morning of 17 December last year he had spent the equivalent of £125 on merchandise when it was seized.

What made the loss harder to take was the humiliation. A 45-year-old female officer slapped him across the face, spat at him, scattered his fruit on the ground and confiscated his electronic scales. Two of her colleagues joined in, beating him. As a coup de grace, the woman insulted Mohamed's dead father, a labourer who died of a heart attack when his eldest son was just three years old.

Mohamed finally snapped. For decades millions of young men like him right across the North African coastal plain have watched television images beamed from the other side of the Mediterranean from a European continent of prosperity, freedom and opportunity. They have watched the cronies of their own regimes growing older and, in their decadence, more arrogant and corrupt. They have watched hope for a better future leaking away.

Seeking justice, Mohamed went to the local governor's office to complain about his treatment. He issued a warning when told that the governor was unavailable: "If you don't see me, I'll burn myself." At 11.30am, less than an hour after he had been robbed and humiliated by the state's forces, he doused himself in petrol in front of the governor's office and set himself alight.

"What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?" said his sister Samia when her brother finally died of horrific injuries on 4 January. "A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live."

The young man's desperate action was a rallying call long awaited in his country and its neighbours. Mohamed Bouazizi's death became the spark which lit the bonfire on which the corrupt regime of Tunisia's President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali would also perish. And, like a bushfire out of control, there was soon fears that the "contagion" would spread.

In an eerie coincidence with subsequent events in Egypt, it took 18 days for Mohamed to die, during which time Ben Ali was sufficiently shaken by the growing voices of anger and protest that he visited the dying young man in hospital.

At his funeral 5,000 mourners chanted: "Farewell, Mohamed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep." He was buried at Garaat Bennour cemetery, 10 miles from Sidi Bouzid.

By then there was no turning back for the old guard as riots in Sidi Bouzid spread to the capital, Tunis. It seemed miraculous to Tunisians how quickly the iron fist of Ben Ali, president for 24 years, was loosened. The internet played a vital role, subverting the state-controlled communications channels by allowing ordinary citizens to bypass them and organise democratically.

"Game Over!" taunted the placards and cheers of the jubilant crowds in a deliberate reference to the age of online computer gaming – a world beyond the reach of ageing tyrants, where the sans culottes of the Arab world come together in cyberspace.

For decades Tunisia had been characterised by the west as a "model" Arab nation, but the WikiLeaks saga, months earlier, revealed the ugly truth of what its key sponsor, the United States, really thought of this "mafia state", run as a virtual private enterprise by Ben Ali and his hated, avaricious wife Leila Trabelsi, who plundered 1.5 tonnes of gold from the central bank when they fled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

Ben Ali's removal from power suddenly seemed to be creating a potential domino-effect around the region. First he tried to quell the protests by addressing the nation on state television and promising reforms. But when this failed to stem the tide of opposition, and with confidence among the armed forces ebbing from him, he chose to run. An international arrest warrant has been issued by Tunisia and his assets in Swiss banks have been frozen.

While opposition figures, including a leading internet activist, have joined an interim government in preparation for elections within two months, the situation in Tunisia remains highly fluid and volatile, with most ordinary citizens unhappy that so many leading lights of the old regime remain in power.

The results of Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation swiftly prompted protests across the region. Inspired by Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution, large protests began in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, with lesser incidents in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco. Many were characterised by a playful, party atmosphere. In Amman, the Jordanian security forces handed out soft drinks to protesters, who laughed as they chanted "Mubarak you are next!"

The Jordanians could not have known they were right. But to fully comprehend the swirling fury of the Egyptian street one must look back nine months. It was near midnight on Sunday 6 June when two Egyptian police officers walked into the Space Net internet cafe on Boubaset Street, a short stroll from Alexandria's crumbling corniche, and demanded to speak to Khaled Said.

According to his mother and sister, Said, 28, was devoted to his pet cats and enjoyed pacing the seafront, flying kites on his own. His room was a jumble of wires and old car batteries, part of a homemade music system Said used to practise rapping; the thumping bass from behind his door could often be heard well into the early hours.

"He was ordinary, like any one of us," remembers his sister, Zahraa. "He never seemed interested in politics at all."

That night Khaled Said was beaten to death by the two officers who came looking for him. They smashed his head against a marble ledge in the lobby of the building next door before throwing his body into the back of a van, driving around, then dumping it by the roadside. It later emerged that Said had taped a secret video depicting what appeared to be corrupt local security chiefs dividing up the spoils of a drugs bust. His family also discovered self-penned anti-government songs stored on his computer.

Three months ago, in the run-up to Egypt's blatantly rigged parliamentary elections, Zahraa told the Observer that the suffering of her brother and others like him could end up shaking the country to its very foundations: "Change will not come from this regime's version of democracy, it will come in the shape of a tidal wave from below. Maybe the torture and murders carried out by our policemen will set that tidal wave in motion." Her words were prescient.

Khaled Said was not the first Egyptian killed at the hands of Mubarak's police force, nor would he be the last. In Said's Sidi Gabr neighbourhood alone, dozens of police torture cases have been logged by local activists over the past eight months, some of them fatal.

But the brazen manner of this particular murder – on a public street and not behind the blacked-out windows of the Sidi Gabr police headquarters – and the fact that the victim was middle-class, with relatives able to resist pressure from the security services to keep quiet, ensured that the name of Khaled Said quickly become synonymous with the staggering brutality and corruption of Mubarak's vast security apparatus, a brutality and corruption to which almost all Egyptians, to a lesser degree, were exposed on a daily basis.

"That was the turning point," claims Heba Morayef, the Human Rights Watch advocate in Egypt. "Prior to that, demonstrations in favour of political reform struck many ordinary Egyptians as somewhat abstract, even if they had vague sympathy with the sentiments being expressed.

"Police cruelty, however, was something that touched people personally and it inspired a whole new, cross-class section of society to adopt a more combative stance towards the state."

After much dithering and buck-passing by the authorities, the two officers responsible (though not their seniors) were put on trial and mass protests in major cities began. The demonstrations were never more than a few thousand strong, and often smaller – not insignificant in a country where a 30-year-old emergency law effectively criminalises any sort of public expression of dissent, but not enough to panic Mubarak's entrenched political elite.

Online, however, it was a different story. Kolina Khaled Said, a Facebook group meaning "We are all Khaled Said", quickly gathered hundreds of thousands, of supporters, who swapped information on other examples of inhumane police treatment and helped organise small-scale acts of civil disobedience.

Along with a loose network of more explicitly political online activist groups, the anonymous administrators behind Kolina Khaled Said – one of whom turned out to be Google's regional marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, who attended to the web page from his home 1,500 miles away in Dubai – tried to find creative ways to get round Egypt's suffocating legal prohibitions on collective action in an effort to make their voices heard on the ground.

Sometimes small groups of youths would "spontaneously" gather in city centres and sing the national anthem; on other occasions individuals wearing black would walk to the Nile at an appointed hour across the country and stand separately by the river in silence, an innocent routine that still managed to provoke a violent response from the security services.

A critical role in the process was played by another online entity, the 6th April youth movement. Taking its name from the date of a 2008 textile workers’ strike in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla Al-Kubra that left three people dead after central security forces opened fire on the crowds, 6th April formed a new bridge between a predominantly young, well-educated generation of urban political campaigners and a rapidly-proliferating wave of labour activism that was already bringing hundreds of thousands of working-class Egyptians into conflict with an unresponsive state over rising unemployment, spiralling prices and an insultingly meagre minimum wage.

“The coordination between those groups had always been lacking before, even though at the root of it all we had the same complaints,” recalls Ahmed Salah, a veteran activist and co-founder of 6th April. “The challenge became to expose the relevance of our separate struggles to each other. We knew that if we could that, everything would be different.”

Although many of them used the internet as an organisational tool themselves, the struggle of Egyptian workers – who sought to obtain their economic rights from a government that had pushed almost half the population below the poverty line through an aggressive series of neoliberal reforms – had often appeared divorced from that of the ‘facebook activists’ so adored by a buzzword-hungry international media. The latter’s genealogy lay in the Kifaya (‘Enough’) pro-democracy movement that peaked in 2005 around the time of Mubarak’s stage-managed re-election, and focused on constitutional reform and an end to the Emergency Law.

Workers’ demands, which included the ability to establish their own trade unions, free from the control of state-backed labour syndicates, seemed more parochial by comparison. Yet taken together the movements offered a substantial challenge to the legitimacy of the Mubarak government, which in its final decade had become characterised by the tight nexus of Egypt’s business and political elite, members of whom were becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

The link-up between 6th April activists and aggrieved workers was not always a smooth one; on the first anniversary of Mahalla’s uprising an online call for a general strike went virtually unheeded. But a spark of collaboration was born, and, for the first time since the early 2000s – when the second Palestinian intifada and America’s invasion of Iraq brought mass protests to Tahrir Square – a loosely coordinated grassroots assault on Egypt’s political overlords appeared to be taking shape.

This vague but energetic new wave of dissent was leaving behind the moribund landscape of formal opposition politics in Egypt, where paper-democrats had long been scrabbling for crumbs of power tossed down by a regime keen to keep up the facade of a pluralist democracy. Now a new alternative avenue of resistance was on the cards and it was led from below, by those who had never known anything other than Mubarak's autocratic rule. With a demographic time-bomb ticking below the surface – two-thirds of Egypt's population is below the age of 30, and each year 700,000 new graduates chase 200,000 jobs – conditions were ripe for a social explosion.

Into this combustible mix entered Kolina Khaled Said, the creators of which took great pains to cast their movement as not party-political, not backed by shadowy foreign forces, and dedicated primarily to encouraging Egyptians not to be afraid. The ingredients for massive social unrest may have been falling into place, but still in the way stood the firmest obstacle of all: fear.

Through a prodigious web of overlapping security agencies ranging from armed riot police to plain-clothes informants to the baltagiyya – casually-employed ex-prisoners and local thugs – Mubarak's ruling clique had effectively instilled a sense of hopelessness in an overwhelming proportion of the population, whose instincts lay in avoiding the state, not defying it.

There was never any doubt that frustration at the status quo was deep and potent in every geographical and social corner of Egypt. If ever a critical mass of street protests were to develop and individuals thought the state's gendarmerie was no longer impregnable, it was likely that a full-scale uprising would quickly balloon. Yet something was needed to break down that initial aversion to open disobedience. Tunisia provided it. Arab neighbours had faced down their own security forces and won; perhaps now Egyptians could do the same.

A change of tactics was essential though if the omnipresent state security agencies were to be outwitted; 25 January, the date of a national holiday devoted to celebrating the achievements of the police force, was selected as the "day of rage" to exploit growing public resentment against Mubarak's security forces which had been fuelled so successfully by Kolina Khaled Said.

An umbrella coalition of youth activists formed small cells and spent the preceding weeks meeting in secret, plotting a series of devolved, localised protests designed to put maximum strain on the state security resources.

In Cairo, 20 protest sites in densely populated, largely working-class neighbourhoods were selected and publicised. One extra location, in the warren of back streets of the Giza neighbourhood of Bulaq Al-Duqrur, was never broadcast – and took police completely by surprise.

"Usually we rally in one place and immediately get kettled in by hundreds or thousands of riot police," said Ahmed Salah, who was involved in planning for 25 January.

"This time we were determined to do something different – be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the 'amin markazi [central security forces], giving us the chance to walk down hundreds of different roads and show normal passers-by that taking to the streets was actually possible."

The plan worked better than they could ever have imagined. Throughout the capital and across the country, pockets of protest sprung up and overpowered the thinly stretched riot police, who had no choice but to let the marches continue. Later, when the different strands rallied in city centres – including Cairo's symbolic Tahrir Square –the police used guns and tear gas to disperse them.

But it was already too late. By destroying the smokescreen of police invincibility, even for only a few hours, the youths had pierced Mubarak's last line of defence – the fear his subjects felt at the thought of confronting him – and a fatal blow was struck to a 30-year dictatorial regime.

Nevertheless, Mubarak would prove to be a mightier force than Tunisia's Ben Ali. He knew he could rely upon the support of the Americans, who had long granted him premier status in the region not just as guarantor of peace with Israel but also the bulwark against Islamist militancy. And, as a fabled military hero, he was not just the creature of the all-powerful armed forces but for decades their own guarantee of stability and continuity.

It was only as the demonstrators refused to desert Tahrir Square or accept Mubarak's concessions for as long as they fell short of his departure, and as Washington dithered and flip-flopped, that the army began to have its doubts about continuing to back him.

As the protests continued, their largely peaceful, non-sectarian nature also assuaged the concerns of those Egyptians who feared chaos or extremism lay at the heart of the largest anti-government uprising their country had ever seen. It was the all-embracing solidarity and strength of those in Tahrir and other major plazas in the country, and the restraint they showed in the face of violent state-backed provocation, that really saw the demonstrations mushroom into an broad-based, inclusive mass social movement.

Repeatedly over the past two weeks the Obama administration, the State Department, CIA and the Pentagon had been unsettled and confused by the situation in Egypt. Caught unawares at the prospect of the protests actually succeeding, they reacted too slowly, then too quickly and, finally, were rescued by events on the ground.

But few should be surprised; American strategy was caught between a rock and a hard place. There was an urgent need to respond to the pro-democracy movement, but at the same time that movement was aimed at unseating one of America's most trusted Arab allies, a man who had been a friend to five presidents over three decades.

At the start the crisis only rippled slowly through Washington. On 26 January, a day after protests began in Egypt, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called Egypt a "strong ally". The impression of support for a president whose army soaks up more than one billion dollars of US aid a year was strengthened a day later when vice-president Joe Biden said Mubarak was not a dictator.

American policy appeared in total disarray. Obama's envoy in the crisis, old school diplomat Frank Wisner, travelled to the country. On 5 February he expressed public support for Mubarak staying on, yet such was the confusion in US policymaking now that, mere hours later, both the White House and the State Department disavowed his comments.

As the protests refused to die down after Mubarak said that he would resign in September, US policy hardened again. It coalesced around the figure of new vice-president Omar Suleiman. For American – and Israeli – interests, Suleiman seemed ideal. He was known as a strong man and someone who wanted to preserve the strategic status quo, yet also a figure who had made the right noises, in public at least, about making the transition to democracy.

He was seen as someone who could avoid the nightmare American scenario of a popular anti-Israeli government taking power in Egypt or, worst of all, an Islamist-influenced one.

On 8 February, Biden spoke to Suleiman by phone and stressed the need for an orderly, and swift, transition of power. That convinced many in Washington that it was only a matter of time.

Yet the impact of the Egyptian unrest was spiralling out into the rest of American diplomacy. Last Wednesday Obama spoke to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in a reportedly testy exchange in which the ageing Saudi royal argued for Mubarak to not be humiliated. When news of the conversation leaked it created a flurry of speculation that the revolt in Egypt was exposing the weakness of American power.

On Thursday CIA chief Leon Panetta told Congress that he imminently expected Mubarak to announce that he was likely to stand down. As Mubarak took to the TV screens that evening, Obama watched the speech on Air Force One as he made his way back from an event in Michigan.

Yet Mubarak fell short of the expectations of those in Tahrir Square and of the army generals when he announced he was transferring his remaining powers to Suleiman but remaining as president, if in name only to save his pride.

It was a move that stunned many and seemed to threaten a complete unravelling and a blood bath, with the demonstrators noisily hatching plans to march on the presidential palace in the morning, a move which would force the Army, thus far maintaining a politically detached posture, into choosing sides.

And so it did, the military's supreme council shepherding the defeated Mubarak onto a plane to take him to a luxurious internal exile at his Red Sea palace. It was an extraordinary finale to 18 days of rage; the army had staged a coup with the backing of the people.

Like a swan looking graceful on the surface while kicking its legs furiously underneath, Obama was able to take to the airwaves and welcome in the changes. "The wheel of history turned at a blinding pace," Obama said.

The day Khaled Said died, his mother vowed to wear only black in recognition of his death and the system that produced it. Yesterday, following Mubarak's departure, she dressed in white.

Inside Mubarak's security apparatus: Eyewitness account of arrests and beatings

2011-01-27T09:34:00.006+02:00

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On the early hours of January 26th I was detained and assaulted in Cairo by Egypt's state security services. Ecaping with minor cuts and bruises, I was one of the lucky ones. Human rights organisations have extensively documented the systematic torture and abuse of prisoners and political activists in Egypt for several years, and public anger at the deaths of Egyptians in police custody was one of the triggers for this week’s remarkable uprising – the energy of which continued to fizz amongst protesters in the police truck throughout our nightmarish journey.

I recorded the events inside the truck, and our beatings beforehand, not to highlight an exception but rather to cast light on a rule, the rule of brutal and unaccountable violence at the heart of Mubarak’s security apparatus.

Today hundreds of Egyptians remain in custody after being arrested during this week’s unrest; thousands more of their countrymen have remained behind bars for far longer, their locations unknown, their basic legal rights suspended by Egypt’s perpetual ‘Emergency Law’. An account of my experiences last night may offer a very limited and shallow taster of what these prisoners of one of the Middle East’s oldest dictatorships live through every day.

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-Listen to the audio recordings from inside the police truck here

-Other journalists remain in detention - follow #jan25 on Twitter for details and spread the word

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In the streets around Abdel Muni Riyad square, it was immediately clear that the atmosphere had changed. Earlier there had been an almost carnival-like vibe in nearby Tahrir square, which demonstrators succeeded in occupying for most of the day; now at 1am the air was thick with tear gas and thousands of people could be seen running out of Tahrir towards me. Several hundred regrouped and rallied in Al Galaa, a main road that leads up towards Cairo station; spotting an abandoned police truck, a few dozen protesters immediately set about attacking the vehicle, eventually tipping it over and setting it ablaze. Through the smoke, lines of riot police could be seen charging towards us from the south.

Along with nearby protesters I fled back down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction, and I assumed they were demonstrators also escaping the oncoming security troops. Two came towards me and suddenly threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was then hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines.

My captors were burly and wore leather jackets – up close I could see they were ‘amin dowla, plain-clothes officers from Egypt’s notorious state security service. All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps; around me I could make out other isolated protestors also being pulled along, receiving the same brutal treatment and choking from the tear gas. We were all being hustled towards a security office on the edge of the square, only two streets away from my apartment. As I approached the doorway of the building other plain clothes security officers milling around took flying kicks and punches at me, pushing me to the floor on several occasions only to drag me back up and hit me again. I spotted a high-ranking uniformed officer, and shouted at him that I was a British journalist. He responded by walking over and punching me twice. “Fuck you and fuck Britain,” he yelled in Arabic.

One by one the captured protesters and I were thrown through the doorway, where a gauntlet of officers with sticks and clubs was awaiting us. We queued up to run through the blows and into a dank, narrow corridor where we were pushed up against the wall. Our mobiles and wallets were removed. Officers stalked up and down barking at us to keep staring at the wall and not look back, whilst the sounds of more protesters being shoved inside could be heard behind us. Terrified of incurring more beatings, most of my fellow detainees – almost exclusively young men in their twenties and thirties, some still clutching dishevelled Egyptian flags from the protest – remained completely silent, though some muttered Quranic verses under their breath and others were shaking with sobs.

After what seemed like an age we were ordered to sit down, though there was barely any space in the little strip-lit hallway to do so. Eventually a senior officer began dragging people to their feet, sending them back out though the gauntlet one by one and into the night, where we were immediately jumped on by more police officers – this time with riot shields – and shepherded into a waiting green truck belonging to Egypt’s central security forces. The steps up to it were small and rickety, whilst the entranceway to the rear body of the truck – pressed into use as a portable metal prison – was barely wide enough to accommodate a single person at a time. A policeman smashed my head against the doorframe as I entered; inside dozens of protesters were already crammed in and crouching in the darkness. Some had heard the officers count us as we boarded; our number stood at 44, all packed into a space barely any bigger than the back of a Transit van. A heavy metal door swung shut and locked behind us.

Inside, conditions were horrendous. As the truck began to move, brief flashes of orange streetlight streamed through the thick metal grates on each side; with no windows, it was our only source of illumination. With each glimmer, bruised and bloodied faces were revealed; we were sandwiched in so tightly that the temperature quickly soared, and a number of people fainted. Snatched fragments of conversation began drifting through the truck, as the inmates exchanged anecdotes.

“The police attacked us to get us out of the square; they didn’t care who you were, they just attacked everybody,” explained the man next to me breathlessly, who turned out to be a lawyer named Ahmed Mamdouh. “They took everybody’s wallet and cell phones and they hit our heads and hurt some people. There are some people bleeding, and we don’t know where they’re taking us. I want to send a message to my wife; I’m not afraid but she will be so scared, this is my first protest and she told me not to come here today.”

Despite the demeaning violence meted out to all those in the truck, the protesters held together with remarkable strength and solidarity; those who collapsed were quickly helped to their feet, messages of support were whispered and then yelled from one end of our metallic jail to another, and when it emerged that a couple of people had managed to hide their mobiles from the police the phones were quickly passed around so that as many as possible could call their loved ones. “As I was being dragged in a police general said to me: ‘Do you think you can change the world? You can’t! Do you think you are a hero? You are not’,” confided Mamdouh. “What you see here – this brutality and torture – this is why we were protesting today,” added another voice close by in the gloom.

Denied anything but scattergun glimpses of the outside world through the grates, speculation was rife about where we were heading. The truck veered wildly round corners, sending us all flying to one side, and regularly came to an emergency stop, throwing everyone forwards. “They treat us like we’re not Egyptians, like we are their enemy, just because we are fighting for jobs,” said Mamdouh through gritted teeth. I asked him what it felt like to be considered an enemy by your own government. “I feel like they are my enemies too,” he replied.

At several points the truck roared to a stop and the single door would clank open, revealing armed policemen on the other side. They called out the name of one of the protesters, ‘Nour’ – the son of Ayman Nour, a prominent political dissident who challenged Hosni Mubarak for the presidency in 2005 and was promptly thrown in jail for his troubles. Nour became a cause celebre amongst international politicians and pressure groups; since his release from prison Egypt’s security forces have tried to avoid attacking him or his family directly, conscious of the negative publicity that would inevitably follow.

His son, a respected political activist in his own right, had been caught in the police sweep and was in the back of the truck with us – now the policemen were demanding he come forward, as they had orders for his release. “No, I’m staying,” said Nour simply, over and over again and to thunderous applause from the rest of the inmates. I made my way through the throng and asked him why he wasn’t taking up the chance to get out. “Because either I leave with everyone else or I stay with everyone else; it would be cowardice to do anything else,” he responded. “That’s just the way I was raised.”

After several meandering circles which seemed to take us out further and further into the desert fringes of the city, the truck finally shuddered to a halt. We had been trapped inside for so long that the heat was unbearable; more people had fainted, and one man was now collapsed completely on the floor, struggling for breath. By the light of the few mobile phones that had made it into the truck, protesters tore his shirt open and tried to steady his breathing; one demonstrator had medical experience and warned that the man was entering a diabetic coma. A huge cry went up inside the truck as protesters began thumping the sides and bellowing through the grates: “Help, a man is dying.” There was no response.

After some time a commotion could be heard outside; fighting appeared to be breaking out between police and others whom we couldn’t make out. At one point the whole truck began to rock alarmingly from side to side whilst figures, hidden from view through the grates, began banging the metal exterior, sending huge metallic clangs echoing round our ears as we clung on for dear life. We could make out that a struggle was taking place over the opening of the door; none of the protesters had any idea what lay on the other side, but all resolved to charge at it whenever the door yawned open. Eventually it did so, to reveal a police officer who began to grab inmates and haul them out, beating them as they went. A cry went up and we surged forward, sending the policeman flying; the diabetic man was then carried out carefully by protesters before the rest of us spilled gleefully onto the streets.

Later it emerged that we had won our freedom through the efforts of Nour’s parents, Ayman and his former wife Gamila Ismail, who had followed the truck at breakneck speed and fought with officers for our release. Shorn of money and phones and stranded several miles into the desert, the protesters began a long trudge back towards Cairo, hailing down cars on the way. Most said that they would be back on the streets again in the morning. “They beat the fear out of me,” said Mohamed Abo Awad, a 21 year old. The diabetic patient was swiftly loaded into a vehicle and taken to hospital; I’ve been unable to find out his condition since.

Mubarak regime in crisis as biggest anti-government demonstrations in a generation sweep across Egypt

2011-01-26T00:35:00.002+02:00

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-Taken from the Guardian

-Cairo - January 2011

- See all the Guardian's live updates on the protests here, including audio footage

Central Cairo was the scene of violent clashes tonight, as the biggest anti-government demonstrations in a generation swept across Egypt, bringing tens of thousands onto the streets.

Shouting ‘down with the regime’ and ‘Mubarak, your plane is waiting’, protesters demanded the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship and said they were fighting back against decades of poverty, oppression and police torture. The protests had been declared illegal by the authorities and were met with a fierce police response, as teargas and water cannons were fired into the crowd and rocks were hurled into the air by both demonstrators and security forces.

In the capital thousands of protesters from separate demonstrations converged on Tahrir Square, the central plaza. Demostrators waved Egyptian and Tunisian flags, hauled down a billboard for the ruling NDP party and chanted "depart Mubarak" at the 82-year-old leader, who will face elections later this year. One policeman died in the Cairo violence and two demonstrators were reported to have been killed in Suez, east of Cairo.

"This is the first day of the Egyptian revolution," said Karim Rizk, at one of the Cairo rallies. The protests against decades of poverty, oppression and police torture had been declared illegal by the authorities and were met with a fierce response. Teargas and water cannons were fired into the crowd and rocks were hurled into the air by both demonstrators and security forces.

"We have taken back our streets today from the regime and they won't recover from the blow," said Rizk.

Protests also broke out in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, where posters of Mubarak and his son Gamal were destroyed. Roads were also blocked in the Sinai peninsula, and large rallies were reported across the Nile delta and the Suez canal region.

The protests were called by a coalition of online activists, who promised 25 January would be a "day of revolt". Apparently taken by surprise at the size of the crowds, police initially stood back and allowed demonstrators to occupy public squares and march through the streets, unprecedented in a country where political gatherings are outlawed and demonstrations normally shut down quickly.

But as the marches grew, the government moved to isolate them. Access to internet, phone and social media networks was shut down, spreading confusion among protesters and temporarily sealing the largest Arab country off from the rest of the world. Access was later restored, although services remained intermittent.

"This is what freedom feels like. What a great day for Egypt," said Ahmed Ashraf, a 26-year-old bank analyst attending his first ever protest. "It was impossible to rally like this before, but today I knew I had to come out. This is our Tunisia." Demonstrators excitedly urged passersby to join them; many obliged. "Egypt is waking up," shouted one coffee shop owner who spontaneously merged with a throng of protesters in Shubra, northern Cairo.

Breakaway groups attempting to reach the parliament building fought running battles with armed police, whose cordons were broken several times. Police fired teargas canisters into the crowd and released sound-bombs to try to disperse protesters. Many demonstrators were seen with blood pouring down their faces. The clashes came on a public holiday dedicated to saluting the achievements of the police force.

Today's events were a litmus test for the strength of a new generation of anti-government activists, who have rejected the moribund landscape of formal politics and begun organising online.

After parliamentary elections in November which handed the ruling NDP a 93% majority and were widely thought to be rigged, this "day of revolt" was seen as the best chance yet for youthful dissidents to prove they could command widespread support on the streets.

As reports came in of large rallies breaking out around the country, several different demonstrations in Cairo headed towards Tahrir Square, where a carnival atmosphere quickly took hold despite violent skirmishes with police breaking out on the fringes. Tahrir Square was last occupied during protests against the Iraq war in 2003, but witnesses declared today's rally to be even bigger.

As night drew in the security forces intensified their teargas bombardment and begun charging protesters on Qasr el-Aini, one of the main roads leading to the square.

Protesters surged forwards again and again in the face of attacks, at one point causing hundreds of police to flee leaving riot shields, helmets and barricades in their wake, which were soon commandeered by demonstrators.

Government forces quickly regrouped and took back the street, forcing protesters back into the main square – now littered with rocks that had been thrown back into the crowds by policemen and pools of water fired in by police water cannons.

As sound-bombs rang out by the Nile, demonstrators chanted "terrorists" at the oncoming police, though also called on them to join their ranks.

"What is happening today is a major warning to the system," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political analyst. He said the uprising would continue to gather momentum unless the government swiftly addressed demands for reform.

*12.25 AM UPDATE*

As midnight approaches in Cairo thousands of protesters are still occupying Tahrir Square, vowing to remain in place until the government falls. News has reached Egyptians here of deaths in Suez and the capital, as well as unconfirmed reports that Gamal Mubarak – the president’s wildly unpopular son and presumed heir apparent – has fled to London, and they appear more determined than ever to hold their ground.

“We will stay here all night, all week if necessary,” said Youssef Hisham, a 25 year old filmmaker. “There are too many people on the streets for the police to charge – if they did, it would be a massacre. I came here today not as the representative of any political party, but simply in the name of Egypt. We have liberated the heart of the country, and Mubarak now knows that his people want him gone.”

As fresh waves of protesters broke through police cordons to join the throng in Tahrir, a festival atmosphere took hold – groups were cheered as they arrived carrying blankets and food, and demonstrators pooled money together to buy water and other supplies. “The atmosphere is simply amazing – everyone is so friendly, there’s no anger, no harassment, just solidarity and remarkable energy,” added Hisham.

Drums were banged and fires started as night moved in; having established their lines, hundreds of security forces stayed put and kept their distance, although alarmingly police snipers were seen to be taking up position on nearby buildings. “They are waiting for numbers to dwindle, and then they will switch off the street lights and charge,” warned Ahmed Salah, a veteran activist.

“We must hold Tahrir through the night and tomorrow, so that every corner of Egypt can take us as an inspiration and rise up in revolt,” claimed Salah. “It’s a matter of life and death now – what happens over the next 24 hours will be vital to the history of this country. It’s a very emotional moment for me.”

Pamphlets widely distributed amongst protesters declared that ‘the spark of intifada’ had been launched in Egypt. “We have started an uprising with the will of the people, the people who have suffered for thirty years under oppression, injustice and poverty,” read the Arabic-language texts. “Egyptians have proven today that they are capable of taking freedom by force and destroying despotism.”

