Inanities

I moved

2011-01-03T17:57:00.002+02:00

Hello. I'm trying out Wordpress. The new blog is here.

War and worship

2010-11-27T23:22:00.002+02:00

As we drove into Omraneya yesterday, Sharshar joked that as soon as enters areas filled with Toc-Tocs, he feels that he is no longer under the authority of the Egyptian state. Two events this week proved how wrong he is, and how right.

156 young men were issued 15-day detention orders on Thursday for charges ranging from failure to produce personal identification to attempted murder. They were taken at various points on Wednesday, during demonstrations against an order to stop the construction of a church in the area. The state responded with its usual light-handed approach: teargas, bullets and mass arrests. Two men died, 19-year-old Makarios was pronounced dead on arrival in hospital. Mikhail died at midnight on Friday night according to the Al-Ahram newspaper.

Omraneya reminded me of nearby Mounib and Imbaba where I went Friday evening. In both, entering feels like going into a maze whose pathways gradually become narrower and less well defined. There is a feeling of being sucked into these places, over and under bridges, and above all a sensation that they are cut off and contained, by natural boundaries of foul-smelling canals and rivers, and manmade obstacles, usually over-arching, monolithic flyovers. These are the original gated communities.

The flyover next to Omraneya is the Cairo ring road, a highway that, amongst other places, takes its users to the luxury Carrefour shopping complex, international schools and expensive housing developments. When demonstrators from areas such as Omraneya rise up (quite literally) and block the ring road – and such incidents are not infrequent – the act is hugely symbolic. Car-owning commuting middle-class Cairenes are confronted with an explosion from the under(neath) world. And, temporarily, it is the latter who hold power.

This isn’t surprising given the amount of living that goes on outdoors in Egypt. I don’t want to pronounce on whether this is unusual or not, because I haven’t travelled enough to say whether it is or isn’t, but on the October bridge Friday night I saw two weddings, umpteen number of courting couples and, best of all, a young man standing on the back of a parked pick-up truck dancing with assured abandon the hip-rolling dance of Shaaby music. Earlier on in the evening I saw a man drink Turkish coffee out of a pristine china cup in the middle of mechanics’ detritus and rubbish and the general heave ho of humanity on a main road. It’s not an original point, but life, including the mundane and the mad, happens most vividly on Cairo’s pulsing arteries.

But permanent control of public space is something else. And sometimes even private space isn’t private, as Omraneya’s Copts discovered. And the arbitrating factors in all this are almost always money and influence. Which are the same thing.

When we asked a man for directions to the Marmina Church in Omraneya he said “turn right down the street which has tarmac”. Tarmac is a landmark in this warren of alleys of jaw-juddering surfaces. Further inside, and as we entered an area where two churches lie in close proximity, the demographics changed perceptibly. Virtually every shop displayed pictures of saints or popes or Jesus, the Muslim veil disappeared and on one street strung between houses was a giant picture of Mary. This isn’t remarkable but the sudden change struck me nonetheless.

The Marmina church was filled with agitated people. We were hustled inside by a man who seemed particularly nervous and, after asking the permission of a priest, he allowed us to speak to people about Wednesday’s events.

It was the usual heartbreaking tale of disappeared sons, fathers and husbands. When we arrived relatives had either not spoken to detained for 24 hours or received a fleeting phone call (policemen or other prisoners /paid can be bribed into letting detainees use their mobiles) from their loved ones informing them that they were being held in a place called Kilo Ashara we Noss. There were allegations of mistreatment in police custody. Lawyers had been prevented from representing the detainees during public prosecution office interrogations.

The charges levelled against the detainees by the police are almost identical to the crimes of which some of the Mahalla 49 were convicted after the events of April 6 2008: disturbing public order and security; deliberate destruction of property, illegal assembly, violent resistance and assault of police officers, illegal possession of weapons…In both demonstrations protestors who had come together spontaneously were put down by the security forces. There are pictures from both demonstrations of protestors throwing stones and Molotov Cocktails. In both demonstrations it is alleged that security forces used force first. In both demonstrations people were shot dead.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry in its obtuseness seems unable to comprehend that even if its officers do not regard shooting protestors dead as an egregious violation of the most basic tenets of human rights it is always a stupid mothafucking thing to do in publicity terms and particularly so four days before the elections.

You can see one relative talking here about her husband who was among those taken.

She also questions why the government has been so quick to stop the construction of a church when “there are a million mosques in Egypt”. The background to this is that there are wildly differing rules governing the construction of churches to those that regulate mosque construction. Owners of the Omraneya church are accused of “illegally” converting a non-religious building into a place of worship.

The government has yet to pass a unified law despite years of lobbying by rights groups, presumably because it fears a backlash from religious conservatives. Instead, it addresses these incidents by suggesting that a “hidden foreign hand” is at work trying to undermine the tightly knit fabric of Egyptian society. On this occasion minister Mostafa El-Feqy put the blame on Mossad. I hope he has been administered his pills and been taken for a lie down in a darkened room.

The regime’s response rang particularly hollow this time because unlike previous incidents of sectarian tension this was not Muslim vs. Christian. None of the people I spoke to suggested that their Muslim neighbours had been involved. Rather, it was the usual state vs. the people, sense vs. stupidity, power vs. the powerless.

Crucially, Omraneya as a whole is in informal area whose buildings were constructed without planning permission. The crackdown on the church understandably therefore raises allegations that the (unfair) law only applies to Copts.

There was a very different atmosphere at a “Day of Anger” march against police brutality I covered yesterday in Imbaba. The whole event had been kept top secret, ElBaradei organiser Abdel-Rahman Youssef refusing to disclose exactly where we were going even while we were en route, in a convoy. When we arrived I understood why.

Turning off the ring road we found ourselves in an area with a shockingly unmade road, and proceeded at 10 mph down a main street until we all parked and met other waiting activists. Once assembled, protestors produced whistles and pots and pans that they banged together producing a din matched only by the sound of collective jaws dropping around them. They produced anti-torture posters, of Khaled Said and Ahmed Shaaban, and then began marching and distributing whistles and flags to delighted children who skipped amongst them.

The whole thing was incredibly tense since as it grew bigger the demo blocked traffic. I expected the law to swoop down immediately but for over half an hour the circus went on, watched by bemused and confused residents and shopkeepers (I overheard people asking if the demo was an election rally, or a wedding). It was only after protestors had rapidly dispersed that three people, including an Al Masry Al Youm cameraman were arrested and briefly detained in Imbaba police station.

The lack of police response puzzled me. Careful planning may be one explanation but an important factor is that Imbaba is a working class area, access to which is difficult for large police trucks and where the police presence is less visible than say, downtown (although a network of police informants operates there as was obvious by the end of the demonstration).

Maybe there is something in Sharshar’s theory of Toc-Tocs and independent rule. Maybe these areas don’t interest the government because they are not usually centres of political mobilisation other than that of the Muslim Brotherhood (I’m basing this on the number of reports of political activity which come out of these areas).

The ordinary criminal investigations police have an interest in these areas as a source of young men who can be abused or tortured, either in order to make them confess to crimes they did not commit or for fun, or who can be hired as thugs to be used during protests, or hustled into polling stations on election days for money. Otherwise the physical evidence that government has forgotten, or is ignoring, or doesn’t know what to do with these areas is everywhere, from the unmade ground to the roofs of the unplanned and illegally built buildings which every now and then collapse, killing their occupants. Maybe there is a measure of freedom in the state’s absence, given the cruelty of what it does when it remembers.

Election (cam)pains

2010-11-22T01:04:00.006+02:00

I had my first taste of Egyptian election coverage today, and it was foul.

I went to Shubra El-Kheima in north Cairo (although officially it’s in the governorate of El-Qalyoubeya, which should have been a warning – more about that later), a sprawling industrial district of 5.5 million people.

The metro station consists of a series of elevated pedestrian bridges one side of which is a busy dual carriageway and on the other a mess of market stalls and narrow streets and marauding tok toks, all covered in a haze of pollution and kebab smog.

The market side opens up into a bus station of sorts that then becomes a major road of chaos, startling even by Cairo’s standards. We entered a tall building which houses the clinic of Dr. Mohamed El-Beltagy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (and deputy leader of the Brotherhood parliamentary bloc) who is also the incumbent MP for Shubra El-Kheima.

The clinic’s waiting room walls are lined with a map of Palestine and framed photographs of Beltagy, mostly of him speaking in conferences. One was of him with George Galloway. Another was completely out of focus. Above a desk in the clinic was a sign saying that receipts are not available no matter what the amount paid. A big ferris wheel is visible out of the waiting room window.

El-Beltagy himself was not there, having already hit the campaign trail, and his aides ferried us in two cars to the village of Meet Nima, some fifteen minutes and 100 years away from central Cairo.

We arrived to find El-Beltagy and supporters parading down a main street to the accompaniment of chants blaring out of a portable speaker thrust aloft a man’s shoulder. Laminated banners of El-Beltagy bobbed up and down above a crowd of youths and men.

This being a Brotherhood affair organisation was tight and conducted by men in suits who directed marchers through Meet Nima’s narrow, unmade streets. El-Beltagy meeted and greeted in that way that politicians do, all teeth and pumping arms. In between these islands of people the march continued through desolate alleys of mud and buildings that looked unfinished but maybe were finished. The chanting died down at this point because only crickets and cats were listening and El-Beltagy put his teeth away and conferred with the suits.

At one café a man seemed intensely irritated by El-Beltagy’s presence. I asked him what he thought of El-Beltagy and he said that he hasn’t seen him once in the five years he’s been MP for the area, and that he hasn’t done anything for it either. At this point I was politely encouraged to move on by an El-Beltagy aide.

A journo friend with me said that she was told that El-Beltagy provides free health care to constituents. I wasn’t able to establish this. Another resident told me that El-Beltagy campaigns vigorously on their behalf but that since spending decisions concerning infrastructure problems etc are taken above, nothing gets done.

At this point I got a phone call saying that there was a problem, two of my colleagues were being detained in a National Democratic Party building. It subsequently transpired that they had gone to interview participants in an NDP counter-demonstration and then found themselves forced against their will to remain in an office, in what was apparently an NDP building, or a building connected to NDP candidate (Megahed Nassar), one of four NDP candidates standing for election in Shubra El-Kheima. The NDP is no stranger to locking journalists up but usually in police stations and/or after a legal process, so this was slightly unusual.

My colleague’s camera was stolen by a man who entered the office and took his bag*. I told Dr Mohamed about what was going on and he said he would put lawyers on the case, but sometime later my colleagues were allowed to leave the building.

The march had ended at this point and two journalists I was with decided to go home while me and someone else planned to go to where my colleagues were waiting. An El-Beltagy campaign aide insisted that he would accompany us, in a tok tok. But there weren’t any, so as he mounted a motorbike which had appeared from nowhere he said he would go and bring them to us in a car. He got onto the back of the motorbike and buggered off, and I can still see his silhouette waving bye.

Two minutes later a man in jeans and dress shoes appeared and began asking bystanders waiting for tok toks if they were “with them” - i.e. us – before shooing them away and I realised that it was our friends from state security investigations. We were told to go down the road to where the two journalists who had attempted to go home had been stopped while in a taxi and been detained.

The usual bullshit then began. We were asked who we were and why we were in Qalyoubeya by the top guy who relayed all this information to “el basha” through his mobile while surrounded by around six men. He told us that we needed to permits to cover the elections (even though the permits we are required to secure only apply to November 28^th, the day of elections itself) and that we should have “passed by” them before starting our work.

There were protestations about the fact that we do not actually need permits to work, which were rejected. All this was delivered in the tone particular to Egyptian state security officers, obnoxious bar flirt meets psychopath. I’m sure they receive formal training in it because the patter is always identical. Alternatively, maybe they are just sent to hang out in South London nightclubs on Friday nights.

As usual it took approximately 287 years for them to establish that I am a foreigner who is also Egyptian. What was weird though was that I was asked my name and I pointed out that the officer asking me this had my press card in his hand and it bore this information. He said “yes but I’m asking you”. Didn’t understand exactly what they were testing here.

The names of my colleagues’ foreign publications proved even more of a challenge but we got there in the end while all the time our names were being run through their big database of Miscreants and Threats to the Security of the Nation. We were then given another tedious lecture about permits and the importance of “reporting to the local police station so that police can protect you” before covering anything, before being allowed to go in a taxi they flagged down approximately 30 minutes later.

The lessons from all this is:

- I really should never return to Qalyoubeya, or at least not for journalistic purposes. We were stopped in an area very close to where Philip Rizk was kidnapped

- Don’t rely on political figures to help you out in practical ways - i.e. not leg it and leave you - if there’s no political capital in it.

- The regime will make it as hard as possible for journalists to describe the processes by which it has ensured that the results of the upcoming elections have already been decided. Darkness lies ahead.

* I got a phone call at 1 a.m. saying that the bag had been "recovered by the MB".

Spongebob Tearpants

2010-11-11T21:06:00.001+02:00

It struck me yesterday as I watched on television young people destroying Tory Party HQ that Margaret Thatcher is almost exactly the same age as Hosny Mubarak, was elected prime minister only two years before Hosny took the throne and inspires equal levels of vitriol. Imagine if she was still in power 30 years later.

A journalist who has done a series on “Generation Mubarak” (in German. Google translate doesn't bugger it up too much) was at a protest I went to today at Cairo University. There weren’t many Generation Mubaraks there however, and in total not more than 100 activists demanding that the government respect a recent court decision and remove interior ministry security officers from Cairo University, which they have in their grip much in the way they have the rest of the country by the scruff of the neck.

The interior ministry didn’t get the memo about casual dress however and arrived in full riot gear, approximately 150 soldiers on active standby opposite the university and more hidden away in thirty trucks.

How fierce they looked, stacked up all in black with their guns and their helmets, lined up against the green mobile fortresses behind them. Impenetrable and unvanquished.

(As I was going home I went behind the line of trucks and saw a small group of the soldiers sitting on the ground, thin without their bullet-proof armour, tearing into bits of bread on which they smeared bits of cheese, or halawa. These conscripted souls are Generation Mubaraks, too).

One of the state security officers policing the protest was unusually fat. I remember him because he proved to be particularly unpleasant during a protest outside the Kuwaiti Embassy earlier this year. He likes to buffet people around with his very loud voice. He attempted to do so to a man who stopped opposite the protest and watch. The man turned out to be a Cairo University professor, with time to spare between lectures and unwilling to take any of his shit. He stood his ground and I thrust a voice recorder in his face. (Too knackered to translate. If a kind soul wishes to do so, please be my guest. And feel feel to correct Arabic spelling mistakes).

‎أنا بأتمشى كدا قدام جامعتي ‫و كليتي و بأشوف آية المظاهرة دي و موضوعها أيه لأن هي لفتت نظري و أنا عندي ساعة، ساعة و نصف فاضي من المحاضرات‬
‎‫جاي واقف هنا شوية‬
‎‫على جانب‬
‎‫فهو قاللي انت بتلف كدا‬
‎‫عاوز تعمل دور‬
‎‫داخل بيبحث عن نيتي‬
‎‫بيعاقبني قبل ما أعمل الدور‬
‎‫أنا راجل واقف‬
‎‫زي ما هو واقف‬
‎‫يقوللي ممنوع الوقوف‬
‎‫هو كل حاجة في الدنيا بقت ممنوع؟‬
‎‫آية ممنوع الدخول و ممنوع البص و ممنوع التعليق و ممنوع الكلام و ممنوع الكل حاجة‬
‎‫ده سيايته و هو مكلف بهذا‬

Later the fat policeman attempted to push Aida Seif El-Dawla around with his voice but he picked the wrong person to mess with.

Aida asked him something along the lines of, “do you people not respect court rulings?”

“No,” he said, laughing.

He laughed later on, too, when a fellow journalist who I promised I would not out on this blog had an unfortunate trouser disaster in the buttocks area caused during horse riding (!) the previous evening.

“I know this is a weird question but would you mind looking at my backside?” the journalist said, and suddenly things were looking up. But actually I was looking down, at a large tear in his pantalon revealing some very upper thigh.

I confirmed that all was not well on the ranch and together we attempted to think of a solution. Being a professional he couldn’t just bugger off, but at the same time Egypt has enough problems without international correspondents wandering around exposing themselves to students. (Although this hasn’t stopped a certain gifted Guardian writer, ho ho. Only joking, Jack!).

Suddenly my eye fell upon a Kefaya sticker.

There is a use for this group yet, I thought. Lacking alternatives the journalist went for the idea and, while ensuring that Abdel-Halim Qandeel wasn’t looking, I procured a sticker and Kefaya suffered possibly its most ignominious trial yet.

Alas said journalist returned some time later and reported that his buttocks were rejecting popular resistance. By this point the trouser issue had become something of a talking point amongst demonstrators and fat security officers, and a protestor who made no effort to suppress his guffaws kindly presented my journalist friend with a safety pin. That too proved unsuccessful and for the rest of the afternoon my journalist friend walked around valiantly, if rather strained-looking.

His Story

2010-11-04T19:29:00.005+02:00

I had a day of history today at one and a half exhibitions.

1. Men 2aglak anta you ungrateful shit

The first was called “Achievements of President Mohamed Hosny Mubarak” (sub-caption: “He promised. And he delivered”. Like Cook Door) and was held at the premises of the Ministry of Social Development, a large expanse of space ruined by that blancmange type of characterless architecture which might also be included under the list of Mubarak’s achievements.

When we arrived a car park attendant confirmed that the exhibition was indeed on but that the exhibitors were packing up. Strange we thought, since the exhibit was advertised as running for three whole days, but pressed on anyway.

Arriving (at around 1 p.m.) at the door we saw flags being folded up, plants being carried away, display stands being dissembled. In short, all the signs of people wanting to leg it and start the weekend. Still there were some achievements left, visible by carefully avoiding bits of wood with nails sticking out of them and other construction debris.

The first exhibit consisted of pictures of Hosny, BFF Safwat El-Sherif, and boy king Gamal (at a post office counter in a casual shirt, perhaps inquiring about his stamps) surrounded by endless and dull text about the many achievements the National Democratic Party has realized under Hosny’s wise stewardship. It was a powerpoint presentation without the power. I had my picture taken with Safwat above my head, like a sinister hat. Moftases gave Hosny’s extended hand a high 5…etc.

Mounting a gynormous escalator we were conveyed upstairs where a live concert of Mohamed Tharwat singing “We Chose Him” for the president greeted us on a big screen. The concert dated approximately from 1991; Suzie had shoulder pads and Hosny’s jowls were still following orders. It turned out to be an exhibit by the Ministry of State Information. Two bored middle-aged employees watched the screen as a never-ending stream of people in cruise-style oriental fancy dress floated past, shook the royal hand and shared a quick laugh.

Most of the exhibits had gone by the time we arrived or were in the process of leaving. They were mostly arranged by governorate and ministry.

Ismailia had loads of pictures of Hosny. El-Wady El-Gedeed had dates. Minia had crystal. The Ministry of Agriculture had wool and handwritten informational posters.

Interestingly there was also a selection of pharonic artifact reproductions accompanied by a sign headed “Egypt’s Wish List”, like on Amazon. Underneath it were pictures of all the gear that foreigners have nicked and which Egypt wants back. Strictly speaking the failure to recover stolen items is not an achievement but in the context quibbling about this point felt like upbraiding a serial killer for swearing in public.

Downstairs there was a slightly interesting travel section about the 3rd Metro line (which will allegedly be completely finished in 2012) and the railways (which claimed that over 30 train stations have been renovated). This being Mubarak’s Egypt, there was an exhibit about a complicated spaghetti junction type flyover resembling innards, in Malawi, Minya.

For no apparent reason there was also a booth by Jaguar the car manufacturers. Achievement by proxy, perhaps, or is Hosny. The people manning the booth had buggered off by this point, obviously, so we couldn’t ask why it was there.

We left, none the wiser as to Mubarak’s achievements but armed with illuminating literature. One booklet listed all the “achievements” Alexandria has witnessed under governor Adel Labib, including basic infrastructural obligations such as installing a sewage system in Agamy and developing Alexandria’s streets.

Not yet completely sickened by seeing images of the president everywhere we then went up the road to the Panorama 1973 War Exhibit, a rotunda building whose sole purpose seems to be to ensure that visitors leave knowing less about the war than they did when they entered.

2. We’re off to Button Moon

Surrounding the rotunda is a pleasant garden filled with military craft replicas and parties of visiting school and college kids. There is a mural donated by North Korea.

Almost immediately upon entering one is confronted with the “souvenir” shop, consisting of miniature flags, Al-Ahly football club insignia and postcards of an assortment of personages including a wrestler I did not recognise and, appallingly, that army-draft dodging Michael Jackson-impersonating item popularly known as Tamer Hosny.

We were almost immediately ushered onwards by an officious man with a walkie-talkie who informed us that the “show was about to start”. Rounding the corner I was delighted to see full size tanks, and that a crowd of excited young girls in fluorescent colours were assembled on top of it, meaning that I could clamber all over it as well, and I did.

We were then shooed into the rotunda through a hall lined with a last supper type image of Hosny et al at a table doing war, as well as a sign on a door saying القائد COMMANDANT which I wanted to nick.

I couldn’t believe that they weren’t taking the piss with the first show. We parked our arses in a cinema type room, along with a party of college students, it all went black and then a loud voice started holding forth in modern standard Arabic. In front of us were some curtains. These then went back to reveal a miniature war landscape made out of papier mache. The voice boomed on and then stuff lit up and little model planes flew and tanks on sticks tanked and rockets rocketed in a frankly primary school project fashion which reminded me of this:

In fact Moftases and I buggered off early and attempted to go upstairs to the panorama exhibit which we had been told is where the real money is. Alas however the Panorama works on a strict conveyor-belt type system and we were informed that there was yet another show to sit through before we could ascend to the heavens. We had a look inside the cinema and it was yet more grim papier mache. Being extremely bloody hungry, but yet not hungry enough to eat a display of the 1973 war, we avoided the enthusiastic attendants and ate some Pot Noodles sold outside, but were foiled in that by the omnipresent officious man with the walkie-talkie who told us that we had FOUR MINUTES to eat before our party would go upstairs to the panorama. Then he stared at us and pursed his lips until we could stand it no longer and fled.

Inside we were given the rock star treatment and allowed to use the LIFT, (only cos there was noone else around) and we arrived in the darkest mothafucking place I have ever been in since I left the womb. Now I can truly empathise with the Chilean miners. The attendant advised us to sit in the middle (“the VIP seats”) and I experienced a mixture of emotions as I groped my way through the pitch blackness to a seat which a certain high echelon governmental posterior might have once graced.

The college party eventually arrived and sat down and then the bloody thing started to spin as we stared at an enormous scene of fighting in the 1973 war painted on the walls of the rotunda which then turned into a recreation using replica objects, creating a sort of 3D effect. I mean it was well done and everything but after about 5 minutes I started wishing they would either speed the spinning up that we could leg it without being apprehended by the bloody attendants. Particularly given that mix of the booming narration and nationalist songs was singularly uninformative.

In the event we stayed until the end when the booming voice stopped and we were plunged back into darkness like someone had accidentally pulled out the plug. Everyone filed out and went downstairs.

I didn’t expect to see any critical examination of the war but I didn’t expect it to be that chest-thumpingly bad. The worst bit however is that as usual the role of the men who actually fought the war – the men who died - is given only a fleeting reference. The big brass gets all the limelight. And everyone who sacrificed something for that war deserves a better tribute than the Panorama.

~~P.S. I forgot my camera in Moftases' car and will add photos once I retrieve it. Now go about your business in a state of unbearable excitement until I do.~~

Oh dear, leader

2010-10-14T19:20:00.006+02:00

"ESMA3 EL KALAM!!!"

Today I attended a public gathering, in Egypt, of more than five political activists that did not end in mass arrests, acts of violence and a Gomhoreya article describing the incident as an act of willful disorder by foreign agents.

The world is not about to spin off its axis however; the “march” was organised by members of the May 4 Movement, a love-in for Hosny Mubarak which, on its Facebook page, describes that eternal gentleman as the “leader of the new thought brigade” and urges him or his son to sit on the Egyptian people for yet another ~~five~~ six years.

This being a pro-regime affair journalists were left in peace but we were screwed over anyway by being dragged out in weather so hot I imagine it is what the temperature would be like if hell invited the sun over for chili fajitas. We were then left to melt for approximately one hour. I sat opposite the Nour Mosque and watched two coffins thrust aloft a sea of hands go in and come out on their final journeys. I was struck by how quickly they moved. Much quicker than the traffic below which skulked past in its usual cloud of lead, noise and invectives.

The Mubarak lot eventually had the good grace to show up, an hour late, and assembled on the pavement opposite the mosque where they unfurled flags and printed posters and handwritten signs. Suddenly everything was a sea of Hosnies.

Everyone stood around looking at each other and wandering what to do until a Japanese journalist turned up, giving two “protestors” the opportunity to show off their English. A state security scribe sloped onto the scene with his clipboard like a friendless loser at the junior high ball and they went through Youssef, Oosha and numerous other variations before it was eventually established that the man’s name was Yushi.

I wandered around and had a look at the posters, which were laminated and very professional-looking indeed. Shame about the load of crap written on them. Then I thought a spot of interviewing wouldn’t go amiss and spoke to three men whose main arguments for supporting Mubarak can be summarised as follows:

1. There have been no wars during his presidency

2. He has built many bridges (as in actual bridges, not metaphorical bonds of peace)

3. Every Egyptian home now has more than one electrical device in it, unlike the 1970s when it was either a transistor radio or a telly.

I noticed that several of the protest “leaders” there had gold-rimmed, pimp, sunglasses on, and for this reason I initially had difficulty differentiating them from state security officers, with whom they were very pally. Cigarettes were offered around out of a silver and leather cigarette case. I overheard one bloke say “El 2akh men 2amn el dawla by2ol…” which is an interesting variation on the epithets applied to state security officers I usually hear at protests.

There were a couple of kids there. One embarrassed-looking 14 year-old had clearly been strong-armed into coming by his dad, a small, cheerful man in his sixties.

“aih ra2yek fe ebny? Negm” [What do you think of my son? He’s a star] he asked/told me.

The son had been thrust into a photo opportunity with an Imam and an Egyptian flag, in what seemed to be an attempt to show the breadth of national unity and complete absence of sectarian conflict in Egypt.

The man turned out to be quite interesting because he informed me that he was trying to set up a union for domestic workers. Alas the conversation soon went south.

MAN: I’ve been to the National Council for Women’s Rights about this but nothing’s happened.

ME: Why don’t you talk to human rights groups?

MAN: No, no. I don’t like them.

ME: Uhm. I know a good lawyer who’d be interested in helping.

MAN: I have a lawyer working with me. It’s Nabih El-Wa7sh.

ME: Good luck and goodbye.

Having exhausted every possible camera angle known to man and grown tired of hearing about bridges I inquired whether the men were thinking of doing any marching in the near future. Initially the journos were told that the march had been delayed pending the arrival of millions of Mubarak supporters.

Then a tall man in a suit and sunglasses dropped a bombshell. Security bodies had cancelled the march! He was asked whether he knew that this would happen before it was announced. He said of course he did but that he didn’t actually decide to start it here and that it was up to him he would have began it near the presidential palace “inshallah 200 metres away. That would still be a march”. However behind the obfuscation was the real probability that, like a man blaming erectile problems on the drink, they were simply embarrassed that no one had shown up.

They’re an odd lot these pro-regimistas. As they went on about peace and stability and free elections (yes, honestly) I kept expecting them to say ONLY JOKING! But they went on and on and their hearts and their heads seemed to be in it. I was reminded of a comment someone posted on my Facebook recently in which he said that he thought an account of torture and police harassment had been made up, cast doubt on whether Khaled Said had been murdered by the police and accused local human rights organizations of publishing lies for their own agendas.

