A dispute between tenant farmers and landlords in the rural village of Surad led to a deadly clash, reports Yasmine Fathi Last week, a dispute broke out in Surad, a village in northern Egypt's Al-Gharbiya Governorate, after tenant farmers refused to return 23 acres of land to their landlords. The clash led to gunfire, and a battle that left four dead, and many wounded. Mustafa Hammam and his brother Hisham had received a court ruling on 24 March 2005 stipulating their right to regain possession of their 23 acres in Surad. Hammam, a former commercial attaché at the American Embassy in Cairo, and his brother, had tried in the past to put the court orders into effect, sometimes with the help of the police -- but to no avail. "Here, people see the land like they see their children; it's precious, and hence, every time the brothers went to regain the land, all the farmers would unite and force them out," explained defence lawyer Atef Abdel-Wahab. Sisters Umm Mohamed, Maany, and Hamdya El-Balziky had been renting the land. "I was born on this land," Hamdya told Al- Ahram Weekly. "We've had this land since my grandfather's grandfather, and maybe even before." According to police reports, the Hammam brothers, with the help of Farahat Youssef (an employee of Hammam's) hired 11 farmers from Manfalout village in the southern governorate of Assiut where the brothers reside. The hired help were told they would be working on, and protecting, the Hammams' land in Surad. The entourage headed to Surad in four cars, arriving in the village at 7am on a Wednesday. According to the police report, Nadia El- Babli -- who was working in a nearby field -- immediately spotted the group. Although the report indicated that El-Babli was one of the tenants, her husband and cousin Mahmoud El-Babli argued otherwise. "My wife was sister-in-law to Maany [one of the tenants], but we are not involved in this land at all," he said. El-Babli promptly began quarreling with the brothers and their group from Manfalout, screaming and insulting them, which attracted the attention of more farmers working in nearby fields, and even others who were in their homes, quickly bringing a great many people onto the scene. El-Babli's husband's account does not corroborate the police report. For one thing, he claims his wife was not the first on the scene. "We were sleeping, and we heard the sound of farmers running. Since I am paralysed, I stayed in the house, but my wife ran with the others. I heard a shot fired before Nadia left the house, and another after she left," he remembered. Lawyer Abdel-Wahab said the massacre only started when one of the Hammam brothers (Mustafa) -- frightened by the sight of the hundreds of farmers who had gathered -- attempted to disperse the crowd by shooting in the air. One of the shots accidentally struck Nadia El-Babli, killing her. "When the other farmers saw the dead woman with blood covering her body," Abdel-Wahab said, "they started mercilessly beating everyone they held responsible, in a bid to avenge their dead." The chaotic nature of the scene from that moment onwards makes piecing together a cohesive narrative of events exceedingly difficult. According to Abdel-Wahab, the villagers began beating the group, with the Hammam brothers and Farahat receiving most of the blows. "The villagers were attacking with sticks, stones, and even tree branches," he said. At that point the farmers from Manfalout allegedly turned against the Hammam brothers, telling them they came to Surad to work, not fight. While Ehab Bahaa, an Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights [EOHR] lawyer who was sent to Surad to investigate the incident, said witnesses told him that one of Hammam's farmers had stabbed him, Abdel-Wahab insisted that no such stabbing had taken place. "This is just a made up story," he said. The police report indicated that one of the drivers of the rented vehicles the group had come to Surad in was arrested, while the other had given himself up. Bahaa, however, had a different story. "Witnesses told me that one of the drivers tried to escape, but ended up driving the car into a dead end, and then into the canal." The police report states that villagers burned all the cars. The Hamman brothers and Farahat were all killed at the scene. The rest of the farmers from Manfalout tried to escape by running into the streets and onto nearby farms. An hour and a half after El-Babli's death, the village mayor, El-Esawy Mohamed Fayed, called the police. The 11 Manfalout farmers were arrested, in addition to 50 residents of Surad. Abdel-Wahab said those 50 were arrested at random. "The police could not deny that there was murder because they had four corpses," Abdel-Wahab said. "Since they could not determine who the killers were, due to the chaos, they had to arrest people, so they wouldn't look like failures. This is how the police work in our country." Of the 50, six were charged with murder, and the rest with thuggery. "It will take a few months until they set a [trial] date," said Abdel-Wahab. He predicted that everyone would be freed "because there is not a shred of evidence against anyone. Too many people were there; it's difficult to point out who the killers were." The police report indicates that two bullets from rifles, seven bullets from handguns, a handgun, another bullet, and eight blood- stained sticks were found at the scene. Bahaa said a great many other weapons were also found thrown in the canal. Surad mayor Fayed said tension between landlords and farmers is common; 90 per cent of the villagers' land is rented. Although quarrels often lead to fighting and the firing of weapons, Fayed pointed that this was the first time anyone had been killed. "Nadia's screams and death lead to the uprising," he said. "We are a small village; people here are low-profile and kindhearted. The sight of a dead woman covered with blood was too much." He said the way the Hammam brothers and the Manfalout farmers arrived on the scene also helped trigger the incident. "In village culture, coming in with strangers is a sign of threat. Also, the timing was bad; perhaps if it hadn't been so early in the morning, we would have managed to settle the matter in a much more peaceful way." While Nadia's death, or the arrival of the strangers, may have been the immediate catalysts, this gruesome incident's real culprit is the new land-tenant law, experts said. The 1992 rent and tenure system reform law lifted Nasser-era rent controls and protections against evictions. After a five-year grace period, the law started being applied, thus abolishing rent control on agricultural land, and permitting land owners to evict tenant farmers. According to EOHR secretary-general Hafez Abu Saeda, the new law has "shaken" a system that has existed for half a century -- thus catalysing the many chaotic incidents we are seeing nowadays. "Ever since the revolution, as long as farmers paid the rent, land laws did not give landlords the right to retain their land. The old law," Abu Saeda said, "went well with Egypt's socialist environment, however the government wanted something to fit the new economic policy." According to Taher Abul-Nasr, a lawyer with the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre (HMLC), the new law should have compensated the farmers. Most of Egypt's villages have land reclamation, which should have been used to provide farmers with alternative land. "The current situation, however, leaves the farmer with no land, no work, and no income. So, of course there will be problems." Abul-Nasr said it was hard to take sides in these kinds of cases. "Both sides are right. The landlord has a right to enjoy his acres, and the farmer has to have a source of income. It's the law that should be fixed."
