Egyptian Christians riot after fatal shooting

Churchgoers targeted after Coptic Christmas Eve mass in apparent payback for alleged rape of Muslim girl by Christian


-Taken from 'The Guardian'
-Cairo - January 2010

Clashes between thousands of protesters and riot police shook Egypt yesterday after six Coptic Christians were murdered, prompting some of the worst sectarian violence the country has seen.

The victims were gunned down in a drive-by shooting as they emerged from church in the early hours of the morning following a Coptic Christmas Eve mass. Egypt's interior ministry said it believed the attack, in the southern town of Naga Hammadi, 40 miles north of Luxor, was in revenge for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Christian man last year. A Muslim security guard was also killed.

"It is all religious now," said the church's Bishop Kirollos. "This is a religious war, about how they can finish off the Christians in Egypt."

By daybreak hundreds of Christians had gathered at the morgue where the bodies of the dead were being held, chanting anti-government slogans and facing down security forces who fired tear gas and bullets in an effort to disperse the crowd. Stones were thrown at police and a number of ambulances were destroyed by protesters. By lunchtime the number of demonstrators had swelled as locals flocked to attend the funeral of the dead, held in the same church where they were shot the night before, and sporadic rioting broke out across the area.

Pakinam Amer, a journalist for the al-Masry al-Yom website who was at the funeral, said the scene outside the church resembled a war zone. "There were tanks parked on the street and huge lines of riot police on either side, some with machine guns," she said. "All around lampposts were snapped, cars were destroyed and shop-fronts smashed in."

Egypt's Coptic population, which celebrates Christmas on 7 January, is the largest Christian community in the Middle East and is thought to number almost 10 million. Copts have often complained of discrimination against them from Egypt's Muslim majority, particularly over acquiring permits for the construction or maintenance of churches. Although several Christians have attained prominent positions in Egypt's political and business elites, violence between Muslim and Christian communities has repeatedly broken out in poor and rural areas, often triggered by land disputes, and only this week a new committee was formed to highlight the government's "neglect" of Coptic rights.

"Egypt has recently witnessed an unprecedented escalation of sectarian violence against peaceful citizens based on their Christian identity," the National Committee for Combating Sectarian Violence said in a statement, less than 48 hours before the shooting. "Neither President Hosni Mubarak, nor prime minister Ahmed Nazif have ever addressed the concerns of Christians regarding the repeated assaults on them."

Some political analysts believe the growth in sectarian tensions has been fuelled by the political failings of the ruling regime, which has faced increased domestic dissent in recent years. "This was not an isolated incident," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, director of history and social studies at Cairo's al-Ahram Centre. "It has emerged out of the decay of national unity in Egypt, which in turn has arisen through the extensive exploitation of religion by politicians. There has been an attempt by the government and the bureaucratic apparatus to encourage Islamisation in an effort to hide their own lack of legitimacy."

The Middle East's Invisibles

Why millions of disabled people in Arab and north African societies have to fight for more than just recognition.


-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free'
-Cairo - December 2009

Earlier this year I played a football match in Cairo against an Egyptian team made up entirely of deaf players. It was a eerie experience; under the dull roar of the 6 October flyover, which carves through the centre of the city and across the Nile, our match was played out in almost perfect silence – the normal breathless shouts of encouragement, congratulation and annoyance between teammates all replaced by dazzlingly fast sign language. What was even stranger was the reaction of my Egyptian friends later that evening – most simply didn't believe that there could be such a thing as a deaf football team, and even the ones that did thought the idea hilarious.

The memory of that game came back to me last week while I was speaking to Hanaa Helmy, an Ashoka fellow who runs a centre for children with cerebral palsy in a south Cairo suburb. "People often ask me why I bother," said Helmy. "The idea that children with cerebral palsy could be self-dependent and integrated with Egyptian society is completely alien; most people think they'd be better off dead."

The challenges faced by the hard of hearing and those who suffer from cerebral palsy are scarcely comparable, but both point to a common factor: the barriers faced by disabled people in the Middle East who want to exercise a degree of self-expression, creativity and personal agency over their lives.