Today’s march may have been a farce but it is easy to forget how representative their views are. Commentators always like to describe the Egyptian people as a pent up ball of fury on the cusp of revolution but this ignores the many people who, regardless of being shat on day after day either believe that the Mubarak status quo is better the devil you know than the one you don’t, are frightened of change, just want a quiet life or have bought into the idea of The Threat from Without (Salafi Islam, Hezbollah, men with beards in general, Israel, Palestinians, Algerian footballers, Facebook, GPS before it was licenced, Iran before Iran-Egypt flights were licenced, religious minorities, neighbours with which Egypt has to share Nile water, neighbours with which Egypt has to share a border, homosexuals, Western moral depravity, half-Egyptians, Saadeddin Ibrahim, the Chinese artificial hymen,) by which the regime has “justified” its existence, and its policies. Creating this immutable link between change and an existential threat to Egyptians’ well-being has been the regime’s master stroke.

A cheerful gentleman who engaged in mild banter with the pro-regimistas. "Saba7 el fol" he said when he saw me photographing him.

MAN BUYS HORSE, REMOVES BRAIN

2010-10-08T16:20:00.003+02:00

CAIRO: A man who bought a horse and immediately removed its brain defended his actions this week, saying, “the decision is in the best interests of the horse and will in no way affect its performance”.

Pharmacist and part-time amateur dramatics enthusiast Sayed El-Baddie purchased the well-known horse, Constitution (15.3. hands) in mid-August. Constitution’s failure to appear at an equestrian show last Saturday set tongues wagging and on Sunday El-Baddie, from Dokki, confirmed suspicions that the popular horse’s head had been axed.

The decision was met with a storm of protest from Constitution fans who seized upon the move as yet another example of interference in equestrian affairs ahead of the 2011 gymkhana when young fillies will compete with old nags for the crown.

Controversy surrounding the gymkhana intensified recently when it was decided that during future gymkhanas, horses will compete in closed halls admittance to which will be limited to gymkhana organizers, and that judging will be carried out in secret.

While Constitution did not compete in the gymkhana, he was a familiar and well-loved figure at events, who in 2007 found himself at the centre of controversy when gymkhana organizers overheard him telling other horses that incumbent gymkhana champion “Immortal Heart” (12.1 hands), who has dominated the gymkhana for 28 years, “is in ill health”.

Constitution made the comment during a dressage event when Immortal Heart’s left front leg appeared unnaturally stiff.

As he flogged an immobile Constitution yesterday, El-Baddie maintained that his decision to remove the horse’s brain was motivated solely by the desire to “make things even better than they already are”.

“Nothing has changed. Constitution will take the same salary, will continue to attend equestrian events and remains an important figure in the horse world. The only difference now is that he’s dead”.

Seeing is deceiving

2010-09-27T20:44:00.007+02:00

The past 10 days have been an extravaganza of seeing things differently, on a personal level and for the nation as a whole.

On the personal level

I had Lasik surgery done, finally. No more chasing contact lenses around the back of my eyeballs for me. For those of you thinking of doing it I say, “Proceed” while noting that at one point you go blind briefly.

Luckily for me I had a very nice doctor who talked me through every stage of the operation (at least during the first eye) in insistent detail like a real estate agent attempting to sell me a penthouse. I didn’t know however about the aforementioned temporary loss, so when Dr announced “you’re going to lose your vision”…“Haa, has your vision gone?” It all got a bit Clockwork Orange and I was startled, to say the least, as all before me turned black.

The hospital where I had it done has a streamlined conveyor belt approach to its patients, rather like a processed cheese production line. The human element did emerge at a few points however, such as when the accountant asked my nationality and I said Egyptian-British (the order varies, I say whatever come out of my mouth at that particular moment) and he interrogated me about my parents’ origins. When I explained that my father is from England he said “ahh, British-Egyptian then” with no further explanation, and sent me on my way with a file number.

Then when I was having a repeat last minute test of the curvature of my cornea I enquired why the repeat test was necessary the technician said, “el doctor talab reblay” [your doctor has requested a replay]. Maybe this is ocular terminology, I don’t know.

Moftasa noted that the porter who was portering me about the various floors for blood tests etc had “toz” [difficult to translate, but in essence two fingers up at the world] conspicuously written on his hand in biro, which offset all and any discomfort endured that day.

The best bit however was immediately after the operation when me and four other processed cheeses who had also been Lasiked were instructed to sit in a group of chairs outside theatre, while Dr finished off other patients.

The way it worked is that the patients on their way to theatre walk past the newly-Lasiked people, which is fine except that we were all in various stages of discomfort after the operation and – from what I could tell when I was briefly able to open my eyes – we were mostly flailing around in silent agony, our faces contorted like an experiment in Cubism. The patients on their way to meet their destiny were thus forced to walk past a scene out of a Ralph Steadman dystopian nightmare.

On the national level

Anyone who has been within 10 yards of the Internet in the past two weeks will have heard about Photoshopgate, Al-Ahram’s misguided bit of Adobe meddling which the newspaper’s editor Abdel-Meneim Said subsequently described as “an expression of Mubarak’s position in the region”. The flood of “expressionist” pisstakes that subsequently ensued were described by Mr Abdel-Meneim as an “attack” on Egypt. Rather than keep his mouth shut until it all blows over he then informed us that the “re-orientation [SNORT] was well received” by the authorities.

There was more photoshopping of reality this week at the 2^nd session of the Khaled Said trial. The ministry of the interior deployed the same pro-police “protestors” it had used during the last trial session, but on a much larger scale. I say protestors, but these were essentially Egypt’s answer to Millwall fans, a load of vest-wearing mullet-bearing dickheads who (as Moftasa said) for LE 50 and a strip of Apitryl were happy to turn up and spout out any old shit, namely that Khaled Said was a drug using army-evading criminal who (presumably, in their world outlook) deserved to die.

I attempted to talk to them through a police cordon (while dodging the wooden sticks they were throwing at the pro-Khaled Said demonstrators) but they refused to talk to any journalists, most likely because they had been ordered not to. That is if they were capable of rational speech.

The reason I was outside the court and not inside was that the wall of security officers surrounding the court told the press that the head of the court had ordered that we obtain his permission in order to enter. This obviously was a load of bollocks and I know this because it’s a common tactic. If you know the right lawyer - and depending on what mood the Interior Ministry has woken up in that day – the lawyer can talk you through the cordon, into the court, where you discover that the judge doesn’t give a shit about your presence or lack of it

So essentially I got up at the crack of buggery dawn in order to stand in Alexandra’s heat and humidity to watch the really sad sight of an image of Khaled Said being hit with a shoe by men in vests working for an interior ministry carrying out its version of damage limitation and in the process shitting on everyone.

The regime is aware of how high-profile this case has become. A friend who has contacts in the Interior Ministry told me that in the wake of the uproar about Khaled Said’s death officers were brought in and given a bollocking, told to calm things down for a bit. Not sure I believe this.

However the Interior Ministry did go to the trouble of mobilising the Milwall fans and printing a huge vinyl banner for them; because on the international level it still insists on that fragile veneer of respectability while behind its back it gives the finger to everyone at home. This time however its standards were really shoddy, and the whole spectacle was in essence a huge fuck you, world, we do as we please.

Update your history book

2010-09-15T22:33:00.001+02:00

Al-Ahram* have disabused us of our misconceptions concerning important historical events in a series of pictures, below. Wael alerted us to the most recent important historical event, here.

أخرجتنا من أوهامنا جريدة الأهرام بخصوص مفاهيم خاطئة كانت لدينا بشأن أحداث تاريخية مهمة في سلسلة من الصور ، أدناه. وائل نبهنا إلى الحدث التاريخي الأخير، هنا.

الطريق الى مصر
The road to Egypt

الطريق الى هاستنجز
The road to Hastings

الطريق الى الفضاء
The road to space

الطريق الى كأس العالم و العالم كله
The road to the world cup and the world

الطريق الى المجد
The road to glory

* Silly buggers have removed the picture now.
** Thanks to Moftases as usual for the technical assistance and translation of the big words.

A night in with Google Reader would have been better

2010-09-05T22:47:00.005+02:00

I went to a cultural event in Cairo on Friday after a self-imposed hiatus following a dire evening at an open-mic “talent” evening some months ago which made X Factor auditions look like a Three Tenors concert. So much bile built up during that never ending 45 minutes that I could have saddled my inflated gallbladder and ridden home on it.

Friday night Natasha Atlas graced the Geneina theatre in Al-Azhar Park and while not a huge fan well it’s lovely to sit outside in a gentle breeze isn’t it. We arrived early, Natasha started late, Guns and Roses style. As her band walked out before she appeared, a heavily accented voice bellowed out “welcome to Egypt” possibly thinking that the female piano player was Natasha? Who knows. Natasha eventually appeared, festooned in what looked like Siwan (tent) material.

Her voice really is incredible and her band was mad tight but there was something missing, despite – or maybe because of the fact – that everything was perfect. It was just like listening to one of her records. It didn’t help that she spent the whole time sitting down (having apparently hurt her leg) and dancing on her chair in a manner resembling a child trying to contain urine.

There were two exceptions to this, but both however were marred by external factors.

1.The achingly beautiful “Black is the Colour (Of My True Love’s Hair)" which Natasha sang very nicely indeed (though no one sings it like Nina). Alas however seated behind me was a Blackberry-owning penis-featured obnoxious tosser who spent virtually the whole song loudly telling someone how to reach the Geneina theatre which meant that we heard:

Black is the colour of my true love’s hair

AYWA YA ME3ALLEM HA2OLAK TAWSAL EZZAY

His face so soft and wondrous fair

SHEMAAL FE YEMEEN

The purest eyes and the strongest hands

AYWA YEMEEN

I love the ground on where he stands

WE KHALEEK MASHY 3ALA TOOL

I love the ground on where he stands

EB2A KALEMNY LAMMA TAWSAL

Every last bit of romance was stripped out of the song.

2. "Riverman", again she sang this well (although not sure that the super vibrato worked) and the band were great, but it pissed me off that she didn’t mention that this is a cover, particularly given that Nick Drake spent his entire career plagued by depression and doubting his own ability (!) before topping himself – and then going on to enjoy posthumous success. Isn’t there some kind of protocol regarding giving credit where credit is due in the music world?

Twenty minutes into the concert my friends and I were already starting to get a bit itchy but the final push was provided by an interminable Tabla solo which was brilliant and everything but all a bit Youtube “Learn Tabla with Ali”-ish. There was a minor comedy moment before hand however when Natasha handed he mic over to Tabla player Ali, explaining that she and he had written a song together which was played at Ali’s recent wedding.

Ali then went on to precede his solo with a short speech in which he introduced “the most important person” in his life. His wife surely! No, his dad bounded on stage in a baseball cap and I imagined somewhere in the audience, a woman bristled.

Rambling account of the trial today

2010-07-31T21:36:00.006+02:00

Today’s instalment of the Abdo show began much as it went on, with the judge getting his handbag out and generally being irascible.

Shortly after it started someone who had not get the memo about the judge’s aversion to lenses used his mobile phone to take a picture. Someone told on him.

“HAATOOLY EL GEHAZ ELLY HOWA SAWWAR BEEH SAWA2 KAAN CAMERA AW MOBILE” [bring me the device he used to photography whether it is a camera or a mobile" the judge bellowed, surely with unnecessary precision about categories of electrical equipment.

Then the judge stood up and started gathering his belongings in a demonstrative fashion after reminding us that his courtroom is a photography-free zone. Lawyer Hamdy El-Assiouty remonstrated, explaining that the gentleman in question might not have been aware of the judge’s photosensitivity.

“E7na mesh fe Studio Masr,” [We are not in Studio Masr] the judge grumbled, but relented and sat down.

The first witness then arrived and off we went on a trip round Bizarreville which eventually ended with us driving off the edge of a cliff.

El Moqaddam Mostafa Hamed works for the Interior Ministry’s Internet Crimes Department. He explained that in February 2007 he got a complaint from Judge Abdo alleging that the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) and 17 other websites had published a statement that he considered libellous.

About a week after this he received instructions from the public prosecutor to investigate the websites in question.

El Moqaddam Mostafa explained that during his investigation he divided the websites into three categories:

1. The ANHRI website which originally published the statement.
2. Other websites which published the statement but did not allow comments on it.
3. Other websites which published the statement and allowed comments on it.

The judge then asked posed his first slightly alarming question: “Do you need special permits to access these websites?”

I hope I misheard the question because (as happened on several occasions subsequently) the answer had nothing to do with the question asked. El Moqaddam Mostafa explained that sometimes websites contain the information necessary to identify their owners and also that he is able to get complete data about a website from the first day it was created.

When asked whether he found any libellous phrases or words on the websites El Moqaddam Mostafa said that two websites allowed libellous comments. Negad El-Borei pointed out that one of the websites, Madha Ba3d ya Watany is not even involved in the case. El Moqaddam Mostafa acknowledged this and gave him the stink eye. As for the other comment, posted on naughty Amr “Mahmoud*” Gharbeia’s blog, it accused Judge Abdo of taking bribes and working for the police.

The judge then asked whether El Moqaddam Mostafa’s investigations revealed who owns the websites that allowed the comments. El Moqaddam began by drawing an incomprehensible (to me at least) analogy between websites and cupboards “El website zay el dowlab” before attempting to explain the concept of domains and sub-domains. Where the website is a sub-domain such as katib.org, only the domain owners know the website author’s identity.

The subject of comments and their authors required El Moqaddam to launch into an explanation of IP addresses (“el basma el electroneyya”) which is fine, except that at one point the judge said something along the lines of “The only thing I use the computer for is to write stuff”. The Internet did seem like uncharted territory for him, which was unfortunate given the subject matter he was confronted with.

El Moqaddam Mostafa explained that he “tried to summon Amr more than once. All we wanted him for was to access the control panel [don’t know what he meant] in order so that we could get the IPs of the people who made the comments”.

“But Amr didn’t come”, he said.

Gamal Eid then challenged El Moqaddam Mostafa to say where exactly in the ANHRI statement the word “stole” was used, saying that El Moqaddam had found that ANHRI accused Judge Abdo of “stealing”.

El Moqaddam countered that he had not used the word “stole” but “copied” (copied).

Gamal Eid then asked whether the ANHRI site allows comments, and whether it contained libellous material. El Moqaddam ignored this question and said the website owners are able to identify the authors of comments.

Another defence lawyer asked El Moqaddam Mostafa whether his investigations revealed the name of one of the defendants, Ahmed Seif (who is also accused of libel).

“I examined about 18 websites and his name might have been mentioned”, el Moqaddam Mostafa said. I wanted to ask whether his investigations might possibly have also revealed the name of Ronald Macdonald or Demitrious Roussos or Laika the First Dog In Space and whether their names should be added to the list of defendants.

Defence lawyer Negad El-Borei then asked whether Amr “Mahmoud” Gharbeia published the naughty ANHRI statement that accuses Judge Abdo of plagiarising 50 pages of an ANHRI report for his book on the Internet.

“I don’t remember. It’s all in the public prosecution office report,” El Moqaddam Mostafa replied most unsatisfactorily.

We then again set off into the unknown when Negad alleged that the Interior Ministry’s copy of the blog post in question by Amr “Mahmoud” Gharbeia might be faked because the comments do not appear in chronological order.

“The website owner controls comments,” el Moqaddam answered. Dr Moftases suggested that while this is not false, it’s not exactly the whole truth either, since comments which e.g. appear in this order:

February 7th 2007

February 5th 2007

February 8th 2007

…will only do so where the blog owner enables readers to vote on their favourite comments (which makes the comments appear in the order readers choose). Apparently Amr “Mahmoud” Gharbeia’s blog doesn’t have this function.

But there is also apparently something called the “nested comments” function which also makes comments appear in no particular order.

The next witness was a defence witness, Gamal Manaa, a former ANHRI employee who was in 2007 head of the research department.

Manaa explained that he identified the pages lifted from ANHRI’s report by Judge Abdo and not credited to them. He said that on February 13 2007 Judge Abdo rang Gamal Eid up and there was a long phone call, which was followed by repeated “annoying” phone calls.

Judge Abdo’s lawyer interrupted in order to demand that the court be told what Manaa’s qualifications are.

The next defence witness was Abdo Abdel-Aziz Hamada who explained that his job is to upload content to the ANHRI website.

Another worrying question was posed by the judge: “How exactly did the plaintiff lift/transfer content from the ANHRI report to his book?” Abdo said that he didn’t know but that the report was published on the net.

The judge then asked what harm was caused by the plaintiff using 50 pages of a ANHRI report word for word without crediting them, and asked what the correct procedures are for referencing material taken from the Internet.

I hoped that this was some kind of sophisticated legal interrogation device rather than being for informational purposes. But then I watched the judge dictate the witness’ answers to the court scribe (there is no stenography in Egyptian courts) and remembered his earlier comment about computers and thought glum thoughts.

Judge Abdo’s lawyer then demanded to know ANHRI’s working hours, whether the report was published in PDF format or Word and how long Abdo has been with ANHRI.

The pattern of this gentleman’s questions reminded me of those Facebook “20 things you didn’t know about me” questionnaire things posted by the unemployed such were their randomness.

Abdo said that it was clear that the report had been plagiarised because identical spelling mistakes were reproduced in Judge Abdo’s book.

Asked about the significance of the PDF/Word distinction, Judge Abdo’s lawyer made the astonishing claim that it is impossible to copy PDF files which even I know is codswallop.

At this point defence lawyers wanted to summon more witnesses but the judge announced that he would need time to read the case file before questioning these witnesses, prompting the outrage of Hamdy El-Assiouty.

This man stood in this position for about 10 minutes without moving. His look of hopelessness sums up the whole day

Things got rather tense and in a moment of high action the judge tersely declared that the case was adjourned until 26 September before exiting stage left, leaving defence lawyers enraged.

Off we buggered out of the courtroom but then a lawyer friend told us that the judge was now summoning witnesses and we went back in and there then followed a series of events.

Then lawyers said that the judge was demanding to hear the witnesses in a closed session WITHOUT LAWYERS, sort of a la Guantanamo.

Lawyers of course refused.

Then lawyer filed a “talab el radd” which is when they demand that a judge be changed.

It was announced that the demand would be considered on September 4 2010.

Then defence lawyers drafted a letter requesting that the talab el radd be withdrawn.

Then we hung around for absolutely ages and eventually went home when it was announced that a decision would be reached by the court the next day.

One lawyer I spoke to was a bit confused by the decision to change the judge since in October judges are all rotated anyway and someone new will hear the case.
I was more or less confused by everything.

Here is what Gamal Eid had to say about it all.

*Private joke too tedious to explain here.

Pane

2010-07-28T17:39:00.002+02:00

I lived in Alex for a year at the beginning of this millennium, and it was one of the best experiences of my life: heat-filled, carefree and of limited duration.

Revisiting the city for the first time after I left it was unexpectedly painful, what with the bumping into the memories and all that. It is a still wonderful city - and one I became attached to far more intensely than I will ever feel fondness for stinky, crotchety Cairo - but with each visit it has become less and less mesmerizing, and is almost now a stranger where once it was my partner in crime. Reduced to someone I would nod my head at in greeting in the street.

The city was intensely unfamiliar when Sharshar, Um Nakad and I arrived on Monday evening. The intense emptiness of the night’s black sea was still there - but it emitted a putrid stench of piss and sweat. The corniche’s buildings, the old soldiers, still stand sentry duty - but are pockmarked and wind-lashed and exhausted. At their feet are the crowds, Alexandrians and holidaymakers happily promenading in the evening’s sticky, cloying air - but I don’t remember seeing so many beggars in Alex when I lived there.

But then memories of places are always carbon copy versions, a faulty imprint of geography and time and emotion.

I was in Alex for the trial of two policemen being tried for misuse of force against Khaled Said, who died when they apprehended him in an Internet café in June. The courtroom was absolutely filled with both media and relatives and friends of the two defendants. Angry-looking women occupied one row. One remonstrated aggressively with the tea-seller about the LE 4 change he had still not brought her. When I squeezed past them in order to take a photo of the defendants they hissed and mumbled in complaint. It was only when a slanging match broke out between them and a woman who is testifying against the defendants that I realized that they were relatives of Mahmoud Salah Mahmoud and Awad Suleiman.

At one point in the trial I had the despairing thought that as usual, justice is only going to be half done in this case; the two men will be found guilty but not of the crime witnesses say they committed (murder, or at least manslaughter) and that those higher up the chain of command will continue to sleep peacefully at night. The findings of the two postmortems performed on Khaled Said’s body have effectively locked the truth in a room to which the legal system doesn’t have a key, as I understand it. Maybe the judge will be different this time. I don’t have much hope of this however since a defence lawyer (who introduced himself as “general” so and so = ex police = regime) speaking after the trial described him in glowing terms.

After the trial we went to Trianon in Raml Square so I could write my article. Sharshar (who had not been allowed into the courtroom and was kept waiting in the sun for two hours) slept, Um Nakad made phone calls and provided invaluable legal assistance for my story.

There was a man in the corner of the café who talked in a loud voice and gesticulated in an animated fashion for the duration of the time we were there. I thought he was using a hands-free but later realized that he was talking to himself. He had a briefcase on the chair next to him. I wondered what was in it.

After I had finished my story I went to use the loo and on the way there saw that all the café’s staff were staring out of the window.

Street children/teenagers were fighting. As we watched through the glass one of them, wearing a baseball jacket, dragged a youth with no feet out of his wheelchair and proceeded to pummel him, assisted by two other children and a young man who came and went.

I stood next to the man talking to himself - whose stream of consciousness now centered on the fight - as it continued, the disabled man on his back, his stumps flailing wildly as the youth in the baseball jacket punched him in the head and the other children kicked him. A middle-aged man carrying a plastic bag stood and watched, half smiling, fascinated.

Separated by the café’s glass, the fight played out for people in the café in silence, and this was perhaps its most disturbing aspect: seeing the disabled man being dragged along the pavement by his shoulders, the empty wheelchair rolling, the fists cutting through the air, the vain attempt to resist, the dirty desperation of it all, how long it was, how long, and all mute.

Café staff eventually intervened and police arrived. The disabled man, now smiling, was placed back in his chair and the youth in the baseball jacket obligingly pushed the wheelchair accompanied by two policemen. Calm returned. I then noticed that the street kids had put pieces of cardboard in the opening of an unused underpass where the fight broke out, in addition to flowers in an improvised vase. A man kicked it all away on the instructions of the man from Trianon.

Um Nakad later told me that someone from Trianon told her that the disabled man had “opened up someone’s stomach last week and is no angel. Nobody intervened because they’re all scared of him. He might be carrying a knife”.

Maybe there will be a time in Egypt when it will be impossible to silence and conceal this everyday violence, when the glass sealing off desperation from people who can afford not to care will be shattered. I hope so.

الكبري ممنوع

2010-07-09T21:16:00.003+02:00

Today there was another silent protest against police brutality, or at least there was meant to be.

I went along to Qasr El-Nil bridge ten minutes after it was meant to have started and encountered the usual scene of lovers staring cross-eyed and nauseatingly at each other while caressed by a gentle wind, but distinctly no protestors. The idea is that protestors all wear black and stand in silence/read the Quran or Bible for an hour, in a line. So far assembly points have been along the Nile, presumably because the presence of the aforementioned couples and other flaneurs both increases the profile of the protest and provides a protection of sorts. Because these are after all only individuals contemplating the Nile. Who all happen to be wearing black while standing in silence.

The filth had other ideas however. As I approached the Tahrir end of the bridge I saw a bunch of them standing by one of the lions instructing youths wearing black t-shirts to bugger off. I then wandered along the corniche below the bridge where 6 – 7 young men in black were positioned doing silence and contemplation etc. I assumed they were part of the protest. Up on the bridge meanwhile on one side even the non-political lovers were being moved on, and I overheard one officer say to pedestrians attempting to walk along the bridge, “El kobry mamnou3” [the bridge is forbidden] and felt like we were in some role-playing computer game and that we would have to find the golden chalice through the haunted forest.

By this point I had run into a journo I know, who was accompanied by another journo I didn’t know called Ahmed, who turned out to be demagh and droll. Me and Ahmed trundled around looking for the protest until we discovered that for some reason it was outside the Trade Chamber [el ghorfa el togareyya] in Bab El-Louq, so off we went.

There were about 20 people there who were immediately descended upon by a group of uniformed cops and plain-clothed nasties. It was “agreed” that the protestors (some of whom were not the usual activists present at almost all demonstrations, and who included a child) would leave in groups of three, which is what happened.

There was a minorly interesting moment when a copper asked a journo in a brusque fashion who he was and what newspaper he worked for. When said journo replied New York Times the tone changed considerably. I must remember to use this tactic.

There was more confusion after that as we wandered and wondered where to go, including a bonkers moment when some men in the street began exclaiming “a protest! A protest!” and “Ali El-Hashem has died!” and “We’re going to the Synagogue!” Two of them strode off while behind us another dragged one man off his seat while all laughed and lots of colourful descriptions of the mother of the man doing the dragging were bandied about. It was eventually established that these gentlemen had nothing to do with the cause, and that the cause had now (inevitably) moved to the Journalists’ Syndicate.

On the way there Ahmed described a protest by El-Baradei’s National Coalition for Change that he had covered a few weeks ago, participants in which – after being having been prevented from demonstrating by the police – decided that they would finish off their evening of activism by decamping to City Stars, a 5 star shopping mall. I don’t know if the anecdote is true, but it reflects an impression held by some that Dr Elbadz’s movement is somewhat elitist - or at least that it recruits individuals from certain social strata.

I thought very unchristian thoughts throughout the day as I observed the feeble number of people who had turned up for the protest, because on Twitter people were calling for “activism” by tweeting tweets about Khaled Said and the protests.

I still have some thinking to do about this and so don’t want to get my high horse out quite yet but I have a burgeoning belief that Twitter activism is something of an oxymoron.

Twitter is indispensable for communicating information and throwing light on issues ignored by the media big boys, but activism? How can writing 140 characters to (as most my followers are, at least) like-minded people constitute activism? Isn’t this like the Pope railing against abortion at a Catholic priests’ annual general meeting? Not that I’m blaming or chastising or judging or anything, I am all for people ranting against oppressive mothafuckas because it’s one of my favourite activities. I just object to the nomenclature. Getting something as a trending topic on Twitter is good and everything but it isn’t activism, it’s awareness-raising. To call it activism is a little bit of an insult to the people who interrupt their lives to go out on the streets, in the process exposing themselves to arrest and injury.

And here endeth the lesson.

Rule of boars

2010-06-14T18:28:00.006+02:00

More blundering, crass stupidity from the police yesterday, as they responded to demonstrators protesting police violence with violence, again.

Some 150 people assembled in Lazoghly Square – home of a state security headquarters – at 5 p.m. This number quickly grew as protestors prevented from gathering outside the main gate of the Interior Ministry - as had originally been planned - converged on the square. They managed to circle the square twice before the police were able to get their shit together. The usual black cordon of cannon fodder was quickly formed and we were hermetically sealed in. We were well and truly kettled.

The Pig, Faltas, Sharshar and his brother arrived late and were prevented from approaching the protest by the cops. As it turned out they witnessed most of the violence, in the form of manhandling and punching and (goes without saying) arrests of some 36 peaceful protestors.

Inside the cordon meanwhile energy levels initially remained high. But then an hour, turned into two…turned into three…and eventually four. Sporadic arrests of people inside the cordon were made as the police’s long arm reached in and plucked people out, like a lizard entrapping a fly with its tongue.

More worryingly however the security cordon was gradually getting tighter, forcing the kind of sweaty intimacy with strangers one only really desires after dinner and a Tia Maria. Plus everyone stank. And there was no air. Someone took pity on us however and bottles of water were thrown in, while above us people watched the show from their balconies and rooftops.

Things got really hairy when the cops decided to crush us, on two separate occasions.

