Doaa El-Bey continues to guess which will come first, the Egyptian constitution or the elections Newspapers monitored the trial of the leading figures in the previous regime, the controversy over which should come first -- the constitution or the elections -- the commemoration of the death of Khaled Said, which helped spark the Egyptian revolution, and a death at the Azbakiya police station. The news about the former minister of finance Youssef Boutros Ghali being sentenced to 30 years for profiteering was on the front page of most of the newspapers on Sunday. Al-Wafd had, "30 years prison and LE70 million fine for Ghali", and Al-Akhbar blared, "30 years imprisonment for Mubarak's minister of finance'. Mohamed El-Ghaiti hailed the sentence of the man who humiliated the Egyptians and looted their money in every possible way. "Ghali took billions from the social insurance money from the public fund and gambled with it in the stock market. God knows how much money Egypt lost from this gambling and where the money went," El-Ghaiti wrote in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party. Ghali was tried in absentia while everyone knows that he is living in Beirut. However, El-Ghaiti wrote, Egyptians do not care how long his prison term is; they are after the money that he took. Egyptians want the symbols of corruption arrested, including Rachid Mohamed Rachid and Hussein Salem. They want them punished and the money they smuggled abroad returned. The controversy over which should come first, the constitution or the parliamentary elections, is ongoing. Mohamed Lotfi asked whether it was possible to build an apartment building without a sound concrete foundation. Likewise, he wrote, we should focus on issuing a constitution before holding the parliamentary and presidential elections because the constitution is the basis by which we can elect a suitable president and a strong parliament that represents all political forces. That could only be achieved, Lotfi added, by uniting the efforts of the protesters, the national powers, the political parties and popular pressure groups. "The constitution is the only guarantee maintaining the success of the revolution," he wrote in the official weekly Akhbar Al-Youm. Suleiman Gouda wrote that there are lots of opportunities as never before, from the time Hosni Mubarak stepped down, to electing a new president and parliament, to agree on a constitution that takes the country from the age of unilateral ruler to one of institutions. There is also an unprecedented opportunity, Gouda continued, to choose a new president who is capable of carrying out a serious programme and a new parliament that represents the various trends in the political street and that is able to monitor the government and issue laws to organise society. "The opportunity to draft a new constitution and elect a new president and parliament has been absent since the July 1952 Revolution. Now it is present before our eyes. It is up to us to seize it," Gouda wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. Gouda linked seizing that opportunity to two factors: our ability to set our priorities rights and second the ability of each political group to deal with the present transitional period with responsibility. However, the writer added, setting up priorities does not seem to work according to logic: "Most influential people in society believe that we should start by issuing the constitution then the presidential and finally the parliamentary elections. Yet there is a persistence to reverse these priorities." Nabil Rashwan focussed on another crisis that is facing political life in Egypt -- political parties. Rashwan wrote that the old and the new parties are in a crisis because the former are too remote from the street and the latter have too small a number of members. Big parties like Wafd, Tagammu, Gabha and Nasserite include members from the elite but are viewed as being disassociated from society. As for the new parties, they cannot find enough members or funding, Rashwan explained. Thus they need to rely on a businessman for funding. And the most dangerous thing about all parties, he added in the independent daily Nahdet Masr, is that they aim to attract members from the elite. They never start from the popular base. People marked the first anniversary of Khaled Said's death by organising marches in Egypt. Wael Qandil wrote that the killing of Said by police in the Sidi Gaber police station was the flame that sparked the revolution. "Mubarak and Habib El-Adli fell with their police state. What remained is the memory of Khaled Said with his lovely smile and baby face," Qandil wrote in the independent political daily Al-Shorouk. "Who would have imagined that the day would come when Said would vanquish his killers who dubbed him 'the martyr of marijuana.'" The 25 January Revolution came to teach people lessons in humanity and dignity. However, the death of a bus driver in Al-Azbakiya police station showed, according to Qandil, that not everyone learnt the lessons. The death of the microbus driver in the police station was a repetition of the Said murder in which an Egyptian citizen lost his life because a police official put the law into his own hands. While the writer called for punishing the Azbakiya policeman, he called for rewarding another policeman and an officer who saved a satellite channel anchor who was attacked by thugs in Tahrir Square last Friday. Mohamed Mustafa Sherdi regarded Azbakiya as proof of how rashness is governing the Egyptian street. His version of the story was different from that of Qandil's. Sherdi wrote in Al-Wafd that the microbus driver refused to show his driving license to a policeman and slapped a police officer in front of several people who rushed to protect the officer and beat the driver who was rushed to hospital where he died. Sherdi said he died because of the people and not the police. But another group of people who heard a rumour that a driver was killed by a policeman in Azbakiya rushed to the station to avenge his death. As a result, fighting erupted between the two groups. Sherdi regarded the incident as evidence that "Cairo is now full of groups that move against each other in a rash manner without asking or double checking the truth. The Azbakiya incident should prompt us to stop and think before believing a rumour. The microbus driver was a victim of his hooliganism and not a victim of the police."
