Uptown downtown nowhere ville

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

1. Seventy killed in the Moqattam Hill rockslide in 1993.


2. 37% of Egypt's urban population live in informal housing


3. Three years imprisonment for Kareem Amer


4. Four years imprisonment for Ayman Nour


5. A five-year battle by Bahais for the right not to have to lie about their faith.


6. April 6th 2008: the death of three people in Mahalla killed by the police has not been investigated.


7. 85% of rural female household heads are illiterate


8. 8.7% unemployment rate


9. Laila Haddad and her two kids detained in Cairo Airport for around 30 hours. Because Laila is Palestinian


10. Egypt has the highest prevalence of Hepatitis C in the world (roughly 11% of the population)


11. 12 - 15 million people live in slum housing


12. 45% of Egypt's female population over 15 can not read


13. $50 billion in US aid received since 1979


14. 60% of steel market share owned by Ahmed Ezz with government support.


15. Between 16,000 - 20,000 people in administrative detention


16. Seventeen people die after being tortured in 2005 (The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights www.eohr.org)


17. Activists detained for 45 days after 2006 peaceful protests against constitutional amendments.


18. 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.


19. February 20th 2002: 370 die in train blaze.


20. 20% of population below poverty line


21. Twenty-two people convicted in the widely-criticised Mahalla trial. Sentenced to between 3 and 5 years imprisonment.


22. Thirty Sudanese asylum-seekers and refugees killed when police violently break up the Mostafa Mahmoud sit-in.


23. 35% illiteracy rates


24. 12,000 people live in graveyards in Egypt


25. 2,000,000 cars on the streets of Cairo. 60% over ten years old.


26. Seventy-nine cars in Mubarak's flotilla


27. 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

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

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

April 6, again.

Confirmation that the 6 April Youth Movement's “Day of Anger” was a day of nothing very much at all came when I found myself photographing my own face to see what a friend's sunglasses looked like, through sheer boredom.

The day “started” at noon, when I went to the headquarters of the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions and found its entrance surrounded by shifty-looking types in jeans and shirts, moustaches in suits clutching walkie-talkies, and not a protestor to be seen. As soon as I arrived this state security man, Hisham El-Iraqi, greeted me with a cheery saba7 el fol [good morning] before urging me to shove off in a extremely gentlemanly manner because, “there won't be anything here today”.

I crossed the street and stood with the other five journos who had also been shooed away, about 50 metres distance from the Federation. It wasn't long before El-Iraqi and pals descended on us in all their Police-sunglassed glory and the “persuasion” began again. “Between you and me, nobody will be allowed to protest today,” El-Iraqi said. “You mean just here or anywhere in Cairo?” I asked. “Anywhere,” he replied. “The only place where a demonstration will take place is the Journalists' Syndicate”.

(Journalists' Syndicate demonstrations are the baby playpen of the protest world – small, tightly controlled and penned in).

And he was right, although students at Ain Shams university apparently didn't get this memo and violent confrontations took place between them and the police. Some of them were arrested.

As far as I've heard, this was the only violence which occurred today.

With nothing else to do I spent lots of time today pondering the police and state security today, in particular their dress-sense. One officer particularly caught my eye, decked-out as he was in a gangster-style pinstriped suit and long little finger nail. (What is the purport and purpose of this repulsive affectation? Explanations I have heard so far include Cocaine-cutting, earwax-removal, nostril exploration and letting the world know that the nail's owner does not perform manual work. The last explanation is questionable since the long finger-nail is beloved of several carpenters I know).


Pimp suit's every movement was shadowed by one of the widest men in the history of the universe, seen below in the black t-shirt. This is the first time I have seen a state security officer accompanied by a bodyguard. I wondered whether this was yet another affectation, like the finger nail.



The Muslim Brotherhood didn't mobilise today, and the various security bodies present vastly outnumbered protestors. All the usual suspects were there; Kefaya, Socialists, April 6 Youth Movement members, Mohamed Abdel Qodous, El-Ghad. Ayman Nour's arrival created something of a stir, as photographers stepped on each other's heads to get a shot of the man.

