“Holy shit!” I thought. The president of Egypt, in power for 28 years and with no vice president is dead!? The biggest news in Egypt–and I learn about it from a Facebook group? (I started to feel guilty for sleeping until afternoon.) But with a little bit of quick research I realized that reports Mubarak’s death were premature In fact, it’s almost definitely not true and its viability as a rumor is due–unsurprisingly–to shoddy Internet journalism. (The Egyptian president has been in a German hospital for over a week after having his gallbladder and some “benign tissue” removed.)

The whole experience, even if it only lasted about four minutes, got me thinking: What if Mubarak really had died? The implications would be tremendous in ways that I can’t even imagine–soldiers in the streets, riots, an internal power struggle, a quiet military coup, who knows?

But one very obvious (and serious) effect of Mubarak’s death would be seen on the Egyptian economy.

This reminded me an article I’d read in Reuters a few days prior. “Egypt’s political stability turning into liability?” the headline asked.

The Reuters story, being for a business audience, naturally focused on the economic implications of Mubarak’s 28-year-long dictatorship. But these-not human rights violations-are perhaps the most likely to affect change in the international politics that help keep Mubarak in power.

“The stable political outlook has obviously long been something that has been identified as an advantage for Egypt,” Reuters quotes some financial wonk saying. “Now, as the presidential succession is approaching, there has been obviously more uncertainty, and this uncertain political outlook has turned into somewhat of a disadvantage.”

Egypt is often heralded as a great place for international business. The International Monetary Fund consistently champions Egypt’s liberal economic reforms and its friendliness to foreign investment. GDP growth has been consistently high in recent years. (Of course very little of this reaches the majority of Egyptians, who have gotten poorer over the past 20 years, but that’s a topic for another day.)

It is not just Mubarak’s economic policies that make the country attractive, it is that under this dictatorship there is confidence among foreign capitalists that Mubarak’s policies will continue to drive Egypt. With Mubarak, investors have a government they can trust will stay the same way for a long time. In Italy, Berlusconi’s pro-business government could fall at any time and the left coalition could take over. In Egypt? Not gonna happen.

But with the president a few months past his 81st birthday and in the hospital for a week with a gallbladder removal (is that a normal thing for old people?), things are starting to look a little more risky. Sure there are most likely plans in place to install Hosni’s even more pro-business son Gamal on the presidential throne, but what if it doesn’t work? What if the Muslim Brotherhood takes power and imposes Islamic financial restrictions on the country? That’s unlikely, but it’s worth keeping in mind back on Wall Street and in Dubai.

The financial situation, of course, mirrors the political one. A number of countries, in particular the United States and Israel, are deeply invested in the Mubarak regime for regional political stability. They, perhaps more so than investors who can move money around relatively quickly, have committed themselves to the continuing “success” of the Mubarak regime.

Right now Mubarak is only dead on Facebook and Twitter. Investors can stay confident in their money that is being plowed into luxury housing on the Mediterranean Coast or natural gas exploration in the desert. For now, at least.

Photo courtesy of the World Economic Forum on Flickr.

Or maybe it’s not meant to be ironic. Police play a crucial role in this country, which is, for all intents and purposes, a police state. The government wants to celebrate the police for making Egypt the country that it is today.

On Police Day Eve (I’m probably the only person who called it that), the Middle East director for Human Rights Watch spoke at a press conference in Cairo unveiling a report on the state of human rights in the region in 2009. The title was “Egypt and Libya: A Year of Serious Abuses.” Implicated in many of these abuses are the police and other security forces.

While it isn’t the worst in the region–Syria’s Bashar al-Assad rules with a fist so iron that even Facebook can barely squeeze in–the security services have tremendous power in this country. Egypt has been under “emergency law” since President Hosni Mubarak came to power in 1981 after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Among other things, the emergency law permits indefinite detention without trial, preserves the government’s right to try civilians in military courts, and prohibits gatherings of more than five people. Naturally, the state of emergency gives broad powers to the security services.

The main purpose of the police and security forces here in Egypt is to protect the regime. Police arrest the regime’s opponents regularly. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most popular and best organized opposition movement, had over seven hundred of its members in jail as of last March, according to the Human Rights Watch report. Dissidents are often arrested under ridiculous pretenses. Bloggers, in particular, suffer under the yoke of Egypt’s police state. The most notorious case is that of Kareem Amer, a blogger who criticized the government and religious institutions for discrimination against women and inciting sectarianism. Amer has been in jail for four years and is not even allowed visits from his lawyers.

