CAIRO-Around 100 Egyptian activists have signed a petition against the continuation of Culture Minister Farouq Hosni in office, calling for changes that bring the Egyptian cultural movement back to its former self. e activists, who include academics, writers, and journalists, deplore the alleged deterioration of all aspects of Egypt's cultural life and say for Egypt to go culturally back on track Hosni and his ministry officials must pack up and leave. “Hosni's policies have led to the extreme deterioration of Egypt's cultural movement,” the activists said in their petition. “These policies lack a clear strategy for the future of Egypt,” they added. Hosni reacted defiantly to their criticism.“ I will not resign under pressure from those bogus intellectuals,” said the official. “I'am the only one who can make such a decision.” Among the signatories to the petition are such high-profile personalities as Alaa el-Aswany, an Egyptian novelist with international fame; Hassan Nafaa, a noted political science professor; and Mahmoud el-Khoderi, a judge who among others led the opposition against election vote-rigging in 2005. They gathered in Cairo at the weekend to discuss ways of doing what they called “salvaging Egyptian culture from its current decline”. “The incumbent Culture Minister is a complete failure,” said Gamal Fahmi, an Egyptian journalist and one of the signatories to the petition. “Hosni has forced Egyptians into this cultural impoverishment for more than two decades now,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. Hosni has been responsible for shaping the cultural policies of this country for 23 years now, his total tenure as Culture Minister. The 73-year-old minister has been through turbulent times, but seemed to survive every challenge to his presence in office quite masterfully. In 2005, a fire gutted a theatre in the southern Egyptian Governorate of Beni Suef and a large number of the audiences, actors, and critics were burnt to death. But Hosni got out of the whole catastrophe and the general anger that followed it unhurt. Two years later, Hosni also managed to emerge unscathed from a campaign of accusations levelled against him after a fire destroyed the downtown Cairo National Theatre. Signatories to the petition against Hosni say the Culture Minister is directly responsible for the perceived failure of all of Egypt's cultural institutions in making culture, books, and arts accessible to the majority of the people of Egypt. They said the Minister and his coterie helped make Egypt lose its cultural leadership in the Arab world, having been a cultural hub in this region for decades. “I can forgive our economic planners for beggaring the people of this country and making their life hard, but I can never forgive our cultural planners who destroyed the minds of this people,” Fahmi said. “It'll take us years to be able to redress this cultural balance,” he added. Hosni was the Egyptian Cabinet Minister who in 2008 offered to burn Hebrew books, a pronouncement that, among other things, deprived him of leading UNESCO a year later. The latest campaign of anger against him is motivated by the robbery of a US$55 million Vincent van Gogh painting from a museum in Cairo. Hours after the “Poppy Flowers” painting was stolen from the museum, Egyptians came to discover that museum security cameras were dysfunctional. “Egypt's cultural heritage is being robbed, while Hosni and his ministry officials are watching,” the activists say in their statement. “This is espoused by corruption which has permeated every aspect of our cultural life,” they add.
