Cairo Post

Top of the minaret, Bab Zuweila, Cairo, Feb. 2007.

The Nile and Zamalek, August 2007.

I started blogging at the Huffington Post a few weeeks ago, leading with this post about the joy of cab rides in Cairo.

But taking a cab is also one of this place’s great daily undertakings, whether through a snarl of laneless evening traffic or an easy drive across the city’s deserted streets on any Friday morning, before the Friday prayers. My older sister, after a visit in November, wished she were out of the East coast and back here just to ride around town again in a Camp David Accords-era Fiat with a driver eager to ask about where you’re from, what you think of Egypt, what you’re doing here — all with the requisite "Welcome to Egypt."

Update:
More posts since, find them all here.

I don’t know how much coverage this is getting in the States — on Monday, 34 constitutional amendments will go to vote by referendum, and this being Egypt, via vote-rigging and low turnout, they will pass. Among the controversial changes to the country’s constitution:

1.) Tight "anti-terror" laws that greatly expands surveillance and arrest ability. Like the Patriot Act in the States, only more thuggish.

2.) President Mubarak can dissolve parliament unilaterally, when he wants

3.) A new government-appointed election commission to "certify" results, finally cutting out that pain of an independent judiciary

4.) Banning political organization on religious lines, theoretically outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood once and for all

Listening to the frustrated opposition, the country seems on the verge of social disaster (the economy’s already accounted for). These will pass. There is another protest scheduled for Sunday, and the secular and religious opposition have somewhat joined together, as Mubarak’s amendments target all dissidents.

The US doesn’t care at all. Condoleeza Rice will probably skirt comment more than State Dept spokesman Sean McCormack did last week. The saddest point is that amid the cynicism, doubt and anger in the region when American set out to "free Iraq and its people" in 2003 were glimmers, if only for a moment, of some believing the hype. What else could you do?

Sec. Rice told a crowd at AUC two years ago “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.

Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

She will forget she said that in Aswan Sunday, when she meets with the Arab Quartet. She will say that Mubarak is a vital ally, that Israel wants peace and nothing else, and that "the arc of time" will reveal the genius of a America’s plan, planting seeds of "political reform" across the region.

Many updates in the coming days. Busy at the Daily Star, which has upped coverage in the past few days. Here’s a piece on the official American reaction here in Cairo that I did, and a piece today on the despair of two leading activists/bloggers written by a friend.

 

Protests in downtown Cairo orgainzed by the Kefaya reform movement and opposition political parties against proposed constitutional amendments ended in a forced sit-in of some 200 protesters outside a party headquarters, surrounded by ranks of state security. Over 30 were detained after protests began at 5pm and by 8pm activists gathered outside the Tagammu party building on a narrow side street as rows of uniformed and plainclothes security agents pushed down the one-way side street, blocking the exit, and minor clashses flared. Activists demanded the release of detainees, 12 of whom were released by Friday morning. The rest was just released early this evening.

Here are two reports of the protests that Adam Makary and I did, one for Al Jazeera and one for the Daily Star Egypt.  

A story I wrote for the Daily Star last week on a few American students who went to Palestine. Photo by friend Greg Jeske, a documentary photographer and student at AUC.

Full Story coming today in The Daily Star Egypt. Photos by Frederick Deknatel.

A lot in the village of Temoua, in southern Giza. The main drag of Temoua St., a few blocks away, was lined with about a dozens of state security and police trucks on Saturday afternoon. They arrived sometime in the morning after a gas truck exploded here around 1.30 am. When the government arrived exactly wasn’t clear — on Temoua St. officers said they first arrived soon after the blast, though people in village said no one was there until 11. Three officers on Temoua St. did not know when the rubble would be cleared. Crowds of children in the neighborhood were standing around and playing around the blown-up truck site, kicking gas tanks. One kid picked up the truck’s muffler when I took a photo.

The truck was loaded with hundreds of gas tanks, and Adam Makary was talking to people there who said the gas was for residents to use. First one tank ignited, then another blew — 3 blasts, accorinding to local witnesses. Firas al-Atrqchi, the DSE’s editor, had taken video footage of the blasts from his Maadi apartment window, across the Nile and miles away, having heard the blasts from there. Perhaps I’ll try and post the clip.