For some unknown reason a woman with a child of about 4 years old was in the middle of the crowd, so when the first crush started the tiny girl risked being pulverized underneath us. We attempted to shield her as best we could but the kid was terrified. She was standing right in front of a row of riot police, who could have lifted her above their heads into safety, but didn’t. She and her mother were allowed out afterwards. Afterwards I saw someone holding up a tiny flip-flop she had lost in the panic.

The second squeeze was worse. It followed the failure of negotiations between a state security officer, Hisham El-Iraqi and lawyer Khaled Ali, about letting protesters out of the cordon.

Ali insisted heatedly that protestors would not leave until everyone arrested during the protest was released. El-Iraqi looked at him with some disgust before holding up his hands, saying “bass..baaas keda” [roughly – “it’s like that is it?”] and buggering off.

I was sitting on the ground approximately 10 minutes later pondering the fact that I was sitting in the middle of a road outside a state security investigations headquarters and also the fact that I was starving when someone told me to get off the floor.

“Why?” I asked. “There are plain-clothed officers gathering outside,” she said.

Then I saw the riot police linking arms more securely and a strange sort of silence descended on the scene. It was eerie, like the space between someone hitting the brakes and the crash afterwards.

The next minute my feet were off the floor and Dr Moftases was doing the face he does when he’s driving and looking into the sun, which is not a good sign. I split my energies between breathing and staying on my feet while women screamed, and men shouted, Allaho akbar, Allaho akbar! [God is great, God is great!] and "betmawwetoona!" [You're killing us]

When the crush stopped protestors were left stunned. Everyone formed rows and linked arms while a senior riot police officer and then a state security officer walked along a sort of corridor they had formed between protestors and the riot police and surveyed us, while we stood in silence.

In the final hour as the sun set and birds flew merrily above our heads, tweeting (while we also tweeted below furiously) some of us engaged in conversation with bored members of the riot police before we were eventually let out in groups of three (and photographed by the police as we left).

One of the riot police asked Dr Moftases about his phone and that led on to the revelation that the soldier enjoys using the Internet, has Yahoo email, downloads songs but doesn’t look at news sites. The soldier seemed unusually willing to talk, and said that if he hadn’t been conscripted into the riot police he would be standing where we were standing.

- Why do you obey orders if you know we’re in the right? We asked.

- Because disobeying orders means 10 days in prison, he said.

The last time riot police revolted was in 1986, over threats that their term of service (3 years) would be extended. The miserable conditions in which they spend these 3 years still haven’t changed, and the soldiers we spoke to told us that while they sympathized with our cause, they also hadn’t had eaten all day and were fed up.

But not fed up enough to resist, just like Egyptian society as a whole has been pushed towards the edge for the past thirty years but never quite seems to get there, no matter what – even if the pace has quickened recently.

A huge factor in why the people who watched us from their balconies and the men who crushed protestors below refused to join them - despite their sympathy for the cause - is of course fear. Because the regime has turned the police into a mafia and the rule of law into a rod for our backs. It has stitched it up nicely.

Sidenote: Dr Moftases has discovered that when it comes to the cops, the police does very literally keep it in the family.

One of the police’s very best techniques for watering down the fury and intensity of the response to their actions is exactly what happened yesterday, and is evidenced by the fact that I have just written 945 words at you without once mentioning the words Khaled Mohamed Said.

That was the point of the protest yesterday. An expression of anger at the fact that the police have yet again destroyed another life, and will most likely get away with it because the rot which started (is that when it started? Or was it when it was consolidated?) in 1981 is now so far advanced, and so grave, that policemen feel secure enough to beat people to death in public, saving them the effort of taking them to the police station to do it.

But yesterday the focus was lost, slightly, and Khaled was buried under the arrests and the beatings – as happens every time. Distraction.

Meanwhile, as usual, the Interior Ministry are doing their very best to spoil Khaled’s good name, but I’m not entirely sure that they’re succeeding.

For the first time yesterday friends who have only a passing interest in current affairs and have never been to a protest came. I think, particularly, that it was brought home to young men of Khaled’s age that they are at risk no matter how much they steer clear of “trouble”. So perhaps something good will come out of Khaled’s murder, after all.

Are you shoura?

2010-06-01T21:02:00.004+02:00

I experienced democracy National Democratic Party (NDP)-style today in Helwan, where I watched people arguing with the police during the Shoura bi-elections.

The governorate of Helwan is right next door to Cairo, but green where the capital is grey, empty where Cairo is teeming. Both suffer air pollution, but I think that Helwan’s must be worse; virtually everywhere you look is a chimney sending out nefarious-looking clouds of smoke. Helwan is famous for its industrial district and particularly its steel factory, the biggest in Africa I am told. The giant skulking insect of the factory’s machinery dominates the Helwan horizon as you approach from Cairo.

We arrived at the El-Rassas polling station at noon, just as the sun was at its highest. Men assembled around the voting station said that they’d been denied the right to vote by police officers who told them that since they did not have voting cards, they could not vote. For our benefit they went back and tried again. You can see what happens in the video below that I filmed, which makes up for what it lacks in sound with the moment when the policeman pins up the voting regulations on the wall.

The voting regulations clearly state that voters must have in their possession “the pink [actually referred to as red] voting cards”.

The voting regulations also clearly state that where a registered voter does not possess the bloody voting card (introduced this year) he may vote using any piece of ID.

The policeman proudly hung up the poster and then triumphantly pointed to the first paragraph. Disgruntled voters pointed to the second. But then the policeman played his joker card.

“Deih el ta3limaat 3andina” [These are the orders we have]

Leaving El-Rassas we drove through Helwan’s hard, unkempt industrial countryside to a courthouse surrounded on one side by a huge heap of stinking rubbish and on the other around 150 angry men and 15 women denied the right to vote. Three small, dusty boys watched the proceedings silently.

Count it properly, count it properly, you’ll find that the result is Muslim Brotherhood (MB) protestors chanted, holding up images of the MB’s Shoura candidate, Ali Fath El-Bab.

As usual with the MB it was strictly organized and segregated, with only a minor brouhaha when someone from the courthouse wanted to close the gates resulting in the taking of umbrage by an MB member.

A cheerful man, Mostafa Mourad who my colleague Jon Jensen filmed in this video, told us, “There is no competition. We’re in competition with the police”.

He and another representative of a different independent candidate both said that they had been denied entry into polling stations in order to observe the election process, despite the fact that they had official accreditation allowing them to do this. The excuse this time was that it wasn’t stamped by the local security directorate.

Later that evening I went to a press conference about the elections given on the 27th floor of what is popularly known as the Television Building. It is the headquarters of the General Information Department, amongst other Orwellian organizations. The head of the General Information Department began the press conference.

He listed all the marvelous ways in which foreign journalists had been assisted by the General Information Department during their coverage of the elections, noting that in a limited number of cases journalists (including Daily News Egypt and The National, both of whom he mentioned) had been denied access to polling stations “because of a disturbance in these polling stations”. This was absolute codswallop. Jon spent twenty minutes trying to get into the polling station in question, and during that time there were no disturbances at all - because the polling station was empty.

Next up was the spokesman of the Ministry of the Interior, a man with a Poirot-esque moustache and gold rimmed glasses who described elections which might possibly have happened somewhere on the planet at some point. They certainly didn’t happen in Egypt on June 1 2010 - lots of MB candidates driving vehicles into polling stations and opening fire on police officers and smashing ballot boxes. None of these incidents – which were dealt swiftly and expertly by the police - undermined the probity of the elections, we were assured.

I had noticed as I entered the Television Building that there was an armed central security forces recruit standing on a sort of bridge overlooking the building’s lobby. This is in addition to the soldiers stationed outside of course. As I left, ruminating on the bullshit I had listened to for forty minutes, the weirdness of this regime again struck me. It is a psychotic librarian. With brutal exceptions, its oppression rarely has any flair or imagination. Like its figurehead, it is utterly uninteresting. It relies on administrative obfuscation and bewildering red tape. Or red voting cards. Or stupid, groundless court cases brought by regime lackeys. And while it does this it puts on press conferences given by men in sharp suits in front of backdrops with dynamic Italic lettering surrounded by majestic views of faraway Cairo.

The worst thing is that it is too stupid, or too complacent, to tie up the ends properly. But that’s ok because its footsoldiers on the ground, when confronted with the inconsistencies can always fall back on the old favourite: ta3lemaat. Instructions.

Old Egypt

2010-05-30T18:51:00.003+02:00

ElBaradei went on walkabout again today, and I went too.

It was Old Cairo that was buffeted with change this time. I descended from the taxi, underfed and underslept to be immediately bellowed at, in English, by a gentleman demanding to know whether I was the girl in the taxi with a camera asking about Old Cairo. I wasn't. I was then apprehended by a man who talked at me about the importance of a memorial to Egypt’s prisoners of war for 10 minutes, including stomach-churning details about bones being carried off by dogs.

On the subject of bones being carried off by dogs, the media scrum was much smaller today than it was during the Dr’s previous appearances. There were notably fewer TV crews, for example. I wondered whether this was the first sign of rust on the shiny change bandwagon.

ElBadz and his (windsurfing) brother Ali arrived and off we all went. The procession was silent as it blundered its way down Mar Girgis street (is that its name?), photographers sending startled tourists flying as they scrambled all over the shop for the ElBaradei money shot.

Call me crazy, but I thought that since it had been advertised on the elbaradei2011.com website, and since ElBaradei was surrounded by about 40 supporters, and since it took place at 10.30 a.m. as opposed to say 1 p.m. (leaving journos plenty of time to write and file our copy while not requiring that we get up too early), the visit might, possibly, have something to do with politics. I threw caution to the wind and tried to ask the doctor a question.

“Hello, Dr Mohamed I’m Sarah from Daily News Egypt,” I said putting out my hand.

He ignored the hand.

“May I ask you a quick question?” I asked.

“No”, was the resolute answer. “Not now”.

Maybe I looked like I had just found out that my husband had been cheating on me with a chair leg, because Nice Guy Ali ElBaradei smiled and said “not now ha ha” in a kindly way.

“This is a personal visit,” Meanie Mohamed said over his shoulder, as he and his supporters marched onwards in their matching T-shirts.

Monsieur Le Change

So that was that. I and other journalists were left wondering what the point of the exercise was, while tourists just wondered who the bloody hell the man at the eye of the camera storm was. I heard “president” said in at least three languages by tour guides during the explanation.

A weird incident happened on the way to the synagogue. A girl was lying on the ground, her foot bleeding. She appeared to be mentally disabled. Suddenly a Coptic monk and a photographer were wrestling over the photographer’s camera, the photographer protesting “wallahy masawwartaha” [honest to god I didn’t photographer her]. The monk was having none of it, and eventually ripped the lens off the camera. The photographer got it back in the end but it was all very bizarre.

There was more walking after that, a spot of light chanting, before everyone went home.

There’s something wrong with the ElBaradei campaign for change, or maybe it’s just that the excitement his initial return generated has fizzled out.

While I think it’s slightly duplicitous (for the reasons listed above) of ElBadz to suggest that his visit today was of a “personal” nature (i.e. media piss off) he isn’t under any obligation to talk to journos if he thinks that this will convince the world that the purpose of today’s exercise was about reaching out to the people. This would have been more convincing however if he had elected to go to an area whose population is not 50% tourist.

House rules

2010-05-24T00:14:00.004+02:00

On Saturday morning I had to get up early to cover the first session of the trial of lawyers Ahmed Seif and Gamal Eid and geek Amr Gharbeia, who are being targeted by that bloody ctrl+c judge. Again.

While we waited, a group of us discussed the protests and sit-ins that have been taking place outside parliament for months. Having woken up at 8 a.m. and left the house without breakfast cos of the dodgy alarm on my fucking mobile phone (which refuses to be stolen or confiscated or fall down the toilet or be sold) I was feeling unusually curmudgeon. Alas my interlocutors were subjected to me setting out my stall and forcefully selling my theory that the government has allowed the parliament protests to happen – while forcefully cracking down on other types of demonstrations - because they serve its purposes.

This theory is based on the following:

- The protests and sit-ins have been allowed to happen, which in itself, in Egypt, is evidence of regime approval

- Al Ahram has written sympathetically about the protests at least three times. A change in editorial staff is not enough to explain this radical change in policy from a state mouthpiece.

- When regime stalwart Ahmed Ezz made his appearance on CNN he mentioned the protests, saying something along the lines of “every morning when I go to my parliamentary office I pass the protests” i.e. Egypt is a blooming oasis of free speech and democracy

- The protests are easy to contain and the permanent sit-ins are (to my knowledge) all protesting for economic – rather than the more “combative” political – demands

Twenty-four hours later I was standing in Qasr El-Aini street talking to a worker from the Amonsito company who was rolling his shirt up to show the marks left on his chest and arms by a policeman’s blows. Negotiations about workers’ demands between the government, state-controlled trade union and Amonsito employees failed. Workers left the People’s Assembly where the negotiations had been taking place and security forces attacked soon afterwards. Eight arrests were made and three workers were injured.

Lovely Dr Moftases talked to workers about the injuries they received and the fantastic Philip Rizk was filming the worker who showed us his injuries when a particularly obnoxious police officer, in his early 20s and his summer whites, who has clearly just graduated from the Police Academy, appeared and interrupted the filming. You can see him at the very end of this video. The usual bullshit ensued. We were instructed to produce press IDs before our mobile phones were taken from us.

“They were filming police officers,” the eager young policeman whined to a plain-clothed officer. “No we weren’t”, we said.

The phones – including that of Moftases who wasn’t bloody filming anything – were taken to another, more superior, police officer, with a deep tan and piercing blue eyes and the general feel of someone who doesn’t deal straight. He and Moftases wrestled, literally, over his phone for a bit like rugby-playing schoolboys, before Moftases relented. Meanwhile two policeman deleted all the images and videos on my phone. They did the same to Moftases and I think to Philip. They tore a page out of Moftases’ notepad on which he had written details about one worker’s injuries.

Later that evening they did to the protests outside parliament what they did to our mobiles, wiping out the demonstrations and threatening anyone who refused to leave with arrest.

As usual, I’m left trying to identify a logic in security bodies’ actions when perhaps there is none. Did Amonsito workers get too loud? Is Mubarak expecting an important visitor from abroad? Was this just another attempt to wrongfoot us, the troublesome public? I can’t help but wonder what they’re planning, what changed, why suddenly the demonstrations stopped being a pretext to boast about public freedoms and became a hindrance.

But ultimately what’s the point of analysis when a police officer, on the subject of our shooting a mobile phone video in what is supposedly a public street without their permission, said to Moftases, “feih 7ad bey3mel keda? Elly dakhel bayt yesta2zen el awwel” [it’s not polite to do that. People entering others’ houses should ask permission first].

Fady the Child gets engaged

2010-04-26T20:44:00.013+02:00

The view from Dronka. I didn't want to leave

When you leave Cairo heading south, the further away you go and with each passing hour, the more you imagine that you have invented the city. On the train the horizon of never-ending soaring concrete gradually thins out into a thread, turns into the flat line of a weakening heart with only very occasional peaks of isolated towns and villages.

In between is all that green. Donkeys and buffalos and emptiness. At level-crossings people, animals and vehicles wait as the train storms through. On riverbeds women wash dirty clothes in filthy water, in a field of long grass a man rests on one side, propping himself up on one elbow and contemplates something, oblivious to the roar of the train. In the towns and ‘cities’ Cairo is again absent and in memory the idea of it grows more and more absurd. A mirror’s reflection, it stops existing unless you’re seeing it.

A second visit to Assiut, and this time it seemed even smaller. Only the huge, sprawling university campus seems to have grown. On Friday nights there are church meetings, and in the early evening doors open to let out hundreds of beautifully dressed, coiffeured women. We bought ice creams and the shella [Sharshar and his gang] watched the parade. Sharshar joked that at this time it is as if ma2soora el mozaz etkasaret – the “babes pipe” has burst.

A huge advertising hoarding bearing the image of a former police officer and the words, “el eltezaam mesh kalam” overlooked the church we were standing by. It was an election poster for the Shoura elections. Someone told me that in a previous incarnation the man was a state security officer known for being unusually tough and unforgiving. As you stand at the entrance of this particular church his giant face is the first, and in fact the only thing you see.

Assiut City is a city with three hotels and three restaurants the shella deem worthy of their patronage. It has a splendid governorate building which when we were there had a row of brand new Caterpillars parked in front of it. Its streets are filled with unveiled women, a fact I didn’t think I would notice, but I did. Drivers stop at red lights. It is extremely clean. It is hundreds of kilometres and a world away from Cairo, its downstream neighbour.

There are some similarities, of course, like the tiny, barefoot girl struggling along the corniche using both hands to carry a heavy plastic bag half her size. She looked somewhere between three and forty years old.

Assiut is so small that on the first night when two non-Assiuty members of our party decided to leave the hotel for an exploratory midnight stroll without our Assiuty hosts they inevitably ran into three of the Assiuty hosts. A fourth Assiuty host later ran into this party. All by chance and limited geography. They went to eat Koshary and then regretted it the next morning.

Guess who!

The purpose of this visit was to attend the engagement party of Fady the Child (another member of the shella) in the town of Mallawi, governorate of Minya. We set off at dusk for the roughly two-hour ride, passing by the corpse of the Safo soap factory and a hamlet where people’s front doors quite literally open onto the fast agricultural road. There have been numerous, bloody accidents.

We listened to this amazing song as we went.

Malawi, or at least the streets leading up the motraneya [main church, unsure of a better translation] where Fady the Child got engaged are incredibly narrow and crowded.

The narrowness led to an interesting occurrence. Upon the conclusion of the engagement ritual Fady the Child and his sweetheart got in a car adorned with flowers which was followed by friends and family in a convoy for the customary zaffa [wedding convoy]. We followed. We thought we were going to the Mallawi Swimming Pool Club where the engagement party would take place. Instead we left Mallawi proper and followed the happy couple’s car as it did the swerves into oncoming traffic that tradition dictates are necessary to mark and celebrate impending marriage.

At a crossroads the happy couple’s car made an abrupt stop. Two young men on a motorbike got off and started firing noisy blanks into the air. Suddenly a car started doing high-speed circles around the happy couple’s car, in the middle of this busy crossroads, which would be fine except that another driver decided to do the same in the opposite direction. The gun kept firing. Shella member Usha in his car had to make an emergency stop to avoid all this. Tragedy was narrowly avoided. And then a trailer lorry whose driver was unapprised of the festivities appeared and tragedy was narrowly avoided again. Everything in Mallawi is narrow. We concluded that marriage parties purposefully drive to this spot and slip traffic policemen fifty pounds to look the other way because it is the widest spot in Mallawi, and the only place big enough to allow zaffa madness.

We survived, and proceeded to the engagement party at the Mallawi Swimming Pool Club.

This photo isn't straight

This was the largest engagement party I have ever been to. There must have been around 300 people sitting around that swimming pool. Fady the Child and fiancée sat on the throne (el koosha), as speakers played music at approximately a million decibels.

Fady the Child danced like his life depended on it, helped by the shella and a group of animated young men one of whom danced better than any woman I have ever seen. On the sidelines a cameraman walked through the 300 people and shone a light in their faces. Their image was shown on a projector screen. Girls put their heads together and smiled coyly, a group of three toughs with unbuttoned shirts and prominent necklaces smoked and winked. Some people just stared into the camera blankly. The shella occupied themselves with a cigar Haidar Wahm had brought.

The next day was the final day of the trip, and the Pig wanted to go to a monastery named after a saint he likes, called Anba Karas. It turned out to be a collection of seven churches whose entrance is opposite a furiously busy toc-toc and microbus stop, in Dairout.

Only one of the seven churches is built out of stone. The rest are makeshift constructions made out of wood, and even the church built out of stone has a wooden roof. A guide who took us around told us that they are forbidden from building permanent structures because of laws obliging them to obtain permits which never come, or depend on the mood of the governor in place at the time. Last year, during a sectarian incident, the monastery was attacked by mobs that tried to break down the door and threw Molotov cocktails.

You would never guess though, that this had happened. All is quiet, all is good. And outside el sa3eed, Upper Egypt, plods along, vast and remote, completely overshadowed by its upstart and anomalous little sister, Cairo.

GOVERNMENT EXERTING “BEST EFFORTS” TO PUT AN END TO THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE

2010-04-19T21:28:00.003+02:00

A member of the Banned Organization shortly after he interrupted Sorour. His family have been informed.

CAIRO: A National Democratic Party MP yesterday urged the government to intensify efforts to put an end to the Egyptian people, who he described as “standing in the way of Egypt’s progress”.

Rizel El-Zeft was speaking during a parliamentary session during which members of the Banned Organisation challenged government plans to use deceased citizens to construct a wall around ports of entry into Egypt.

NDP member Mofeed Shehab said that the wall was a first step to removing from Egypt “elements determined to unweave the weft of our society by bringing with them subversive ideas about promoting bald-headed jumped up secretaries to positions of power”.

Shehab said that this could not be allowed to continue, citing the millions of Egyptian pounds that had to be paid out during the last elections in order to ensure that Egyptians voted for the correct candidate.

A member of the Banned Organization interrupted Shehab in order to condemn the presence of baton-wielding thugs during parliamentary and local elections.

Shehab joined the member of the Banned Organization in condemning the thugs who he said are too expensive for the value they provide.

He stressed that as a business-friendly government issues of cost-saving and quality must take priority, adding that if the member of the Banned Organization continued to interrupt him he would ask NDP member and goalkeeper Ahmed Shobeir to benchmark his head.

“If we must have elections, I suggest that we use special electrified voting cards. This way, if a citizen makes the incorrect choice in the polling station he is dispensed with immediately without the need to employ excessive numbers of personnel for this purpose”.

The debate then turned to the issue of protests.

"I don't know why the Interior Ministry is so lenient with those who break the law. Instead of using water hoses to disperse them, the police ought to shoot them; they deserve it,” NDP member Hassan Nashat El-Rassaas proclaimed.

He was immediately rebuked by PA speaker Fathy Sorour.

“And I suppose you’ve sat down and done the calculations about how much the bullets would cost?” Sorour said, before shouting “STOP! HAMMER TIME” and throwing his mallet at El-Rassaas’ head.

As El-Rassaas’ lifeless body was removed from parliament Sorour said, “one down, 79,999,999 to go”.

The issue was taken up by NDP member Ahmed Ezz who said that protestors are dealt with adequately by karate death squads who beat them to death at a quarter of the expense. Ezz added that the use of this traditional method of crowd control is also better for the environment as it does not involve smoke emissions, as is the case with canons - a method of crowd control proposed by the head of the PA’s security committee.

Ezz also proposed that citizens’ bodies be buried in the foundations of constructions in the new cities in order that potential building land is not taken up by cemetries.

The Banned Organization member asked Ezz who would live in these buildings if the NDP was planning to get rid of the entire Egyptian people.

Ezz objected to the accusation with some vigour, even throwing his cushion at the Banned Organization member while condemning his “twisting of the facts”.

“Egyptians who possess two nationalities or two companies will be spared the clean-up,” Ezz explained.

After the debate members of the Banned Organization were invited to throw themselves off the October Bridge at its highest point.

Howa dah el 7al Habib El-Adly said, dusting off his hands as he walked away through Cairo’s deserted streets.

Gigolow

2010-04-14T10:55:00.003+02:00

"Hey! Pretty lady! I have coffee, you want?"

I left the demo fuming yesterday and wanting to draw blood out of someone and anyone, and luckily found that my friend Hadeel had sent this by someone called Karin Badt (“professor of cinema and theatre in France”).

In the days before the Internet, Debbie and Mike and Jason and Sharon parachuted into a country for ten days, observed the country through a tour bus window or experienced meaningless encounters with tourist industry workers whose “friendship” they construed as a rare window into the hidden world of this ancient land and its mysterious people.

Debbie and Mike and Jason and Sharon might share their reflections during the photo slideshow in their living rooms, in between having a laugh about the image of them pointing at the hieroglyphic with the erect penis. A postcard is possibly the extent to which these reflections would be recorded for posterity.

But now, thanks to the Internet and lax submissions policies, the whole world can read that fucking postcard.

Badt’s path has quite clearly crossed with an obnoxious, salacious hustler in Luxor whose bit of patter and apparent attempt to get her in bed she misinterpreted as an anthropological examination of Egypt’s sexual mores.

Or maybe she did indeed stumble across a concealed pearl (“Mike/Mohammed”) in the algae of Luxor’s tourist touts. Let us examine the evidence. I suspect Mike/Mohammed is a figment of Badt’s imagination but we’ll ignore that and proceed.

The first paragraph reads like a Mills & Boone novel. Maybe Badt’s being ironic. We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and move on, but not before pointing out that most of my female friends if asked whether they “would like to know the difference between making love to an Egyptian woman and a European woman” by some turd would tell him to shove his wisdom up his arse and exit-left immediately.

Badt however senses she is being admitted into an inner chamber and says “yes”.

Mike/Mohammed informs Badt that his first step as a Don Juan began in pubs in the English countryside where he had “experiences with European women”. Mike claims to be stunned the first time he is set upon by one of the lady predators in the pub and describes his “it’s no coffee!” encounter with the innocence of a choirboy invited to polish the church silver by Father McRandy.

Note also the “the sun setting in the desert hills behind him, with the Valley of the Kings just beyond”- scene-setting with the finesse and subtlety of a “your name in papyrus” souvenir.

I didn’t know this but apparently in England it’s considered vulgar to ask for sex and people offer coffee instead – fancy! All those missed opportunities I misinterpreted in job interviews etc. But again this is Mike/Mohammed describing his fascinating encounters in the UK and obviously not actually Badt making up a load of old shite.

Mike/Mohammed was taught to give pleasure by a “British lady” through “using his mind” to “resist for one hour” [Mike/Mohammed apparently slept with Paul Mckenna]. Again, right-minded women who had made it this far into the conversation would deduce that douchebag Mike/Mohammed is offering coffee, but Badt is either oblivious or feels that duty calls and she must resist.

The conversation turns to Egyptian women and Mohammed/Mike “looks downcast”, as well he might given that his first attempt to get into Badt’s knickers failed.

Apparently, ALL women are circumcised/circumsized [sic] in Egypt and sex is a painful, two-minute affair for women and merely a “chance to relieve themselves” for men – who lucky for all the circumcised/circumsized women haven’t had Mike/Mohammed’s Paul Mckenna experience.

Mike/Mohammed was once married but the union failed because he married an inanimate object.

“She was a board,” he said. “That’s why the marriage failed”.

Confirming his douchebag factor +100 Mike/Mohammed tells Badt that he and the board had one son that he has never seen. The marriage was arranged of course – “as are most in Egypt” but the difference is that his was arranged in a hardware store because he married a board and he’s a tool.

There is then the inevitable description of sex with circumsized/circumcised women the reading of which is arguably more painful than the act itself.

“I had known what it is like to have sex with a woman who has pleasure, and it’s such a difference. Egyptian women don’t feel anything!” Mike/Mohammed says breathlessly, possibly while gyrating his hips.

Badt points out that Mike/Mohammed had just told her that “there’s a sex trade in Cairo [and Luxor, and it’s sitting with you]” and we think she’s finally catching on, but alas it was only to ask whether “all prostitutes are circumscribed [sic]”.

Mike/Mohammed, Luxor’s answer to Dr. Heba Qotb, says that of course they are all, but whether he’s talking about FGM or the enclosure of prostitutes within defined bounds is uncertain.

Mike/Mohammed makes another attempt at Badt by telling her that he’s “lonely” in Luxor and spends his days with tourists to “pass the time” wink wink. “Like with you, we had a chance to talk, and so we passed the time. And I will never marry again, I’ll just have an affair here and there, that’s it – and have you got the bloody message yet you stupid woman”.

