With talk of reform in the air, the frozen Engineers' Syndicate doesn't want to be left out in the cold. Mona El-Nahhas reports Security forces prevented Engineers' Syndicate members from holding a scheduled conference at the organisation's downtown headquarters on Saturday. Hundreds of angry engineers headed for the nearby Bar Association instead, which had agreed to host the conference. The Engineers' Syndicate was placed under sequestration in March 1995 due to alleged financial infringements committed by its Islamist-controlled council. Two octogenarian court-appointed custodians -- Ahmed Moharam and Aziz Yassin -- have been in charge of the syndicate's administrative affairs since then. It was Moharam and Yassin who called in the security forces on Saturday, much to the dismay of many of the syndicate's more active members. One of the major stumbling blocks facing the syndicate at present is its inability to hold elections for a new syndicate council. According to Law 100/1993, only the chief justice of the Southern Cairo Court can set dates for elections, supervise the electoral process and announce the results. The law also requires half of the syndicate's members to be present in order for an election to take place. With over 300,000 members, this is practically impossible, and thus elections have been postponed indefinitely. At Saturday's conference, engineer and human rights activist Ahmed Bahaeddin Shaaban said the National Democratic Party (NDP) was working on a new law that he warned "would not be much better than the current one". The conclusion, attendees said, was clear -- engineers would have to exert tremendous efforts to "liberate" their syndicate. A peaceful march to the People's Assembly is being planned for 27 March. Members are also planning a sit-in at the syndicate's headquarters, as well as a general strike. More conferences will be held in different governorates, and as many signatures as possible will be collected for a petition demanding that the syndicate be allowed to operate normally. A Web site and a periodical bulletin are also being planned. Lawsuits will also be filed. A case against Irrigation Minister Mahmoud Abu Zeid -- who, according to syndicate regulations, is entitled to supervise the syndicate's affairs -- has been filed at an administrative court. It charges Abu Zeid with not allowing an emergency general assembly of the syndicate to be held. Shaaban said thousands of engineers should attend the court sessions "to give the impression that we are a unified front". At the conference, engineers wondered why the government was continuing to adopt a "hostile" attitude towards civil society organisations, including professional syndicates, at a time when general calls for political reform were increasing in pitch and tone. "How can they deprive us of our legal rights and prevent us from entering our own syndicate?" asked Shaaban. "It's unacceptable that the syndicate has become a place to pick up pensions," and not much else, he said. According to Mohamed Ali Beshr, a former secretary-general of the syndicate's council, engineers waited patiently for years for the syndicate's problems to be resolved. "Our silence led to nothing," Beshr said, "so, now we have to change our policies and be active." Beshr, an Islamist, said there must be coordination between differing political trends so that no one trend was dominant. Analysts attribute the rejuvenated interest in syndicate affairs to the fact that several members of the dissolved Islamist- controlled council have already served their jail time. Their presence at the conference was obvious to all. In its concluding statement, the conference said the continuing sequestration was wasting syndicate money, eroding the level of services being offered to members, and, perhaps most damaging of all, reducing Egypt's presence and influence in important Arab and international engineering organisations.
