A few links on the issue of Gamal Mubarak:
Things are picking up speed. Gamal’s putative candidacy, which seemed to be foundering, is still not clearly secure (the military and security services remaining the big unanswered question), but there’s clearly a solid push, however elitist, to promote him. Of course, Daddy hasn’t yet said he’s not running, but the health rumors persist.
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Issandr El Amrani, known in the blogosphere as The Arabist, has a new weekly column for Al Masry Al Youm English. This week’s asks if Egypt is “too big to fail.”
I think he makes an important point here. Of course there are uncertainties involved when a President has ruled for nearly 30 years and seems about to leave the scene. And Husni Mubarak has been a President whose stock in trade was caution: none of the surprise reversals and dramatic gestures of Anwar Sadat (throwing out the Russians, going to Israel, etc.) Some members of Mubarak’s current regime (Safwat al-Sharif, for one) have served throughout his tenure in various positions. It has been a stable system, perhaps too stable.
The military, the security services, the business establishment, the official religious establishment, and of course the ruling party apparatus and the state bureaucracy all have a lot invested in that stability. Even the Muslim Brotherhood and the opposition parties have stakes.. Some of these (the military and security services, business) are not going to allow a descent into chaos.
And Egyptians have a stoic ability to muddle through. It’s a conservative society, usually under centralized rule since King Scorpion 5000 years or so back. We just marked the 58th anniversary of the 1952 Revolution. Before 1952 there was — well, the thawra of 1919, which was aimed at the British, and the Urabi revolt in the 1880s. I think Issandr is also on target in hoping for some progress, though:
But being too big too fail can also be a curse. Egypt’s problem is not that it teeters on the brink of an abyss, as the alarmists would have it, but that it is too complacent, too certain of a rescue, too ready to choose the path of least resistance and just muddle along. Just as financial institutions assured of a bailout can eschew necessary reforms, so can political systems. Future leadership, hopefully, will be able to both steer a course away from regional extremes and to make a clean break with an unhappy status-quo.
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Following the recent confrontations between Egyptian security forces and bedouin in Sinai, the government has released some 69 Sinai bedouin who had been detained, including activist Mosaad Abu Fagr, who had been held for 30 months. Al-Masry al-Youm English has an interview with him here. His description of life in Egyptian prisons is not a pretty one.
Abu Fagr has been the subject of international human rights criticism and the release suggests a new sensitivity to the growing tensions between the security forces (the Interior Ministry) and the Sinai bedouin.
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By Flickr user Marek Wykowski
Look! Here are the links:
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Egypt is abuzz with outrage after the death of Khaled Said, allegedly at the hands of the police. Here is a brief backgrounder:
“On Sunday, Khaled was at cyber café at around 11:30 in the evening. Two policemen asked him for money and when he said he didn’t have, they beat him,” Muhammad Abdel Aziz, lawyer with el-Nadeem, told al-Masry al-Youm. “As he was beaten up, his head hit a marble table and he started bleeding.”
According to Abdel Aziz, the policemen took Said out of the cyber café and continued to beat him. “He screamed at them saying ‘I am dying, leave me’, and he fell on the floor.” Abdel Aziz added that witnesses saw a yellow liquid coming out of Said’s mouth when he fell on the floor, after which there was bleeding. A pharmacist and a medic passing by confirmed he was shortly dead after they checked his tension.
Witnesses said a police car picked Said up. His family was later contacted and told he is in the morgue of Kom el-Dekka, to which they were denied access. At the prosecutor’s office, security told Said’s mother and brother that he swallowed a bag of drugs and that there were witnesses to the incident who confirmed seeing the bag. Ahmad Badawy, an activist in Alexandria with al-Ghad Party went on 11 June to the cyber café where the incident happened and said witnesses told him the drugs bag belonged to the two policemen who beat him up as he was shooting a video of them while making a deal.
The video refered to is here: Mohamed Abdelfattah ???????? ???????????????: Khaled was ‘assassinated’ because of this video
CAIRO — The owner of an Egyptian Internet cafe says he witnessed police beating a young man to death and described the killing that has outraged rights activists.
