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Sewage Street story
Why now?
It is a question being asked in tones of anger and frustration by a great many people. And the reason behind their bewilderment at the sudden eruption of terrorist incidents in Egypt after years of calm should be obvious to all. For, however seriously -- or not -- we take the harbingers of Egypt's democratic spring, even the most pessimistic acknowledge that there is something new in the air, that decades of suffocating political stagnation might, just might, be coming to an end.
However sceptical one may be about the real extent of reform encapsulated in the proposal to amend Article 76 of the constitution -- allowing for multi-candidate presidential elections -- there should be little doubt in that it represents a crack, a potentially devastating fissure, in at least one plank of a hitherto sacrosanct, if anachronistic, authoritarian constitution. The presidential elections may, as many critics suggest, in the end deliver little more than the old wine repackaged in a new bottle. But the simple fact that a few of the more serious opposition parties are being allowed to put up presidential candidates cannot help but enliven the political and ideological debate, opening up new vistas to a public demoralised by having been stuck for decades in the same old scene.
And while it is true that the increasingly vociferous tone of anti-government opposition during recent months has been confined to what is, ultimately, a narrow political and intellectual elite with little or no popular base, the mere fact this elite feels it can voice its criticisms in such unprecedented terms is significant. Such boldness is contagious, encouraging more and more groups to join the fray.
The revival of street politics -- however limited, however heavily under siege -- was helping to create a new climate in the country, a climate in which other sections of the population were being encouraged to make their own entrances on the political stage, shyly, hesitantly perhaps, but entrances nonetheless. It may have been too early to celebrate a nascent political vitality that remains, for now, too feeble and limited to convince that democracy is finally within our grasp. One thing, though, is sure. Acts of terror are guaranteed to set the whole process back. Hence the urgent question: Why now?
That Cairo should have been the scene of three terrorist operations in less than a month is worrying enough. Far more frightening, though, than the rapid-fire recurrence and the targeting of tourists is the extreme youth of the perpetrators, the horrifying amateurishness of their attacks. There are millions just like them, inhabiting the depths of poverty and hopelessness, suicidal and desperate. The utter misery of their lives need not be so graphically symbolised, as in the case of the Yassin family, by their living on Sharia Al-Magary -- or Sewage Street.
The culprits are, in a sense, victims, though to reduce them to such, to make them exclusively victims reflects only the deep-seated contempt in which the intellectual and political class actually holds the poor and disenfranchised, viewing them alternately as a docile mindless mass and a blind force of seething, pent-up anger. The poor are objects, with no minds of their own. They are to be pacified, kept down, manipulated, distracted or incited. They are never perceived as subjects capable of making choices.
But the Yassins and their group -- in setting out on their murderous mission -- were making a choice, however destructive and evil. It was a desperate choice, but it seemed the most attractive choice on offer.
Those responsible for limiting the horizons of people like the Yassins to the extent that death becomes preferable to living are manifold. They include the security bodies that the first annual report of the National Human Rights Council, established by none other than the president, portrays as an extra-legal force on the rampage, responsible for wholesale roundups involving thousands, the routine torture, and sometimes killing, of suspects, including women and children taken as hostages. Need I say that the bulk of their victims are the poor and disenfranchised?
The security forces are ably aided and abetted by the contributions of the political and intellectual classes, both in government and opposition. Have they not contributed to the Yassins' murderous choice by waxing poetic over, or rationalising away, the equally murderous choices of Bin Laden and the video butchers of Iraq? Have they not -- through official, opposition and independent media -- left millions of young Egyptians prey to the internet-disseminated drivel of militant Islamism? In using religion as the ultimate distraction, they have made religious trivia the paramount subject of discussion. And what of their crude populist propaganda, the imminent threat to Islam, this war on Muslims that nonchalantly weaves fact and fiction to create a Muslim flip-side to the neo-conservatism of Bush and his cronies?
What are the effects of incessantly celebrating death, of constructing vengeance and self-destruction as the only option available to the oppressed and disempowered? Busy squabbling over the terms and scope of political reform, has anyone given a thought to the people who live on Sewage Street? Does anyone try to make reform relevant to them? Does anyone make the least effort to engage with them? Is anyone interested in helping them find their own way onto the political stage?
That groups of fanatical, desperate and poorly-educated adolescents can hold a nation's future hostage is outrageous. But they can, and will continue to sprout like so many mushrooms as long as we have security bodies that roundup and torture people in their thousands, and an intellectual and political class that is unwilling to ponder, let alone accommodate, the lives of millions of Egyptians, or to perceive them as anything more than objects of manipulation.
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