These barriers are partly due to inflexible institutional structures, but also to the widespread social attitudes that stereotype and marginalise those who are physically or mentally different from the majority. It's not just that the disabled are often invisible – part of what the latest Arab Human Development Report labels "the vulnerability of those lost from sight" – but also that they are conceived of only in terms of their disability.

According to the World Bank, there are up to 30m disabled people in the Middle East and north Africa region, where – more than in the west – disability and poverty are "inextricably linked". In Egypt alone, there are up to 4 million people who need some sort of rehabilitation for a disability, and maybe the same number again who do not appear in the official figures. As in neighbouring Arab countries, those who fall into this category are far more likely than the rest of the population to join the ranks of the absolute poor – just as the absolute poor are far more likely to become disabled.

Studies have shown that access to healthcare, education and jobs all dissipate after the onset of a disability here in Egypt, not to mention the concurrent physical checks on activity (as any visitor to Cairo will testify, the city's assorted potholes, badly parked cars, water-gushing air conditioners and inopportunely placed pavement shisha smokers make it hard enough to walk through the streets on two legs, never mind navigate them with a wheelchair).

Government legislation theoretically protects the rights of disabled people in Egypt but in common with the way it treats most of its citizens, President Mubarak's autocratic regime rarely matches its rhetoric with concrete action. True, the rule on large firms making up at least 5% of its workforce from the ranks of the disabled does throw up some interesting anomalies – one KFC branch in Cairo is staffed entirely by deaf workers – and the recent case of a policeman who carried out a horrific assault on a mentally disabled man in Alexandria being brought to justice was cited by some as evidence that official concern for those with disabilities was on the rise. But on the whole there is a deplorable lack of institutional support for those who fall between the cracks of the mainstream health and education systems.

For once, though, not all of society's ills in this area can be pinned on Egypt's dysfunctional ruling party. As the sentencing of Colonel Akram Suleiman (the attacker of the disabled man in Alexandria) showed, not only is there a strong taboo about admitting the presence of disability within families, but when the existence of disabled people is acknowledged they are usually viewed either as wretched creatures deserving of charity or as miraculous achievers who overcome all the odds – but never as anything in between. As the NGO Handicap International says in its profile of Egypt, "ordinary" Egyptians "hardly consider [disabled people] as regular capable citizens having their own strengths and weaknesses, rights and duties".

The idea that disabled people are somehow detached from the common knowledge of what constitutes "ordinary humankind" – the normal experiences we all share of eating, drinking, learning, loving, having fun, experiencing sorrow, or indeed playing football – has formidable consequences. Psychologically, it prevents those with disabilities being taken seriously as independent agents, leaving them at the mercy of negative stereotypes.

Stars of Hope, a Palestinian NGO which promotes the rights of women with disabilities and also receives support from the Ashoka foundation, says that disabled women are often seen as "childlike, dependent, incompetent, asexual, unable to take on the role of worker, sexual partner, or mother. As a result, they are left confused about who they are, and who they can become."

This isn't just a question of Arab society acknowledging the existence of disabled people, it's about acknowledging their place within the spectrum of "ordinary" life.

The problem though, as Brian Whitaker points out in his recent book What's Really Wrong With the Middle East, is that the idea of society being vibrant, pluralistic and above all a forum in which individuals can legitimately carve out their own personal thought and space in their own manner – and still be an accepted part of the community – is one that is stubbornly denied through social norms inculcated through both the family and school systems. Educational models in the Arab World tends to encourage "submission, obedience, subordination and compliance, rather than free critical thinking"; in other words, children are taught that the best route to success is to accept their parents and schoolteachers vision of the world unquestionably and to learn it by rote.

It is little wonder, then, that the Middle East's disabled population struggle to be accorded the status of productive, self-expressive individuals that they deserve, but are instead diminished into caricatures. Government neglect of the disabled is unacceptable, but the real challenges start closer to home.

