Losing A Voice of Reason in Egypt

 A young man died yesterday who by any reasoning should still be here with us. Bassem Sabry was a writer, analyst, activist of the highest ethical standards whom I first encountered online during the winter of 2011. At times, reading the discussions on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, I was struck by his strong wisdom and innate kindness. When he published this on his blog I was stunned to realise how young he was, only 31 at this death, and how wise he was beyond his years. I posted many things that he wrote because he did it so much better than I did. I would urge everyone to take a moment to read this post from last May and think on it. If we all learned as much as he did in his thirty years, surely this world would be much better.


copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Another Year Another Anniversary

 It's 6 am and I find myself awake on this Jan 25 without any apparent reason. The older I get, the more anniversaries of different events I have crowding my life. I remember well the Police Day three years ago. I had one of my daughter's friends staying with me at the farm and neither of us had any real intimation that the day was going to be so momentous. We'd heard rumours of marches and such being planned but no one really had any idea what would be started that day and we still don't know how it will end. Today I will be staying out here in the countryside with my animals and staff. It looks like a lovely winter day in Egypt, but I'm hoping that I won't be following timelines of pain and damage online as I check Twitter and Facebook feeds. The one thing that changed for me forever that January 25 three years ago was my connection to current events through social media. It was the only way to keep track of what was going on here during those 18 days, and I developed an addiction to knowing what was happening in Egypt without having to wait for events to pass through the innumerable filters that are the ordinary media in the world.

Yesterday I, like everyone else in Egypt and probably in the world, was shocked by the news of the explosion in front of the Islamic Museum early in the morning. A friend who had been planning to bring her daughter out to the farm texted me at about 8 am saying that they'd felt/heard the explosion all the way out in New Cairo. The shockwaves must not have traveled so well through the Nile, because I had to admit that I'd slept well and soundly without disturbance.  The bomb that went off in a car parked in front of the police headquarters in downtown Cairo was aimed at the police, not the newly renovated Islamic Museum...the museum was simply collateral damage, but that is the problem with car bombs. They really don't aim well. The fact that it went off at 6:30 am on a Friday morning was a real blessing, since no self-respecting Egyptian would be out and about at that hour on a Friday (This is the only day off for many, so a lie in is essential!) and the street by the police building was essentially empty. I wonder why this is a detail that most news reports fail to mention. Had it gone off even three or four hours later, the death toll would have been much, much greater.

Following Twitter, the subsequent bomb at a Metro station (again near a police station) in Dokki, an apparently ineffective bomb at the police station across from the Mena House at Giza (somehow that seems fitting since my experience with that particular place of social "justice" has shown it to be dubious at best) and then another bomb attack on a police official in Giza filled the day with ever increasing amounts of concern. Maybe I've lived too long in the Middle East, or maybe I've just lived too long period, but from my angle we were blessed with either some incredibly inept bombers yesterday or they were people who really didn't want to hurt that many people. Who, at this point in time, is to say what the truth of the situation is.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I had some women come out for a ride in the countryside, I did my grocery shopping in the village of Abu Sir, and I spent some time in the afternoon with some very lovely Italian Egyptologists who had been visiting the pyramids of Abu Sir and the Sun Temple just across the road from us. Overall, the contrast between my Twitter feed that was full of anger, fear and lots of finger-pointing and the relatively idyllic afternoon in the garden couldn't have been more stark. The government press has done a brilliant job of cranking up anti-Muslim Brotherhood anger since the end of June, a job that honestly didn't need much amplification since by the end of June most people in Egypt were well and truly fed up with them, their incompetence, their unwillingness to negotiate anything or to cooperate with anyone and the general sense of depression at the thought of having to spend more precious time in this particular funk. We have had enough free-floating anxiety, fear, and worry, thank you.