When activists hold political demonstrations, the government responds with an overwhelming show of force. Within minutes hundreds of riot police arrive on the scene, cordon off the area of the protest, and, frequently, beat on protesters. American and European pro-Palestine activists learned this lesson the hard way when they staged demonstrations in Cairo last month. They seemed surprised.

But one doesn’t have to be a dissident or an activist to feel the heavy hand of Hosni Mubarak’s police force. General thuggery abounds. To fill quotas, police will sweep a neighborhood and arrest dozens of young men, hoping that one of them will have his documents out of order or a chunk of hash in his pocket. People disappear for weeks at a time into police stations, where they are beaten or suffer other forms of torture.

This is not a secret. Stories of abuse and torture appear daily in the local independent press. In the past few years there have been several cases of police throwing people from windows. In July 2008, police apprehended a borderline mentally disabled man and, after accusing him of soliciting a prostitute, beat him so severely that he had bleeding in his brain, his shoulder and neck were fractured, and his left arm paralyzed.

Think Giuliani’s New York City times a thousand.

As a foreigner living here, I have very little occasion to deal with the police here. Foreigners are largely off-limits for the security services-unless they do something really bad like talk about Gaza. Even then, the punishment is light by Egyptian standards.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m shielded from it completely. It’s not uncommon to see a police officer grabbing some dude by the collar and screaming at him in the middle of a sidewalk, sometimes going as far as punching him in the face. Occasionally, trucks full of police officers will tear through an open-air market kicking over people’s stalls and stealing goods. A friend of mine told me her landlord informed her that the secret police had been lurking around the apartment building trying to figure out who the foreigner was. Another friend, who volunteers with street children, says that a few weeks ago one of the kids was randomly arrested by the police and hasn’t been heard from since.

Moreover, cops are everywhere in this city. You can’t turn a corner without seeing a police officer. Gigantic boxy trucks packed with cops rumble through the streets day and night. Plainclothes police are ubiquitous.

So what does Egypt do to celebrate Police Day? CNN’s Cairo correspondent suggested on Twitter that “the president will be giving a ‘golden cow prod’ and a ’silver broomstick’ on police day to Cairo’s best.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so scary.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user 3arabawy.

Last week, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Egypt is building an underground wall to prevent smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza. The tunnels are used to transport everything from livestock to motorcycles to weapons into Gaza, which has been under blockade since the Islamist militant group Hamas took control of the Strip in June 2007. Egypt has cooperated with the blockade by keeping its border with Gaza closed. The tunnels are illegal and periodically bombed by Israel.

Egypt has justified the construction of the metal by way of an editorial in a state-run newspaper that said, “They forget that the smuggling of weapons through tunnels under the Sinai is a direct assault on Egypt’s sovereignty — on the legitimacy of the state.” The Foreign Minister has said that Egypt will do whatever it needs to in order to protect itself.

Egypt’s security is not the main issue in Egypt’s decision to block the tunnels or take part in the Israeli-led blockade on Gaza. Ostensibly, it’s possible that an open border with Gaza could allow a free flow of Hamas militants into Sinai, which they could then use as a base to fire rockets at Israel, something along the lines of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. This could be a potentially disastrous scenario in which Israel bombs Egyptian territory to stop rockets aimed at its soil.

But this doesn’t seem like the real reason behind the underground anti-tunnel wall, or for that matter, Egypt’s aid in the blockade. Rather it seems that these policies are at the urging of Egypt’s patron: The United States.

Reports on the underground wall all indicate that the project comes at the behest of the United States. One newspaper even said that the Army Corps of Engineers is involved in the wall’s construction. At the same time, the US pressures Egypt to maintain the blockade in order to help achieve Israeli policy goals. With Egypt receiving about over a billion dollars in aid from the United States every year (the second largest recipient after Israel) it doesn’t have much choice but to comply.

The Egyptian government’s decision to ban the Gaza Freedom March, on the other hand, is a little less simple.