More to Egypt riots than football

The tribalistic violence that followed World Cup defeat to Algeria was fuelled by a genuine set of grievances

-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free'

-Cairo - November 2009

The chauvinistic brand of nationalism that swept across Egypt last week – the violent fringe of which saw riots outside the Algerian embassy in Cairo – really isn't about the football, despite what Joseph Mayton says in his Cif article yesterday.

The spark was a football match, certainly, but Mayton's contention that depressed Egyptians were simply "unable to deal with the fact that even on the football pitch, they cannot achieve success" does not tell the whole story.

Mayton appears to want to condemn the flag-burners, congratulate the police, slam President Mubarak, and move on. The reality is far more nuanced, and far less heartening; an irresponsible and sensationalist media in two countries mobilised a particularly poisonous form of latent tribalism among some Egyptians by fixating on – and exaggerating – a very genuine set of grievances over the way Egyptians were being treated abroad.

The first point to make is that Algerian attacks against Egyptian targets in Algiers were real, and the fact that they were allowed to occur in a exceptionally security-conscious state, suggests there was some government complicity in them, indirectly at least. One observer witnessed 200 youths vandalising the offices of Orascom, an Egyptian communications giant, while riot police looked on; the same firm has now been hit by a $600m bill by the Algerian tax authorities in a move that suggests Algeria is willing to jeopardise its entire foreign investment infrastructure for the sake of firing another salvo at its Arab neighbours. Embellishments and fabrications are two-a-penny in this mess, but not to recognise that Egypt was provoked in any way is disingenuous to say the least.

Second, it's all very well to denounce those who allegedly threw bricks and lobbed Molotov cocktails around in Cairo; you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd endorse that sort of xenophobic rampage. But righteous disapproval doesn't take us any closer to understanding the sentiments of tens of millions of non-rampaging Egyptians who were also furious with Algeria and expressed their outrage in other ways.

Like most post-colonial countries, Egypt is a "nationalistic" state. Combined with poor education levels, low standards of living and the inevitable sense of disenfranchisement arising from systematic oppression (which is helpfully meted out to Egyptians daily by their own government), such patriotic fervour ensures the spectre of tribalism – the retreat into an exclusionary group identity – always bubbles just below the surface.

Egypt is hardly unique in this respect; there are countless examples of African and Asian countries where ethnic tensions are high and forms of tribalism more visible. But it does exist here, even if it remains largely subterranean; after all, there is usually little opportunity for proud flag-waving under a regime that has overseen the decline of Egypt's role on the international stage, the rise of relative poverty among its people and the murder of innocent civilians by police sporting the national symbol of an eagle on their armbands. Football, of course, is an exception: the "romanticism of an 'all or nothing' game" offers the perfect outlet for a bit of brazen nationalism, relatively untainted by the government-induced disarray the rest of the country is lying in.

The key characteristic of tribalism is that it is aggravated far more by external actions – because it involves an image of the self that is inherently based on some conception of "the other" – than it is by threats at home. In fact the dignity and rights of Egyptians are assaulted a great deal more often, and to a far greater extent by Egypt's own elite than they have been by Algerians or any other recent outsiders; as Hossam el-Hamalawy, a local journalist and activist, pointed out recently, "Hosni Mubarak's thugs have beaten and killed more Egyptians than any hooligans."

But to many Egyptians, that wasn't the point; the attacks in Algiers were perceived as an extraneous peril that deserved an extreme response. The conditions were set for an explosion, and somebody just needed to light the fuse.

Enter a phalanx of pampered actors, singers, TV personalities and other assorted celebrities who quickly saw a chance to jump on a populist bandwagon and regale all the talk shows with lurid accounts of their near-death experiences while attending the playoff match in Sudan. There is an epic chasm between the lives of the (mainly) upper-class Egyptians who could afford to journey down to Khartoum for the game and the world of the masses who watched it in their living rooms and in shisha cafes, a chasm that the former attempted to bridge through a hypocritical and exploitative campaign of disinformation.