Reports of groups chanting against the MB floated across the news feeds along with some reports of clashes where anti-MB types were actually prevented by police from taking out their anger on some hapless bearded person. This was not the sort of scenes that I like hearing about. A mob is dangerous, no matter what it's orientation. By evening, I'd had it with what was being called reality beyond my bubble and I turned off my computer to watch a Coen Brothers film, but not before I got a concerned message from my son in New York.  He was only seeing the filtered, amplified "Cairo Is Burning" news reports on the mainsteam media, so of course he wanted to know how I was.  I reassured him that nothing at all was blowing up out among the water buffalo, that all the targets for the bombs seemed to be the security/police forces, and that he had to remember I've been through all that before here in the 90's when the world was screaming about terrorists in Egypt, while what was actually happening was that there was a pretty focused battle going on between various groups and, again, the police/security forces. Back then, we kept an eye out on where the security/police people were and simply made sure that we were somewhere else. While life in Egypt is not all that it could be, it was certainly also not at all what it was being portrayed as being.  And at the end of the day, the security people could certainly be trusted to follow through on these bombs....after all the prosecutor general was investigating Pepsi ads that were supposed to be inciting demonstrations. Some things in Egypt don't change.


copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Laugh In The Dark

A couple of little old ladies (ok, one of them was me so maybe the "ladies" part is an exaggeration) were having lunch yesterday at the new Lebanese place on Road 9 in Maadi. (Al Balad is nice food, a little pricey, but good.) Anyway, we were talking and my companion told me that at every single shop where she'd stopped that morning the workers within were bursting to talk to her about all the advice Egypt seems to be getting from governments abroad. The gist of each outburst was "But none of those people have been here! None of them has seen their businesses go under because there's no power/gas/clients/money! None of them have had to listen to the crazy religious jabber of people who think that the age at which a girl marries is more important than the security of our hospitals!" There were variations on the theme, but essentially that was what she was hearing, and being a nice woman originally from Pennsylvania but also a 25 yr resident in Egypt, they really wanted to understand where all this was coming from.

The problem was that my companion felt the same way. As she put it, how could Pakistan, for heaven sake, where people get killed in horrible sectarian violence all the time, stand with a straight face and criticise the "coup/revolution/junta"? Neither of us are happy with the situation as it stands, especially since if people start running down streets away from mobs or CSF forces, us little old ladies aren't very fast. We make terrible revolutionaries.  Over olives and bread, I had a thought and it was that as much as what Egypt is doing in terms of our social/political growth (hopefully) and change (certainly) scares us Egyptians, it is TERRIFYING most of the rest of the world.

In my search for thought-provoking articles for my Facebook page, I follow people who comment on events worldwide, and one of the remarkable things I've noticed is that the general discontent level worldwide is rising. This is accompanied by a rise in conservative-unto-fascist thinking as many people retreat in the face of their worry and confusion (which is a whole other topic but it is feeding into the general divisiveness in Egyptian society), but many governments around the world must be really worried that if crazy, chaotic Egypt can get a ton of people (and I will not get into the question of just how many but it was a hell of a lot) into the streets, what would happen if THEIR people did it! This is a very sobering thought because no matter what form of government is concerned, the fact is that no army or police can really deal with a situation if literally millions of people simply walk into the streets and refuse to leave. So far, most places have not been driven to the point of distraction that Egypt was, so it hasn't happened, but the fact that we've done it means that it can be done. I'm quite sure that this is a lesson every government is hoping that their people don't notice or learn.

I think that, while being aware of others' opinions is not a Bad Thing, being overly concerned with them is debilitating, especially when the ship of state is sailing uncharted waters. Please forgive the nautical metaphors but having spent some years helping to skipper a sailboat around the Mediterranean, the image is the best I know.  The reality is that we don't know what is going to happen here. The MB seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to accept the political world that the majority of Egyptians are currently willing to be living in, which means that the military goal of clearing Raba'a and Nahda is going to be very difficult to achieve. And the recent allowing of "emergency" powers to the military AGAIN! is troubling to many of us who remember all too well that the military have kept a subtle but firm hand on our government throughout all since 2011, much to the detriment of the people. Will Tamerod be able to pull off another coup/revolution/whatever against the military should everyone realise that we are being steered back to 1990...or will the threat be enough to keep the military somewhat in line until we have some sort of real  opposition party? We simply don't know but we can't stand still. We must move on.

