In Safaga, Mohamed El-Sayed and Magda El-Ghitany witness the tragic ramifications of the sinking of Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 Tossed to and fro by the waves, 6-year-old Mohamed Hassanein was alone in the middle of the Red Sea. It was completely dark, and the little boy was freezing. His parents had thrown him and his 3-year-old sister into an overcrowded lifeboat as the ferry they were on rapidly sank into the sea. When the lifeboat was later overturned in a crush of desperately drowning humanity, the sea swallowed up the three-year-old girl, just as it had her parents and the ferry itself. Six hours later, Mohamed -- who was wearing a life jacket -- was picked up from the choppy waters by rescuers. He was one of the few who survived the tragic sinking of the Al-Salam 98 ferry in the waters of the Red Sea, 57 miles off the coast of Safaga, in the small hours of Friday, not long after it set sail from the Saudi Arabian port of Duba. Of 1,414 passengers who were on board the 35-year-old vessel, only 400 or so have been pulled out of the sea alive. Tawfik Emad's wife and two children, aged six and nine, were not amongst them. Emad said his family slipped from his arms as he was trying to place them on a lifeboat. Abdel-Mohsen Mohamed's brother met the same fate. Mohamed himself only managed to make it by desperately clinging onto a lifeboat with 34 other people already on board. Along with fifteen others, he hung on to a plastic rope tied to the boat for more than ten hours. "Every once in a while, a part of the rope would break off," he said, "and someone would say their prayers before being swallowed by the waves." Only six of the fifteen "hangers-on" made it to shore. Both Emad and Mohamed said the tragedy began to unfold after a fire broke out on the ship. "We kept telling the crew there was a fire, but they told us not to worry about it," Emad said. As the crew desperately tried to put out the fire, the water they were using ended up flooding the ferry itself. At 2am, Mohamed said, "we asked the captain to go back to Duba, but he insisted on proceeding towards Safaga. Nobody would have died had he only gone back." In Safaga, anxious families have been waiting for news of their loved ones for days. They are mostly poor Upper Egyptians who have transformed the street leading to the port into a makeshift shelter. "We were told that everyone would get LE300 for food and water, but that never took place," said one of the waiting relatives. At one point, in search of any scrap of information, the agonised crowd attempted to storm the port. Riot police fired tear gas on them, and the gathered crowd responded by hurling stones. "We need officials to tell us about the latest developments and the rescue operations, not security forces that bar us from entering the port, and even fire tear gas on us," one angry man said. Many were furious about the way they were being treated. "Where is the president?" asked a disgruntled Ramadan Fathi. "Why didn't he show up here in Safaga? When we went to Hurghada to complain, police forces barred us from talking to him. We just wanted to tell him the truth, which is far removed from what we see on TV. We feel like we have no dignity. Are Egyptian lives so worthless that not a single official bothered to come [to Safaga] to tell us where our relatives' bodies are?" According to Fathi, had the passengers been foreigners, or richer, better-connected Egyptians, "the government may have dealt with the matter in a more proper manner." Mohamed Diab, a middle-aged farmer from the Upper Egyptian governorate of Sohag, ended up leading a makeshift protest at the entrance to the port. "We tried everything to get the government to listen to us. We clashed with police, we screamed, and we cried, but it was all in vain." Diab encouraged the gathered crowd to start a hunger strike. "I cannot go back to Sohag and tell my uncle's six bereaved children that I didn't find their father's body. I need his body so that when his children want to see him, they can go to his grave, and won't feel they have completely lost him." Diab also suggested that things would have been different had tourists, not Egyptians, been on board. "If just one tourist had been on board, I swear they would have left no stone unturned until they found the body. When 14 tourists were killed in a bus accident last week, every state apparatus was on red alert. But because we are poor people, the government ignores our distress. It's not like we are asking the government to treat us like tourists; we just want to be treated like human beings." Those who made their way into the port were not much happier. "When the officer asked us to gather together to listen to a list of names belonging to the dead bodies that had been pulled from the sea," said one man, "I told him: 'Go ahead and lie'. Why? Because I knew he was only going to announce the same names he listed yesterday." As the officer read out the names, it quickly became clear that the man was right. "This is just a show," said another man who left the area, even as the names were still being called. "There are no new names on the list. It is the same list that has been announced for the past three days," he said. Another said, "the problem now is that all of us still have hopes of finding our relatives' bodies; and yet the officials are only listing the same names as those announced before. In this way, they give us hope, and then just as quickly destroy it." Mahmoud El-Sayed, one of those waiting, said it was "astonishing that the government thought the compensation money would make a difference." In any case, he said, he had only heard about the compensation issue from the newspapers, rather than from officials on the scene. "We don't want compensation; we want the bodies of our beloved," he said. "Victims' families may have agreed to sleep on the street as we wait for news, but we will never allow our relatives' bodies to become food for the sharks." All the disgruntled relatives Al-Ahram Weekly spoke to felt the state-affiliated media was misleading the public. According to Shaaban Gad, "the government did its best to prove -- via the media -- that the accident was an act of God," rather than a matter of negligence or corruption. Gad also called the figures that appeared in the press "big lies. They said there were 385 survivors, and that over four hundred dead bodies were found. Fine, where are they, and what are their names?" One man said that only "God can bring us justice -- not government officials, the president, or the media." All alone at the Hurghada Public Hospital, six-year-old Mohamed fixed his eyes towards the sea that was visible through the window of his second-floor room. "My mom and dad are down there," he said, pointing at the window.