The Gaza Freedom March is a non-violent protest scheduled to begin on December 27 in Egypt and culminate in the Gaza Strip on January 1. The aim of the march, which comes on the one-year anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, is to draw attention to the plight of Gaza’s population. The omnipresent, pink-shirted, anti-war group CODEPINK is one of the major sponsors, but a number of other organizations are also involved. An 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Britain’s uber-solidarity MP George Galloway, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd will all be attending, in addition to 1,300 others. They are hoping to go through the Egypt-Gaza border crossing, presumably walking right past-or on top of-the tunnels and the wall.

Yesterday Egypt announced that it was banning the Gaza Freedom March. The reason given by the Egyptian government was the “sensitive situation on the border area.” The government is warning that “any attempts to violate the law or public order by any group whether local or foreign on Egyptian soil will be dealt with in conformity with the law.”

The situation is not much more sensitive now than it was a month ago, when plans for the march were proceeding apace. The only thing that has changed the status quo is construction of the underground wall. Hamas supporters have launched protests at the main border crossing with Egypt. A member of the Palestinian Legislative Council said that the wall is “a sign of an impending attack on Gaza by Israel.”

Egypt doesn’t want the solidarity protesters to enter Gaza through the Egyptian border simply because it draws attention to the border’s existence. Cairo was once the focal point of Arab nationalism and Egyptians still celebrate their almost-victory against Israel in 1973. Israel is widely despised throughout Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. That the Egyptian government is perceived as a collaborator in the Israeli siege of Gaza puts it in an uncomfortable position. That Egypt has no choice but to collaborate because of what America dictates makes for an even more uncomfortable position.

Egypt’s solution has been to deflect attention from the Gaza border as much as possible. State security forces regularly break up pro-Gaza protests. At least two foreigners who attended such pro-Gaza events have been deported. The Gaza Freedom March and the new underground wall draw attention to one of Egypt’s most embarrassing issues.

If they could make the border disappear, they surely would.

Photo courtesy of Flickr User piersonr, used through a Creative Commons license. This is actually a photo of a portion of the above-ground wall, which was breached a few weeks after the end of Operation Cast lead last year.

Many of Cairo’s upscale restaurants, bars, and nightclubs more or less forbid the entry of women who wear the hijab, or headscarf. This is something of an open secret here in Egypt, but it often comes as a shock to foreigners.

Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition (which, in the interest of full disclosure, is where I am employed) recently published a long article on the hijab ban at bars and restaurants. You can read it here. It gives you a good idea of what the ban is about, how it functions, and what people think of it. What I find most interesting, particularly as an American living in here, is the way that Egyptians react to the hijab ban.

While nightclubs in the United States have dress codes, one that targets members of a specific religion would, I suspect, be seen as discriminatory and probably ruled illegal. Of course, when the discrimination targets the majority of the population, the dynamic changes.

My reading of the hijab ban-and I know it’s dangerous to venture too far into armchair sociology-is that it helps secular Egyptians to maintain a few spaces for themselves in a country that has over the past few years become increasingly religious. Egypt’s turn towards religiosity over the past decade is well documented in scholarship and journalism, and the reasons behind the trend are varied and hard to pin down. The effect is that secular Egyptians are a now a minority, though an elite one. Like minorities often do, they feel threatened.

I suspect that non-religious Egyptians want to maintain spaces where they can still be the majority. According to a popular narrative, fifty years ago Cairo was replete with elegant restaurants and nightclubs full of well-dressed men and women. Cairo, people like to say, used to rival Paris. Or something. But populist economic policies and migration from the rural areas changed the character of the city.

Even if this is not exactly what happened, it is how people feel. So secular Egyptians perceive themselves as a minority in what should rightfully be their own country. To assert a sense of control they try to maintain spaces for themselves. There are other dynamics at play, of course, namely classism. This is elitism but the debate over the head scarf in Egypt, as in Europe, offers a good view into the complex dynamics of the society.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon.

Egypt lost. The score was 1-0, and honestly, the Algerians played a better game. After the match, according to numerous reports, Algerian thugs attacked Egyptian fans in Sudan. Some Egyptian newspapers reported that Egyptians had been killed. More specifically, they wrote that Egyptians had been stabbed with machetes. That story seems to have been dropped, but there was clearly violence after the game.

The football war continues. On Thursday night, almost a whole week after the game,  angry fans gathered outside the Algerian embassy. When I was there early in the night, before the real rioting started, there were a few hundred angry Egyptian youth chanting, what literally translates to, “Hey Algeria! Yo mama’s pussy!” but functions more like, “Hey Algeria! Fuck you!” Either way, you get the point.