They went on to call for the immediate removal of President Mubarak and his government, and urged Egyptians nationwide to begin a wave of strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations across the country until these demands were met. “Long live the struggle of the Egyptian people,” the pamphlets ended.

Cut off from telephones, the internet and social media – all of which have been shut down by the authorities in an attempt to isolate protesters – several of those rallying appealed to the foreign press to make their voices heard. “We want you to broadcast what is happening here to the world,” cried Haisam El Tawed, a 26 year old software engineer. “This is my first protest, but it won’t be the last. The social suffering of our people cannot go on, and the Tunisians have shown us that change is possible. The parliamentary elections were a fake, our only option is to stay here until the regime falls.”

His colleague, Mohamed Mamdouh, went on to criticize the government’s attempts to restrict communications on the ground. “It’s futile; in the 21st century, you can’t stop people sharing and organising information,” he said. “It just shows to the world how desperate and afraid Mubarak is – closing down telephones and the internet is a last resort, the act one carries out when he is preparing to flee.”

News continued to filter through of other occupations throughout the country, where offices of the ruling NDP party were said to have been stormed. A huge cheer swept through the crowds as the first editions of Al Masry Al Youm, an independent Egyptian newspaper, passed into the square – its front page carried a single photo of protesters massing in front of Mubarak’s security forces, with the headline: ‘Ultimatum’.

A remarkable day in Egyptian history, one that could have vast ramifications within the Arab World and beyond. Observers are now asking themselves how long the international community will continue to back Mubarak – a key western ally, despite his penchant for torture and human rights abuses, and the recipient of more US financial aid than any country in the world except Israel. However things play out tomorrow, it’s clear a crucial fear barrier has been broken today in Egypt; if that emboldens the millions of Egyptians who have long harbored latent hostility to the government and yet who have thus far been too afraid to confront it openly, then regime change could be closer than we think.

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The death of 28-year-old Khaled Said in the port city of Alexandria in June last year has proved a potent rallying point for the opposition in Egypt and human rights activists elsewhere. Graphic pictures of his injuries after a fatal beating allegedly by police quickly appeared online. Witnesses claimed Said, who had earlier posted a video of local officers apparently dividing the spoils from a drugs bust, was assaulted at an internet cafe near his home.

He was kicked, punched and had his head smashed against a marble staircase in the lobby of a building next door. His body was dragged into a police car and later dumped by the roadside. Security officials at first claimed Said died of asphyxiation after he swallowed a packet of narcotics hidden under his tongue. The United States and EU called for a transparent investigation. A trial of the two police officers charged with brutality is expected to resume next month.

Egypt braced for 'day of revolution' protests

2011-01-24T18:51:00.004+02:00

Youth activists, Islamists, workers and football fans to hold rallies and marches against Mubarak government

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - January 2011

-Cartoon by Carlos Latuff, featuring Khaled Said and Hosni Mubarak

Egypt's authoritarian government is bracing itself for one of the biggest opposition demonstrations in recent years tomorrow, as thousands of protesters prepare to take to the streets demanding political reform.

An unlikely alliance of youth activists, political Islamists, industrial workers and hardcore football fans have pledged to join a nationwide "day of revolution" on a national holiday to celebrate the achievements of the police force.

With public sentiment against state security forces at an unprecedented level following a series of high-profile police brutality cases and the torture of anti-government activists, protest organisers are hoping that a large number of Egyptians will be emboldened to attend rallies, marches and flash mobs across the country in a sustained effort to force concessions from an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.

In a move that suggests the uprising in Tunisia may be spreading to other parts of the Arab world, Tunisian activists announced they would be holding their own protests in solidarity with their Egyptian counterparts, while many Egyptians plan to wave Tunisian flags. Parallel protests are also scheduled to take place outside the Egyptian embassies in London and Washington.

Demonstrators are calling for the sacking of the country's interior minister, the cancelling of Egypt's perpetual emergency law, which suspends basic civil liberties, and a new term limit on the presidency that would bring to an end the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, one of the Middle East's most entrenched dictators.

State security officials have branded the protests illegal, and said that those taking part will be dealt with "strictly".

"I'm answering a call that began online, a call to stand up against police brutality on the day the regime wants us to celebrate their so-called achievements," said Salma Said, a 25-year-old activist and blogger who plans to protest in Cairo.

"Of course demonstrating against police brutality means demonstrating against Mubarak himself and his whole regime, because they are the ones who created this system. Momentum is gathering really, really fast; friends I haven't spoken to in years have been ringing me up, promising to come down."

Tomorrow's events, dubbed a "day of revolution against torture, corruption, poverty and unemployment" by protest leaders, were initiated by two dissident movements, both based online. One is dedicated to the memory of Khaled Said, an Alexandrian man beaten to death by police last year, while the other, "6 April", is a youth group named after the date of an uprising two years ago in the Nile delta town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, in which three people were killed by police.

After initially dismissing the protests, the Muslim Brotherhood - Egypt's largest organised opposition force - has now said it will back the demonstrations symbolically, although it has not called on its supporters to take to the streets. Strikes are expected by workers in several parts of the country, including Mahalla, and a number of Egypt's traditional opposition parties and prominent public figures have pledged support.

Mohamed Adel, a spokesman for 6 April, said the broad range of participants distinguished tomorrow's action from previous protests. "It will be the start of something big," he told the Egyptian news outlet Al-Masry Al-Youm.

In a sign of how seriously the Mubarak regime is taking any challenge to its authority following the downfall of Tunisia's president Ben Ali, counter-protests are being organised under the banner of "Mubarak: Egypt's security". Organisers say they want to express their rejection of the "destruction of state institutions" by the opposition, raising fears of violent clashes on the ground.

"Regardless of how many people turn up, these protests will be highly significant," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political analyst at the semi-official Al-Ahram Research Centre. "Those confronting the regime on Tuesday will be the sons and daughters of virtual activism - a new generation that has finally found something around which they can unite and rally.They are the product of a government that has never offered them any ideological vision to believe in, and now they have themselves become a symbol of contemporary Egypt."

Egypt's young wait for their lives to begin - and dream of revolution

2011-01-23T11:03:00.007+02:00

In Cairo, as in places up and down the country, all eyes are fixed on the drama that is unfolding in Tunisia. Jack Shenker travelled across Egypt and heard people increasingly asking: could it happen here, and if so, when?

-Taken from the Observer
-Cairo-Mahalla-Alexandria - January 2011

News of Egypt’s latest act of self-immolation reached Waleed Shamad whilst he was sitting in the bourse, a dense warren of outdoor shisha cafes tucked away in the back alleys surrounding Cairo’s old stock exchange. An unemployed man had just set himself alight in the middle of a busy street – the twelfth such incident this week. According to a television newsreader, the 35 year old moved to the capital some time ago in the hope of finding work and saving enough money to buy a home and get married, but lack of job opportunities had driven him to despair. “That could be a description of any of us,” said Shamad, pulling his scarf tighter against the cold. “These human blazes are coming so fast, it’s hard to keep track.”

Cairo is a city built for sunny days and balmy nights; come winter-time the wind can lash downtown with a ferocious bite, chilling passers-by to the bone. But that hasn’t stopped Waleed and his friends gathering for their customary late-evening tea out on the pavement to talk through the day’s gossip: the Friday sermons devoted to Islam’s disapproval of suicide, new government restrictions on the purchase of bottled petrol, and of course all the latest from Tunis – where developments have kept the whole group glued to Al Jazeera for days.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” grinned Shamad, recalling the sight of Tunisia’s ousted despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fleeing a land he had ruled for 23 years. “I’m so proud of the Tunisian people. When you see a friend or brother succeeding in some great struggle, it gives you hope, hope for yourself and hope for your country.”

In common with two-thirds of Egypt’s population, Shamad has lived his entire life under the presidency of Hosni Mubarak, a key western ally whose three-decade grip over over one of the most pivotal states in the Arab world has looked marginally more shaky following the events at Sidi Bouzid. At 27, Shamad – university-educated, getting by on scraps of informal work here and there, and still living at home with his parents – is part of a demographic bulge that accounts for nine in ten of the country’s unemployed, and whose simmering frustration, according to some analysts, could tip Egypt towards its own intifada – and unknown consequences for the rest of the Middle East. “Not having a regular job affects every aspect of your life practically and psychologically; almost everybody I know of my age is still unmarried and dependent on their families – it makes you feel hopeless,” he explained.

Last year’s UN Human Development Report for Egypt declared that many of the nation’s young people are trapped in ‘waithood’, defined as a prolonged period “during which they simply wait for their lives to begin.” “It’s not as if we want to sit here passively and accept the situation,” Shamad added. “The problems come from the government, but the instinct of our generation is to avoid the state, not confront it. I know that there are big demonstrations planned for next Tuesday, but we’re taught from birth to be fearful of the police. They know how to hurt you, and hurt the ones you love.”

Tuesday’s ‘big demonstrations’ will take the form of a nationwide set of anti-Mubarak protests, dubbed ‘revolution day’ by opposition activists who hope that Tunisia’s uprising will embolden the vast number of individuals like Shamad – young people whose latent hostility to the Mubarak regime has never yet translated into action on the street – and persuade them that the time is right to come and make their voices heard. “In every neighbourhood in the country there is a pressure point which the government is afraid of and which will be brought to the surface on Tuesday,” insisted Ahmed El-Gheity, a 23 year old doctor and one of the regional organisers of ‘revolution day’. On the event’s facebook page, tens of thousands of supporters have posted comments suggesting that Ben Ali’s departure could be the precursor for Mubarak’s downfall. “If Tunisia can do it, why can’t we?” read one. “We will either start living or start dying on January 25th.”

Weary of the formal political arena, where even superficial opposition parties now find themselves blocked off from legitimate avenues of dissent (last November’s blatantly-rigged parliamentary ballot delivered a 93% majority to supporters of the ruling NDP), urban young Egyptians are instead carving out their own spaces in which alternative voices can be heard. If all 70,000 of those who have made an online promise to attend actually show up on Tuesday, it will represent an organisational triumph for the youthful activists and provide a dramatic boon to Egypt’s fragmented anti-government forces, who rarely muster more than a few hundred when demonstrating in the open. But such an outcome appears unlikely.

“At the informal level – blogs, chat shows, social media – there’s been an explosion of political activity, entirely disconnected from the official mechanisms of government,” observes Amr Hamzawy, research director at the Carnegie Middle East Centre. And yet this dynamism has largely failed to spill out onto the street, where Mubarak’s ubiquitous security apparatus still maintains near-total control, facilitated by a perpetual emergency law that suspends basic civil rights and provides officers with effective immunity when combating any form of resistance. The only sector of society that has consistently succeeded in physically occupying areas controlled by the state is Egypt’s beleaguered workforce, who have confronted the regime over a range of economic grievances, from privatisation to the ludicrously inadequate minimum wage (unchanged at £4 GBP a month since 1984) – and succeeded in extracting concessions.

“This is where the regime is most fearful; they don’t want the young, online activists with their political demands linking up and inspiring the labour force who are campaigning for a better standard of living,” claims Gamila Ismail, a dissident politician who unsuccessfully challenged the NDP in the recent elections. “If youth in Cairo and Alexandria are connecting with Mahalla then the government knows it is in trouble.”

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Sixty miles north of the capital, the textiles town of El Mahalla El Kobra has been the militant spearhead of an unprecedented wave of strikes and sit-ins sweeping Egypt over the past five years; in April 2008 a walk-out by factory workers in the town led to three people being shot dead by police. The road out to Mahalla passes through Cairo’s urban hinterlands which bleed messily into the Nile Delta and surrounding desert – here the high walls of sealed, fast-proliferating gated communities for the rich look down upon the redbrick clusters of ashwa’iyat, informal slum areas that are now home to 60% of the city’s population and offer a clear window onto the defining hallmark of Mubarak’s reign – a colossal appropriation of land and capital by the political and business elite, whose members have become increasingly indistinguishable.

Young residents of the private compounds live in a parallel universe from their counterparts in the ashwa’iyat, but both share a fundamental detachment from campaigns for political change of the sort planned for January 25th. “Of course we are all excited about Tunisia; the people there threw off their shackles and I pray we could do the same – rising prices are hurting all of us and something had to change” said Mahmoud Abdel Halim, a 29 year old construction worker from the far reaches of Imbaba, one of the biggest informal neighbourhoods in the capital. “But I don’t see how we could repeat Tunisia here. I haven’t heard about any protests and even if I had, it’s not like I can afford to stop work and go and get arrested.”

Omar Kandil, former student union president at the American University in Cairo, one of Egypt’s most prestigious and exclusive educational institutions, said many of his colleagues were equally unplugged from grassroots political activity, though for different reasons. “Most students here are happy with the current system. They’re not particularly aware of what’s going on politically, they just know that in their own circumstances they don’t need any kind of change to the status quo.” But, he argued, a recent strike by domestic staff at the university had punctured the bubble of privilege. “There’s a lot more engagement now,” he added. “The strike commanded huge support from the student body.”

Off Mahalla’s main square, through a narrow doorway partially obscured by mobile phone adverts and up five dimly-lit sets of stairs, a group of young people from across the Delta spent Friday morning carefully preparing a series of Tunisian flags, pinning each to a short wooden pole. Others sketched out placards expressing Egypt’s solidarity with Tunisia and condemning government corruption, police torture and poverty. They boasted a broad range of political backgrounds, though some had no affiliations at all. When around fifty of them took to the streets in the late afternoon, handing out pamphlets advertising the upcoming protests on January 25th, they were met with a bemused but generally positive response from passers-by, a handful of which joined in with the campaigning. A group of local political elders, all veterans of the more established opposition parties, watched proceedings from a nearby window. They had advised the younger activists not to hold a demonstration today but, following a chaotic internal vote, the latter had gone ahead with it anyway.

“I’ve never been on anything like this before, although my brother’s friend was attacked by police back in April 2008,” said one 26 year old motorbike driver as he stopped to see what all the commotion was about. “Circumstances have got pretty bad now, and I think changing the big sharks at the top is probably the only way we can make things better. I’ll try and make it.” The demonstration ended with a recital of the Tunisian national anthem, which concludes with the words 'When the people will to live / Destiny must surely respond / Oppression shall then vanish / Fetters are certain to break.'

Back in their 5th floor offices afterwards, the activists whooped and high-fived each other, their faces flushed with excitement. “Yes it was very small, but it showed that other young people are receptive to our energy,” beamed Yasmeen Hamdy El Fakharany. “I think January 25th will be a great success.” Ahmed El Gheity insisted that links with Mahalla’s working class had been established, the exact thing which Gamila Ismail believes the government is most fearful of. “They too will be walking out on Tuesday,” he said. “It’s going to be a very important day.”

Not everyone agrees. Another seventy miles northwest, in a wood-panelled Alexandrian coffee shop facing out to the Mediterranean, Hossam El-Wakeel shook his head angrily at the suggestion that his own organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, was betraying the anti-Mubarak movement by refusing to participate in Tuesday’s ‘revolution day’. “Will those coming out on Tuesday bring down the regime? I think not,” said the 23 year old journalist. “The Muslim Brotherhood believes that change must come from below, that we must rebuild society layer by layer as part of a gradual process, not chase revolution and impose new leaders from the top.” Earnest, cardigan-clad and sporting a trim black beard, el-Wakeel explained why he has thrown his lot in with the only opposition movement that actually has the capacity to bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets – and yet persistently refuses to do so.

“As an Egyptian, you have no voice – at least not under this government. But the Brotherhood gifted me an awareness about the world that gave me the strength to stand up and articulate how I felt; their view of what’s wrong with society and how we can change it is a holistic one, and that was very important to me.” El-Wakeel is engaged to a fellow Muslim Brotherhood member, selected from a shortlist drawn up for him by one of the organisation’s senior ‘sisters’. “We have so much in common, you might call it love,” he smiled. “I wanted to find someone who was on the same ideological path as me, someone who could bear the pain of me being jailed for my political activities. Neither of us have any money but she’s a struggler, like me. We will get through. Our problems are nothing compared to many Egyptians who lack even the most basic supplies, and the Muslim Brotherhood is helping all these people directly, in every neighbourhood, every day. We’re busy doing that instead of throwing all our energies into spectacular protests which aren’t likely to amount to much.”

El-Wakeel’s vision of political change in Egypt is far removed from that of the Tunisian-flag waving activists in Mahalla. Yet both share a commitment to direct confrontation with the Mubarak regime, something which Cairo’s Shamad – along with many others like him – still considers too risky, despite his deep anger at the government. The young inhabitants of the ashwa’iyat buttressing Cairo’s ring road and their gated neighbours also feel severed from any process of political reform or regime change, although, like Shamad, if a spark was to set off a mass mobilisation in the streets there can be little doubt that many of them would quickly join in – especially if the regime’s worst nightmares come true and youth activists begin acting in tandem with the industrial working class. It seems doubtful that protests on the 25th January will provide that spark, although anything could transpire on the day. But when the spark does come, there can be no question as to who will be leading the way.

“The real story of Egypt’s future is not in what’s happening at the top; rather it lies in the dynamics amongst Egypt’s youth,” says Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak. “Most international (and many local) observers see that social segment afflicted by poor education, enjoying limited exposure to world-class technology, thinking and processes, and being mired in a coarse, uncouth, culture. These ills are true. Yet there are many positive trends amongst young Egyptians. The young are acutely aware of the need for serious and quick progress. They reject the sad present they inherited from the previous generation. That drive for development is a potent positive force, and Egypt’s future depends on which of these dynamics – negative or positive – shape their actions.”

Sidi Bouzid, an Egyptian intifida, and why Mubarak's plane may be waiting

2011-01-23T09:06:00.004+02:00

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-Taken from Monocle
-Cairo - January 2011

If Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak thought that his country was insulated from last week’s remarkable events in nearby Tunisia, a quick glance at twitter would have set him straight. Ousted dictator Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali had barely left the airstrip when news of his departure began clattering around Egypt’s vibrant online community, and it didn’t take long for dozens of unflattering messages to go viral. “Tell Mubarak a plane is waiting for him too,” read one. “I send my sincerest condolences to President Mubarak for the ousting of his brother, his identical copy, his relative, his apprentice who exceeded his master. May God show us similar outcomes for our despot,” said another.

But could the so-called ‘jasmine revolution’ really spread east towards the Nile?

Egypt certainly boasts many of the same conditions that helped tip Tunisia into an intifada, including rising prices, widespread unemployment and decades of oppressive, single-party rule. This week no less than nine Egyptians attempted to set themselves on fire – apparently in an effort to replicate Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian whose self-immolation provided the spark for his own regime’s downfall. Amidst rising public anger and growing panic at the top, the Egyptian authorities quickly flagged up a series of crowd-pleasing ‘poverty-reduction’ measures and were forced to deny that the country’s Supreme Defence Council – summoned only in national emergencies – had just been convened.

“[The self-immolations] are an attempt to imitate things that won’t happen in Egypt,” claimed the Finance Minister, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, as international investors took fright and Cairo’s stock market dived. “Egyptians are different from Tunisians.”

Any parallel uprising in Egypt would have an electrifying effect on the Middle East; at 80 million, Egypt’s population is eight times larger than Tunisia, forming the biggest nation in the Arab World. And as a key western ally – despite his penchant for torture and human rights abuses – any threat to Mubarak would be viewed with trepidation in London and Washington, particularly because there is a widespread belief that Egypt’s political Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, are waiting eagerly in the wings.

Concern about what might replace the current regime is one of the reasons why some analysts believe events in Tunisia are unlikely to be replicated here. “I think that while the grievances in Egypt may be similar to Tunisia, the framework is quite different,” says Issandr El Amrani, a prominent blogger on Egyptian politics. “First you have a higher degree of fear of the chaos that might ensue from an uprising, especially amongst the elite. Secondly it's hard to see the army intervening against Mubarak. Thirdly you have a much worse societal anomie than in Tunisia, but yet at the same time there are greater opportunities to vent frustrations.”

But with nationwide anti-government demonstrations scheduled for this coming Tuesday, no one should be placing bets on the status quo. “One could see a ‘perfect storm’ of domestic and regional events that would lead to a real street uprising in Egypt,” adds El Amrani. “You never expect the Spanish Inquisition, after all…”

ElBaradei: The critics are wrong

2011-01-21T11:44:00.003+02:00

Egyptian dissident insists he hasn't lost momentum
Mubarak's 'authoritarian dictatorship' has created a 'failed state'
Smear campaigns are taking their toll on family
Wikileaks has 'undermined credibility' of the US

-Taken from Monocle
-Cairo - January 2011

The following interview took place at Mohamed ElBaradei's Cairo home in mid-December 2010, just over a week after Egypt's parliamentary elections but before the Alexandrian church bombing and the intifada in Tunisia (which he later gave his views on here). An edited version of the interview appeared in Q&A form in this month's edition of Monocle.

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Jack Shenker: What has your reaction been to the recent parliamentary elections?

Mohamed ElBaradei: As you know I called on everybody not to get involved with this charade. Even if the election had been ‘transparent’, the whole structure would have inevitably led to a parliament that was not representative of the people, a parliament that maintained the distortion of the constitution, maintained the laws that regulate quotas for women and farmers and labourers and so on, quotas that do not represent any of these people. Plus the fact that the president appoints some part of the legislature, the fact that the parliament does not get access to full budget, and so on. The whole thing just has nothing to do with democracy, and you don’t go like a bunch of sheep into a slaughterhouse and then complain that you got slaughtered. The writing was on the wall, and it said ‘don’t come nearby’.

But anyway, I hope they, the opposition, have learned lessons – either you continue along the path which Einstein defined as insanity, i.e. doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, or you learn from your mistakes. This is really the basic question now we have to ask ourselves as Egyptians, and it requires heavy lifting. I understand that people are desperate and anxious for change to happen overnight, but it won’t– unless people mobilise and understand how to go about it. Because we are dealing with a police state and it doesn’t require rocket science to work out that you cannot really work within the system, within the so-called political institutions. They are not institutions; they are a bunch of laws that are basically designed to perpetuate an authoritarian system in power.

JS: Opposition parties emerged with almost no representation in the legislature; did the results leave you feeling vindicated in your previous call for a boycott?

MEB: What good does it do to feel vindicated? I’ve been vindicated so many times before on so many more important issues, but that’s not what matters. The issue for me is to see whether the Egyptian people can think rationally and strategically on issues, not emotionally. And so far it has really been a burst of emotions: fifty people going to a demonstration here, a declaration coming there, and these are all well and good but they are not going to change the system. And as I said you look at the system, you look at the experience of other countries around the world, and you see that to change a system similar to that which existed in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union you have to work completely outside the system, and through unconventional means, and you have to rely on the power of the people.

We need united opposition in numbers, and I still believe that is the only way to do it. If you get five or ten million people signing this petition, which nobody should be afraid to sign, all it does is strip legitimacy from the regime and say to the people of Egypt and the world that Egyptians want change and want to start a process of democracy.

JS: But isn’t that clear already? These parliamentary elections stripped the regime of any last shred of democratic credibility, yet the ‘world’ has done nothing about the situation.

MEB: Everybody knows that the regime has no legitimacy, but at the moment the opposition cannot go to Mubarak and speak. Whereas if I go to Mubarak and say ‘we have 20 million signatures behind us’ that completely changes the equation; he will not be able to argue against the fact that change has to come, and he will either have to cede power or start implementing the demands of the opposition.

So the petition is not just symbolically valuable, it has a very real impact – it gives you a platform, it gives you a mandate in the face of a regime that doesn’t want to see or hear any opposition. It gives you something concrete, and in my view if you get 20 million signatures – and these are not signatures for me, these are signatures supporting demands that everybody knows are common sense – then that matters. And if you have a united opposition, which we should have today – everybody from the Marxists to the Muslim Brotherhood to the liberal social democrats – saying yes we have our differences but we agree on one thing, and that’s a system where the people make the final call. And if people are willing to go into the street to demonstrate in large numbers, on social issues, political issues – well, these are the tools we need to work with.

JS: You said in your recent video message that the Mubarak regime must realise that if it continues repressing peaceful protests then there will be violence on the streets.

MEB: Well, my fear is that we will reach a tipping point, and quite frankly I see that coming. People say the Egyptians are patient but you go around the streets of Cairo – you don’t even have to the countryside when you have 81 slums in the capital and half the city’s population is living within them in subhuman conditions – and you’ll see the tipping point coming. I fear that at some point we will see a revolt, not over human rights issues specifically but a revolt of the poor, a melange of everything. I was thinking yesterday about how many Egyptians already sacrifice their lives to try and reach Europe; if they don’t drown and die the first time they will try again. They have reached the point where their life is not worth living; if they have even just a 5% chance of making it to Europe they will take that 95% risk of dying in the process.

If Egyptians are already doing that then why does anyone not believe that it may come to a point where those same people are saying ‘my life is not worth living unless there is change, but we are not able to effect change through peaceful channels’? Then everything could explode. And nobody wants that because then everything will go.

JS: What do these parliamentary elections say about the state of Egypt’s political institutions, and the regime’s intentions over the coming year?

MEB: Egypt is a one-party state and an authoritarian dictatorship. If you have overall opposition with 14 seats in parliament … tell me any state in the world that even pretends to be democratic and is in a similar position. If you have the Muslim Brotherhood going from 88 seats to zero, if you have three Copts out of a population of ten million in parliament, if you have only three women in parliament and have to invent a quota system to produce more, if you have former army generals who are in the parliament under the rubric of being labourers, then you have a parliament that is totally unrepresentative of the Egyptian people, a parliament that has come about through a completely rigged process where violence has been used.

The outcome we have is the best example possible that we are going from bad to worse. At least in 2005 there was some effort in taking shy steps towards democracy; this time the corruption is in your face. And I don’t understand – if you want to rig the elections then you have to be intelligent, yet there is not even a sense of intelligence because there’s not a single person in the world today who could look at this system and think it a democracy, or even a system marching on the way to democracy. Everybody can see it’s a regression.

JS: Given that, do you think the regime is trying to send a message about its tolerance of opposition in the run-up to presidential transition?

MEB: I don’t really know whether they have the ability to articulate a message; they appear to be fighting all over the place, between young and old and who knows where else. But if there is a message then it’s definitely the wrong message; they are telling people ‘you will continue to be enslaved, you will continue to be poor, there will be no change in policy, there will be a continuation of what you had in the past thirty years’. I see Egypt as a member of the party of sixty or so global failed states, and I see Egypt rock bottom on measures of transparency, corruption, human development – we have 40% living on less than two dollars a day.

JS: So has Egypt become a failed state?

MEB: According to the ‘Foreign Policy/Fund for Peace’ tables it has become a failed state. People use different criteria but if you’re looking at the ability of the state to provide a minimum and decent life for every human being then of course it’s a failed state. If you look at the ability of people to feel free and express their basic rights of religion, expression and so on, then of course it’s a failed state. If you look at Egypt’s ability to influence the region through soft power then of course it’s going backwards. A state is not just borders and government, at the end of the day a state is supposed to serve its people, it’s ultimately a territory where people live and where ultimately the sovereignty lies with the people, who live together under the benefits of a social contract. And if you look at the people in Egypt, you will get 95-99% of the people saying ‘the state has failed us’.

JS: Do you have any insight into the succession battle going on within the [ruling] NDP – especially reported struggles between Gamal and forces within the military that oppose his presidency?

MEB: I don’t concern myself with that, and I keep saying it doesn’t matter who it is that comes into power, what matters is how he or she comes to power. That’s why I boycotted the parliamentary elections and that’s why I’m calling for a boycott of the presidential elections, because you cannot be half-pregnant – either you are a democracy or you’re an authoritarian system, and to try and put up a façade of democracy… well that façade is now long gone, indeed has been gone for some time. The NDP itself is a continuation of the failed state; if they had any sense they would say ‘we have tried, we have failed, and we would like to give a chance to other Egyptians’. For the love of this country, I’d love them to do that. They keep talking about 5-6% [economic growth] but it didn’t trickle down – the rich got richer, the poor expanded.

JS: The Madinaty land row seems to have exposed – even more blatantly than normal – the blurring of lines between power and wealth in the higher echelons of Egyptian society. Is it a symptom of national malaise?

MEB: There’s a linkage between lack of good governance and poverty, a sense of marginalisation, radicalism, violence, social decay, sectarian strife, and so on. All these are linked, and that’s my greatest worry. Egypt used to be at the forefront of the Arab World, the other nations looked to it as a model, and in the ‘40s and ‘50s it was a bastion of moderation, tolerance and culture. People used to listen to Egypt’s perception and views. Right now all that has gone, and the region is pulverised – there is no worse region in the world when it comes to civil war and to violence. My greatest worry is that steady radicalisation in the region; Egypt could be the one to reverse that trend, get people to get back to where they should belong – part of the international community, pursuing political participation and social justice. Or we could continue to see the extremism that’s growing everywhere. And that is where I turn to the west; the west doesn’t realise that stability is not based on short-sighted security measures – stability will only come when people are empowered, when people are able to participate.

When I see the statement by the High Representative of the European Union, or by the State Department about the Egyptian elections, I not only feel disappointed, but I feel that they are losing every ounce of credibility in the region because actions speak so much louder than words. And even those words are so sheepishly pronounced – they express ‘regret’ and ‘dismay’, and they end by reaffirming that Egypt is a major ally, which is a way of saying ‘forget about the fraud, we will continue to work with you’. If they think they are buying themselves stability then they are completely misguided; don’t then be surprised if this increasing fragmentation, radicalisation, marginalisation, anger and humiliation that’s brewing in the region comes back to haunt them.

The west is losing all credibility when it comes to convincing people here that they are serious about their basic values: democracy, freedom, justice, rule of law – all of that is out the window. There’s a lot of anger and distrust from people towards the west, not just over the elections but also over the Palestinian issue, Iraq, Iran; you’re losing credibility and the west’s policy towards the Middle East has been a total failure. And then compare that to elections in Zimbabwe where sanctions were applied and the opposition is now power-sharing at least, or to the situation in Burma or to Iran. The reaction of the west at present is based on political hypocrisy rather than deep-rooted values, and now what I see here is a feeling in the street that we need to wash our hands of the west, that the west is not interested in our freedom, or our social justice, or our endemic conflicts. The feeling is ‘if they don’t give a hoot about me, why should I give a hoot about them?’ And people don’t realise that if you are not going to solve the problem of radicalism by going through this bubble at airports; the issue is much deeper and you have to take a long-term view.