The ruined, charred gas truck and tanks littered one end of the muddy lot in Temoua on Saturday afternoon. Across from the rubble, on the two far ends of the lot, two other trucks, also loaded with gas tanks, were parked, apparently moved in that day, according to residents. There is a storage facility near Temoua and other sources said the exploded truck had been parked overnight on its way there. Fortunately no one was hurt, although two similar explosions occurred elsewhere very recently, as our story reports, causing two deaths. 

So when will the rubble be moved? Late last August, my first week in Egypt, I was on a train to Alexandria four days after the major train crash just north of Cairo that killed 58 people, and we passed the wreckage, lying on the side of the tracks.

Been off here for a while. Arrived back in Cairo a little over a week ago; a two week break in the States was full of family, friends, great food, and cold, cold weather. Hoping to get into more of a routine on the CP like in the balmy days of September and October.  I felt hot in a taxi for the first time in a while today — high of 73, sunny — maybe a shift to warmer weather will bring back regular posting.

I’m continuing to write for the Daily Star Egypt, with a number of stories before I left Cairo in mid-January and a few since returning back last week. Building up an archive, here’s the file so far: 

The strange case files of Egypt-Israel espionage (Feb. 5, 2007)

No easy opinions in America on Bush, future direction (Jan. 31 ,2007) 

Political activism continues to create a buzz on Egypt’s political blogs (Jan. 15, 2007) 

Egypt teen finds his game squashing the best (Jan. 14, 2007) 

Torture victim sentenced to three months in jail (Jan. 13-14, 2007) 

New web portal to improve Iraq news coverage (Jan. 5, 2007)

Saddam execution reopens Iraq discussions in Cairo (Dec. 28, 2007)

I just started interning at the Daily Star Egypt and my first story was Wednesday evening, getting reactions in Cairo to the news that Saddam Hussein is to be executed. Here it is.

SADDAM EXECUTION REOPENS IRAQ DISCUSSIONS IN CAIRO
Some call Bush a terrorist
By Frederick Deknatel
First Published: December 28, 2006

CAIRO: The decision of an Iraqi court to uphold the death sentence given to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein opened the door to many discussions about Iraq among Cairenes with many expressing concern for the deteriorating situation in the war-ravaged Arab country.

Opinions were framed around the dire situation in Iraq and the wider political climate in the region, and responses often included harsh words for US president George W. Bush and his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

The escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, in the minds of many in the Egyptian capital, has rendered Hussein’s fate irrelevant.

"His term is up," said Hamdi abd Al Said, a taxi cab driver. "But with all the people that have been killed, and everything that is happening in Iraq, it doesn’t matter. It’s finished."

Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity earlier this year for the 1982 killing of 148 Shiites in Dujail, in northern Iraq. Earlier this week, a Baghdad appeals court upheld the decision that he should be hanged within 30 days.

Mohammed Hassan, a Khan al-Khalili storeowner who introduced himself as a Robert de Niro fan, disagreed with the execution:
“A prison sentence is better - for Bush. In prison he’s going to suffer, so Bush will feel happy.”

While admitting Hussein’s crimes, Hassan immediately wanted to shift the focus onto the violence in Iraq.

“It is Iraqis fighting Iraqis now, not Saddam or the Americans, and Bush did that, he instigated that," Hassan said.

"They knew everything that was going on. He and his father, before in Kuwait, had everything planned,” concluding that the situation now is the product of American foreign policy plans.

Hassan said Bush was a "terrorist" and asked “what about what he has done?”

But he maintained that he did not like Hussein.

Likewise, Wael Khalil, socialist activist and a member of the opposition group Kefaya, stressed that he doesn’t empathize with Hussein, but does not trust the verdict or the process.

“To put tyrants on trial is good, but it should be done by the public not by another tyrant… the occupation,” Khalil told The Daily Star Egypt when the verdict was first handed in November.

He said he doubts if the Americans are deceiving any one with their achievements in Iraq.

“No one is seeing the rule of law being applied there.” This also includes the unplanned results of the trial. “If [the Americans] are trying to rebuild [Hussein’s] image, they are doing a great job,” he added.

