THE 17TH Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre opened on Tuesday without much fanfare as Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni cancelled the opening ceremony. The decision came in the wake of the Beni Sweif Cultural Palace fire that killed 48 people and injured many others. Still, families of the deceased and students of the Art Academy, who had earlier called for the cancellation of the festival altogether, picketed the Cairo Opera House -- venue for many of the festival's performances -- on Tuesday evening, protesting official negligence in dealing with the incident. In a related development, and on Tuesday morning, the Minister of Culture terminated the contract of Mustafa Elwi, head of the Culture Palace Authority and a political scientist on leave from Cairo University to work for the ministry. Last week Hosni himself tendered his resignation to President Hosni Mubarak, but the president asked Hosni to continue carrying out the duties of his job as minister of culture. Hosni's resignation was prompted by the harsh criticism levelled against him in the press, and a statement signed by over 100 Egyptian intellectuals accusing him of negligence and calling for his resignation. Signatories of the statement included Youssef Chahine, Ali Badrakhan, Ahmed Fouad Negm, Bahaa Taher, Mohamed El-Bosatie and Sonallah Ibrahim. The day following the appearance of the first statement, 400 intellectuals issued a counter-statement calling on Hosni to withdraw his resignation. Signatories included Anis Mansour, Salah Montassir, Salah Issa, Gaber Asfour, Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi and Salwa Bakr. Egyptian literature Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz issued a separate statement on Sunday welcoming the return of the tradition of public officials resigning when something under their mandate goes wrong -- a tradition, Mahfouz reminded, which existed in Egypt before the 1952 July Revolution. However, Mahfouz also said that "such fatal negligence in the cultural sector should not conceal the fact that the term of Farouk Hosni, as minister of culture, had witnessed great cultural and artistic achievements." ( For related stories see culture section)