Friends in the US and Canada who read alarmist headlines contact me constantly about possibly returning to the lands of sanity (in their minds, but not mine), but I'm here for the long haul. Life these days reminds me of a carnival ride I went on when I was about seven in San Diego. It was called Laugh In The Dark and you sat in a small car that went through dark tunnels where skeletons and the like would pop out at you around corners or fall almost into your lap. It was terrifying and I believe I went on it three times that day. This is all utterly mad, but I wouldn't miss it for the world.


copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Redefining Political Realities

I haven't written anything in my blog for a very long time. To be honest, life in Egypt has had a fluidity lately that most people only encounter while white water rafting.  It's pretty hard to comment on something that is changed the very next day. But the past few days have been amazing. The demonstrations called by Tamarod surpassed everyone's expectations and the political response has been no less astonishing than the events of 2011. To be quite honest, I did not expect the popular outpouring that brought millions of Egyptians out into the streets. In my old, jaded mind set, a petition is something someone does to make him/herself feel better about something that they aren't really going to do anything about. Egyptians have redefined the concept of petition, very  largely because they don't generally use them and felt free to define it in a new way.

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of days. I get notices, often a half dozen a day, on FB and in email, to sign this petition or that one to save the spotted orangutan that is being hunted to extinction in Afghanistan or to tell politicians that Americans really don't want ground plastic in their corn flakes and some of them I take the trouble to sign and pass on and others I don't. Have I ever really had the sense that a petition would change my world? Not really. Maybe someone would read it but most likely not.

But in Egypt, we just removed a president who was delusional, irresponsible, unresponsive, and incompetent (pretty good reasons to get rid of him) by petition. Yes, it wasn't an army coup that did it, it was a petition. Over 20 million Egyptians signed a petition saying that they could not tolerate Mohamed Morsi any more. The army came in only to say to Morsi's followers, many of whom are just as delusional as he is, that the people REALLY have spoken and we will NOT have a blood bath here. The issues of whether or not this was a military coup are, in my mind, secondary and complicated and they don't really speak to what has happened. They may, in fact probably will, be very important in the days to come as the military and the people try to build a constitution and a means of ensuring both political change and stability that doesn't necessarily mean bringing millions of Egyptians out into the streets. But right now I want to talk about what happened here because I think too many people are seeing it through the lenses of predetermined labels and thought.

When I was a little girl, I clearly remember dreaming that if I were walking along a sidewalk in San Diego I could fly simply by picking one foot off the ground, and then picking the other foot up at the same time. I would then float along the sidewalk at roughly the same speed as if I were walking and at the same altitude. I must have been afraid of heights even then because I don't remember any soaring above clouds or anything. Then one night in my dream I was doing this and someone walked up to me, I can't recall who, looked at me flying along the sidewalk and said, "Don't you know that you can't do that?" and BOOM, I was on the sidewalk and never flew in my dreams the same way. I could only do it until someone told me it was impossible. I never forgot that dream because I always had a sneaky feeling that if I could convince myself that I could fly it would work again. So far, in sixty years, it hasn't so perhaps some real innocence is what is needed and this innocence speaks volumes in understanding Egyptians' approach to politics.

Egyptians don't really use petitions. Tamarod was the first real grassroots petition I've seen here. Upper class Egyptians are prone to the same petition signing online, but "normal" working class Egyptians haven't really been exposed to petitions. When I first heard of Tamarod, I was intrigued but not impressed. I thought, terrific for the minority who understand petitions, but what about all the poor, the farmers, the workers? As the Tamarod movement grew, these kids who were running it did the smart thing. They moved the petitions into cigarette kiosks, small grocery stores, and Egyptians by the millions who had been allowed no other voice suddenly found an outlet for their frustrations and they signed it in droves....and they passed the petition on. And, even more important, having taken this massive step of actually signing a piece of paper saying that they wanted a voice in their government, they came out at the end of June to back that statement up with the presence of their bodies in the streets. I'm willing to bet that at least 80% of the people who signed Tamarod came out into the streets at one point...and remember that there were 22 million of them.