For cab driver Al Said, Hussein’s execution figured into a wider view. “I work from 10 to 7 every night. I sleep through daytime. I don’t have time to keep up with current events, but I still sympathize with struggles in the Arab world,” he said. “Egyptians have sympathy for everything.”

Hussein was a prominent Arab leader for decades and his deposal from power and the subsequent violence in Iraq, according to many in Cairo, reflected the ongoing impact of foreign, particularly American, influence.

Dr Mark Sedgwick, an Associate Professor of History at the American University in Cairo, told The Daily Star Egypt that while Hussein was "no longer very relevant," and that confirmation of his execution was “inevitable,” he was not “totally sure that it was a good thing because, basically, that’s the old story now. He did what he did and that era has finished."

Most of all, Sedgwick believed that Hussein’s trial "might have been an opportunity to show some mercy in a situation where mercy is in short supply."

The view of Hussein as tied to American foreign policy was continually mentioned.

"Saddam destroyed his country and his people," said a grocer downtown who asked that his name not be printed, "but he was a tool of American foreign policy – [like] Kuwait in 1991.”

Al-Said reiterated those sentiments: “It’s American foreign policy – everything he did – Iran, Kuwait – they gave him permission to do. He is not any better than the people who came before him.”

Mohammed Abdel Satar Ahmed, who has been driving a taxi for a year and a half since receiving a degree in engineering, revealed the dynamics of expressing political opinion in Egypt, saying first what he thought the government wants people to say: “I understand that the Iraqi court decided that Saddam would be executed by this date, but they won’t do it. I like Hussein and want to see him live.”

Then he demurred, saying the pressures on public speech from the government cuts off his and others opinions, that “they don’t let people think.” Instead, he said, “Saddam has to die, for all the reasons that are there.”

But he still wavered: “I’m not the one who should say he should or should not die, because he is an Arab just like me.”

Some photos that my sister Anna took on her visit to Cairo. She was on her way to the Citadel; I was in Arabic class.  

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.

Photos by Amr Abdullah. Via Hossam el-Hamalawy.

 

The Egyptian government is cracking down on bloggers and writers who cover sectarian issues, journalist and website owner Hossam El-Hamalawy has said.

“To be frank, all the bloggers who have been arrested from their houses have been detained for [touching upon] religious matters. If other, [more politically oriented] bloggers are arrested, they are arrested at demonstrations," Hamalawy, whose blog is called 3arabawy (www.arabist.net/arabawy), told The Daily Star Egyp .

"[The government] lets people say what they want, but when they talk about sectarian issues, such as oppression of Coptic Christians or Islamic fundamentalist [rhetoric], they go nuts.”

El-Hamalawy mentioned numerous cases of bloggers who were arrested for commenting on sectarian issues, whether to highlight discrimination against Copts or, in one case, an Islamic fundamentalist who posted an anti-Coptic rant on his blog.

He added that in the case of political bloggers, they usually receive “phone threats … and intimidate you as in the case of Wael Abbas (a blogger who recently posted pictures of the alleged sexual attacks in downtown Cairo).”

On Monday, Abdel Karim Suliman Amer, also known as "Kareem Amer," a student blogger, was detained by state authorities and is being held in custody pending prosecution for his secular online writings in which he criticizes Islam, his lawyer told The Daily Star Egypt

The prosecutor’s office has remanded him for a further 15 days.

More, from the Daily Star. Here for Egypt blogs.

CAIRO: Over 250 people protested in front of the Press Syndicate on Thursday calling on the government to be held accountable for the allegedly widespread sexual harassment downtown during the Eid Al-Fitr holiday.

Surrounded by hundreds of soldiers and armored vehicles, the crowd was composed of women from all walks of life, including Egyptian and foreign students, veiled elderly women, bloggers and activists. Many men were also present, chanting and holding banners.

Organized by the Liberties Committee of the Press Syndicate, the Egyptian Committee for Women’s Rights, Kefaya and Nehdet El-Mahrousa, the crowd criticized Kasr El-Nil police station and also called for the resignation of both Interior Minister Habib Al-Adli and President Hosni Mubarak.

“This means we are not going to be pushed off the street,” said Aida Seif El-Dawla, a member of activist organization The Street is Ours and a professor of psychology at Ain Shams University.

“This is what we said after the harassment of May 25; it is what we are saying now and it is what we are saying tomorrow.”