No government from outside can change the regime in Egypt, and I’ve said that many times, but as people – and the governments of the west are supposed to be representatives of their people – the people should express deep condemnation for the deprivation of human rights anywhere, the way it is expressed over Burma, Iran or anywhere else. There should be a sense of human revulsion – if I see someone losing their freedom in Timbuktu, it will provoke a reaction in me; forget about the ethical dimension for a moment, even just from the selfish perspective of wanting a world based on global stability, you have to have a reaction. And you won’t have global stability if you send the message that freedom and democracy is good for us, but not for the barbarians (as the blacks were called in apartheid South Africa). You have to send a message to the people that we care about your freedoms – we are not interfering in your internal affairs, but we are sending a message to the regime as people, not as governments, that we care about your freedoms and this is an issue we take extremely seriously.

JS: Is the international community receptive to your message?

MEB: Tremendously; I haven’t met one single leader who does not understand the plight of the Egyptian people.

JS: And yet the US continues to fund Mubarak’s security apparatus to the tune of $1.3bn a year.

MEB: Well none of these people can influence what is happening here or change the system, but they can react as people to what is a blatant violation of human rights. The way we reacted to Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, so we should react to everyone who is denied his or her freedom. I’ve started a process, and I don’t think it’s going to stop. It might take a year, it might take longer, but change is inevitable here, and when I finally retire – and my wife wishes I had done that yesterday – I will feel quite satisfied.

JS: You’ve faced criticism from your own supporters about your persistent absences from the country and the perceived loss of momentum that’s gone with that. One Al Masry Al Youm columnist said recently that your involvement in Egyptian politics turned out to be half-hearted, and that as you retreated, ‘so many of the substantial gains he made were wasted… his popularity diminished, along with his credibility.’ Is that fair?

MEB: The critics don’t have any point, and the credibility of these critics is open to question – many of the criticism is coming from within the ruling party. I have been vilified in every possible way, from supposedly being an agent of Iran, an agent of the US, responsible for the war in Iraq, hacking my own daughter’s facebook page… so we have to ask about the credibility and the honesty of some of these criticisms. And I happen to take a completely different view. I have said from day one that there is nobody on a white horse that is coming to liberate Egypt; the bad news is that that person does not exist. All I wanted to do was start a process, and tell them ‘we need to catch up with the 21st century, we need to defend our rights, and we need to think about ways in which to defend our rights – this is a police state, so don’t play their game’.

And there have been a lot of people – and there continue to be a lot of people – who are responding to this message, because there is little credibility to the established opposition, who might be well-intentioned but they haven’t achieved anything. People are looking for a different way to go about achieving change. My tactics have been firstly to say ‘you need to work outside the system’, and secondly ‘you need to provide me or people like me with a mandate to have a strong foothold from which to confront the regime’, and that’s through the petition, and thirdly to strip all legitimacy from the regime by boycotting elections. Imagine if that election had been completely boycotted and we had 30 million people signing the petition – the regime would have gone, in my opinion.

JS: But what does working outside the system mean in a practical sense, apart from the petition? What about mobilisation on the street?

MEB: The petition is the easiest way is to break the culture of fear, which is still in place. We have one million signatures, many of which are from the Muslim Brotherhood because they are the most organised, but when you have one million out of 80 million then you still have a way to go. But I understand that, I think that’s down to a culture of fear and I keep hammering at this – you have to take one single step to start with, and what you are really saying by signing the petition is ‘I want to restore my humanity’ – we shouldn’t be afraid, the regime will not be able to detain and torture 80 million people. But it takes time; we have a background of 58 years of total repression and total dictatorship under three different rulers where everyone, from Marxists to the Muslim Brotherhoods, has been excluded. People are afraid – if you go in the street there is 90% support for what I am saying, but if you ask them to sign the petition it’s different so we have to take things gradually.

So signing the petition is one thing, uniting the opposition is another; I’m now calling on the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Wafd, Al-Ghad and all the major opposition parties to unite. We have a lot of different views on a lot of different issues but let us at least unite on saying ‘we need democracy, we need to change the constitution, we need to have fair and free elections, and we commit ourselves in every way to not participating in the presidential ballot – and if the regime doesn’t listen we need to go to the streets and agitate, through peaceful demonstrations. In every movement for change the grassroots have to be at the forefront, labour must be at the forefront, young people must be at the forefront. There is of course an increasing number going to the streets but we need to see that snowball growing.

These are the tools I have; people don’t understand that in a police state, people need to be educated that everyone has to participate to change the system, I can’t do it alone, and a lot of this disappointment is coming from the myth that if I’m here things will change, and if I’m outside things are not going to change. Also people must understand that they can’t just think emotionally; they must plan together, unite together, work together – but the tools available are very limited.

JS: But I think many people accept that there is no knight in shining armour riding in to save the country; what they’re looking for is a figurehead around which people can rally, and who can inspire momentum on the ground, galvanise the grassroots. And the problem is that when those people are being dragged away by state security at demonstrations, or tortured in police stations, and at the same time they see you on book tours in Brazil or Japan or wherever, they feel let down – can you understand that?

MEB: Well I see this as part of the process of education, because even if I’m here – and I’m here now – that’s not going to stop the police from torturing people. Nor am I going to attend – and I don’t think it’s my role to attend –demonstrations of 30 people. When Khaled Said was killed, you’ll remember that I did go on the demonstration at Alexandria, and this was the largest demonstration we’ve seen, about four or five thousand. Of course there was an equivalent number of ‘amin markazi [central security] present, and it’s the first time I saw that – I was absolutely stunned.

But these are not the numbers that are going to affect change; this was a test, and it showed that people are still afraid. Because you have this most egregious violation of human rights, a young man tortured to death, and yet you’re getting less than 10,000 on the streets; in normal circumstances, in somewhere like Thailand, you’ll see a million on the streets, and then you can start talking about change. So the message to the people is ‘don’t just hide behind me and think you will be protected – you need to protect yourselves. You have to be large in numbers, and you have to understand that you must take risks for your own liberty.’ And I think this is succeeding now; after lots of outcry about me being outside the country, they are realising they will have to work on their own whether I’m in or out.

Another issue is that I have no access to the media here. And an important part of this is my visibility, credibility and my continued focus of putting a floodlight on the atrocities of the regime, and much of the time I am able to do that more from the outside, through my contacts, my media exposure, and so on. Interestingly not a single Egyptian television station has asked to see my face.

JS: I think many people still aren’t convinced, they still feel let down.

MEB: Well let me explain further why I’m in and out of the country. I’m in and out because this is my access to the world; I need to continue focusing attention on the Egyptian regime and creating empathy for the Egyptian people – not amongst governments but amongst ordinary people. I want to show that Arabs are not the stereotypes they imagine; I want them to see an Arab, an Egyptian who is a commissioner. When you say I was in Brazil signing books, actually I wasn’t – I was there as a commissioner on HIV/AIDS, something no one even wants to talk about here. I was in Hiroshima because I was fighting for nuclear disarmament, an issue of major importance in the Middle East. I was in Mauritius talking about African economic integration and making it clear that we, North Africa, are a part of black Africa. So we have to show that we are not the stereotyped, isolated group of fanatics that some people imagine. And that’s a very important role, to continue to work with the rest of the world.

In addition I have certain legal obligations, I have a book coming out in May – in the middle of all this I get sent chapters to work on and revise, and this to me is very important because it tells my story. It’s called The Age of Deception and it talks about the deception I’ve seen right, left and centre in big countries and small countries. But it doesn’t impact on my campaigning because my physical presence is not the issue, it’s the ideas that count. And as you know I use twitter, I use facebook – geography is irrelevant. People need to shed themselves of the idea that I’m their protector; at the deep level they think if I’m here they’re protected, but they’re not protected – I myself am not even protected. I live here without any security, and of course there is a risk, not from the regime necessarily but there are so many people who would like to see me removed from the scene. However I am following every day what is happening in Egypt, and I want people to understand that I am with them all the time.

JS: The writer Tarek Osman says you have a colossal liability: you’re ‘a liberal who represents the classic Egyptianism that combines Islamism and Christianity in one identity’. He describes you as part of a 1950s and ‘60s generation of Egyptians ‘shaped by traditions of cosmopolitanism, secularism, and social leniency’, and argues that today this is at odds with the ‘potent religious-conservative wave that has ridden over much of Egyptian society’. Does that worry you?

MEB: I don’t think so, no. I think part of my mission and those of others is to get Egypt back to being a cosmopolitan, tolerant, open society, and not a blinkered, extremist, fractured society. So I’m proud to be all of the above, and it will take time, but I’m not here to perpetuate the status quo that I see in Egypt today – if that was the case then I wouldn’t be here at all. I have a mission vis a vis myself which is yes, I’d like to bring Egypt back to when it was on the right track, before it got completely distorted.

JS: But in this day and age, are many Egyptians receptive to that argument?

MEB: I think so. Of course this is a very fractured society; if you go to the Copts then naturally they are receptive to it, as are Muslim moderates. And of course there will be a lot of opposition. I have been accused of being anti-Islam and anti-everything Islamic – obviously these people have magically got into my heart and discovered what I secretly believe! I laugh at all that stuff, I’m like ‘Teflon’ Reagan – nothing sticks! In Egypt the challenge frankly is that it’s not just about restoring democracy, rule of law and basic freedoms, it’s about restoring values which we used to have. Values like tolerance, social solidarity, respect, decency, transparency. And all these values exist in every religion.

JS: What's your take on current sectarian tensions in Egypt?

MEB: My take is that this is a symptom of a decaying society. Alright so I’m an old man, I lived in Egypt through the ‘50s and ‘60s, I dealt with Christians, Jews, Italians, Armenians, you name it, and it never occurred to me or anyone at that time what your colour or religion or creed was. We were all part of Egypt living together. Everybody I dealt with was a different nationality. Sectarianism is a symptom of poverty and repression, which bring out the worst in people. None of us are born as Mother Theresa, or as a suicide bomber. So the conditions are producing this; if it’s not Copts and Muslims, it will be Nubians and the Cairo government, or Sinai Bedouins and the Cairo government. People express their frustration in different ways.

I don’t want to get philosophical but Jean-Paul Sartre said that people always want to feel superior, that someone’s below them, but that doesn’t exist when everyone in society is protected by law, is treated like a human being and is taught to be tolerant, understanding that you can believe in whatever you want to believe in and that is your own business. These are values we lost. And when I see three people from the Coptic community elected to parliament today, what does that say about where we are?

JS: Yet you’re willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of which are hostile to the idea of a Copt becoming president.

MEB: I want to see all the parties working together, going to all parts of the country to spread the message; we need united, not fractured opposition at the moment. My tactic is a united opposition, where we are all working for the same goal and can be seen together, giving a clear-cut commitment not to participate in the presidential elections, everyone doing their best to sign the petition and get a mandate – because if we have 5 or 10 million signatures we can go to Mubarak and say ‘we are representatives of the people, and here is the paper to prove it’. And this is the most elegant, peaceful way of doing things. They [the opposition] lost a golden opportunity to push this during the elections, but anyway. And people who have lost their jobs, who are living on ten [Egyptian] pounds a day, people who have social grievances, they have the right to go into the streets to call for the economic and political rights, and they should go into the streets. These are the tools available to us. But neither I nor anyone else has a magic wand.

When people talk about the Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood] being banned, it’s like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand. No matter what you say, the Ikhwan have the sympathy of probably – and we can’t say exactly because we don’t have polls for this sort of thing – but at least 20% of the people; after all they got 20% of the seats in a rigged parliamentary election. My first ever encounter with an Ikhwan person was with [former Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary leader] Saad El-Katatni when I arrived back in Cairo this year, and I made it clear that we agree on the big picture need for democracy. He agreed on the need for civil society, that they’re not looking for a religious society, which I thought was a good thing to hear from them and we need to pin it down in the constitution and make that a red line.

I keep saying everywhere: I will work with every single Egyptian who wants change, but there is a red line, which is that all Egyptians have the same rights and obligations. And I’ve said in public and in private that although I work with the Ikhwan, I would be very happy to see a female Copt as president of Egypt. So working with the Ikhwan or with Marxists… I’ll work with every Egyptian, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion – let’s build a democracy and let the people decide.

JS: Have the attacks on your character and your family by the state-run press taken a toll?

MEB: On my daughter yes, though not on me – I’ve become so used to this stuff that it’s laughable. It’s ironic that I’m the most decorated Egyptian wherever I go in the world, and the most vilified within my own country. But I take that as another decoration, a sign that I’m fighting for the right cause. So it doesn’t affect me personally, but of course it takes a toll on my family and on our security. My daughter lives in London and is married in England and of course she was extremely offended at the intrusion into her privacy [following the publication of her facebook photos on the internet], something that isn’t necessarily understood here. And I must say that the British were extremely supportive and took all measures necessary to protect her. Of course these are issues I have to take care of, it’s about my family.

It just shows the level of desperation, the level of debasement that the regime has sunk to in order to vilify me. It’s interesting that until today I haven’t seen one single discussion [within the state press] on the actual things I’m talking about – nobody is explaining why the constitution is good as it is, why the election regulations are good as they are, why Egyptians abroad cannot vote, why we should not have international observers. There was never a single discussion on a substantive issue, it’s all vilification which makes me the devil incarnate. But what they don’t understand is that this continues to add to my credibility everywhere else in the world. I was with a famous black African singer recently – I won’t say his name – and he said to me ‘take back the country’, so [the regime] are not helping themselves with any of that stuff.

JS: You talk about the limitations of operating inside a police state. Social media like twitter and facebook seems to be an important tool for you; how effective do you think you’ve been in exploiting those mediums?

MEB: As I’ve said, we don’t really have many tools, so we have to use the tools we have intelligently. I can’t have even a headquarters, raise funds, hire a conference room to give a speech. So in many ways I am the leader of a virtual opposition.

A year ago I had no clue about tweets, now I’m an expert in how to write something in 140 characters! They always say old horses don’t learn new tricks, but I’ve been forced to learn new tricks.

JS: Does the existence of these alternative forms of media change the paradigm of how information is controlled and disseminated in a country like Egypt?

MEB: Social networks are excellent, facebook and so on. Printed media isn’t ‘objective’; you can see a variety of underlying ideologies. Why is it that the conservative Washington Post has had ten recent editorials on Egypt, but there’s been none in the liberal New York Times? It is remarkable. So social media has become important because it gives you raw data, it gives you information. And it’s important in Egypt because of the context of media repression. I have on my facebook fan page around 300,000 supporters which is remarkable in a country where internet penetration is only about 17-18%. I’ve been told that this was more pro rata than Obama had before the election, which shows how thirsty young people are for an outlet.

Now I can record a video at home without even going to a studio, put it up on YouTube, and by the end of the day it’s running in full on Al Jazeera. We’re in an age where you cannot restrict people, and I’m sure the regime is agonising that messages can be spread everywhere. But there has to be a division of labour in that process of change, and I see my point of strength as exposing the regime, creating empathy for the plight of the Egyptians, and that requires me to keep up my contacts outside and inside the country, and that’s something local politicians and young people don’t always understand. And I can appreciate their enthusiasm, but I think they’re gradually getting the message that they’re protection lies in their numbers, not in sitting behind one person.

JS: Looking at some broader issues, what are your thoughts on the current talks between Tehran and the west on the former’s nuclear ambitions?

MEB: I’m very optimistic about the current talks. Western policy towards Iran, as with the Middle East as a whole, has been a complete failure. Iran is a question of competing ideologies, east and west, and it’s about a confidence deficit and a complete lack of trust on both sides. The only thing people are worried about is Iran’s future intentions, and Iran’s future intentions depend on trust, which you need to strengthen through confidence-building. And that will never happen until the Iranians and the Americans sit around the negotiating table.

You can try sanctions, isolation, covert operations, stuxnet worms, or whatever, but that is not going to resolve the situation – in fact it takes it in the opposite direction because it empowers the hardliners, reinforces the us vs them mentality, which is something we need to get rid of. My gut feeling is that Iran is not really interested right now in having a nuclear weapon, and they don’t need a nuclear weapon – they might have thought of it when, with the support of the west, Iraq was using chemical weapons against them, but they want to have the technology which will allow them to produce a nuclear weapon in a very short span of time and in that respect they’re no different from Japan or Brazil.

And you can ask your own country [the UK]: why you are spending billions of dollars modernising Trident [Britain’s nuclear weapons defence system]? [Tony] Blair talked about the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] but he completely misread the NPT because the NPT says ‘yes Britain has nuclear weapons, but you have to get rid of them’. Or when I hear [David] Cameron saying ‘Britain will always have a nuclear deterrent’ – what message is he sending to the rest of the world> The message is that if you have nuclear deterrence it brings you an insurance policy, it brings you power, it brings you prestige. But then you turn around to Iran and tell them ‘don’t even think of touching that technology’. Again it comes down to us vs them, the moral equivalency factor – unless you sit down, reconcile your differences and agree on a modus vivendi and live by it, there is no other way. I know both Iran and the US understand that, I know that both Obama and Ahmedinejad firmly believe it is the only way, sitting down and negotiating – just before I left office I had talks with them to that effect.

I am optimistic, but I hope that the west finally looks at the big picture and understands that psychology and respect is important, and I hope that Iran finally understands that they need to address the concerns of the west and take confidence-building measures. There was an excellent opportunity provided by Brazil and Turkey, a variation of the proposal I made before, but the west decided the cup was half empty whereas in my view the cup was more than three-quarters full. But I am optimistic, there is no other option.

JS: Does the recent aggression on the Korean peninsula worry you?

MEB: Of course it worries me – everywhere there is nuclear material I worry. With 23,000 warheads don’t you think I worry that one of them will be used, either by computer error or human miscalculation or whatever? Especially when many of them are on hair trigger alert, where the US or Russian presidents have half an hour to respond to a reported nuclear attack, when you have all this material alongside an illicit trafficking network – the greatest worry is that an extremist group will get hold of radioactive material, and then forget about any deterrence because for these guys deterrence has no meaning, they are willing to sacrifice their lives in the name of whatever ideology they have.

North Korea is no different from Iran – it needs security assurances, economic assistance, it’s an impoverished country. You have to talk to them, give them incentives, and in both cases in my experience, incentives are much more important than sticks. Try to use a stick and in most cases it doesn’t work – it certainly didn’t work in Iraq. Instead what happens when you apply these draconian sanctions is you end up committing the most egregious violation of human rights, in the name of human rights, as happened in Iraq where many people – old and young and vulnerable – died whilst Saddam continued to enrich himself.

JS: As a career diplomat you must have written your fair share of private memos – what was your reaction to the Wikileaks release of secret American diplomatic cables?

MEB: I’ve always said in public what I’ve said in private, so at a personal level I’m not worried about any of my own memos coming out! But overall I think the release of these cables has undermined the credibility of international institutions, shown how they have been manipulated – by the US at least, and by other major powers. And it undermined the credibility of the US when you see a cable, relevant to me, that they have been wiretapping every conservation I have in order to see if I have some sort of secret deal with Iran. It’s done a lot of damage to international institutions and countries that publicly preach the rule of law and right to privacy, and it has added a good dash of public cynicism towards politicians and the mechanisms of international politics.

JS: Are you therefore saying it’s a good thing that these cables have exposed the duplicity of certain countries, or would it have been better for them to have remained secret?

MEB: Well frankly I have mixed feelings on this. In diplomacy you have to have space to have confidential discussions, as [former UK foreign minister] Malcolm Rifkind has argued recently, and a lot of diplomacy, especially the prophesising, has to be confidential, at least until you reach the outcome. Of course you are a journalist so you’ll love to have everything out in the open, but a private space has to be reserved for diplomacy because if you really want to succeed in resolving the Palestinian issue, the Northern Ireland issue, you need the space to brainstorm ideas freely and you’ll never be able to do that if everything is in the newspaper.

However, it does send a message to those quislings who are saying one thing in public to their people and a completely opposite thing in private. They will have to think twice now. It’s fine to have confidentiality, but you have to be honest with your people.

JS: What about Wikileaks revelations that suggested your IAEA successor Yukiya Amano was ‘solidly in the US court’, presumably in contrast to yourself – what did you make of that?

MEB: I can only talk about my record, I can’t talk about my successor – it’s a question of decorum.

JS: Returning to Egypt, do you see yourself as part of the lineage of Saad Zaghoul and other great Egyptian resistance leaders?

MEB: I don’t know and I don’t care, to be frank. That’s not meant to sound arrogant, but what matters to me is seeing Egypt moving forward. Whether I’ll be remembered as someone who initiated change is not important – I’ve had enough recognition in my lifetime; it’s nice to be recognised but it’s not the most important thing for me right now.

JS: Do you ever regret having launched yourself into the mire of Egyptian politics?

MEB: I don’t. I don’t regret anything. My family would have liked to have seen me at my age doing the things I like. And I love my work; this is something I try to teach people – there is life beyond Egypt, there are major issues that concern us all as a human family. I wrote my wife an SMS from Brasilia saying ‘I feel fulfilled, I feel satisfied being part of this HIV/AIDS campaign’. In Brazil I saw a two month old baby infected with HIV. Maybe it’s because of my formation, but for me humanity is indivisible, so I work on issues like HIV/AIDS, arms control, nuclear disarmament which I dedicated many years of my life to – it’s all about the sanctity of human life. I know that there are ten million poor people with no access to HIV drugs even though they are available – these are issues which go straight to my heart and they are issues I will continue to work on.

I want to say again that I am starting a process here. We have been all emotions, and the Egyptians now are hopefully starting to understand that change will come through rational thinking and not through just emotion. I think I have managed to do two things which are quite significant. First create the environment where everyone understands the need for change – if you talk to anyone, and they know they’re not being listened to by the security apparatus, they will tell you of the need to change. And secondly I’ve created an alternative. The regime has always acted on a concept of dualism: military repression or an Al-Qaeda style religious state. I have at least proven to the people here, and to the world, that Egypt is full of alternatives, that the country can be run with modern management techniques and commonly accepted human values – respect, tolerance, democracy, transparency, what have you. These two are there; what is left is how to connect these two, how to turn this yearning for change into reality.

We just want to come back to the basics – which we had. In the 40s and 50s Egypt was at the same level of economic development as Korea, as Spain – and when I visited Korea recently my heart ached because I saw the way that country has developed and the way Egypt is today. We are just going backwards. I can’t look at myself in the mirror and think about the country I grew up in – seeing how it was, seeing how it is now, and then just sit back and let it go down the drain. That’s not how I want to end my life. Egypt is not the epicentre of the world but it’s the land I know the most, and I’d like to see its people respected, enjoying a minimum standard of life and holding no fear of walking down the street and demonstrating for their causes.

Mohamed ElBaradei warns of 'Tunisia-style explosion' in Egypt

2011-01-19T22:42:00.003+02:00

Dissident says Egyptians are 'yearning for change', but draws criticism for holding back on street protests

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - January 2011

The Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei has warned of a "Tunisia-style explosion" in his country as self-immolation protests proliferated and anti-government activists announced plans for a nationwide "day of anger" next week.

But the former UN nuclear weapons chief stopped short of calling on his supporters to take to the streets, prompting scathing criticism from opposition campaigners who believe ElBaradei is squandering a rare opportunity to bring an end to President Hosni Mubarak's three decades of autocratic rule.

Today Ahmed Hashem el-Sayed, 25, from the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, died in hospital after setting himself alight on the roof of his home. It was the latest in a series of self-immolation incidents that have spread through Egypt over the past two days, after the Tunisian vegetable trader Muhammad Bouazizi's self-immolation provided the catalyst for the toppling of his country's president last week.

"What has transpired in Tunisia is no surprise and should be very instructive both for the political elite in Egypt and those in the west that back dictatorships," ElBaradei told the Guardian. "Suppression does not equal stability, and anybody who thinks that the existence of authoritarian regimes is the best way to maintain calm is deluding themselves."

The Nobel peace prize winner repeated his call for the Egyptian government to implement urgent political reforms, claiming that the citizens of the Arab world's largest nation were "yearning desperately for economic and social change" and that without drastic improvements, a "Tunisia-style explosion" in Egypt would be unavoidable. Nearly half of the country's 80 million citizens live on less than £1.25 a day, and despite record GDP growth the majority of the population has become poorer in real terms over the past 20 years.

Yet on the heels of six reported incidents of self-immolation and large anti-government demonstrations planned for next week, ElBaradei refused to throw his weight behind street-level protests, instead expressing concern at the "general state of instability" engulfing the country.

"These things need to be organised and planned properly," said the 68-year-old. "I would like to use the means available from within the system to effect change, such as the petition we are gathering demanding political reform. The government has to send a message to the people saying 'yes, we understand you', and of course, if things do not move then we will have to consider other options including protests and a general strike.

"I still hope that change will come in an orderly way and not through the Tunisian model," he added. "But if you keep closing the door to peaceful change then don't be surprised if the scenes we saw in Tunisia spread across the region."

Grassroots activists accused ElBaradei of timidity. "From day one ElBaradei has proved himself not to be a man of the street," said Hossam El-Hamalawy, a prominent journalist and blogger. "He comes from a diplomatic background and the kind of change he wants is peaceful and gradual, something that will not shake the foundations of the establishment. But unfortunately for him the Egyptian people have far more radical demands than the ones he is articulating: this is not just about creating a clean parliament and a fair presidency, it's about the daily bread and butter of the Egyptian people."

Opposition groups are planning a series of national protests next Tuesday, coinciding with a public holiday designed to celebrate the achievements of the police force – an institution that has galvanised popular anger against the state in recent months after high-profile police torture allegations and the deaths of several Egyptians in police custody.

"We hope it will be big, very big" said Ahmed Salah, one of the organisers. "Whether it will provide the spark that brings down the regime we simply don't know. But I think the most exciting thing about events in Tunisia is that we've seen that when people move, they move for democracy – not for religion, not for elite interests, not for private loyalties. It shows the choice that we're always being presented with in Egypt by Mubarak and the west – a choice between Mubarak's oppression or religious fundamentalism – is a false one."

Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Centre, said the Egyptian opposition had been emboldened by the uprising in Tunisia. "In the last couple days, we've already seen a newfound energy and optimism that wasn't there a month ago. Perception is sometimes more important than reality. And, now, perhaps for the first time, Egyptian opposition groups believe they have a chance.

"Before Tunisia, no one thought it would be possible to unseat Arab leaders any time soon. But now many Egyptians are asking, if the Tunisians can do it, why can't we? After all, conditions in Egypt are worse. Unemployment is higher, and the gap between between the rich and the rest of society is larger."

But he said a popular revolt in Egypt would be more difficult. "The Egyptian regime has always been particularly adept at playing the Islamist card. Tunisia didn't have a large Islamist opposition to frighten people with. There is a minority in Egypt that will stop at nothing to prevent Islamists from even having a chance to gain power. Also, Tunisia wasn't crucial to western security interests.

"Egypt, on the other hand, is the second largest recipient of US aid and is a pro-American pillar in the region. The US can afford to lose Tunisia. But Egypt is a different story. The Obama administration won't take too kindly to the idea of losing Egypt to the opposition, particularly when that opposition is likely to include the Muslim Brotherhood."

'Strangers in our own country': Egypt's Copts look back on dismal year

2010-12-24T21:29:00.004+02:00

Clashes with security forces over church construction in Giza cap a depressing twelve months for the Middle East's largest Christian population

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - December 2010

Christmas is approaching in the Al-Talbiyya district of Giza, but the road to St Mary’s, the neighbourhood’s half-built church, is a bleak one. Lined by a small row of windswept shops on one side and a deserted, faded-neon set of children’s funfair rides on the other, the ground is scattered with giant clumps of concrete – all torn from the four-lane highway that towers above. It was from this highway late last month that security forces launched a barrage of tear gas, live ammunition and handheld rocks upon thousands of Coptic Christians demonstrating below.

“Imagine for a moment how it feels to be standing in your own country with your own people, as the agents of your own government begin hurling bullets at you and your children,” recalls Ayed Gad, a local pharmacy worker who was on the scene. The clashes, triggered when local authorities halted construction at St Mary’s, left two young Copts dead; at the time a local priest described the government’s actions as ‘barbaric’. “The police acted as if they were Israel and we were Hamas,” Father Mina Zarif told a local newspaper.

It’s been a dire year for Egypt’s estimated eight million Copts, the largest Christian community in the Middle East. 2010 began with an Upper Egyptian drive-by massacre of churchgoers leaving a Coptic Christmas midnight mass; it has ended with the deadly violence in Al-Talbiyya, along with election results that leave Copts with less than 1% representation in parliament. In between there has been a bitter row over the alleged kidnapping of a priest’s wife who wanted to convert to Islam, accusations by Muslim clerics that Christian places of worship are being used to stockpile weapons, and a high-profile spat between the Coptic pope and the Egyptian government over the Church’s right to regulate ‘personal status’ issues among its members.

“Sectarian polarisation of Christians and Muslims stretches back over the centuries, but the problem of sectarian violence as we know it today is a modern phenomenon,” says Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a prominent human rights activist. “This year we’ve seen Muslim protesters shouting anti-Christian slogans after the Friday sermon, which is a very new and worrying development.”

Bahgat’s campaign work concentrates on two areas: communal violence between Muslims and Christians, and the more humdrum problem of daily prejudice. “The issue in Egypt is not just the torching of homes and attacks on monasteries, but also the everyday examples of employment discrimination and other non-violent manifestations of sectarianism,” he claims. Egypt’s Copts complain of being shut out of the higher echelons of business, politics and academia; despite notable exceptions like finance minister Youssef Boutros Ghali or telecoms tycoon Naguib Sawiris, most Christians believe they are denied opportunities for social advancement because of their religion – a state of psychological insecurity that has in turn fuelled an entrenchment of sectarian identities.

“Egyptians have become increasingly embedded in their religious institutions and the consequence of that is a growing sense of polarisation,” adds Bahgat. “We’re trying to tell people that it’s equally bad to only do your grocery shopping from a Christian vendor because you’re Christian, or if you only go to a Muslim dentist because you’re Muslim. These are the seeds of sectarianism that eventually escalate into neighbourhoods being set aflame.”