Do you think it would work in France, the US or China? I don't know but I think that my dream speaks to that. In 2011, thousands of Egyptians went out to protest police brutality on Police Day. They encountered police brutality, which didn't surprise them, in a really brutal form, which did surprise and anger them, and they basically decided that it was ENOUGH!  No one went out in January to bring down the Mubarak regime and everyone was quite astonished when they did. It was probably the first time in Egyptian history (hieroglyphics don't have much to say about popular uprisings) that the Egyptian people brought down a government by simple force of will (combined to be sure with some Machiavellian maneuvering on the part of the Egyptian military). We and the rest of the world were stunned and like a dog that has finally caught a car after chasing it for so long, frankly we didn't know what to do with the country.  Reality in the form of referendums, elections and the incompetence of the people elected who had no experience at all with the nuts and bolts of governance, set in. Expectations that the Muslim Brothers who had always been the first on hand with help for the poor or disaster-struck would be able to handle governing were pretty much shot down by the time the presidential elections came around and Morsi squeaked in more by virtue of people NOT voting for his opponent than by anything else. Many Egyptians boycotted the elections hoping that large numbers of people NOT voting would be noticed....but they weren't really. People don't notice something that should happen but doesn't. What they notice is something that shouldn't happen but does.

So when Tamarod was organised and the more worldly of us sort of looked at it and thought "Cute. Nice try, kids. A petition never changed anything." the rest of Egypt was learning to fly because no one had ever told them that it wouldn't work. This was one of those things that had never been done, so why wouldn't it work? And it did work. It worked because the signers put their heart, souls and bodies into their action. And this morning, whether we see peace or fighting, whether the army deals with us honestly or not, whether Mubarak's weasels try taking over the government or not, this morning is the result.

At this point, I suspect that there are a lot of governmental types all over the world viewing Egypt very suspiciously. A country that has a terrible literacy rate, has one of the worst school systems in the world, has carefully taught its population to follow orders, that has a huge population of poor people who barely manage to survive, and that has no experience in that exalted form of political activity, democracy, has toppled two leaders in two years. Doing it once can be dismissed as a fluke, but doing it twice could mean that these people have actually figured something important out. I think that Egypt's complete inexperience in political matters has actually worked to its advantage because there are young people out there who come up with a simple idea like Tamarod and try it, not knowing that it isn't supposed to work. And as long as no one believes that it isn't supposed to work...it will work. Ignorance can be bliss.

copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Don't Mess With Egyptian Women!

 I have time for a quick Christmas present from the women of Abu Sir to the rest of us before I scamper to get my Christmas lunch organised. Yesterday I was out for a ride with a friend and stopped by one of my neighbour farms just to say hello and chat briefly. He had a story that almost had me falling off my horse in laughter. The women of my area have my deep and abiding respect. They care for farms, families and homes in pretty tough conditions but never fail to have a smile, a greeting and to lend a hand to others. They are the steel of their families. While this is a very traditional part of the country and one of strong religious conviction, these women are also very accepting and friendly and have always been a source of laughter and joy for me, a very nontraditional aging Canadian. I've been hearing from many of my neighbours that they are very unhappy with the mismanagement from the Muslim Brotherhood and the meddling ways of the Salafis for some time. One neighbour told me how when buses came to shuttle protesters into Heliopolis for the demonstration at the presidential palace that turned so bloody a couple of weeks ago, quite a few of the mothers around me informed their sons that if anyone wanted to take the bus into town, they were welcome to do so but not to bother to come back.

So apparently a group of Takfir wal Higra moved into our area to help our local population behave in a more "proper" manner. They were seen walking along the roads in their short galabeyas and had taken a mosque for preaching and an office in Abu Sir for organising.  A week or so ago, eight of the men went into the main souq of Abu Sir and as they were entering noticed one woman sitting by her produce with a little bit of leg showing from her galabeya. Very rudely kicking at her leg, they told her to cover up and be decent. This was a monumental mistake. As it happened, this woman was the head woman for the souq and a member of a very populous clan in the area that number in the thousands. She and the other women in the market attacked the eight men and beat them so severely that they had to go to the hospital. When the men tried to file a report with the police about the attack, the police refused to take the report, saying that they weren't going against these women as well...were the men crazy? So now the youth of Abu Sir are using the office as a tea room and the mosque is no longer being used for their fundamentalist sermons and no one has seen the Takfir group for some time.