Mike/Mohammed’s attempts fail but even as he is dropping Badt off he is making a last-ditch attempt, telling her about an Australian girl with whom “he had the opportunity to spend the night”.

The account ends with a UN statistic about the number of women in Egypt who have undergone FGM in Egypt, and a picture of a pharaoh.

I am so sick of chancers making green out of Egypt with tinpot bullshit like this.

Badt, sweetheart, if you want to discuss FGM, talk to an expert and circumcised women. If you want to discuss sexual relations in Egypt talk to more than one person and preferably have a point to the whole exercise.

If however you want to peddle stereotypes about British women, fetishise Egyptian men and reproduce bullshit about Egypt “substantiated” by a half-arsed paragraph at the bottom, then mission successful.

Does the Huffington Post pay for submissions? Pay me. I’ll sing you any motherfucking tune you want to hear.

Conscript

2010-04-13T20:46:00.003+02:00

Kefaya, slowly awakening after its hibernation, organized a protest today, exactly a week after the police battered demonstrators on April 6.

The existence of a sort of nervous anger immediately struck me when I arrived. Around two hundred people were assembled outside the public prosecutor’s office. The usual buffer zone of absent black-clad riot police lined the perimeter of the area. Beyond them the men in suits and sunglasses.

A group of young people began congregating at one end of the pen in which the demonstrators were being held. The slow surge gradually gained intensity, to chants of, “why are you fencing us in?” The riot police started looking unsure. Suddenly there was an enormous push and the steel barrier between protestors and the police was lifted up. The riot police – conscripts, from impoverished backgrounds – hesitated, looked behind them for orders. Reinforcements were brought in and the surge was stopped.

On the other side of the road Bahaa appeared, and began chanting. Bahaa is a protest veteran who seems to like to take risks if not actively provoke the police. Today he swaggered (there’s no other word for it) up and down 26th July Street waving his arm above his head while police officers chased behind him making a feeble attempt to pen him in. He continued marching and shouting. Other protestors joined him when it looked like the police were beginning to lose patience.

At the same time protestors under the impression that Bahaa was being arrested again tried to storm the barrier. Concentrating on this, I lost track of what was happening with Bahaa. The next time I looked he was prostrate on the ground surrounded by people throwing water on him in an attempt to revive him. He had apparently fainted.

He woke up, got up and again started chanting, before pulling off an officer’s hat and throwing it in the air. This seemed to be the last straw. The beating began, and from my vantage point Bahaa disappeared in sea of arms and fists. One officer actually slapped another across the face after pulling him off Bahaa.

Sayyed, another demonstrator who went to Bahaa’s aid was also set upon, after he slapped an officer who had been hitting him across the back of the neck. They chased him down like a pack of dogs and then roughly four officers beat him unconscious. You can see it the video below. An officer pulls them off while behind him Sayyed slowly slips down the car the officer is propping him up against.

Improbably, Bahaa reappeared after this, topless, his hair dripping wet from the earlier dousing of water and his trousers half falling down his legs revealing what looked like a black thong-type affair. Some of the demo wolf-whistled. But Bahaa looked both pitiful and manic. He was again set upon by tens of police officers who flagged down a passing taxi and attempted to bundle him in. They were unsuccessful and the taxi driver sped off. Another taxi was stopped and Bahaa pushed inside. Four of five officers got in with him and sat on top of him. I don’t know where he was taken.

One positive thing: for the first time, I saw Egyptian protestors (admittedly less than 10) being allowed to demonstrate in the street unmolested. I also heard chants of "the street is ours" for the first time today.

There was calm after Bahaa and Sayyed were assaulted, and demonstrators began leaving. A protestor sitting on the railing next to me tried talking to the conscripts. Attempted to persuade them to refuse to obey orders because once they’ve finished their service they’ll go back to their lives where they’ll be fucked over by the state they’re currently protecting. They looked up impassively. Childlike is not the correct epithet, because these are hardened men who will use their batons if instructed to.

Wretched is a better description. Wretched and stoic and, as usual, they – the silent poor – were on the frontline of Egypt’s relentless march to a better future: quite literally standing between the old guard and the forces of change, absorbing the blows of a battle not really being fought in their name. How will Mohamed ElBaradei or Hamdeen Sabahy or the workers’ movement reach these people? Once they take off their uniforms and disappear back into their underworld; illiterate, uneducated, too busy surviving on the margins to be angry, too marginal for their anger to count. Who will reach them?

I fought the law, and (for now) the law won

2010-04-10T22:39:00.004+02:00

I attended my third “April 6” last Tuesday, and have been pondering why the police went ballistic ever since.

If you follow events in Egypt you’ll know what happened. If you don’t, this video sums it up.

Jack Shenker, the Guardian’s fantastic writer and raconteur extraordinaire presents his analysis of events here. I agree with his view that protest in Egypt is cyclical, and is often galvanised by events/opportunities not necessarily linked to the grievance to which the protest give voice.

Shenker says however in his last paragraph:

Oppressive autocracies the world over have a dizzying array of tactics in their arsenal to cling on to power – from media manipulation to strategic support from superpowers – and it is only when they are feeling at their most vulnerable that the basest of these tactics, naked violence, is resorted to. Tuesday's clashes indicate that in Egypt those vulnerabilities are bubbling to the surface; both ElBaradei and the grassroots campaigners below him are in a position to take advantage.

It’s this - the idea that Tuesday’s violence was the product of vulnerability - which I take issue with, and by Jove I’m going to tell you why now.

Ready? Go.

Tonight (and every night) the streets are ours

Prompted by Tuesday’s events I picked up “Life as Politics: How ordinary people change the Middle East” by Asef Bayat, which I have been meaning to read ever since I bought it. It’s a really interesting read. Bayat’s thesis is that, unable under repressive regimes to resort to traditional channels of dissent, ordinary people challenge authority and carve out a space for themselves (intentionally or otherwise) in their every day lives in seemingly mundane ways. Bayat gives the example of people who illegally build informal housing that the government is then forced to recognise by installing water and electricity etc. Bayat calls it “creating realities on the ground”.

Bayat talks about the significance of public streets in the relationship between a repressive government and the people it denies a voice:

Here, conflict [between the public and state officials] originates from the active use of public space by subjects who, in the modern states are allowed to use it only passively – through walking, driving, watching – or in other ways that the state dictates. Any active or participative use infuriates officials, who see themselves as the sole authority to establish and control public order.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly who have an idea that I spend my life covering protests in Cairo that take place almost exclusively in these places:

1. On the steps of the Journalists’ Syndicate

2. Outside the public prosecutor’s office

3. On the steps of the Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Syndicates

And more recently:

4. Outside the People’s Assembly

5. Outside the Cabinet Office

The agreement between state security and protestors is this: You can say what the bloody hell you please. You can even turn your protests into sit-ins. You can be in the thousands. But only if you’re in one of the five places listed above.

(I’m excluding here workers’ on-site protests because – as significant as they are – I don’t think factorys and company premises count as public space, in most cases).

As Bayat says, there is no such thing as public space - with the meaning of space belonging to the public, with all that that implies - in Egypt. This has implications for any kind of potentially collective behaviour, even the most mundane, such as when Shady Ahmed played guitar in Zamalek and was surrounded by confused police officers within minutes.

The last time I witnessed violence like Tuesday’s was during the protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when men coming out of Friday prayers erupted into ‘spontaneous’ chanting.

However, the last time I saw a mass demo was also during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when hundreds of mostly Muslim Brotherhood protestors demonstrated outside parliament and then marched to the Doctors’ Syndicate where they protested some more, unmolested by the police.

I’m not claiming that I’m making an earth-shattering point here, but the key here is consent: my yard, my rules.

Which brings me onto the next issue, the fact that the April 6 Movement informed the Interior Ministry that they would be protesting in advance.

Tommy, you gonna let him get away with that? You gonna let this fucking punk get away with that? What's the matter? What's the world coming to?

I’ve never heard about a group notifying the Interior Ministry in advance that they’re protesting. It’s unnecessary mostly because 1. The Interior Ministry always knows everything in advance and 2. Protests are almost always held at one of the five places listed above.

Unsurprisingly, the Interior Ministry informed the April 6 Youth Movement that it had banned the march, a day or two before it went ahead. Seventy or so brave young people were able to briefly congregate outside the Shoura Council despite the efforts of state security officers.

Have you ever watched Goodfellas? Remember when they do the huge airport heist and Robert De Niro warns gang members not to buy anything flashy afterwards for fear of attracting the cops’ attention, and one of the members and his wife come into a bar in new fur coats and they end up hung up in the meat freezer?

State security had a similar reaction, because the tiny protest was essentially a big, “up yours, I don’t care what you say, this is my street too”.

No kids, it aint.

Hit first, ask questions later

The Interior Ministry is like an easily provoked, irascible man in a pub. Generally always spoiling for a fight, seeing insults where there are none. Ask the Nadeem Centre about that. Aside from the many accounts of torture and abuse in police stations documented by NGOs, the kind of “naked violence” which Shenker describes took place (in addition to the Israeli attack on Gaza protests) in December 2009 during the Gaza Freedom March, when peaceful protestors decided to obstruct traffic in Tahrir Square and were immediately pounced on my the police.

Again the common factors in all these protests are:

1. Protests taking place in an area other than the five fucking places I spend my life in, and

2. An absence of prior consent, and

3. A complete disregard for the inevitable international condemnation of the violence

My point is this: the regime (and specifically the Interior Ministry) did not feel vulnerable on Tuesday, it felt insulted. The violence was punitive, not defensive. It was about reminding the April 6 Youth Movement (and Egyptians in general) about who they daddy is.

Having said all that, I lift my cap to protestors for the challenge. Fuck this regime, keep pushing.

The ElBaradei factor

If I’ve explained my reasoning sufficiently clearly you’ll see that I think ElBaradei has nothing to do with these events. The same would have happened if the protest had gone ahead and ElBaradei and his many spectacles had decided to retire in 2011, instead of 2010.

A far more interesting question is why ElBaradei’s visit to Mansoura was allowed to go ahead so freely. I heard a rumour that ElBaradei was initially scheduled to pray at a far larger mosque in Mansoura accommodating thousands of men, but that he was asked to change this to a far smaller mosque. I’d be interested to know if this is true. Was some kind of agreement reached?

As I suggested in my last post, the regime’s absence from Mansoura is worrying. I wonder if their silence is because they’re waiting for his National Coalition for Change to implode from within. I wonder if they have other plans. I wonder what their reaction would be if ElBaradei decided to have a Friday post-devotional stroll in downtown Cairo in the coming weeks. I wonder if the arrests of Egyptian National Coalition organisers in Kuwait is a message that, ElBaradei being untouchable at the moment, they’re starting at the very edge of his bubble and working their way inwards.

Silence

2010-04-02T22:25:00.005+02:00

To the Delta today, where I watched ElBaradei do his stuff through a rugby scrum of media in Mansoura.

As usual, the trip there was odd. After disembarking from a microbus driven by a man with a predilection for using the front of his microbus to sexually harass the back of lorries at the speed of light (we arrived from Cairo in record time. He truly was a maniac) I got in a taxi.

An old, nearly blind, man got in the back, guided by a young man on a break from army service, and we set off after the old man both finished entreating God for a safe journey and managed to shut his door after several attempts.

The army recruit got out, we continued on our way. The old man held forth on various topics in a thick Delta brogue, before asking, “wel usta menayn?” [and where is the driver from?]

The driver said he was from a certain village. The old man was going to the same village.

“Tab ow2af. Ow2af khamas da2aye2”, [stop. Stop five minutes], the old man said.

“Delwa2ty?” [now?]

“Ah” [yes].

We stopped in the middle of a side street.

“Ta3raf enta ___?” [do you know ____?]

“Aywa” [Yes].

“We ____ ebn _____?” [and ______ son of ______?]

“Aywa. Tab ya 7ag ana ma3ya zabou-“ [Yes. Hag I have with me a custom-]

“Mashy. Ta3raf el 2ahwa elly 3and awwel el balad?” [OK. Do you know the coffee shop as you first enter the town?]

And so it went. The driver stared at me, smiling, as he answered. I stared back. We had got through half of the town’s inhabitants before el 7ag was persuaded that we could proceed while he continued his survey of the land.

I arrived fucking early – thanks to that lunatic in the microbus - at the Kidney Centre where ElBaradei would be visiting his friend Dr Mohamed Ghoneim. Luckily I needed the toilet. I went to a KFC. The toilet door had what I assumed was ‘push’ written in Chinese (?). What can it mean?

Outside the streets were clean and empty and burnt white in the sun. I like Mansoura a lot. There are two entrances to the Kidney Institute. At one there was the usual gaggle of patients/relatives waiting to get in. At the other was a journalist fighting with the Institute’s security, also about getting in or something.

The Egyptian political opposition arrived and then they started fighting with security, too. Apparently only five names had been put on a list. Like in a posh nightclub. A big hoo-hah then broke out within the Egyptian political opposition about whether the names on the list should go in, or whether no-one should go in, in protest. In the end George Ishaq went in, but only after cracking a joke about who would be praying in the mosque with ElBaradei during the Friday prayer. “Everyone’s praying except me. I’ll pray next time”.

More standing about in the sun while ElBaradei was inside. I spoke to a pharmaceutical sales manager in a ElBaradei T-shirt who said that ElBaradei makes him feel that there is still hope, that the country still belongs to “us”.

ElBaradei came out and as usual there was pandemonium, mostly the fault of the media, who descended on him like vultures. He retreated into a mosque to pray while outside onlookers and supporters gathered.

By the time prayer had finished there were some 300 people gathered outside the mosque, chanting and milling about and generally excited. ElBaradei fought his way out of the mosque and we turned left. A tight ring of National Coalition for Change young people encircled him. A second ring of journalists surrounded them. Beyond the journalists were a random collection of supporters, men who had been praying at the mosque and curious onlookers. In total I estimate that there were between 500 – 800 people there. The chanting filled the street. It rose up the balconies of the buildings surrounding us and cut through the traffic brought to a standstill by the surge of people.

The crowd was so intense that ElBaradei sought refuge inside a building for around 20 minutes before his jeep came and carried him off. (I later learnt that he held a short press conference. Missing the main event is rapidly becoming my trademark).

There was no uniformed police presence during all this, and very few identifiable state security investigations officers. I remembered a book I just finished reading called the Soccer War by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinksi. He talks about silence:

SILENCE: People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.

I find it extraordinary that today a man unconnected to the regime was allowed to walk through an Egyptian street, and that hundreds of people were allowed to congregate around him unmolested by the police. Tomorrow there’s going to be a protest for a minimum wage in Cairo, and the street will be black with uniformed riot police.

Where were they today? Why did they allow Egyptians to gather together and experience a sense of genuine optimism without knocking seven shades of shit out of them and of hope?

I overheard two middle-aged men speaking while ElBaradei was hiding inside the building. One was saying, “they can’t touch him. He’s protected because howa ragel 3alamey [he’s international]” – as in he’s a former international diplomat.

I contended that that the regime doesn’t fear anyone, if past experience is anything to go by.

“No”, the second man said. "It does fear something".

What? I asked.

“Us. The people,” he replied.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bs81JOMAgo*

2010-03-31T23:52:00.007+02:00

Mubarak’s triumphant return to the homeland in his carpet slippers has, as usual, caused an outbreak of nauseating sycophancy and puke-inducing paeans worthy of a Greek deity.

His highness glided down on Saturday from his plane onto terra firma via an electronic staircase (beat that, ElBaRaDEi!!). The speed at which he was conveyed southwards reminded me of that moving belt at Yo Sushi restaurants. Next to him was that dish Suzie, looking tremendously spritely in contrast to Le Hoz, who wobbled into the arms of the waiting notables, where he was embraced.

There was a minor discussion on Twitter and Facebook about why he didn’t kiss Pope Shenouda when everyone else got a cheek to cheek. It was decided that since Pope Shenouda was granted the longest chat with Mr M – complete with trademark jokey finger-wagging (oh, but he’s such a card that Hosny!) – Mubarak made up for it.

Even while the electronic stairs were still rolling the tributes begun. I was listening to the radio on the way to the cinema when normal programming was interrupted for a NEWSFLASH of officials’ responses to Hosny’s return, each trying to outdo the other for grandiloquence and arse-kissing.

That gnome Fathy Sorour declared that “Mubarak is the father of all Egyptians and the father has returned to his children”.

The gold star however goes to the sinister Safwat Al-Sherif, who affirmed that the President’s airplane touching down in Egypt was akin to “the soul returning to Egypt’s sons”. By my analysis Safwat means that either:

- Egypt’s citizens were all dead without realising it until last week

- Mubarak has re-possessed us all after a brief hiatus.

Shereen meanwhile ensured prime concert bookings in the best and most profitable locations for the duration of the current regime with this offering.

No-one though can hope to outdo journalist Momtaz El-Qot, a man who seems to live for toadying, who has made of it his raison d'etre.

His last memorable episode was on Mubarak’s birthday, when he published a picture of the man on his rag’s front page with a giant headline something along the lines of, EGYPT’S HISTORY BEGAN WITH YOU (if someone has a link please send. I’m sure I’ve got the sentiment right but the wording wrong).

Never missing an opportunity, while Mubarak was convalescing in Germany, Momtaz penned him an imaginary letter from the (imaginary) Egyptian people expressing their (imaginary) love in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.

I’ve copy-pasted some of it below with links which I think illustrate the wonderful truths of Mubarak’s Egypt which Momtaz so lovingly lists. I stopped near the end because quite frankly, Momtaz has more stamina for obsequiousness than I do for finding links and keeping the bile down.

English only readers: as you can see, it’s in Arabic – sorry darlings.

NOTE: I realise that having an English introduction for something in Arabic on an English-language blog is a bit odd. But then so am I, so logic to the wind!

*This is a deliberate title not a cock-up. Copy-paste it into your browser cos the hyperlinking's gone mad.

كلام يبقى حمد الله على السلامة

الناس كلها عايزة تاخد تأشيرة .. وتروح المانيا عشان تزورك وتقولك ألف مليون سلامة عليك .. وحمدالله علي سلامتك .
الناس في بلدنا طيبة واللي في قلبها علي لسانها .. الناس في بلدنا بتحبك وبتدعي ربنا ليل ونهار إنك ترجع لنا وإنت بكل صحة وعافية .
لكن يا سيادة الريس إحنا في العشرة أيام الأخيرة من الشهر .. يعني المرتبات خلاص !! وكمان هدايا عيد الأم .. وكلها مصاريف زيادة .. قلنا نبعت لك جواب .
ياتري نكتبه إزاي؟ ! بكلام الجورنالجية .. ولا بكلام عبدالباسط ومحمدين ومرقص وأم محمد .. قلنا ياريس نكتبه بلغة المصريين ولاد البلد اللي بيحبوها .. واللي عارفين إنك أكتر واحد بتحبها وبتحبهم .
وبعد ..
يصل ويسلم للسيد الرئيس ..
ألمانيا .. مستشفي هايدلبرج
يا ريس :
ألف ألف مليون سلامة عليك .. وترجع لنا بألف سلامة وبسرعة .. بصراحة يا سيادة الريس مفيش حاجة في مصر كلها لها طعم من غير متكون معانا .. خدنا علي كده .. شايفينك ليل ونهار رايح جاي عشانا وعشان ولادنا وعشان مصر اللي إنت أكتر واحد بتحبها .. وحياتك كلها كانت عنوان لكل مصري أصيل حب بلاده .. وكان همه كله انها تفضل دايما راسها مرفوعة في العلالي ... يعني فوق .. في السما اللي كتبت منها في ٣٧ أحلي أنشودة للنصر ... لسه وهنفضل طول العمر بنغنيها .
أنا عارف يا سيادة الريس إنك متضايق قوي عشان إنت بعيد عن مصر وعايز ترجع بسرعة .. مش هنسي يوم من الأيام كنا مع سيادتك وسافرنا ٥ دول من دول الخليج في ٦٣ ساعة ... يعني يوم ونص .. ننزل في مطار ونطلع لمطار .. من مباحثات لمباحثات .. وساعتها كلنا حسينا بالتعب وكانت أول مرة نعرف فيها إن منصب الرئيس ده حاجة تانية غير اللي إحنا فاكرينها .. يوميها سألت سيادتك ليه يا ريس مستعجل دايما .. ليه مانبتش يوم في كل دولة نستريح فيها !!
يوميها يا سيادة الريس قلت حاجة مش هانساها : » انتوا عايزين تباتوا عشان تلفوا وتروحوا تشتروا حاجات وتشوفوا البلد .. أنا بقي هعمل إيه .. هستني جوه الفندق ولا القصر .. يعني سجن .. لا هعرف اروح ولا آجي .. أحسن نروح بلدنا نشوف شغلنا «.
يوميها بس يا سيادة الريس عرفت إن الرئاسة مش جاه وأبهة وبروتوكولات وموتوسيكلات .. دي هم كبير أوي .. ومتعب قوي .. ربنا بيختار له ناس قدرهم مابيبقاش ملك إيديهم .
> > >
ساعتها يا سيادة الريس رجعت لزمان .. يوم نصر أكتوبر .. يوميها ياريس كنت بالنسبة لنا البطل .. في مدرسة المساعي المشكورة كنا كلنا فخورين قوي إنها مدرسة البطل حسني مبارك صاحب الضربة الجوية .. كل واحد حاسس إنه جزء من الضربة الجوية .. كل واحد كان عاين صورتك معاه .. وكنا بنتمنظر علي زمايلنا في المدارس التانية إننا في مدرسة حسني مبارك صاحب ضربة النصر .
بعدها اختارك الرئيس السادات نائب له .. يعني منصب وصلت له وأنت أصلاً في قمة المجد والنصر .. مش هننسي أبداً ياريس يوم لما وضعوا نياشين النصر ورتبة الفريق أول علي كتفك وسط هتاف نواب الشعب .. الشعب البطل اللي السادات وحسني مبارك كانوا ولاده .. كانوا رجاله لأنهم اختاروا طريق صعب .. طريق يرجعوا فيه كرامة بلدهم .. حتي لو كانت حياتهم هي التمن .. اختاروا إنهم يعملوا اللي عليهم والباقي علي ربنا .. حياتكم يوميها ياريس كان ثمنها غالي .. ثمنها كان عرض وشرف وكبرياء مصر .. مصر اللي العالم كله افتكر إنها خلاص في خبر كان بعد هزيمة مُرة .... هزيمة ماحاربش فيها جيشنا خالص .
صدقني ياريس بكلمك من قلبي .. طول اليومين اللي فاتوا الناس في بلدنا زعلانة أوي .. زعلانين عشان عملت عملية .. حاسين ياريس إن إحنا السبب .. إحنا تعبناك قوي .. طول عمرك شايل همنا وبلدنا مليانة مشاكل .. تعبناك لأنك بدأت من أول السطر .. البلد كانت مفلسة .. يوميها مكانش فيه ولا مليم عشان نشتري قمح .. وساعتها عارفين إنك اتصرفت ياريس .. ومن يوميها بدأت تبني مصر كلها من أول وجديد .. شوارع وبيوت وكهربا وميه وتليفونات .. هَم مايتلم !! لكنك كنت قدها وقدود ..
> > >
بصراحة إحنا عارفين .. عارفين إنت عملت إيه لبلدنا .. وازاي حافظت عليها من كل المؤامرات .. لكن دايما إحنا بننسي .. أصلنا طماعين !! وما صدقنا إن فيه واحد بيحبنا وبيسمعنا وعمره ما زهق ولا هيزهق مننا .. وهنفضل دايما نقولك عايزين وعايزين ..وعمرنا ماهنقولك كفاية .. أصل البحر بيحب الزيادة . وإنت طلعتنا من القمقم يا ريس .. كنا فين وبقينا فين .. معدش حد في وجودك يا ريس ممكن يروح ورا الشمس .. وزوار الفجر يا ريس .. خدوها من قصيرها من يوم ما اختارك شعبنا عشان تكمل بينا المشوار .
ياريس معلهش .. عايز أقولك حاجات كتيرة .. لكن أنا متلخبط .. مش عارف اقولك علي اللي في قلبي وقلوب كل المصريين .. حاجات ياريس هي اللي خلتنا نحبك .. بصراحة مش هنحبك لله في لله !! لكن إنت ابتديت ياريس من أول يوم ... اسمك عرفناه وقبله كلمة بطل .. أول يوم عرفناك كنت في قمة المجد يا ريس .. الرئاسة عمرها ما كانت في بالك وتاريخك قبلها هو سجل شرف وعزة وكرامة .. من أول يوم رئاسة شفناك بتطلع الناس من المعتقلات وبدون ضجة ولا شوشرة .. شفناك يوم ما عملت أول مؤتمر اقتصادي .. شفناك وإنت بتلف في المصانع والمزارع .. بتكلم العمال والفلاحين .. بساطتك ياريس وحبك لشعبك ..خلت الناس كلها تحبك وروحها دايماً معاك .. دي حقيقة والله يا ريس .. حتي اخوتنا اللي لسانهم طويل الأيام دي !! عارفين قلبك وحبك وسماحتك .. عارفين إنك إنت اللي فتحت باب الحرية وشجعت الناس يقولوا ويشاركوا .
خليت الناس يا ريس في مصر الفرعونية ينسوا كلمة الخوف من الحاكم ... لأول مرة من ٨ تلاف سنة .. صحيح اللي بيقولوه الجماعة إياهم زاد شويتين عن الحد !! لكن صدقني ياريس كله عارف ومتأكد من صبرك وحبك وحلمك .. عمرك ما غضبت من أي واحد فينا .. إنت صحيح بتغضب لينا لكن مش علينا .. بتغضب لو أي حد مس مصر بأي كلمة ولا همسة .
كلنا عارفين ياريس إنك كبير في تعاملاتك مع كل دول العالم اللي بيحبونا واللي بيكرهونا واللي نص نص !! ساعات بتعدي ... بس بمزاجك ... وساعة الجد يا ويله يا سواد ليله اللي يفكر يهوب بكلمة علي مصر ..
> > >
عايزينك ترجع بسرعة ياريس .. مش هننسي عملت إيه في بني سويف الأسبوع قبل اللي فات .. كل الحكومة مشغولة في حل أزمة البوتاجاز والكيروسين والبطاقات الذكية واللي مش ذكية !! فجأة شافوك ياريس وبحاستك ونظرتك اللي دايما باصة لقدام بتقول للحكومة .. شوفوا حل للبطالة .. خلوها أولوية قبل أي حاجة .. الظاهر الحكومة كانت بدأت تنسي حكاية البطالة وفاكرة إن التلاتة ونصف مليون فرصة عمل اللي اتوفروا في التلت سنين اللي فاتوا كفاية يسدوا رمق الناس .
صدقني ياريس ساعتها ربكت الحكومة .. وعرفتها إنك علي طول أقرب واحد لينا .. عارف إيه مشاكلنا .. بتعيش معانا همومنا .. وكمان بتحلم نفس أحلامنا .. إنت منا ياريس وعمرك ما كنت أبداً بعيد عنا .
ياريس من يوم ما حضرتك رحت ألمانيا .. وعملت العملية .. الناس حاسة إن فيه حاجة نقصاها .. حاجة كبيرة وغالية علينا قوي ياريس .. الناس كلها بتسأل إمتي هترجع .. وحشتنا يا ريس كلنا .. وحاسين إن الأيام اللي غبت عنا فيها سنين طويلة وصعبه علينا .
الـ ٨٨ مليون يا ريس قلوبهم بتدعي ربنا سبحانه وتعالي إنك ترجع لنا بألف مليون سلامه .. سلامتك يا ريس هي سلامة مصر كلها .. لكن اسمح لي أقولك ياريس عايزينك ترجع .. عشان حاجات كتيرة عايزينك تكملها .
قلت لسيادتك إحنا طماعين !! لكن إنت عودتنا علي كده .. طول عمرك بتوفي معانا بأي وعد لك .. والبرنامج الرئاسي لسه عايز زقة .. وانسي ياريس إن قرار ترشيحك مرة تانية مش هيبقي ملك لك .. القرار ملك لشعبك .. وطول عمرك ياريس كنت جاهز دايماً للندا .. ندا الواجب .. طول عمرك ماردتش طلب لشعبك .
صدقني ياريس عايزينك ترجع لنا بسرعة .. الشعب كله ياريس بيتحاما فيك .. ولو الحكومة عملت حاجة كده ولا كده !! عارفين إنك مش هتسكت وأول واحد هيقولهم » استوب «.. كله إلا الغلابة .. إنت الوحيد اللي حاسس بينا .
عمرك ماكنت بعيد عنا إلا ساعة الشديد القوي .. وربنا ما يعيدها ولا تشوف حاجة وحشه أبداً تاني .. والحمد لله ربنا استجاب لدعاء ٨٨ مليون مصري » في وش العدو « مش عايزين حد يحسدنا .. وأولهم الدكتورة مشيرة خطاب وزيرة السكان !!
> > >
عايزينك ترجع ياريس عشان الدكتور يوسف بطرس غالي يخف علينا شوية !! ويشوف له حل في حكاية الضريبة العقارية .. ويعمل التعديلات اللي سيادتك قلت عليها .. صحيح إحنا عارفين اللي فيها ... عارفين إن مواردنا مش أد كده .. عارفين إن سباق الأرانب اللي دخلنا فيه وبقينا ٨٨ مليون بياكلوا كل حاجة .. ونتيجة أي اصلاح ما بنحسش بيها .. عارفين إن الموازنة فيها عجز .. ولكن ربنا دايماً ساترها معانا ياريس .. والله العظيم طول ما إنت معانا ..
عايزينك ترجع لنا بسرعة ياريس عشان تفتح بقية مشروعات المية والصرف .. وجودك ياريس معانا ومتابعتك لكل حاجة .. هي الحاجة الوحيدة اللي مطمنانا إن إحنا ماشيين دايماً لقدام .
عايزين نشوفك تاني بسرعة ياريس مع العمال في المصانع الجديدة اللي في وش العدو بقوا ٠٥١١ مصنع .. مش ألف بس !! عايزين نشوفك معاهم .. وهما بيضحكوا من قلبهم لما تكلمهم وتسأل عن أحوالهم .. عايشين فين؟ .. بيركبوا إيه من البيت للشغل؟ .. بياخدوا كام؟
عايزينك ترجع بسرعة ياريس عشان فيه شوية قوانين جديدة كده ممكن الله أعلم .. تحتاج منك توصية .. ولا ضبط للبوصلة .. زي قانون التأمينات الجديد وقانون التأمين الصحي .
عايزينك ترجع ياريس عشان تروح بنفسك تشوف الهايبرات الجديدة بتاعة رشيد .. بتشغل ناس وكمان بتبيع بأسعار أقل .. عشان بتبيع كتير .. وإنت طالبت بزيادتها .. ودي هتوفر ٠٠٧ ألف فرصة عمل .
عايزينك ترجع بسرعة ياريس عشان تروح المصانع الجديدة والمناطق الصناعية والمناطق الحرة .. عايزينك تفتح بقية الموانئ اللي بنيتها ياريس .
عايزينك ترجع بسرعة ياريس عشان هيعملوا الموازنة الجديدة .. ولازم توصيهم علي العلاوة الاجتماعية الجديدة في يوليه عشان يعملوا حسابها من دلوقتي .. ومحدش يفكر يلغيها ولا يقصولها !!
> > >
عايزينك ترجع بسرعة ياريس عشان تتابع بنفسك حل مشاكل الفلاحين اللي إنت بتنصرهم ودايماً واقف معاهم .. وشلت ديونهم .. أصل الدين هّم يا ريس .. وكلهم ملهمش إلا إنت ابن أرضهم الطيبة ياريس .