Later in the night these same fans, apparently bolstered by a few hundred more hooligans, scuffled with Egypt’s notoriously efficient riot police, throwing rocks and punches. They also, in typical rioting form, smashed the windows of local businesses. It was widely viewed as stupid hooliganism, but it’s indicative of the national mood here.

Local newspapers have featured cartoons depicting Algerians with bloody knives in place of their mustaches. The Cairo International Film Festival, which ended on Sunday, decided to exclude Algerian films from the Arab film competition. Many Egyptians have changed their Facebook profiles to show an Algerian flag with a foot stepping on it. Algeria Street in the Cairo neighborhood of Mohandiseen will become Shehata Street, after Mohamed Shehata, the coach of the national soccer team.

President Hosni Mubarak joined the fray in a speech before both houses of parliament on Saturday in which he underscored the importance of “Egyptian dignity” both at home and abroad.

A cab driver yesterday was thrown off by my strange accent and asked if I was Algerian. I told him I’m not and he said that’s good because if he meets an Algerian he will kill him. Just in case I was confused he picked up a sharp piece of metal that happened to be in the cup holder next to him and dragged it across his throat.

Where this intense nationalism and jingoism comes from is unclear. Off of the soccer field, Egypt and Algeria have had friendly diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations.There’s a long history of cooperation between the two countries, including Egyptian support in Algeria’s war of independence in the 1950s.

The local media in both countries is certainly to blame to a certain extent. They have amped up hostilities with sensationalist headlines and unconfirmed rumors. And why wouldn’t they? This kind of news sells. The governments of both countries, which are probably happy to have all this anger directed at foreign countries than their own corrupt authoritarian regimes, also probably deserve some of the blame.

If that still doesn’t seem like a complete explanation, it’s because it isn’t. The entire response to this soccer rivalry is absurd. It may represent a larger anger that is simmering beneath the surface of these countries, but that’s difficult to speculate about. Here in Cairo the riots are over now, but it doesn’t seem like the jingoistic backlash will stop any time soon.

When it comes to soccer, Egypt and Algeria have a rivalry that seems better suited to North and South Korea than to two otherwise friendly North African Arab states. To make it to the World Cup, Egypt had to win the soccer game by three goals, a nearly impossible task. To force a play-off, they had to win by two, which still seemed unlikely.

The war started in September when Algerian hackers attacked Egyptian websites, including that of Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt. Since then, media in the two countries have been trading barbs, with the Algerians accusing Egypt of cheating in earlier games and Egyptians reciprocating with similar accusations.

When the Algerian team arrived in Cairo, their bus was pelted with stones and glass bottles as it made its way from the airport to their hotel. Two Algerian players ended up in the hospital because of the attack. An investigation by the Egyptian government claimed that the Algerians had broken the windows themselves and faked their injuries. I’m skeptical, especially considering that the next day an enthusiastic teenaged waiter told me proudly that he had been among those throwing bottles.

The night before the game the Algerian embassy was under heavy police supervision. Cars with Egyptian flags waving from their windows drove around the embassy in circles and honked their horns in a victorious rhythm.

I went to watch the all-important match with some friends in a pedestrian neighborhood in downtown Cairo that is lined with coffee shops. Several large screens projected the game to the hundreds, maybe thousands, of fans who wanted to watch the game in a crowd but couldn’t make it into the stadium. (The stadium holds some seventy thousand people, but the line for tickets lasted hours and prices doubled or tripled when they hit the black market.)

The fans waved flags, banged on drums, and, inexplicably, employed flamethrowers made from bottles of hairspray. (This is apparently a common practice during soccer games in Egypt.) I arrived an hour before the game and the energy level barely modulated the entire time. People were pumped.

When the game finally started, Egypt scored within the first five minutes. It seemed like a miracle. Maybe they actually would win by the three points necessary for them to qualify for the World Cup. Then the rest of the game proceeded like soccer games so often do. The excitement dropped off slightly.

At the halfway point I was tempted by the prospects of a beer, a comfortable seat, and no ten-year-olds hovering over my shoulders and I left the crowded pedestrian area for a crowded but considerably more comfortable hotel bar. The game continued tediously. By the end of the second half I was convinced that the match would end in the least exciting of possible outcomes: Egypt would win, but not by a margin big enough for them to qualify for the world cup.

