Prices gone mad
In Egypt, statues, spiraling inflation and the Arab intellectuals' conference vie for newsprint space with developments in Palestine and Iraq, where the setting up of a ruling council in one and the roadmap's endurance in the other give the impression that some type of order is at last coming to Arab affairs. Amina Elbendary reads the week's Egyptian and Arab press
Inflation continued to be a major concern for opposition as well as national newspapers this week. The banners of the Nasserist Party's weekly Al-Arabi on 13 July emphasised the maverick increase in the prices of basic commodities such as sugar, oil, rice and chicken. The Leftist Tagammu's Party's mouthpiece, Al-Ahali, also carried news of inflation on its front page on 9 July, with the premonition that charges for water would increase four-fold soon. For its part, Al-Wafd, issued by the Wafd Party, on 12 July called this "the week of rampant inflation", with inflation being the subject of many of the week's cartoons.
Also on economics, Al-Wafd on 10 July questioned government- announced GDP figures, which contradicted those released by UN organisations. "Who is deceiving the Egyptian people?" the paper asked on its front page. Meanwhile, on-going revelations of corruption in public life prompted Nabil Zaki to write in Al-Ahali calling for a "clean-hands" campaign to curb the corruption that he said had permeated all corners of public life.
The forthcoming elections at the Press Syndicate continued to cause debate, especially as the incumbent, Al-Ahram's Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Nafie, had announced earlier this week that he would not be running in the coming round. Mahmoud El-Maraghi writing in Al-Arabi on 13 July outlined the various sides of the election battlefield, questioning whether the Press Syndicate had become a way of controlling the press and making the struggle for Nafie's chair a highly-charged one.
Well-known journalist Salah Montasser has already announced that he is nominating himself for the position of chairman, and, according to El- Maraghi, senior editors of all the major newspapers have been discouraged from running in the coming elections, keeping other journalists, such as Makram Mohamed Ahmed and Samir Ragab, out of the race. El-Maraghi predicted that Montasser's main contender would be Galal Aref. Writing in the independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma on 14 July, Nabil Omar argued that the current crisis in the Syndicate was tied to a crisis in Egyptian journalism in general, but while the former was temporary and on its way to closure, the other was chronic and more complex.
The on-going debate on reforming the national education system received new input from Labiba El-Sayed El-Naggar. Writing in Al-Ahali on 9 July, El-Naggar refuted recurring calls to abolish free education as the solution to deteriorating standards throughout the country. The problems the national education system was facing did not stem from its being free, and nor would they be solved by privatisation, she argued.
The decision to move an environmentally-hazardous solid waste-disposal dump on the North Coast some 27kms away from holiday resorts at a cost of LE9m was hailed by all newspapers. Editor-in-Chief Galal Dweidar writing in Al-Akhbar on 15 July thanked all the officials concerned in the decision, including the prime minister, the ministers of housing and environment and the governor of Alexandria, for taking the criticism and suggestions of the national press seriously on this issue.
Fall-out from the Arab Intellectuals' Conference, organised from 1 to 3 July by the Ministry of Culture, continued to occupy the national press. The six Egyptian intellectuals who had issued a statement opposing the conference and its agenda were -- predictably -- attacked by some and hailed by others. Al-Arabi carried a comprehensive interview with the most senior member of the aforementioned group, Abdel-Azim Anis, in which his analysis of the status quo in the Arab world signalled only pessimism.
Anis called for an intellectuals' conference that would be independent of states and of ministries of culture, bringing together various trends in the Arab world and affirming Arab identity in the face of international imperialism. The Ministry of Culture's mouthpiece, Al-Qahira, for its part defended the conference on 15 July, with Al-Sayed Yassin dubbing the above- mentioned statement "haphazard criticism" and Mohamed El-Sayed Said declaring such criticism to be "fascist". The independent weekly Al-Usbou devoted two pages to the conference, publishing a response by Secretary- General of the Supreme Council for Culture Gaber Asfour defending the conference and its agenda, as well as reports on the attacks, especially the claim that the conference had convened in response to American pressure.