If anyone is wondering who to support to get rid of Islamists in Egypt, here is your answer. The women of Egypt are some of the strongest women I've ever seen.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Shaken Not Stirred

 What's it like living in a country that is still in the middle of a revolution? It's actually a lot like living in a lot of countries these days, just a bit more dramatic. Almost everywhere I look I see change occurring at a phenomenal rate, partly brought along by the changes in communication that this blog exemplifies. When I began blogging in 2003, people were much more reliant on the main stream media for information about events whether at home or abroad. In the almost ten years since then, events have taken on an immediacy never anticipated through media such as Twitter, Facebook and Storify. Where once I felt I was happy to be able to go online to read commentary on events from a wide-ranging collection of news sources via the internet, now I go online and check the comment on Twitter from their correspondents in our ever-boiling part of the world to see what happened overnight before it even appears in the media.  One of the results of this increase in media availability has been an increased sense in the instability of our world. I'm not sure how more unstable it is, but I am sure that we are more aware of it. I also am very aware of the fact that I am one small cog in this huge global information machine.

When the Egyptian revolution started in January 2011, my children in the US contacted me to see if I wanted to go visit them for the duration...but they weren't terribly surprised to hear that it wasn't in my plans. I chose the location of my farm with care, knowing my neighbours and the social structure into which I wanted to fit. It is probably as safe for an older woman who lives alone with an unholy amount of dogs as anywhere can be. Once they'd assured themselves that I was still the stubborn old lady that they knew and loved, they did lay down some ground rules. With the outcome of the revolution very much in the air, I was NOT to post anything at all on my blogs. The few times I did, I was the recipient of immediate angry feedback from my offspring. But it's really hard for someone who naturally resorts to writing not to write, especially when the country around her is almost literally boiling. So we came to a compromise. I was allowed to post other people's articles about events in Egypt on my Facebook page which became a defacto news service. Writing by proxy saved my sanity. I've tried to keep a fairly balanced viewpoint about events, although clearly my feelings could not be denied. Over the past couple of years, my Facebook page has become less a personal account of my activities and more a forum for my friends all over the world to read news, blogs, and snippets from Twitter and to comment on or argue over them among themselves. I've likened it to the old fashioned literary salons of the 19th century at times. I love watching the discussions although often I don't take part in them if a couple of people are really into a topic. When life gets REALLY interesting in our neighbourhood, like it is now, I find that I really have to make the time to sit and write my own words because there is so much out there that others are saying.  So far worries about retribution for what ideas we are putting out on the internet are relatively small, since to worry about a little old lady on a farm in Giza who never shows up on TV or at a protest would appear to be a waste of time when half of Egypt is online complaining about one thing or another.

So, what is Egypt like in the middle of a revolution? Because that is where we are, in the middle, in a process that no one knows the ending of. I think everyone in Egypt has been anxious in the past few weeks with many people going down to Tahrir and gathering in other squares in other cities to protest the actions of our fairly recently elected president and with the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of said president were planning to have their own protest in support of the president. One of the main, not always unspoken, fears was that somehow the two groups would simply explode if put in contact, like a match to a stick of dynamite. A while back the Ikhwan bussed in supporters from outside of Cairo to come to Cairo University to support Morsi as he prepared to announce the acceptance of a draft constitution for a public referendum. The fact that the committee drafting the constitution did not contain any constitutional experts in any general sense was extremely worrying to many people. After all, a constitution of a nation isn't exactly a set of rules for a children's backyard club. It is supposed to protect the rights of all the members of the nation and with limited representation by minority groups and women, there has been an enormous amount of concern with what the output would be. On Thursday an Arabic version of the draft was released, which has been the topic of enormous amounts of discussion. I've printed up copies of it for my staff to read and think about. An English translation of it was published by Egypt Independent which I have been reading as well. Late in the evening yesterday, Morsi announced that this would be either approved or disapproved in a referendum on December 15, giving voters only two weeks to consider the issues.  I'm not sure that more time would necessarily lead to more clarity of thought on the subject, but it's fairly sure that only having two weeks to find, read, and discuss the draft does make it harder for people to object to it. Most referendums in Egypt have ended in a "yes" vote out of inertia. And in the end, this referendum was no different.

