Egypt:
A Social And
Political Tinderbox
By Jean Shaoul
30 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
Last week’s collision between
two trains on a busy route packed with workers travelling into Cairo
for work from the poorer northern outskirts of the city has exposed
the social and political relations within Egypt today.
At least 58 people were killed
and 143 injured in the crash that occurred when a stationary train at
Qalyoub station was hit by another travelling at 50 miles an hour, which
caught fire after derailing. There were long delays before the emergency
services arrived.
If the response of the ambulance
and fire services was slow, that of the security forces was not. The
government despatched 15 trucks of riot police to the scene in anticipation
of the protests and riots by furious passengers and relatives that have
erupted at other such disasters. At one point, an angry crowd began
accusing the government of negligence and corruption.
The transport minister, Mohammed
Mansour, immediately sacked the railways chief executive, suspended
his deputy, and announced US$860 million worth of investment in the
railways plus another US$600 million in loans and an inquiry into the
cause of the crash, in an attempt to deflect criticisms from the government.
Underfunding and privatisation
The August 21 train crash
may have been accidental, but it was neither unexpected nor without
cause. Egypt’s transport infrastructure is dilapidated, horrendously
overcrowded and dangerously unsafe after decades of underinvestment.
Signalling systems, which lay at the heart of this accident, are out
of date. Third-class carriages are so overcrowded that some passengers
even travel in the overhead luggage compartments.
There have been three major
train crashes since February. The same month, a ferry sank in the Red
Sea killing about 1,000 people in one of the worst accidents at sea
in recent years. According to a parliamentary investigation, this was
the direct result of flouting the most basic safety precautions and
official corruption reaching up to the highest levels. The owner of
the ship, Mamdouh Ismail, a government-appointed member of the upper
house and the ruling national Democratic party of President Hosni Mubarak,
fled the country to escape prosecution. He reportedly had the assistance
of top officials concerned that a trial would lead to politically damaging
revelations of Ismail’s operations and his high-level connections.
By far, the worst rail accident
took place just a week earlier when a train caught fire killing at least
373 people because there were no emergency exits in the third-class
compartments. Carriages built to take 150 people were holding 300 at
the time of the fire.
According to a report released
by the Egyptian Ministry of Transport last November, 6,000 people are
killed each year as a result of road accidents, with another 30,000
people injured. Egypt has some of the highest road accident rates in
the world, and road accident fatalities are the second major cause of
avoidable death after heart disease.
The decay of Egypt’s
limited infrastructure is bound up with the government’s implementing
of the diktats of the international financial institutions: the privatisation
of state-owned enterprises and public land, banking bailouts, slashing
taxes for the rich, eliminating nearly all subsidies on basic commodities,
and the introduction of user charges for essential public services such
as schools and healthcare.
The government has built
prestige projects. Dreamland and other opulent suburbs are just minutes
away from downtown Cairo via new expressways for the wealthy, and tourist
resorts on the Red Sea display levels of wealth few Egyptians could
ever experience. A family outing to Dreampark, the amusement park in
Dreamland, costs more than a month’s average wages.
The state has subsidised
the bankers, speculators and property developers, while the army too
has taken part in the construction boom, building new luxury enclaves
for the officer elite. These projects have come to symbolise the Mubarak
regime’s economic priorities, with its emphasis on prestigious
development projects while the country’s poor majority go without
jobs, decent transport and their most basic material needs.
While Egypt’s economy
grew at 6 percent last year, the fastest pace in years, there is little
sign of it in the poor suburbs and crowded slums of the capital.
Al Jazeera reports that market
traders complain of slow trade and public sector workers say their wages
do not support their families, while young boys in Cairo’s squalid
slums sift through rubbish looking for items such as broken coat hangers
for less than a US$1 a day amid the stench of rotting household waste.
Eben school teachers take home less than US$2 a day, while soup kitchens
have become commonplace.
The official rate of unemployment
is 10 percent, but most people believe that it is more than double that.
With more than half the 70 million population under the age of 30, 700,000
new jobs are needed every year. Half of all young people are believed
to be either unemployed or underemployed, while women are particularly
badly affected. The privatisation of state-owned lands in the rural
areas has created destitute agrarian workers who have flocked to the
cities in search of work.
Rising oil prices have increased
the price of fuel and diesel, creating enormous hardship among the poor.
Economic and political tensions mount
These levels of deprivation
and social inequality could only have been accomplished with the backing
of the US, which has given Egypt $2 billion a year in military and economic
aid, second only to Israel, since the peace deal it struck with Israel
in 1979. Such support has been crucial to holding the working class
of the most populous Arab country in the region in check by means of
the most brutal repression.
Mubarak’s regime is
little more than a front for the military. His first act on coming to
power more than 25 years ago was to declare a state of emergency. It
has remained in force ever since, providing the legal basis for arbitrary
detention, trials before military and security courts, the banning of
demonstrations and public rallies, strict press censorship, the routine
hounding of journalists, and making it a criminal offence to “engage
in political or union activities reserved for political parties or syndicates.”