Just down the road from the disputed St Mary’s – now clad in scaffolding and guarded day and night by state security officers – the neighbouring church of St Paul’s is tucked away down a dimly-lit side alley. Here, in a third-floor chapel and beneath the glow of energy-saving chandeliers, festive worshippers are engaging in the traditional Coptic fast – abstaining from animal products for 43 days in preparation for the Advent – and pondering another institutional challenge to their community. Every pew is packed solid, and it’s been standing room only for evening services throughout the run-up to Coptic Christmas, which is celebrated on January 7th.

“Things have been getting more crowded since the late 1980s; to keep up with the growing size of our community we’d need at least three or four new churches in the area – but of course they can’t be built” says Nabil Girgis, a senior member of the congregation. Egypt’s Christians have played as big a part in the country’s recent demographic explosion as their fellow Muslims, but whereas new mosques are built and renovated freely throughout the country, Christians have to navigate a bewilderingly web of bureaucracy in order to secure permission for church construction; there are an estimated 2,000 churches in Egypt today, alongside 93,000 mosques.

It’s a state of affairs that has left some feeling like their very identity as Egyptians is being purposely eroded by the state, particularly when set alongside the government’s apparent reluctance to prosecute Muslim perpetrators of communal violence – a tactic, says Bahgat, which leaves Christian victims feeling “assaulted twice, once by their Muslim neighbours and then again when the powers-that-be side with the attackers.”

“We are treated as second-class citizens in every way; the only interaction we have with the government leaves us feeling like failures, and of course that makes us feel like we don’t belong,” says Peter Gobrayel, a worshipper at St Paul’s. “I fought for Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and was a PoW in Israel; you could say that I’ve spent the whole of my life on the frontline for my country. Now, speaking honestly, when I see the nation burning I just want to add petrol. I am an Egyptian first and foremost, and yet my country seems to want to eradicate me.”

The greatest difficulty in assessing the extent of anti-Copt discrimination in Egypt is picking out which grievances are motivated foremost by sectarian tensions, and which are merely the product of a wider breakdown in state-society relations; many of the complaints raised by Copts, from mistreatment at the hands of police to being passed over for civil service promotion due to a lack of wasta (connections or influence) are common to all Egyptian citizens, be they Muslim or Christian.

Long-term corruption and political malaise has left the government’s role as neutral social arbiter fatally weakened, and the concurrent growth of visibly Islamic symbols and discourse in public life since the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood largely abandoned its attempts to overthrow the regime and instead concentrated its efforts on ‘Islamising’ society from below, has created an environment where sub-state religious affiliations increasingly trump any sense of national identity, and where normal community disputes can quickly take on a dangerously sectarian hue.

For Hossam Bahgat, Copt-Muslim tensions will only be resolved when the government ends its security-driven response to sectarian violence, and begins implementing the rule of law. “The reaction of the state to sectarian trouble is always motivated primarily by their desire to impose ‘quiet’; hence it is directed by the security services in a typically heavy-handed way,” he argues. In the aftermath of the Al- Talbiyya fighting, over 150 local Copts have been taken to jail, prompting Pope Shenouda to withdraw to a rural monastery in protest.

“When you look at the big picture, it’s so clear that the security apparatus is at the heart of the problem,” says Bahgat. “Their tactics are bad not only for democracy and human rights, but for long-terms security too.” Peter Gobrayel agrees. “We just want to be treated like Egyptians, with our rights respected and our voices heard. These days it’s hard to find anyone, Christian or Muslim, who gets treated like that.”

ElBaradei launches comeback quest with call to boycott presidential poll

2010-12-08T19:19:00.003+02:00

Former UN nuclear inspectorate chief signals return to opposition with warning of civil unrest

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - December 2010

The former UN nuclear inspectorate chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said he will not run in next year's Egyptian presidential elections, after dismissing the country's recent parliamentary poll as a "farce" and warning of dire consequences if the government continues to suppress peaceful protests.

In a wide-ranging video message released today, the Nobel laureate urged all Egyptians to boycott the 2011 vote and warned President Hosni Mubarak's government there would be violence on the streets if the authorities tried to close down every avenue of public dissent.

ElBaradei's intervention came as a coalition of independent election monitoring groups called on the president to dissolve Egypt's new parliament, saying that systematic ballot violations had set Egypt "at least 15 years back". "Rigging and forging the citizens' will has become the 'law' regulating this election," they claimed.

Final results from last week's vote indicated that opposition parties secured 14 seats in the 508-strong people's assembly, with Mubarak's ruling NDP party now enjoying complete dominance of the legislature.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest organised opposition force, was left without a single representative in parliament after withdrawing from the contest, citing "blatant" electoral fraud.

ElBaradei's latest appeal comes at a critical time for the 68-year-old, who has been accused by former supporters of spending too much time abroad and losing precious momentum since making a triumphant return to Cairo in February when he launched a high-profile campaign for democratic change.

"It now seems [ElBaradei's] brief involvement in politics was only half-hearted," wrote columnist Ahmed El-Sawi in the local al-Masry al-Youm newspaper. "As he retreated, so many of the substantial gains he made were wasted. His popularity diminished, along with his credibility."

Grassroots anti-government activists have criticised the "personality cult" surrounding ElBaradei, arguing that far more work is being done by pro-democracy and trade union movements on the ground to mobilise public support and pose a challenge to the Mubarak regime.

Today's video signals ElBaradei's intention to re-enter the fray and establish himself once again as a leading opposition figurehead, just as the Arab world's largest nation enters a period of unprecedented political uncertainty.

The three-decade rule of Mubarak, now 82 and frail, could end with next year's poll and there is growing evidence of a power struggle within the NDP over whether his son, Gamal, should be allowed to succeed him.

In the message, ElBaradei called on Egypt's intellectuals to put aside their differences and seize this moment to effect much-needed historical change, insisting that the status quo must end. "You are not investing in your future," he warned. "You are investing in the end of what you have, in destroying Egypt and in destroying future generations."

Egypt's 'elections' were pure stagecraft, directed by a dictator

2010-12-01T19:59:00.003+02:00

Sunday's farce sends a message that the transition from one pharaoh to the next must take place within the regime's autocratic confines

-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is free'
-Cairo - December 2010

Covering Egypt’s parliamentary elections this week was a surreal experience. Like actors in a bad B-movie we dutifully paraded from one cheap set to the next, trotting through our allotted lines and contorting our faces into wild expressions of indignation as and when the plot demanded it.

The problem wasn’t that this studio lacked colour or intrigue. There was, for example, the polling station where security officials cut the power to prevent us seeing stuffed ballot-boxes, only for opposition candidates to light burning torches and lead us self-righteously into the darkness. Later I was at a ballot count – part baladi wedding, part warzone – where lines of riot police held back the crowds as crates of votes tripped and tumbled into a giant tent bathed in gaudily fluorescent strip-light. It almost felt festive, in a tragic sort of way.

So thrills and spills were in plentiful supply behind the 2D props and cardboard cut-outs. The real problem was that at times we seemed to forget this was a studio at all.

The day after the poll, civil society monitors, human rights activists and journalists all swapped examples of egregious violations, from vote-buying to police intimidation – yet how can you violate a circus? At times it felt as if merely using the language of "irregularities" helped to confer a sort of false legitimacy on to these electoral theatrics, however systematic those irregularities were shown to be.

Thankfully, Egypt's high elections commission (HEC) stepped in this morning to clear up any misunderstandings over whether or not the country had just conducted a serious democratic exercise. Announcing first-round results, which hand the ruling NDP party 97% of the seats contested and leave the Muslim Brotherhood – previously the largest opposition force in parliament – with nothing, the commission's spokesperson informed us that "the elections as a whole were conducted properly, and the results … reflect the will of the Egyptian electorate". In Cairo, farce talks with a straight face.

The HEC's statement unshackles us from the burden of pretending that what transpired last Sunday – and will play out again this coming weekend when a run-off ballot is held – constitutes anything resembling an election; instead, it is better described as a (not particularly artful) piece of stagecraft by Egypt's political elite. Stage performances are designed for an audience though, so the question now becomes "who is this performance aimed at, and why?".

With President Hosni Mubarak's three decade-long rule now coming to an end (he is 82 and frail), the various shades of Egypt's self-perpetuating regime now face a year of deep political volatility as rival NDP insiders attempt to manoeuvre themselves into the position of natural successor.

Sunday's performance revealed little about the dynamics of that race, despite featuring several scenes of intra-NDP competition. That's because the internal struggle to win a ruling party nomination for parliamentary seats is generally a parochial one, with wealthy local businessmen looking to consolidate or expand their privileges through entrance to the legislature – which offers legal immunity, access to the higher echelons of the state, and significant opportunities for personal advancement – and hence doesn't really reflect factional divisions at the heart of the NDP.

The latter exist of course, and they are likely to intensify as decisions are made over whether Mubarak should be handed another six-year term when presidential "elections" are called next year, and as his son Gamal confronts an entrenched military harbouring doubts about his ability to step into his father's shoes.

But this show was about something else. It was about sending a message that – whichever elements from within the existing autocracy triumph in the internecine battles to come – the transition from one pharaoh to another will take place wholly within that autocracy, with all other voices excluded.

The significance of that message, at a time when the Arab world's most populous country is witnessing an outburst of labour activism, sporadic street protests and an explosion of forums of dissent – despite the government's efforts to neuter the independent media – can't be underestimated. It is a warning to the Egyptian nation that there will be no public avenues for expressing grievance, no pressure valves – even of the superficial variety – through which those outside the inner sanctum might be able to speak and help shape the direction this country is travelling in. As Shadi Hamid of the Brookings thinktank put it: "The regime … is not in the mood to take any chances over its own survival as we enter what will be one of the most challenging periods in Egypt's modern history."

In the short term, that means the Egypt that Mubarak has shaped in his own image will continue to thrive – one where a foreign-funded security apparatus, fuelled by a state-led cessation of the rule of law, is given a free hand to snuff out opposition, and where the nation's commonly held natural resources are pimped out to private profiteers. In the long term, it means uncertainty. Yesterday, a senior Muslim Brotherhood spokesman declared that the government was "destroying any hope of the people for change by peaceful means". But with the social, economic and demographic pressures bearing down on Egypt, maintaining the status quo in perpetuity is not a viable option.

And so all eyes turn to Washington, where the state department – pulling the purse-strings of Mubarak to the tune of $1.3bn a year – put out a mealy-mouthed statement of "dismay" yesterday at the conduct of the parliamentary poll.

As Hamid points out, the Egyptian regime's own statement of intent regarding its unwillingness to countenance any opposition in the run-up to the transfer of presidential power puts the Obama administration in a tricky position, especially when much of the region – Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, for example – is moving in the opposite direction, towards more subtle forms of authoritarianism.

Make no mistake; there is no desire on the part of Egypt's western allies to see the country embrace any genuine form of democratisation – you only have to speak with police torture victims in Alexandria, some of whom have been bound up with American handcuffs while facing the blows of their tormentors, to understand the extent to which the "international community" supports the repression of any dissidents that could potentially upset Mubarak's grip on power.

But the blatant and uncompromising quality of this latest act is problematic for the dictator's cheerleaders, because it peels away the facade and could well be storing up unimaginable problems for the future.

Hamid believes that Sunday's farce will force a debate in western policy circles over the wisdom of sticking so close to Mubarak. "Alarm bells are ringing," he says, "and the election results will really force a discussion; whether or not that discussion will lead to concrete changes in strategy is a different story."

But the real story of Egypt's coming political transition will have to be written elsewhere – outside western diplomatic corridors, and outside the self-serving, self-preserving elite that has dominated the country so pervasively for a generation. The curtain is up – and the drama has just begun.

Egypt's opposition parties pull out of election amid claims of fraud

2010-12-01T17:38:00.002+02:00

Muslim Brotherhood and Wafd party to boycott run-off ballot after initial figures show NDP took 97% of seats in Sunday's poll

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - December 2010

Egypt's main opposition groups walked out of the 'democratic process' today after official results indicated the ruling party had captured 97% of seats in the parliamentary elections.

Initial figures from the high elections commission showed that President Hosni Mubarak's NDP had won 209 out of the 221 seats that were settled definitively at last Sunday's vote, while the remaining 287 seats are to be the subject of a run-off ballot this week.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest organised opposition force, had been due to contest 26 of the remaining constituencies, but will now withdraw from the race. "Sunday was marked by fraud, terrorism and violence carried out by police and thugs," said the Islamist group in a statement, in which it announced it would be taking legal measures to invalidate this "pseudo-parliament".

"We're trapped in a vicious cycle if we carry on trying to participate in this charade," said one prominent member, who wanted to remain anonymous as he had not been cleared to speak with the media. "We've gone from 88 seats to nothing, at a time when the political elite have never been more unpopular. Anybody can look at these results and see instantly that they are farcical. We don't want to assist the regime anymore in this ridiculous and tyrannical game."

Meanwhile the liberal Wafd party, which had been widely expected to make gains at the expense of the Brotherhood due to a reported deal with the Mubarak regime, will also boycott this Sunday's vote after winning only two seats in the first round. A spokesperson for the party's ruling committee declared the results to be "scandalous".

Egypt's autocratic leaders are widely believed to be clearing political institutions of all potential opposition before next year's presidential poll, which could end Mubarak's three-decade reign.

Egypt closes beaches over shark attacks

2010-12-01T17:32:00.002+02:00

Hunt under way for shark responsible for maiming three Russian tourists at Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - December 2010

-More shark drama here and here

A hunt is under way to track down a shark responsible for maiming three Russian tourists in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, one of whom remains in a critical condition.

Tonight Egyptian officials closed Sharm el-Sheikh's famous beaches and suspended nearly all diving and watersports activities, which attract more than 3 million holidaymakers every year.

Two of the attacks took place within minutes of each other yesterday afternoon, when an oceanic whitetip shark moved close to shore and began snapping at a couple swimming in the Red Sea. The man's legs were torn by the shark and the woman sustained injuries to her legs and back and had to be resuscitated after rescue.

This morning a further attack, believed to be by the same shark, was made on a woman snorkelling on a reef north of the city's Na'ama Bay. Her arms were bitten off, and she was flown to Cairo for emergency treatment. "We are monitoring the situation very closely and working together with all authorities to ensure the safety of all members and visitors in the Red Sea," said Hesham Gabr, chairman of Egypt's chamber of diving and watersports. "Our thoughts are with the victims and their families."

The oceanic whitetip is a common species of shark that can grow up to four metres long, but as its name suggests it is mainly found in deep water. "This event is absolutely extraordinary," Richard Peirce, chairman of the UK-based Shark Trust, told the Guardian. "Since records began in the late 16th century there have been only nine recorded attacks on humans by an oceanic whitetip. It's abnormal behaviour; this shark hasn't just decided to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – there must have been a specific activity or event that brought it there."

Sharks can be sighted frequently in the Red Sea waters around Sharm el-Sheikh, but attacks on humans are rare. There have been some suggestions that fishing vessels have recently started coming closer to the shore.

"Something has brought this animal to the area and made it think dinner, and it's likely that it involves something being put in or on the water," said Peirce. "If fishing vessels have started coming near the beaches and they're discarding unwanted fish over the side, then that's a powerful shark attractant. It could also be camping sites or hotels dumping rubbish, although until further investigations are done none of us can comment intelligently on what the trigger was."

Today a team from the South Sinai national park launched a search for the shark, which they plan to trap and then release in the Gulf of Suez at a safe distance from the shoreline. The Egyptian government will be watching nervously to see whether the incident has any long-term impact on tourism levels, an important source of revenue for the country.

"It won't be just a bump – this is a catastrophe for the local tourism industry," said Ramy Francis, a veteran diver with close knowledge of the area. "Three attacks so swiftly in succession and all of them that aggressive – it will certainly take some time for the hotel and watersports trade to recover."

But Amr Aboulfatah, the owner of a Sharm el-Sheikh dive centre and former chairman of the South Sinai Association for Diving and Marine Activities, disagreed. "Everyone is scared to get in the water right now, but there are concerted efforts going on to resolve the situation and I really don't think we will see any lasting consequences in terms of the tourism industry."

Egypt's ailing regime tightens grip after elections wipe out opposition

2010-11-30T20:51:00.005+02:00

• Governing party wins 96% of the vote in early results
• Islamist opposition may be left with no seats

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - November 2010

Egypt’s repressive regime sent out a dramatic warning to the international community tonight over its determination to face down any challenge to its authority, after stage-managing parliamentary elections that virtually wiped out the country’s formal opposition.

Early results from the poll, described by domestic and international observers as ‘breathtaking’ in its levels of fraud, suggest that the ruling NDP party have captured 96% of the seats, whilst the 88-strong parliamentary presence of Egypt’s largest organised opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, could be erased to zero.

“We knew it was going to be bad, but I don’t think anyone realised it was going to be this bad,” said Shadi Hamid, Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Centre and an analyst of Egyptian politics. “Egypt has joined the ranks of the world's most autocratic countries. Now we're talking full-blown, unabashed dictatorship.”

The parliamentary ballot was widely seen as a dry run for next year’s more important presidential elections, when current leader Hosni Mubarak may be forced to step down. Mubarak, 82 years old and believed to be seriously ill, has ruled the Arab World’s most populous nation for almost three decades and has remained a close ally of the west, despite reports of systematic human rights abuses at the hands of his extensive security apparatus and slow progress on political reform.

But with no designated successor to the president, there is intense nervousness at the heart of Egypt’s political elite over the potential consequences of transferring power at a time of growing public anger over declining living standards and pervasive state oppression.

“These election results indicate that the regime is frightened about the impending transition, and they’re not in the mood to take any chances over their own survival as we enter what will be one of the most challenging periods in Egypt’s modern history,” argued Hamid. “Previously Egypt’s level of political repression was never at the level of Syria, Tunisia or Iraq; it was always careful to retain some superficial democratic trappings. But now the government is sending a strong message that opposition will not be tolerated.”

Sunday’s vote took place amidst a backdrop of widespread electoral violations, including incidences of ballot-stuffing, vote-buying, and the exclusion of opposition representatives, civil society monitors and journalists from polling stations around the country. In some towns riot police moved in to block voters from accessing polling booths; election-related clashes claimed at least eight lives across the day and left dozens more wounded.

Officials from the governing party rejected reports of wrongdoing in the poll. “The NDP has done its best to ensure that the voting is clean and free from any irregularities,” insisted NDP Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif. But critics disagreed. “The violence we saw was very much a controlled violence, where the authorities seemed to be in charge of what happened and when” said Joe Stork, Deputy Middle East Director of Human Rights Watch. A run-off vote in some constituencies will be held later this week.

Such clear evidence of rigging is likely to cause consternation in western capitals, where pressure on Mubarak to embrace at least some outwardly visible signs of democratisation has been strong. It will be viewed as a particular slap in the face for the Obama administration, which only last week had publicly pressed the Egyptian government to ensure these elections were credible. “We are dismayed by reports of election-day interference and intimidation by security forces,” said a spokesman for the US State Department, which provides more aid to Egypt than to any other country bar Israel. Britain’s foreign office announced it was “deeply concerned” by reports of state-sponsored disruption to the electoral process.

“It’s is really a sign that the ruling clique has no interest in appeasing the international community, and has calculated that the west will not provide the sort of vigorous response that you might expect a blatantly stolen election to provoke,” said Hamid.

Attention will now turn to the various regime insiders jockeying for position in the battle to replace Mubarak, chief among which is the president’s son, Gamal. Long groomed for the leadership, the former banker and architect of many of the country’s divisive neoliberal economic reforms has recently run into opposition from the country’s powerful armed forces, who are concerned at the prospect of a non-military figure taking the reins of power and who want to retain a strong influence over the process of selecting Egypt’s next ruler.

But as the latest election has shown, there will be little opportunity for dissident voices to participate in that process. “These elections were rigged and invalid,” warned Essam El-Arian, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. “They are destroying any hope of the people for change by peaceful means.”

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EYEWITNESS - ELECTORAL FRAUD

Many of the violations which marred Egypt’s parliamentary elections on Sunday were witnessed first-hand by The Guardian, which spent the day monitoring polling stations in the populous Shubra neighbourhood of northern Cairo.

At the entrance to one ballot location in Shubra El-Kheima, a queue of voters were heard arguing with security officials over how much they were being paid for their vote, with one man claiming he had been promised LE 500 (£55), but had received less than half that amount. At another polling station, a school in the nearby constituency of El-Sahel, state security colonels initially attempted to physically block access to the voting booths before eventually killing the power to the classrooms and plunging the whole station into darkness. But by the light of burning torches brandished by opposition candidates, ballot boxes stuffed with neatly-stacked, unfolded votes for the ruling NDP party were clearly visible. The civil servant responsible for the booth claimed they had been placed there ‘by security’ but said he would lose his job if he recorded this breach of electoral law.

Later at the El-Sahel count, lines of riot police held back opposition representatives and journalists whilst a procession of ballot boxes passed into the building, many of them with their seals torn open (video). Outside, a supporter of the liberal Al-Wafd party candidate held aloft bunches of NDP votes which had been stamped by polling station officials and which he claimed were due to be jammed into ballot boxes prior to the count (video). “There has never before been an election rigged to this scale,” he told an angry crowd.

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Egypt's discredited elections blighted by police violence

2010-11-28T08:09:00.006+02:00

As Egypt goes to the polls today, allegations are multiplying of political torture and killings by a security service beyond the control of the courts

-Taken from the Observer
-Alexandria - November 2010

The Mahmoudia canal wends its way through some of Alexandria's poorest quarters before eventually reaching the middle-class suburb of Somoha, where elegant blocks of flats abut the water's edge and a rickety old footbridge connects one bank to the other.

It was here that 19-year-old Ahmed Shaaban's body was found, battered and bruised and floating amongst the reeds. The police say he drowned himself deliberately, though it is difficult to see how – the channel is so shallow it barely reaches one's knees. A few days later, Shaaban's uncle stood in front of a local journalist's video camera and addressed Egypt's leader, Hosni Mubarak, directly. "You are at war with your own people," he said softly. "Your gang is running loose killing citizens, and all you care about is the presidential chair."

Something is rotten at the heart of Alexandria, one of the great metropolises of the ancient world and Egypt's modern gateway to the Mediterranean. The country goes to the polls today to elect a new parliament in a ballot widely condemned by human rights groups as being blatantly rigged in favour of Mubarak's ruling NDP party, and which has been marred by violent clashes on the street between government security services and opposition supporters.

With more than 1,200 Muslim Brotherhood supporters arrested in recent weeks and prominent dissidents, including former UN nuclear inspectorate chief Mohamed ElBaradei, calling for a boycott of the vote, international analysts are watching this election closely – not for the final results, but to pick up clues about Egypt's political direction as it enters the final days of Mubarak's reign. The three-decade-long leadership of the 82-year-old president, who is believed to be seriously ill, could come to an end next year when a presidential poll is scheduled. Possible successors, including his son Gamal, are jockeying for position.

But as more than 50,000 polling stations open today, allegations of police torture are disrupting the government's carefully constructed narrative of a nation on the brink of democratic reform. "These are the stories our regime does not want you to hear," says Ahmed Nassar, a lawyer who has represented victims of police abuse and tried unsuccessfully to get his name on this year's parliamentary ballot paper. "On the streets of Alexandria these days, brutality counts for more than the law."

Nassar's professional attentions in recent months have been focused in one particular direction: Sidi Gabr police station in Alexandria's most populous neighbourhood. It was from this squat, yellow, two-storey building that two officers headed out in June to pay a visit to Khaled Said, a reclusive young Egyptian who had just posted a secret video online seemingly showing local police officers dividing up the spoils of a drugs bust. They found the 28-year-old in an internet cafe by his house, just off the harbour. Twenty minutes later he was dead, his head smashed against a marble staircase in the lobby of the building next door.

The killing ignited a storm of protest in Egypt, bringing thousands on to the streets. Amid mounting pressure, the government – which initially insisted that Said had died of a self-inflicted drugs overdose – eventually agreed to prosecute the two officers involved, although not on a charge of murder, as Said's family had demanded. As the trial got under way, many believed that the officers of Sidi Gabr police station would lie low and attempt to avoid controversy for a while. They were wrong.

The Observer has collected testimony from several people in Alexandria alleging that they have been tortured by officers from Sidi Gabr over the past five months. Some, such as 30-year-old science lecturer Mohamed Tarek, are active dissidents. Others, such as Mohamed Ibrahim, have nothing to do with politics and were seemingly plucked off the street at random.

In the cramped apartment he shares with his elderly mother, Ibrahim, a 29-year-old electrician, tells how a group of officers bundled him into a Toyota van last month while he was talking on his mobile in the street. He says he was taken to the upper floor of Sidi Gabr police station, where they stretched out his leg on the landing and then stamped on it, breaking it in two places. "I immediately felt numb and let out a scream, but it was like shouting into the desert," claims Ibrahim. "Nothing I could say had any impact; they just kept yelling the most terrible insults, kept on proving their power over me."

Stories such as Ibrahim's, who says he was never accused of any crime and was released with no explanation the following day, are all too familiar in Alexandria. "We have no sense of security on the streets and most of my friends are scared to even walk past the police building – they refer to it as the Sidi Gabr butchery," says Mohamed Abdelfattah, a journalist and film-maker who has closely followed incidents of police abuse in the city.

Victims who have attempted to hold their tormentors accountable through the courts have found themselves the subject of intense harassment from security services; Ibrahim says he was told by police that "we know how to silence people like you", while Said's family have been accused in state-run newspapers of being drug-dealers and Zionist sympathisers. The trial of his alleged killers is still going on.

According to campaigners, the atrocities of Sidi Gabr are not anomalous, nor do they stem from the deeds of renegade officers acting in defiance of orders. "We are beyond the stage of talking about police abuse and murder as isolated human rights abuses; all the evidence points to this being a systematic state policy," says Aida Seif El Dawla, a founder of the El Nadeem Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture. "The Mubarak regime relies on its security apparatus absolutely for its survival, because they have nothing else to fall back on; the government's popular legitimacy is non-existent."

Tarek, who says he was beaten repeatedly by police and threatened with rape and electrocution after being picked up at an anti-torture demonstration, thinks the authorities believe they can only sustain power by keeping the population in a state of terror. "Sidi Gabr is just the tip of the iceberg," he says. "At the Khaled Said protests, people were singing 'down with Hosni Mubarak' and their only weapon against this sentiment is fear.”

Nassar says Alexandria's dark record of police corruption is a product of the regime's long-held contempt for the rule of law – the same malaise that lies behind today’s exercise in extensively-documented electoral fraud. In 1981 the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and consequent rise to power of Hosni Mubarak triggered the activation of Egypt’s Emergency Law, which suspends a wide range of civil liberties and largely immunises the security services from judicial oversight; the ‘temporary’ legislation has been kept in place ever since.

"This entire political elite is founded on the violation of the rule of law," says Nassar, who had his candidacy for parliament rejected by the local authorities with no official justification. Ignoring calls from some leading dissidents to boycott the poll, Nassar had planned to base his campaign around raising voter awareness of an individual's legal rights in the face of police abuse; each of his leaflets featured the line "you are an eyewitness" emblazoned across the page. "State violence defiles not just the law but people's minds too; they see themselves and society as detached from the state and its processes. That's why so few people will vote in these elections; they know the results are fixed, but also they feel that the whole system is something to stay away from."

In Khaled Said’s home his sister Zahraa showed me the intricate sound system that her brother had hooked up from old radios and car batteries, and on which he would practice rapping into the early hours. He was a shy and quiet man, devoted to his pet cats and preferring to fly kites on the corniche than spend time with friends. “He never seemed interested in politics at all,” she said. It was only after his death that the family found several videos depicting Said performing self-penned anti-government songs.

“It wasn’t just a beating gone wrong, it was a public execution,” claims his mother. “The officer was heard by witnesses phoning his superior and saying ‘it’s done, the issue is over’. They killed him in broad daylight, and now they are going after young people everywhere. The youth have declared ‘We are all Khaled Said’, that’s their slogan, and the police are responding by saying ‘yes you are – we will deal with you like we dealt with him’.”

Ahmed Shaaban was held at Sidi Gabr police station for five days before his corpse was, according to police, fished out from the Mahmoudia canal. Three weeks ago the 19 year old was on his way to a wedding when he was stopped at a police checkpoint; his family never saw him alive again. Unlike Khaled Said’s relatives, the family are not middle-class and are hence more vulnerable to police intimidation; since Shaaban’s uncle first criticised the president on tape, he has stopped publicly questioning the official account of his nephew’s death. “We have nothing to do with all this, and we accuse no one,” he told me over the phone this week. “The family are broken,” says Mohamed Abdelfattah, who has met them on several occasions. “Ahmed has been taken from them, and they’re terrified.”

Tonight Egypt’s High Elections Commission will announce the results of the parliamentary poll, heralding the start of a year of political volatility in the Arab World’s biggest nation. But for many Alexandrians, the list of winners and losers printed in tomorrow’s papers will have little relevance to the struggles they face in their daily lives. “Change will not come from this government’s version of democracy, it will come in the shape of a tidal wave from below,” said Zahraa Said as she stood on her brother’s balcony. “Maybe the torture and murders carried out by our policemen will set that tidal wave in motion.”

Trouble ahead for Egypt's Islamist opposition

2010-11-27T15:09:00.005+02:00

-Taken from Monocle
-Cairo - November 2010

Times are tough for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s leading organised opposition movement and progenitor of several powerful Islamist groups across the Arab World.

With Egyptians heading to the polls tomorrow to theoretically elect a new parliament, the Brotherhood have faced a brutal crackdown on their activities by the state that has seen over a thousand activists arrested, scores of candidates being denied a place on the ballot paper, and violent clashes on the streets of major cities like Alexandria where police have fired tear gas and live ammunition at the group’s supporters.

It’s little wonder that independent NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are queuing up to condemn the poll as a stage-managed farce, in which the chances of citizens being able to exercise a free and fair vote stand at virtually zero. “Through their brutal attacks on us, the [ruling] NDP party have revealed their utter contempt for the rule of law,” says Medhat El Haddad, a Brotherhood parliamentarian in Egypt’s Upper House. “What’s happening on Sunday is not an election. It’s a mockery.”

