15 - 21 March 2001
Issue No.525
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 March 2001 Issue No.525 |
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A legend in silhouette
Ahmed Hamroush mourns Maria Ghazi, an Egyptian-born champion of the dispossessed
When I was informed of Maria Ghazi's recent death, by a phone call from Theoharis Babamargris, the head of the Greek chapter of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, my initial reaction was not grief. Rather, it was a mixture of nostalgia and disbelief. Notwithstanding my sadness at her loss, it seemed incredible that such an illustrious figure should pass away unnoticed. Thus, I decided to write, not an obituary, but a personal reminiscence of the woman and the circumstances in which I knew her.
Babamargris, through whom I met Ghazi, was born in Alexandria. He lived there until the age of 18, when he moved to Britain to study at Oxford, eventually to return to Greece where he became minister of labour, then a consultant for the Central Bank of Greece -- a position which he continues to hold. In the 1990s, when I first met him, he was also the head of the Greek chapter of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, and in 1992 returned to Egypt for the first time in three decades, heading the Greek delegation at a conference organised by the Egyptian chapter of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee. Maria Ghazi was a member of Babamargris's delegation.
My initial impression of Ghazi was one of pleasant surprise: she spoke Arabic with the fluency and flair of an Egyptian. Ghazi was born in Egypt, it later turned out, and had lived for many years in the popular district of Shubra. Her intimate, grassroots understanding of the culture was indeed unmistakable. I discovered that she had early on become a member of Egyptian leftist organisations and played a vital role in Egyptian political life (coming into contact with many a future political figure, one of whom subsequently became a minister).
Along with her husband -- another staunch activist -- Ghazi was imprisoned for her political activities prior to emigrating to her homeland. In Greece she did not give in to conventional family life. Instead, she resumed her course as an activist, occupying the position of general secretary for the Greek chapter of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee and not only supporting the Palestinian cause but focusing her attention on it in a number of other venues; the Conference for Solidarity and Cooperation in the Mediterranean being one notable example. She developed links with anti-Israel organisations, and became a central figure in the resistance working extensively with unofficial bodies in Palestine.
At all these conferences, and in the course of private conversations, Ghazi was provocative, ingenious, committed and alert. The last time I saw her, in Athens in 2000, during a conference held in solidarity with the Palestinian people, she was physically exhausted: her struggle with illness had weakened her body. Yet Ghazi was mentally in command, as engaging and as committed to the struggle for human rights as she had always been.
* Ahmed Hamroush is chairman of the Egyptian chapter of the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation . A well-known analyst, he was a member of the Free Officers movement, which engineered the 1952 Revolution in Egypt.
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