Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1998, Pages 57, 93

Cairo Communique

Egyptians Get Economic and Environmental News to Cheer About

By James J. Napoli

Crowds of young men screaming “Allahu Akbar!” and waving Egyptian flags were marching across the El Tahrir bridge connecting downtown Tahrir Square with the island of Zamalek.

Drivers of blocked cars, trucks and buses were banging away at their horns, and passengers were yelling out their windows to add to the general din in the cool Cairo night.

But, for once, it was a happy din.

Unlike the Cairo demonstrations against the United States when it seemed that the superpower again was about to pulverize pipsqueak Iraq for not complying with U.N. Security Council resolutions on weapons inspections, this demonstration was celebratory.

On Feb. 28, Egypt’s national soccer squad had just delivered a stunning 20 blow to the favored South African team in Burkina Faso, thereby winning the African Nations’ Cup for the fourth time in 41 years. One measure of the victory’s importance was the fact that the Egyptian team was welcomed home at Cairo International Airport in the wee hours of the morning by none other than President Hosni Mubarak, accompanied by Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri and other top brass.

It was a much needed shot in the arm for Egypt, which has been down in the dumps in recent months, particularly since the slaughter of 58 foreign visitors by Islamic terrorists at one of the nation’s most prized tourist sites, the Hatshepsut temple in Luxor, last November.

Tension was added to depression as the U.S. British military built up for an attack on Iraq, prompting widespread condemnation in the Egyptian press and antiwar demonstrations at universities, the Khan El Khalili bazaar near AlAzhar mosque and even in front of the grim, fortress-like American Embassy in Garden City. American expatriates were bracing for Islamist groups to make good on threats to attack Western interests if the bombs should fall.

Thanks to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who negotiated a respite from the immediate threat of war, and to Mahmoud Al Gohari, who coached Egypt’s soccer squad to victory, the tension broke. And, at least for a while, Egyptians could feel good about things.

For the most part, Egyptians sup on a pretty steady diet of bad news and discouraging realities: terrorism, repressive police, poverty, overpopulation, creaky government bureaucracies, phony democracy, pollution and horrific problems in health care and education. But the big soccer victory was a happy reminder that things are not all bad all the time—and that positive developments were also taking place in Egypt.

At least for a while, Egyptians could feel good about things.

For one thing, although the Luxor massacre did devastate the $3 billion-plus tourist industry, there are some early signs of recovery. The London stock brokerage firm T. Hoare and Co. recently reported that the hotel occupancy rate in Egypt was slowly rising from the depths—although much of that rise may have been due to domestic tourism.

In early March, the ever optimistic, peripatetic Minister of Tourism Mamdouh El-Beltagui was leading yet another delegation—this one to the Berlin Tourism Bourse—to plump for Egypt among tourism organizations around the world.

A White Paper prepared by a group of security experts and international diplomats, including former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley, concluded that Egypt seemed to be doing a good job of tightening security at important tourist sites since the Luxor incident, which was a textbook case of poor planning and incompetence. The report came out in March, shortly after the U.S. State Department had lifted the travel advisory for Egypt that it had issued last November.

The White Paper was an initiative of Embrace Egypt, a group launched by Egyptian businessmen trying to draw attention to the security measures taken by Habib El Adly, who became interior minister following the resignation of Hassan El Alfi. El Alfi was publicly reprimanded by the president at the Luxor massacre site for its lax security.

Further, the economic effects of the drop in tourism may not be as broad as originally feared. The stock market, though down about 5 percent since Jan. 1, has not plunged precipitously. And organizations like the World Bank maintain that, despite the near collapse of the foreign tourist industry, the economy could still fare well if—a big “if”—Egypt sticks to its plans for economic reform and privatization.

Changing the Face of Egypt

Egypt also has big construction plans that could change the face of the country, most of whose history has been played out for thousands of years along the banks of the Nile. One project would divert water from the Nile into the Western Desert to create a new delta, bringing millions of acres of new land into cultivation, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs and drawing some three million people from the Nile Valley—at least in theory.

Another project would irrigate and develop vast tracts of the Sinai Desert.

These and other ambitious new schemes are fraught with technical, environmental and political problems. For instance, upriver countries like Sudan and Ethiopia are understandably wary about plans for massive diversions of the Nile that they themselves want to exploit more heavily—and it’s easy to conceive of their misgivings developing into confrontation. But for the moment, Egyptian officials and planners are flush with enthusiasm for visionary projects on a scale with the pyramids and the Aswan High Dam.

The country’s environmental problems are also getting some unwanted attention as Egypt’s sweeping environmental law, passed in 1994, finally went into implementation stage in March.

Nadia Makram Ebeid, the country’s first full time environment minister, promises to crack down hard on polluting industries, such as cement plants and lead smelters. The problem is that many of these plants are government owned, thus presenting a dilemma for enforcers: Will government have the will to close down government industries in the interest of the environment?

Some of the public, in any case, is taking the law seriously and residents of some rural areas are already filing environmental lawsuits to compel government enforcement of the sweeping new law, which is intended in 103 articles to clean up the country’s air, land and water, as well as protect the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. It also provides protection for wildlife, prohibiting, for example, the hunting of rare species of animal and birds.

The future won’t be all black if government proves itself in earnest about the greening of Egypt. And that would give the Egyptian public something to cheer about besides soccer.