Nour today unveiled El-Ghad's “Cairo Declaration”. The Cairo Declaration is a list of ten demands which Hosny has a year to respond to, or else. If he doesn't they'll announce a[nother] national strike on April 6 2010. When Nour mentioned his Cairo Declaration at a seminar recently blogger/activist Karim El-Beheiry launched into a long rant which can be summarised with, “who the bloody hell does he think he is? Saad Zaghloul?” Fair play.

Also speaking at that particular seminar was Kefaya's Abdel Halim Qandil, who suggested that the idea of reform under the current regime is nonsense.

Today's events give credence to Qandil's position, I think. “Only” about 34 people were arrested either today or preemptively in the past two days, and there wasn't the same tension in the air as there was on April 6 last year when hundreds were detained. Today was stage-managed. This is a regime which doesn't have the ability or maturity to deal with surprises, and April 2008 (and particularly Mahalla) was a surprise. April 6 2009 was not, and neither will 2010 be. Today it was business as usual herding the dissent into the Journalists' Syndicate, the only place in Egypt where one can freely chant down with Hosny Mubarak into the ether.

Bread and butter VI

Here I go on about Captain Mamdouh Farag. Again.

Flotilla the pun*

Much is often made of the vitality of Cairo's street life and its grimy, insistent, animation, its business of 24 hour people, cars, donkeys and drama. A never-ending presence has not however, lent Cairo's population ownership over the capital's streets which - like every other aspect of Egyptian public life – remain under the strict control of a regime afflicted with a mania for micromanagement and heavy-handedness.

Which is why I was nonplussed when I heard that singer-songwriter Shady Ahmed had decided to busk in Cairo's streets. The decision was made in the same week that an author faces a trial for writing a comic book in which , amongst other things, the events of May 25 2005 are described. On that day – Black Wednesday – females journalists and protestors were sexually assaulted in downtown Cairo as members of police looked on. Next week, on April 6, demonstrators will again take to Egypt's streets a year after Egyptians in Mahalla had the temerity to take to their own streets and protest rising food prices; three people were killed in the ensuing confrontations between the crowd and police.

Shady chose to start out in the foreigner-enclave of Zamalek, outside the Diwan bookshop. I was there with a DNE colleague, Jon Jensen, who apparently used to inhabit the island. A Maison Thomas delivery guy walked past. “Thomas!” Jon Jensen shouted. “Baaasha!” Thomas replied.

Within four minutes of Shady opening his mouth in song a gentleman in an ill-fitting dull brown jacket, and an ill-fitting dull brown mustache appeared. Unmistakably a mokhber. He was accompanied by Thomas, and one of Thomas' colleagues. The mokhber proceeded to ask the usual, boring questions about Shady's identity, address and alta mater before buggering off. He hung around, looking uncomfortable, for the duration of the performance.


The law's second appearance came in the form of an 3askary ta2meen - a low-ranking uniformed policeman - again accompanied by Thomas - making me wonder whether Thomas gives tips as well as receiving them. The policeman, an officious pompous type requested that Shady stop singing because “people have complained about the disturbance”. (All this was said as the roar of 26 July Street's traffic practically drowned him out).

He was immediately surrounded by two passers-by and a traffic cop. I then apparently had a brief out-of-body episode, because I heard the traffic cop say, “leave him alone, he's not doing anything wrong, this is about personal freedom.” Like Ban Ki-Moon. It was a beautiful moment.

Shady was mostly resolutely ignored by the people at the bus stop in front of which he was performing. The majority of passers-by cast a furtive glance. The exception to this was a bloke carrying a bag of bread. He stopped for a spot of improvisation, delicately picking the right notes out of the air with his thumb and forefinger.


There was something heartening about the fact that Shady was able to sing in the street, and I left with an odd, unfamiliar feeling which I identified eventually as mild joy.

This feeling was quickly dispelled as Dr Moftases and I sat in a queue of traffic waiting to join the October Bridge. After ten minutes of non-movement we decided to get out and walk, and discovered the cause of the delay; a mawkeb, or flotilla. One side of the October Bridge was almost completely empty save for three angry-looking policemen shouting instructions into their walkie-talkies, holding up traffic trying to join the bridge and angrily moving a group of kids on off the bridge, where they had been looking at the Nile.