“The street belongs to the citizens and we have the right to walk in it without fear. We should all live in safety and freedom.”

Banners and chants echoed this demand, with placards demanding greater legal and police protections against sexual harassment.

“The police protect Mubarak!” demonstrators chanted. “The police protect his heir! The police protect corruption! The police do not protect the people!”

The Eid incidents were first reported by bloggers who claimed that they saw hundreds of men chasing and groping women in the streets of downtown Cairo during the Eid.

According to witnesses, the mob attacked women regardless of their dress, ripping off their veils and clothes. Eyewitnesses said that even women who were accompanied by their husbands weren’t spared after their husbands were beaten and pushed aside.

During the Eid, Kasr El-Nil police station denied that any such attacks took place.

“It’s true, it happened,” said Mustafa, who works at a juice shop on Talaat Harb Street. “I hid some girls in my store myself.”

The incidents were reported in other local and international media in the weeks that followed.

Mohamed Gamal, a blogger who witnessed the incident in front of Metro Cinema argues that the Egyptian government should be held accountable for its failure to protect the people.

“It is the duty of our government to provide security to all Egyptian citizens,” he says. “The security forces are only protecting the regime instead of the Egyptian people.

“Today we are surrounded by security,” he said, gesturing toward the lines of riot police encircling the protestors. “The security forces are simply protecting the regime, and not the people.”

But Khaled Sallam, a student at AUC, said he could not hold the government directly responsible for the alleged incidents.

“I think there is a state of moral bankruptcy in Egypt, and I think it is caused by the restrictions on pre-marital sex.”

Holding a megaphone, women shared their experiences of sexual harassment with the crowd.

“At first I thought it was just us,” said Kelly Kerr, an American student studying in Cairo, “But then I realized it happens to everyone. We came here because we want to help our Egyptian friends.”

“People try to give different reasons for why this happens — delayed marriage, sexual repression. I don’t care. Whatever conditions men are under, women are under the same conditions. There is no excuse for their behavior,” said Nour El-Tahawy, a veiled middle-aged Egyptian.

Via the Daily Star Egypt.

2008 will be the 50th anniversary of iraq’s revolution, which ended the british hashemite monarchy. if we are to believe david brooks and how he frames iraq’s violent past, then maybe this will be a big moment. undoubtedly it will be commemorated, though how who knows. of course mr. brooks history of iraq, provided in an op-ed 11/00, was a polemic, a quick look at an essay based on british documents and the following summary:
 
"And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution."

while dismissing a base, unspecified view of iraq as historically violent, the reasons for bringing up history are still there. americans were the first foreign invaders and occupiers of iraq since the british; perhaps george h w bush didn’t order tanks all the way to baghdad because he didn’t want that weight on the us. perhaps george bush sr had a head for history. i could be wrong, but even if that thought crossed his mind only for a moment, that’s more than we can expect from his son. the baseless rhetoric and public talk that america rode into iraq and that continues to propel the war expects little from americans.

americans need not know a history of the modern middle east, shaped by imperialism, zionism, and increasingly since the end of the second world war, american foreign policy. the settlement program begun by israel after the june war in 1967, and supported continuously by every American president since, is only part of the picture on the ground. in the 1980s, america supported Israel’s invasion of lebanon; through the 1990s and into 2000, a perhaps hopeful peace process failed in israel/palestine, not simply because arafat rejected barak’s "generous offer" but because of the flaws of that ungenerous offer. newspapers might have described it generous, but a look at the definitive maps — which no papers provided at the time — revealed the american support for israel confining palestinians to three cantons in the west bank, dissected by israeli roads and settlement blocs. palestine would have been the gaza strip and a broken west bank, behind a expanding, meandering wall, the ‘67 borders constantly being redrawn by settlements.

immediate military aid for israel throughout the second intifida, when the ratio of palestinian and israeli death was near 10 to 1, and the bush administration’s support of increased israeli aggression and settlement expansion under sharon did not disappear as factors on the ground when america began its war on terror. they did not go away when america invaded iraq. when we ask why so much of the middle east is not ‘moderate’ to our liking, why iraqis — thank you mr. brooks — have a historical penchant for being violent, greedy, and against the common good — well, that is when we need to ask other questions. why the american view is so essentialist, casting ‘moderate’ against ‘rogue’ and ‘terror’ against ’security’ in such a way that precludes any real consideration of the place and the increasingly american presence in the region, whether directly in iraq or indirectly along the separation wall, in the grid of new west bank settlements, or in the empty space of a bulldozed palestinian home.