If you can't beat them (or imprison or defame them)...

2010-03-01T22:41:00.003+02:00

Thank you to Moftases for the photoshopping on the royal head.

Flaxing muscles

2010-02-11T00:03:00.004+02:00

I went to a sit-in today in downtown Cairo by workers from the Tanta Flax and Oils Company. About 350 men have been sleeping on the pavement there since Monday, in the cold, because they’d like to be able to feed their families, and sometimes wages don’t come without a fight. It’s the usual story: public sector company is privatized and sold off. Investor buys it (at a huge discount) and then proceeds to slowly and systematically dismantle it with a view to selling the land on which the factory stands and making a tidy profit.

The only problem is that new investors are contractually under an obligation to “protect” the workers who come as part of the package, which means that they can’t just sack them, shut up shop and walk happily into the sunset, pockets bulging. One common strategy is to force workers out on early retirement, another to make life as intolerable as possible (especially for those active in defending workers’ rights) in the hope that they will quit of their own accord. The results are invariably a reduced, and demoralized workforce.

While Egypt’s steady privatization has made it a star pupil with the World Bank, these policies are far from popular amongst the people they most directly affect, as it well known. I spoke to one worker today who told me that he had the option of joining a private firm but opted for Tanta (when it was still government-owned) “because the state protects me in a way private companies won’t”. Tanta workers are not the first formerly public sector workers I have spoken to who reject the idea that the government doesn’t owe them anything after the integration of their company into the private sector. In fact, several such workers I spoke to continued to refer to themselves as public sector employees.

I’m poorly equipped to discuss with authority the economic merits or otherwise of Egypt’s privatization process, but its effects as I have witnessed them have largely been extremely negative. And certainly the trickle-down benefits lauded by the architects of this process has yet to be felt amongst the majority of Egyptians. But I really understood as I spoke to workers today that the privatization process is an affront to some workers not merely because it (usually) impoverishes them and threatens their working futures. On an ideological level, men in their 40s, 50s and 60s are bearing witness to the tearing down of the last remaining vestiges of a legacy which has informed their whole lives; the idea that the state will protect them. Privatisation of these men’s factories is a multi-pronged attack. On their security, their livelihoods, sometimes their pride and always the belief system which has underpinned their whole existence.

Times and economies change and that’s life, some argue. There are always victims on the road to progress. Alas these victims are often steamrollered multiples times by this progress. Tanta workers have been battling for almost a year for basic entitlements. What they want now is either for their factory to work properly (raw supplies aren’t being renewed and machinery is being removed, they say preventing them from working) or for them to be made redundant with the severance pay they are legally entitled to. The company is doing neither.

It has offered them half of the sum workers believe they are entitled to as redundancy pay. Workers have recently been informed that they won’t be being paid January’s salaries because they haven’t been working (they were on strike). Yesterday, as workers were thinking about putting up a tent to shelter them from the cold security officers stormed their gathering attacking four workers in an attempt to get to activists from the Tadamon [Solidarity] group who have been supporting the workers. You can see a video of the arrest of the activists here. They were subsequently released shortly afterwards.

I went back the same evening and workers told me that they're not intimidated. But they also said that this is because this protest is their resort: there's nothing else they can do after this, and how can they go back to their families and the factory and Tanta having failed?

I had left the sit-in shortly before the attack happened, and encountered another of Egypt’s odd moments of irony. As I walked away, wondering whether Egypt’s government is in professional training for the Screwing Over Your Own People Olympics or just doing it for fun, I walked onto Qasr El-Eini and found it empty. Big men in suits and shades carrying machine guns in 4x4s were parked on the side of the road, waiting to escort out parliamentarians. Behind them a sea of cars, ordinary Egyptians, were being held up. Without wishing to labour the image – you get the idea – walking along, the workers’ chants still audible behind me, it felt like yet another huge Up Yours from the men in charge.

Guide to writing about Egypt

2010-02-04T22:50:00.008+02:00

Authentic modern Egyptians. Bonus point for donkey. Source here

REJECTED BLOG POST FROM CAIRO

In Egypt, writing an article follows a formula as old as the pyramids themselves*

By: I be earnin big Gs, baby

CAIRO: Your first paragraph, and you will use it to paint a stunningly authentic picture of Egypt for your inferior, under-traveled readers: a pastoral scene of the Nile Delta perhaps, or a portrait of poverty in Cairo’s gritty, urban chaos as described to you by your stringer. There will probably be a headscarf in there somewhere, being gently caressed by the wind of Egypt’s uncertain and precarious future.

Whatever you choose, your first paragraph must mention at least one of four things: the Nile, the Pyramids, overcrowding or Egyptian fatalism.

“At this point, a quote is long overdue,” chuckled Mohamed Father of Eight, who will usually be employed in something sufficiently blue collar-y as to give what he says that all-important authenticity. Make sure however that he is mellow and an exponent of the famous Egyptian sense of humour - despite the fact that he is being fucked over sideways by life.

You will describe Mohamed either cheerfully smoking a sheesha in a sidewalk café while resigning himself to God’s will, or masterfully cutting his way through Cairo’s notorious traffic in his taxi, throwing out colourful expletives at other drivers to the symphony of the capital’s car horns.

“Insha’allah what I say will include a word in transliterated Arabic. The reader will recall hearing this word during the pharaonic dress-up party on the Nile cruise he did in 1994 and realise that he has a deep and unshakable understanding of Arab culture and Islam in particular,” Father of Eight said, inevitably and suddenly looking older than his 40 years.

But you have lived in Egypt for eight months and were once told by a man in Dahab that you speak Arabic better than Egyptian themselves: useful because you attempted to use this expert Arabic at the police station later, after you realized that the disaffected youth had pinched your wallet because he can’t afford to get married in Mubarak’s Egypt.

In short, unlike your cosseted reader, you realise that the seemingly mundane minutiae of Egyptian society are portents of something more sinister, and also a useful way of filing copy when news is slow.

80 million Egyptians disagree. You know however that the double shock of Sadat’s 1980s economic opening – or Infitah [your readers wont know this one. You are superior] – and the Dina video scandal has deeply scarred this nation and rendered the opinions of the general public irrelevant vis-à-vis your theories.

“Another quote at this point, this time by an expert who will gladly come out with any old bullshit in order to see his name plastered all over your international publication,” commented Dr. Bo2ayn Aihkalam, author of El Forsa Betdo2 and a part-time dental hygienist.

“I will hold forth on the downtrodden Egyptian people and gladly back you up on your assertion that a phenomenon which is more or less common to all mankind is unique to this country,” Aihkalam said, speaking in his clinic on a busy Wednesday afternoon.

Now draw tenuous links between all the above. If your story is a political piece suggest that the creation of a Facebook group called “Elboradei lovers” with 312 members one of whom is wearing a green t-shirt means that Egypt is on the cusp of an Iran-style revolution.

Try to squeeze in a reference to Copts, bloggers, the Muslim Brotherhood and bread queues if at all possible. Mention sexual harassment, the African Cup of Nations, succession and Amr Diab and you will have a royal flush, sir.

If however your story begins with either “letter from Cairo” or “Cairo journal” you are relieved of journalistic duties such as fact checking or conveyance of useful information.

Structure your story in ever shorter, staccato sentences.

Thus.

Make sure to talk a load of bollocks.

After a long and uninteresting journey mostly round your own prejudices the reader will be conveyed to his final destination.

Which is that, in the eternal city, when Egyptians have colds, they sneeze.

* This post is a blatant rip off of this brilliant idea, and was written in rage after reading this.

A few 'yo mamas' would have been quicker

2010-02-03T23:13:00.003+02:00

I just want to record here because I forget these things, and because I have nowhere to record them, that this man:

Cracked me up at a protest I covered today.

He had something against People’s Assembly chief Fathy Sorour. I mean more than the usual dislike of Fathy Sorour. It was personal, I felt. Like Fathy Sorour had introduced this man's sister to crack cocaine or something. He stood outside the metal barriers for about 40 minutes, and every time someone chanted something, he tailored it to assuage his Sorour vitriol.

Thus:

الحزب الوطني هو المسئول

The National Democratic Party is responsible

became

الحزب الوطني و سرور هم المسئولين

The National Democratic Party AND Sorour are responsible

and

يا مبارك ساكت لية انت موافق ولا اية

Mubarak why are you silent, do you approve or what?

became

يا مبارك و يا سرور ساكتين بية ..الخ

Mubarak and Sorour, why are you silent...etc

but my favourite was this:

مصر لكل المصريين!

Egypt is for all Egyptians!

which our friend rendered

مصر لكل المصريين ما عدا سرور

Egypt is for all Egyptians except Sorour.

Occupy in the sky.

2010-01-31T22:21:00.005+02:00

This is where Tony was hiding the WMDs

Tony Liar’s appearance before the Iraq Inquiry coincided with the release of this heartbreaking short documentary film on the killing of a nine year-old boy by the Blackwater private security company, and my reading of a book called “In Cairo With Kitchener”, published in 1917.

“In Cairo with Kitchener” is a gem of a book, written before governments had to dress up imperialist ambitions as acts of philanthropy, before they had to go through the tiresome processes of securing a United Nations rubber-stamp for their invasions and justify their actions retrospectively, eight years too late.

“In Cairo” is written by Sydney A. Moseley, a British journalist who spent two years in Egypt, and who is largely motivated by a desire to complain about interference in the publication and content of his book by Lord K himself. Moseley is a name-dropper par excellence and is the type of journalist who likes to shoehorn himself into the story, so this act of censorship seems to have thrilled him.

Mosely writes in the book’s preface that the Al-Shaab newspaper reported that an introduction had been written by Minister of Public Works Ismail Sirry “Pasha”, without Sirry actually having read its contents. Sirry, “having learned that the book contained many reflections on the British Agent [Kitchener]…has gone round telling all those he met that he did read the book before writing the introduction”.

We are told that Sirry did not know that Moseley would take an attitude of “frankness and independence” in his book. References to Kitchener in the edition I read were unreservedly sycophantic, so I can’t understand both what the author means by “frankness and independence” nor what the bloody fuss was about.

In any case, a strange irony has been given to the book, 90 years later. Moseley unwittingly reveals the British occupiers in all their crass, orientalist, arrogance - but he also says a couple (very few, admittedly) of things which still ring true today.

Below are some of Moseley’s thoughts on his sojourn in “the Land of Paradox”, as he insists on calling Egypt.

“There are evils in Egypt which exist not so much as a result of British policy, but because of the crass stupidity and overwhelming conceit - which always go together – of individual officials. These persons, some of whom I mention in the following pages, constitute themselves as modern Egyptian gods and expect idolatry of Ra in the twentieth century. Those who have been inured to the enervating and narrowing atmosphere of the Land of Paradox accept this well enough. The few bolder, who do not go so far as to worship, take care, nevertheless, not to blame where they are unable to praise.” - Note the separation between “individual acts” and “policy”, a favourite stratagem of the politician. No comment on “modern Egyptian gods”.

“’Robbers and blackmailers are, in Egypt, treated more fairly than editors accused of infringing the Press Law.’”

“The suppression of newspapers and newspaper men in Egypt is nothing new”. - Ya ragel.

“This unparalleled interest in his [Lord Kitchener’s] coming can only be set down to the reputation and prestige he had gained on the banks of the Nile. There could, indeed, be no plainer proof of the old saying that nothing strikes the Oriental imagination so much as success in war”. – Obama still busy trying to strike that oriental imagination.

“It is unusual for an Egyptian crowd to cheer” – he forgot to add, “under occupation”.

“It is true that on this score [Egypt’s 1st parliament] criticism has not been lacking; but while one who desires to record a situation as it actually is must examine such criticism, it should be borne in mind that a first parliament, like the first of lesser institutions, must take time before it can be rid of its defects. Only time and British representatives can do that”. - vomit.

Moseley wasn’t entirely oblivious though, and devotes an entire chapter to the consideration of “Why the Englishman is disliked”.

“The statement has been made by bewildered [LOL] British students of Egyptian politics that the Egyptian does not like the Englishman. This charmingly frank and innocent conclusion is arrived at with a tinge of bitterness…

After all we have done for them – which they fully admit – they will be glad to see the back of us [fancy that!].

Strangely enough, these writers have said nothing of the Briton not liking the Egyptian. Perhaps these students failed to notice the stand-offishness of the superior British official towards the common Egyptian. If they had given heed to this obvious fact they would have saved themselves a host of doubts and theories. The British have a natural aptitude for governance abroad [they beat insubordinate natives round the head with their stiff upper lip]. This must have originated before our advent in Egypt ; for, well as we have done there, we could have accomplished much more – the friendship of the Egyptian, for instance – if we had been wiser in our choice of civil servants. As it is, we appear to have been at pains to send our snobs to Egypt. The Land of Paradox has become the City of British Snobs.”- Again, the policy isn’t wrong, IT’S THE INDIVIDUALS. Got it???

“The fact is, the cringing and abjectness of the native have transformed many responsible Britons in Egypt from masters tolerant towards their inferiors into the kind of tyrant who recalls Egypt’s darkest history”.- It’s the natives’ faults, just like in modern day occupations where occupying troops commit atrocities because of the pressure of having to fight those ungrateful recalcitrant natives. Btw Moseley thinks that Egypt’s “darkest history” was under the Turks, who he intensely dislikes.

“The more general type of man who schemes for an “unfettered” Egypt is generally the bloated half- Turk, half-something else, whose interests, in the main, are mercenary and nothing else. He has actually no more aesthetic sentiment about the political state of Egypt than a gamoose. Let him obtain unlimited fodder at the expense of others, and he will content. It was individuals of this type who wrote the pages of Egypt’s blackest history. Heaven forfend that we should permit him to hold sway again!” – heaven forfend indeed!

“Consider yourself very fortunate that you, an outsider, should have been chosen for this wonderfully good fortune [of the British occupation. I kid you not]. You know that the reason why we sent great Englishmen thousands of miles from our own misery in order to keep yours was because circumstances, in the very inspiring form of finance, necessitated those early steps…Since he was already there the Englishman thought he might just as well knock the country into shape; for the surroundings, after all, were good to look at and the climate most inviting.” – That is: right we’re here robbing the country, let’s build a few roads.

““Self-indulgence and corruption have eaten the heart of the Turkish oligarchy,” wrote Lord Milner.

“It is the curse of the whole vast region which still lies under the blight of the Ottoman dominion, that the governing classes are devoid of the morality which essential to governing well”.

That class would again govern Egypt if England left Cairo to-day”.

I'm always astonished that countries formerly occupied by the British didn't collectively invade Britain and beat its rulers around the head with the latters' sense of entitlement.

Moftases has extracted the most important parts of the Habib and Mofeed interview

2010-01-27T16:35:00.002+02:00

here.

Erring on the side of distortion

2010-01-26T00:06:00.002+02:00

Mubarak decided to make national police day a public holiday this year. While national police day isn’t a recent invention, this is the first year that the Egyptian public gets a day off out of it. My own explanation for this sudden act of lie-in generosity is that Mubarak - inspired by countries which have several bank holidays - decided that there is no reason why Egypt shouldn’t have public holidays named after one of its most hated institutions.

The idea of a national holiday in honour of the police is so unchallengeably farcical that it is hard to believe that the authorities penciled it in the national calendar with a straight face. Tellingly, Interior Minister Habib El-Adly said during a TV appearance on Sunday that Hosny Mubarak decided to make it a national holiday so that the sacrifices made by Egyptian policemen against the British occupation wouldn’t be forgotten. Past glories are extremely useful for filling in the blanks of today.

I can’t resist a few words about the El-Adly appearance. He was interviewed by Mofeed Fawzy, one of my favourite presenters.

مفيد فوزي و هو بيحاور صباعه

Fawzy presents a programme called “Talk of the Town” in which he barrels around Egypt being pompously sycophantic with anyone more famous than him, and humiliating and badgering the proletariat. I first encountered him during a fit of insomnia some years back when I didn’t have a satellite dish, and was suddenly confronted with this troll-man at 2 a.m., bearing down on prisoners in Alexandria’s Borg El-Arab prison. I particularly remember that he interrupted one startled prisoner doing a timed exam in order to chastise him about his life of crime and lecture him on the dangers of recidivism.

There was none of that with our Habib, of course. The interview was conducted in a room resembling the Mohamed Soghayar hair salon waiting area, which we were told is in the Interior Ministry. Habib and Mofeed were seated on chairs on a shag pile rug. The rug resembled, to some extent, Mofeed’s hairpiece, though of a lighter hue. Mofeed spat out questions at Habib in the unique fashion for which he is famous, namely verbosely and interminably, and often in highfaluting modern standard Arabic.

Habib meanwhile spent practically the entire interview trying to make his eyebrows reach his (rapidly retreating – even his hair is scared of the police) hairline, while giving circuitous and nonsensical responses. Ever eager, Mofeed finished off many of Habib’s sentences; such is the time that the latter spent saying “errrrr”.

I had always understood that holding public office requires a degree of fluency, and dare I say charisma, but should have learnt better after John Major. There is also a major difference between holding, and impounding, public office, as Habib, who has been in the job since 1997, might like to errrrr about if asked.

Needless to say that since the interview was broadcast on state television, Habib is not pressed on anything (even though Mofeed regards himself as iconoclastic, and the Jeremy Paxman of Egyptian television). You can see the load of pie in the sky codswallop Habib comes out with here (apologies for linking to myself, I can’t find anything else in English). I was astonished though, by his frank admission that security bodies re-detain individuals given court release orders where these bodies “know” that the individual in question poses a threat. As I understand it, most countries either deny that their security bodies do this, or locate such practices on distant, non-touristic, Caribbean islands - so as to avoid contaminating their justice systems.

Mr Useful and the Qatari Channel of Discord

2010-01-04T00:29:00.003+02:00

Al-Ahram published one of its gems on Saturday, an article which forgets it is an article and is essentially just a propaganda fax from the control room with a bit of filling in the middle.

It’s written, sort of, in the form of a long speech made by Dr. Mofeed Shehab, minister of legal affairs, except that in the middle it references Shehab himself, and has the feel of a man in a raincoat muttering to himself in the corner of a pub about the rapture.

Here Shehab manages to combine some of Egypt’s favourite bête noires in a long tirade which is ostensibly a response to the iron wall Egypt is building on its border with Gaza.

It’s a bit like when you ask for the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever at a disco, and the DJ decides to get creative and plays a medley of their greatest hits.

I had a laugh reading it and translated some of it. I left out some of the duller parts, as well as a long bullet-point list of the many plots planned by those dastardly Palestinians in the motherland, foiled by our glorious security bodies.

All the stuff outside the square brackets is a translation of what’s written in the ‘article’. Content inside the square brackets is a mixture of Shehab’s thoughts - which I sucked out of his head using my superpowers - and me just saying any old shit.

(And I’m not a professional bloody translator so don’t start).

SHEHAB: THE WORKS ARE TO SECURE OUR BORDER WITH GAZA

During all the crises confronting the Egyptian state, we search for a means of managing national issues in the face of campaigns targeting political decisions, such as what happened two weeks ago in relation to the engineering installations on our eastern borders [GIANT FUCKING UNDERGROUND IRON WALL], the aid convoys and other controversial topics.

Media treatment – and I mean here the television programmes and satellite channels – has disappeared from the scene, and has not performed the full role we want and wish for. It’s true that a large number of Arab satellite channels have been established, at the head of which is of course the Qatari channel of discord [THE DEMONIC AL-JAZEERA] itself, which has installed itself as a sovereign ruler on our land and as usual spread its anti-state and anti-regime poison [AIRED OPINIONS OTHER THAN THOSE HELD BY THE EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT] in order to plant discord and inflame the Egyptian and Arab street with the aim of causing a clash with official institutions [QUESTIONING OF THE OFFICIAL LINE].

It launched its attack on Egypt just as it did during the barbaric attacks on Gaza a year ago. Its programmes, news bulletins, correspondents and guests – well-known and carefully chosen – were all used to attack Egypt and even to cast doubt on its judiciary, as a dishonoured Nasserist [DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO THIS IS?] did while discussing the public prosecutor on the channel of discord last Tuesday. It didn’t of course occur to the presenter Lina Zahreddin to ask him about the extent of the independence of the Egyptian judiciary!!

This presenter and her channel and her bosses didn’t utter a single word in condemnation of the arms, rockets and smart bombs sent to Israel to be used against Gazans from Qatar’s many bases. The channel of discord is an Israeli tool par excellence; it took the news about the Egyptian building works from the Israeli media [ONLY THE EGYPTIAN GOVT IS ALLOWED TO DEAL DIRECTLY WITH ISRAEL, NAMELY IN THE FORM OF CUPS OF TEA AND LAUGHS WITH NETANYAHU] and started formulating its usual conspiracy theories [WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY NOT WHAT I AM DOING].

The Egyptian media meanwhile has not performed its role of countering this and presenting the state’s position and plans in full [VOMITING OUT THE PARTY LINE]. It has been unable to answer the doubters and those with interests and agendas who call themselves Arab nationalists. These individuals and their relations and sources of funding must be exposed before public opinion. States bodies have many examples of these individuals. People who support Iran and Hamas at the expense of our nation must be exposed [. There cannot be a single second of doubt that the people of Gaza are not more important that Egyptians. It is true that we stand with Gaza [BEHIND OUR GIANT WALL], but the priority is Egyptians [WHOSE LAST NAME IS MUBARAK].

The armed forces are implementing the engineering installations [BERLIN WALL] in order to improve Egypt’s border with Gaza. It is being carried out as part of a plan aimed at securing Egypt’s borders and ensuring the safety of its land and people [WHO ARE FACED WITH THE TERRIFYING DANGER OF GAZANS BREAKING THROUGH THE BARRIER IN ORDER TO GO SHOPPING]. Dr Mofeed Shehab said that the installations being created by the armed forces is part of its Constitutional responsibility to protect the country and its land and ensure its security.

These installations are not new but rather a continuation of development in this area. Current events gave impetus to them – it is enough to consider what the world witnessed on 23 January 2008 when tens of thousands of Palestinians stormed the Rafah Crossing [AND WENT SHOPPING], and in 2006 when armed men stormed the cement barrier on the border and destroyed a large section of it. I ask all Egyptians and nationalists: do you accept the violation of your country’s sovereignty , and is there a country in the world which leaves its border open to anyone coming and going and abusing it as if we are fair game for anyone?! To anyone with a critical mind or in collusion against their country [QUESTIONING BUILDING A GIANT FUCKING WALL IN ORDER TO DESTROY TUNNELS WHICH PROVIDE BASIC GOODS TO A PEOPLE UNDER SIEGE], I ask: Why do you defend those who kill and blow themselves up in tourist resorts in Sharm El-Sheikh and Taba and Dahab and even El-Azhar [BECAUSE IF YOU ARE AGAINST US YOU SUPPORT TERRORISM. BUSH EL EBN SAID SO].

Those who spread discord and ignite fires forget that Gaza is still under occupation according to the provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention. It has not been liberated and Israel governs everything within it, its ports of entry [WHAT WAS THAT YOU WERE SAYING ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY] and movement in and out of it. Individuals looking for revenge against their country close their eyes to the real issue of who is controlling Gaza and refusing conciliation with the people of their country.

They are the real reason – the crossing was fully open until the coup by Hamas against legitimate rule in July 2007 [WHICH IS WHAT THE NDP CALLS ELECTIONS]. Hamas is choking Gaza’s people and Israel is helping it in this. Egypt however has never tarried in its role and has never been late in sending aid across the Rafah Crossing. Goods are piling up in Gaza, especially via the Rafah Crossing and even via the tunnels, and Hamas imposes customs taxes on everything smuggled in and keeps this money for itself [WHEREAS WE JUST STEAL LAPTOPS IN AIRPORTS].

*But why isn’t the Rafah Crossing kept open all the time during the siege of Gaza?

* What is Egypt’s interest in closing the Crossing?