Hassan Mosbah, in a filmed interview posted online Sunday, says two police officers came into his cafe in the city of Alexandria, dragged Khaled Said out into the street and beat him to death there. Pictures of Said’s shattered face appeared on social networking sites after his death on June 6.
More details:
The most damning evidence is the picture of Khaled Said’s face taken at the morgue, which shows clear signs of skull and jaw fracture (warning – graphic):
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If you need a little strong qahwa mazbut to get your Monday started, you might try this article on the Cairo coffeehouse scene from Al-Masry al-Youm’s English website. A lot of it focuses on Zahret al-Bustan, next to the Cafe Riche. The Riche was a regular spot for me in the old days, before it was closed for many years after the Cairo earthquake, though it’s since been reopened I understand.
An article mainly for the Old Cairo hands, or those about to become some.
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Several quick takes on Egypt, courtesy of Al-Masry al-Youm’s English site:
- Farouk El-Baz, the Egyptian-born ex-NASA scientist who was critical to the US space program (so much so that in at least one Star Trek episode there’s a shuttlecraft named the El-Baz: no kidding), and brother of Usama El-Baz, who was Egypt’s foreign policy guru for decades and still commands attention (in short: smart family), has spoken to students at Cairo U and said that “over the past 7000 years Egypt has never been as backward as it is now.” I suspect this is normal Arab exaggeration: nobody could read or write 7000 years ago, though indeed that marks the beginnings of Egyptian civilization.
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Did I forget the links again? Do read the first link, very nice local reporting on an issue that’s long nagged at me: the barricades surrounding the US Embassy in Cairo’s Garden City neighborhood, which is also where I live. The permanent barriers and checkpoints are really getting tiresome and have depressed this part of Central Cairo that should be vibrant. I am relatively unaffected since I don’t drive, and can easily cycle (yes I am the one of the crazy khawagas who cycles across Cairo) past the barriers. But it’s really rather bad for the neighborhood, increasing traffic density through small streets and blocking off a thoroughfare in Lazoghly St. It’s just not very nice for local residents, who of course were never consulted in the process. Not to mention the image of America it gives: it looks like the second biggest embassy in the world, in a key regional ally, is in a Green Zone. And it’s not only the Americans, the nearby Brits are to blame too (and perhaps, a little further off, the Canadians and Belgians too.)
Also, there’s a new movie about Garden City that I’m dying to see.
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Categories: Arab Blogs Tags: al masry al youm, Al-Masry, Al-Youm, America, Cairo, central Cairo, Egypt, Embassy, embassy in cairo, film, Garden City, Israel, Mal-Vie, neighborhood, us embassy in cairo
I’m off for the weekend and it’s my daughter’s birthday, so anything short of peace breaking out won’t lure me back, but here’s a story to leave you with. It relates to last Friday, not to today, but here’s the tale: Mohamed ElBaradei was making a visit to the Delta city of Mansura last week, his first major foray out of Cairo to promote his reformist agenda. Plans were for him to attend Friday prayer at a mosque that can accommodate 3000 worshipers, but surprise, for “security reasons” he was told to attend a mosque that can hold only 500.
As the linked Al-Masry al-Youm English report notes, regular worshipers at the mosque were surprised to see a new preacher in the pulpit. He repeatedly cited the Qur’an Sura IV, 59, ” O ye who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the Messenger, and those charged with authority among you.”
He also prayed for the health of Husni Mubarak, that his Presidency would continue, and noted that Mubarak had made Cairo as significant as Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
I’ll let Muslims comment on the propriety of that remark, but my own reaction is: subtle. Subtle as an atom bomb. Do they think this helps their case?
Oh, and also: doesn’t the government keep saying the Muslim Brotherhood can’t run as a political party because it’s wrong to mix Islam and politics?
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Categories: Arab News Tags: al masry al youm, Al-Masry, Cairo, Friday, Jerusalem, Mansura, Medina, mohamed elbaradei, mosque, Mubarak, muslim brotherhood
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