Attack on German Tourist Bus Bad Omen for Both Egyptian Government and Islamic Militants

By James J. Napoli

Tens of thousands of people and hundreds of cars and buses mill and wind through the sprawling enormity of Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo virtually 24 hours a day, every day. But on Thursday afternoons, which mark the end of the work week, the crush is particularly bad.

From a short distance across the square on the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 18, you would hardly notice one fire-blackened bus sitting in front of the Egyptian National Museum. You would have had to get up pretty close to see several charred bodies still on the floor hours after an attack on the bus by men with weapons—including at least one gun—and home-made petrol bombs.

Nine German tourists and the Egyptian driver were killed in the bus. Other Egyptians and foreign tourists were still gawking at, or snapping photos of, the scene long into the aftermath of the horrific conflagration.

"It's over, khalas! This will be the end of tourism in Cairo," said one Egyptian man who heard the explosion and gunfire while driving near the square at midday.

He may be right. There were some reported cancellations by tour companies in the following week. But the more general view is that tourism, one of Egypt's most important revenue sources, won't be seriously harmed so long as there is not another, similar incident very soon. Further violence against tourists now would make it more difficult to write off this attack as just an isolated incident instigated by a lunatic.

Government officials had been crowing about how they had effectively brought Islamic terrorism under control in Egypt, or at least managed to confine it to areas in the southern part of the country. It's to their advantage now to dismiss the murders in Tahrir Square as unconnected to any militant movement, as did both Information Minister Safwat El-Sherif and Tourism Minister Mamdouh El-Beltagi.

Two brothers, Saber and Mahmoud Abul-Ela Farahat, were captured by police at the scene of the attack, the beginning of an astonishing and constantly shifting story about what exactly happened. Early accounts were that three or four people were involved in the attack, and that not everyone had been captured. The latest story is that the brothers acted alone, perhaps in response to the action of the Israeli extremist who two months earlier had hung up posters in the West Bank town of Hebron depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a pig.

Saber Farahat, 32, a failed singer who had apparently turned in frustration to religious extremism, had lived with his family in a slum in the northeast part of Cairo called Ezbet El-Nakhl. He was arrested four years ago for shooting to death three foreigners and wounding three others in the five-star Semiramis Hotel only a few blocks away from the museum where the latest massacre took place.

No strong evidence has emerged to link any organized militant group to the attack.

He was put into Al-Khanka mental hospital. Reports now conflict about whether he was really insane or had only paid for a certificate saying that he was. In any case, he had left—or escaped from—the hospital three days before the bus attack. State security prosecutors have since ordered the arrest of five alleged accomplices, as well as three psychiatrists and six male nurses at the hospital.

One early speculation was that the attack was motivated by the recent decision of a military court to sentence four alleged Islamic militants to death and 68 others to long prison terms for bomb attacks on banks. Another was that the Germans were targeted because a Berlin court had ruled in April that some Iranian leaders were connected to the murder of four Kurdish Iranian dissidents in the German capital in 1992.

But no strong evidence has emerged to link the two brothers to any organized militant group in any way aside from shared, extreme religious views. Two important militant Islamic groups in Egypt, Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, have remained conspicuously silent about the attack on the tourist bus. And it has been denounced by the largest Islamist group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

In fact, some leaders of the Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad groups this past summer called for an end to violence against the regime in order to refocus their activities against Israel. Al-Gama'a reportedly gave up attacks against tourists after April 1996 when 18 Greek tourists, whom the assailants believed to be Israelis, were massacred.

Uncontrolled Passions

If the attack at the museum was not part of a larger campaign, however, the news is not an unalloyed good for either the Islamic groups or the government. It would illustrate in a spectacular and bloody way that they are not entirely in control of events, and that some of the passions abroad in Egypt cannot be easily contained or directed.

For instance, some analysts argue that the chronic bloodletting in Upper Egypt has more to do with a prevailing culture of vengeance than with any organized political or religious movement. That would help explain the stubborn persistence of violence despite tough police crackdowns on the militants. Further, the government is facing some dangerous economic crises in the coming months that could feed extremism by enlarging and deepening the mood of frustration among the poor.

Most imminent is the planned implementation this October of Law 96 of 1992 reversing land reforms initiated by Gamal Abdel Nasser decades ago. The controversial law would allow landlords to renegotiate existing agricultural leases with tenants or sell the land—essentially giving them the power to throw tenants off land they had tilled for many years. The idea is that large holdings in fewer hands—rather than tiny holdings in the hands of a multitude of farmers who are slow to change—could greatly increase crop production efficiency and export potential.

That's fine from an agribusiness point of view, but the futures of thousands of tenant farmers and their families are uncertain, if not bleak. Confrontations between farmers and riot troops, attacks on government agricultural cooperatives and arrests of peasants and political activists have already taken place ahead of the law's going into effect.

Two areas where the violence already has turned deadly are in the Fayoum and in Minya. Both are centers of Islamic militancy, and the government may have no more control over the passions unleashed there than it did over those of Saber Farahat and his brother.

James J. Napoli teaches journalism at the American University in Cairo.