People who pose this question are waiting for an opportunity to attack the country and want people to believe that Egypt is taking part in the siege on Gaza [BECAUSE IF YOU QUESTION US YOU ARE AGAINST US]. Unfortunately everyone who asks this question has an answer for it. They have heavy consciences, they don’t follow God’s will, they violate the truth and mislead public opinion and fabricate [AND STEAL LITTLE GIRL’S SWEETS IN THE PLAYGROUND] for the following reasons:

1. Hamas’ coup is the reason for the closure of the crossings, including the Rafah Crossing.

2. Egypt is committed to not opening the border formally because of the absence of a legitimate authority and, in compliance with the 2005 treaty, in order to protect Palestinian unity and avoid giving Israel the pretext to shirk its obligations in the Strip in its capacity as an occupying power.

3. To stop Israeli ambitions and plans to divide Gaza from the rest of Palestine; Gaza – the West Bank – East Jerusalem.

4. The Rafah Crossing is for people and not goods.

5. Egypt is applying pressure for the other crossings into Gaza controlled by Israel to remain open. Egypt has nothing to do with these crossings and they are: Karem Abu Salem, Erez, Kesoufeem [sp.?], Sufa, Karni and Nahal Oz.

6. The flow of aid through the crossing has not halted and Egypt has facilitated in all ways possible the passage of aid caravans in conformity with the rules set by Egypt.

7. Every country in the world protects its sovereignty and ensures the security of its land in cooperation with its neighbours. No state accepts the infringement of its laws, and it punishes those who do infringe them.

8. The attack on Egypt is organised. Israel was not subject to a similar attack by Arab satellite channels and some politicians and opposition figures when it built its racist wall [AT LEAST NOT HERE IN LA LA LAND]. This places all of these people in the same basket with regional powers who have adopted the inflammatory message against Egypt [DOCTOR THE MONSTERS ARE COMING].

These Egyptian measures are aimed at protecting our interests and our citizens against danger. They are necessarily and most definitely against the interests of Israel, which wants to push Gazans into Sinai where they will become refugees like Palestinians dispersed in several Arab countries and then the story will be over forever [AS HAPPENED OF COURSE WHEN THE ‘TENS OF THOUSANDS’ OF GAZANS STORMED THE BORDER IN 2008].

The media lacked information and the truth as it talked about the French people [THERE WERE ANOTHER 41 NATIONALITIES REPRESENTED IN THE GAZA FREEDOM MARCH BUT I WILL CONVENIENTLY IGNORE THIS] who came to Egypt ostensibly for tourism but who in fact had other motives - going to Gaza [SHOCK HORROR. IS THERE A SPECIFIC VISA FOR ‘GOING TO GAZA’?]. There has been a plan to deceive, and all the media fell for it. Most of these French people were Algerian women carrying French nationality [THIS IS COMPLETE TWADDLE BUT INDULGE ME] who took advantage of the protests for Gaza [TWADDLE DUM TWADDLE DEE]. These Algerian women are carrying the message of the Algerian media from the heart of Cairo [T WORD, AGAIN]. They appealed to human emotion but there was a political aim behind their actions. We all remember what happening in Khartoum and the consequences after the match on November 18 [A LOVELY DISTRACTION FROM HOW CRAP THE GOVERNMENT IS]

In this way Algerian women came to Egypt with French passports and in their hearts they have taken a position against Egypt [EL TWADDALO, AGAIN. IF IT WAS TRUE, IT WOULD AGAIN BE A REMINDER THAT EGYPTIANS AND ALGERIANS REALLY DO HAVE MUCH IN COMMON].

The 3rd lifeline convoy [Viva Palestina] and what happened afterwards is part of this outrageous role. There was never, at any time, an objection to the convoy’s entering Gaza – rather, there was a warm welcome [WARM AS IN STUCK UNDER THE SUN IN AQABA] with faith in Egypt’s role in reducing Palestinian suffering. However, the arrangements for the convoy made since August were carried out without Egypt being supplied with any information [THE REST OF THE WORLD KNEW BUT NEVER MIND]. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry, via its Embassy in London requested the convoy organisers – and at their head George Galloway – for complete coordination, but they carried on as if their entry into Gaza will be against the wises of the Egyptian state, and despite the prior notification that aid will be brought in via the port of El-Arish.

The operation’s organisers took this lightly, and decided to continue their journey via Aqaba demanding that they enter via Nuweiba. They made arrangements with a number of Arab and international media outlets, and corresponded via the Internet [GOSH!] in order to put Egypt under international pressure. The state refused to go back on its position [HEAR US ROAR].

Bella ciao

2009-12-29T23:49:00.003+02:00

Note loads of foreigners, friendly copper cordon, absence of riot police

Egyptian government has been busy recently adding new chapters to its part-time project of an equivalent to ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ aimed at despots, called ‘How to Shaft People Within (and beyond) Your Jurisdiction While Not Giving a Shit About Popularity Ratings’.

Earlier this month pictures emerged of what is allegedly an underground steel wall along Egypt’s border with Gaza, designed to put an end to the smuggling tunnels which as we all know are used only to smuggle in weapons and artillery and not food and other basics which Israel (with Egypt’s help) has prevented entering Gaza since it imposed its siege in 2007.

Egypt is extraordinarily obsessed with asserting its sovereignty, in the same way that some short men feel compelled to prove to the world that an absence of stature in no way comprises their masculinity and virility. A better analogy is perhaps a bald man. My mother always told me to never trust a man with a comb-over. Egypt’s eastern border policy, with all its sovereignty chest-thumping, is clearly that of a bald man attempting to conceal the fact that he doesn’t have autonomy over his own border.

I might be wrong of course. Perhaps Egypt’s decision to restrict opening of its border with Gaza and prevent activists from the Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina from reaching the crossing is just serendipitous coincidence, a case of Israeli and Egyptian interests overlapping. Perhaps Egypt decided that it is in its national interest to prevent hundreds of foreigners from entering Gaza and instead have them wreak protest havoc in Cairo, thereby ensuring a double whammy of steel wall + foreigner-sprawled-in-front-of-traffic-outside-French- embassy bad guy international media spotlight.

The other theory is that this is all a vendetta against Hamas, that the Egyptian government is putting pressure on it to come to a deal about Gilad Shalit.

Whatever the reason, as usual it’s the Arab man on the street who’s being fucked over in all this. As I wrote this on Monday night there were reports on Twitter that journalists – Egyptian, obviously – were detained for a couple of hours in a police van during their coverage of a protest by 100 or so Gaza Freedom March members who have been camping out on the pavement outside the French Embassy since Sunday evening.

Anyone familiar with Egyptian protests will understand what occupation of a bit of pavement means in Egypt. This afternoon, I was at a sit-in outside parliament by workers from the Ahmoseto company. They were protesting for severance pay. The company owner – deeply in debt – has legged it, leaving the factory closed and them in the shit. As usual. When I arrived there were about 100 men occupying one stretch of pavement with another 500 or so penned in by security bodies around the corner.

About five minutes after I arrived the men began chanting Allahu akbar – negotiations with the government had finished and the men had been promised severance pay. Almost immediately an officious little man of about 25 in a blue blazer with gold buttons began telling them to leave. They’d got what they wanted, now bugger off.

When the man told me to push off I asked him who he was and he said state security. State security have apparently issued instructions to their staff ordering them to dress like the air stewards of a budget airline.

But to return to the theme, Egyptians have very little public space in Egypt and it is therefore expected that if anyone is going to get arrested during a protest attended by 100+ French activists and three Egyptian journalists covering it, it sure as hell wont be Serge and Pierre. Because in addition to being brutal arseholes, Egyptian security bodies are perfidious, ball-less scumbags just like their bosses.

I haven’t been following the Gaza Freedom March with much enthusiasm because if I wanted to join I wouldn’t be allowed to; people with Egyptian or Palestinian Authority (!) passports can’t, according to the website. The justification for this is that “it has been difficult for Egyptian citizens and people with Palestinian Authority passports to enter the Gaza Strip…So unfortunately we cannot take [them]”. I object to this policy. In addition to protesting the siege and torment by one people of another, this is a march against discrimination, and individual demonstrators of any nationality who want to try to enter alongside their more privileged European and American counterparts should be allowed to.

However, it’s always good to see the Egyptian government be given a hard time, and I hope that at some point in the future it is held to account for its actions.

Foreign activists organized a demo this afternoon outside the Journalists’ Syndicate. While trying to get the attention of a woman from Code Pink a state security officer who I am on nodding terms with asked me, “which group is she from?” having seemingly failed to notice that she was wearing a fluorescent pink t-shirt with the words CODE PINK emblazoned on it (and he speaks some English). He also seemed not to have heard of Code Pink, despite the fact that hundreds of foreign women dressed in pink are currently giving him lots of overtime. Stupidity seems to be part of the job description.

Later that evening there was another protest, this time organized by Egyptian activists and attended by some of the GFM members. I was tickled to notice that because this was an Egyptian-organised event, riot police and steel barriers were deployed, despite the fact that numbers were less than the earlier demonstration – when a row of ‘friendly’ plain-clothed policemen formed a loose cordon and chatted with the foreign women.

Overheard from a copper to one woman, while he chewed gum vigorously, smiled and winked: “Why you no talk about Afghanistan? Why you no talk about Guantanamo?”

Inside the journalists syndicate itself a press conference was being held, attended almost exclusively by hundreds of serious looking men and their beards.

After we left the demo and as we were walking down Champollian Street, Moftases and I heard the insistent thumping of a Tabla. It was coming from a side street. Looking down it I was stunned to see two veiled women dancing exuberantly inside a ring of chairs. A mechanic told us that we could approach them, and that it was a soboo3, the celebration of the birth of a baby. The baby was nowhere to be seen, which was good considering the volume of the music being played on the sound system.

We were invited to sit down, before bags of popcorn and sugared almonds were thrust upon us by a child. The dancing continued apace, with unbelievable sensuality, given that it was about 8.30 p.m. and less than ten metres away was a street full of mechanics. Barefoot and dressed in black, the women were exemplars of belly dancing its best, watched idly by a young man next to the decks who spent the entire time resting his chair on two legs against a wall. A group of three boys meanwhile watched transfixed the women’s arses talking sex, left right, left right.

As is inevitable Moftases and I were dragged up in turn to dance. Our arses said very little at all.

Egyptians often ask me why I choose to live in Egypt. I often ask myself the same question. Cairo is an exhausting, perplexing, cruel, bitch of a city. On some days it quite literally stinks; it gets in your nose and burns your throat and wraps itself around your lungs. On clear days there are still moments you feel you can’t breathe.

But then there are moments like tonight, when you turn a corner and find yourself in the middle of a giant Fuck You at Egypt and its iniquities. A stretch of pavement taken over by women, public space (finally, temporarily) owned by the people, a gasp of oxygen.

Uptown downtown nowhere ville

2009-12-12T23:28:00.006+02:00

I spent this weekend getting knocked over the head by the many worlds which exist in Egypt, again.

A relative of mine is an event organiser, and she invited me on Friday evening to the launch of recently released new Land Rover models. My interest in 4x4s doesn’t extend beyond avoiding getting hit by them but two compelling factors persuaded me the evening would justify the need to get out of my pyjamas and leave my house: firstly, the high probability of an open buffet and, secondly, the fact that the event was being held in Uptown Cairo.

Uptown Cairo is on top of the Moqattam Hill. The last time I went to Moqattam was to photograph a police station where a man in police custody had been defenestrated. On the way back, Moftases and I decided that it might be nice to have a look at Uptown Cairo.

Now Uptown Cairo is not so much a gated community as a $4 billion fortressed community. A series of flapping flags bearing the insignia “Emaar” (an Emirati property development company) at the corner of a road announce its existence. The road leading to the development is long and windy and makes getting there without a car tricky if not impossible. Which is the point. When Moftases and I arrived at the gate that day posing as potential real estate buyers we were told that we weren’t allowed in unless a company representative takes us around, and that none work on Friday. Moftases has a 10 year-old Fiat with engineering issues which may or may not be material to the matter.

I wondered why they didn’t just build a moat and ask people to send copies of their bank statements via Bluetooth on their iPhones at the gate.

So on Friday night Moftases and I went back to the fortress. Moftases gaily called out “Land Rover” as we breezed past the gate, the security guide waved us through with his walkie-talkie like it was a wand, and we carried on further down the yellow brick road, eventually reaching the obligatory fountain next to a car park where we stepped out into a cold whose level of bitterness was someone between Tiger Woods’ wife and Egypt after That Sudan Match.

Because we have legs and are plebs, Moftases and I soldiered on through the inclemency, ignoring the group of men shouting out something behind us, until a lovely man informed us that a fleet of Land Rovers and Jaguars were conveying guests from the car park to the event location, approximately 1 km away. In we popped and 40 seconds later were deposited at the event marquee on Uptown’s “Street of Dreams” which reminded me of Brookside a bit.

The Facebook invitation to the event had what I now realise was a warning, rather than a recommendation: “Dress Code: GLAMOUROUS”. I had made the concession of putting on a necklace, but as ladies in mini skirts and fur coats floated in on clouds of rich perfume I realized that a brown wool cardigan affair with a stripey scarf and pink socks rendered me sartorially-speaking a badly coordinated Before to their After.

Luckily I didn’t care, and neither did the cheese smorgasbord buffet which Moftases (wearing a blazer) and I proceeded to demolish until we were made aware of the existence of a bar.

We watched the guests file in while coating our innards with cheese. Most were wearing my monthly (if not yearly) salary, they killed me. Cigar-wielding men greeted each other effusively. I was pleased to see that one man was wearing a Del Boy camel hair coat. Music played and drinks flowed and Egypt seemed far, far away.

Halfway through the proceedings Moftases and I went to have a look at the Emaar show home, a two-storey, four bedroomed villa offering lovely views over Cairo. This wasn’t the most expensive finish available we were told, if were prepared to shell out more than the LE 9 million that this particular villa costs.

LE 9 million will buy you a four-storey block of flats in central but ordinary areas of Cairo such as Dokki. The ‘disadvantage’ is that in these areas you are not hermetically sealed off from the rest of Egypt by a road and gate which keeps the unwashed carless and the car-driving undesirables respectively, away.

On Saturday I went back to Egypt for a Kefaya demonstration outside the high court, apparently to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the group’s first protest. As in 2004, Saturday’s protest was to do with impending elections. Kefaya leader Abdel Halim Qandil announced that Kefaya would be boycotting the 2010 and 2011 elections. With the usual bluster he declared that “the Public Group for the Egyptian People” would be created, composed of 500 “former and current opposition MPs, public figures and strike and protest leaders” who will form a “popular parliament” and elect an “alternative president”.

A series of civil disobedience actions like strikes and protests and a signature campaign, Qandil said, will convince the incumbent president to bugger off “freeing Egypt” from his presence, and leaving his seat to the alternative president.

Qandil, tired of thinking about thrash metal, now thinking about alternative rock

Qandil said that Kefaya was “extending its hand” to Mohamed El-Baradei, who is hanging up his Nuclear Atomic Agency hard hat and given the Egyptian media lots to write about now that the football saga has run out of steam by hints that he might run for the Egyptian presidency.

There is something a bit sad about Kefaya protests; perhaps the knowledge that with its protests and grand gestures, the group is pissing in the wind, and like Ayman Nour’s travelling circus, has become a joke. While the reasons behind the decision to boycott the elections are noble, it was probably in no small part taken because Kefaya does not have a credible candidate for the presidential election (even if the election rules allowed it to field a candidate), and understands that someone of El-Baradei’s stature would be unwilling to associate his name with the movement because that would mean instant death.

A mass movement without the mass is reduced to a collection of friends meeting up now and again to do a bit of chanting and remind the world that they are still alive. On Saturday, they were even bickering about whose turn it was to chant, which only deepened my despair. As I watched them I thought about Egyptians who possess the means to buy LE 9 million homes and LE 1.5 million cars, and wondered for the umpteenth time how change is possible in this morass where wealth (both extreme and absence of) ensures that political self-determination is either irrelevant or a luxury to the happy rich and the fed-up underfed who are both too busy chasing a dime to try to stop Egypt imploding.

Sometimes she remembers my name

2009-12-09T17:51:00.001+02:00

My mother says: (5:30:39 PM)
Happy birthday!

Carah Sarr says: (5:30:51 PM)
Hiiiiiiii thanks :-)

My mother says: (5:32:00 PM)
You were born at 4.05 pm. I remember it well

My mother says: (5:32:20 PM)
Or was it 4.13?

Related links: This ridiculous article.

The beautiful game

2009-11-20T00:17:00.005+02:00

“Football has developed quickly in many countries because it used to be part of the politics of the pursuit of power and the ideologies it serves. Rapidly, it became the expression of nationalism, patriotism and chauvinism, even before federations were established. More than most sports, it lends itself to tribal feelings: the collective effort, the team colors, the speed, the physical aggression.”

“Egypt should bomb Algeria”

My sense of patriotism has always been a bit skewed, I think because there can be no absolutes if your parents come from different countries (or planets, as mine do).

Another factor is the deep sense of bitterness that comes from never really belonging, or being accepted, to both, or either country. That’s a whole other story but in brief my identity is slightly nebulous simply because it’s always been defined (imposed) by where I am, and those around me.

An example: The day before Egypt’s first match against Algeria I went to the Algerian Embassy in Cairo and photographed Algerian fans there. I was approached by a woman who, once she discovered that I work for an Egyptian paper/am partly Egyptian (I never discovered what exactly got her goat) summarily ejected me.

A year ago I was at a protest where a lawyer refused to be interviewed because, he quote unquote, “doesn’t talk to foreigners”. I showed him my national ID card. He remained unmoved. Which reminds me of an incident which happened last week when a secretary registering my details in a hospital said (while turning over my apparently fucking useless Egyptian national ID card in her hand) “heyya el genseyya aih?” (What nationality?)

Which is not to say that I didn’t support Egypt during its World Cup bid. I did. How couldn’t I? Few things match the sense of collective joy I experienced when Egypt won the African Cup, and when Egypt beat Algeria on Saturday. There have been suggestions that an interest in football is a distraction from what really matters, that celebrating a victory by Egypt’s national team somehow gives legitimacy to the ruling regime, or that football fervour is a distraction. I disagree with these sentiments.

In the Egyptian context, football is one of the few areas where the ruling regime has little influence and practically zero relevance, despite the zoom ins on Gamal Kermit Mubarak every time a goal is scored. I also object to the suggestion that a love of football equates to manipulation by the regime, and that football victories are used to let off steam of anger which would otherwise be channeled into political opposition movements. To suggest this is to deny Egyptian football fans agency: some Egyptians actually just love football in the same way that the rest of the world does. It’s also dodgy and highly simplistic, because it links in with the theory that if football didn’t exist to distract the oppressed masses they would all be in their homes plotting the revolution. Where’s the evidence?

Which is not to say that a certain amount of manipulation hasn’t gone on off-pitch. Nationalism is wonderful when it’s positive, but its existence is necessarily predicated on the existence of other nationalities. And mankind likes groups and tribes, and these groups and tribes are necessarily defined by other groups and tribes. And therein lies the danger.

What’s interesting about Algeria and Egypt is that these are two very similar countries in terms of social identity, religion, economic status, oppression, etc. Which means that the Us vs The Unknown Other – the bogey man - element which is so often a theme in the Egyptian media has been more difficult to manufacture this time. The emphasis has been on the violent history of Egypt vs. Algeria encounters and on the suggestion that “our Algerian brothers” have somehow betrayed their Arab identity.

It all started with the allegedly fabricated attack on the Algerian team bus when they arrived in Cairo.

There is a video which shows missiles being thrown at the bus by Egyptian youths. The Algerian team claim that three of their players received head wounds necessitating stitches as a result of the “attack”.

The Algerian team’s claims were almost immediately dismissed as made up by the Egyptian media, and eventually the public prosecution office. I didn’t read a single news item which questioned why – against a backdrop of extreme tension in the run-up to the game – hotheaded fans were allowed to get so close to the Algerian team’s bus. The difference between the team’s entrance to Egypt and their exit from Cairo’s stadium after their defeat was stark, and amounted to about six central security trucks and two riot trucks complete with armed soldiers. The truth about how damage was caused to the team bus is almost irrelevant here. Egypt had a duty to protect the Algerian team. It failed. Whether or not Algeria protected the Egyptian national team when it was in Algeria is irrelevant, because duties are not defined according to the extent to which others fulfil their obligations.

The most interesting thing in all this business was the reaction to the shameful attacks by some Algerians on Egyptian interests in Algeria (Egyptair offices, Orascum employees) after Algeria’s defeat in Cairo.

Egyptians have been fucked over routinely in the Gulf ever since Egyptian migration to the Gulf began. Exploited, abused, vulnerable, unpaid, relieved unwillingly of their passports, injured…Where’s the domestic outrage? I can only assume that there is none because the competitive/chauvinistic element of football is missing. Or perhaps it’s because the Egyptians exploited in the Gulf aren’t Naguib Sawiris, and are voiceless in Egypt anyway.

On Wednesday Egypt was beaten by Algeria. It was a shit match, not only because virtually every single member of the Algerian team insists on throwing himself to the ground “in injury” every time an Egyptian player comes near him, but because the Egyptian team was all over the shop. But the match was irrelevant anyway.

Egyptians who attended the playoff in Sudan returned claiming that they were attacked by hordes of Algerian barbarians flown in by the Algerian government expressly for the purpose of terrorizing them with knives and violence.

Things I find astonishing about this and other developments since:

1. This is a football match being played out against an ongoing feud which began in 1989 and was revived only very recently in Egypt’s defeat of Algeria in Cairo. Violence and football are not strangers. Sudan anticipated violence. It deployed approximately 15,000 soldiers. The international media termed it a “revenge match”. Egyptian fans were apparently the only party “shocked” at the possibility and reality of violence.

2. The On TV channel this morning broadcast half an hour of interviews with Egyptian supporters in Cairo Aiport coming from Sudan, who described scenes of “hell” and “war” and savage attacks by Algerian fans. No Algerians were interviewed. No Sudanese eyewitnesses were interviewed.

3. No videos of these alleged attacks have since appeared despite tens of thousands of Egyptians and their mobile phones flying to Sudan. A video of young men brandishing knives has appeared on Youtube. They are not wearing Algerian team colours. There is nothing to prove where and when this was shot.

4. Nobody has doubted the credibility of claims that Egyptian buses carrying fans were attacked by Algerian fans, while the fact that the Algerian national team necessarily trashed its own bus is not open to debate and a matter of logic.

5. The Egyptian media has entirely failed in its responsibility of uncovering the truth. Truth (where it exists) is composite, and is usually discovered by speaking to people who refute the conclusion you already have in your head when you set out to discover the truth.

6. No distinction is being made between Algeria, football, the Algerian government and the Algerian people. Algeria el sha3b [the people] is now a blow up plastic devil with oxygen supplied by the Egyptian media. As I write this, an Egyptian actress is on a Dream TV talk show telling us that 3,000 Algerian criminals were released from prison and flown to Sudan expressly for the purpose of terrorizing Egyptian fans. She has not provided any evidence for this claim. The presenter has not asked for any.

7. Egypt has recalled its ambassador to Algeria because of the treatment of Egyptians at the hands of Algerians. Apparently, only Egyptians have the right to mistreat other Egyptians.

Samia who cleans my flat and I had a huge argument today about all this. She has concluded that “there’s something not right about Algerians”. I asked her why the Egyptian media has decided not to interview Algerians, to get the other side of the story. She suggested that no Algerian would consent to be interviewed by the Egyptian media, and then repeatedly muttered 7asby Allah we na3m el wakeel under her breath as fans described their experiences on On Tv.

Bread & Butter VIII

2009-11-09T12:18:00.003+02:00

Ragai (left) with wunderbar lawyer Mohamed Abdel Aziz

Here's some good news for a change. A copper sentenced to five years after a horrible attack on a man in a police station.

ALEXANDRIA: Relatives of a mentally disabled man who was brutally assaulted in a police station last year were relieved on Saturday after offending police colonel Akram Suleiman was found guilty and slapped a five-year jail sentence.

“This is really great. Thank God. I’m so happy,” Ilhamy Sultan, the brother of Ragai Sultan told Daily News Egypt.

“I really didn’t expect that Suleiman would receive such a heavy sentence … I was confident that he’d be found guilty but thought that he’d be given a two- or three-year sentence at most.

“The court really understood what Ragai went through.”

A juvenile crime squad led by Suleiman arrested Ragai Sultan on the evening of July 22, 2008, as he walked on Alexandria’s Corniche.

His brother eventually found him the next day — after he has filed a missing person report — unconscious in a hospital.

Ragai, who had been dumped at the hospital and registered under the name ‘citizen,’ spent three days in intensive care after suffering a broken rib and shoulder, a fracture in the neck and brain hemorrhage that necessitated surgery.

Suleiman was found guilty of three crimes: misuse of force, possession of an illegal weapon and causing permanent disability.

The first offence carries a maximum sentence of three years while defendants found guilty of the second offence face a maximum of one year’s imprisonment.

The maximum sentence handed down in cases of causing permanent disability is seven years. The sentence is calculated according to the seriousness of the disability caused.

Suleiman’s defense lawyers alleged that Ragai — who is nearly 40 — was targeted by a juvenile crime squad because at the time of his arrest he was accompanied by a teenage girl called Passant, who he planned to engage in sexual relations with for money.

The defense maintained throughout the three-month trial that Ragai’s injuries had been caused by him falling down a flight of stairs while attempting to flee the police.

Forensic doctor Karam Shehata categorically repudiated this defense in October when he told the court that Ragai’s head injuries could only have been caused by being struck with a blunt object.

During Saturday’s court session, Suleiman’s lawyers changed tack and attempted to undermine the credibility of the forensic report. They claimed that Shehata did not examine Ragai and said that the fact that the CT scan carried out on Ragai was not accompanied by a report is irregular.

They also maintained that injuries of the gravity sustained by Ragai could be caused “by someone falling over on a beach while playing tennis”.

Doctors from Al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence who attended the trial said that these medical claims were simply “false.”

Mostafa Hussein, a psychiatrist with the Nadeem Center, told Daily News Egypt that CT scans are not usually accompanied by a report printed on the CT film itself, as the defense claimed.

He added that while falls may lead to concussion or a brain hemorrhage, this is only the case where the fall is from “a considerable height” or if the person has a pre-existing malformation in the brain’s blood vessels, “which is not the case with Ragai.”

Two prosecution witnesses, who were held in the Alexandria Security Directorate at the same time as Ragai, appeared during Saturday’s trial, and gave conflicting accounts of what happened.

Both, however, concurred that a junior policeman called Mohamed was responsible for Ragai’s injuries.

Ragai had initially told his brother that the person responsible for his assault was called Mohamed, but changed this account eight months later when, Ilhamy says, his memory returned and he identified Suleiman as his assailant.

Defense lawyers argued that the fact that Ragai changed his account indicates “Akram is an innocent scapegoat.”

Lawyers who had lodged, and won, a claim for LE 10,001 compensation for Ragai’s injuries expressed surprise at Suleiman’s “shambolic” defense team throughout the trial.

During Saturday’s session Suleiman appeared in the dock wearing sunglasses and at points appeared to be crying.

At the conclusion of the defense team’s pleadings, he shouted out from the dock in tears, “Why am I here? Why has nobody listened to me? I’m being tortured in the newspapers and on websites. Why would I hit him? What is there between us that I would hit him?”

Defense lawyer Gamal El-Swede also focused on this angle during his defense pleadings.

He acknowledged that incidents of police violence and brutality do occur, but added, “members of the police only hit people in order to extract confessions.”

While complaints about police brutality are common, few police officers are held to account for such incidents.

Suleiman’s sentencing is roughly the sixth conviction of a police officer for brutality since 2007.

The heaviest sentence was handed down in November 2007 to a police officer and two policemen, each sentenced to seven years imprisonment, after they were found guilty of killing Nasr Ahmed Abdallah.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the Nadeem Center said that Suleiman’s sentence is “one of the heaviest sentences ever handed down by the Egyptian judiciary in a torture case.”

