Almost two months after a landslide buried residents of Dweiqa rescue workers are still uncovering bodies, Reem Leila reports For years the shantytown of Ezbet Bekheit, in the Dweiqa area of Manshiyet Nasser, grew in the shadow of a limestone cliff. Wooden shacks and gerry-built brick apartment buildings spread across the hill and the waste water they generated slowly exacerbated geological fissures. Two months ago they reaped a deadly crop as massive boulders came crashing down on the flimsy houses and more than 100 residents lost their lives. Rescue operations are ongoing. Bodies are still being uncovered as workers clear away the rubble, says Major General Ahmed Hashad, head of Civil Defence at the Ministry of Interior. "This week workers pulled out two bodies from beneath the debris. As work continues at the scene we expect to find more." Hashad says no date has been set to end the clean up operation. "We may be here for days, weeks or months. Only one thing is sure, civil defence personnel won't leave the area before they have made sure there are no more bodies underneath the rubble." In the wake of disasters such as that at Dweiqa public anger directed against the government is growing. "There's no denying that popular anger towards the government is rising across the board," says Manal Tibi, head of the Egyptian Centre for Housing Rights, an NGO that monitors government housing regulations. "The political friction has become obvious." Residents of the shantytown claim the government has consistently failed to meet promises to construct new residential units away from the threat of landslides. "The spread of informal housing is a long- standing problem," says Tibi. "The Dweiqa accident has served to further infuriate the poorest segments of society at a time when they are already fed up with what they see as official apathy to their plight." A press release issued by the governorate of Cairo points out that 2,000 families have already been provided with alternative housing. Sherif Abdel-Moneim, the governorate's media spokesman, insists that the families now staking claims to alternative accommodation are fraudsters. "People are still coming from all over Egypt's governorates asking for apartments, claiming that they have families buried under the rubble. They have no papers and no proof of their claims. Without such evidence the governorate can do nothing. They should go back to wherever they came from." While the government cannot be blamed directly for the disaster few would deny that the incident has thrown the spotlight on the state's long-standing inability to cope with the proliferation of informal -- and often structurally unsound -- housing in and around Cairo. Hamdeen Sabahi, the founder of the left-leaning Karama Party, estimates that 10 million Egyptians now live in shantytowns like Dweiqa. "If the problem isn't solved," he predicts, "it will eventually lead to a spontaneous popular explosion." In the wake of the disaster Sabahi proposed that half the annual budget earmarked for ministerial offices should be diverted to construction of housing for the urban poor. "The government completely ignored the proposal," Sabahi told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It's as if it cares nothing about public welfare." "I don't know if President Mubarak even realises the extent of the frustration on the street. People may have lost all faith in the government but they have no more confidence in the opposition. The government has failed across the board and the opposition has failed to rally public discontent and bring about political change." MP Gamal El-Zeini argues that the problems are now so serious they require not one, but two new ministries to tackle them. The first, he says in proposals that he has passed to the People's Assembly, would be dedicated to shantytowns themselves, monitoring the appearance of slum housing and setting a timetable for the evacuation of residents to alternative housing, while the second would supervise the necessary coordination between ministries to achieve these ends. The ministry of shantytowns, he says, could then play an important role in modernising Egyptian society and raising the economic and social standing of the less privileged. The tragedy that befell residents of Dweiqa is not the only incident to adversely affect popular perceptions of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and the government, which comprises a number of powerful businessmen. In March 2007 the Qalaat Al-Kabsh area of Al-Sayeda Zeinab went up in flames. The homes of 150 families were destroyed. It took a year for 100 families to be re-housed. The remaining 50 are still homeless. Half of Cairo's population of 20 million are concentrated in the dense slums that fringe the city, vast areas of brick dwellings built without planning permission, often by migrants who come from the countryside seeking work, and where building safety regulations are completely ignored. The Dweiqa shantytown cropped up in the late 1960s on an area of wasteland. Eventually its population swelled to more than 1.2 million squeezed into two square miles of narrow lanes and ramshackle apartments. In the late 1990s, the National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research issued a report to the government warning of the danger to the shantytown from sewage that had soaked into the rock, dissolving the limestone and weakening the cliff face. A solution was announced in 1999, and construction began less than a mile away on the Suzanne Mubarak Housing Project, funded by a grant from the United Arab Emirates. Manshiyet Nasser MP Haidar Baghdadi now accuses "corrupt officials in the housing authority" of stymieing the development by demanding bribes for the apartments and letting their relatives move into the project.
