Doaa El-Bey and Rasha Saad on why few people believe the official version of the death of a young Alexandrian and why Obama's relationship with the Middle East has gone sour The five-way summit which gathered the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar in Libya on Monday was widely regarded as a positive step on the path of joint Arab cooperation. Fawzi Mekheimar hailed the summit which he dubbed "the Arab modernisation summit". He wrote that it was in line with the last summit's recommendations which called for rooting Arab solidarity and inter-Arab dialogue as a tool to eradicate any differences and help Arab states confront foreign interference. Mekheimar wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar that the summit aimed to pursue efforts to modernise the Arab League and the Council for Arab Peace and Security. "The five-leader Arab summit comes within serious Arab efforts to develop a mechanism for joint Arab cooperation," Mekheimar added. Difference over the way Khaled Said died remains. Two weeks after the death of the young Alexandrian, there are still many question marks hanging over the circumstances that led to his death in a police station in Alexandria. Maged Mohamed wrote that although forensics proved that Said died because of asphyxiation from swallowing a pack of marijuana cigarettes, many Egyptians find it hard to believe the story. First, it is not possible to believe that a person can swallow a pack of marijuana that big unless it was literally stuffed down his throat. Second, there is widespread belief that police are no longer at the service of the people as they used to be. Instead, the public is at the service of officers and detectives. Third, torture has been on the increase inside police stations yet perpetrators are rarely punished. Mohamed cited a few examples of police brutality that went unpunished. "Khaled Said's tragedy is a repeat of the same scenario of beating and torture inside police stations, proving that police are now loyal only to officers and detectives rather than the people," Mohamed wrote in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party. Mohamed El-Saadani wrote that Said's story would remain a stain on the police uniform, no matter how white it is, because stains tend to attract the attention of people. However, El-Saadani said that he would not focus on whether Said was guilty or the forensic reports of the testimonies. Instead, he wished to discuss the reasons behind the insistence of protecting two detectives who behaved irresponsibly in arresting an unarmed man. The danger of this issue, El-Saadani added, is that it affected every youth who feels he could be the next victim of police brutality. It is a serious issue because it casts doubt on whatever is said about freedom of expression in Egypt. "A whole nation and a respectable security body are at stake because of two detectives and whoever is protecting them," El-Saadani wrote in the official daily Al-Ahram. Mohamed El-Shabba viewed Said's issue from a different perspective, that it has become an opportunity for whoever wants to settle accounts with the government. The campaign launched after Said's death has opened the way for a landslide attack against the government. Said's family and lawyers, El-Shabba explained, rejected the first forensic report and requested the re- examination of his body by an independent non- governmental body. However, when the second report came out to confirm the results of the first report, there was a furore, as if they did not want to know the truth about Said's death, but sought to prolong the controversy in the hope of creating more popular stars in the media. "How can one explain the strange insistence on rejecting the report issued by the committee of the prosecutor-general? Why do we adopt double standards when we deal with the law? Is it only because we hate the authority and security bodies?" El-Shabba wondered in the official daily Nahdet Masr. Efforts to resolve the crisis between judges and lawyers had not reaped fruits up till this week. Their differences are still unbridgeable. Essam Galhoum asked who could be satisfied with the difference between the two groups and the danger it posed to the whole country. However, whoever followed up the developments in the problem would find many question marks in the events of last week's session in Tanta where the court did not rule on the release of the two lawyers as expected. The series of meeting held between People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour and the lawyers' representative raised expectations of a breakthrough in the crisis and the release of the detained lawyers. But the continued detention of the lawyers, explained Galhoum, widened the gap. He would have preferred that the court looked at the public interest and relieve the suffering of thousands of people as a result of lawyers' protests that restarted this week. "If the two lawyers committed a mistake, how could the investigation with them be carried out in that speed and how could the prosecutor be a party and the judge in the same case? Wasn't detaining the lawyers for that period a lesson for them? It would have been appropriate to release them in order to resolve the present stalemate," Galhoum wrote in the official weekly Akhbar Al-Yom. Galhoum summed up by calling on the protectors and guards of justice to realise the danger that their division imposes, relinquish differences and work in the interest of the country. The differences between students sitting for high school or thanaweya amma exams and those who put the exams do not appear to be bridgeable in the near future. Students sat for the last exam this week to the relief of most Egyptian families, including that of Affaf Yehia. Yehia wrote in Akhbar Al-Yom that the chronic headache of thanaweya amma came to an end at last. The same scenario is repeated every year -- students and their families cry bitterly, faint and ambulances waiting at exam centres collect them. Such scenes occur only in Egypt, she emphasised. Yehia added that the students' yearly ordeal with thanaweya amma means one of two things: either we do not have experts capable of setting up tests that assess the standard of students or students are incapable of being educated. Either way, Yehia satirically concluded, it would be easier to stop education altogether and save both the state and the parents the huge amounts of money they spend on education.
