London and El-Sherif dominated. Dina Ezzat finds connections The killing of the top diplomatic Egyptian envoy to Baghdad and the massive explosions in London kept newspapers busy -- and in a depressing gloom. Hardly a day passed without readers having looked at pictures of bodies or terrorised individuals. Photos of devastated family members of those killed and seriously wounded were also abundantly present on the front and inside pages of the press. The week started with news of the London explosions and the assassination of Ihab El-Sherif, head of the Egyptian diplomatic mission to Iraq. It ended with the early results of the investigations into the London explosions indicating that the explosives used could have been bought from military hardware stores. There was also a small but growing number of news stories suggesting that the Qatar satellite news channel Al-Jazeera had in its possession a tape of the killing of El-Sherif and that it was planning to air it, that Israel might have been involved in the abduction and killing of the diplomatic envoy and that El-Sherif might not have been killed by Al-Qaeda kidnappers after all. Coverage and the analysis reflected two main concerns by the press. On the London explosions there was clear concern that Muslims and Arabs in Britain might be subjected to serious backlash incidents. "The London terrorist attack could simply widen the scope of harassment of Arabs and Muslims," warned Hussein Abdel-Raziq in his column "To the left", in Al-Ahali, the weekly mouthpiece of the left-wing Al-Tagammu Party that comes out on Wednesday, Regarding the El-Sherif story, there was serious concern over the performance of the government that many argued was disappointing either because, as some suggested, the government sent El-Sherif to a post too risky -- he had previously served in Tel Aviv -- or because Cairo had succumbed to terrorists who wish to keep Egypt out of Iraq. On Saturday, the independent daily Al-Masri Al-Youm ran a column by its editor Magdi El-Gallad calling on Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit to resign for "mismanaging" Egypt's diplomatic relations with Iraq. On Monday, Magdi Mehana dedicated his daily back-page column to argue that it is the entire government and not just the foreign minister which should resign over the El-Sherif incident which indicates a collective failure in performance. "Ihab El-Sherif deserves better," wrote Mohamed El-Shabba in his regular back-page column in the independent daily Nahdet Misr. "The Egyptian Foreign Ministry should have issued a strong statement demanding that the Iraqi government bring the killers to justice. Egypt should send an investigative team to Iraq," El-Shabba wrote on Sunday. As the news pages carried no response to El-Shabba's calls and other similar urgings for swift diplomatic and intelligence action, commentators continued to wonder. "What will we do with the killers of Ihab El-Sherif?" was the headline of an opinion piece in the Monday edition of Nahdet Misr. The writer, Mohamed Abdel-Salam, reflected what many commentators in the press have been debating this week: the file of El-Sherif cannot be closed and someone has to be held accountable for his tragic death. "Those who killed El-Sherif have to pay the price for their crime... they have to be chased for as long as it takes," he wrote. The debate on how justice could be done for El-Sherif was long and interesting. Many fumed, blaming the failure of the US-backed Iraqi government to provide adequate security measures or to gracefully acknowledge wrong- doing in the case. They said Egypt must cut its diplomatic presence in Baghdad to a minimum. "Despite the fact that the decision to reduce the size of the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Baghdad was delayed, it was a step in the right direction," wrote Nabil Zaki in his weekly back-page article in Al-Wafd, the daily mouthpiece of the opposition right-wing Al-Wafd Party. A left-winger, Zaki stressed that Egypt should refrain from enhancing its diplomatic presence in Iraq until all foreign troops are pulled out of Iraq. Others disagreed. Egypt, wrote liberal and independent writer Mohamed El-Sayed Said in his column in the cultural weekly Al-Qahira should not let the terrorists hijack its diplomatic will but rather should maintain an effective diplomatic presence in Baghdad to serve its own diplomatic interests. From among the many voices criticising the performance of the government for sending El-Sherif to Iraq and for pulling out the mission in the wake of his assassination, there came one voice criticising the press for its coverage of El-Sherif's story. In his regular back-page article in Al-Wafd, Mohamed Salmawi, chairman of the Egyptian Writers Union and editor-in- chief of the French-language Al-Ahram Hebdo, said on Wednesday that coverage in the Egyptian press of El-Sherif's murder was dismaying. It is not the role of the press to just reflect the sad mood that followed the killing, wrote Salmawi. "The press was expected to go beyond the incident and offer its readers an in-depth analysis not just of the incident but also of the situation in Iraq that led to the killing." Making sense of El-Sherif's killing and the London blasts was what Suleiman Gouda pursued in his daily article in Al-Masri Al-Youm on Wednesday. Like Salmawi, Gouda argued that Egyptians have yet to make sense of what happened to El-Sherif. By contrast, he argued, the British have made sense of the London blasts; they are saying it in the press and elsewhere. Their prime minister, who has turned the economy around, has undermined their nation's security priorities by engaging Britain in the US war against Iraq, thus antagonising the Islamist militant groups including Al-Qaeda. According to Mohamed Abdel-Moneim's new daily column in Al-Akhbar, "Logically speaking", the difference between the reaction of the British to the London bomb blasts and that of Egyptians to the killing of El-Sherif is significant. "Life should go on. People should not stop to lament disasters or blame officials... People should overcome bad times... This is what the British are trying to do," Abdel-Moneim wrote on Wednesday. However, as Makram Mohamed Ahmed rightly noted in his new weekly column in Al-Mussawar, Egyptians and British alike are not sure how to defend themselves against further attacks. "The entire world is perplexed over which way to take in the fight against terrorism. The only way out of this is for world leaders to pursue an international conference that may decide the reasons for and solution to international terrorism. This is an initiative that has been proposed by President Hosni Mubarak."
