CAIRO - Dozens of women and men squat outside a depot with their rusty gas cylinders needing to be refilled. Time drags by until a truck suddenly comes in sight. "It's come at last!" shouts one customer impatiently. "Yes, at last!" the other customers answer in chorus, as they dart towards the truck with their empty cylinders. They have been cooling their heels since the early hours of the day, hoping to get their empty gas cylinders replaced at the State-subsidised price. Cooking gas cylinders sell on the black market for LE45 ($7.50), more than eight times higher than the subsidised price. The truck has barely stopped outside the depot when the poor customers are pushing against it, jostling each other to ensure they can lay a hand on a refill. The truck is loaded with hundreds of cylinders, but they aren't enough to cater for the large number of waiting customers. In the twinkling of an eye, the scene has become a battlefield, with everyone at pains to emerge triumphant. In the melee, the old people risk sustaining serious injuries or getting crushed to death underfoot. "Please stand in a queue, so that everyone can be served and leave in safety," says a depot employee with a distinctively husky voice. "This is not going to work. If the chaos continues, no-one will get a cylinder," he warns. His warning, however, is lost in the chaos. Some well-built customers even climb onto the truck to secure their share of this precious commodity. Apparently concerned about the consequences of this perilous situation, the depot manager calls for law enforcers, who swiftly appear on the scene. They turn out to be soldiers led by a young officer. With some persuasiveness, they manage to streamline the frantic people and convince the operator to order a new batch of cylinders to meet the needs of those still waiting. "May God bless you, my dear son," an old man says, as he carts away his refill. "You have spared us much trouble," he adds in a hearty tone ��" and quite rightly so. Obtaining a gas cylinder at the subsidised price has become a terribly difficult task for many Egyptians in recent months. In fact, several people have lost their lives in what some local newspapers label Egypt's forgotten war. The problem has always been there every winter. Nonetheless, it has never been so acute and bloody. Some months ago, a local man lobbed a petrol bomb outside a depot near Cairo to scare off other customers fighting with him for one such cylinder. Imagine the disaster if his home-made bomb had set off the cylinders inside the depot. On other occasions, trigger-happy customers have wielded sticks and even guns, according to the local media, while angry people in several parts of the country have recently blocked roads and disrupted the traffic in protest against a severe shortage of gas cylinders necessary for heating, not just cooking. Understandably, they see no reason for Egypt supplying other countries with inexpensive gas at a time when they are paying with their lives to have access to the service. Several officials of the former regime, including Mubarak himself, are being tried for cutting long-term deals to export gas at prices far lower than the market value, thereby squandering a phenomenal sum of public money. Still, tens of millions of Egyptians, who have no piped gas in their homes, need more than the trials of suspected officials to see an end to their humiliating dilemma. Allowing such problems to drag on unresolved threatens to make nonsense of a revolution, whose original purpose was to restore Egyptians' dignity and social justice. One year on, such slogans are still proving elusive.