But the Brotherhood’s problems go far deeper than tomorrow’s blatantly-rigged ballot. Long misrepresented in the western press as a monolithic and fundamentalist force, the Ikhwan – as the Brothers are called in Arabic – are actually a Janus-faced beast, blending together a series of ideological strands and devoting as much of their time to social welfare programmes as they do to campaigning in the political arena.

As pressure on the group is ratcheted up by the regime of ailing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, internal divisions are now bubbling up to the surface – especially over the decision to participate in these elections at all. The Brotherhood ignored calls by prominent secular dissidents to boycott the poll, but an ‘opposition front’ within the movement is now challenging the leadership over that move and urging Ikhwan candidates – who have to technically stand as independents to circumvent a ban on religious parties – to withdraw from the race.

Part of the problem lies in the Brotherhood’s uncertainty over what it actually stands for. Battle-lines are drawn between ‘conservatives’ and ‘reformers’ over issues like female circumcision, tolerance of Egypt’s Christian minority, and the thorny matter of how strongly the group should be challenging the government. Mubarak’s international legitimacy rests largely on his symbiotic relationship with the Muslim Brothers; without the Ikhwan as an ever-present ‘threat’ to the region’s stability which only he can contain, the 82 year old dictator – born in the same year the Brotherhood was founded – would lose much of his western support.

Ultimately, the Brotherhood is torn between political participation and religious evangelism; some members believe that spreading the message of Islam should be merely a tool for gaining power, whilst others insist that political power is merely a steppingstone to the ultimate goal of spiritually transforming the country.  

As one Ikhwan election campaign manager told me last week, “When people ask me whether the Brotherhood is going through a crisis, my answer is that I don’t really know what the Brotherhood is. Is it us, here, shouting slogans in the street? Or is it a group of students quietly reading their Qurans in a mosque? To be honest, I think none of us are sure.”

Egypt's elections: 'fixed ballot' offers drama in everything but the outcome

2010-11-22T19:11:00.009+02:00

Muslim Brotherhood and rivals raise profiles for Sunday's vote, but without hope of unseating ruling NDP

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - November 2010

The cramped alleys of Kirdasa don’t lend themselves to easy vehicular passage; with a carpet of broken and dusty rocks below and a tangle of casually-strung electricity cables above, even donkey carts find it tricky to negotiate the town’s narrow twists and turns. But that hasn’t stopped Abdel Salaam Bashandi’s campaign bus – a bright-red pickup truck adorned with giant posters and a creaking sound system – from plunging precariously into the warren.

‘Islam is the solution – wake up and vote on November 28!’ blares the loudspeaker as hundreds of well-wishers crowd at their doorways to shake hands with Bashandi, a bespectacled book publisher in his early 50s. “We have great, great hopes of this poll,” grins the Muslim Brotherhood candidate amidst the commotion. “Of course this isn’t about winning the seat. The regime won’t allow such a thing, that’s to be expected.”

Welcome to the bizarre world of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, where thousands of candidates from dozens of parties are competing for hundreds of parliamentary seats – all safe in the knowledge that their campaigning will have virtually no impact on the final result. “No one thinks parliamentary elections in Egypt are democratic or even semi-democratic,” says Mona El-Ghobashy, a political scientist specialising in Egyptian affairs. “The elections do not determine who governs. They are not free and fair. They install a parliament with no power to check the president … And citizens know that elections are rigged, with polling places often blocked off by baton-wielding police, so few of them vote.”

Yet despite the blatant fraud accompanying what is theoretically one of the largest democratic exercises in the Middle East, these elections still matter deeply to a plethora of political forces – from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), who are guaranteed to emerge from the ballot with a landslide majority in parliament, to a wide range of opposition movements exploiting the poll to mobilise local support bases and raise their party’s profile.

For political observers within Egypt and beyond, Sunday’s vote promises something else too – a rare and valuable insight into the drama over who will succeed the country’s ill and ageing president, himself up for re-election next year.

Kirdasa, a palm-fringed suburb to the west of Cairo, offers a unique window onto the surreal dynamics of this poll. Once a rural village far-flung from the chaos of the capital, Cairo’s unstoppable urban sprawl has now enveloped the town completely; in recent years migration from the countryside has sent population levels soaring, making this electoral district one of the biggest – and most hotly-contested – in the country.

Every major party is running a candidate here, but few of Kirdasa’s residents have been enthused by the campaign. Although the area laps up to the edge of the 4,500-year-old Giza pyramids, it is this constituency's more modern neighbourhoods, and the contrast between them, that best explains why so many voters feel excluded from political life. Kirdasa's vast electoral district encompasses gated compounds for the rich alongside redbrick settlements for the poor, the type of neighbourhood where six in ten Cairenes now reside and a stark illustration of the yawning social chasm that has come to epitomise Mubarak's Egypt.

“Our circumstances don’t allow for politics; we’re living on the breadline,” claims Alaa Khalil, a 37 year-old welder and Kirdasa native. “The sons of Egypt are in crisis right now: food prices are spiralling, our incomes are going down, and we have almost no means with which to feed our kids. Elections may have some value for the ‘big sharks’, but not for us.”

Khalil’s cynicism is understandable. Kirdasa – the site of a deadly showdown between Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military police and Islamist protestors back in 1965 – has long been marginalised from Egypt’s civil and political centre; viewed by the government as a potential opposition stronghold, no local has ever been allowed to become a security officer or hold any senior position within the state bureaucracy.

At the last parliamentary elections in 2005 Bashandi – who in common with other Muslim Brotherhood candidates is forced to run as an independent to circumvent a legal ban on religious parties – claims to have won a majority of 12,000 votes, a figure backed up by a number of independent sources; the authorities refused to accept the ballot count and instead declared his rival NDP candidate the winner. Later that evening riot police stormed the town, tear-gassing hundreds of angry youths protesting in the streets.

This time around few of Bashandi’s supporters believe he will get the chance to represent them in parliament, regardless of the final vote tally – five of them have already been detained by the security services, adding to the 1,200 Muslim Brotherhood activists arrested nationally in the run-up to these elections. In a damning 37-page report detailing a wide range of oppressive measures executed by the Egyptian government in recent weeks, Amnesty International concluded that “the pattern being established is one that is already familiar from previous elections, which were carried out amid, and marred by, serious human rights violations.”

It is this sort of political repression that led a host of prominent dissidents, including former UN nuclear weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei, to call for a boycott of these elections – a call the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as a number of legally-sanctioned secular opposition parties who offer no real challenge to the political status quo, have chosen to ignore.

“What is happening right now is the actual rigging of the vote,” Saad el-Katatni, a prominent Brotherhood lawmaker, announced in a press conference this morning. “The regime is sending a message that there will be no election … [but] this is a political and constitutional struggle and the street is with the Brotherhood and we will not let them down.”

“In normal circumstances we are not allowed to give lectures or hold conferences; we’re deprived of all opportunities to promote our beliefs and connect with the community,” explains Bashandi, whose father was a Brotherhood founder in this area. “During election time, those opportunities sometimes arise, so to remove ourselves from that process altogether would be illogical.” Judging by the adulation he receives on the streets, Bashandi’s anti-corruption and pro-local services message is clearly finding an audience, despite widespread frustration at the inequities of the voting process.

But Sunday’s vote isn’t only a litmus test for Egypt’s opposition movements, as they seek to refine their divergent tactics in advance of the presidential ballot in 2011. It’s also a critical moment for the NDP, who in light of Mubarak’s waning health are beginning a search for his successor – the future leader of the biggest nation in the Arab World. Long considered to be the heir-apparent to his father, Mubarak’s son Gamal has recently been forced to publicly row back from suggestions that he might inherit power, as competing factions within the NDP clash over Egypt’s post-Mubarak future.

Those internecine struggles have put the ruling party into the strange position of running several official candidates for the same seat in some districts, including Kirdasa where two formal NDP candidates and one other NDP member are both lining up against Bashandi. Some disaffected elements of the local NDP are even throwing their weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood man, according to local sources.

“It’s impossible to separate the coming parliamentary elections from the 2011 presidential race,” says Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. “The NDP’s latest decision to have multiple candidates compete over single seats means the internal party battle has moved from ‘behind the scenes’ to the front lines of elections.”

And so Egypt will elect its parliament this week with a collective shrug from the majority of its population, whilst below the surface a series of developments help reshape the political trajectory of one of the west’s closest allies in the Middle East. For at least one voter in Kirdasa though, polling day cannot come too soon.

“This is my first election and I believe it could be free, it has to be free – the government tells us we live in a democracy so let them prove it,” says Sara Moustafa, a 19 year old student. “We have lived our entire lives under Mubarak and the NDP but Egypt is on the brink of something big over the next year. Times are changing; those at the top may think we are too young to have an opinion, but here we are. They’ll see.”

[The National Democratic Party were invited to comment on this article, but declined to respond.]

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MEDIA MUTED

Egypt’s vibrant independent media sector has been dealt a series of blows in the run-up to this year’s parliamentary elections, with TV stations shut down, critical chatshows hauled off air, outspoken columnists and newspaper editors forced out of their jobs, and new regulations bringing mass SMS messaging and live broadcasts firmly under state control. Despite government assurances the freedom of expression will not be restricted as the country enters a year of intense political uncertainty, rights groups have lashed out at a ‘climate of terror’ created by the state, in which dissident voices are excluded from public debate. “At a time when the free flow of political information takes on heightened significance, the government is intent on controlling all sources of alternative knowledge,” warned prominent Egyptian blogger Baheyya last month.

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Exodus: A Sea and its People Evaporate

2010-11-21T15:20:00.000+02:00

In Karakalpakstan, an obscure corner of central Asia where the waters of the Aral Sea have turned to desert, Jack Shenker finds a nation fleeing ecological disaster and authoritarian rule

-Published in Prospect, The National, E Magazine and Internazionale
-Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan - 2009-2010

-Original photography by Jason Larkin

Ziyo hunts by day and flies by night, with a polished Winchester shotgun tucked under one arm and a cigarette between his lips. The van he drives can fit eight to ten people, sometimes twelve at a push, and for the past 15 years it’s nearly always been full for the border run. Under the cover of darkness Ziyo wends his human cargo out past empty houses; they are isolated at first but then tumble together into hamlets, all weather-cowed and crumbling-stone. No one talks. The desert watchtowers which mark the beginning of Kazakhstan are still thirteen hours away, and until they are reached there is little to do but stare out of the window as the salty landscape rolls on by in the gloom, coarse and jagged as if it had been ripped through with an old razor. Ziyo will return here; most of his passengers will not. Tonight, as on so many other nights in this obscure corner of the world, a homeland is being emptied of its people.

No one knows exactly how many have left Karakalpakstan, a former Soviet Republic nestled deep within the bizarre confluence of ruler-straight lines and flamboyant squiggles that make up the map of Central Asia. Official figures put it at over 50,000 in the last ten years alone – roughly 10% of the population – though this figure doesn’t include the passengers in Ziyo’s van, or the vans of dozens of other people smugglers like him, who pay around $500 each to obtain falsified passports from corrupt government officials and then slip out under the radar of the authorities, voyaging north to a new life. But although the numbers behind this exodus are disputed, the reasons for it are clearer. Within a couple of hours of setting off from their departure point – a nondescript village in one of the southern frontier provinces near Turkmenistan – Ziyo and his companions will pass within a hundred miles of what scientists have called the largest anthropogenic ecological disaster of the 20th century, a man-made climate catastrophe so severe that it has devastated the economy, health and community fabric of an entire society for generations to come. Locals simply know it as the Aral Ten’iz – a sea which fled its shores.

On their way out to the Kazakh border Ziyo’s van will pass something else too: a prim neatly-trimmed square in the Karakalpak capital of Nukus. There two flags flutter in the wind; one is that of Karakalpakstan, and the other is the flag of Uzbekistan, de facto custodians of this semi-autonomous republic since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The writing above the doorway of Karakalpakstan’s nearby parliament building is in Uzbek first and Karakalpak second, telling passers-by everything they need to know about the balance of power within this uneasy coupling of nations. This story is not unique; the personal identity crises, communal resentments and violent backlashes that have flowed from Uzbekistan’s iron-fisted control of its neighbour form a familiar echo of countless other nationalist conflicts around the globe. Nor is climactic environmental disaster particular to this region, though few other places have suffered from it quite so relentlessly. Yet it’s only here, in this overlooked slice of distant, desiccated farmland, where two of the biggest challenges looming over 21st century humankind – ecological change and fragmented, exclusionary nationalism – have become irrevocably enmeshed.

Deep within the delta of the ancient Oxus river, the largely bone-dry path of which Ziyo is now shepherding his midnight flock down, Karakalpakstan – a nation which few have heard of and which was declared by one writer to be ‘the worst place in the world’ – may just be offering the rest of the planet a foretaste of its future.

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Nukus is a stark, space-flooded city that magnifies the smallness of its occupants. Its central squares are splotched with trees and criss-crossed with paths wide enough to accommodate a military parade; they stretch off into infinity, only occasionally interrupted by signs of activity – a cluster of schoolgirls, the empty faded-neon aqua-park, a clutch of corrugated iron garages where a lone man is sorting through empty vodka bottles. “Love is dead”, reads the graffiti on one makeshift metal wall. “Long live Linkin’ Park”.

Sulton has lived in Nukus his whole life and knows its secrets; after sitting me down in his plain, white-walled living room, where a display case shows off the best family china and a single, dusty globe, he instinctively unplugged the telephone from the wall before talking. “Everywhere is bugged,” he explained, jerking his thumb vaguely in the direction of Jaslyk, a small town two hundred miles away where a ‘severe regime’ prison houses hundreds of Uzbek President Karimov’s political enemies, some of whom have reportedly been boiled to death. Jaslyk is referred to locally as a gulag, the place from which no one ever returns. It’s only one cog in a much larger Uzbek security apparatus that ruthlessly suppresses domestic opposition to Karimov’s ruling clique and has established, according to Human Rights Watch, a ‘culture of impunity for torture’. “If they catch me talking, I go there and don’t come back,” said Sulton simply.

Like most of the Karakalpaks I meet, Sulton is friendly in a detached, somewhat apprehensive way. At 44, he’s old enough to have served under the Red Army and proudly recounts his experiences of guarding missile bases as far north as Siberia. But contact with the outside world has come to Sulton in scattered fragments: a pirate Hollywood movie here, a Russian TV news snippet there, a fencing tournament he competed in last year. By and large the universe beyond Karakalpakstan’s borders remains shrouded in fog for its citizens, penetrated only by a few very specific torch-beams. The opposite is true as well; outsiders can be afforded rare and enchanting insights into Karakalpak society, but mostly Karakalpakstan feels closed and private, dominated by a Soviet-era distrust of the other.

As I followed Sulton out of his house and into a sunset-drenched Nukus, the city threw up a tantalising glimpse of its organs, the heft and muddle of daily life: a bout of shoving at the marketplace; the chaotic unloading of a truckful of squashes in the dusty shadow of a apartment block; the eerie weave of the town’s strange central heating pipes, which snake their way silently and unapologetically through the streets at head height, clad in glistening silver insulation and appearing curiously like a single inverted vein, plucked from beneath the pavement’s concrete skin and sewn back on top of it with neat, surgical precision. But for the most part this looked like a world sealed shut: buildings faceless and anonymous, faces expressionless, streets tight-lipped and solemn as they radiated out in autumnal gold from Independence Square.

We headed out south to the cotton fields. On the way we passed numerous checkpoints; international journalists are effectively barred from the country, particularly sensitive areas like Karakalpakstan, and each time soldiers flagged down our creaking Volga, Sulton gulped nervously. “It’s like we’re at war,” he grimaced, “and they’re winning.” Karakalpaks are not the only recipients of Karimov’s widely-documented and liberally-dispensed brand of political terror; Uzbeks themselves were mowed down in their hundreds by government forces after an anti-Karimov uprising in the eastern district of Andijan back in 2005. But here in Karakalpakstan there is a different current of fear, stemming primarily from the timeless insecurity of exclusion. Karakalpaks, a people who trace their roots back three millennia to ancient Aral Sea marsh-dwellers, are culturally and linguistically closer to their Kazakh neighbours than they are to Uzbekistan. They have their own language, customs and dress – ‘Karakalpak’ literally means ‘black hat’, a reference to the distinctive traditional headwear which marked this ethnic group out from other surrounding peoples – and they were considered an autonomous socialist republic under the USSR for many years, as well as being briefly part of the Kazakh SSR.

Although today the modern republic of Karakalpakstan is populated by many more Kazakhs and Uzbeks than it is by Karakalpaks themselves, the nation has an identity entirely separate to that of Uzbekistan, the country it is now engulfed by, which helps explain the overwhelming presence of soldiers and policeman on the streets and the undercover intelligence agents in every village. The Uzbek government in Tashkent is desperately twitchy about any hint of independent Karakalpak nationalism.

Just such a movement, known as the Khalk Mapi, broke out in the 1990s and was brutally crushed by Karimov’s troops; many experts think the potential for instability in Karakalpakstan remains high, and that any conflict there would have huge repercussions across the region. A Radio Free Europe dispatch last year claimed a new Karakalpak separatist group was whipping up nationalist sentiment and accusing the Uzbek government of genocide against the Karakalpak people. No one has been able to corroborate the report though, and the story’s main source has since been arrested.

“Karakalpaks see themselves as physically and politically marginalised,” says Reuel Hanks, a professor from Oklahoma University who has studied Karakalpakstan closely. “In a region already beset by civil war, ethnic rivalries and enormous economic and environmental challenges ... the political geography is likely to remain mutable and fragile for some time.” For now Karakalpakstan, which lies to the far west of Uzbekistan, retains the outward shell of an autonomous state and boasts its own flag, parliament and constitution which theoretically allows for a referendum on secession from Uzbekistan at any time.

Like so many gaudy baubles on a plastic tree though, these accessories are nothing but political gimmicks; Karakalpak leaders are hand-picked by Karimov, the Uzbek army is everywhere and no one in Tashkent is in any mood to contemplate independence for their troublesome little brother. Since Stalin divided up the old region of Turkestan into republics based on ‘nationality’, each territory has worked tirelessly to construct a narrative of cultural and political unity in an effort to legitimise their claims to a ‘separate space’ from their neighbours, a process which accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of independent nation states in the region.

Breakaway enclaves pose a mortal threat to that fragile legitimacy; one doesn’t have to look far in the shadows of the former USSR – South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya – to find populations who have rejected the nation-state borders imposed upon them from above. Karimov, a 71 year old dictator who ruled Uzbekistan under the Soviets before improbably restyling himself as an anti-Russian freedom fighter as the USSR cracked apart, doesn’t want a repeat performance in his own backyard. As the city’s low-rise suburbs gave way to fields, I asked Sulton about opposition activists. “There aren’t any,” he replied flatly, staring out the window. “No demonstrations, no protests, no critical songs or books. Nothing.”

The story of Karakalpakstan starts and ends in cotton, with greed, forced labour and disaster stitched in between. We sped past mountains of ‘white gold’ piling up in the district collection points, where farmers drop off cotton by the tonne in accordance with government directives. Chances are that most of the cotton in your wardrobe originated here; Uzbekistan is the world’s second-largest cotton exporter and unlike its neighbours, the industry remains almost entirely in the hands of the state. The price paid to growers is fixed each year by ministers – 80 Uzbek som per kilo in 2009, far below what the flossy thread fetches in the open market across the border in Kazakhstan – and in Karakalpakstan the annual increases have failed to keep pace with the spiralling cost of living. Unemployment is rampant, and poverty – often delicately shrouded behind the paper employment offered by collective farms, many of which lie dormant for much of the year – is increasingly pervasive.

The fields were bleached-brown and dull, except when sprinkled with a riot of moving colour – the bright clothing of schoolchildren who, like their peers across Uzbekistan, spend every day of every Autumn picking the cotton harvest. NGOs estimate that 50% of Uzbek’s cotton exports are the fruit of child labour, and there is nothing voluntary about the work; for two or three months a year the education system – from schools to universities – shuts down en masse as teachers lead their young charges out into the crops. Everyone from doctors to civil servants also follows suit; on one occasion when I went to interview the director of a prestigious Karakalpak medical institute, I was informed by the secretary that she was out supervising the cotton harvest.

We stopped at one field and struck up a conversation with the students. They had been working eight hour days for fifty days now, but were happy; the harvest was a great opportunity to escape the classroom and play and flirt in the countryside. It took a while for the chinks to appear. I asked Sabina, a 16 year old girl, about her plans for the future and a stream of excited, broken English bubbled out as she detailed her dream of being a transport dispatcher. Her teacher, standing behind her, shook his head sadly. “There’ll be no job available when she graduates,” he told me when she was out of earshot. “Not for her, not for anyone.” I ask the pickers whether they know of anyone leaving Karakalpakstan because of the lack of work and the dire state of the economy. Every single one of them nodded, including Sabina – her father had emigrated to Kazakhstan earlier this year. The group broke up as someone spotted a security officer from the local government ‘hokkim’ swing down the dirt track towards us. Sulton and I beat a hasty retreat.

Cotton lies at the heart of the only thing ever to have thrust a reluctant Karakalpakstan on to the global map – the awesome and terrible sight of one of the world’s biggest inland bodies of water quite literally disappearing into thin air. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Aral Sea was Central Asia’s baby blue pride; 42,000 square miles of saline waves, abundant fish and island resorts which attracted Russia’s rich and beautiful for their summer holidaying. There were also cotton fields fanning out from its shoreline, and these rolling acres of profit were to be the sea’s downfall. In the 1940s work begun on irrigation canals that diverted water from the sea’s two main tributaries – the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers – into the fields, boosting the harvest and leaving less and less water every year arriving in the Aral basin.

By the 1960s the Aral was losing up to 60 cubic kilometres of water annually; by the 1980s, the level of the sea was dropping almost 10cm a month. Geologists and environmentalists flocked to witness and condemn the decay, but the architects of this grotesque transformation were unmoved. “Nature’s error” was how one Soviet engineer dismissed the sea; the hubris of those who thought they could rewire an ecosystem would come back to haunt the dead sea’s victims later. Today the sea has shrunk to a mere 10% of its original size, leaving in its wake the world’s most recently-formed desert, from which 200,000 tonnes of salt and sand are whipped up by the wind each day and dumped over Karakalpakstan and other nearby regions. Lung-related diseases in the republic are three times higher than the Uzbek average; the fishing industry, Karakalpakstan’s financial lifeblood, has collapsed.

The Aral Sea disaster didn’t just plunge Karakalpakstan into turmoil. It also reshaped how Karakalpaks view themselves in a series of subtle ways. The republic’s Kazakh population has returned to their ethnic homeland in droves, attracted by a Kazakh government-sponsored ‘oralman’ programme encouraging the immigration of its diaspora. In some villages I visited, entire Kazakh-language schools had simply shut down because every pupil had left. The Aral also stretches across the border up into Kazakhstan, and in its northern stretches a series of new dam projects are salvaging the sea there, fuelling further optimism in what is already a relatively vibrant economy. It is no coincidence that the wholesale movement of a population from one side of this once-mighty lake to the other mirrors nature’s contrasting fortunes; almost any Kazakhs who can leave are doing so, however wrenching the transition may be. “At my age, it’s hard to adapt to a new climate,” I was told by one Karakalpak-born Kazakh farmer whose two younger brothers had already left for Kazakhstan and who was close to following in their footsteps. “I’m proud to be a Karakalpak; this is my land, and who wants to change their motherland? But there are no jobs. It’s inevitable.”

Karakalpak Kazakhs who touch down one morning in the Kazakh capital of Almaty with their suitcases in tow are expected to rapidly discard one identity like an old jumper and pull on a new one. The oralman programme’s narrative is that these new arrivals are reconnecting with a long-severed historical attachment with the Kazakh nation, even though many of them, just like their forefathers, will have never seen Kazakhstan before in their lives. Karakalpakstan’s environmental mutation hasn’t just remodelled the ground; it’s remoulded people’s minds and recalibrated their histories. In this region, said travel writers Matthew and Macleod, “only the past is as unpredictable as the future.”

For ethnic Karakalpaks, the choices are even harder. Many have moved to Uzbekistan and stayed there; others use fixers like Ziyo, the people smuggler, to alter the ethnicity printed on their passports so that they too can appear Kazakh and escape across the border. When they make it to Almaty they often find that communal resentments are rife between the Kazakh-born Kazakhs and the first-generation immigrants; as ‘fake’ immigrants the ethnic Karakalpaks go straight to the bottom of the social pile, suddenly looked down upon by those who, back in Karakalpakstan, they used to call neighbours. Those left behind in Karakalpakstan are struggling to come to terms with this transformation in Karakalpak society; are those that have fled traitors or trailblazers, and should they be condemned or emulated? Some claim the route to economic empowerment lies with closer integration with Uzbekistan; others believe that this will lead to the death of Karakalpakstan as a nation and instead advocate a fight for more autonomy.

No matter what their stance though, everyone, everywhere feels a sense of communal identity being whittled away. It’s being spirited across borders, and it’s being spirited behind closed doors. Sulton tells me of his brother, the former manager of a successful aviation dealership until the government confiscated it from him in the mid-90s. He now scrapes together a living in his back garden putting together go-karts from old motorbike parts and selling them on to the thrill-seeking Kazakh nouveau riche; being hidden from view is a prized asset in a place where the sinewy tendons of authority tend to bring more harm than good to those they touch. And it’s being spirited into graves, the fate of those who lose the long struggle against lung cancer and tuberculosis.

For many, all these tensions simply resolve themselves in a vaguely articulated sense of bitterness at the status quo, where life carries on as best it can and anger shines through only in the odd nervous joke and a rare flash of emotion. That night I slept in a local village at the home of a Karakalpak man in his mid 60s, named Farhod. As we delved into his old black and white photo albums stuffed with stiffly formal poses of marriage and war, the television flickered in the background. “You know what the Russians say,” whispered Farhod to me conspiratorially as he poured out another cup of green tea. “‘If you want to see heaven, watch Uzbek TV; if you want to see hell, go to Tashkent.’” The words were met by everyone in the room with uproarious laughter that soon gave way to quiet nodding.

“Did you hear the one about the Russian, the Kazakh and the Kyrgyz man all arguing over who would cry the most if a plane crashed whilst all three of their presidents were on board?” grinned Ziyo, who’d joined us for dinner. “’I’d shed the most tears,’ insisted the Russian. ‘No, no, I’d be far sadder than you,’ countered the Kazakh. ‘Rubbish, such a loss would make me inconsolable,’ replied the Kyrgyz. In the end they turned to a Karakalpak friend who had been sitting quietly in the corner. ‘You’re all wrong,’ he said. ‘I’d cry the most, because President Karimov wasn’t on board.’”

The following afternoon Farhod and Ziyo took me out hunting. Biblically-proportioned swarms of mosquitoes tracked us through the strange and fluffy landscape, the stillness of which was broken every few minutes by a volley of shotgun cartridges and the dull thud of a pheasant hitting the ground. Both men looked jovial in their army fatigues; they shared a final cigarette together on the bonnet of Farhod’s car as bloodstains seeped out of Ziyo’s canvas bag and the sun began to drop achingly slowly across a shimmering-wheat horizon. On our way back we passed mile upon mile of desert scrubland, formerly fertile ground now pockmarked with salty encrustations, a by-product of the Aral’s disappearing act.

Then out of nowhere a small shock of golden yellow appeared; trees so vivid by the roadside that each leaf seemed to have its own source of evening twilight. Apart from us, the road was completely deserted. Farhod pulled over the car and got out to admire the scene, tucking his red shirt carefully into his trousers and pulling on his deerstalker hat. After a few minutes fingering the leaves silently he suddenly exploded into gleeful shouts. “Svobda, svobda!” he yelled in Russian, dancing across the tarmac. “This is beauty! This is freedom!”

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Eldor was late. I’d been standing at a level crossing on the outskirts of Nukus for an hour in the mid-morning heat when he finally showed, just as I was staring up at one of President Karimov’s ubiquitous propaganda signs tacked onto the signal post. ‘Uzbekistan has a wonderful future’ it read in big stencilled letters. It was partly obscured by a montage of Western Union money transfer adverts, all aimed at those receiving money from relatives long-departed from the country.“What’s up my niggers?” boomed an American accent behind me, delivering the first of many ‘Bachelor Party 2’ quotes that would clatter discordantly over my ears for the rest of the day.

Eldor was part of a small but conspicuous breed of Karakalpaks who spoke English, were well connected and who generally landed plumb government contracts which cushioned them from the rest of the republic’s economic woes. They hung out in places like Merlion, the city’s plushest eatery. It had dark red walls and fake marble tabletops and a Sinatra lookalike in the corner who crooned listlessly along to an Uzbek pop track. It’s where I first met Eldor and his friends. They all got their jobs through their fathers – a position in one of the Karakalpak ministries, a management role at a local asphalt company, a distributor for an Uzbek brewery – and they all issued blandly formulaic responses to my questions about Karakalpakstan’s predicament. The Aral Sea issue is bad, but the water might come back. Political problems exist, but Uzbekistan’s democracy is young and progressing steadily.

Some of this optimism was genuine – one suit-clad 22 year old mentioned the return of several Karakalpak Kazakh émigrés who couldn’t find jobs across the border, and also highlighted the opening of a new canning factory in Qazaqdarya, suggesting an industry that had been defunct for decades might now be struggling back to life. But for the most part these answers floated straight out of a bubble of elite contentment, mouthed by those who elected only to see the positives. With no free media in Karakalpakstan or Uzbekistan, ignorance and apathy is an easy choice for the rich. Mid-conversation the restaurant lights suddenly disappeared and without warning lasers fired out from all sides of the room. Everyone abandoned their meals wordlessly and hit the dance-floor for a surreal half hour of pulsing, heaving energy. Then the lights came back up, the Sinatra lookalike resumed his station, and each reveller returned to their seat as if nothing had happened. “Why are they complaining?” asked a panting Eldor, in response to my pre-dance question about critics of the government. “If they worked a bit harder they would move upwards.”