Does this signal the end of the process? By no means, and not the least of the reasons is Morsi himself. He's put people who even many Muslims and revolutionary types can't approve of on the Shura Council (the upper house of parliament) like generals and members of the Islamic Jihad. There is such a thing as appropriate, really Dr. Morsi. Virtually everything he has done, while he may have words to say that it has been expedient or for the good of the country, simply screams authoritarian Islam. And this is wildly offensive to Egyptians of all varieties who were thrilled to get rid of Mubarak. We are nowhere near the end of the tunnel and no one is sure what those dancing lights are. They could be Salafi cigarettes (soon to be taxed at much higher rates!), the steam engine of economic collapse, fireflies, fairies, or, heaven forbid, the end of the tunnel. My personal bet at this time is not the last, but the fairies or fireflies sound good to me.

So am I packing up for what might be the stability of the US or Canada? Not at all. First, I'm not all that sure of the stability of either state, to be honest. Both are awash in political and religious conservatism themselves, albeit both Canada and the US are so much larger than Egypt physically that the effect is diluted, and both are facing serious domestic political issues. Gun control in the US is vital, although many people are extremely vocal against it. My personal cynical view of the gun issue is that given the US is the world's largest manufacturer and seller of weapons and ammunition, the gun enthusiasm has been created in the same way that other consumer appetites have been and that no one is going to try to control the selling of guns for fear of damaging an important part of the economy, just like all the calls for cutting back on the "aid" for Egypt is going to lead to nothing because that "aid" is actually a government subsidy for the arms industry in the US and the money goes directly to the companies producing weapons and ammunition and to those servicing such weapons. What happens to them later is irrelevant to the US government or those industries, but the sooner they are used or blown up the better because that simply creates a new demand.

Canada, aside from the environmentally wasteful behaviour of the current government, is facing a deeper and perhaps more dangerous domestic issue that could easily splash over the border to the south. Both countries were created by wave after wave of immigrants primarily from Europe over the past three hundred years or so...a brief second compared to the history of Egypt. These immigrants, having now the positions of power in a land that they essentially invaded and confiscated (no wonder that both their governments are fairly staunch supporters of Israel, the most modern European colonial power) are crying now about how new waves of immigration are threatening their life style. Oddly enough, the indigenous peoples of North America, who for the most part live in poverty and on marginal properties to which they were pushed by the immigrants of their times, are getting rather fed up. A movement that started in Canada with a tribal chief Therese Spence, who is on a hunger strike for assistance for her people, Idle No More, is gaining support from other indigenous people's groups worldwide. At some point, the urge for justice that seems so keen in many semi-European countries in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa is going to have to thrust itself inwards to examine the morality of how those countries came to be in the first place. This is going to be intensely painful for many people. On the other hand, they could try to ignore it like they have in the past, but with the character of communication in our societies these days, that simply isn't so easy.

All things considered, I'll stick with my Egyptian revolution which for the most part is relatively straightforward even if we haven't the foggiest where the path is taking us tomorrow. I see shudders of change running through countries all over the globe and I don't think that anywhere is going to be immune. All the patterns I see forming are indicating that with information becoming so much more readily available and so much more easily placed in the public eye, many profound changes in human society will be seen in the relatively near future. My analysis is, of course, done very much by eyeballing events and getting a vague sense of movement. There is nothing scientific about it and I'm sure that some of the things I suspect will happen will not come to pass, but of this I am sure: Change is inevitable and will be faster than expected. It will likely make many people unhappy.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

The Mogamma Game in 2012

 

I went downtown today. I went to the Ministry of Justice on Lazoughly Square to get a paper stamped for a friend. There I was told that I had to take the paper to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When I pointed out that I'd been sent to the Ministry of Justice by the people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they told me that I had to go to the BIG Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the one on the Corniche next to Maspero. Terrific.

Mohamed drove me over there as we passed through the area of downtown Cairo that has been "in flames", "melting down" and "filled with rioters". Other than the usual Cairo traffic, the trip took no time at all as there were no road blocks, no protesters, no fire bombs, not even very many police. It only took half an hour to find the door. Egypt's foggy bottom tends to be really foggy even in broad daylight and just happens to be across the road from what has to be the world's largest used clothing market. 

