Last week I wondered: "What happened to us?". Readers have sent me many e-mails asking me to explain what I meant and telling me their bitter experiences. I am not very good at making analyses and I do not have the power to find solutions. Our job is more about raising questions. However, in the readers' answers I found a main common element, namely justice or rather the lack of justice. Justice begins with the right to live a decent life and to be treated fairly in police stations and before courts. Here, though, the state has deceived over the course of the years and has come up with flawed criteria that it may be difficult to fix now. Justice starts with a chance to get education, and I mean real education, not just a broken chair, a humble desk and a classroom with 80 children eventually leaving school more ignorant than they used to be (in addition to the ones who drop out). Justice means distributing schools among governorates and villages instead of just focusing on state-of-the-art schools inaugurated by senior personalities in Cairo and Alexandria alone in front of TV cameras. Justice is all people's right to have the main basic services (potable water, decent sanitation and electricity) without disparity or neglect. Yet, those living in Upper Egypt and in slums are not given the simplest bases of a decent life. Justice means having equal job opportunities, giving posts to skillful people - and not to those having clout, power or connections - valuing abilities and seeing education as an advantage. Justice is when all people stand before the police and judges at the same level and the only thing distinguishing them is right or wrong and not power, money and public relations (I am not saying kinship, as money has become much more powerful). Strangely enough, we can talk to and about the police, but we can not get close to judges, who are the basis of justice. They are not gods, but simple human beings. They can make mistakes, know and ignore. They also have their own needs. Therefore, justice means, first and foremost, letting judges live a decent life: a good salary so that they do not have to work as counselors here and there, a good health insurance and the necessary tools to judge fairly. Judicial rulings, regardless of the kind of judiciary, must be discussed. Why do we have to say "We are not commenting on judges' rulings?" I may be investigated for what I am saying. Perhaps, I do not know, I have no legal counselor to ask. What I think and believe in, though, is that both justice and injustice are indivisible. If people want to feel they belong to their country and to work and improve their performance, they must feel there is justice. This is the starting point.