Then, in the last five minutes of the game, the Egyptians scored again. The bar erupted. Grown men kissed the waiters and stood on chairs chanting, “Oh God!” and “Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!”

I left the bar and followed the crowds in the street as they made their way through downtown Cairo. Fans climbed on top of the statue of proto-nationalist leader Talaat Harb in the middle of the eponymous traffic circle and waved the Egyptian flag. Men and women danced in celebration. “Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!” everyone chanted. A group of young men put a flag down in the middle of the street and touched their foreheads to it in an imitation of Muslim prayer.

The only time I’d seen that kind of mass euphoria was in Oberlin when Barack Obama won the election. The only difference being that there are only three thousand Oberlin students, whereas there are twenty million Cairenes. And Oberlin students are more inclined to public nudity.

The celebrations moved through the city and into Tahrir Square, the focal point of Cairo’s traffic. The streets were blocked with revelers beating drums, chanting, waving flags, standing on cars, and spraying fire from aersol cans. There I ran into an Egyptian friend who is a socialist. His reaction was mixed. He was happy about his country’s victory, but he was put-off by the spectacle in the streets. “If we had just a tenth of these people here protesting something, that would be the fucking revolution,” he told me.

Every few minutes a big truck of riot police rumbled through the crowd. The soldiers in the cage cheered along with the celebrators but their presence seemed to be there to remind the revelers that they could be quickly dispersed if the government decided it was time. But for now it didn’t matter. Everyone was just happy to be moving on to the next round.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/egypt/2009/11/17/73/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/egypt/2009/11/03/egypts-deadly-infrastructure-problems/ http://thefastertimes.com/egypt/2009/11/03/egypts-deadly-infrastructure-problems/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:13:31 +0000 Max Strasser http://thefastertimes.com/egypt/?p=60 Eighteen people died and dozens more were injured when two trains collided on the outskirts of Cairo last week. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. It fits into a pattern of deadly accidents in Egypt caused by poor safety standards and ill planning.

The most dramatic train accident in recent memory occurred in 2002 when a packed train car caught on fire because a passenger was using a gas stove. Over three hundred people died. In August 2006 two passenger trains collided killing fifty-seven people. A few weeks later there was another accident that killed five. The problem, it seems, is systematic.

But train accidents aren’t Egypt’s only problem. Infrastructure as a whole is failing. And the results are often deadly.

Last year, a landslide in Duweiqa, a Cairo shantytown, killed over a hundred. (An internal investigation recently decided that the landslide was “fate” and no one would be held responsible.) At the beginning of September a sinkhole opened up in a downtown neighborhood, swallowing three cars and forcing dozens of people out of their homes.

Even on a less calamitous level there are serious failures of government services. Because of the slaughter of Egypt’s pigs last May and a dispute between the government and European sanitation companies, garbage has been accumulating at a dizzying pace in Cairo’s streets.

Signs of failing infrastructure are everywhere in Egypt. Sidewalks are busted into chunks; electrical wires are frayed and exposed; street lights are burnt out or flickering. Sometimes this is just an inconvenience or a cosmetic shortfall. Sometimes it’s a bigger problem.

These problems, I believe, are a by-product of Egypt’s authoritarianism and its gigantic class divide. The people at the top of Mubarak’s regime aren’t particularly worried about train crashes because they travel around the country in chauffeured cars. They don’t notice if Giza is full of festering trash and don’t care if people in Duweiqa die in a landslide because they don’t live in those neighborhoods. They live in verdant, recently built, Boca Raton-like suburbs on the outskirts of Cairo. And they don’t have to worry about not being re-elected.

American democracy may not be perfect, but it generally forces leaders to take responsibility for problems. If a train catches on fire and three hundred people die, the blame will be pinned on someone. At the least, politicians have to feign concern.

Potholes are the archetypical issue in American local politics. Mayors and city council people are re-elected or voted out of office based on their ability to get potholes filled. If they want to keep their cushy jobs, then they need to make sure the garbage gets picked up and the streetlights work. Not so in Egypt.

Politicians here, from the Minister of Transportation to the head of the city council, need only be on the good side of the regime if they want to keep their cushy government jobs. And hence, there is little motivation to take care of infrastructure.