If ever a reminder was needed that your country is being held hostage by a group of thieving, redundant, gangster pimps, you need look no further than these flotillas. The idea is that 894,000 cars should be forced to wait, sometimes up to two hours, because ma3aaly el wazir Mr. Prick minster of bribes wants to get home in time to watch himself on 90 De2ee2a, or do a spot of pilates, or polish his forehead. Or because he just doesn't want to mix with the hoi-polloi. Entire districts are cleared of traffic for these morons. Here's some empty road at rush hour right here:

The NDP: emptying tarmac since forever.

Interestingly, Moftases sent me this, describing an accident involving a flotilla which may possibly have been the same one we witnessed on Wednesday night.

My translation:

A car forming part of the Interior Minister's security detail hit citizen Mohamed Gamal while the minister's flotilla was passing through Gamat El-Dowal El-Arabiyya street on Wednesday, amidst a noticeably tightened security presence.

Gamal found himself thrown on the ground next to his flattened mobile phone. Security men in the area didn't lift a finger to help him. Rather, they showered him with blame, saying, “why don't you open your eyes?”

The matter didn't stop there. The security men then became suspicious about Gamal – who works in a computer store on Gamat El-Dowal El-Arabiya Street – and demanded to see his I.D and work cards, without displaying the slightest concern about his injuries.

*Geddit?? Apologies.

Indo Drama

Hamalawy used Adobe Lightroom to make this photo of Shibeen El-Koum strikers look wowzers blazers.

Yet another trip to Egypt's Delta this week, this time to Shibeen El-Koum, in Menufeya – birth place of Mubarak but otherwise lovely.

Workers at the Indorama – formerly Shibeen El-Koum - spinning factory have been on strike since 5th March, after company chairman announced that workers won't be getting the annual raise given them every year in March because the company isn't making any profits.

The company was privatised in 2006, and had already been making a loss prior to its sell-off. As usual, blame for the losses is attributed to the other party by workers and management. In Shibeen, workers showed Per Bjorklund and I round the shell of a factory halls. A worker pointed to the place where machines had once stood, his voice bouncing around the hall's empty walls like a squash ball as he explained that management has sold functioning machines only to replace them with new ones which were then sold for scrap.

The current strike is the 95th to have taken place since the company was privatised. There is something broken in the relationship between workers and management, a deep sense of having being betrayed on the part of workers which, in its crudest form, manifests itself in a suspicion of the Indian administrative employees and technicians. They accuse the Indian staff of granting themselves powers beyond their job description and treating them in an imperious manner. The resentment is exacerbated by the knowledge that Indian workers are paid an undisclosed amount in dollars, and are provided with free accommodation and cars while the company buses used to transport workers are left to rot.

By far the most revealing conversation I had about Shibeen – and about class relations in Egypt generally - was with a member of Indorama's management.

The company chairman had told me that he was too busy to speak to me but that his administrative manager would telephone me. I concluded that this was a brush-off, and decided to invite myself to their office. The administrative manager did in fact call me while I was on the way, announcing himself as 'Colonel' Emad, and demanding to know who I am and what I want in the breathy, impatient tone which is the signature of senior Egyptian police officers. When I cheerfully told him that I was on the way to the office without an appointment he then reprimanded me about my manners.

Per Bjorklund and I were admitted to the Colonel's office soon after arriving and discovered a man in a moustache and Italian loafers. The office, which was surprisingly small for a colonel, was dominated by his desk which, in addition to various bric-a-brac, had a writing pad with three small clocks on it, like a ship's deck. His filing cabinet were decorated with several stickers of F-16 jets, while the Colonel himself was drinking out of a travel mug with another picture of a plane emblazoned on it and the name of a manufacturer of something or other in Detroit.

A natural yogurt and a spoon stood incongruously amongst all the armaments.

We asked the Colonel why Shibeen El-Koum is making a loss and why Indorama bought it in the first place, amongst other questions. He blamed everything – in that insistent whisper - without exception, on the workers. This is a selection of some of the gems he came out with, lifted directly from my article:

As for the issue at the center of the strike, Abdel Khaliq says that despite assertions to the contrary from the Minister of Manpower herself, Indorama is not obliged to pay the yearly bonus because it is making a loss. “If you were making the loss, how would you pay?” he asked.