if in 2008 violence in iraq has subsided and the american-catered government can pacify the country, then perhaps the celebration of 1958 will take on a glow of actual progress. if in 2008 we are where we are today, which is fairly close, just worse, than where we were in 2005 and 2004, then 1958 will likely be remembered another way.

if the dates and details actually impress themselves on us, perhaps the totality of american history in the middle east, from the 1950s to the present, will tell us to finally scale back our involvement, to change course, to not push all the way to baghdad, and to try and actually broker even resolution in israel and palestine. maybe when we see the iraqi revolution of 1958 in 2008, we will takes the significance of the moment, which was the collapse of the british system there, and apply it preemptively on the course of american foreign policy.

David came to Egypt for a week, and left last Saturday. I’ve been offline a bit with his visit during ‘Id and midterms the week before to close out Ramadan. We went to the Sinai for a few days, where we lost and then found a passport near Taba after we arrived, and rode in a minibus full of hotel workers for 6 hrs from the Sinai back to Cairo when we left two days later. The details of the ride  boiled down to Khalid, a cab driver who lived at Castle Beach in Ras Shaytan, where we were staying, befriending us, helping us track down David’s passport via cell phone calls to what seems like an expansive network of Sinai cab drivers, and then agreeing to drive us to Cairo. Only, at an exhorbinant price, as he told us on the road. After getting the price down in increments, only to find out that he didn’t really want to drive all the way, and that we didn’t what to drive all the way with him for what he was asking, he arranged for us to overpay still to ride instead in another minibus. It was like any of the minibuses that buzz around Cairo with four full rows of seats and little wheels. Taking digital photos with a little Canon camera in a bus of men who work for a week in Taba for 300 Egytpian pounds, and pay 30 pounds for the ride, didn’t seem appropriate. That David and I had been duped into paying far more than that was not so much a surprise — prices for tourists are always higher, most of all in the Sinai, where on the stretch of beach camps between Taba and Nuweiba, on the border with Israel, cab drivers expect  American dollars. I saw one couple pay with a crisp 100 dollar bill; we only had pounds. 

We went to Giza on David’s last day; my first daytime trip to the Pyramids. It’s a park, really - walk around, and pay to go inside - we climbed a narrow shaft in the Great Pyramid up to the clammy burial chamber - soon you realize that all these old burial holes, or whatever, scattered around the Pyramids and in the sand are full of garbage. The Sound and Light Show stage, and the tourist cafes, face the Pyramids, but across the street there are the stables where you can rent camels and horses, and slums. The contrast is overwhelming but there flocks of people and tourist buses - a road cuts been the two big Pyramids - none of which seems to react. Guides holding laminateed, numbered group signs lead packs of tourists under the Sphinx, trashy looking British and American women huff cigarettes in the sun, their backs to Pyramids, men on camels and horses try to shuffle you on for a ride, best rate, and across the street in the unpaved allies behind KFC poverty Egyptian children wearing old dot-com tee-shirts. Old women sell packs of tissues, and a steady stream of tourists - Egyptians, Americans, Europeans - ride through on horses, on their way to the open desert and the big view of the all the Pyramids.

On a day when the British government announced that it will spy on Muslim students, since universities have become "fertile recruiting grounds," Martin Newland comments on the current acceptance of undermining all symbols of religion with a skeptical, if not scathing  and supposedly informed eye:

Reactions in everyday secular society to manifestations of religiosity, such as the veil, range from a patronising accept-ance to the downright insulting. We are told, by the diligent self-publicist Salman Rushdie, that the veil "sucks". Columnist Allison Pearson says the veil is a "nosebag" and a "female-inhibiting shroud from the House of Taliban". Yasmin Alibhai-Brown claims that the veil is not mandated by the Qur’an. But what is mandated is that women cover themselves. What is also mandated is that men dress plainly. And the original texts have been followed, as in all the mainstream faiths, by teachings and interpretation which are also considered by the faithful to be linked to the will of God.

