Will the latest rail disaster finally force the government to address the chronic problems of Egypt's transport networks? Not if past experience is anything to go by, writes Shaden Shehab The people who gathered to help survivors of Monday's train crash in Qalyoub had few doubts as to the cause of the disaster. Negligence, negligence and corruption, they said as one, echoing the thoughts of a great many members of the public. And like a great many members of the public they have few hopes that the situation will improve. Emotions ran high after two third-class trains collided, killing 58 and injuring more than 140. It will have escaped nobody's attention that the death toll almost matched that of this month's Qana massacre, which provoked an international outcry. But few expect the train disaster to elicit anything more than the government's usual promises that it will conduct an enquiry and rectify the causes -- promises that sound increasingly hollow as one disaster follows another on Egypt's transport network and the casualties continue to mount. The two third-class trains were heading to Cairo from the Nile Delta towns of Mansoura and Benha. The Mansoura train driver is reported to have ignored a stop signal, crashing into the rear of the Benha train which had halted in Qalyoub, 20 kilometres north of Cairo. The handling of the immediate aftermath of the crash compounded feelings of frustration. According to official statements ambulances and rescue teams arrived at the scene almost immediately after the 7am crash. Survivors say they began to arrive half an hour later. It was the local residents, and survivors of the crash, who were trying to save passengers caught in the wreckage and crying out for help, eye witnesses told reporters. Civil defence teams, the police and military did work together throughout the day to search for survivors and recover bodies amid the crushed carriages. Cranes were used to remove the twisted wreckage from the tracks and unblock the key rail route, allowing train services to resume the same day of the accident, though with delays. Families faced an ordeal as they attempted to locate relatives and discover whether they had survived. The injured were taken to seven different hospitals and the dead to Zeinhom morgue. Lists of names of those admitted to hospitals were incomplete, leaving some families to travel back and forth between hospitals. At the Zeinhom morgue families had to look through all the sacked bodies to see if they could identify any of the corpses. Government officials quickly announced that LE5,000 would be paid to the families of the dead and LE1,000 to those injured. Mahmoud Mohieddin, minister of investment and head of the Supreme Council for Insurance, also said the families of those killed will receive LE20,000. While the investigation is ongoing, a number of officials have already started to blame the driver of the Mansoura train. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has vowed that "those found to be responsible will be held truly accountable". Transport Minister Mohamed Mansour responded by sacking the director of the rail network, Hanafi Abdel-Qawi, and suspending his deputy, Eid Mahran, pending the results of the investigations. "They are scapegoats. And whether it is human or technical error that is eventually blamed is a matter of detail. The rail network suffers from chronic problems, from the condition of trains to the safety measures in place. All of these need to be addressed. The rail system needs a radical overhaul," says Hamdi El-Tahhan, head of the parliamentary Transport Committee, which has compiled dozens of reports on accidents. He fully expects, however, that the "investigations will fail to address the true reasons for the accident or condemn the real culprits." El-Tahhan warns that, "unless the government treats the condition of the railways as a matter of national security and provides the budget to upgrade them more tragedies will happen." Soon after taking office last December the transport minister requested LE8 billion in funding in order to implement a five-year refurbishment of the rail system. His request met no response until Monday's tragedy, following which the prime minister announced that the funds would be allocated. Until such promises are fulfilled, though, accidents like that at Qalyoub are likely to recur. As if to underline the point on Tuesday, just 24 hours later, a sleeper train collided with a tractor in the town of Beni Sweif, injuring two people, a Ramses communication centre suffered fire damage and 11 tourists heading to Taba were killed in a bus accident. This week's crash is the third rail disaster since February. In May, 45 people were injured when a cargo train slammed into a stationary passenger train near the Nile Delta village of Alshat in the northern Egyptian governorate of Al-Sharqiya. Three months earlier 20 people were injured when two trains travelling in the same direction collided near Alexandria. The second, faster train, ran into the back of the first. In February 2002, 360 passengers died when fire swept through a train heading to Upper Egypt in what was Egypt's worst ever rail disaster. The subsequent investigation found 11 low-ranking employees responsible though when the case against them was brought before a court the judge dismissed the prosecution, acquitting the defendants saying they were being used as scapegoats. He concluded that "negligence and inefficiency at the highest levels was the cause". No further prosecutions have been made over the 2002 disaster and government promises to upgrade the rail network and bring those responsible to justice remain just that -- promises. It is the same story with February's sinking of the Al-Salam ferry, one of the worst maritime disasters in recent history, in which more than 1,000 people lost their lives. There have been no prosecutions relating to the disaster. "Monday's catastrophe underlined that the government has not even come close to addressing Egypt's chronic problems," said prominent columnist Salama Ahmed Salama. "Although the government continuously assures the public that the welfare of ordinary Egyptians is its top priority, it is poor people who continue to pay with their lives for corruption and negligence." "Decades of corruption make it difficult for any reform to happen, whether it is in the transport, health or education sectors. Making it worse, the government shows little will in tackling the problem." Al-Wafd columnist Gamal Badawi agrees: "the state is collapsing," he says, "because of the rot of corruption."
