Caught between corruption and chaos was the furore over the ferry, writes Dina Ezzat Death on the Red Sea inundated the press and the voluminous number of stories over the Danish cartoons which depicted the Prophet Mohamed as a terrorist failed to stem the tide of anger sweeping the Muslim world. The photos of the grief and mayhem in Safaga, the port that the ship Al-Salam 98 never docked in, spoke volumes. The headlines underscored the magnitude of the crisis. Just like the nation, the press was struck hard by what many Egyptian commentators qualified this week as "shame" and "the unforgivable sin". The sinking of Al-Salam 98 that claimed the lives of 1,000 people left no daily or weekly national opposition or independent without long column inches of harsh criticism and blame not only against the company owning the sunken ship but certainly and more prominently, against the government that had allowed the company to operate -- actually manipulate -- the decaying ships that carry hundreds of thousands of Egyptians from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and back annually. In the independent Al-Masri Al-Youm on Sunday, Magdi El-Gallad, the editor in-chief, asked the pointed question of whether or not this company is owned partially or fully by some key government figures who wish to remain anonymous while making huge profits at the expense of the life of Egyptians who strive hard overseas to make a living. "Who exactly owns this company that killed so many people? Is he a high-ranking official as some have suggested?" El-Gallad asked. In the same Sunday issue of Al-Masri Al-Youm, on the same page, the daily columnist Magdi Mehanna bluntly accused the government of failing to respond promptly and properly to a sea disaster that is one of the worst maritime tragedies in world history. Mehanna went as far as to claim that the government seemed to act with intent to cover up the real reason that led Al-Salam 98 to sink in flames and take down with it so many innocent people, without sending even one SOS. Mehanna said that the "reckless" way with which the government reacted to the crisis indicated that it is simply a "prime suspect". It was left up to the cynic commentator Ahmed Ragab to summarise the entire tragic story in a few punishing words: "a ferry that carries the Panamanian flag of convenience to hide its deteriorating condition and an Egyptian government that tolerates the fiasco... which has been rejected by the naval authorities of the European Union... the end result is the tragic death of hundreds of Egyptians who sweat blood to make a living." It was therefore that Al-Ahram 's most prominent columnist Salama Ahmed Salama asked the government on Tuesday to end the saga of lies and ineptitude and start acting properly. It was interesting however, that almost none of the commentators argued that there was need for the government or the company to apologise to the families of the victims or to a nation in mourning. In fact, the word "apology" only appeared in the Egyptian press this week in relation to the controversy over the 12 cartoons printed in late September last year by a Danish daily mocking the Prophet Mohamed. Day in and day out writers from the right to the left insisted that the humiliating cartoons that angered over a billion Muslims around the world and sent them on loud demonstrations on the streets required a clean-cut apology. Indeed, as Hassan Abu Taleb, a senior member of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies argued in an opinion piece on Monday, that the cartoons are not an exercise of freedom of expression as many European newspapers claimed. "If rendered void of ethics and basic values and if used to hurt the feelings and undermine the creed of others, then the freedom of expression becomes a misused banner. This is what the Danish daily and a few other marginal papers in Europe did when they chose to antagonise Muslims," Abu Taleb stated. "It was only recently that the prominent historian David Irving was widely criticised for having dared to raise some questions in relation to the Holocaust. Those questions were not tolerated under the pretext of freedom of expression that is used now by the Danish paper to justify the insult accorded to over a billion Muslims," wrote Suleiman Qenawi on the opinion page of Al-Akhbar on Monday. On Tuesday and on a full page in Al-Ahram, the Danish paper that instigated the whole episode printed a lengthy apology to all Muslims. What the reader now waits for is an apology from all those responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 Egyptians in the Red Sea over the weekend.
