Two days ago the FT did a special on Egypt, with about a dozen different stories. I enjoyed reading this column by Samir Raafat about the history of Omar Effendi. There’s a lot more there, including this one on the Sinai bombing trial, this one on Egypt’s waning regional role and this one on growing income inequality.
Month: December 2006
heavy security
Security was heavy but well controlled for Kefaya’s second anniversary demo at the Journalists’ Syndicate yesterday. One CSF guy got carried away. Rumor had it that he got kicked in the whats-its. You would have thought, with all that padding…
I’ve put a couple more shots on my flickr site.
Bad cops, good cops (22)
December 11, 2006
The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, then the line went dead.
We tried to call him back later, because you can’t give a story based on the word of Amr something-or-other, certainly not an Americans-killed-dozens-of-people kind of story, but he’d either moved out of coverage area or the appalling Iraqi mobile networks were having another miserable day.
Then the press release came. “20 Al-Qaeda terrorists killed” in a midnight airstrike about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. The wording in these things are key. As US ground forces approached a target site, they were suddenly fired upon, forcing them to return fire – killing two “terrorists”. “Coalition Forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close air support.”
They really had no choice, it seems.
Don’t drink the water
The US Embassy in Cairo has apparently released the following advisory:
Periodic routine testing by a U.S. military laboratory of “Safi” brand bottled water showed results of elevated radiological readings for alpha and beta particles. Laboratory protocol now requires specific follow-on testing. Although initial testing levels fell within the safety margins of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. military authorities of the Central Command suspended the sale of Safi water through the retail facilities it operates. The American Embassy commissary, which is used by American diplomats and military personnel assigned to Egypt, suspended sales of Safi pending further test results. Based on the EPA standards, we do not believe that the consumption of Safi water has posed a risk. We will report the results of further testing as soon as they are available.
Isn’t Safi bottled by the military?
serve and protect
Reuters piece up at the moment on the police-sodomy video that did the rounds a few weeks back. Elijah Zarwan gets in some good quotes on behalf of the human rights community, and Hisham Kassem pops in at the end to point out that, surprise surprise, apathy reigns.
However, the piece, which appears with a December 11 dateline, ignores a number of blog postings, including Hossam Hamalawy’s, that suggest that not only has the victim been identified, but so have the perpetrators.
Time for Reuters to update this story.
Who trains Egypt’s teacher?
From the Egypt Human Development Report 2005:
The Ministry of Education, as the main provider of in-service teacher training, does not have the capacity to cater for the training needs of all employees, even within the traditional parameters. This has led to the adoption of the ‘one size fits all’ strategy whereby all teachers receive the same training at the same time irrespective of the wide variation of their qualifications (only 46% of employed teachers are graduates of Faculties of Education).
Others are filling in, namely international IT companies, most recently under the Egyptian Educational Initiative. I wrote a piece on it for qantara.de, trying to show how these companies take over government tasks – out of their own interest, but for the benefit of school teachers (at least those who participate), I believe.
Excerpt:
Independently of the current initiative, Intel plans to train an additional 650,000 teachers on its own. The company has thereby shown itself to be even more ambitions than other businesses active in the IT field in Egypt.
The Egyptian Ministry of Education presents a rather different, seemingly uninvolved image. Its press spokesman referred to the participating companies and the responsible department head in the IT Ministry. In the end, he refused to answer any questions about the program.
(This week google announced another cooperation with the Ministry of Education, bringing its products to students in Egypt.)
Arab Human Development Report 2005
UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report 2005 has been launched this week – this year it focuses on women in the Arab world. Next to a lot of valuable data and figures, it discusses progress and continuous discrimination of women. It makes some interesting points – for instance arguing that moderate Islamic groups with their increasing respect of human rights, minorities, internal democracy and good governance are balancing the noise that extremist Islamic groups are making in public. The report also criticizes some Arab states for claiming to have ratified international conventions, without adapting national legislation to an extent where women and men would be fully equal before the law.
Overall, the report seems to argue that it is much less Islam but rather deep-rooted traditionalism in Middle Eastern societies which is responsible for the situation of Arab women.
Better late than never?
I read the recommendations and descriptions of the Iraq Study Group report wit a mixture of elation and rage. Elation because this was the final nail in the coffin of the whole incredibly destructive US neo-con mission to remake the Middle East. It was the reassertion of traditional realpolitik over US policy — not necessarily the best and most constructive approach, but certainly less destructive that Bush Jr. and his psychopaths. I’m sure many would say it’s not even the lesser of two evils, but under the cold calculating approach by people like Baker and the others, Iraq would not have been so horrifically destabilized. As the cartoon in the Guardian said, it was time for the adults to get back into politics. God save us from the visionaries.
But if the price for Bush’s humiliation was the wholesale dismantling of Iraq’s social fiber, was it really worth it? And that’s where the rage comes in. It’s a good report, it’s familiar reading because all of us – media, Iraqis, international organizations – have been saying this for years. Where the hell was this panel a year and a half ago before got quite so awful?
Why do these old fogies say it and everyone, including the president, nod sagaciously and accept it, while everyone else was ignored before. The upbeat military weekly military press conferences, the blog attacks on the “liberal media�, the Bush administration’s defense of the situation … suddenly it’s all gone, as though it never was, and everyone seems to have no problem acknowledging that the situation in Iraq has become beyond awful.
Better late than never. I guess.
Unless of course it’s too late.
Islam and science special in Nature
Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific magazines, has a special on Islam and science. There’s tons of interesting stuff, from the attitude of Islamist parties to scientific research to the neglect of scientific funding in most Islamic countries.
IMA funding under threat
There is a looming financial crisis at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, according to this Le Monde report. Arab states are supposed to be funding 40% of its budget, which keeps running a deficit, but they often push for something in exchange (exhibitions for Qadhafi’s son or insignificant Kuwaiti artists) and have been running late with payments. Just like the help they always promise the Palestinians.
Still, funding something like the IMA would probably get more diplomatic bang for the buck for France than its recently launched 24-hour news station. At less than 25 million euros a year for about one million visitors annually, a great library and bookshop, and some of the best exhibitions in Paris (not to mention a Jean Nouvel building that became an instant Paris landmark with its photo-reactive diaphragm windows), it’s a steal.