Now Eldor and I were speeding weightlessly across Karakalpakstan’s more northerly countryside on the way to pay a visit to one of these critics, his pasha-disco throbbing car a little balloon of modernity in this endlessly antiquated landscape. Our destination was one of the villages in the Qazaqdarya region, which bordered on to the old shores of the Aral Sea. The route took us across the dilapidated Amu Darya, where a bridge had fallen in. We joined the queue for a tiny floating pontoon, already laden with a jeep, a microbus and 25 chatty revellers on their way to a wedding; the men in dark suits, the women all kitted out in the bright red and gold of traditional Karakalpak marriage-wear. This river was once the legendary Oxus, a passage so vast and fearsome that it took Alexander the Great’s army five days to cross it. The pontoon, pulled along by a grizzled man clutching a rope, made the same trip in about ten minutes; today the river snakes through a channel half the size of the valley carved out for it.

Nazar was waiting for us in his village, which lay on the banks of a green canal in the middle of nowhere. It was a simple, graceful little place, full of reed and stick fences, grazing lambs and goats, and home-made barges floating softly back and forth across the water. It was also in the grip of gangsters, according to Nazar; he pointed some of them out to us as he led us to his family home. They were young, well-built men with caps drawn low over their faces, and were busy chatting to a couple of local government security agents who were known for extorting money from villagers. Later one of these agents drunkenly staggered by as I took a stroll through the fields, paying me no heed but bellowing into a mobile phone: “I’ll kill you mother-fucker, I’ll find you and kill you.” A girlfriend tottered along behind, giggling. Further on by the canal, an old man in a farmer’s cap stormed past. “Where are you, bitch?” he yelled, reeking of booze.

Nazar is 38 and works as a public schoolteacher. When we met he was already engaged in numerous battles with his superiors over the non-payment of wages; he theoretically earns $120 a month, on which it’s a challenge to support his wife and their four children, but the money often doesn’t come through at all. His latest bone of contention was the method by which teachers like him are paid. “They want to give us plastic cards and have us withdraw our salaries from ATMs,” he snorted as he laid out a plastic table cloth and served us bread and cheese. “How will that work? There’s only one ATM in the whole of Karakalpakstan, and it’s broken!” Nazar’s parents, both ethnic Karakalpaks, left long ago for Kazakhstan, and Nazar is worried his children will one day do the same. “I’ll never leave, I’m a patriot – those that abandon their motherland are just second-class citizens,” he said, his face suddenly brewing into a storm. He sighed, and his features mellowed: “But then again I can understand it. The kids in my school; their parents aren’t paid on time, if it all, and they can’t afford vitamins. I mean, we’ve had an ecological catastrophe here, the vegetables are bad and the water’s bad and people need vitamins. But the kids don’t get them. They get anaemia and kidney failure instead.”

For the past few years, Nazar has been quietly agitating at work for better rights for teachers; others at the school are usually aghast at his effrontery. I’m not surprised – Nazar was one of the very few people I ever met in Karakalpakstan who seemed willing to risk a degree of open hostility to the authorities. “They’re just dead, like robots,” he said of his colleagues. “People are too afraid to talk about politics.” His experiences in the classroom have convinced Nazar that Karakalpakstan must break free of Uzbekistan to develop and prosper, and he unfolded a huge map of Central Asia to draw a finger down the old borders of the republic, which reach as far as the towns of Zarafshon and Nurota in the east. “These places belong to us and have been stolen. Our country is Karakalpakstan and our enemy is Tashkent.” He spoke slowly and deliberately in Karakalpak, refusing to use Uzbek words and keeping his eyes locked on mine throughout. “I saw Ossetia rise up from nowhere and demand independence, now we must do the same. Many, many people here share these thoughts, yet nobody can say anything. But I’m saying something. I tell my pupils every day, ‘our time is coming’. I’m not scared because I’m speaking the truth. We’re fighting for our freedom.”

Professor Hanks believes it to be highly significant that anybody in Karakalpakstan is prepared to speak like this to foreigners, even under a veil of anonymity. “With the security structure in place there, for one active dissident to be able to express these sentiments you need a much wider passive group around him who sympathise with what he’s saying to the extent that they won’t inform on him to the police,” he argues. “It means people are losing their fear, and that’s remarkable.”

Perversely, the very poverty that could help motivate a rebellion against Uzbek rule is also a limiting factor against it; people are too interested in basic sustenance to consider clashing with their political masters. Nazar took us out to visit the grave of Alako’z, a 19th century Karakalpak tribal leader who united his people and defied the nearby Khan of Khiva (a town which lies within modern-day Uzbekistan) by establishing an independent khanate on the banks of the Amu Darya. He was eventually betrayed by some of his compatriots and retreated to a coastal fort on the Aral Sea, which held out against the besieging Uzbeks for three months before falling. Alako’z was buried where he was killed, and where the waves could lap at his grave. A hundred and fifty years later, the tomb is surrounded by 70 miles of dry earth. An elderly shepherd decked out in the flamboyantly striped gown of a traditional Uzbek peasant wandered over to us as we stood over the grave, and said that he too wanted to be buried under the old seabed. “One day maybe the sea will come back and wash over me,” he smiled.

His wish is unlikely to be realised. The sea will not return to these parts; in fact globally the trend is heading in the opposite direction, with regions as diverse as California, north-western India and the Nile Delta all facing the prospect of severe water shortages over the next half-century. In some places water tables are falling due to over-extraction; elsewhere upstream agricultural demands have caused domestic water deficits. The result is that one third of the arable land on the planet is being destroyed, and the problem is only set to deepen; currently the growth in the use of water stands at double that of world population growth. In the Middle East, water is cited by some analysts as the next trigger for geopolitical conflict; globally, the United Nations has identified 300 potential flashpoints over water insecurity. “Water,” claimed Mikhail Gorbachev, “like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people.” It is the competitive resource of our generation.

If Karakalpakstan is anything to go by, the insecurity unleashed by environmental catastrophes like the Aral Sea produce centrifugal reactions capable of recalibrating the identities and loyalties of entire populations. “Water security is the elephant in the room in Central Asia”, says Professor Hanks. Around Karakalpakstan the Aral Sea is only one of a series of environmental crises for which increasingly brazen solutions are being found; in nearby Turkmenistan the government has started work on a $20 billion ‘golden lake’ that scientists believe is completely unworkable. “All the countries know that water is a festering issue which at some point or another is going to come to a head, but as a region none of them have come together and formulated a unified policy,” adds Hanks. “Water has been used in the past as a political weapon, and it will be used so again.”

---

On my last day in Karakalpakstan I drove out to the shores of what’s left of the Aral Sea. My guide, Viktor, was from Moynaq, a once bustling port town that now resembles a ghost strip; empty tower blocks bordered by clouds of dust and rusting tractors, an unused stadium, a single child on a bicycle freewheeling in the dawn mist. Viktor, an ethnically Russian Karakalpak, lived in a disorientating time warp on what was formerly the Aral coastline; his garden was scattered with relics of a lost era – a bust of Lenin the size of a satellite dish, a stagnant swimming pool dreadlocked with vines and a rusting anchor, the tailfin of an aeroplane currently pressed into service as a weather vane. Behind a garage blaring loud Russian rock was a scrap-yard guarded by gnashing dogs and a corroding bathtub; a jumble of tank parts and armoured personnel carriers was just visible through the doorway. Nailed to the adjacent wall into was a 1988 calendar of topless Japanese girls, along with several dead birds of prey.

Viktor himself was age-lined and quiet; his gnarled hands clutched a ten-inch machete which he was employing to make some delicate alterations to the 4x4 which would carry us across the former seabed. “The government was just throwing all this stuff away after independence,” he said gruffly in response to my inquiring glances. “I thought I’d collect it.” We stole out of town as the sun began peeking up through the sand, and Viktor told me about his late father, a fisherman who wanted his son to follow in the family trade. By the time Viktor grew up there was no water left to fish in, so he became a pilot instead. He talked of this with no nostalgia; indeed the only time he looked mildly wistful is when he pointed across to the many gas and oil installations craning across the landscape before us. Mineral wealth has been discovered under the Aral’s old belly; where the sea has retreated, Russian and Chinese companies have advanced, drilling into the ground and piping its riches straight out of Karakalpakstan and towards Tashkent. “We should be one of the wealthiest countries in Asia,” I remembered Nazar telling me with clenched fists, back in Qazaqdarya. “The Uzbek government doesn’t give us a cent.”

As we approached the cliffs overlooking the Aral’s modern shoreline, the landscape changed; the machinery was far behind us now, leaving just dead wood which vaporised underfoot and crunchy soil that split into cakes around it. Then, suddenly, the sea itself appeared below, abutted by a hypnagogic moonscape of grey dunes and smashed rock. It looked like a half-filled basin, with the water –as baby-blue as ever – curving slenderly round the bowl. The wind was bitterly cold and there were no gulls, ice-cream trills or funfair jingles; in fact, there were no other humans or signs of life for what seemed like hundreds of miles. But the surf still lapped gently at the sand, a coy and crippled reminder of what once had been. In the distance I could almost make out the former island of Vozrozhdeniya, or ‘Resurrection’, the site of an abandoned Soviet bio-weapons facility. Down on the seashore itself specks of honeycomb foam tore off the waves in bunches before rolling and fluttering and chasing each other towards the cliffs. They looked like polystyrene balls tipped from packing box. Beneath them lay the strangest terrain I have ever stepped over; neither sand, mud nor salt-crystals, but some chemically-mutated mashup of all three. This was nature gone wrong.

On the way back we passed one of the Aral’s ship graveyards, a cemetery for old fishing boats unwittingly liberated from their ocean. Some contractors from Uzbekistan had been hauling the maritime corpses onto the back of trucks and were just finishing up for the day; the metal will eventually be sent to the Tashkent ironworks by rail. I asked one of the men what all this scrap would be used for, and he shrugged. “New ships, I guess, for a new Uzbekistan.” Behind us the world’s youngest desert stretched to the horizon. “The sea is coming back, you know,” he added. “It has to. If it doesn’t, there’ll be trouble.”

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To protect anonymity, some names and details have been changed.

'We must not tame ourselves': Media crackdown raises the stakes for journalists in Egypt

2010-10-15T19:38:00.007+02:00

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-Taken from the New Statesman and the Arab Press Network
-Cairo - October 2010

Just two days before Egypt's most dissident newspaper editor was forced out of his job, he sat down to type a remarkably prescient editorial. "It's impossible for the Egyptian regime to give up election rigging," wrote Ibrahim Eissa. "So the solution it has devised is that instead of putting a stop to rigging, it will put a stop to the talk about rigging. Hence the steps to rein in the satellite media; up next are newspapers. Perhaps soon we'll see urgent legislation to snuff out Egyptians' freedom of expression on the internet. And several understandings will be arrived at with representatives of the western media in Egypt."

Forty-eight hours after that column hit the newsstands, Eissa - a 46 year old who in recent years has done more than any other individual to challenge the state's hegemony over public narratives on Egypt and its politics - was summarily sacked. The removal of Eissa from Al-Dostour, a leading daily newspaper, was a personal blow to a man who has spent his entire career on the mercurial borders of Egypt's vibrant (though limited) world of officially-sanctioned independent media, but it also represents something far more chilling and expansive - and throws up a personal challenge to every journalist working in Egypt today.

The breadth and clout of independent media organs has ebbed and flowed in recent years in accordance with the sensitivities of Egypt's authoritarian Mubarak regime. At times of relative 'liberalisation' contrarian voices have flourished - not as a result of government beneficence, as ruling party NDP officials would have one believe, but rather because of the technological innovations (satellite television, the internet, mobile phones) which have made top-down mastery of the media in the 21st century an absurdity (if not a complete impossibility), as well as the government's need to demonstrate a degree of glasnost to its western allies and sponsors.

Exploiting the changing media climate to subvert the rules of the game has long been the goal of Eissa and many others like him, determined as they are to offer sceptical audiences an alternative slant to the rose-tinted, photoshopped window onto Egypt and its leaders that gets served up by the state-controlled press with formulaic consistency. In pursuit of this end they have benefitted, just as the street-level opposition movements to the government have benefitted, from the canny utilisation of political events like Israel's assaults on Lebanon in 2006 or Gaza in 2008-9, which evoke angry sentiments and throw into sharp relief the detachment of the ruling elite from the mass of public opinion.

Meanwhile at times of potential political volatility, or generally when the regime feels up against the ropes, the space in which criticism is tolerated gets reined in, usually through a flurry of legal cases, forced resignations and bureaucratic thuggery. As someone who has always been pushing the boundaries of that space - and a veteran himself of many a courtroom battle with the powers that be - Eissa was important not just for what he achieved, but also for what he revealed about the febrile state of free expression in the Arab World's largest country. From the establishment of Al-Dostour in 1995, to its closure in 1998 and triumphant re-emergence in 2005, right up to the trials, sentences and pardons of 2007 onwards, Eissa has been a bellwether for the health of the independent media sector, dredging ever-shifting invisible red lines to the surface - normally by stepping over them.

Which is why his sacking last week by Al-Dostour's new owner, Al-Sayed Al-Badawi, tells us something deeply worrying about the direction Egypt is heading in. Al-Badawi is the president of Al-Wafd, a political party that, like the rest of Egypt's official opposition, exists primarily to legitimise the one-party rule of the NDP by coating Egypt's parliament in a sheen of superficial plurality. Al-Wafd are widely believed to have struck a deal with the regime which will offer them a larger share of seats in next month's rigged parliamentary elections in exchange for assistance in neutering the less malleable elements of the opposition, including former UN nuclear weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei who called for a boycott of the polls - a call that Al-Wafd has unsurprisingly chosen to ignore. Ever since Al-Badawi took over Al-Dostour rumours have been circulating that he would be employed as the government's tool to silence Eissa, and so it has proved; after reeling off a series of pious promises regarding the sanctity of Al-Dostour's editorial independence, Al-Badawi swiftly conjured up a fake controversy over the publication of an front-page op-ed by ElBaradei (on the anniversary of Egypt's 1973 war with Israel) and used it as a pretext for giving Eissa his marching orders.

Many of the newspaper's staff walked out in response, claiming that political pressure had been behind the sacking. They were right. In recent weeks prominent dissidents Alaa al-Aswany and Hamdi Qandeel have also had their public platforms removed (in this case regular columns in Al-Shorouk), part of a wider process of other independent dailies being corralled into self-censorship. The result is that the space available in the print media for holding the country's business and political elite to account is being slowly but steadily curtailed.

Set alongside a parallel crackdown on independent voices in the satellite media - which has seen four channels shut down, popular TV chatshows hauled off air, a series of high-profile resignations (including Eissa himself, from the popular Baladna Bel-Masri show), and the launch of a new channel by regime acolyte Ahmed Ezz, as well as this week's new set of regulations that effectively puts all live TV news broadcasting under state control - and it is clear that a sustained, organised and state-orchestrated operation is underway to muzzle any influential voices of dissent as Egypt enters a period of unprecedented political uncertainty. With the 82 year old Hosni Mubarak looking increasingly frail, succession plans for his son running into trouble, and both parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled over the next year, never has it been more important for Egypt's leaders to re-establish a semblance of dominion over the flow of information reaching the public.

Nor is this pressure restricted to media outlets. NGOs continue to fight attempts to criminalise their work following the circulation of a draft law earlier this year which would slash away the independence of civil society organisations and suffocate government criticism. New restrictions on SMS messaging have just been unveiled that will hinder the opposition's ability to mobilise support on the ground. And elsewhere the instruments of state control over Egypt's population remain shrouded in secrecy: the broadcasting and even basic reporting of court cases - such as the trial of two policemen alleged to have beaten an Alexandrian man to death in broad daylight after he posted an online video of corrupt officers apparently engaging in the narcotics trade - has now been prohibited, official candidacy information for the parliamentary vote is no longer published publicly, and the workings of the Higher Election Commission, a government-controlled body who have replaced judicial supervision of elections and presided over this year's Shura Council poll with spectacular efficiency (the NDP won over 90% of the seats), continue to be a mystery.

Yes, spaces still exist for free expression and debate in Egypt, and yes, the scope of media freedom remains wider than what's on offer in many of the country's regional neighbours, but there is undoubtedly a new and distressing air of intimidation emanating from the regime at the moment, and one with potentially very dangerous consequences. "Everything is exposed," wrote former presidential candidate Ayman Nour on twitter in the aftermath of Eissa's removal. Columnist Issandr El-Amrani has called it the end of the 'Cairo spring' and the start of a 'Cairo autumn'; blogger Baheyya concludes simply that "the government is intent on controlling all sources of alternative knowledge."

Eissa himself has likened this multi-pronged crackdown to a stage being set for the magician's final act, and some are now asking what role international journalists will be assigned within the theatrics. In his now infamous penultimate editorial Eissa listed a number of places where the state's fist would strike next, and found to his personal cost that his first guess - newspapers - was entirely correct. If the rest of his predictions are as accurate then the 'representatives of the western media' will soon also be targeted - not, in all probability, by the sort of harassment and intimidation which Egyptian colleagues have to contend with, but rather, according to Eissa, through some sort of 'understanding' which foreign editorial desks will reach with the regime.

Here I think Eissa may be wrong, partly because the political and PR repercussions of a wholesale assault on the foreign media are too risky (though that doesn't mean that individual correspondents won't necessarily be singled out, as some have been in the past), and partly for a more depressing reason: that such a move would achieve very little. By and large the western media apparatus does little to interrogate the regime-friendly prism through which events in Egypt are seen by the outside world; indeed it does rather more to strengthen it. This is a prism which gets peddled aggressively by lobbyists like the Podesta and Livingston groups on Capitol Hill and Bell Pottinger in London, all of which are paid handsome sums by the Egyptian government to spread one message - Mubarak equals stability - and rarely do we see that narrative challenged.

That's not to say that western media coverage flatters the president or his government; human rights abuses are certainly documented and protests get reported, albeit without the sort of prominence afforded to opposition activity in countries which aren't led by 'moderate' allies of the west. But through its selection and presentation of news from Egypt the international press often subtly entrenches the status quo perspective on Egypt in the west, and that in turn helps subtly reinforce the status quo configuration of political power in Cairo.

I've written elsewhere in more detail about what that perspective involves and why it receives such a sympathetic airing in the print columns and TV news segments of the western media; without repeating myself at length here suffice to say it comprises a misleading analysis of Egypt's neoliberal economic reform programme, skewed reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood - describing it continuously in the terms of an omnipotent threat to the survival of Egypt as a liberal, secular state rather than an complex, diffuse organisation that has a symbiotic relationship with the ruling elite - and a tendency towards supposedly depoliticised 'colour stories', which exaggerate the cleavage between 'religious fundamentalists' and 'secular forces' and leave many genuinely remarkable political developments, like the rise of the labour movement, completely unreported. All of which strengthens the message about Egypt and its current government that the Mubarak regime is desperate to sell to the international community, in order to preserve from that community the uninterrupted flow of political support and hard cash that the regime's survival depends on.

As journalists like Joris Luyendijk and Nick Davies have painstakingly explained, the institutionalisation of misleading news reporting has dizzyingly deep roots and is hardly confined to Egypt alone. But the present media crackdown makes it all the more important for the international press to raise their game and shine an even harsher spotlight on the social, political and economic violations perpetrated against Egyptian citizens by their rulers, particularly with sham elections looming just around the corner. Although it can never be a sustainable alternative to good quality domestic reporting, international press reports can serve as a vital enabler to local media outlets; in the past, some newspapers and TV shows have been able to skirt around local restrictions that were hindering publication of a certain story by reporting instead on the reports of foreign correspondents, who face less constraints going about their work. And in the best of cases the coverage of foreign media outlets can in its own right serve to inform Egyptians who can access it on the internet, carving out a small but increasingly vital island of free expression and in a limited way helping to defend Egyptian citizens against the egregious excesses of the state - as well as puncturing the pyramid-sphinx-Nile axis of clichés that dominates vistas on Egypt from beyond its borders.

With other sources of debate and dissent being shut down, it's imperative that foreign journalists exploit their inherent logistical advantages to the full. The government is trying to tame every organ of scrutiny within Egypt's borders; in this climate it's more crucial than ever that we do not tame ourselves.

Egypt's last leprosy colony broaches time of integration

2010-10-11T09:55:00.005+02:00

"This place is paradise": Leprosy patients reluctant to leave colony despite change in attitude towards sufferers

-Taken from the Guardian
-Abu Zaabal, Egypt - October 2010

It was 59 years ago that Ahmed Ali was grabbed from his house by the Egyptian security services and bundled into an unmarked car, but he remembers the day with perfect clarity. "A neighbour contacted the authorities and told them that I had the leprosy disease, and in those days that's all it took," he said. "I was confused and I was terrified. I had no idea where they were taking me."

Ali's destination was Abu Zaabal, Egypt's only surviving leprosy colony. Back in the 1950s this was an isolated community set deep in the Egyptian desert and guarded day and night by camel-mounted policemen.

Now, following significant medical advances and a sea-change in social attitudes towards leprosy, Abu Zaabal's doors have finally been thrown open again. But, despite their new freedom, its residents are refusing to leave. "This place is paradise," said Ali. "Why would I want to go?"

The future of the colony is now at the heart of a debate about how sufferers of one of the most stigmatising diseases can be reintegrated into society. "Colonies were built for an era where the only known treatment for leprosy was complete quarantine," said Dr Salah Abd El-Naby, head of the leprosy programme at Egypt's ministry of health. "That's no longer the case."

Despite specialist outpatient clinics having opened up in every governorate in the country, negating the need for the isolation of leprosy patients, official efforts to bring Abu Zaabal's days as a separate community to an end have been met with stiff resistance from the patients themselves.

The story of Abu Zaabal begins in 1933, when a leprosy colony was established in what was then a remote wasteland 20 miles outside of Cairo. Originally intended to be a self-sustaining community incorporating 125 acres of farmland, patients brought to Abu Zaabal instead found themselves locked in an open-air prison with little contact with the outside world. Shunned by fearful locals and with few resources to fall back on, the colony soon slipped into disrepair.

"You can't imagine what it was like back then," recalled Gian Vittoria, an Italian nun who arrived at Abu Zaabal in 1985. "The government hired nuns from abroad to treat patients here because no Egyptian nurses would come near the place. When we arrived we found it completely trashed."

Over the past decade, though, a series of dramatic improvements has transformed the largest leprosy colony in the Middle East into a thriving village of 6,000 people.

Three-quarters of them are former leprosy patients who rely on the colony hospital for ongoing medication; many have married and had children, while some outsiders have also been attracted to job opportunities inside the compound. "Everything's different now," explained Dr Ahmed Rashad, director of Abu Zaabal's hospital. He grew up in a nearby town and remembers his school friends spreading dark rumours about the colony, which was situated far from roads and across a river. "Leprosy had a fearsome reputation back then and we were all scared of the patients living behind those walls. Now a lot of money has come in from foreign donors and we have a bakery, a kitchen, a shoe workshop and even a broom factory; even those with quite severe deformities are offered employment tending to the gardens and keeping the place clean."

Formerly far removed from other settlements, Abu Zaabal has now been enveloped by Cairo's rapidly-expanding urban sprawl; where empty desert once stood, the capital's fringes have crept right up to the colony's doors. The patients' new proximity to wider society has reflected a shift in global attitudes towards leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease – one of the oldest medical conditions on record.

In the middle ages sufferers of leprosy in some parts of the world were made to wear bells and use separate currency due to the assumed contagiousness of the disease, and as recently as 1985 it was still considered a significant health issue in 122 countries.

Modern research, however, has shown that 95% of people are naturally immune to leprosy and that the disease is not hereditary; in the past 20 years multi-drug therapy has cured 15 million patients, and the days when forced quarantine was considered the only possible treatment have long been left behind.

According to El-Naby, that is why the residents of Abu Zaabal are now free to come and go as they please. In recent years though, fewer than 200 patients have chosen to move outside of the colony's walls.

"I spent my youth here, I built a house here, I married my wife here – this is the place I've constructed my life," insisted Radi Gamal, a 40-year-old who was brought to Abu Zaabal from the northern Egyptian town of Beni Suef while in his teens. His friend, Yasin Ali, who earns 150 Egyptian pounds (£16) a month doing plumbing jobs in the colony, agrees. "This used to be a prison, and yes we're now allowed to leave," he observed while playing dominoes on one of the colony's neatly trimmed lawns.

"But outside these walls when I see people who are fine looking at my deformed hands, I feel ashamed. Here we're all the same, there's a sense of belonging."

As in other parts of the world where individuals living with leprosy are concentrated, self-stigmatisation of patients and misconceptions held by non-sufferers about how the disease is transmitted continue to act as barriers to full integration.

"People in the surrounding areas are still afraid, there's no point pretending otherwise," said Vittoria. "But today you see many Egyptians arriving with food, clothes and other donations, and the patients themselves have helped build a remarkably successful home. The story of Abu Zaabal is a happy one."

The Egyptian chatshows that talk too much

2010-10-04T18:55:00.000+02:00

-Taken from Monocle
-Cairo - October 2010

For millions of Egyptians, tuning into one of the numerous political chatshows that dominate the evening TV schedules is as habitual as eating dinner or lighting up a Cleopatra cigarette. Anchored by heavyweight stars, the high-profile programmes have played a major role in the expansion of Egypt’s vibrant independent media sector in recent years – but that could be about to change.

After a series of resignations, business bust-ups and show cancellations, the chatshow industry has been left reeling and analysts are attributing the problems to a government crackdown on dissent in the run up to November’s contentious parliamentary elections.

One of the most popular shows, "Al-Qahira Al-Yom" ("Cairo Today") has already been pulled off air following a tussle with state-owned production studios which claim they are owed money for studio rental; the show’s co-host, Ahmed Moussa, has already dismissed the legal wrangle as a fabrication, insisting that "government malice" was behind the move and warning that "someone wants to crush freedom of expression and opinion".

Meanwhile, rival production "Baladna Bel-Masri" just lost its famous host Ibrahim Eissa, a prominent independent newspaper editor and outspoken government critic, who suddenly quit the show mid-season with no explanation. Although the programme producers quickly insisted Eissa’s departure was not politically motivated, Eissa, himself a veteran of many a court battle with the Mubarak regime, has pointedly refused to comment on the situation.

According to Gamal Eid, executive director of the Cairo-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, applying the screws to independent television is a well-worn tactic by the state. "Certainly there’s political pressure behind the latest developments," he told Monocle. "Both shows went beyond the red lines by tackling issues of corruption and political succession, and by disrupting their production the government is ensuring that the upcoming elections can be rigged without anyone being able to talk about it."

Soliman Gouda, a leading newspaper columnist who also hosts his own political chatshow, agrees. "How can anyone believe talk about electoral integrity when such television shows are being banned?" he wrote last month. "Everything that’s being said about the integrity of elections is just words. Nothing will be seen on the ground."

Gouda is right to worry – his program runs on the private Dream TV network, whose owner Ahmed Bahgat recently admitted that he would immediately 'shut the network down' if asked to do so by the authorities. "What else could we do? Would we challenge the state" asked Bahgat, who is currently saddled with a $500m debt to the (state-run) National Bank of Egypt.

The small-screen drama comes as the country gears up for a national poll that domestic and international observers believe is likely to be fixed in favour of the ruling party, and which has already provoked violent clashes on the capital’s streets between protesters and security forces.

Khaled Said death protests renewed as trial of Egyptian police officers begins

2010-09-24T16:34:00.010+03:00

Alexandria expects more street demonstrations over alleged fatal beating that has become flashpoint between government and opposition activists

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - September 2010

The Egyptian city of Alexandria is bracing itself for a renewed outbreak of street protests tomorrow, as the trial of two policemen accused of beating a civilian to death in broad daylight finally gets under way.

Awad Suleiman and Mahmoud Salah are charged with illegal arrest and brutality following the death of 28-year-old Khaled Said in early June, an incident which sparked demonstrations throughout the country and has become a political flashpoint between the government and opposition activists.

Numerous witnesses claim that Said, who had earlier posted an online video of local police officers apparently dividing up the spoils of a drug haul, was attacked in an internet cafe by the two plainclothes officials who kicked and punched him before eventually smashing his head against a marble table-top. His body was dragged into a police car and later dumped by the roadside.

Graphic photos of Said's injuries circulated online and became a rallying cause for activists opposed to Egypt's 29-year-old emergency law, which suspends many basic civil liberties and provides effective immunity for the security services before the courts.

Cases of police abuse and torture have been exposed with increasing frequency in recent years, and the death of Said garnered extra attention after former UN nuclear watchdog chief and prominent dissident Mohamed ElBaradei joined protests against the killing.

Government officials initially said that Said was a wanted criminal and produced two state postmortems which concluded that he had died from swallowing a packet of narcotics hidden under his tongue. But following pressure from the US and the EU, as well as local and international human rights organisations, Suleiman and Salah were eventually arrested for brutality and will face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Said's family have called for the pair to face charges of murder and want to see the officers' superior in the dock as well, but so far their demands have been ignored.

"It's an important trial for Egypt, but with responsibility being limited to these two officers alone we're not optimistic that justice will be done," said Mohamed Abdelaziz, a lawyer with the anti-torture El-Nadeem centre who has been in close contact with Said's relatives.

The court case has struck a chord with the public in a country where police corruption and the unaccountability of security officials is a highly visible part of everyday life. "Khaled Said's death has caused public outrage in Egypt, which means that if the evidence is sufficient then it's very important a strong conviction is made," said Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch.

"There is a culture of impunity for police in torture cases, with officials quickly jumping to the defence of officers suspected of abusing their power and superiors not being held accountable. That has to change; the Khaled Said case has shown that it is possible for public pressure to override the initial instinct of the authorities to cover-up these incidents."

Violence on Cairo's streets as Egyptians say no to Gamal

2010-09-21T21:45:00.005+03:00

Hundreds of protesters clash with riot police over widely held belief that president's son is being groomed to take power

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - September 2010

-Watch the Guardian video here

Clashes broke out in central Cairo today after hundreds of Egyptians took to the streets to protest against what they claimed were plans for the president's son to assume power.

Lines of riot police encircled and attacked demonstrators opposed to Gamal Mubarak outside Abdeen palace, the site of a 19th-century nationalist revolt against monarchical and colonial British rule.