The latest train crash may prove to be different. A few days after the accident, Minister of Transportation Mohamed Mansour resigned from his post. It was the first resignation of a minister since President Mubarak took office almost thirty years ago. It may signal a growing concern for the safety of average people. Egyptians who ride the train can only hope that it does.

The Campaign is a broad coalition of opposition groups including leftists, liberals, Islamists and Nasserists who, despite their ideological differences, have united around a single cause: Opposing the Gamal Mubarak’s ascension to the Egyptian presidency. In fact, that is the campaign’s only goal so far.

The Campaign is headed by Ayman Nour, a (sort of) charismatic character who ran for president in 2005 and was subsequently arrested on trumped up forgery charges. Nour was imprisoned and tortured for four years before being released on health grounds in 2009. Nour is the founder of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) Party and he has become a convenient face for the Egyptian opposition, particularly with Western politicians and media, who love Nour’s secular liberalism in a country where the strongest opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Gamal Mubarak’s presidency is seen as almost a done deal. Gamal is currently the head of the ruling National Democratic Party’s policy committee, firmly ensconcing him in the cabal that controls Egyptian politics. Many of the members of the current cabinet came from out of the NDP’s policy committee. Gamal hasn’t yet announced that he will run for the presidency, but he doesn’t need to. There are Facebook groups dedicated to promoting him. Last week the Coptic pope announced his support for Gamal’s presidency. Those who want to stay in the government’s favor are quickly lining up behind Mubarak Jr.

It’s unclear when Gamal would take over from his father. It was reported earlier this month that Hosni Mubarak has said he plans to rule until his “last breath.” But the president is eighty-one and rumored to be in poor in health. Also, presidential elections are scheduled for 2011 and some are starting to announce their candidacies. The handover could happen sooner than expected.

Many–possibly most–Egyptians don’t want Gamal Mubarak as their next president. The Campaign Against Presidential Succession seems like it should be successful. But it’s unlikely that it will be.

Over his twenty-eight years in office, Hosni Mubarak has become adept at crushing opposition. Imprisonment and harassment are expected. The Muslim Brotherhood, which is Egypt’s largest and best-organized opposition movement, has hundreds of its members in jail at any given time. Bloggers who speak out against the regime are regularly arrested and beaten. There’s not much room for dissent in Mubarak’s Egypt.

Moreover, there have been similar big-tent opposition groups in the past. In 2004 and 2005 a group called Kifaya, or Enough, emerged calling for democratic reforms. In fact, the movement directly called for Mubarak to step down, something that no one had done before during his presidency that begin in 1981. But after a batch of high profile protests and ensuing police harassment, the movement has largely fallen silent.

Last year, an online activist movement developed to protest the regime. The group, which called itself the 6 April Youth Movement used Facebook and Twitter to organize a national strike and open debate on the future of the regime. But after a series of arrests and beatings, this movement, too, fizzled out.

It seems entirely possible that the Egyptian Campaign Against Presidential Succession will suffer the same fate of past opposition movements. Maybe it won’t. Maybe the group will succeed in uniting the millions of Egyptians who don’t want to see their country become a hereditary dictatorship. But to do this the campaign will have to endure plenty of harassment from the state security services. Last week’s raids are only the beginning.

Welcome to Egypt, which is currently in the grip of an all-out swine flu panic, extreme even compared the worldwide hysteria.

The best known evidence of Egypt’s panic came last May when the government ordered the killing of a million pigs, ostensibly to control the spread of the disease. International media attention stopped thereafter, but Egypt’s seemingly insane public health policy did not.

In early September, just days after the start of the new academic year, the Ministry of Health ordered every school in Egypt closed for three weeks, from the American University in Cairo to the neighborhood primary schools. This extended vacation was billed as a means of containing the spread of the flu, though many wondered how delaying the school year would prevent the flu.

School is back in session now, but the hysteria continues. Students who are suspected - not necessarily confirmed - of having the flu at universities are quarantined. In the lower schools they are undertaking all sorts of other precautions, none of which make much sense. Some schools are dividing the week by gender, with boys attending classes three days a week and girls attending the other three days, presumably to control overcrowding. A Cairo theater festival announced that all performances would have ambulances on hand in the event that performers or audience members are overcome by swine flu. And of course there are the bouncers with thermometers.

To date there have been about a thousand cases of the flu in Egypt and three deaths. By comparison there have been so many reported cases in the United States that the Center for Disease control has stopped counting. It is estimated that over a million Americans have been infected and around 600 have died.