I’m sorry Mr. Rushdie but I don’t think I could comfortably vilify a majority of the female population of Cairo and many of the students at AUC. Nor do I think, Ms. Pearson, that any of them believe they are falling in line with the Taliban by being devout.

As soon as Sheikh Nassar concluded his sermon with "peace be upon you," roars of "down with the pope, down with the Vatican," echoed from one end of the mosque to the other. Hundreds of protesters rushed outside with placards proclaiming that the Vatican’s war on Islam is an extension of Bush’s war on Islam. People chanted in unison: "Where are you Muslims? - the pope is waging a new Crusade against Islam."

Many Islamists, blocked by dozens of security personnel from spilling out on to the streets, went round-and-round the gate carrying a young man and chanting after him: "Oh [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak, where are you? Where are you? Muhammad’s religion is your religion too."

 

There was another game of Risk last night after many nights off. Risk always leads to scattered political points as we’re taking over the world. Last night an Egyptian friend of Adam was explaining how the best government was still a benevolent dictatorship. I asked isn’t that an oxymoron, and he said no, one person can keep the interests of everybody in mind, with those interests being food, shelter, and money. Some of his main points: instead of charging Egyptians 200% for every car purchase (if you buy a car for $50,000, you pay the government $100,000), the smart autocratic government would provide adequate healthcare and decent, universal education. Instead of cronyism and corruption soaking up all the government’s funds, the money would go to hospitals: the ones in downtown Cairo might look bad, he said, but go out of the city, to the Delta or the desert, and see how the felaheen get their healthcare — in a filthy room without bed-frames, mattresses on the floor, if at all.

Egypt and its people have been regressing, he said, stuck doing things inefficiently and in a decaying pack-mentality (Nasser’s Free Officers, the purging of intellectuals, scientists, and engineers for nationalists in key ministries, the wasting of water resources by building into the desert), and so the response to this level of society has to be dictatorship, but a smart, benevolent one (that is, none of the type of the past half century). In London, where he is a student, people actually do things on time, he said, on a schedule, and there is little to no chance that he will be driving down a highway near his house and have to avoid a truck barreling down the same side of the road at him. At least in England, that truck driver would be off the road for years if he drove the wrong way down a highway, and he’d be a shock story on the evening news. You just don’t do that, he said, you don’t drive your truck down the opposite side of the highway, except in Egypt.

He was speaking with the political confidence I’ve seen in prep-school Americans with presidential aspirations and his education and status in Egyptian society was clear. That he so was articulately advocating an authoritarian government — a smart one, yes, but a heavy hand still — is not only the kind of thing "birth pings of the Middle East" American think-tanks wouldn’t want to hear (or would they? after all, who props up Mubarak?) but the sort of muddied social theory that reveals to me a different Egypt that what I might learn in American history classes or pages of the American press. Nasser might have been a leader of ideas, the  uniting Pan-Arabist cherished in memory and mostly lauded in history books for leading Egypt and the Arab world. But he also brought in a new era of cronyism, and Egypt in 2006 operates on his legacy.

If you start a business in your apartment and hire the boab (doorman) to run it, the friend explained, and then that boab fills the office with all his friends in the neighborhood who are boabs, that’s bad business, right? It will ruin the business over time. He did not critique Nasser or his successors because they are dictators, plainly, as many Americans might hope; he critiqued them because they were crooked, swayed by ideology and personal wealth over that of the country. But I have to think that they are one in the same.

Of course all this theory is pretty utopian. The benevolent dictator. The myriad problems of Egypt (far more than just the price of fool as highlighted in today’s International Herald Tribune by Michael Slackman), and the knowledge that democracy is not a foreign policy band-aid to stick on millions of people living under repressive, corrupt, and humiliated governments in the Middle East. They are authoritarian, yes, but in hearing the friend, the presence of dictatorship is not the problem alone. That people starve, that hospitals remain filthy, that trucks barrel down the wrong side of the highway without a ticket, that resources are wasted on car taxes over school aid, that the government employs thousands of men in Cairo as ineffectual traffic cops, paying them less than 100 Egyptian pounds a month — these are the problems. Instant democracy will not solve them, he said; will smart autocracy? If they’re products of decades of dictatorship, can a shift in absolute authority correct them?