No matter that most of these individuals have now quietly recanted their claims of bloodletting in the stands; the media were only too happy to whip up the hysterical tales of these two-bit phonies who thought they could grab some grubby stardust by singing along with lies and distortions to the patriotic tune. The same process, by the way, was also under way in the Algerian press, where the poisonous al-Chorouk newspaper printed fake story after fake story in an attempt to stoke tension.

This confluence of chauvinistic nationalism and media hyperbole lay at the heart of last week's chaos. That's not an excuse, just an explanation (and an incomplete one too, as nothing this wide-ranging affair can be pinned down to a single cause). The government played a key role in fanning the flames, and they certainly tried to exploit the crisis for political gain – although I'm inclined to think Mubarak's clique decided somewhat belatedly to surf the wave of popular anger, rather than playing any part in initiating it.

As one Egyptian friend recently put it to me, Egypt's ruling class are "half-bright bureaucrats and armchair statesmen"; in the international arena they prefer to keep their heads down and avoid making enemies, which is why Egypt has so shamelessly sold out the Palestinians in Gaza and also failed to stand up to Libya or Saudi Arabia over the well-documented mistreatment of Egyptian migrant workers.

Indeed, the only good thing that might possibly emerge from the past fortnight would be a growing awareness of the duplicity of Egypt's political leaders, who are now promising to unleash "Egypt's wrath" on those who flout the rights of Egyptians. Championing those rights in recent years has involved arresting peaceful demonstrators, torturing dissidents and presiding over a state so corrupt and dysfunctional that recent train and ferry accidents have killed more than 300 and 1000 Egyptians respectively (tragedies, incidentally, that Mubarak did not think warranted a presidential visit). Tribalism may search for antagonists beyond the borders, but the real enemy of the Egyptian people lies closer to home.

Mubarak adds fuel to the fire as football riots spread

• President vows to defend Egyptians abroad as violence spreads across Cairo and Algiers
• Egyptian regime accused of whipping up nationalist fervour for political gain

-Taken from 'The Observer'

-Cairo - November 2009

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ratcheted up the diplomatic tension with Algeria yesterday as football-related violence continued to spread across both countries. In a statement to the Egyptian parliament, he told cheering MPs that “Egypt will not be lax with those who harm the dignity of its sons.”

It is the president’s first public intervention in a row that has seen thousands of protestors flood the streets of both Cairo and Algiers and a wave of tit-for-tat reprisal attacks against Egyptian targets in Algeria, and vice versa. The trouble started when Egypt won a controversial World Cup qualifier against Algeria in Cairo last week, setting up a playoff between the two sides in Sudan to decide which country would progress to the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa.

Earlier this week Egypt recalled its envoy from Algeria after expressing its ‘outrage’ and ‘denunciation’ at the treatment faced by Egyptian fans in Khartoum, where Algeria won the match by a single goal. Despite appeals for calm by the General Secretary of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, rioting has since spread to both capitals. In Algiers the offices of Egypt’s national airline were destroyed, whilst in Cairo hundreds of Egyptian security forces did battle with demonstrators attempting to reach the Algerian embassy, which was reportedly hit by fire-bombs. Parts of the city remain under police lockdown.

Yesterday’s speech by Mubarak did nothing to ease the frenzy, as he swore to protect the rights of Egyptians in the face of violations and transgressions against them. “The welfare of our citizens abroad is the responsibility of the country,” he added. It followed a television interview with the president’s son, Alaa Mubarak, in which he labelled the Algerian fans ‘mercenaries’ and ‘terrorists’.

However there were signs last night that a public backlash against the government’s handling of the football storm was gaining strength. Mubarak’s autocratic regime, which has faced a number of popular protests by Egyptians over spiralling food prices and the restriction of democratic freedoms, has been accused of exploiting the current crisis for political gain.

“Hosni Mubarak's thugs have beaten and killed more Egyptians than any hooligans,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a local journalist and blogger. “I'm glad everyone suddenly remembered Egyptians have ‘dignity’ that should be fought for and protected from humiliation.”

