Problems on hold:Who’s afraid of Watani Braille?

This is not the first time I write about Watani Braille, our monthly publication of material selected from Watani and printed in Braille for the benefit of the visually impaired. I wrote before of the dilemma we have been through for close to five years now during which the Supreme Press Council (SPC) has denied Watani Braille the proper licensing.Watani Braille has been issued as a non-periodical publication since April 2005, while it waited for the necessary official publication licence from the SPC. Last August two Watani editorials reviewed the five-year-long correspondence between Watani Printing and Publishing Corporation, which had applied for licence to issue a monthly Watani Braille in 2005, and the SPC. I explained that the SPC demanded a number of documents from Watani, but never at one go; every time a demand was made and we fulfilled it, another different demand followed a few months later. We at Watani felt that these successive, unending demands were being expressly used to delay the licence; it would have made sense to place them all at the outset had there been a real intention to issue the required permit.<BR>Being the first paper for the visually impaired in Egypt and probably in the entire Middle East, we never expected Watani Braille to face any problem with obtaining official licence. Following five years of procrastination on the part of the SPC, and following Watani’s two editorials last August deploring the unnecessary delay in issuing the licence, Watani last September received a letter from the SPC demanding that we furnish it with a list of the editors of Watani Braille, reminding that they should all be practising members of the Journalists’ Syndicate. This was data we had twice before been asked to furnish the SPC with and had promptly done, yet we again complied to the demand and sent the required data. On 29 October 2009 the SPC wrote asking about the name of the printing house which printed Watani Braille. We were stupefied since we had already cited this information in our application for the permit. We submitted the information on where Watani Braille was printed—which was not at any of the major printing houses in Egypt, since Braille printers for non government-sponsored material can only be found with NGOs which serve the visually impaired.The most recent letter from the SPC regarding Watani Braille, however, reached us on 30 December 2009. We received a letter which asked us to: “Kindly comply with the stipulation of Article V of the Law 76 of 1970 regarding the Journalist’s Syndicate.” We rushed to leaf through the text of the law, only to find that Article V stipulates that a journalist may be registered on the main and branch lists of the syndicate provided that:• He should be a professional journalist who is not an owner of a paper or a news agency in the United Arab Republic.• He should be a national of the United Arab Republic• He should be of good repute and was never sentenced in any crime of honour or honesty.• He should hold a BA or BSc degree.The implication of the SPC’s letter or the purpose behind it was beyond us. All previous correspondence between Watani and the SPC included official documents proving that all those who worked with Watani Braille are registered, practicing members of the syndicate. So what was it that was required of us now? No-one had any clue.The situation remains as is. Watani Braille is still published as a non-periodical publication to serve the visually impaired. Everyone admires the service but no-one can imagine the bitterness and frustration felt by those who work to bring it to light, owing to the SPC’s insistence to deny it proper licensing. I raise this complaint to the SPC head Safwat al-Sharif and the Journalists’ Syndicate head Makram Mohamed Ahmed, since I feel confident that they may not be aware that the red tape in their organisations appears to be immune to questioning.