Abdel Khaliq says that the strike is being conducted illegally.

“Work, and let the trade union committee ask for your rights. Prove that you are productive rather than putting a blanket out on the street and saying that you’re not going to work — that’s the law of the jungle. How can you ask me for more money when you don’t want to work?”

Abdel Khaliq claims that workers’ wages have been doubled despite the losses the company is suffering — a claim which Shalaby denies.
And why is the company making a loss? Abdel Khaliq says that the problem is simple: workers don’t want to work.

“In the past Shibeen El-Koum was famous all over the world; someone taking it over while it was making a loss was bound to turn it around with this reputation. Why? Because of the quality. It has the best yarn in the world. Since we took over it’s become the worst. Why? Because the workers don’t want to work. They say that the government sold them out,” Abdel Khaliq said.

“Why don’t they work like they did while the factory was government-owned? Because the government has a whip — if a worker did anything a call was made to the police and they came and took him.

“The private sector meanwhile is chaos. We sent yarn to Spain and it was returned because it was of such poor quality. Who made this yarn which sells for a fourth of what it should sell for? Is it not the worker? If it’s bad quality why’s isn’t he doing anything about it?”

Abdel Khaliq claims that striking workers are “just hanging out” and that “only 10 percent” of workers are actually involved in the strike.

“Workers still think that they’re working in the government sector: all they say is ‘give me’. We’ve doubled wages and tripled the food allowance.

Why aren’t they happy? Because of their culture. Freedom without culture results in thuggery.”

I've always found this paternalistic attitude to the “great unwashed” who shouldn't be given the sharp knife of autonomy in case they cut themselves or others, repellent. It is particularly galling when it comes from a man with F-16 jets on his filing cabinets who has almost certainly been employed because of his connections with security bodies whose job it is to quash workers exercising any form of autonomy (he told us that he was previously employed in the army).

These comments aside, the Colonel was able to counter a few of the allegations made by workers with semi-convincing responses, and I left his office confused by the knot of the back and forth of the various allegations.

Luckily, Per did some good thinking here. I agree with him that, “the worst accusations and suspicions put forward by some of the workers doesn't necessarily have to be true. A company can make losses without any conspiracies being involved, of course. In the end, it's just about who is going to pay - the capitalists or the workers.”

Akunt

There is an expression in Arabic, 'faqary', which means bringing bad luck. I pondered on it in the early hours of Thursday morning as I watched a diminutive topless Senegalese-American pop singer standing on top of a car threatening to punch members of his own audience.

This is the 3rd mass event I have been to in Cairo which has gone spectacularly wrong. Should I ban myself from attending future events in the interests of Cairo's nightlife?

The diminutive topless individual was Akon, he of 'Smack That' fame. While presumably having a fleeting moment of optimism, I volunteered (!) to cover his concert, thinking that it might be a laugh on some level.

The signs that this was a disastrous decision were all there from the start. When I went to purchase tickets from the Opera House (the incongruous setting for Akon's performance), I was informed that tickets for LE 150, 250, 500, 750 and a whopping 1,000 were available.

Maybe the LE 1,000 tickets offer the chance to be dry-humped by Akon on stage, I thought, silently.

“Will I be able to see anything in the LE 150 area?” I inquired out loud.

“Yes, yes. You'll be able to see...something...” the ticket woman replied, with an unsettling grin.

“Are the LE 150 tickets in the toilets?”

She grinned (knowingly).

I was wrong: the LE 150 area wasn't in the toilets, it was mostly between the toilets. Wady El-Mer7adayn.

Needless to say it was at the very back of the Opera car park which had been converted into the venue for the evening's shenanigans. Screens were vaguely visible if you a. Climbed a tree or b. Were over 6 ft or c. Climbed on top of one of the portable toilet cabins until instructed to get down by toilet staff.