It is widely believed that Gamal, now 46, is being groomed to succeed his father, Hosni, 82, as Egypt's next ruler. The younger Mubarak accompanied the presidential delegation to peace talks in Washington this month.

Parliamentary elections, which some elements of the oppostion want boycotted, are due in November and presidential elections will be held in September next year.

The protest also spread to Alexandria, where it was reported that 30 demonstrators were arrested and women had their clothes torn. In Cairo journalists were among those beaten.

"They have been beating us. You can see the blood on my neck. We are a republic, not a kingdom," said a supporter of the prominent dissident Mohamed ElBaradei, who formerly ran the International Atomic Energy Agency and is considered a potential rival presidential candidate to Gamal Mubarak.

"If Gamal Mubarak becomes president, this country will go to hell. He cares only about businessmen.

"The people of Egypt are all dying. We are dying of poverty and we are dying of a lack of freedom."

Referring to the 1882 uprising, when Ahmed Orabi declared that Egyptians should no longer be slaves, the protester said: "After 30 years of Hosni Mubarak's rule we are saying the same thing today: we should not be slaves.

Later protesters tried to break out of the security cordon. Sympathetic bystanders threw in water bottles to trapped demonstrators.

Another protester said: "I am 30 years old and I still have not got enough money to marry. I can't find a job. Tell the world to help us. We are dying under Mubarak. Send an SOS." He then set fire to a picture of Gamal Mubarak. "We are supposed to be a democracy even though everyone knows it's a sham. We will not stand by while the presidency passes from father to son."

Gamal Mubarak has long been associated with a series of neoliberal reforms which have proved unpopular with many Egyptians.

Sadat's daughter to sue over claims he poisoned Nasser

2010-09-21T12:05:00.004+03:00

President Nasser died three days after drinking coffee made by his successor, hints former aide on al-Jazeera television

Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - September 2010

The daughter of the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is going to court to defend her late father against allegations that he murdered Gamal Abdel Nasser, founding father of the modern Egyptian republic.

Sadat, most famous for his controversial peace deal with Israel at Camp David, took over the presidency after Nasser's unexpected death in 1970 from a heart attack that some doctors attributed to poisoning.

Last week, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, a veteran Egyptian journalist and former Sadat aide, used his show on al-Jazeera television to give an account of Nasser's final days, which included several hints that the second president's death might not have been natural.

In what the Egyptian press have dubbed a "40-year bombshell", Heikal recalled an incident at a Cairo hotel where Nasser was meeting the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. According to Heikal the two leaders had a heated argument, after which Nasser looked so nervous that Sadat, who was vice-president at the time, offered to fetch him a cup of coffee.

Heikal alleges that Sadat ordered the president's private cook out of the kitchen and made the coffee himself, which Nasser drank. Three days later Nasser collapsed and died, bringing several million mourners out on to the streets of Cairo and leading one best-selling Arab newspaper to declare that "one hundred million people – the Arabs – are now orphans."

Sadat's family have responded angrily to what they see as an attempt to link Sadat, who was later assassinated by radical Islamists, to his predecessor's death.

One daughter took to the airwaves to dismiss the claim as false, while another has filed an official complaint with the Egyptian prosecutor-general, accusing Heikal of libel and slander.

"What Heikal said has inflicted tremendous damage on me and my family and hurt our feelings deeply," wrote Ruqaya Sadat in her submission to the courts.

Offering an intriguing insight into the detachment of political leaders from their people, Sadat’s family have argued that Heikal’s account cannot be true – because Sadat was incapable of making a cup of coffee on his own.

On the same TV show Heikal, one of the oldest and most high-profile public commentators in the Middle East, went on to say that he thought it "unlikely" Sadat had poisoned Nasser's coffee, but that qualification has failed to quell the storm. Many observers believe that the commentator's on-air statements, which included the line, "there's no proof [that Nasser was murdered], but a lot of speculations," were deliberately designed to cast suspicion on Sadat.

"This is a brawl between celebrity and senility," said Hisham Kassem, a prominent Egyptian publisher. "Heikal has had nothing to say over the past four decades and his TV show has become increasingly insignificant, so he's trying to drum up some publicity.

"Ruqaya Sadat wants to sue practically anyone who mentions her father outside the context of a god. The fact that so much has been made of this story is a sad reflection on the state of the Egyptian press."

The controversy has erupted just as extra attention is being heaped on the legacy of Nasser, a towering historical figure who styled himself not only as a revolutionary leader of the Arab World but also as a global champion of developing and post-colonial nations throughout the 1950s and 60s.

The Egyptian government recently announced that Nasser’s former Cairo home would be turned into a national museum; in an ironic twist of fate that reflects the transition Egypt has undergone since the demise of its socialist talisman, the construction of the museum will be contracted out to a private company.

Tackling sexual harassment in Egypt

2010-09-21T11:44:00.006+03:00

A new mapping project seeks to highlight abuse and transform social attitudes in the process - but the biggest harassment hotspot is inside people's minds

The 'veil your lollipop' campaign hit Cairo in 2008, stating: 'You can't stop them, but you can protect yourself' - part of a wider public discourse that has attempted to shift the blame for sexual harassment onto female victims themselves

---

-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free'
-Cairo - September 2010

Suzanne Mubarak, First Lady of Egypt, is a woman who treats criticisms of her country with a generous dose of scepticism. Take sexual harassment, a phenomenon that has indisputably been on the rise in recent years. It's an issue in which Mrs Mubarak, as head of the government's National Council for Women, might be assumed to take at least a passing interest.

"Egyptian men always respect Egyptian women," she gallantly informed a pan-Arab television station back in 2008, a few weeks after a series of sexual assaults marred a major public holiday. "Maybe one, two or even 10 incidents occurred. Egypt is home to 80m people. We can't talk of a phenomenon. Maybe a few scatterbrained youths are behind this crime."

Those "few scatterbrained youths" must have been extremely busy. In the same year that the First Lady took to the airwaves to accuse media outlets of "exaggerating" reports of sexual harassment, a Cairo-based NGO released the first major survey of women's experiences in this area; it concluded that 83% of Egyptian females and 98% of foreign females had been exposed to some form of sexual harassment in Egypt – almost half of them on a daily basis.

The report, which was issued by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR), also revealed that two-thirds of men admitted to carrying out harassment – defined by the survey as "unwanted sexual conduct deliberately perpetrated by the harasser, resulting in the sexual, physical and psychological abuse of the victim regardless of location". Examples cited by respondents included groping, verbal harassment, stalking and indecent exposure.

As several bloggers observed at the time, Suzanne Mubarak – wife of an authoritarian leader whose corrupt regime has turned detachment from reality into an art form – is hardly the go-to woman for an insight into what's happening on the ground. The blogger Zeinobia, a keen analyst of Egyptian affairs, memorably pointed out that Mrs M had never walked alone on a street that hadn't been cleaned of everything – including humans.

It's the attitude of those like Suzanne Mubarak, who refuse to believe the evidence and automatically dismiss any discussion as a nefarious plot to tarnish Egypt's reputation, that has ensured no specific legal prohibition on sexual harassment exists on the statute book (though three draft laws in this area are currently making their way through the country's glacially slow parliamentary process).

Now though, a group of volunteer activists is launching a project that aims to prove sexual harassment sceptics wrong – and help transform social attitudes towards women in the process.

HarassMap, which will launch later this year if it can find a funding partner in time, is a web-based system which allows women to instantly report incidents of sexual harassment via SMS. Victims will receive an immediate text response, offering them support and practical advice and a centralised list of organisations that can help – something that isn't available at the moment. More importantly, the reports will be used to build up a publicly available map detailing harassment hotspots, partly so that women can take extra care in those areas and partly to shame the authorities into tackling the problem head-on.

It's based on an open-source mapping tool called Ushahidi which is more commonly associated with humanitarian disasters and election monitoring.

"HarassMap will offer victims a practical way of responding, something to fight back with," explains co-creator Rebecca Chiao. "As someone who has experienced sexual harassment personally on the streets of Cairo, I know that the most frustrating part of it was feeling like there was nothing I could do."

The team behind HarassMap – a mix of Egyptians and foreigners, most of whom have a background in women's rights campaigning – have an ambitious set of ideas to go with the basic map. In places where harassment is revealed to be rampant, they want to encourage shopkeepers to offer their premises as "safe spaces" where women can come if they feel threatened. In the long term the team would even like to connect their system to the police network to allow the forces of law and order to react quickly and catch offenders (although in the ECWR survey, foreign women identified policemen themselves as the most likely perpetrators of sexual harassment).

It's not a catch-all solution – for one thing sexual harassment here is not so much localised as it is psychologically internalised, existing in mobile places like buses and tube trains as well as away from the streets, in the workplace and behind domestic walls. But it's a start.

In order to get the project off the ground they'll have to tread a fine line between raising awareness and stirring up debate while simultaneously dodging accusations of being unpatriotic and ruining Egypt's reputation.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project, though, is the question it raises: why is sexual harassment such a problem in Egypt? Anecdotal evidence suggests that 20 years ago this simply wasn't an issue on the same scale; when cases of harassment did occur other people on the street would often step in to help. These days such assistance is rarely forthcoming.

Many different explanations have been put forward, with varying degrees of credibility. Some blame Islam's (highly contested) attitude to women, though harassment levels in Egypt seem to far outstrip those in other Muslim countries. Others point to sexual frustration, which is certainly a factor in a country where economic pressures are forcing many young people to wait longer and longer before they can afford to marry – but this doesn't account for pre-pubescent children and married men being among the harassment repeat offenders.

HarassMap's Rebecca Chiao offers another perspective: "Egyptians today are exposed to a great many pressures: unemployment, inflation, urban overcrowding, pollution … pressure from all directions. And one of the ways that pressure manifests itself is in the targeting of the weak and marginalised; in the news we see negative attitudes towards refugees, sectarian violence, and of course harassment of women – who are a social minority, despite making up 50% of society."

It’s certainly true that this is an age when clashing cultural perceptions of women are taking centre stage; in a media market dominated by Saudi-style Salafist Islam on the one hand and western MTV culture on the other – both of which objectify females as sex objects and deny agency to both men and women over the way ideas about gender are constructed – women can all too easily find themselves being cast as 'fair game' targets for street harassment in what remains an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. Whether the HarassMap can make a difference remains to be seen.

Women in Egypt get hi-tech aid in battle against sexual harassment

2010-09-20T13:55:00.003+03:00

Harass Map allows women to instantly report incidences of sexual harassment by sending a text message to a centralised computer

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - September 2010

A hi-tech weapon has been unveiled in the battle against sexual harassment in Egypt, where almost half the female population face unwanted attention from men every day.

HarassMap, a private venture that is set to launch later this year, allows women to instantly report incidents of sexual harassment by sending a text message to a centralised computer. Victims will immediately receive a reply offering support and practical advice, and the reports will be used to build up a detailed and publicly available map of harassment hotspots.

The project utilises an open-source mapping technology more commonly associated with humanitarian relief operations, and the activists behind it hope to transform social attitudes to the harassment of women and shame authorities into taking greater action to combat the problem.

"In the last couple of years there's been a debate in Egypt over whether harassment of women on the streets is a serious issue, or whether it's something women are making up," said Rebecca Chiao, one of the volunteers behind the project. "So HarassMap will have an impact on the ground by revealing the extent of this problem. It will also offer victims a practical way of responding, something to fight back with; as someone who has experienced sexual harassment personally on the streets of Cairo, I know that the most frustrating part of it was feeling like there was nothing I could do."

Harassment of women is believed to be on the rise in Egypt. The only significant recent study on the phenomenon was a survey by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights in 2008, which revealed that 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women have been exposed to some form of sexual harassment, including groping, verbal abuse, stalking and indecent exposure.

Contrary to popular opinion, incidents do not appear to be linked to the woman's style of dress, with three-quarters of victims having been veiled at the time. But efforts to curb the problem have met with resistance.

Although a number of draft laws dealing with sexual harassment are under consideration by parliament, there is still nothing on Egypt's statute books that specifically prohibits harassment – blame for which is often placed on the victim rather than male perpetrators. Just weeks after a series of sexual assaults marred a public holiday two years ago, Egypt's first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, accused the media of exaggerating the threat posed by sexual harassment, and concerns about tarnishing the country's image have continued to stifle debate on the subject.

"We have to transform the social acceptability of sexual harassment and open up a discussion about solutions," said Chiao. "Egypt is our home. When you have a problem in your home then you fix it because you're proud of it.

"You don't cover it up and hope it goes away. We're not trying to ruin Egypt's reputation, we're just trying to address this problem in a constructive and progressive way."

Hosni Mubarak left red-faced as doctored red-carpet photo goes viral

2010-09-16T18:02:00.006+03:00

Embarassment as Egyptian newspaper photoshops image of president to put him at the head of peace-talks procession

Before...

After...

-Taken from the Guardian (with Haroon Siddique)
-Cairo - September 2010

There are those who lead and those who follow, and the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram clearly feels that President Hosni Mubarak fits in to the former category.

When he was pictured with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, trailing behind Barack Obama on the red carpet at the White House recently, it was nothing Photoshop could not fix. So, on Tuesday, state-run daily Al-Ahram published the same photo, taken at the launch of the latest Middle East peace talks – but with Mubarak now switched to the front of the procession.

The doctored picture was exposed by Egyptian blogger Wael Khalil and quickly struck a chord with Egypt's vibrant network of online opposition activists; spoof versions have since appeared depicting the 82-year-old Mubarak landing on the moon, breaking the 100m world record, and hoisting aloft the World Cup.

The controversy comes as the government gears up for parliamentary elections and amid rumours the authoritarian leader, who has ruled Egypt for nearly three decades, is seriously ill.

"I think what's significant is that Al-Ahram, the regime's mouthpiece, is clearly very sensitive about the way Mubarak appears to the general public in the current climate," Khalil told the Guardian. "People have picked up on the photo because it's such a good insight into the way the government operates in Egypt; whenever there are problems or failings they simply try and gloss over them – you can see that in this photo, and you can see it in the way they run the country."

Al-Ahram is the most widely-circulated Arabic newspaper in the Middle East and is known for its largely fawning coverage of the Egyptian government.

Its market share has been challenged in recent years by an increasingly bold crop of independent newspapers willing to adopt a more critical tone towards the ruling NDP party, a stance which has landed many independent editors in court.

By contrast Al-Ahram and other state-run publications have a track record of subtly 'improving' pictures of Egypt's political elite, although usually in a less obvious manner than this week's example.

The scandal will come as a blow to Al-Ahram director Abdel Moneim Said, a former Egyptian senator who was thought to have presided over a slight revival of the 135-year-old newspaper's fortunes since taking the helm last year, following decades of mismanagement. Al Ahram has so far failed to issue any response or apology for its actions, although the offending photo has been removed from the paper's website.

Although the incident has caused plenty of mirth at the president's expense, some are not amused. The anti-government 6 April Youth Movement said: "This is what the corrupt regime's media has been reduced to." It added that the newspaper had "crossed the line from being balanced and honest," and accused it of unprofessionalism.

The publication of the photograph coincided with the arrival of Abbas and Netanyahu at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for the second round of talks under the current peace process.

Egypt's energy conundrum

2010-09-12T18:05:00.008+03:00

Power shortages are fuelling popular protests - and a desperate search for new energy

-Taken from Monocle
-Cairo - September 2010

Anyone who has passed through the Middle East during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan will have taken one visual memory home with them: the sight of row upon row of lights – flashy, fizzy, gaudy and kitsch – dominating the streetscape at every turn. After sunset in Cairo, when the day’s long fast finally comes to an end and families join together to eat a giant iftar (breakfast) and settle down in front of the TV, it often feels like the whole of this ancient city has been draped in neon. But this year the festive bulbs weren’t quite so ubiquitous, thanks to a series of power cuts that plunged parts of the Egyptian capital into total darkness – and which has left the country’s beleaguered government scrambling around for a new set of energy solutions.

The outages, which brought protestors out onto the streets in many parts of the country, were partly a result of 2010’s exceptionally hot summer (temperatures regularly topped 40°c in major cities, driving up the use of air-conditioners), and partly a consequence of Ramadan, when a great deal of economic activity shifts to the night-time hours. But they also underlined a long-term crisis at the heart of Egypt’s energy policy – the growing gap between domestic demand for power and the country’s ability to supply it. With a demographic explosion increasing electricity usage up by 13% this year alone, it’s becoming painfully clear that the existing energy infrastructure, which has been underfunded for decades, in creaking dangerously under the strain.

That’s why government ministers have spent the last few weeks unveiling a blitz of controversial new energy projects, including the construction of a $1.5 billion nuclear reactor on the Mediterranean coast in an area that had been earmarked for luxury holiday resort development. They’ve also thrown open Egypt’s waters to deepwater drilling, of the kind that led to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill back in April. Shut out of US oil and gas fields by President Obama’s moratorium on deepwater drilling, many companies are now setting up shop in Egypt instead; Transocean, the firm that owned the fateful Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has already been operating in Egypt for years, whilst BP has just inked a fresh deal with the Egyptian government that will see it extracting 900 million cubic metres of gas a day out of the Mediterranean seabed from 2014 onwards.

It’s all happening a bit too swiftly for the likes of Issandr El Amrani, a blogger and columnist who thinks there hasn’t been enough scrutiny of the potential environmental risks involved with deepwater drilling. Earlier this year an oil rig accident near the Red Sea resort of Hurghada gave Egypt a brief taste of the damage that can be caused by offshore energy extraction; because Egypt lacks the economic clout of the US, argues El Amrani, “it is all the more urgent to have a serious debate about the costs and benefits of deepwater drilling.”

But there could be an alternative way forward in Egypt’s drive for energy security, and it lies in the baking sunshine and fast-blowing winds that sweep across this desert nation with remarkable consistency. “Egypt’s potential to be a centre of renewable wind and solar energy in the Middle East is huge,” says Engineer Samir Hassan, Director of RCREEE, an independent renewable energy think tank based in Cairo. Wind speeds in the Gulf of Suez average 9-10 metres a second, far higher than those recorded at similar sites in Europe, and the World Bank has just approved a $210m loan which will help Egypt develop 10 GW of wind energy by 2022. Meanwhile the country’s first solar farm should connect to the grid within the next six months. With Egypt’s current reserve of fossil fuels set to run dry within 30 years, there’s no time to waste when it comes to the expansion of alternative energy.

“We’re not a rich country and we don’t have the luxury to sit around talking about this issue,” warns Engineer Hassan. “We need to develop new sources of energy now.”

Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei urges election boycott

2010-09-07T22:56:00.008+02:00

Nobel Laureate threatens campaign of mass civil disobedience if his demands for political reform are ignored

-Taken from the Guardian

-Cairo - September 2010

Former UN nuclear weapons chief and prominent Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei has called on Egyptians to boycott next month's parliamentary elections, threatening a campaign of mass civil disobedience if his demands for political reform continue to be ignored.

In his most provocative speech to date since making a high-profile return to Cairo earlier this year, the Nobel Laureate warned that the poll would be marred by fraud, and that "anyone who participates in the vote either as a candidate or a voter goes against the national will".

He went on to claim that the three-decade rule of president Hosni Mubarak was a "decaying, nearly collapsing temple", and promised activists that regime change was possible in the coming year.

Mubarak, 82, is believed to be in poor health, and there is speculation his son Gamal is being groomed to succeed him ahead of next year's presidential ballot. ElBaradei's intervention comes at the end of a tumultuous few weeks in the race for the presidency, during which the 68-year-old accused the government of waging a smear campaign against him following the publication on Facebook of photos purporting to show his daughter posing in a swimsuit alongside bottles of alcohol.

The creator of the Facebook page, entitled "Secrets of the ElBaradei family', said the images proved ElBaradei's family were atheists, a politically devastating accusation in a predominantly Muslim country. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) denied involvement.

The Facebook controversy is the latest development to shake up Egypt's traditionally stagnant political landscape as rival forces begin jockeying for position in anticipation of Mubarak's reign – which has been criticised for human rights abuses – coming to an end. In a sign of potential splits within the NDP, posters backing intelligence chief Omar Suleiman for the top job were recently pasted anonymously on top of placards bearing the face of the president's son, only to be removed by security services the following morning. Egyptian newspapers were banned by the government from reprinting the images.

ElBaradei's National Association for Change, which is among those campaigning against inheritance of power, announced this week it was nearing 1 million signatures in support of the former IAEA director's call for constitutional change. ElBaradei has insisted he will not stand in next year's presidential elections unless reforms take place to ensure the vote is free and fair.

In the meantime, he is trying to persuade the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest organised opposition movement, to join the boycott of next month's parliamentary elections.

"If the whole people boycott the elections totally it will be, in my view, the end of the regime," he told supporters yesterday.

El Alamein's new desert battle as mine victims search for justice

2010-06-29T13:12:00.006+03:00

As luxury resorts spring up along Egypt's northern coast, many still living with the legacy of the second world war feel betrayed

-Taken from the Guardian
-El Alamein - June 2010

-Original photography by Jason Larkin

---

Along Egypt's white-sand Mediterranean coastline, an enormous metal advertising hoarding is being hauled into place by the roadside. "Blissful indulgence, natural splendour," it declares in huge letters above a picture of a child snorkelling in azure blue waters. "Marassi: It's where you've always belonged.

Behind the sign lies a messy scrub of beach and desert, pockmarked with a few half-built houses on stilts. Across the highway is Egypt's Western Desert – and somewhere beneath the ever-shifting sands lie 16m pieces of unexploded second world war ordinance.

Eventually, this patch of land will become a 6.25m sq metre gated holiday resort incorporating luxury villas, artificial lagoons and an 18-hole golf course. To Egypt's government, Marassi is a symbol of regeneration in a beautiful region; to many locals, it represents marginalisation and betrayal.

"This sort of development does nothing for us," said Eissa Murgan, a 37-year-old Bedouin who used to work as a shepherd before his leg was blown off by a landmine. "There are no benefits here for those that truly need them."

Battles over El Alamein's future are nothing new; the town and its surrounding shores have long been contested by rival armies, most notably in 1942 when axis and allied forces met in a confrontation that changed the tide of the second world war.

Now a new struggle is taking place over how best to confront the legacy of that conflict: the buried ordinance that is estimated to have killed and maimed thousands of Egyptians over the past seven decades and has condemned the region to economic stagnation. Victims such as Murgan find themselves fighting for justice on two fronts: from their own authorities, whom they believe are more interested in extracting profits than in promoting sustainable development; and from the British and other European governments, whom they hold responsible for the carnage left behind.

Egypt's ministry of international co-operation has unveiled a $10bn (£6.6bn) plan which aims to bring 400,000 jobs to the area and expand the population from 300,000 to more than 1.5 million, easing the pressure on Egypt's overcrowded Nile Valley in the process.

"This is an area immensely blessed in natural resources," said Fathi El-Shazly, the official responsible for transforming its fortunes. "We're looking at highly significant oil and gas reserves under the ground, plus 3m acres of fertile land and a staggering potential for tourism. But all of these assets are difficult to access, at least until de-mining takes place."

The question of de-mining has brought the government into conflict with the Bedouin, who believe that the limited mine clearance implemented by the Egyptian army has been targeted at meeting the needs of the oil companies and resort developers seeking to exploit the region's riches, few of which are trickling down to those most affected by the munitions.

Last year a unit of specially trained soldiers cleared around 130 sq km of land but, with an estimated 2,800 sq km (more than 1,000 sq miles) of desert still infested with explosives, their efforts were a drop in the ocean. Officials say that with limited funding, they are trying to strike a balance between mine-clearing areas for commercial development and addressing humanitarian concerns, such as clearing access to farmland. "The north-west coast is completely free of any tension between the government and the local community," insisted El-Shazly.

Ahmed Kassim disagreed. In 1981, his two brothers and a cousin, aged 10, 11 and 12, were grazing sheep near the regional capital of Marsa Matruh when they spotted something shiny on the ground. Ignorant of what it was, they began to throw stones at it. "The explosion that killed them was so large that when I ran to the scene, I initially couldn't see anything," recalled Kassim, who was 18 at the time. "All that was left was small pieces of their bodies, no bigger than a cellphone."

Now Kassim, who has two young sons, is demanding to know why the mines around his home – the exact locations are unknown – have still not been cleared. "My family got nothing from the Egyptian authorities; there has been no compensation and no de-mining happening anywhere near us," he said. The 43-year-old works as a maintenance director for an Italian-Egyptian oil firm 209 miles away in the desert; the company's plant and access roads were all de-mined long ago. "It's very upsetting; they clear the mines for the sake of private profits, but not for the sake of our children," he said.

Kassim reserves his greatest wrath for the UK government, which has so far refused to compensate those injured by British munitions or offer any large-scale contributions to the clear-up. "Your war is over, yet ours continues every day," he said. "You have no idea what it's like to live always under threat, to never feel safe on your own land. We are innocent people: this was your war, not ours, and yet we are the ones dying."

It is a sentiment shared by the Egyptian government, which points out that Egypt is the most heavily mined country in the world, more so than trouble spots such as Angola, Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Officials have spent years lobbying their British, German and Italian counterparts for more funding to tackle the problem, largely without success. Although all three countries laid mines, most Egyptians identify Britain as the primary culprit. Egypt was effectively still under British colonial occupation, and many Egyptians believe Britain has a moral responsibility for bringing conflict to Egypt's shores. The other countries have also been quicker to offer financial help on the issue.

The Foreign Office said that it channels £10m a year globally to clear mines, but does not wish to enter any bilateral agreements with Egypt, while the latter refuses to sign up to the Ottowa treaty, which prohibits the use of anti-personnel landmines by national armies.

Trapped in the middle of a diplomatic row, the Bedouin community on Egypt's north coast has grown tired of waiting for answers. Last year a group of victims under the leadership of a local tribal mayor formed a non-governmental organisation which is planning to force the British government into the dock at the European court of human rights in an effort to win compensation for their injuries. They have already been in contact with lawyers in Cairo and London and aim to prosecute the British ambassador to Egypt through the Egyptian courts.

Such a move is unprecedented and its chances of victory are slim but those behind the legal challenge believe it could be the first step towards forcing Britain into offering a full financial settlement to those who have suffered at the hands of its army, along the lines of Italy's economic partnership with Libya.

"We have a local proverb here that we trust," said Omda Abdel Rahman, whose tribal lands witness the construction of more high-end private resorts every day. "It goes, 'No right can be lost as long as there are people still demanding it'. This compensation is our right, as is the de-mining of this area – de-mining for the benefit of those who live there. So we will fight for those things. Until then, we remain paralysed."

---

Last Stand

By July 1942, the allies were on the back foot in north Africa as General Rommel pushed his forces eastwards towards the Suez canal and the Arabian oilfields beyond.

With German U-boats sapping Britain's naval strength in the Atlantic, and axis forces taking control of most of western Europe and Russia, El Alamein was seen as a last stand for Britain if it was to avoid a rapid and potentially devastating loss of military momentum.

On the night of 23 October, Field Marshall Montgomery ordered his engineers into the Devil's Garden, the heavily mined stretch of land lying between the two forces, and clear a way for the tanks of the Eighth Army to approach Rommel's Afrika Korps.

After 10 days of fighting which claimed a total of 43,000 casualties, Rommel ordered a retreat.

Winston Churchill said of the battle: "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

Today, those who lost their lives at the battle of El Alamein are commemorated at a number of European war cemeteries in the north African town.

Battle for the Nile: Egypt puts river at heart of its security

2010-06-26T12:22:00.005+03:00

Threatened by a cut in Nile water supply, Egypt sees its leading regional role draining away and its desert farms running dry

-Taken from the Guardian
-Aswan - June 2010

-Part of a Guardian package on the Nile, including Xan Rice in Uganda, John Vidal in London and an online interactive guide to the river.

-Original photography below by Ayman Farag

---

There’s only one way to appreciate the scale of Egypt’s monumental Aswan High Dam, and that’s by standing directly on top of it. Beneath your feet lies 43 million cubic metres of granite rock, construction material which took ten years and a billion dollars to assemble. To your south more than 5000 square kilometres of water stretch out towards the Sudanese border, forming Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs on earth. And to your north, gurgling out quietly from deep within the bowels of the barrage, is the Nile – now tamed, steady, and ready for use by 80 million dependents downstream.

In terms of sheer technical ambition, not to mention its impact on Egypt’s economic fortunes, political might and cultural identity, nothing has rivalled the High Dam since the pyramids.

It’s obvious from the nationalist symbols plastered all over a nearby celebratory monument and from the spectacle of heavily-armed soldiers silently patrolling the dam’s walkways – the site is reportedly protected by an anti-missile system as extensive as the one that protects the seat of government in Cairo – that this vast structure means as much to Egypt today as it did when it was finally completed forty years ago. From its inception the dam was intended to stand as a symbol of the country’s historical mastery over the world’s longest river, control of which has determined the fate of every Egyptian ruler in history, from the earliest pharaoh to Gamal Abdel Nasser.

It’s also marks the spot where, should upstream African countries have their way, surrender of that control will first become visible.

The consequences of any reduction to Egypt’s share of the Nile’s flow will be felt across the whole length of the country, not least on the brackish fields of the Nile Delta some 800 km away where farmers are already struggling to find the freshwater needed to fight off underground intrusion from the Mediterranean. But one doesn’t have to travel far from the dam’s soaring concrete slopes to witness first hand just how important the Nile is to Egypt, which relies on the river for 90% of its water supplies.

Omar lives on the west bank of the nearby city of Aswan, on a narrow slither of verdant land that extends no more than 600 metres from the river at its widest point before quickly giving way to rocky desert. Temperatures here can reach up to 45°c in the summer but a network of irrigation canals and oxen-powered water pumps keeps Nile water streaming in all year round, allowing Omar and his fellow farmers to produce grapes, figs, watermelons and a wealth of other crops for export to the big food markets in Cairo.

“The Nile is everything to us, it’s liquid gold,” explained the 25 year old as he oversaw the day’s mango harvest. “Without it the land would die, the crops would die, the animals would die, and then we would die. We’re like fish here: take us from the water and we’ll perish.”

As with most of the predominantly Nubian communities in this area, discussions about Nile water politics have dominated conversation in Omar’s village recently. “It’s been all over the news channels,” he says. “Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone’s afraid. My family were one of those relocated when the High Dam was built and Lake Nasser flooded our homeland; now we fear our livelihoods will be taken away again if the water level drops and farming comes to an end.”

