Is the Engineers Syndicate crisis nearly over? Mona El-Nahhas tries to find out At an emergency general assembly at the Nasr City Conference Centre on Monday, around 5,000 engineers voted to lift the judicial sequestration imposed upon their syndicate in 1995. The assembly called upon judge Hanaa El-Mansi, who heads the judicial committee in charge of supervising elections at professional syndicates, to set a date for syndicate elections within three months. In the meantime, the assembly agreed to sort out the lists of syndicate members who have the right to vote; this process may yield up to 300,000 names. Electoral committees large enough to accommodate those numbers will also be defined. A seven-member committee has been assigned to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations passed on Monday. The assembly set 19 May as the date for its next meeting. The gathered crowd, a great many of whom belong to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group, applauded the assembly's recommendations. They had initially expressed their anger when the syndicate's court-appointed custodian, Ahmed Moharram, tried to chair the meeting. Mohamed Ali Beshr, who was the syndicate's secretary-general prior to its sequestration, attempted to calm the angry engineers down. "It doesn't matter who is going to chair the assembly," Beshr said. "Our real concern is for today's assembly recommendations to pass." Beshr said that if the engineers really cared about liberating their syndicate, they would keep quiet. The syndicate's statutes mandate that the general assembly's eldest member chair the meeting. As a result, the 93- year-old custodian took charge. "Please don't be provoked," Beshr said. "Otherwise, the assembly will fail." The crowd appeared willing to heed his calls. When Moharram said that he had decided to take over the syndicate in order "to save it", however, all hell broke loose again. "Shut up," yelled several of the engineers in the crowd. Others loudly accused the custodian of wasting the syndicate's money during the ten long years of sequestration. One of the engineers, Amina Abdel-Gawwad, said the sequestration had allowed "financial and administrative corruption" to reach its peak. "Engineers were kept in the dark about their syndicate's budget. Services were lacking, and general assemblies were banned. [We] were not allowed to question those in charge," Mustafa Mahmoud told Al-Ahram Weekly. The assembly also witnessed several clashes between engineers and security officers who initially locked the door to the hall where the meeting was being held. With only several hundred engineers allowed in, thousands of others -- many of whom had came from across the country to attend -- were left waiting outside. "The ones that went in are engineers who work for the government," said Ali Abdel-Wahhab. "They do not represent us, and should not speak in [our] name." The crowd outside threatened to break the doors down if they were not allowed in. "It's a matter of security," an official said. "We'll open the door when the assembly starts." When the doors were eventually opened, the engineers streamed in en masse, instantly crowding the hall. The genesis of the long-awaited general assembly meeting took place in December 2004, when a court ruling enabled engineers to convene and take steps towards staging syndicate elections. However, in his constitutional capacity as the syndicate's sole supervisor, Irrigation Minister, Mahmoud Abu Zeid contested the ruling. Although the minister's appeal was quashed, both he and the custodian continued to refrain from carrying out the ruling. Just as a group of engineers set out to sue the minister and the custodian for not abiding by the law, Abu Zeid surprised them -- ahead of last September's presidential elections -- by asking the custodian to take the necessary steps towards holding an emergency assembly. It was originally scheduled for December 2005 before being postponed to this week. The minister also said elections would take place in mid 2006. Abu Zeid's sudden change of heart was seen by some as evidence of a rapprochement between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a powerful presence within the syndicate. In fact, the brotherhood's influence was the main reason for both the syndicate's sequestration in the first place, as well as the deliberate delays, over the years, with regard to holding elections. The next few months will reveal whether or not the government's promises will be kept.
