Doaa El-Bey writes on Mursi's trip to China The selection of the presidential team was the top story in Tuesday newspapers. Al-Wafd had 'Presidential team disclosed without El-Ganzouri, Anan or Tantawi' and Al-Shorouk's banner blared 'Mursi's presidential team belongs to Islamic currents with few exceptions'. Newspapers followed President Mohamed Mursi's visit to China which started Tuesday, as well as the repercussions of last Friday's demonstrations against Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) together with the problem of contaminated water that poisoned hundreds of people last week. Al-Ahram on Monday had 'Seven major projects in Egyptian-Chinese summit', and Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote 'New Bou Azizi on the door of the president'. Al-Akhbar on Sunday headlined 'Government report says water in Sansaft contaminated'. Osama El-Ghazali Harb praised Mursi's step to start his international tour by visiting China (his first trip outside Egypt as president was to Saudi Arabia) because it is the global power that serves as a counterweight to the US. "China has wide political influence in the Arab world at present, though it prefers to play an inconspicuous political role in the region. The only exception is its support or at least its non-hostile stand toward the Syrian regime," Harb wrote in the official daily Al-Ahram. The most obvious Chinese presence in Egypt is in trade through which Beijing inundates the Egyptian market with nearly everything starting from toys to electronic equipment. However, he added, the main domain in which we can benefit from the Chinese experience is basically the mechanisms by which they run small scale productive projects. That could be the beginning of benefiting from the wasted energy of millions of unemployed Egyptian youth and to involve them in developing their country. Writers scrutinised the impact of last Friday's demonstrations and questioned whether it succeeded. Mohamed Barakat pointed to reasons for the failure of the demonstrations, namely the absence of an influential political organisation that could unite the protesters and help to recruit more demonstrators from the governorates. "With all due respect, those who called for the demonstrations were non-homogenous political currents that lacked common coordination or a presence on the street," Barakat wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar. The other reason for the failure of the demonstrations was the rumour that the demonstrators planned to attack the headquarters of the MB. That rumour made people reluctant to take part in the protest. The third reason that Barakat pointed to was the demands of the demonstrators. For instance the call for the president to stand down ignored the basic fact that he was elected via the ballot box and the only way to force him to step down should be though the ballot box. However, Barakat emphasised that not all the demands of the demonstrators were illogical especially when calling for the correction of the status of the MB. Given that the MB is not a banned group anymore, it is high time to make it an official group that abides by the rules and laws that govern similar groups. Mohamed Salmawy wrote that the outcome of the demonstrations against the ruling MB was not in the interest of the group. President Mursi failed in the first democratic test, he explained, because MB militias responded violently to the demonstrations, pelting the demonstrators with stones, and using at other times knives and live ammunition. That attitude, Salmawy added, led some parties to accuse the militias of launching similar attacks on demonstrators in the past months especially in Maspero and Mohamed Mahmoud Street which were blamed on a "third party". Visitors of social network sites, he elaborated, wrote that they knew who the "third party" in these incidents were. He appeared clearly with a galabeya and a beard and stopped the demonstrators from reaching demonstration venues. "The MB candidate said in TV interviews that he would leave his position immediately if demonstrations were launched against him. Now demonstrators were launched against the MB, but they were stopped from reaching demonstrations and attacked with stones, knives and live ammunition," Salmawi wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. Demonstrations were in governorates and some demonstrators decided to sit-in at the time when state-run Egyptian TV reported that demonstrators did not exceed the hundreds. That reminded us of similar coverage during the revolution, Salmawy summed up his column. The problem of contaminated water was another issue that engaged the press this week. Hazem Hashem wrote that people were resorting to buying water from non-government companies following the severe shortage of water suffered by government companies. They did not know they were subjecting themselves to deadly diseases as a result of the poisoning. Even those who drank government water, he added, were drinking contaminated water because the pipelines of tap water and drainage were not properly separated. People repeatedly complained but nobody listened. Even when thousands fell sick in Sansaft village, Hashem added, "we saw how officials tried to escape responsibility and find excuses. Mosque preachers said water in mosques was sound and fit for drinking. They also roamed the villages with loud speakers saying the same thing. Officials of the government's water company blamed the problems on non-governmental companies that distribute contaminated water. "In the Sansaft crisis, one can learn a new lesson in how to shirk responsibility and find excuses or other parties to blame," Hashem wrote in the independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma. Mohamed El-Gheiti also pointed to the comic excuses that some official came out with to find justification for the Sansaft crisis. The governor, for instance, blamed the crisis on poisoned food that citizens ate. El-Gheiti described the crisis as a crime and called for punishing those who caused it by capital punishment, "because it is a crime of premeditated collective murder." However, he believed food or water poisoning is not as dangerous as poisoning the intellect and awareness of the people. He pointed to the hardline fatwas that were issued recently like banning parties and attacking actors as an example of that kind of poisoning. "Is the fatwa of bloodletting by those who called for demonstrations against Mursi sensible or related to religion in any way?" El-Gheiti asked in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party.