But it’s worth considering that Egypt is a poor country with a serious overcrowding problem. Many public schools lack running water in the bathrooms, so a hand washing campaign, which might seem like a more logical approach than school closures, wouldn’t really work. Furthermore, the majority of Egyptians lack access to adequate health care, so a virus could be particularly deadly here. Furthermore, Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. People live on top of each other here and flu could spread very, very quickly.

There’s another possibility, slightly more conspiracy minded, but certainly possible in this country with an authoritarian government that prioritizes maintaining its own power above all else: Swine flu is a distraction from politics. Encouraging panic helps deflect the populace’s attention from the fact that the elections are coming up in a year and the government is cracking down on opposition groups. It sounds far-fetched, perhaps, but not entirely implausible.

Regardless of the real reason is behind it, there are no signs that the hysteria will abate soon. So next time you go to a Cairo nightclub, put a cool cloth on your forehead if you want to be sure to get in.

The day is the anniversary of the start of the 1973 war with Israel, known in that country as the Yom Kippur War. (For now, let’s just put aside our reservations about celebrating the beginning of a war.) Very briefly: The 1973 war began on October 6 when the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal in an attack that took the Israelis by surprise. The Egyptians quickly made their way into Sinai, reclaiming land they had lost in the 1967 war. Three weeks later, after the United States provided Israel with a massive re-supply of arms, the war ended.

October 6 a national holiday, when everything is closed. Think Memorial Day, but with even fewer traditions. (No barbeques.)  Most people I talked to said it’s an excuse to stay out late the night before or do something fun with friends during a day off from work. Some people stay at home and watch TV movies about the 1973 war. But as a recent arrival in Cairo eager to take advantage of all the cultural opportunities the city has to offer, I wanted to find something special to do to mark the holiday. So I went to the October War Panorama, a museum-complex housed in a circular building between downtown Cairo and the airport.

En route to the panorama, I was greeted by men selling Egyptian flags. When I got to the gates it was packed with families. Children. Hundreds of Egyptian children standing in the heat, holding their mommies’ hands, waiting to get into the panorama compound. It felt more like a national field trip than a holiday. Vendors sold popcorn, iced cream, and hotdogs. A man at a table sold small pictures of Anwar Sadat dressed in full military garb next to photos of Egyptian movie stars. It was a pleasant carnival atmosphere, but not the main attraction.

The garden surrounding the panorama is an expansive area filled with military relics. On one side is a formation of Egyptian artifacts from the period-a Mig 17, a Howitzer of the kind used to shell the Bar Lev line, a Soviet-made tank. On the other side were Israeli memorabilia. A captured tank, a few large caliber guns, everything marked “Made in USA.” The tail of a felled Sky Hawk protruded from the ground, covered in Arabic graffiti. With little sense of history, children climbed over the military equipment. “Ahmad, no!” a father yelled at his son who tried to spin the wheels on an Egyptian fighter jet. Families posed for photos.  Between the opposing unmanned armies were four bronzed Egyptian soldiers in a rubber raft that was used to cross the Suez on October 6.

Inside the main attraction a narrator spoke in muffled Arabic, extolling the glories of the Egyptian army while the seating area spun around the circular room, passing by miniature tanks and battle scenes. A crumpled Hebrew newspaper lay in an abandoned foxhole. The walls, which had been painted with help of artists donated by North Korea, depicted scenes from the war. The show ended, there was some half-hearted clapping, and we all exited the panorama complex and returned to the Egypt of 2009.

No one mentioned that 15,000 Egyptians died during the 1973 war, far more than the 3,000 Israelis. No one mentioned that by the end of the war Israeli forces were within 150 kilometers of Cairo. And of course, no one mentioned that October 6 is also the anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s assassination.

But national holidays aren’t created to remember the bad. The early days of the 1973 war proved that Egypt was a military power that could rival Israel. It instilled a renewed confidence in the Egyptian military and it led to Egypt regaining control of the Sinai Peninsula. But even those details aren’t that important.

National holidays are about creating myths and fostering nationalism. That is why the panorama is perfect for children. When they drive over the 6 October Bridge or go to visit an uncle in 6 October City, somewhere in their minds they will recall victorious feeling of climbing over an Israeli tank or spinning the wheels on an Egyptian jet.

Photo by Paul Keller.