The Gamal Show

2009-10-25T23:24:00.006+02:00

The Gamal Show aired online tonight, and I watched it live with loads of people on Twitter. Was fun.

The Gamal Show is Gamal Mubarak’s attempt to convince us that he’s Barack Obama. He appears in a studio with a load of hand-picked young people in a “dialogue”, on this occasion moderated by Lamis El-Hadidy, a television presenter married to Amr Adeeb, brother of Emad Adeeb, head of the executive board of newspaper Nahdet Misr, which recently published a story in which it stated that all Egyptian Bedouins (except direct descendents of the Prophet Mohamed) are criminals.

Lamis wore an odd waistcoat affair that looked like the back was made out of a flak jacket. Gamal didn’t wear a flak jacket because he is protected from flak, because his audience was handpicked and as far as I know he doesn’t meet real people outside studios and controlled public appearances and dinner time with Khadiga.

During tonight’s Gamal Show Gamal was joined by trade minister Rashid Mohamed Rashid, so that he didn’t have to talk as much as on other shows.

Gamal’s hairline and Rashid’s face for some reason remind me of Tunisian president Zeineddin Bin Ali, who in a twist of fate is busily writing himself into another five years of history tonight.

(Aside: Rashid’s Wikipedia page tells us that he went to Stanford, Harvard and MIT, and only acquired Diplomas from each establishment).

The point of the Gamal Show tonight was to impress upon us the importance of a free market economy and the wondrous good being worked by the private sector and private companies who are selflessly and beneficently shouldering the task of providing all the services that Egypt’s failed state can’t, like vocational job training and practical skills.

Gamal, who - God help us - manages to combine looking scary with a complete lack of charisma stressed the importance of reforming the Egyptian education system and, predictably, suggested that this should be done by making teaching a vocation rather than merely a government position.

In government terms this translates into making pay rises for teachers conditional on their passing tests which mostly examine very little to do with what they teach.

As expected, there were several comedy moments during tonight’s Gamal Show:

1. Almost all the young men had been given identical striped ties of the type favoured by Republicans, making them look like a giant Mormon boy band.

2. The questions were farcical, and determinedly and deliberately skirted round ills of Egyptian society using one of the following methods:

Model A

Audience member: I am a victim of [insert minor ill of society, such as unemployment]

Rashid Ben Ali/Lamis El Flak Jacket: Are you still a student?

Audient member: Yes

Rashid Ben Al/Lamis El Flak Jacket: You lack experience and your contribution must therefore be ignored.

Model B

Audience member: I am a victim of [insert minor ill of society, such as unemployment]

Rashid Ben Ali/Gamal: You must immediately open your own business. This will solve everything.

Model C

Audience member: There are no minor ills of society, such as unemployment and people who say so are lazy liars.

Lamis El-Flak Jacket: Bravo. Next question.

3. A contribution from Wahid Ramadan Mohamed, manager of a Macaroni factory. A carbohydrate Willy Wonka.
4. Gamal’s observation that “Egyptians as a general rule don’t like to move from the place they’re born in” – such as the presidency of Egypt perhaps?
5. This series of exchanges:

Exchange 1

Audience member: There is no wosta [use of high-up connections to obtain benefits one wouldn’t otherwise get such as a job, or special treatment] in Egypt.

Lamis El-Flak Jacket: Bravo, that’s right. Next question.

Immediately afterwards.

Exchange 2

Audience member: I wanted to open my business but was unable to get the necessary licence.

Lamis El Flak-Jacket: What? Really? We’ll call the governor for you immediately and sort it out.

Gamal making change

6. Lamis El-Flak Jacket towards the end of the programme telling audience members to get to the point with their questions cos time was running out and apologizing for being ‘dictatorial’ quote unquote. At least she apologises for it, unlike the father of a certain 40-something year old former banker who wasn’t a million miles away from her.

I was surprised to discover that Gamal really does seem to believe all the nonsense he spouts about foreign investment and a strong private sector and a pulling back of the state being the answer to Egypt’s problems, despite much of the evidence pointing to the contrary.

I was unsurprised to discover that he did not have the decency to make any reference to the tens of people who died yesterday night when a train went into the back of another train. But then it only involved Egypt’s poorest, the people who are hopelessly shut out of Gamal’s grand plans for the expansion of the private sector and whittling down of state services, and who are ploughed down daily again and again and again by his government’s merciless schemes.

*Screenshots by Moftases

CAIRO AIRPORT DENIED ENTRY INTO CAIRO AIRPORT

2009-10-07T18:26:00.003+02:00

The whereabouts of these plastic chairs is currently unknown

CAIRO: The fate of around 400 plastic chairs, two duty free sections and various other permanent fixtures remained unknown yesterday after Cairo Airport was denied entry into Cairo Airport.

“It happened at around midnight,” an ashtray who wished to remain anonymous said.

“I was approached by a uniformed officer while someone was putting their cigarette out in me. The officer told me that ‘my name is in their system’ before I was taken into a small room filled with people some of whom I recognized. The officer also took the man who was putting his cigarette out.”

Speaking from Paris Asuit Case described his experiences.

“I arrived in Cairo exhausted after 8 hours in transit in Paris. Just before I was about to be put on the luggage belt two officers instructed the luggage handlers to put me down. I was then questioned for two hours about whether I have ever carried arms into Gaza,”

“They eventually put me on a flight back to Paris.”

While journalists were not allowed to approach the site of the Cairo Airport terminal, a mobile phone image smuggled out by an airport worker revealed that the once busy terminals now stand empty.

The assiduous security operation has left no stone unturned. Pen Birolund, a Swedish writing device explained what had happened to him.

“I was stopped just before going through passport control. I was told that that have my name on their computer and they took me into a side room where some police officers asked me whether I planned to lead a strikes and protests in Cairo and declare myself president. I saw Boeing 747s, luggage belts, and soap dispensers being held in airport detention, all waiting to be deported.”

While Interior Minister Beloved Le Juste has not publicly commented on the campaign, a security officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the operation – informally known as Operation Stop Wael Abbas – was a security operation aimed at getting to the core of “insurgent” activity in Egypt.

“There exists a minority in Egypt who wish to undermine Egypt’s stability by organizing marches in the countryside involving 14 people and writing about events which actually do happen and calling it news when it is merely a smear campaign,” the official said.

“We have discovered that these people communicate with people outside Egypt using something called Twitter, which is a top secret communication device similar to Morse Code.”

The official revealed that security bodies successfully infiltrated Twitter, by creating a Twitter alias and following people.

“This was an extremely complicated operation which involved signing up for Twitter. Computer specialists were called in for the task. Once we identified that Egyptian insurgents are communicating with outside elements we decided to tackle the problem at its root by banning Cairo Airport altogether. It is well known that Cairo Airport's plastic chairs provide support to these enemy elements.”

The official said that the authorities plan to build a giant moat around the perimeter of Egypt which he says will “stop false rumours entering the nation”.

He added that a leading Egyptian scientist is currently working on creating a giant roof modeled on the roof used on Wimbledon’s central tennis court which will cover Egypt’s airspace and serve the same function of “keeping out elements which seek to destabilise the country”.

It should be noted that Nobel-prize winning scientist Ahmed Zoweil has not been seen since his family reported him missing last month.

Barred

2009-09-29T08:44:00.004+02:00

I was woken up today by a phone call at 2.30 a.m., which I was expecting. It was a woman’s voice, which I wasn’t expecting. It was bad news, which I was half-expecting.

“They’ve stopped Per. I’ve got through but they’re not letting him through.”

I digested this as sleep softly beat me around the head. Swedish journalist Per Bjorklund (he of the heavenly Scandinavian eyes) and his girlfriend, A (who rang me), were meant to be staying at my place for a few days while looking for a flat, and looking after the cats in my flat, while I go to Dahab. They had just arrived at Cairo Airport.

A was eventually able to give back Per back his mobile phone and the next time I rang it he answered.

“Hey,” the familiar, phlegmatic voice answered. “My name’s on a computer apparently. I’m being held in a security room and waiting to see a security officer. This looks like it could take some time.”

I’ve never met anyone as self-possessed, at all times, as Per, and this is saying something as our working relationship largely consists of me watching him nearly getting arrested at protests, having his camera memory card stolen by the police (more than once), nearly getting run over while trying to stop a police car kidnapping someone, and dealing with the sinister after-effects of that decision. I’ve never once seen him shout, seen him be rude to anyone. In fact I largely have to attempt to interpret his emotions through the speed at which he says stuff.

I tried to text and call A on her Swedish mobile while Per was inside. All I got was dead air. I then promptly fell asleep :-s

The next message I got was from Hamalawy at around 4.40 a.m., informing me that Per was going to be deported on a flight to Prague.

Per – or Bar as I and virtually everyone else call him - is a blogger, but more importantly he is one of the few journalists I know who actually gets off his arse and goes to situations which he knows won’t make headline news, rather than relying on phone calls and/or Twitter. He was one of the few journalists (Egyptian or foreign) who covered the Mahalla 49 trial with any consistency, having to contend with me at 9.30 a.m. for two and a half hours in a Peugeot.

He was always great company too, and always seemed to be able to analyse – and analyse well – situations very quickly.

In short he gives a shit.

I’d like to think that Per was deported because they’ve been following his Swedish-language reports on the labour movement and street protests in Egypt and decided that he is a threat – at least they’d be a chain of thought there.

I suspect though, as usual, that the decision makes as much sense as a rat in roller skates. I don’t want to waste the few functioning brain cells I have at 8 a.m. on considering reasons why he was stopped because what’s the point when actually there probably isn’t any kind of logical bloody reason for it. As there wasn’t when Travis Randall was deported, and a Palestinian mother was kept in Egypt for a week, supposedly for “being a security threat”.

Per was one of the people involved in the To Gaza march – as was Travis Randall – but other foreigners on that march have been in and out of Egypt since then without problems. No, there’s no great plan. This (“your name is in our computer”) is just yet another instance of what they do best: bullying disguised as bureaucratic procedure, as thought-out policy.

The last call I got in this whole sorry saga was an hour ago, when A rang me, still at the airport. No-one had bothered to tell her that Per had been deported (or at least told that he was going to be deported. His phone was switched off after Hamalawy spoke to him). She had been waiting there, alone, all that time. She broke down in tears.

لمستجير

2009-09-24T23:18:00.001+02:00

" و لماذا بتعين علينا عندما نكتب ألا نتحدث إلا عن جمال الزهور و روعة عبقها ، بينما الخراء يملأ الشوارع و مياه الصرف الملوثة تغطى الأرض ، و الجميع يشمون الرائحة النتنة ويتشكون منها؟"

صنع الله إبراهيم

Obla dee

2009-09-14T00:55:00.000+02:00

One of the harder things I had to do while in the UK this summer was visit my grandmother, who was recently put in an old people’s home.

The last time I saw her, in 2008, she was in sheltered accommodation, having moved there roughly a year before. She had had a heart attack, was increasingly frail, was gradually becoming less and less mobile and more and more anxious and depressed. The move to the sheltered accommodation didn’t help, or at least didn’t slow down the inevitable. After thirty years of visiting her at the house she had lived in for forever (I think since the 1970s) seeing her, and her antique furniture in this new place was eerie, like the time I came across an old newspaper from 1970-something in an abandoned house announcing that the post office was to become computerized. Trapped history.

My dad and I had a huge fight when we went back to gran’s almost empty flat in the sheltered accommodation this year, after she had been moved to the old people’s home. We were there to pick some of her stuff up, and the fight was ostensibly one of our usual inflated spars about nothing very much at all. I freely admit I was a pain in the arse, and part of the reason was the almost empty flat, with its bits and pieces of her stuff almost all of which I recognised and which now lay abandoned, and forgotten. Some of her belongings Dad and his siblings are storing in their homes. A lot has been given away. It got to me that 90 years of life can be fragmented, and lost like that.

The old people’s home is a two-storey converted detached house, which in the entrance smells like a million condensed British lunches. The smell intensifies and mutates the further you go inside, along a hallway from which residents’ rooms branch off. Their names are written on the doors. One was a “Mr & Mrs ____”, their door was slightly ajar. A television blared loudly.

The heart of the house is a dining area adjoined to a living area, a room lined with high-backed chairs along three of its walls. Of all the other areas on the home, this room hit me the hardest the first time I went.

In the centre there is a big cage, and in it there is a single grey parrot. In the chairs there are mostly women, asleep, or just sitting and looking at each other, or at nothing. When I went to see Gran we sat opposite a slightly obese woman. She was joined by a woman with a false shoe using a Zimmer-frame, who spent ages maneuvering herself into her seat. The slightly obese woman watched her throughout, in silence, continuing to stare even once she had sat down.

It was the staring that intrigued me. It was the type that babies and cats do.

Unembarrassed. Virtually none of the residents greeted or spoke to each other and when they did it was a few words about nothing, about objects, such as a stray handbag.

The first time I went I found Gran in the middle of the room on her Zimmer-frame. The minute she saw me she told me to put up my right hand and declare, ‘”I am Sarah Carr”. She was proving a point to the nurses – most of whom she mistrusts and suspects of being out to get her – that her granddaughter had come.

One of the nurses responded with, “don’t be silly, we never said she wouldn’t come”. I noted a One Threw Over the Cuckoo’s Nest iciness. Paranoia is a feature of Gran’s illness, which explains the Me vs. Them mentality vis-à-vis the nursing staff.

Another feature of her illness is that she has lost, or been liberated from, the trappings of convention. It is perhaps this which is most different about her; throughout her life gran was always very proper, correct, never forgot a birthday or anniversary, was an expert at small talk and manners and enduring people she didn’t like very much without letting them realise the effort involved. A good Christian, a church-going woman.

Although I love her, the politeness was always a barrier to getting as close to her as I would have liked. She was at home in the hello – how are you – fine thanks – lovely weather routine - the conversational signposts which prevent interlocutors straying into the woods of talking about themselves. Just once, I would have liked to hear her say something along the lines of “actually, I couldn’t give a fuck” – preferably to me. So that we could really parlay.

Which is why I was astonished – and pleased – when I saw her reaction to a particular nurse in the home. For a change of scene Dad, Gran and I had moved out of the grim social room with the parrot in it and onto a sofa placed in the hallway area. Nurses, and lost residents went past every so often, including a young nurse dressed in green. I noticed that every time this particular nurse went past gran would clench her teeth and quite literally snarl, like a wolf, at the nurse’s disappearing back.

Apparently, the nurse was a spy or a thief – I forget which now. The new honesty may have been symptomatic of an illness but for me it was a change for the better. The small talk, the chit-chat has simply been obliterated - replaced by weird fantasies and persecution complexes yes, but during the periods when she is lucid at least I know the truth about what gran is actually, truly, feeling.

And the truth, surprise surprise, is that she’s not happy. I see no reason why she should be. It’s difficult to express this without it somehow sounding as if I am pointing a finger of blame at the people responsible for putting her in the home (my father and his four siblings). I’m not. I understand that no other options existed short of gran living with one of them (extremely difficult if not impossible) There’s no certainty in any case that she would have been any happier there. If it was me however, and if I had 90-odd years of life under my belt and kids and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I wouldn’t want to end my days in a place which smells of lunches and piss with a parrot and strangers.

In a very bleak moment in the social room during the first visit I looked around and breathed in that peculiar scent of food and excretions and catatonia and wondered why begin if this is the end.

During a lull in the “conversation” Dad had got up to harangue the parrot, and began whistling and making duck noises at the creature. Behind him, a woman who had been wheeled in on her wheelchair shortly before watched him intently. Her head was framed in a halo of crazy, unbrushed white hair and she was stick thin, apart from her torso. She looked like a deflated balloon.

What struck me most however was her expression. I wondered if she had modeled for Edward Munch. I would call it despair, except for the confusion. Torment is the closest description.

So there she was, head in hand staring bewildered at my dad making his noises at the trapped bird while the overweight woman and the lady with the false shoe gazed and a woman inhaled oxygen from a machine and in a corner I noticed that what I thought was a pile of blankets was actually a tiny, slumped-over old lady, asleep.

I experienced one of those terrible moments of what pessimists call clarity and optimists call pessimism, when the scale of life and existence is simultaneously huge and tiny, and you are reduced to nothing, and that nothing is everything. Without wanting to go all Paulo Coelho, what I mean to say is that in that moment life sits on your heart like a bag of rocks.

But life goes on and there is always the blessing of practical matters to attend to. For the first time in her life Gran’s fingernails were long and someone had painted pink nail varnish on them. It was now chipped. Gran asked me to cut them. We borrowed a pair of scissors from the woman with the oxygen machine. She had a pair in her handbag. Gran’s handbag had always been a mobile office filled with everything you could possibly need, but now was an extension of herself: confused and messy. She requested that we buy her a pair of nail scissors, and some cheese. Dad agreed to only one of the requests.

Somewhere over the rainbow in Nasr City

2009-09-05T20:41:00.004+02:00

I attended a public discussion about a book on gays in a petrol station on Tuesday. Egypt.

The book is a novella called 'Fe Balad El Welad' (“In the Country of Boys”) by journalist Mostafa Fathy, and the petrol station as I recall was Ta3owen. It was held in a bookshop (located inside the petrol station which, God help us, is located in Nasr City) called the J.C bookshop/cafe. Sharshar unhelpfully kept referring to it as Jesus Christ.

We arrived 10 minutes late, which meant we arrived 50 minutes early. We bought books, we drank tea, we stared at a man sporting a bouffant mullet.

By the time Fathy made his arrival the place was reasonably full. He got the ball rolling by inviting questions, and then effectively rolled said ball into a discussion ditch by (inadvertently) inviting a question from a man who on the basis of scripture regards homosexuals as malevolent aliens but decided, what the hell, he'd come along to the discussion anyway we yebden 3alayna shwaya [enrich the discussion with his contribution].

The inevitable discussion ensued, the man’s (“Engineer Mohamed”) first argument was that rather than discussing homosexuality, writers should be covering other “more pressing” issues in Egyptian society. His true agenda was revealed the more he talked, and talk he did, informing us that if he discovered that his boss was gay he would “seriously consider” leaving his job, and that he feels compelled to encourage homosexuals who cross his path to repent and denounce their satanic practices of falling in love and organising parades and enjoying musicals.

Fathy responded by suggesting that since bedroom activities aren’t any of your business Engineer Mohamed, and since you’re not God, and since your complete absence of a sense of humour and human empathy places you beyond advances of any kind, gay or straight (I made that last bit up. I said that inside my head), perhaps you could live and let live and treat people as human beings rather than obsess about their orifices.

This back and forth continued for approximately 29 years until Moftases could stand it no longer and, in an unorthodox move, asked a question about the book. This instigated a trend, and more discussion which did not mention the word Lot ensued until a man who announced himself as a lawyer started on some spiel the point of which none of us could understand. He declared that God has “forbidden relationships between a man and a man” at which point Moftases playfully interjected “and between a woman and a woman” knowing that it would throw the lawyer as indeed it did. He stopped briefly, mouth open, either flummoxed by the idea of Sapphic desire or reminiscing about his last download.

Like a wriggling queen drawn to an Abba revival party the conversation inevitably ended back with Engineer Mohamed and his dull religious crusade. By this time Moftases was doodling and Abadodo was off smoking fags (I mean having a cigarette, not out on a homophobic rampage) every five minutes and me and Sharshar were writing childish things on the sugar packets.

Interestingly though, books periodically fell off the top shelf behind Fathy for absolutely no reason at all, and we all wondered whether a higher power was trying to smite the sexual deviants in the room but had missed.

The book in case you’re wondering reads a little bit like Gays for Beginners and is a collection of angst-ridden trials endured by an Egyptian man coming to terms with being gay. None of the characters identified as gay are entirely at ease with themselves and all except the protagonist are at some point subjected to some form of violent gay bashing. All in all it had the feel of a plea for tolerance masquerading as literature – and Fathy made no secret of the fact that the idea for the book emerged from his original plan to write a series of articles on the subject.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading it - I did. And, as a friend remarked, it’s a brave first step towards open discussion of a subject which rarely receives sympathetic – or indeed any - media coverage.

His wife was in unaccompanied luggage

2009-08-27T19:17:00.002+02:00

Sharshar regaled us with the story below during a recent summit of friends. While he swears that it's true - having heard it from someone who works in the cargo department of Cairo airport - and while the involvement of Egyptair might support his claims, it nonetheless sounds slightly like an urban myth to me.

Anyway I got him to write it out in Arabic cos I thought it might sound funnier if recounted as he originally said it. Not as funny when he said it.

من القصص المعروفة في قسم الشحن التابع لمصر للطيران ان في مرة واحد خليجي كان مسافر على مصر للطيران من اوروبا و شاحن معاه كلب.
في الترانزيت و هما بينقلوا الكلب لاحظ موظفين الشحن انه مش بيتحرك, ففتحوا الصندوق لقيوا الكلب ميت, فمنعا للمشاكل و الفضايح, استلقطوالهم كلب صاحي و حطوه مكان الكلب الميت و عدت الشحنة.
لما الخليجي وصل بلدة و رايح عشان يستلم الكلب, و قبل ما يقرب من الصندوق صرخ و قال الكلب ده مش بتاعي, قعدوا يقولوله يا باشا طيب اتأكد الاول يمكن هو,
قالهم مستحيل, انا شاحن الكلب ميت

One of the well-known tales about Egyptair's cargo department:

Once a gentleman from the Gulf was travelling on Egyptair from Europe, and had put a dog in cargo.

While they were moving the dog in transit, they cargo workers noticed that he wasn't moving. When they opened his container they discovered that the dog was in fact dead. In an attempt to avoid problems and a scandal, they replaced the dead dog with a live one, and sent it on its way.

When the gentleman from the Gulf arrived in his country and went to get the dog, he started shouting, "that's not my dog" even before he got near it.

"Basha, have a look first you might be mistaken," the workers said.

"Impossible," the gentleman from the Gulf said. "The dog I put in cargo was dead".

Market stalled

2009-08-24T00:07:00.001+02:00

I was reminded of the state's relentless obsession with minutiae today, while attempting to buy some onions.

The local street market was mildly frenzied, as is usual in last two hours before Iftar (Ramadan fast-breaking meal) when tired fasting people make last minute purchases. Whilst in a reverie examining courgettes in a vegetable stall/shop, I suddenly became aware of the frenzy stepping up a gear, and looked up to see the shop's workers hurriedly snatching up wooden crates of fruits and vegetables displayed on the pavement outside the shop, and depositing them inside. The same thing was happening all along the street, flustered men barking instructions to other men while fearfully looking towards the square where the market begins.

Standing by the scales inside the shop waiting to pay, another woman and I were effectively boxed in by crates hurriedly flung inside.

“What's happening?” I asked the woman.

“Baladiyya” [a group of municipal representatives] she replied.

Abandoning all hope of purchasing anything I dumped my onions and got out of the shop while I still could, negotiating my way through giant cabbages and crates carried by sweaty, pissed-off men.

Outside, people were standing in small groups looking in the same direction, towards a blue police box (pick-up) slowly making its way down the street. Its pace reminded me of a tank, somehow. Further up, approximately level with the box, uniformed policemen and men in plain-clothing surrounded a boy who looked like he was around 12 years old. Two men marched him towards the box by the scruff of his neck, the boy convulsed with tears.

While this was going on a lorry following the box came to a stop next to a wooden two-wheeled cart laden with vegetables. It was lifted into the back of the lorry by the policemen, who were pelted with onions and peppers falling off the cart. The lorry drove off, while the cart's owners resignedly picked-up from the ground the few intact vegetables which remained.

A man with a towel tucked into his shirt collar outside a barbers told me that seized property is returned to owners if they pay a fine, and that the size of the fine is according to the property's “capabilities”.

A young girl in tears sprinted towards a group of middle-aged women and told them, “khadoo Amira” [they took Amira]. A tough-looking woman immediately marched towards the group of policemen. Some time later I saw her marching back, Amira in tow. A bystander told me that this is the first time they have seized a woman.

More of this street furniture was added to the lorry further on, their owners only having had time to salvage their produce before the baladeyya's arrival. Loaded with carts and tables and even small baskets, it trundled on, plain-clothed men walking alongside it. There were no objections, until the lorry reached a vegetable stall manned by a vocal bearded man and his family.

He attempted to prevent the baladeyya taking his table, while beside him another fruit & veg seller desperately pushed his display inside before triumphantly bringing down his shutter.

Things became heated and, as the lorry began to move away – the table precariously placed on top, held in place by a policeman perched on the side of the lorry – the bearded man attempted to hold on to the side of the lorry. It drove off anyway, at some speed, and the man was forced to release his grip. Standing in the wake of the dust left by the lorry he pointed at bystanders and screamed at no-one in particular, “le kol zalem we ebn zalem nehaya” [every oppressor and son of an oppressor will meet his end].

I couldn't believe the effort put into clearing metre-squared bits of pavement (and to what end?), the (deliberate?) chaos of it all, the (typically) vicious way in which the state dealt with what it apparently considers people as disposable as the furniture its enforcers dumped in the lorry. It reminded me of a cowboy film, when the town's inhabitants all scurry into the safety of their houses and lock the door upon the arrival of the shadowy bad guy.

The real joke though of course is that this assault on people's livelihoods is – ostensibly, at least – carried out in the name of ensuring the free-flow of traffic. It's a shame the state isn't quite as zealous about traffic movement at other times, such as when a minor official decides to cross from one side of Cairo to another and Cairo's 2.5 million other car owners are forced to stew in their vehicles while the flotilla passes.

Sa-hell

2009-07-17T19:30:00.003+02:00

Be gentle. Taken by a 6-year old.

I was reminded of the relationship between exclusivity and pleasure in Egypt this week when I joined members of my family enduring each other at close proximity, AKA having a summer holiday.

This year it was the Diplomats holiday village, on the North Coast, whose beautiful Mediterranean shores are gradually being cluttered with holiday resorts hidden away behind perimeter fences, security gates and entrance tickets. In addition to being financially off-limits, many of these resorts are in any case physically inaccessible: I caught a Superjet bus to the Marina resort (half an hour away from Diplomats and apparently the only stop between Marsa Matrouh and Alexandria), and saw some microbuses scuttling along, but imagine lugging two weeks' worth of luggage and kids from Cairo in a microbus on a three or four-hour ride.

Unencumbered by kids or much luggage I enjoyed the trip from Cairo, because of the El-Alamein Road's spectacular scenery - big skies and vast, empty plains, only slightly marred by the fact that we were subjected to Tamer Hosny in Craptain Hima for the duration of the trip. An elderly scowling gentlemen of discerning taste seated next to me rested his chin on his hands - which were gripping the walking stick placed in front of him – and closed his eyes throughout.

Diplomats is a labyrinthine warren of bungalows which in places reminded me of Bournemouth. The bungalows are not referred to as bungalows, of course, but rather as chalets, despite being altogether too grand for such a title. I got lost the second night there, attempting to return to our bungalow in the dark. All the streets look the same. Upstairs Auntie advised me to get my bearings through reference to a giant inflatable Pepsi can placed outside the central Social Club. It helped, but not in the dark.

The Pepsi can was an early indication of the extent of corporate sponsorship in Diplomats and elsewhere on the North Coast's exclusive resorts. On the beach we sat underneath Pepsi umbrellas on Vodafone beanbags. Adverts for a particular bank adorned each street corner. Signs on the El-Alamein road announced that drivers in trouble can call an emergency number – courtesy of Mobinil. The state was conspicuous by its absence. Everything was very well done, very well organised, and reserved for 0.5% of the Egyptian population.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I heard more English in Diplomats then I do on the Tube in London. The AUC graduating class of 2020 was apparently holidaying at the same time as me. The preference for English transactions is partly explained by the fact that many of the kids I saw on the beach were accompanied by their nannies, mostly non-Arabic speakers of African and Philippine origin. One exchange particularly struck me: a group of three teenage boys elected to bury a member of their group in the sand. “Let's get cracking on this bitch!” said one of them, in the style of Sid from Last of the Summer Wine meets Notorious BIG.