The view was largely obstructed by the strange platform erected for the LE 500 or LE 750 crowd who, being superior beings, had been given SOFAS to sit on. The LE 250 cattle had been herded into an area to the right of this platform, while the LE 150 pariahs stood behind them separated by a barrier reminiscent of the Berlin Wall, guarded by fridge-sized bodyguards one of whom was brandishing a thick wooden stick. He thumped the stick down menacingly on the barrier whenever any of the LE 150s threatened an attempt to escape the colony.

The LE 1,000 section was a distant promised land whispered about but never seen. The only news we received about it came two hours into proceedings, when someone on stage requested the LE 1,000 golden people to “go and get their money back”. How odd, we thought. No explanation was given.

The majority 11-year old LE 150s and their parents milled around the area, the kids in a state of high excitement, the parents looking for anywhere to park themselves (the only option was pavement curbs). Bad boys in tracksuits and baseball hats started impromptu breakdancing sessions while far away on the distant stage an individual called DJ Ahmed Shaker played records and sang forgettable Arabic R n B numbers.

Three and a half hours later, at 11.30 p.m., Akon still hadn't appeared. By this time the LE 150s had got bored of the breakdancing and were milling about the LE 150/LE 250 barrier. The bodyguard with the stick was looking ever more edgier, barking instructions at his colleagues, mountain-sized all.

Suddenly and spontaneously the LE 150s made their move, storming and knocking over the barrier before charging, cheering, into beautiful freedom. The bodyguards were hopelessly outnumbered by pubescent teenagers and a DNE hack, and conceded defeat.

We arrived in the LE 250 area just in time to witness Lebanese chanteuse Melinda start her act. She was wearing gold lame leggings and that is all I have to say on the matter.

There then ensued what felt like years of standing, accompanied to the soundtrack of tunes spun by DJ Feedo. By this time two of the three giant screens had given up the ghost, as if in solidarity with us.

At midnight a man and a woman who I am given to understand are Nile FM DJs appeared on stage. “OK you're not going to believe this...” the woman said. Akon's not coming, I thought, secretly slightly relieved.

“Akon's STUCK IN TRAFFIC!!!” the woman announced, before she and her colleague made witticisms about how it would have better for Akon to get the metro. How we laughed.

“BULLSHIT”, said the crowd.

Just as I was about to throw up from so much standing a gentleman sporting a mohawk and a tartan skirt which wasn't actually a kilt bounded on stage, at about 12.40 a.m.

He went through the motions of warming up the crowd, quite successfully, before roaring, “Akon if you in Cairo lemme hear you say something.”

“Konvict [sic] Music,” a weedy voice said from nowhere.

Akon eventually appeared on stage, without providing any explanation as to why he had kept us standing for two hours – as befits an ARSEHOLE superstar, after all.

He and the Kilt man launched into their act with great gusto. The crowd loved it, pogoing and swaying their way through songs only a few of which I recognised. The rest of his material just morphed into some indistinguishable grey-coloured mush.

The fact that Akon was lip-synching appeared not to bother the crowd.

Akon chatted between songs, muttering on about how happy he is to be back in Africa, and how a man in America once told him that to succeed you need “money, power and respect” and that “no-one's better than anyone else just because they have more money than you”.

I looked up at the LE 500s sitting on the sofas and sighed.

One of Akon's more cryptic pronouncements was, “I can stand in Cairo and know that I'm not the only person from the Ghetto.” Whether this was a reference to the 0.1% of Cairo's elite who had been able to afford a ticket or to Cairenes generally remains a mystery.

Akon then took his shirt off (to the delight of the 50 women in the audience) and from this moment on everything went downhill: it was like a secret code for hell's guards to open the gates.

It started with crowd surfing. Akon did it twice, prompting a horrified and frenzied reaction from the bodyguards on stage who scrambled to fish him out of the crowd.

Apparently spurred on by the success of this endeavour, Akon then declared, “today we're one people, one blood, one world” and that he was going to cross from the front of the stage to the back of the crowd, on top of their heads.

He called it his 'bridge of peace', and instructed everyone to put their hands up so that they could carry him. “This won't work unless we all work together!” he screeched while people started working out where the nearest escape exit was.

Off he went, crawling over the hands elevated over people's heads, like a demented crab. I wondered whether he has some kind of Jesus complex, and this is his version of walking on water.