According to Human Rights
Watch, about 15,000 people have been kept in long-term detention without
trial or even charges being laid against them, while car bomb attacks
on tourists since October 2004 have led to additional mass arrests and
arbitrary detentions. The Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights (EOHR)
reported 292 known torture cases between January 2003 and April 2004,
with at least 17 additional cases of death in police or security force
custody.
Targets of government repression
have not only included the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists,
but leftists, liberal democrats, feminists, gay men, intellectuals,
Coptic Christians and human rights activists. Socialist publications
and organisations are banned.
The army and security forces,
which number nearly a million, act with impunity. A government official
told Human Rights Watch that the government had not conducted a single
criminal investigation of the security forces for torture or ill-treatment
in the past 19 years or imposed any disciplinary measures, despite numerous
credible allegations of serious abuse in custody.
But Mubarak’s role
as one of the US’s most important strategic and political allies
in the Middle East, far from strengthening the regime, has compounded
its isolation from the broad mass of the population.
The US-backed Israeli military
assault on Gaza and Lebanon, Washington’s intervention in Afghanistan
and Iraq along with its “extraordinary rendition” programme
are all bitterly opposed by working people, as is Egypt’s own
role in policing its border with Gaza against the Palestinians.
Mubarak stood by while Israel
mounted an air, sea and land blockade, invaded Gaza and destroyed its
infrastructure, killed civilians and conducted house-to-house searches,
ostensibly seeking the soldier captured by militant oppositionists.
He closed Egypt’s border with Gaza, leaving the Palestinians no
means of escaping from Israel’s unrelenting bombardment of their
homes and the mounting humanitarian catastrophe.
He had also indirectly condemned
Hezbollah’s seizure of the two Israeli soldiers, thereby providing
crucial cover for Israel’s criminal war against Lebanon. Mubarak
hoped that if Israel were able to inflict a crushing military defeat
on Hezbollah, it would strengthen his position in the region vis-à-vis
Iran and Syria, and reduce popular support for Islamists at home. He
even refused to take the most elementary diplomatic measure of recalling
Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv as a sign of protest toward Israeli
aggression against Lebanon.
While totally dependent upon
US imperialism, too overt an accommodation by the ruling military clique
to the White House’s diktats threatened a political explosion
in a country where social tensions have reached boiling point. The month-long
war in Lebanon saw demonstrations and clashes with riot police as protesters
demanded the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador from Egypt, the
recall of Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv and the boycott of
trade with Israel.
Mubarak made a tactical adaptation,
eventually calling for a ceasefire, whilst continuing to blame Hezbollah
for Lebanon’s misery. He also turned down a US request to host
talks on the war in Sharm el Sheik (these were held in Rome instead).
Fully cognisant of the fact that the war is not about the destruction
of Hezbollah but the complete subjugation of Lebanon and its transformation
into a US-Israeli protectorate, Mubarak refused to mount any challenge
to the US-Israeli proposals to send an international force to police
southern Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah, although he did refuse to participate
in such a force.
Independent socialist policy required
There are indications that
the massive opposition to the war is beginning to coalesce with social
and political demands that fundamentally threaten not only Mubarak but
the entire Arab bourgeoisie.
Thus far, this has found
only partial and distorted expression.
The largest opposition group,
the illegal but semi-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood, made electoral gains
in the elections last year on the basis of its anti-corruption campaign
and its provision of welfare services that form a vital safety net for
millions of workers and their families.
In the last few years, the
regime had begun to relax its restrictions on the Brotherhood in attempt
to shore up its own Islamic credentials and outflank its opponents.
This has proven something of a double-edged sword. When the Brotherhood
seemed set to make a strong showing in the local elections, Mubarak
postponed them so as to preempt an electoral disaster for his own National
Democratic Party and prevent the Brotherhood from qualifying to run
its own candidate for the next presidential election.
However, the Muslim Brotherhood
has a long history of opposing workers’ struggles and has extensive
investments of its own in land and property and supports the broad thrust
of Mubarak’s economic policies and his emphasis on the free market.
None of the liberal opposition
parties such as the Wafd and the Ghad, whose leader Aymain Nour is in
jail on trumped-up fraud charges, have a mass base. They all espouse
similar economic policies, and all seek to curry favour with the Bush
administration.
The Kifaya organisation formed
in 2004 and made up of liberals, Islamists, ex-Stalinists and Nasserists,
has tried to jump on the so-called democratic “colour” revolutions
of Ukraine and Georgia, which were backed by the US.
This only underscores the
bankruptcy of Mubarak’s ostensible opponents. For the US policy
of “regime change” carried out in the former Soviet republics,
as with that implemented in Afghanistan and Iraq, has nothing to do
with establishing democracy but rather with consolidating the geopolitical
domination of US imperialism across the world. And in Egypt, as elsewhere,
its target would be the working class and poor.
A progressive solution to
war and oppression can only be found through the development of an independent
political movement aimed at the creation of a United Socialist States
of the Middle East. This would remove the artificial boundaries imposed
by imperialism and enable the valuable resources of the region to be
used for the benefit its peoples.