Dina Ezzat skims through the predictable and gets down to the juicy insides With so many political regional developments, the banner headlines of the Egyptian press this week were almost exclusively taken by Arab affairs and Egyptian foreign policy stories. Developments in Palestine and Iraq along with the Jeddah blast and the shocking shift in Egyptian- Israeli relations made the front pages and covers of the weekly magazines. It was the inside material, though, that must have caught the eye of the reader interested in home front affairs. For this reader, the Egyptian press offered several interesting stories on alarming signs of sectarian strife and the debate over the upcoming legislative and presidential elections. "The conspirator and the inept government" was the headline of a front page story of the independent left-wing oriented weekly Al-Osbou . The story offered more of Al-Osbou 's regular attacks on controversial sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim. The latest grievance against the self- declared human rights activist, who carries both Egyptian and American citizenship, was the ostensibly intense criticism by Ibrahim against the alleged despotic and dictatorial practices of the Egyptian government -- the allegations that Al- Osbou carries on many of its pages. The complaint of the weekly, however, was not about the allegations but about who made them. As far as Al-Osbou was concerned these allegations were made with the expressed intention of "setting the stage for the American and Zionist military machine that Saadeddin Ibrahim is calling on to intervene and put an end to what he calls dictatorship and despotism." "Where are the state's legal apparatus?" asked Al-Osbou and why do they not act against Ibrahim when they reacted aggressively to lesser disturbing calls for reform? Al-Arabi, the mouthpiece of the Nasserist Party, also reflected interest in Ibrahim this week. Al- Arabi, however, was interested in Ibrahim's declared intention to nominate himself for the October 2005 presidential elections should the constitution be amended to allow for direct elections to be conducted for several candidates. Quoting an interview Ibrahim gave a US news agency, Al- Arabi noted that the sociologist, who had spent eight months in jail over charges of financial corruption and was released after deteriorating health and increasing American pressure, is overtly challenging the ruling regime and its top officials and is getting away with it. "I know that my chances to win are very slim but my aim is to allow my fellow countrymen to know that there should be no political taboos," the AP quoted Ibrahim as saying. Press talk of the next presidential elections always comes with a bit of Gamal Mubarak news, speculation and rumours. And for Al-Arabi, it also comes with attacks against any potential plan to take the political career of the younger son of the president off the partisan track on to the executive track. For a change, however, Al-Arabi was willing to give a vote of confidence for Gamal Mubarak as a potential president of the republic. On its front page, Al-Arabi quoted Egypt's former first lady Jehan El-Sadat, speaking on the American-funded Al-Hurra TV channel. "I will definitely vote for Gamal Mubarak if he runs for president," El-Sadat said. Meanwhile, the Egyptian press, especially the opposition and independent, dedicated their usual attention to allegations of corruption. Al-Arabi ran an extensive interview with Minister of Agriculture Abdel-Fattah El-Leithi who was accused by members of his ministry of corruption. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the right-wing Al-Wafd Party, ran a double-page spread on corruption in Egypt. But the catch quote in most Egyptian press coverage of corruption stories this week was a statement made in parliament by the chief of the presidential staff and prominent member of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) about the rise in corruption in the municipal administration . Shura Council speaker and NDP Secretary- General Safwat El-Sherif was another top government official to acknowledge press and public concerns over increasing levels of administrative corruption. In an extensive interview with the independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma, El-Sherif, however, warned against over-dramatising the charges of corruption in view of stands taken by public opinion, and the press, against some of the figures allegedly involved in illicit dealings. And according to El-Sherif about "85 per cent" of the corruption charges in Egypt are accountable. The performance of the less than six-month-old government of Ahmed Nazif might have not caught the attention of the Egyptian press as such. After all, commentators and feature writers have repeatedly declared that the public should not expect too much from this government -- not soon anyway. For many writers and commentators, the public should not expect the Nazif government to do much better than the previous Atef Ebeid government. A few words of support -- conditional and cautious -- were given to Nazif by Lamis El-Hadidi in her daily column in Al-Alam Al-Youm. On Monday, El-Hadidi expressed appreciation for Nazif's declared intention to step down if he fails to deliver on his mission to make the lives of Egyptians easier. Meanwhile, the attention of some was caught by a small news item about the potential nomination of Ebeid for the state award for social sciences. "If Ebeid was so prominent and apt as an economist, asked Suleiman Gouda in his column in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, "why then was he removed from his job as prime minister (to be put in charge of a prominent bank that gives him an annual salary of close to LE6 million) and is now being nominated for a top national award?" Gouda's question is one of many posed in the Egyptian press -- without answers. "I am tortured by the many questions that the Egyptian street keeps asking [and finds no answers to]. I personally do not have an answer. The government offers no explanation. The [ruling] party does not offer satisfactory answers [either] and people do not know where they stand," wrote Moufid Fawzi in his weekly column "Something in my Heart" in the prominent Akhbar Al-Youm. Some of the most troubling questions that caught the attention of the Egyptian press this week were related to the incidents of potential civil strife in Upper Egypt. In his daily column on the front page of the Coptic Watani, Youssef Sidhom warned that the worst is yet to come if the government, and for that matter the public, fail to show enough courage and admit that there are certain problems related to the status of Copts in Egypt. Things could only deteriorate if "the situation worsens without any careful examination or remedy", Sidhom noted. He said the only way out of these problems was to put an end to "the absence of democracy, human rights and respect for citizenship and concepts of equality". Lack of creative thinking is perhaps the reason behind some of the crucial problems that the country suffers from. "Lack of creativity" was the title of the weekly article of prominent Egyptian writer and thinker Mustafa El-Feki on Tuesday in Al- Ahram. "We suffer from a lack of creativity that has given us a case of short-sightedness and low morals that we are suffering from," El-Feki wrote. Some creative calls were made. A couple of calls were made by two controversial public figures, Islamist but liberal thinker Gamal El-Banna and women's rights advocate Nawal El-Saadawi. In Al-Masry Al-Youm of Saturday, El-Banna called for innovation in approaching Islamic readings but asked the clergymen of Al-Azhar to stay away from the process because they are just about "the last people who can handle this job in view of their affiliation to reactionary establishments." And on the same day and the same paper, El- Saadawi called for a total separation between religion and all marital status affairs that are traditionally based on Sharia law. The time, El- Saadawi said, has come for civil-based marital status laws and for women to take full control of their bodies and start denying their husbands conjugal pleasures if they wish to punish them for poor domestic treatment.