In the fishing and agricultural districts of Upper Egypt there is little sympathy to be found for the plight of upstream countries threatening to unilaterally increase their allocation of the Nile’s resources. It’s an uncompromising stance echoed by technical experts in Cairo, who claim that Egypt’s share of the overall water in the region is already dangerously small.

“Nile basin countries as a whole receive 7000 bcm [billion cubic metres] per year of rainfall,” says Khaled Abu Zeid, a regional water resources program manager at the environmental organisation CEDARE. “In the Nile basin itself, you’re looking at 1660 bcm of annual rainfall. And then from all this, you have Egypt taking 55.5 bcm a year from the Nile, our only source of fresh, renewable water. So we have to ask ourselves exactly what we’re talking about when terms like ‘water-sharing’ are used. Egypt is a desert environment, whereas some of the upstream countries could not get any greener.”

Given the already precarious state of Egypt’s water security, which is set to degenerate further as population growth accelerates, it’s little surprise that successive political leaders have described any possible alterations to the current distribution of the Nile as an existential threat to the nation. President Sadat famously declared himself ready to go to war over any attempt to limit Egypt’s dominance of the river; recently columnists in Egyptian newspapers have characterised the actions of upstream states as a ‘genocidal war’ against Egyptians and an attack on the country’s ‘history, future and existence.’

Some have suggested that Egypt’s strident rhetoric has hampered the spirit of cooperation between Nile states, all of whom are set to be hit by seismic demographic and climate changes over the next few decades.“Egypt sincerely wants to work with upstream countries, and I hope that those countries don’t look negatively upon these statements about the Nile being a ‘red line’ for Egypt,” counters Abu Zeid. “But regardless of what language you choose to employ, the fact is that the Nile is a national security issue for Egypt, it really is.”

As an indication of how seriously the Egyptian government is taking the present crisis, responsibility for the Nile Basin dispute was removed from the Water and Foreign Affairs ministries last month and instead put in the hands of Egypt’s powerful intelligence and security chief, Omar Suleiman.

Suleiman was in Uganda this week holding talks with the country's president about the Nile issue, as Egypt stepped up efforts to persuade other countries, such as Burundi, not to sign the rival River Nile basin co-operative framework agreement threatening Egypt's hegemony.

Egypt makes much of its water recycling and desalination programmes, arguing that the country’s barren environs have forced it to be far more proactive than more profligate upstream countries at finding ways to use slender water resources efficiently. But critics dispute these claims, pointing to the outskirts of big cities like Cairo where the dizzying growth of luxury residential developments has seen a rash of water-intensive landscaped gardens and luxury golf courses spring up out of the desert sand. Some analysts argue that decades of outdated grids and flawed domestic water policies are playing a bigger role in water scarcity in Egypt than any potential decrease in supply.

There are many though who believe that Egypt’s current Nile predicament reveals something far deeper as well: a long-term political malaise which has seen the country’s status as the preeminent regional power slowly drain away. “In the 1950s and ‘60s relations with African states were never better,” says Nabil Abdel Fattah, a research director at the Al-Ahram Centre. “President Nasser cultivated a sense of post-colonial solidarity with upstream states based around the Non-Aligned Movement, yet under the regimes of his successors Africa has been neglected.”

Both Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak went on to yoke Cairo’s foreign policy more firmly with the USA’s, precipitating a decline in Egyptian influence in sub-Saharan African and leaving other countries like China and Israel free to fill the void.

“Since Nasser we have seen a marginalisation of the African Affairs institutes at universities, a marginalisation of African news on our TV screens,” contends Abdel Fattah. “The problem here is ethnic politics and the perception we have of Egyptian identity. Our politicians see Africa as a backwater and its countries as underdeveloped, and this has been one of the primary mistakes in our foreign policy – to lose our standing in Africa just when we needed it most. Egypt is trying to escape from its black skin, and this secession from our ethnic heritage is coming back to haunt us over the Nile.”

Back in his mango groves, Omar could not agree more. “This would never have happened under Nasser; if he were still with us nobody would dare try and come and take our water.” As a diplomatic war of words over the Nile continues to echo across the capitals of north-east Africa, it’s those stuck in the middle like Omar who are watching closest – and fearing the worst.

ElBaradei joins huge protests over Egyptian police death

2010-06-25T17:43:00.004+03:00

Opposition figurehead and former head of nuclear watchdog uses police brutality case to launch his most direct challenge to President Hosni Mubarak yet

-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - June 2010

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, joined about 4,000 Egyptians at a rare large-scale street protest today, in his most direct challenge to President Hosni Mubarak since returning to the country earlier this year.

The Nobel laureate turned opposition figurehead joined the sit-in in Alexandria over the case of a man allegedly killed by plain-clothes policemen.

Numerous witnesses say Khaled Said, 28, died after being kicked and punched by the officers before eventually smashing his head against a marble shelf in an internet cafe on 6 June. Security officials claim Said died of asphyxiation after he swallowed a packet of narcotics hidden under his tongue.

The officers dragged Said into their car and drove off, before returning to dump his body on the street in front of the cafe, the witnesses said.

ElBaradei, who has said he will consider challenging Mubarak for the presidency next year if conditions are free and fair, called the incident an "egregious humanitarian violation" which revealed a "lack of sanctity of human life".

Human rights organisations have condemned the attacks and the botched investigation that followed it. According to Human Rights Watch, which is calling for the individuals involved to be prosecuted, this has so far involved two highly-flawed autopsies, a lack of proper evidence-gathering and a series of misleading statements from the Interior Ministry accusing the victim of being a wanted criminal, an accusation which Said’s family deny. Meanwhile the two officers responsible for the incident remain on active duty.

“Even if Khaled Said had been wanted in connection with some earlier offense, that does not give license to police to attack and murder him in cold blood,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director for the organisation. “The Interior Ministry statement is grossly irresponsible, implicitly condoning police brutality.”

Graphic photos of Said’s mangled face have spread quickly across the internet, prompting a series of protests in Cairo and Alexandria which have themselves been forcibly broken up by police violence. Today's protest was the largest so far.

“These pictures are a rare, first-hand glimpse of the routine use of brutal force by the Egyptian security forces, who expect to operate in a climate of impunity, with no questions asked," said Amnesty International in a statement. "“The Egyptian authorities must reign in their security forces. [They] should know that the eyes of the world are increasingly on them, and the pictures online mean that they cannot avoid conducting a thorough investigation with another whitewash.”

Street demonstrations in Egypt are not uncommon, with regular protests over food prices and low wages, but most of them remain very small and are quickly broken up by riot police. The size and scale of today's events in Alexandria, a stronghold of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood movement, suggest that Said's death has struck a chord.

ElBaradei and a group of other prominent opposition figureheads – including former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, who was jailed after his unsuccessful attempt to unseat Mubarak in 2005 – arrived in Alexandria earlier to visit Said's tomb and meet his family. After Friday prayers, the protesters congregated at a mosque where they were met by a huge contingent of riot police.

Egypt has been under a state of emergency law for 29 years, offering effective immunity to many elements of the police and security services.

The death of Said, who has become known as the "emergency law martyr", is viewed by many as a potential turning point for the growing opposition movement.

ElBaradei is believed to have left the protest early after hundreds began chanting anti-Mubarak slogans. The 68 year old was keen to avoid accusations that he was exploiting Said's death for political gain and had called for the protest to be a silent one - but his wishes were ignored as public anger at the authorities boiled over.

Can Mubarak weather a perfect storm?

2010-06-05T13:22:00.002+03:00

Anger over support for Israel in addition to political stagnation and economic instability could undermine Egypt's president

-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free'
-Cairo - June 2010

Holed up under the belle époque domes of his presidential palace this week, ailing Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak would not have heard the crowds chanting his name on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Fayoum and other major cities across the country.

Which is just as well, as their words were enough to send a chill down the spine of any Arab autocrat fighting to maintain his grip over a nation increasingly reluctant to afford those at the top of the political tree any kind of credibility. "Ya Mubarak, Ya Sahyoni" ("Mubarak the Zionist") sang the protesters, as anger over Israel's deadly assault on the Gaza aid flotilla gathered momentum. "Down with the siege, down with Mubarak."

Only last month the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was describing the relationship between Mubarak and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a "wonderful friendship" and claiming that Bibi felt closer to the 82-year-old Egyptian than to any other world statesman.

Well, friends can sometimes cause each other headaches, and Israel's bout of gung-ho piracy on Monday has just handed Mubarak a head-splitting migraine right at the moment when he needed to be at the top of his game.

Domestically, Egypt's role as an accomplice in Israel's crippling siege of Gaza has long been Mubarak's biggest political vulnerability. As well as keeping the border at Rafah largely sealed and regularly gassing the underground tunnels that the Palestinian territory relies upon for economic survival (not to mention the construction of a 18m deep underground steel wall intended to cut them off altogether), Egypt has also consistently blocked aid convoys from entering the Gaza Strip and played a hefty part in the failure of rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah to reconcile their differences.

The rewards reaped by Egypt's ruling elite for facilitating an illegal blockade against a fellow Arab community are two-fold. First, Cairo gets to contain and cripple Hamas, whom it identifies as a threat to its own national and regional hegemony – not least due to the Islamist party's links with the semi-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement back home. Second, it brings Egypt firmly into the fold of the comically titled "moderate" grouping of Middle Eastern autocracies that enjoy American support.

Making nice with Israel opens the door to billions of dollars worth of aid from Washington, money on which Mubarak's clique depend to fund the security apparatus that sustains them in power. It also helps ensure that the west turns a blind eye to the flagrant transgressions of democratic principles and human rights that emanate out of this volatile corner of North Africa with awkward regularity - from the torture practiced by state security officers on political dissidents to the planned regal succession of power from father Hosni down to his son Gamal.

But the price the Egyptian government pays for this deal comes in the form of public legitimacy. Egypt may be formally at peace with Israel but the vast majority of the population remain steadfastly opposed to cultural normalisation with the Zionist state, never mind unequivocal political and logistical support for the economic and social strangulation of one-and-a-half million neighbouring Palestinians. The murder of flotilla activists has, predictably, fuelled a surge of anti-Israeli sentiment among many Egyptians. The challenge now for the fragmented anti-Mubarak opposition movement is to channel that sentiment towards condemnation of Egypt's own government as well.

Recent history is on their side. Over the past decade regional political crises have twice produced a sharp spike in the number of people demonstrating on the streets in Egypt, firstly at the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in 2000 and subsequently during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when 40,000 people occupied Cairo's central Tahrir Square for a full 24 hours before riot police managed to disperse them.

On both occasions, protests relating to events taking place abroad quickly mushroomed into a powerful critique of local tyranny, with linkages drawn between injustices playing out beyond Egypt's borders and the oppression so pervasive within them.

The flotilla controversy already appears to be following suit. Egyptian protesters denouncing Israel this week extended their anti-siege slogans to cover their own immediate experience of being kettled-in by baton-wielding riot police; on Tuesday, the day of rigged elections to the upper house of Egypt's parliament, TV cameras filmed one veteran dissident likening Israel's actions in Gaza to the Egyptian government's "massacre" of people's votes.

Prominent political activist Hossam el-Hamalawy told me:

"Unanimously now, whenever protesters get together, you'll find their first chants are against Mubarak. Whenever anything happens with Palestine and Israel, the strongest impact is here in Egypt. It's very ironic: we have the most treacherous regime when it comes to the Palestinian cause – Mubarak is America's most senior thug in the region – and yet the people of Egypt are among the most sympathetic you can find in terms of the Palestinians, because they can understand the correlations between the Palestinian issue and their own situation."

It is wise not to exaggerate the potential of such protests; numerically they remain small and, as another long-term dissident, Ahmed Salah, explained to me recently, most Egyptians remain fearful of expressing public opposition to Mubarak for fear of the consequences. "The majority of people, if you ask them about getting on to the streets to show their anger, simply reply 'Mafish fayda' ('It's no use'). They don't want to sacrifice themselves in vain."

But that doesn't mean that Mubarak is off the hook. With economic standards declining, political stagnation entrenching and more (highly flawed) elections approaching just at the time when the president is widely perceived to be close to his last breath, Israel's bloodshed in the Mediterranean injects a new element of uncertainty into what amounts to a perfect storm for the octogenarian's regime.

Former UN weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has become a popular figurehead for some parts of the opposition movement, has lost no time in publicising Mubarak’s undeniable share of responsibility for the deaths at sea and the humanitarian nightmare that those who died were attempting to ease.

Even more worryingly for the Egyptian government, the very leverage it held in the Israel/Palestine arena may itself be draining away. "The situation is explosive and in the upper echelons of the state there's total confusion in terms of how to handle it," el-Hamalawy argues. "There’s been a terrible failure recently on the part of the regime in terms of fulfilling its obligations to its imperialist sponsors – he’s supposed to ensure no war, no clashes, no militancy. And he’s not succeeding."

Caught between his people and his paymasters, tough times lie ahead for one of the Middle East's oldest western stalwarts.

Rafah: Gaza's lifeline, Egypt's dilemma

2010-06-02T23:34:00.003+03:00

President Hosni Mubarak caught between Arab solidarity and reliance on Israel, his country's neighbours

-Taken from the Guardian
-Rafah, on the Egypt-Gaza border - June 2010

-Follow the Guardian's live updates from the region here

From the sight of donkey carts trundling lazily down near-empty roads in the baking afternoon heat, you wouldn’t have thought this dusty patch of land lay at the centre of a vast diplomatic storm. Nor did the row of bored-looking customs officers sipping tea in the shade give any indication that their work was now commanding global attention. But the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza has long been a surreal place where rhetoric and reality rarely meet eye to eye.

Less than 24 hours after President Mubarak effectively promised to break Israel’s siege of Gaza by throwing open Rafah’s doors indefinitely, today’s developments were no exception.

In the end, the small trickle of Gazans who eventually made it out onto Egyptian soil spoke volumes about the dangerous predicament Egypt’s ailing leader finds himself in following Israel’s deadly assault on the Free Gaza flotilla earlier this week. Caught between the need to appease growing public anger at Israel’s actions on the one hand, and the necessity of maintaining his close relationship with the Jewish state on the other – a friendship which opens the door to more than $2 billion of annual American aid, money on which many analysts believe Mubarak’s unpopular regime depends upon for survival – the Egyptian government has found itself incapable of living up to its own hype.

“No one is optimistic that this will lead to any kind of permanent solution,” said one UN official making his way from Egypt to Gaza. “The border has been opened for political purposes alone. Such an opening is critical for humanitarian reasons, but it won’t last.”

Indeed at times the level of activity at Rafah terminal dropped so low that it was hard to discern whether the border had really been opened at all. Several aid trucks did make it into the Palestinian territory over the course of the morning, including a dispatch of power generators from the Egyptian Red Crescent, and hundreds of Gazans who had been staying in Egypt did successfully manage to return home. But traffic in the other direction, both human and cargo, remained barely visible.

Officials believe that no more than three busloads of passengers had made it across to Egypt by early evening, leaving an estimated three thousand Gazans waiting on the other side. Some pinned the blame on bureaucratic delays on the Gazan side, where Hamas officials were reportedly trying to implement a new system of prioritising who should be allowed to cross first. Others insisted that Egyptian intransigence was at fault.

Most of those who reached Egypt were in need of medical attention, but a smattering had more cheerful reasons for making the trip. One couple were en route to their daughter’s wedding in Dubai and were overjoyed at having navigated their way through a dizzying maze of officials and security checks. “There are many buses backed up on the other side filled with people who want to come through,” explained the father of the bride. “We were lucky to make it.”

The lucky were few and far between, however. Mostly the arrivals hall remained desolate, in stark contrast to the departures lounge which was periodically flooded with Gazans returning home from Egypt. Theoretically the Rafah terminal is already open two days a week to allow Gazan residents on the Egyptian side of the border to cross back over, but the buzz around today’s events fuelled a sharp rise in the numbers of those travelling. Many had taken the opportunity to stock up on supplies in preparation for their return to a space where items as innocuous as coriander and A4 paper are routinely blockaded by the Israelis.

Ramzi, a grocer from Jabalia, was clutching two brand new bicycles with him as he threaded his way through the crowds. “I was over in Egypt visiting my father who’s in hospital there, and I thought I’d pick up some presents,” he grinned sheepishly. Trolleys laden with mattresses, flat-screen TVs, air-conditioning units and even full size refrigerators all made their way towards buses waiting to ferry passengers across no man’s land and back onto Palestinian territory.

“Any product you can dream of, you’ll find it here,” confided one Egyptian customs officer, gesturing towards a queue of Gazans waiting to have their passports checked.

Not everyone could join the import bandwagon. Seham Mohammed Hamdani, a mother of two from Gaza who now lives in the Egyptian city of Ismailia, had rushed to the border this morning in the hope of seeing her son and daughter for the first time in 13 years; they live on the other side of the crossing and now both have children of their own. Due to apparent irregularities in her paperwork, Seham has been unable to travel back into her homeland for over a decade, whilst her children are not allowed to leave it. After hearing about Mubarak’s instructions to open the Rafah crossing yesterday, Seham believed she would finally be reunited with her family, but the Egyptian border guards once again turned her away. “It’s the end of hope,” she sighed on her way back. “It’s up to Mubarak now to resolve our plight.”

Seham is not the only one looking to the 81 year old for answers as the fallout from Israel’s naval attack continues. At a time when he is already fending off a wave of dissent over spiralling economic hardship and the consistent stalling of political reforms, and with presidential elections looming in 2011, this reminder of Egypt’s long-term role as an accomplice in Israel’s siege of Gaza could not have come at a worse time for Mubarak, one of the region’s most entrenched autocrats. Israel remains the president’s biggest political vulnerability; judging by the strange half-measures which constituted today’s Rafah border ‘opening’, extricating himself from this mess could prove to be one of his toughest challenges to date.

Travel: The Other Egypt

2010-05-08T14:10:00.007+03:00

One dodgy car, three irritable companions and 1000km by the Nile: Cairo to Luxor by road

-Taken from the National
-Upper Egypt - May 2010

-Original photography by Jason Larkin

If you slip out of Cairo to the south, past the banks of Maadi tower blocks sweating dust in the evening haze and under the choking, snarling traffic of the Salah Salem interchange, the dual carriageways will eventually thin out, the cars begin to melt away and finally – smog-streaked and exhausted – you’ll reach Helwan. Built on a giant mound that kept it safe from the Nile’s annual floods, the town sits opposite the ruins of Memphis; by the 19th century, like the ancient capital that once cast its reflection out across the river, Helwan’s beautiful sulphurous springs were showering the town with opulence and exclusivity, a tranquil respite for the well-heeled from the pulsing bedlam of Cairo 25 kilometres away. Gazing gently over the start of the old agricultural road, which threads its way down the Nile’s banks for another 1,000km into Africa, Helwan – at least on paper – seems like the perfect place from which to launch a lazy self-drive adventure down the length of Egypt. The only hitch is that the air is laden with cement dust, the streets are roaring with the din of grinding steel works, and inhospitable policemen keep swarming over the car every time we stop to spread out the map. Let the relaxation commence.

The Nile, reckoned by most to be the longest waterway in the world, has been no stranger to traveller cynicism in the hundreds of thousands of years it has been flowing north from Rwanda’s far-flung Nyungwe rainforest, out into the mouth of the Mediterranean. The river’s contradictions have always enraged as much as enchanted. The 10th century Baghdad-born adventurer Ebn Haukal grumbled over its elusive source, while in 1737 Frederick Norden, a Danish captain sent by his king to investigate Egypt, observed that it was hard to appreciate the glories of the Nile whilst being constantly harassed by boatmen – a sentiment no doubt shared today by those trying to follow in Norden’s footsteps. By the time the industrial revolution began to cast a black pallor over the Nile’s blue water, Pierre Loti – the late 19th-century French naval officer and novelist – could muster nothing but scorn for the modern river bank, bordered as it was by factories and shrouded in soot.

“Today the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the old Nile – wakened to enslave it,” he thundered in his book The Downfall of the Nile, published a century ago. “They have disfigured its valley ... silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water by dams ... Soon there will scarcely be a river more dishonoured than this, by iron chimneys and thick, black smoke.”

With such appalling write-ups by its reviewers, it’s little surprise that 21st-century tourists usually elect to skip the dubious pleasures of the Nile Valley altogether, apart from some selective felucca dabbling in Cairo and Luxor. The vast majority of foreign holidaymakers who want to take in those two great cities opt to scale the bulk of Upper Egypt by plane, soaring down the spine of the country from one tourist metropolis to the other in 45 air-conditioned minutes of packaged comfort. And it’s not just pretentious literary carping that keeps them off the ground; throughout the early and mid 1990s, the Nile-side towns and villages south of Cairo formed the breeding ground of the country’s deadly Islamic insurgency which killed more than a thousand – including tourists – and left in its wake a crippling web of police checkpoints, convoys and security restrictions across the region. Add to that the unenviable reputation of Egypt’s creaking road network, with its randomly scattered gaping potholes, high-speed lorries, crop-carrying donkey carts and legions of drivers for whom headlights are viewed as an unnecessary waste of energy – even in the dark – and you can see why Cairo’s car rental outlets are not exactly heaving with tourists eager to self-drive down south.

Which is a shame, because it’s here on the banks of the Nile Valley – where life hums within a narrow band of lush greenery on either side of the river before petering out starkly into barren desert – that Egypt showcases both the full breadth of its distant past and the ongoing struggles to shape its future. Granted, there are low points – the manufacturing smokestack of modern Helwan (mutated from its spa origins during the Nasser era) being one of them. But there are also sprinkled gems, and unlike in Cairo, where the blinding energy of the city can leave the subtler nooks and crannies bleached out to the passing eye, or in Luxor, where the touts and hawkers smother everything of interest in a blanket of plastic trinkets, Egypt’s Nile Valley serves up a manageable space and pace for tourists to navigate the country’s perdurable relationship with the river.

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It was in Fant, after night had fallen and the road was thick with shadows, that we noticed the neon-decked minarets hanging ethereally in the sky. With their bases shrouded in riverbank foliage, they took on the appearance of soaring daggers suspended in mid-air, a fitting conclusion to a day dominated by symbols of higher power on the highway. Alongside its Muslim majority population, Egypt boasts a 12-million-strong community of Coptic Christians and large numbers have found their home along the Nile; drive south by the river and you’ll see the crosses of churches and monasteries embedded deep within a long conveyor belt of roadside mosques, stretching from tiny stone outposts to towering Disneyfied bubble-domes.

Relations between Copts and Muslims in the Nile Valley have often come under strain; sectarian clashes over land use have dominated local headlines in recent years and our route down to Luxor would eventually take us through Naga Hammadi, the scene earlier this year of a drive-by shooting which killed six Christians (and a Muslim security guard) as they left a Midnight Mass on Coptic Christmas Eve. But such tensions feel relatively isolated in villages like Gebel el-Teir (Bird Mountain), perched dramatically 130m high on a cliff-top just north of El Minya, a key provincial capital.

An old hitch-hiking sheikh whom we’d gathered on the way up filled us in on the history behind the name. Legend has it that on the annual feast day of the village monastery – Deir el-Adhra (Monastery of the Virgin), built on the site of a 4th-century cave chapel – all of Egypt’s birds would come to rest at Gebel el-Teir for a few days, just as the Holy Family are believed to have done on their epic journey through Egypt. Inside the monastery on the day we visited were men with microphones crouched between great stone pillars flooded with natural light; outside, the whole curve of the valley seemed to sweep out before us, carpet parcels of alfalfa unfurling either side of the glittering river, speckled with palm trees, softly-chugging water pumps, and in one corner a blindingly white limestone quarry ascending in powdered ridges from the ground.

The reverie was interrupted by the sudden appearance at our side of Bishoul, an 11-year-old who had proudly given the church service and his attendant family the slip, and was now eyeing us with affable curiosity while sucking on a lollipop. “Everyone else is fasting,” he confided guiltily, jerking his thumb at the congregation inside. “Do you want me to give you a tour?” Within seconds we were plunging down tiny back alleys and hidden stairwells with Bishoul’s unceasing commentary piercing the muggy afternoon air. “If you like this stuff,” he ventured authoritatively, “you should really check out the Red and White Monasteries in Sohag. Now they’re really cool.”

It was a wrench to leave El Minya, “the Bride of Upper Egypt”, where our beds were in cabins on a 19th-century Nile-moored Mississippi steamer, dinner took the form of sumptuous meat grills at the incomparable restaurant Bondoka (notable also for its Quranic-verse-playing lifts), and the gardened Corniche became transformed each evening into a makeshift playground for partying children and courting couples, a slow-burn urban utopia sewing together antiquated colonial charm and new-build gaudy kitsch. But the Red and White Monasteries sounded intriguing and the route south offered something else as well: an unrivalled window on to the art inspired by the valley, spanning the best part of 4,000 years.

First up lay the sprawling necropolis of Beni Hasan, tombs from the 11th and 12th Pharaonic dynasties paint-clad in weird and wonderful depictions of hunting, acrobatics, sex and politics, all designed to protect the mummified occupants (most of whom were local governors, known as nomarchs) for their passage to the world of the dead.

Today, sleepy moustachioed guards carry on that tradition, keeping most of the vaults firmly locked until some baksheesh is produced and the keys are found. Some have been preserved perfectly with sensitive lighting and carefully controlled air conditioning, while others lie forgotten under a mountain of dust, the exquisitely drawn birds of prey on the wall scratched over with the carved graffiti of many generations of explorers – from the Romans to the French – who have passed this way before. Haunting as they are, the tombs at Beni Hasan failed to move us as much as the nearby modern cemetery at el-Matahira el-Sharqiya, a vast mud-brick resting ground of the deceased from where we watched the sun set over the Nile to the west, with unruffled felucca sails floating serenely through the graves.

It’s the kind of scene that has long inspired Hasan el-Sharq (Hasan of the East), the son of a local butcher who launched a dizzying career out of producing “spontaneous art” inspired by the day-to-day rhythm of the valley around him. Hasan, now in his early 60s, started out using colours gleaned from the spice collection of the village herbalist, smearing them on trees, stones and wrapping paper from his father’s meat deliveries; when we met him in his studio he had the toothy grin and electrified hair of a mad scientist, and quickly set about showing off his many paintings. His subjects ranged from Klimt-esque kneeling couples to morbid figurines peeking out from gravestones and mischievous chess pieces duelling on grotesque boards. “I’m drawn to storytelling,” he told me as we walked over to the new museum el-Sharq is building in his native village of Zawyet Sultan. “I take inspiration from folk epics like that of Abu Zayd el-Halili or the 1001 Arabian Nights, but also of the stories told by the environment around me here. I’ve never had any academic training in the fine arts.”

The elegant yet often cartoonish nature of el-Sharq’s work served as a good introduction to some of the art on display down in the Deir el-Abyad (White Monastery) and Deir el-Ahmar (Red Monastery) when we finally reached them the following day. Built around 400AD to trumpet the victory of Christianity over Egypt’s pagan gods and lying 12km north of the decidedly 20th-century city of Sohag, some portions of the monasteries are now being restored by Egypt’s Supreme Antiquities Council and the removal of centuries of grime has revealed a series of startlingly intricate Coptic frescoes depicting human faces, peacocks and gazelles. The White Monastery featured labyrinthine corridors and Pharaonic columns; the most interesting thing about its Red counterpart was its gangster-like monk, clad in a black gallabiya with a matching bandana on his head, with a woman on each side and a bandage on one hand. Leaning nonchalantly against the souvenir kiosk outside the chapel, he looked every inch the extra from a 1970s mobster flick. “No photos,” he warned quietly before waving us out.

Past Sohag, the sky grew thicker and darker with the heat and dust of an approaching sandstorm. By the time we reached Qena, the last major town en route to Luxor, visibility out of our mud-splattered windscreen had virtually disappeared and the rolling acres of sugar cane that radiated out around us begun to feel faintly apocalyptic, like the final frontier of the Wild West. It was market day and out in the fields clumps of men were hacking down and loading up the cane, armed with tools that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the arms of Beni Hasan’s Pharaonic nomarchs: medieval scythes, palm-twine ropes, and rickety old single-track railway carriages, hauled along by branded camels. As we wended our way towards the town sandwiched between the market delivery trucks, small armies of children descended from the Nile-side alleyways to try and steal a piece of cane for themselves, dodging the furious whips and shouts of the farmers as they did so.

The implements used for farming today may not appear to have changed much over the past few millennia, but the relationship those wielding them have with the Nile Valley land certainly has. Serenaded by palm-leaf avenues and soothed by gurgling freshets, it’s easy for anybody making this extraordinary drive down from Cairo to miss the extent to which the future of these pastures is contested.

“There has been a historical link between the people of Upper Egypt and the land of the Nile Valley, a link which is now being severed,” explained Dr Boutros, a physician who abandoned practice in Cairo to move down to the poverty-stricken villages of Luxor’s West Bank and offer his services there. We were speaking on the final night, at the end of a journey that had taken 10 days to complete, in a car that clocked up more than 1,000km and four flat tyres. “The amount of land stays the same but population is on the rise, mechanisation is increasing, and more and more rural families are forced to diversify.”

Egypt’s unpopular central government in Cairo is stoking the fire further by launching a full-frontal assault on Nasser-era land reforms, including, in some places, sending in state security forces to help seize agrarian land from small farmers and place it back in the hands of long-deposed land barons – a recipe that Professor Ray Bush, an expert on Middle Eastern agriculture at the University of Leeds, says is a “guarantee of continued communal struggles”.

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The spidery rebars that poke out of half-finished redbrick buildings all along the Nile’s banks hint at the demographic crisis engulfing Egypt, a country where 95 per cent of the population live within 20km of the river. With the population set to double to 160 million by 2050, the government is now being forced to seek out new urban centres away from the Nile Valley, out in corners of the desert that were hitherto thought uninhabitable. What effect that monumental change will have on the future of the valley itself remains to be seen. In the meantime, its lush olive groves and broken tombs, not to mention the felucca captains and self-made artists, all offer a unique insight into the multiple realities of ancient and modern Egypt. It’s not always a comfortable ride, but it certainly beats reading an inflight magazine on a 45-minute plane flight.