And get cracking they did, first giving their victim breasts before proceeding to lovingly carve out a penis of frankly obscene proportions - which one of them then violently destroyed in a fit of possibly Freudian anger.

Speaking of knobs, an elderly gentleman decided to get his out in order to urinate – in the showers on the beach – exactly at the moment I was jogging past one morning. I wondered if he had mistaken me for a male, and was cottaging al fresco. My long-held conviction that jogging is evil was confirmed, in any case.

Instructions placed in the showers sadly do not explicitly ban pissing, but do mention that “workers and nannies” may only use the beach “in the designated areas” - a bantustan inside the bantustan. Where exactly these designated areas are remains a mystery. The workers I saw were invisible. Silently collecting rubbish, serving guests or looking after their children.

In Porto Marina I saw off-duty workers seated on the ground, eating, underneath a huge advertising hoarding showing a laughing family frolicking in water.

Nannies were everywhere in Porto Marina (entrance fee LE 10) a complex of shops, a hotel and time-share apartments, constructed around an artificial bay. Running through the mall is an artificial waterway on which punters can take a Gondolier ride (LE 20) past shops selling convertible Mini Coopers (around LE 300,000) and waterskiing equipment. My cousin's kids wanted a ride on the boat which does a circle of the artificial bay (LE 25 per person). “Hatet2elab, hatet2elab” [It's going to capsize] six-year old Elvis insisted, when the boat rocked violently in the wake of a jet-ski manned by an eleven-year old slicing his way through the lake.

One of the nannies I saw in Marina was the same height as her charges, around ten years old, fragile and tiny. In the Andrea restaurant in the Hacienda resort a kid with a raspy, newly-broken voice stood outside the toilets. “Etfaddaly” [approximately, welcome] he said, as I walked in. “Etfaddaly” he said, as I walked out. Back at the table I watched an Ethiopian nanny try to rein in a particular boisterous child wearing a t-shirt reading, “records are made to be broken”. He was amusing himself by collecting, and lobbing about, chair cushions. His mother eventually took notice. “Keda 3abat” [that's stupid] she said, and the nanny attempted to restrain him. He gave her a nasty pinch on her upper arm, discreetly.

I mentioned the Andrea kid manning the toilets to my cousin. She suggested that families will send their children out to work whatever happens and that doing this type of job is better than children being exploited in workshops. At least there they learn skills, I said. Yes, but they're exploited, she replied.

There is – of course – an artificial beach in Porto Marina, to match the artificial bay and the artificial Venice. Booths advertise video games and sell Zalabia. Children and teenagers parade up and down Marina's central strip, while in the kids' play-area sad-eyed women supervise other people's manic children in a fluorescent, bouncy castle, nursery-rhyme, hell.

Like Scooby Doo, without the fun or the flares

2009-07-01T14:51:00.001+02:00

Innit funny how certain films are able to strip previously decent actors of all and any talent? Like paint-stripper, whooosh. Gone. I spent Tuesday night trying to find where the director of the Suspect might have hidden Amr Waked and Bassem Samra's talent, unsuccessfully.

Waked himself has disassociated himself from the film: in an interview with the Al-Shorouq newspaper he says that he walked out halfway through an advance screening such was his disgust at how awful it is, and demanded that certain scenes be re-shot. Director Mohamed Hamdy – whose cinematic capabilities are “extremely limited” according to Waked – agreed, but did not keep the promise.

Waked told Al-Shorouq that he has abandoned the ugly bastard child of the Suspect, and considers that he only has one film out this summer, the well-received 'Ibrahim El-Abyad'.

Two of the friends I saw the Suspect with also attempted to escape the film. They spent the film looking for pretexts to escape its direness, getting popcorn and going to the toilet, bobbing up and down like life buoys. Meanwhile, I laughed, as before me this monstrosity of a film blundered its way towards the final credits.

The signs that something was wrong were there from the very beginning. Respected musician Waguih Aziz was brought on to provide the score, but he got the paint-stripper treatment too. The result is the world's most intrusive, most inappropriate, most ridiculous film score, ever, with which we are barraged from the very start. The Suspect is supposedly a thriller. Why then, as we watch cars in flames and people fleeing death, do we hear muzak, an odd, interminable, very vaguely oriental mush? Imagine watching Goodfellas listening to Kenny G and his fucking saxophone covers and you'll get an idea.

So there we are, Waked and Sawsan Badr about to go tete-a-tete in a potentially tense scene, and suddenly an instrumental Jingle bloody Bell Rock or something akin to it bursts forth. Whoever is responsible for musical direction in this film has an approach similar to deaf sign-language subtitles, namely that everything, every emotion, every gesture, should be translated into music.

Unfortunately the music and and the emotion rarely coincide. The musical director was apparently blindfolded when he directed the score.

Perhaps they could have just turned up the music really loud, and turned the Suspect into a silent movie, or a musical, it wouldn't have made much difference. At least this way we would have been spared the dialogue. Much of the film is, in any case, physical, by which I mean that people never stop running.

In case you're wondering, they're running away from a mysterious killer. Waked (who, to add salt to the wound of his embarrassment at the film, appears twice, in the form of twin brothers) is Maged. Maged's brother Motaz was killed in an unexplained road accident. Ever since the accident Maged, his mother Sawsan Badr, Motaz's widow Sahar (played by Boshra) and daughter May have been terrorised by a masked, knife-wielding maniac who repeatedly succeeds in entering their villa without, apparently, any of them considering a review of home security.

We see the family burying Motaz, who was last seen motoring away from the villa in his BMW, incandescent with rage at the possibility that Sahar might be having it away with another bloke. The funeral is interrupted by police officer Sherif Beih (Samra), who arrives in a customised Jeep Wrangler of the type favoured by lothario diving instructors, wearing horrid I-give-you-good-price 1980s plastic sunglasses. We subsequently discover that Sherif Beih is an upstanding, principled, and dull police officer, despite his sartorial gigolo tendencies.

To remind us that Badr is An Old Woman she has been giving a streak of white hair Corella De Ville style, making her look like a couple of pigeons with Dysentery have wiped their bums on her head.

Seven year-old May gave the film's best performance, mainly because her role was limited to saying two lines and being carted about by the adults.

The film is essentially a tiresome murder mystery. What secrets lurk in Sahar's past? Could Motaz still be alive? Why is Maged so cagey? Will May ever speak? Why does everyone's name begin with M? In the middle of all this Murad floats around, making sudden appearances in the villa, uninvited, without anyone minding. Who he is exactly, or where he has appeared from is never really explained, but he has great big fucking red arrow pointing at him throughout the duration of the film.

In case we weren't able to pose these questions ourselves, the villa's bowab and his wife did it for us, slapping their cheeks in a distraught, country bumpkin manner about their employers' plight while the audience wondered what exactly was the point of these characters.

The knife-wielding murderer sequences were largely tedious, as expected, with the exception of one hilariously-bad scene conducted in the hospital where May has been taken, possibly in shock at only being given two lines. Remarkably, the family have checked May into the emptiest hospital in Egypt. Pointless, lingering shots of empty ward corridors thoughtfully let the audience know that a chase scene is in the offing, and that it will be long, since this is apparently a hospital which functions without patients and only one nurse, who Sahar witnesses being strangled by the man in black. She decides that the best thing to do would be to 'hide' May in the bathroom while she herself legs it.

The ruse works because the killer is clearly stupider than Sahar, and there then follows an endless chase scene, Sahar dashing around at approximately -0.5 miles per hour in stiletto heels like a snake on stilts, the click-clack of her heels echoing around the empty hospital, but apparently insufficiently loudly enough for the killer to locate her.

Interestingly, the hospital basement car park to which Sahar flees was full of vehicles, despite being uninhabited above, we noted in between almost expiring from laughter.

Needless to say all this was accompanied by the lift music.

Further guffaws were drawn from the audience when Sherif Beih drew a gun on someone with such stiffness, at such a 90 degree angle, that it was like watching a bridge being lowered. Better still was when, at the film's denouement after a 'dramatic' shoot-out, Sherif Beih asks Magdy whether he's OK, and Magdy replies “I'm OK”, with the emotion of a catatonic mushroom.

Ultimately viewing this film was surreal. I kept asking myself whether it was all an elaborate tongue-in-cheek send-up, or a tribute to Egyptian 1980s kitsch, in the manner of Tarantino's Grindhouse – particularly when during the screening I went to, the lights went up during the intermission, the film stopped, relieved audience members were gratefully lifting themselves out of their seats only for the film to suddenly and without warning start five seconds later. It would seem that even the projectionist wanted the pain to end as soon as possible.

PLANTS DEMAND RESPECT OUTSIDE STATE COUNCIL

2009-06-10T20:21:00.002+02:00

Potted plants demanded an end to the practice of under-watering and eventual death in every single government office in Egypt.

CAIRO: Roughly 100 potted plants who began a sit-in on the steps of Cairo State Council say they will continue their protest despite intimidation by security bodies.

The plants, a mixture of household and outdoor flowering varieties, are all members of the banned Free Foliage Movement.

The group - which counts some three gazillion members – is accused by the government of terrorist activity.

Speaking during a press conference on moustache-care held in Marina last week Interior Minister Beloved Le Juste said that the group “threatens national security and its propaganda soils Egypt's image abroad.”

Le Juste - who has a well-groomed moustache - said that the Movement's members “form part of a giant cell seeking to overthrow democracy in Egypt. This cell is in itself part of a worldwide movement.”

As evidence, Le Juste pointed to the colour of Palestinian group Hamas' flags (green) which he said “is the colour favoured by these enemies of Egypt's security”.

He also told reporters that intelligence reports have established links between the Movement and members of the Hezbollah group.

“We have pictures showing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gently stroking a Poinsettia leaf. Furthermore, when the Rafah crossing was breached in January 2008, palm trees – the movement's militant branch – were seen obstructing Egyptian policemen's ability to shoot at people.”

“These criminals can and will not be allowed to compromise Egypt's sovereign borders,” Le Juste added.

Speaking outside the State Council Movement member Abu Tilon poured scorn on Le Juste's statements.

“Yes, plants won't be allowed to compromise Egypt's national borders - unless Israel wants some nice Gardenias planted at the Taba crossing that is.”

Bahia Absinthifolia, secretary-general of the Movement's women's section, alleges that potted plants are routinely subjected to violations of their rights by members of Egypt's security forces.

“My husband was arrested in a midnight raid in front of our children, one of whom was still sprouting. They threatened to dead-head my husband. He then disappeared for two weeks. I was recently allowed to visit him in Tora Meshtal prison and he was in a terrible condition.

“He and other Movement members have been denied sunlight and adequate watering and kept in the criminals' section. Other prisoners put their cigarettes out in his pot.”

Security forces cracked down on the potted plants when they began to sway their leaves gently in the wind, in time to “Garrab nar el 3'eera” by Warda, the group's spiritual guide.

Police officer general Arse Tourettes El-Teez interrupted his tea drinking and prayer bead manipulation to order journalists to fuck off under threat of being hung, drawn and quartered.

El-Teez was then seen muttering into a mobile phone, after which a large group of plain-clothed thugs arrived, some armed with pruning instruments.

Speaking as she was being dragged away by the police Abu Tilon's wife Dahlia lashed out at the US administration.

“After years of repression, the oppressive Egyptian regime used us to decorate Cairo University for the speech by US president Hajeeb Al-Azaaar. Al-Azaaar was quite happy to wave at us from his flotilla as he went past but remains silent as our rights are brutally abused.”

This page cannot be displayed, you naughty boy.

2009-05-12T22:34:00.006+02:00

As part of its long-term campaign against ~~common sense~~ swine flu, the government has put up US Aid funded posters inside metro underground trains, advising passengers on what measures to take to avoid contamination. One of the suggestions, after household members' temperature monitoring is, “avoid crowded areas”. I wondered if they're taking the piss.

The other arm of the flu-fighting strategy, is, as the whole world alas now knows, the culling of Egypt's 300,000 pigs. I myself used a similar strategy a while back, when I got a CD stuck in my laptop disc drive. After the fix-all cmnd+alt+esc didn't work, I switched the laptop off and on again. When that didn't work, I did a thing which I thought at the time was logical but with hindsight realise was moronic. I inserted a second CD into the disc drive.

The thinking behind this was that there's no way the bloody thing will accept a second CD, it can't hurt, and this might somehow solve the problem. I anticipate a recruitment call from the ministry of health tomorrow morning first thing.

The health minister has admitted that the cull has nothing to do with the swine flu. Advocates of the destruction of Egypt's pork industry say that is a public health measure necessary to rid Egypt of the vile four-legged health hazards and their stink. Opponents suggest that in addition to being unnecessary and insane, the measure has sectarian overtones.

The administrative court today issued an important judgement. The case was brought by a lawyer who clearly does not use Facebook and therefore has too much time on his hands. He is also clearly too concerned with what other people do with their time, and their hands. He raised a case demanding that the ministry of telecommunications ban 'obscene' websites, and the court found in his favour, goddamit.

Here's an extract from the court's pompous and stupid reasoning:

“Rights and freedoms are not absolute, but rather limited by the [need to] protect the pure essence of the family which in its turn is the basis of society, and whose constituent elements are religion, morals and patriotism. The state and society are obligated to safeguard the nation’s high level of religious upbringing, moral and patriotic values … as well as public morals.”

If someone can illuminate me as to how society should safeguard moral values when society itself is getting busy with the google searches, I would be grateful.

Some ministry of telecommunications suit gave an interview on talk show 90 Minutes this evening, sounding non-loony and quite reasonable. Maybe they'll appeal, or ignore it. Or maybe Egypt's youth will be dusting off their porn collection before the year is out.

The porn decision – issued by a court, OK, but some observers suggest that the government is waiting for any opportunity to control internet activity – forms part of a series of weird decisions taken by state bodies recently.

Observe:

Porn – spreading depravity. Ban.

Pigs – spreading sausages. Destroy.

Hezbollah cell in Egypt – sending aid. Prosecute.

Caritas – spreading love. Stop.*

Emos – spreading black eyeliner. Arrest.

* To be fair, the campaign against Catholic relief organisation Caritas is being led by newspaper El-Masry El-Youm, which more and more seems to “report” news from another planet.

The common factor in all these cases is that they involve a foreign element (or an element foreign to Islam, as with the pigs), which reminds me of a bonkers front page story published by Al Ahram recently:

The official Egyptian government daily newspaper, al-Ahram, devoted its main front-page headline Saturday to an unprecedented attack against the leaders of Iran, Syria, Qatar, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, Hamas, as well as the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera television network and Hezbollah’s al-Manar television. Al-Ahram accused those countries and organizations, which have been dubbed by Egyptian commentators as the “Axis of Evil,” of collaboration with the “plot” to topple Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime from power by means of terror attacks inside Egypt.

(This was before Swine Flu, which is why pigs weren't included in the list of mortal enemies.)

I'm stating the obvious, but I'll say it anyway: a paranoid regime which exerts the majority of its energies on rabble rousing against an external threat(s) is trying to conceal its own inadequacies. Which is not to say that suspicion of the other does not exist in Egyptian society. It does. Ask an Egyptian Bahai. But as with xenophobia against immigrants in Western Europe, how much of this antipathy is attributable to deliberate misinformation, and poor education, and media which loves a sensation? Does what is ostensibly over zealous nationalism mask a deep insecurity, even a loss of identity?

A ~~pharoah~~ god, apparently, demonstrating complete disregard for the nation's high level of religious upbringing, moral and patriotic values.

Original picture here.

Bread and butter VII

2009-05-06T19:35:00.002+02:00

Here's an article what I wrote about having my gear nicked.

Two days after World Press Freedom Day, Egypt marked the event in its unique, inimitable style on Monday.

The April 6 Youth Movement - a small group of young activists who are a regular feature at anti-government demonstrations and in police stations – announced at the end of April that their birthday gift to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on May 4 would be a protest “to let people know that Mubarak isn't holy, and that he's a failure as a civil servant.”

The group planned to hold its demonstration at Cairo's State Council, where the administrative judiciary is hearing the ongoing case against Egypt's gas exports to Israel.

Five of the group's activists were arrested even before they reached the State Council and immediately taken to the nearby Dokki police station. 17 people were detained over the course of the day.

There was considerable activity at the State Council. Mubarak's birthday coincided with two other high-profile cases being heard by the court other than the gas export trial: the banning of aid caravans to Gaza and the constitutionality of interior ministry police officers on university campuses.

The case roster read like a laundry list of sensitive issues for Mubarak.

At around noon some 30 central security trucks surrounded the State Council. Plain-clothed thugs employed by the security forces on occasions like these were spread out on the building's steps. State security investigations officers, who interrogated everyone attempting to go inside, prevented journalists from entering the State Council.

'Yalla, to the police station'

Journalists hanging around outside the building were given a scouring by gusts of sand-filled wind (sandstorms hit Cairo this weekend).

The tedium of waiting was dispelled suddenly when the gas case hearing concluded and activists who had somehow got inside the State Council earlier that morning emerged. About twenty of them now stood on the steps – on the opposite side to that occupied by the plain-clothed thugs.

Approximately two minutes before they came out a particularly zealous state security officer approached me and instructed me to put my camera in my bag. I refused, on the grounds that how I choose to carry my camera when not using it is none of his bloody business.

The protesters then emerged, and people on the steps immediately started filming them with mobile phone cameras.

“Look, they're being allowed to film,” a press photographer complained to the officer, at almost the same moment as police officers and plain-clothed thugs descended on them.

“Not anymore,” the officer said.

Mayhem then ensued as individual protesters were surrounded and attacked. The police apparently gave no thought to the danger posed by the location of the protesters – on the steps - and as a result two people fell or were pushed to the ground.

One female journalist tumbled down on her back, her head bouncing off each of the ten steps. She was helped up looking visibly dazed, and staggered away.

While watching all this, open-mouthed, I heard an officer say, “take the camera” and suddenly found myself in a bizarre tug of war with a man who had grabbed my camera's strap.

This went on for about thirty seconds before he got the better of me, at which point another officer pulled my mobile phone out of my hands.

“Yalla, to the police station,” the officer said. Uncertain as to whether he meant me or just my electrical goods, I legged it.

Police criticize press

I got my stuff back eventually (the few photographs I had managed to take had been deleted, of course) after an hour spent in Dokki police station.

The arrested April 6 Youth activists had been left outside the police station in a locked police truck where they busied themselves with chanting “down with Hosni Mubarak”.

Twenty minutes of the time spent in the police station was spent working out my name. I have Egyptian nationality but a British father, and the foreign middle name and surname apparently caused considerable confusion.

The rest of the time we listened to a bored police station employee (his exact job was unclear) hold forth on the press (“I read all the papers but trust [independent daily] El-Masry El-Youm most”) and press criticism of police violations (“Nobody is above criticism. Even doctors make mistakes and should be held to account”).

“The difference is that nobody takes a scalpel out of a doctor's hand while they are in the middle of performing an operation,” someone said, in reference to my camera.

“You're not going to provoke me,” the man replied.

(Editors note: All 17 of those detained on Monday were released later that night according to sources in Cairo.)

Originally published here.

It's his birthday and I'll cry if I want to

2009-05-04T22:15:00.004+02:00

Today is Mubarak's 81^st birthday. To mark this, and to mark the fact that he's been in power for 28 years - 1/3^rd of his lifetime - here's a list of 28 of the wonderful things which have happened under his beneficent and wise ~~reign~~ rule.

I would have posted this earlier but some of his henchmen stole my effin camera and mobile phone while I was covering a demo, and I spent two hours getting them back. Funny thing is, I wasn't even taking any photographs at the time the camera was taken. I was too busy staring open mouthed as a female journalist tumbled down the steps of the State Council while above her about twenty peaceful protestors were set upon by the police.

The list

Seventy killed in the Moqattam Hill rockslide in 1993.

37% of Egypt's urban population live in informal housing

Three years imprisonment for Kareem Amer

Four years imprisonment for Ayman Nour

A five-year battle by Bahais for the right not to have to lie about their faith.

April 6th 2008: the death of three people in Mahalla killed by the police has not been investigated.

85% of rural female household heads are illiterate

8.7% unemployment rate

Laila Haddad and her two kids detained in Cairo Airport for around 30 hours. Because Laila is Palestinian

Egypt has the highest prevalence of Hepatitis C in the world (roughly 11% of the population)

12 - 15 million people live in slum housing

45% of Egypt's female population over 15 can not read

$50 billion in US aid received since 1979

60% of steel market share owned by Ahmed Ezz with government support.

Between 16,000 - 20,000 people in administrative detention

Seventeen people die after being tortured in 2005 (The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights www.eohr.org)

Activists detained for 45 days after 2006 peaceful protests against constitutional amendments.

A 19th century palace, house of the upper house of parliament catches fire on August 18th 2008. A month later on September 27th, a downtown theatre catches fire, the same month as the Beni Suef theatre fire which killed 45 people in 2005.

February 20th 2002: 370 die in train blaze.

20% of population below poverty line

Twenty-two people convicted in the widely-criticised Mahalla trial. Sentenced to between 3 and 5 years imprisonment.

Thirty Sudanese asylum-seekers and refugees killed when police violently break up the Mostafa Mahmoud sit-in.

35% illiteracy rates

12,000 people live in graveyards in Egypt

2,000,000 cars on the streets of Cairo. 60% over ten years old.

Seventy-nine cars in Mubarak's flotilla

Twenty eight years of emergency rule.

The President indicating the number of candidates who will be allowed to compete in presidential elections (without being imprisoned) after he steps down in 2050.

Obscenity

2009-05-01T22:50:00.004+02:00

In summer, Cairo's broader bridges become pavement cafes. The perennial huddles of anonymous illicit lovers facing the water are joined by families and groups of friends parked on plastic chairs. A ten year-old in beaded belly-dancer's headgear courses through the crowd chased by her brother and sister, all watched by another kid seated by a cart selling Termes, a cat stalking a fly. Unable to leave the cart he alternates between watching the children play, filling plastic cups with termes and squirming out the precious and relentless energy of childhood, stuck in a plastic chair.

Cars, buses, taxis and motorbikes are the animated backdrop to all this. The bridge shakes with their passage. The ground is littered with the confetti of Termes skins. When the breeze stops briefly the air smells vaguely of vomit and shit. Can it be true that sewage pipes are attached to the bottom of bridges? Why in Egypt does the underworld, the dirt and the darkness, constantly threaten to usurp the happiness above?

On another part of the river Ghanem is shepherding his plants in a nursery. His right arm is full of faded tattoos, a picture of what looks like Christ is bordered with illegible writing on his shriveled skin.

A beautiful plant with pink flowers is selected. How much? 12 pounds says Ghanem. We give him 15. We wait for change. Some baksheesh for us ya basha, Ghanem says. We request the change. Saloo 3al naby [pray for the Prophet] he says, stalling. 3alayh el salah wel salam [peace be upon Him], we say. Money so we can drink tea, he says, something for us, and suddenly it is no longer just business.

In an almost deserted bar downtown an American film is being shown on a television while in the real world below three women work. One of the woman is almost middle-aged, though she has tried to mask this fact with dyed blonde hair and lycra. Another girl seems still to be a teenager. The third is wearing her coat. All are leaning over men, one knee on a chair, suggestive. The man who seems to be in charge says you can photograph anything except the women. Enty fahma tab3an. [You understand why of course].

At one point the youngest of the woman, the girl, addresses the blonde with 'mama'.

Somewhere in Mexico a kid falls sick, a genius somewhere else decides to call it Pig Flu, and that's that for Egypt's pigs who are filthy, dirty, disease-carrying obscenities, and condemned to death swiftly, and without hesitation. Strange that this particular obscenity should take precedence over the hundreds of ages-old others, command this much attention, this many resources.

Every new crisis, every new tragedy in Egypt is a reprieve, a fresh start, another chance to put things right. It's never taken. Things are always and inevitably ballsed up, and back we are dragged to zero. Kids go on wiping windscreens at traffic lights, pensioners beg for your loose change and everywhere there is the sigh of failure and defeat. This is what is really obscene.

Metro and marriage

2009-04-18T19:44:00.003+02:00

The Egyptian legal system hasn't been at its best this week. On Wednesday 19 year-old Mahmoud El-Esawy was found guilty of a double-murder and sentenced to death. The case is high-profile because one of the victims was a the daughter of a well-known singer, and the heat the police knew they would get if they didn't find the perpetrator seems to have spurred them to either:

a. carry out a remarkably fast and efficient investigation, or

b. stitch up some poor bastard who doesn't have the connections to buy himself out.

I know which option I'd bet my mother on, if this tragic video is anything to go by. For non Arabic-speakers, El-Esawy was taken to the villa where the murder took place and filmed by the police while he "explained" how he carried out the crime. This unedited version was leaked by a newspaper. El-Esawy is clearly being coached as to what to say, but the most telling part is when – after El-Esawy doesn't perform as required - the agitated, offscreen voice says ya Mahmoud, hatsa7sa7 wala a7'lly 7ad yesa7sa7ak? [Mahmoud, are you going to wake up or shall I make someone wake you up?]

I don't understand why this video, plus the fact that the only thing linking El-Esawy to the crime is a blood-stained vest which he says doesn't belong to him, wasn't enough to make the court dismiss the charges.

Speaking of obscenity, today I spent the morning in Abdeen Court, where the author of a graphic novel and the individual who published it are standing trial for “infringing public morals”. The graphic novel in question, Metro, has a couple of illustrations showing the characters – cover your eyes, ladies – copulating under a blanket. While the comic's presentation of the grim realities of Egyptian society isn't exactly kosher in National Democratic Party terms, it doesn't say anything which hasn't already been said before, either. The backstory to this is that the publisher, Mohamed El-Sharqawy, has done bird previously for his political activity, before his reincarnation as a bookseller, and this would seem to be about settling old scores.

Abdeen court is currently in the process of being renovated, and the courtroom the case was heard in was all shining marble and clean walls. The carcass of half a fan was nonetheless inexplicably strewn to the right of the judge's bench, underneath a desk, together with other assorted crap.

The judge himself has a very good, sonorous voice, which he used almost immediately we went into the courtroom to tell Sharqawy off for talking. I meanwhile spent the court session in battle with a copper who spent the entire time telling people to put away their (silent) mobile phones or in my case a voice recorder, which was also apparently contraband. When not doing this, we fought over the 30 cm square area of land I was allowed to stand in.

The wonderful Sonallah Ibrahim gave testimony today, as did Ahmed El-Labbad, a graphic novel artist. Ibrahim and El-Labbad were asked a series of inane questions about whether they found the two scenes in question offensive, and about the criteria separating a graphic novel from porn. It was all so ridiculous, I waited for the judge to stop at any moment and announce, “right this is clearly a load of old bollocks. Sharqawy, gentlemen, get your coats and let's all go for a round of mini-golf.”

But there we are, in Egypt reality really is stranger than fiction, and fiction depicting reality is wrong, and you'll never believe this but on the way home from court a bloke I had never met before proposed to me.

I heard a cheery saba7 el-foll! [top of the morning!] and looked over to see a spritely-looking gentleman of around 70 in a sharp suit sitting on a chair. I waved. He beckoned me over with his baton sale [breadstick]. I went over , established that his name was Farouq and that he is the proprietor of a furniture store before he got straight down to business.

“Te2o3dy fe masr we tetgawwezeeny?” [How about settling in Egypt and marrying me?] he said, while waving his baton sale at me.

“Mana already 2a3da fe masr” [I already live in Egypt]

“Tayyeb! Tetgawwezeeny ba2a!” [OK! Marry me then!]

After rebuffing repeated gentlemanly offers of tea and marriage I left. Neharek sa3eed! [Good day! – a charming and now virtually obsolete greeting from another age] he called after me.

Farouq, the future Mr Scarr