At a passing glance, President Barack Obama’s meetings with the leaders of the Arab Gulf states have borne fruit in terms of furthering mutual respect and as a building block to closer cooperation. But when one digs beneath the flimflam and the verbal pledges – with the exception of a joint missile defence system and a promise that deliveries of US weapons would be fast-tracked – the recent Camp David Summit delivered few tangible benefits.
I was recently in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Aswan to meet with local government, partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and people working together to fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a widely-spread practice in Egypt that predates both Christianity and Islam.
A year into his rule, one of the most challenging files on the president's in-tray was militancy, which in Egypt has taken the Sinai Peninsula as its base. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stepped into office 11 months after former Islamist president Mohamed Mursi was removed from power. Throughout the first year of Sisi's tenure, much has happened in relation to militancy and the Sinai Peninsula and many have been caught in the crossfire.
Yet again news comes of Coptic families expelled from their villages, this time in Beni Soueif and Minya, part of the terms of customary reconciliation agreements reached in meetings of local residents, clerics, and state representatives.
Speaking of tyrants Nael Shama said: “A typical consequence of such a distorted mind set is the equation between personal criticism and disloyalty.” Though that particular article was penned in the summer of 2008, two and half years before the [25 January] revolution, it is such a penetrating deconstruction that will draw readers of the new book Egypt before Tahrir by Dr Nael Shama, political commentator and St Andrews PHD holder.
I wrote this article shortly after the president’s televised address, at the end of the day on which ‘Good Morning Egypt’ had announced the justice minister’s resignation because of his unfortunate statements about the opportunities available to the sons of sanitation workers.
The latest conflict over the capital gains tax on stock exchange transactions is not a battle between justice and injustice or big business and the people. It is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the economic discourse: the gap between the desire for justice and a fuzzy apprehension of the tools needed to realise it.
Since January 2011 the Egyptian media has been subject to accelerated and troubled shifts. The space here would not be enough to fully outline the situation of the media during the years of the revolution. However, we can summarise the six main shifts as follows.
We used to work together in the same company during the 25 January Revolution, a genius upper-middle class young man in his mid-twenties and I was his manager. We would run into each other in Tahrir Square chanting the same slogans of “bread, freedom and social justice”, and carrying the same banners demanding change.
Egypt has been struggling for democracy for some time now. Despite how some observers of Egyptian politics and society mark January 25th 2011 as a beginning of tangible efforts to implement a democratic regime-- after removing an authoritarian one-- the truth is that a series of events and efforts were taking place during the last decade of Mubarak’s rule.
Some argue that the Islamists are the reason for the scourge and misfortune of the Arab world. They deal with the Islamists as one bloc without differentiating between the Islamists who confine their activity to preaching, others who engage in peaceful politics, those who take up arms for jihad and those who consider others infidels and cut their throats.
Before dawn last Friday in Al-Anbar in Iraq, “Islamic State” (IS) took over the government complex in Ramadi, the capital of the province. In the meantime, news spread that the security forces retreated from the complex following violent clashes with IS. The government complex includes the province’s office, Al-Anbar’s police department, the affairs directorate of Al-Anbar, and a number of government and service entities.
The debate over the new investment law has taken a new turn. It is no longer about the law’s content only, but speaks to the generally confused state of legislation in Egypt at present, and raises the question of how to fix statutory errors once they are enshrined in law.
We [judges] are the masters and the rest are the slaves” is indeed the most memorable quote by Egypt’s new Justice Minister Ahmed Al-Zind, head of the Judges’ Club. The rest of this sentence as said by Al-Zind during a phone interview on a TV show was: “Whatever represents an attack on the Judiciary’s prestige, dignity and respect will not pass lightly. On the land of this nation, we are the masters and the rest are the slaves…whoever burns a judge’s photo will have his heart, his memory and his shadow burned from Egypt’s land.”
President Al-Sisi has repeatedly emphasised the importance of the tourism sector. The head of the Egyptian Tourist Authority Samy Mahmoud said he wants to target the Asian and Russian markets, and the former head of the Federation of Tourism Chambers Elhamy Elzayat has called for more investment in tourist infrastructure. Tourism will continue to be important for the Egyptian economy, up to 10% or more of GDP. Recently, tourism has shown some growth, but has not rebounded to pre-2011 levels. What to do to boost the tourism sector?
A common friend/colleague’s name came up in a recent conversation. My memory for names was always abominable and is becoming increasingly so with age. To make sure we were, in fact, referring to the same person, I asked: “Is she the one with the … ” gesturing with my hand across my head to indicate the headscarf, or veil — the non-verbal gesture very likely an attempt to blunt the edge of a possibly un-PC question. “Yes, she is,” came the answer, “but she’s taken off the veil.”
Cairo Criminal Court has upheld a three-year sentence against deposed president Mohamed Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, fining them LE125,779,267, ordering them to return an additional LE21,197,000 to the state, confiscating all the forged written documents and ordering the defendants to pay for the trial expenses. This verdict was issued in the retrial of the case charging them with embezzling LE125 million of the presidential budget allocated to Egypt's presidential palaces and forging official written documents.
There were doubts inside David Cameron’s camp that the British Conservative Party could win a majority (326 seats or more) in the recent general elections, but it won 331 seats — the biggest win of an incumbent government since the victories Margaret Thatcher scored in the 1980s. What are the reasons behind this result? And what challenges will Mr Cameron's government face in the Commons?
A minister is gone but injustice remains. At a time when Egypt longs with the desperation of a hungry toddler for its mother’s milk for justice, its minister of ‘justice’ has been ushered stage politically. Mahfouz Saber’s mistake was not uttering a politically embarrassing classist diatribe, but rather it was saying a truth that both uncovered a regime and a society. That societal elites govern developing nations, in particular, is not a socio-political secret and Egypt is a standard bearer in that regard rather than an exception. But the record speed with which the naïve minister was dispatched speaks of a more sinister truth: the regime wants no reminders of the successes and failures of a revolution that dreamt of justice and social equality.
Others
Hostages appear to leave the Bataclan concert hall as siege ends with two attackers reportedly having been killed
Paris Attack