Crackdown in Cairo as football violence erupts

• Rioting sparked by Algeria victory spread to Egypt
• Fans attack embassies in wave of tit-for-tat reprisals

-Taken from 'The Guardian'

-Cairo - November 2009

Parts of Cairo are under police lockdown amid some of the worst football violence ever seen in the region.

More than a thousand security personnel deployed to protect the Algerian embassy and other key locations came under attack from angry protesters after Egypt's contentious defeat to Algeria in a World Cup playoff match on Wednesday. Egypt recalled its envoy to Algiers and condemned the Algerian government for failing to prevent the destruction of Egyptian offices. The secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, appealed for calm on both sides.

Reports said 39 policemen were injured in rioting that left shopfronts smashed in the upscale neighbourhood of Zamalek, an island in the Nile home mainly to expatriates, wealthy Egyptians and foreign embassies.

Alaa Mubarak, the son of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, did nothing to dampen hostilities when he demanded that Egypt take a "tough stance" with Algeria. "When you insult my dignity ... I will beat you on the head," he told a TV news programme.

Trouble first flared last week in the run up to a highly anticipated match between two of north Africa's biggest football nations. After an increasingly bitter war of words in the media Egypt won the game 2-0, setting up a playoff in Sudan to decide which country would go through to next year's World Cup finals in South Africa.

Off-the-field controversies intensified the aggression ahead of the playoff, including allegations from the Algerian team that it was pelted with stones on arrival in Cairo – an incident Fifa is now investigating – and erroneous reports in the Algerian press of an Algerian fan being killed in Egypt.

Egyptian targets in Algiers were besieged by demonstrators who destroyed the offices of Egypt's main airline, prompting several large Egyptian businesses with offices in the country to announce they were withdrawing their staff for security reasons.

Matters intensified after Egypt lost the playoff game in Sudan by a single goal, with local reports claiming that Egyptian fans were left running for their lives in Khartoum following assaults by the celebrating Algeria supporters.

A diplomatic spat broke out when an Egyptian plane sent to rescue citizens trapped in Algeria was refused permission to land and the Algerian authorities slapped a $600m tax bill on Orascom, an Egyptian telecommunications company that operates there.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said it had summoned Algeria's ambassador to Cairo to make clear Egypt's "outrage" and "denunciation". The Egyptian Football Federation has threatened to withdraw from international football as a result of the "weapons, knives, swords and flares" allegedly used to attack Egyptians as they left the stadium in Khartoum.

The attacks on the Algerian embassy in Cairo mark a new low point in relations between the two countries, who were historical allies in the battle against European colonialism. Local media reported that firebombs were thrown at the embassy compound during the night, though this has not been confirmed.

"Our government are not doing enough," said Islam al-Hussein, a 23-year-old customer service manager who was walking the streets near the embassy with a sign that read "Algeria shall pay for what they did". He criticised the violence directed at the embassy but insisted: "I need an apology from Algeria, nothing less is sufficient for our people."

Others were more forthright. "We should treat Algeria like any country that has declared war on us," Amr Higazi, a university student, told AFP.

Nubian fury at 'monkey' lyric of Arab superstar

• Black Egyptians sue and demand album be banned
• Row casts fresh light on racism in the region

-Taken from 'The Guardian'

-Cairo - November 2009

One of the Arab world's biggest pop stars has provoked a torrent of outrage after releasing a song which refers to black Egyptians as monkeys.

Haifa Wehbe, an award-winning Lebanese diva who has been voted one of the world's most beautiful people, is now facing a lawsuit from Egyptian Nubians claiming the song has fuelled discrimination against them and made some Nubian children too afraid to attend school.

The row has cast fresh light on the position within Egyptian society of Nubians, who are descended from one of Africa's most ancient black civilisations and yet often face marginalisation in modern Egypt.

Wehbe, a 35-year-old model turned actress and singer, is widely regarded as the Middle East's most prominent sex symbol and has been no stranger to controversy in the past. Her skimpy outfits and provocative lyrics (one previous hit was entitled Ya Ibn El Halal, roughly translated as Hey, Good Little Muslim Boy) have earned her the wrath of religious conservatives and forays into the political arena have also sparked debate, including her very public praise for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah during the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon.

