CAIRO - Affiliation to the formerly ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) is fast becoming a plague, amounting to the curse of the pharaohs or even worse, almost three months after a popular revolt forced Hosni Mubarak to stand down as president of Egypt. With most of the party members and leaders now in jail on corruption and premeditated killing charges, the party seems to still have many bad things in store for its affiliates. The journalists who used to work for the mouthpiece newspaper of the party Al-Watany Al-Youm are the last to be hard hit. “My life has become in total ruin,” said Taher Abu Zeid, a journalist from the newspaper. “This party's policies have destroyed everybody in Egypt, but the journalists of its newspaper suffered the most,” he told The Gazette in an interview. When he came to Cairo from a poor village in the Nile Delta Governorate of Kafr el-Sheikh six years ago in search of a journalistic job, Abu Zeid, 33 and the father of two children, could not imagine that his dreams would come to dust. But this was what has already happened. The newspaper of the NDP, which monopolised Egypt's political life over the past 30 years, had to close down after a Cairo court ordered dissolving the party and nationalising its assets, which include money (about 30 million Egyptian pounds) and a large number of offices nationwide. The closure of the newspaper, however, entailed untold suffering for the 43 journalists who worked for it for years and reaped nothing at the end but loss and defamation. Abu Zeid and his colleagues have hopes that the Government would help them find jobs at other State-run newspapers, but this seems to be a far-fetched dream, while the Government has much larger problems to solve. “Our problem needs to be solved and immediately,” Abu Zeid said. “We have families that need financial support.” The dissolution of the NDP dashed the hopes of other people, including its new chief Talaat el-Sadat, a nephew of the late president Anwar el-Sadat and an outspoken critic of Mubarak's governments. But at least el-Sadat still keeps his job as a lawyer. The journalists of the party's newspaper, however, cannot do another job. Some journalists of the newspaper had to divorce their wives as a result of their failure to meet the requirements of their families, according to colleagues. Others search for jobs in other newspapers, but they are faced with this situation where the name of this badly reputed party sticks in an indelible manner. “If any of us goes to another newspaper, we will suffer discrimination simply because our names are connected with this party,” said Loai el-Masri, a Foreign Desk reporter from the newspaper. “Some people call us names at the Press Syndicate already.” El-Masri, 28, had worked for the NDP's newspaper for five years. With a monthly salary of 700 pounds (US$ 117), he had to borrow money from his parents to keep things going, but he was dreaming of becoming a full-fledged member of the Press Syndicate. He should have been registered in the union next month. “I have even been deprived of this,” he said. “This means that I got nothing from this party, but the curse of being affiliated to it.”
