Newspapers looked at the repercussions of the ruling of the constitutional court which said the upper house, or Shura Council, and a panel that drafted the new constitution are invalid. Al-Ahram on Monday wrote ‘Shura Council to continue legislating until new House of Representatives holds first session' and Al-Masry Al-Youm had ‘Void with stay of execution'. Newspapers also covered the Ethiopian decision to divert the Blue Nile waters together with a report by the tripartite committee on the controversial dam that threatens Egypt's amount of water. Al-Akhbar on Sunday wrote ‘Egypt shows reservations about committee report: we reject the design of the dam and international arbitration is the last resort' and Al-Wafd described the report as ‘weak and concealing the real dangers of the project'. Writers were not less keen to look into both issues. In his regular column in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm Suleiman Gouda compared the MB to a student who did not study well for his exam and was lucky to find that the exam was postponed. The ruling of the constitutional court gave the MB a second chance to study and possibly pass. He wrote that the constitutional court ruled that both the election law by which the Shura Council was elected and the constituent committee that drafted the constitution are unconstitutional. That means that it took the Shura and the constituent committee back to square one. Meaning, he added, that those who said Shura Council should not be given full legislative authority were right. He said the ruling as a genuine chance for the MB if they want to make real reform or conduct a serious review of their priorities. “The ruling is a chance for us to start from the right point. We should start by writing a consensual constitution that is written by experts rather than a group of MPs who have no experience,” Gouda wrote. Salah Montasser said he wrote in June last year that the constitutional court ruling that the law by which parliamentary members were elected was void which meant disbanding the assembly. Given that the Shura Council was elected using the same law, everybody expected the court to issue a similar ruling. However, Montasser noted a few things regarding the constitutional court ruling, namely that if the court had ignored that the election law was unconstitutional, it would have meant that it made a mistake regarding its ruling concerning the parliament. Had it ruled that the election law was constitutional, he added, it would have fallen into a trap because it issued different rulings for similar situations. “The ruling came to emphasise a similar ruling issued regarding the parliament. However, it gave the Shura Council temporary immunity according to Article 230 of the constitution,” Montasser wrote in the official daily Al-Ahram. Wael Kandil said the different political groups looked at the court ruling in a way that conforms to their political beliefs and ambitions. Some regarded it as a slap by the Egyptian judiciary to the MB and a blow that ended the Shura Council while others see it as an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Shura as a temporary legislative body. Kandil added that the wording of the sentence is like a riddle. “It revealed a dangerous virus that has affected the minds.” It also indicated that nobody has the least doubt that there are no lines the between judiciary and politics in these difficult days and that the judiciary has an eye on politics. The ruling also revealed the blindness of political groups. Every group, Kandil explained, sees what he wants to see and the rest is absent. In addition, words like “revolution”, “martyr” and “patriotism” which used to have a well-established definition, now have dozens of meanings. “That blindness has affected the ability of political groups to judge properly and this is also reflected in their stand on the problem in Turkey. “Those who lifted Erdogan's pictures in the streets of Cairo in 2008 as a symbol of struggle see him now as the greatest devil. Those who were not moved by Bashar Al-Assad's genocide against his people did not dare to ask him to step down. They now ask Erdogan to do so,” Kandil wrote in the independent daily Al-Shorouk. The issue of the Nile water and the Renaissance Dam was a cause of much concern. Galal Dweidar noted that Egypt, by nature, does not resort to confrontations unless it has to. Thus, it keeps good relations with its neighbours. In that framework, Dweidar wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar, Egypt is dealing with the Nile problem especially regarding the impact of building the Renaissance dam which might reduce the amount of Nile water that Egypt gets. He saw the report of the tripartite committee which called for some amendments in the design of the dam as a possible breakthrough in the crisis. However, Dweidar noted that although Ethiopia started working on the dam more than two years ago, Egypt, without doubt, did not exert the required effort to maintain its historic and legal rights over the waters. “The important question now is whether the dam would affect Egypt's badly needed share of Nile water. Any fall in Egypt's quota would expose Egypt to more water poverty,” Dweidar wrote. Adel Sabri looked at the missing pieces in the issue of the dam. He wrote that four years ago Egypt was shocked by the news that China would build eight dams on the Nile. The writer, who has close relations with the officials at the Chinese Embassy asked them how could their country take such a step that would prove a real threat to Egypt while they claimed they were a friendly state with Egypt. The officials told Sabri that when Ethiopia asked China to build a big dam like Renaissance, Beijing made it conditional that Egypt and Sudan had to agree first. The official added that because China gave Mubarak's regime guarantees that the dam would not cause Egypt any harm, Mubarak accepted the project during a meeting of the Chinese-African Forum in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2009. “The present regime is not apparently aware of the issue, which is why it claims that it is consulting with an international committee. Then, the president called for a meeting with the minister of defence and other top officials, and then it was declared that the meeting was to discuss security in Sinai. “Facts about the dam are absent to the people. The previous regime definitely accepted the dam project. The minister of defence and a national security committee discussed it and authorised the Foreign Ministry to send Egypt's consent on the dam together with its fear regarding a shortage in water during the period in which the dam's reservoirs would be filled with water,” Sabri wrote in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Al-Wafd Party. It is unfair, he added, that we live in luxury while Ethiopia is suffering from a severe shortage of energy. Addis Ababa has electricity for 10 hours per day at the most.