On a similar theme, Al-Arabi carried a long interview with the Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Qader Gamal, in which he warned of an "Americanised Arab mind".
Developments in Iraq and Palestine remained at the forefront of national concerns. Samir Ragab, editor-in-chief of the national daily Al-Gomhuriya questioned in his editorial of 10 July whether the US would start playing the "Sunni-Shi'ite card" in Iraq by appointing a majority Shi'ite governing council and sidelining the Sunnis.
The front page of Al-Usbou on 14 July was taken up by Editor-in-Chief Mustafa Bakri's editorial on the so-called "Iraq-gate" crisis, "The liars fall," in which he attacked the American and British administrations for failing to prove their allegations regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities, followed by a report on what he argued was the US's plan to control the African continent and intervene militarily in a number of on-going conflicts.
Hussein Abdel-Razek made similar predictions in an article in Al-Wafd on 11 July: "It is obvious that President Bush's African tour, and his meeting on the first day of his visit to Dakar with 14 African presidents, is part of this aggressive policy and that it carries real dangers to Africa. The presidents who welcomed this visit will realise the extent of the dangers that will befall their countries because of this American interest, and they will pay the price for this belated realisation," he concluded, urging Egyptian policymakers to be aware of the true intentions of the visit and their negative effects on Egyptian interests in Africa.
Newspapers also carried reports on continuing Egyptian negotiations with the various Palestinian factions to help them reach common ground. The controversial BBC documentary on Israel's nuclear weapons, broadcast worldwide recently and leading Israel to suspend cooperation with the British corporation, also spurred discussion, with Maha Abdel-Fattah writing in the national paper Akhbar Al-Yom on 12 July that Israel had in fact employed its non-conventional weapons and did not just keep them to deter others, as is the official Israeli line. The writer also drew attention to the environmental hazards that Israeli nuclear installations pose for the region, a matter referred to in the BBC documentary but never alluded to in official discourse.
In Al-Akhbar on 13 July, Galal Dweidar pointed out that Israel -- and by extension the US -- did not have problems with Yasser Arafat as an individual. The problem was that the extreme right-wing and religious fundamentalist rulers in Israel consider peace to be an enemy to their expansionist and settlement policies; side-lining Arafat was meant to disappoint the Palestinian people and force them to surrender, he said. The whole Israeli policy banked on creating rifts within the Palestinian body politic and politically leadership, he argued.
On a perhaps lighter, if equally politically-charged note, public statues came into the spotlight once more. After the Governor of Giza commissioned and set up a number of public statues recently, commemorating Naguib Mahfouz, Taha Hussein and Ahmed Shawqi, followed last week by the unveiling of the statue of Omar Makram in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Akhbar Al-Yom's columnist Anwar Wagdi called for the restoration of the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, in its original location at the entrance of the Suez Canal in Port Said.
The call was seconded on 12 July in the same paper by Galal Aref who had -- he confessed -- opposed the idea vehemently for the past 15 years. However, he had changed his mind, he wrote, because the statue had been destroyed in the 1956 Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, but the younger generations were not aware of that, or of the attempts to disfigure the history of the nation and the significance of Egypt's regaining the Suez Canal.
"The statue will be -- undoubtedly -- destroyed again. And younger generations will know a side of the story kept from them about how Egypt was pillaged for decades, how it regained its independence, liberated its land and restored its fortunes, and about how we used the money from the regained canal to build the High Dam and hundreds of factories.... Let the de Lesseps statue return, then, to give us a chance to destroy it once more."
Inside, the paper devoted a two-page spread in the same issue to discussing the suggestion, rejected by many, of the association of de Lesseps with European imperialism. De Lesseps should not be treated as a national hero was the main argument put forward by opponents of re-erecting his statue in Port Said.