The latest accusations of racism came after the release of her new song, Where is Daddy?, in which a child sings to Wehbe, "Where is my teddy bear and the Nubian monkey?".

Wehbe has since apologised profusely for the offending lyrics, insisting they were penned by an Egyptian songwriter who told her that "Nubian monkey" was an innocent term for a popular children's game. That hasn't stopped a group of Nubian lawyers submitting an official complaint to Egypt's public prosecutor and calling for the song to be banned.

"Everyone is upset," said Sayed Maharous, 49, the Nubian owner of a coffee shop in Cairo. Adul Raouf Mohammed, who runs a nearby store, agreed. "To compare a human being to an animal is insulting in any culture. She has denigrated an entire community of people, and now some of our children are afraid to go into school because they know they will be called monkeys in the playground."

The row over Wehbe's song has highlighted a growing sense of communal identity among Nubians in Egypt, a country where the government has traditionally promoted a very monolithic brand of nationalism, sometimes to the exclusion of religious or ethnic minorities.

Despite breaking through into the cultural mainstream – several Nubian novelists are well-regarded within Egyptian intellectual circles and Nubian singers such as Mohammed Mounir are among the most popular in the country – Egypt's estimated two million Nubians remain largely invisible on television and film, except as lampooned stereotypes.

“I think what’s interesting about the Haifa Wehbe case is the reaction of the Nubian activists,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, the Director of History and Social Studies at the Al-Ahram Centre in Cairo. “There is a new spirit and mobilisation of Nubians as an ethnically and culturally important group within Egyptian society which wasn’t present ten or twenty years ago.” One of the biggest issues around which Nubians have rallied is the plight of thousands of Nubian families who were forcibly relocated from villages close the southern city of Aswan to make way for the Aswan Dam back in the 1960s, one of the biggest engineering projects on Earth.

Construction work on the dam destroyed much of the historic region of Nubia, which also includes parts of northern Sudan, and many Nubians claim that government promises regarding re-housing and compensation have still not been met.

Outspoken Nubian rights activists such as Haggag Adoul have argued that official antipathy towards Nubians stems from racist attitudes running deep through all Egyptian social classes and which demonises many dark-skinned communities, including Sudanese and East African refugees. But few Nubians report experiencing any overt hostility on the streets of urban centres like Cairo and Alexandria where many now are now based, and Abdel Fattah believes the explanation lies elsewhere.

“I don’t think it’s racism that’s the problem,” he argued. “Yes, there are no Nubian TV presenters, but this is due to our history of colonial rule under the Ottomans, which established light skin as a model for beauty. The same with the dam resettlement programme; the issue here is Egypt’s political decay as a whole, not a specific attack on the Nubians.”

The question of whether Egypt’s Nubians are marginalised because of their skin colour, or whether, as Abdel Fattah suggests, they are merely victims of the general political malaise afflicting the whole of Egypt looks likely to be raised again over the controversial construction of a new luxury hotel complex in Aswan by the tourism tycoon Mansour Amer. Opponents of the plan claim that the project will cause significant social and environmental damage to the surrounding Nubian area, and argue that it is yet another symbol of the unhealthy ties between the political and business elite that have developed under the unpopular regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

Nubian singer Mohamed Mounir has reportedly promised to “pull the rocks off the Great Pyramid” if government approval for Amer’s ‘Porto Aswan’ plan goes ahead.

And the rich got richer... Egypt's neoliberal disaster

Egypt is lauded as a poster child for neoliberal reform. But few of its people have enjoyed the spoils of the boom


-Taken from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free'
-Cairo - November 2009

When it comes to dry reads, it ranks somewhere between Welding and Metal Fabrication Monthly and the collected speeches of Alistair Darling. And yet a newly-published report from the Egyptian government's investment authority, GAFI, is one of the most significant and explosive pieces of writing to appear anywhere in the Middle East in recent years.