Approximately halfway across Akon – by this time sounding somewhat tense – had started instructing people not to pull him back, and eventually to "get away from him".

It was at this point that the surge of people moving towards Akon caused a lighting rig on which people had been standing to collapse – on top of other crowd members. Akon was unperturbed - “we can just cut it out of the film,” he said while people started fleeing the area. Prick.

True to his word, Akon proceeded all to the way back of the deserted LE 150 area. 'Mr Konvict' Big Stuff by this time could be heard saying “help me, help me” into the mic, like a girl. I went out to find him standing on top of something, surrounded by bodyguards several of which were now armed with sticks, which they were using to keep people away from Scaredy Pants – who by this time had started throwing punches. Smack That indeed.

He was eventually unceremoniously escorted out of the area on bodyguards' shoulders before the concert came to an abrupt end. Akon was ushered out to his waiting Hummer by the bodyguards.


Akon left in his wake two trashed cars, which he had elected to stand on top of. His fans had done the same and this was the result:




I wonder if Akon will be charged with criminal damage.

I subsequently found out that the reason why the LE 1,000s had been instructed to get their money back was that the LE 1,000 had partly collapsed, causing “minor cuts and bruises” according to one employee I spoke to. Another man standing near the light rig told me that people had been injured by its collapse. I saw several people walking around looking stunned and traumatised, and a kid in an ambulance having his arm wrapped in bandages.

The funny thing is that on the way to buy the tickets for this effin cock-up on Monday, I saw builders in the process of erecting the feeble-looking wooden frame which was the stage and had visions of it collapsing.

Perhaps the organisers and Pepsi (sponsors of the events) who beamed their logo onto the Cairo Opera House dome (which is itself wrong somehow) should have invested more money in safety, rather than using the profits of their extortionately-priced tickets on sofas.

If anyone ever sees me at a corporate-sponsored event again, they have the permission to drop-kick me.

The invisible scarecrow

It is remarkable how little effort the footmen of a police state have to put into intimidation. The mere suggestion of a threat, of danger, is enough. The invisible scarecrow.

The strategy works because of the not knowing, the waiting, which entirely consumes novices. Every act, every decision, every word is suddenly imbued with a new significance. Immediately after the threat is received, things seem to speed up somehow, and the outside world retreats – or is blocked out - a little. External sounds become distant as the deafening fear courses through the bloodstream from the stomach and the heart until it reaches the head, where it sits like spilt oil on seawater, choking hope and happiness and normal thought.

And in that moment they've won.

The knowledge of being watched is suffocating. Its worst, most exhausting, aspect is that after they enter your head, they are in your home, at your work, in your car, in your street, everywhere you look. It is difficult to put into words the feelings induced by receiving a phone call at 1 a.m advising you to leave your house immediately because they might be coming for you. The mad 10 minute rush of getting dressed and putting basic essentials into a bag, waiting, waiting, waiting for the explosion. Your home suddenly transformed into a trap.

And then out into the night, and the comfort – or the illusion of comfort – provided by constant movement.

It's surprising how you can get used to fear, learn to live with it. Gradually it becomes yet another of the million things lurking at the back of your mind - the unreturned library books, the email not sent, the people not called.

The only bright spot in all this is people's support, their solidarity. Solidarity is a word often bandied around in activist statements etc. Its true worth can only be appreciated in situations when it is really needed. It is a life jacket. I will never forget the friends – Moftases, Abadodo, Sharshar - who dropped everything so I wouldn't be on my own, and Aida who unquestioningly gave me a bed in her home in the middle of the night, and Haitham or Umm Nakad who rang up to check on me periodically.

I'm so happy that Philip was released, but feelings of happiness have almost been obscured by anger: anger that this happened to him (would it have happened to a foreigner?), anger that these people have interrupted my and others' lives, anger that their sickness is allowed to spread through our society by the people in charge and their supporters abroad, anger about the people still in detention.

One day this will end, and hopefully it will be soon. When it does, it will because of people like Philip, whose first public statement on being released from his incommunicado detention was that the marches in solidarity with Gaza should continue.

To people reading this: next time you hear about someone in danger and are requested to join a protest or sign a petition or send a letter, don't hesitate. Please do it.