It doesn't mention the Muslim Brotherhood, or antisemitism, or artificial hymens, and so far it has garnered precisely zero coverage in the international press. What it does do is address an issue which day in, day out, shapes the lives of the vast majority of Egypt's population and hundreds of millions of others beyond its borders.

The report systematically destroys the myths and distortions that have driven the country's economic policy for the last two decades – the same myths and distortions which have set the development path for numerous other countries in the Global South – and shatters the illusion that soaring economic growth rates have anything to do with widespread, sustainable social prosperity.

Since 1991, the year Egypt yoked itself to an IMF structural adjustment programme and embarked on a series of wide-ranging economic reforms, the country has been something of a poster child for neoliberal economists who point to its remarkable levels of annual GDP growth as proof that "Washington consensus" blueprints for the developing world can work. Coming on the back of an economic crisis precipitated partly by profligate government spending on arms sales (subsidised by US aid), the regime of President Hosni Mubarak signed up to an IMF loan that was conditional on economic liberalisation. Those conditions – relaxed price controls, reduced subsidies, an opening up of trade – were met with gleeful abandon.

Ever since, the country has been subject to successive waves of neoliberal reform. In 1996 a huge privatisation drive kicked off – resulting in sham sales to public banks and regime cronies, a rapid deterioration of working conditions and a wave of strikes so powerful that one analyst labelled it the largest social movement seen in the Middle East in half a century.

Then 2004 brought a new cabinet which swiftly cut the top rate of tax from 42% to 20%, leaving multimillionaires paying exactly the same proportion of their income into government coffers as those on an annual salary of less than £500. Special economic zones were created, foreign investment reached dizzying heights ($13bn in 2008) and, in the past three years, economic growth has clocked in at a consistently high 7%. The minimum wage, incidentally, has remained fixed at less than £4 a month throughout. The global business community applauded Mubarak's rule as "bold", "impressive" and "prudent".

So Egypt is now a glitzier, more prosperous land with pharaonic-style riches to match its pharaonic-style leader (now entering his 29th year in power). Except, as the GAFI report inconveniently points out, 90% of the country has yet to see any of the bounty. Foreign investment has been largely channelled into sectors like finance and gas which create few new jobs. While national resources like natural gas have been sold at subsidised rates to the tycoon owners of iron and fertiliser factories, the cost of ordinary commodities like bread and cooking oil has spiralled. In fact since the IMF began hauling Egypt's economy into modernity, Egyptians have got steadily and dramatically poorer: when structural adjustment began 20% of the population were living on less than (inflation-adjusted) $2 a day; today, that figure stands at 44%. In the past decade, when GDP growth was at its strongest, absolute poverty has climbed from 16.7% to almost 20%. Chomsky called neoliberalism "capitalism with the gloves off"; it's hard, looking at this jumble of statistics, to discern anything but a shameless hit-and-run job perpetrated by a tiny band of Egypt's business elite.

Of course this isn't the first time that conservative economic theory has proved to have a catastrophic effect on the lives of ordinary people, especially in poorer countries, but this report – sponsored by the very government it criticises – is a particularly powerful example of just how dangerously flawed the idea is that making the rich richer can be a engine of society-wide economic progress.

Timothy Mitchell argues that neoliberalism's triumph is its double-thinking: it encourages the most exuberant dreams of private accumulation and yet aggressively narrows public discussion so that "the collective well-being of the nation is depicted only in terms of how it is adjusted in gross to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets". Nowhere is that truer than in Egypt, a doublethink society where the ruling National Democratic Party can use its annual conference (held last weekend) to congratulate itself on wearing a western-tailored economic straitjacket while millions struggle to meet their basic daily needs.

The conference was entitled "Just for you". Whom that "you" was wasn't specified, but it can't have been any of the 90% shut out of Cairo's miraculous economic boom. As the eminent Egyptian economics professor Galal Amin argues, "Those who continue to preach the trickle-down theory are likely to be the ones who do not really care whether anything trickles down at all."