I found my way in and told them that the people at the Ahmed Orabi Department of Foreign Affairs had sent me to the Department of Justice who had sent me to this Department of Foreign Affairs. "Why?" they asked. "I haven't the slightest idea, but I need this paper stamped." I replied. They looked at the paper and told me that it was dated 1988 and was a marriage contract. I agreed and pointed out that it was stamped by the Consulate in New York. They told me that it should have been stamped by Foreign Affairs and/or the Justice Department over twenty years ago. I pointed out that as the groom on the paper had been dead for about a year and the bride was living in the US, there wasn't much they could do about that, but I was trying to get the inheritance papers sorted out for my friend and that if they woulf be so kind as to  help me, I would really appreciate it. A small whispered consultation took place and I was suddenly given a numbered tag and marched over to a tent where apparently the one man in all of Egypt who could sign this paper and stamp it for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in lieu of the Department of Justice was working. This very kind and polite elderly gentleman did so and then directed me to a third Department of Foreign Affairs.

According to the guys at the big Department of Foreign Affairs, this third office was “just behind the Semiramis Hotel near the US embassy”. Wonderful. This was exactly where I had promised my two currently long-distance kids not to go after the excitement of the past few days. Back into the car, a trip through the madness that is Cairo’s roadways near the Ramses Hilton (a place that I absolutely refuse to drive myself) and we found our way to the back of the Semiramis Hotel. Mohamed had to drop me and leave because there were no parking places and no way the police around there were going to allow him to wait around. Once I asked for the building with this office, I was pointed to a spot about two or three blocks south. “Behind” is a very relative term in Egypt. If you are in our foggy bottom looking south, then the other Foreign Affairs IS behind the Semiramis, but it is also behind the Shepheard’s Hotel and behind a couple of other buildings as well. To my untutored mind, I naturally assumed that “behind” required “in front of” being facing the Nile, but obviously to them it meant “in front of” being facing them. Interesting world view.

As I made my way to the hopefully last office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the shortest route was blocked by a four meter wall of enormous concrete blocks recently placed across the road to block protesters from the US embassy, so I had to walk around the Shepheard’s to the Corniche along the Nile, turn left away from the Nile and then zigzag around roads blocked with razor wire and very bored Central Security Forces. A couple of friendly secret police not so secretly gave me directions to the entrance of the ministry, which was guarded by even more bored CSF personnel. The brass plate told me that the office was on the fifth floor but someone obligingly pointed out that it was actually on the first. Naturally. This is an odd office that seems to work only with embassies, which would explain why it was practically next door to the US and British embassies, among others. Again I had to go through the entire sequence of events, was told quite brusquely by a very nasty little man to go sit down outside and dismissed. This wasn’t looking good, especially when the same nasty little man came out and shouted at a couple of the people who were waiting outside for whatever they were waiting for….but, miracle of miracles, after twenty minutes I finally received my properly stamped paper so that the lawyer can work on the statement of heirs for my friends.

Years ago, people used to joke about the Mogamma Game, a sort of sadistic snakes and ladders that would be experienced by people trying to do paperwork in the Mogamma, things like visa renewals. At the time, I had a very conscientious husband who made sure that the most I ever had to do was to show up at the appropriate time and sign something. Since his death I’ve learned how to do things the hard way, like everyone else in Egypt, and luckily most of the time I can keep a sense of humour about it. So I wandered all over melted down Cairo today and except for the fact that a lot of pavement was being held down by snoozy CSF personnel and I had to walk over four blocks out of my way because of yet another unnecessary wall (wish I had the commission on that franchise with all the walls built over the past year). But the good news is that Cairo is alive and the system of bureaucratic torture is very well indeed.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Recognising Catastrophe

These days the news from Egypt is pretty depressing for just about everyone. Voters are expected to choose soon between two candidates who are not the first choices of most of the voters, and who are fairly diametrically opposed. There is Dr. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who terrifies all the voters who worry about Egypt turning into another Iran, while opposing him is Hosny Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, who claims that everything will be different if he is elected president, but most people sort of doubt that. Faced with two miserable choices, everyone is seeing disaster everywhere they look.

Some of us make a habit of seeing disaster in everything and I'm one of those people, oddly enough. "Catastrophizing" is a psychological term for the act of seeing the worst case scenario in every situation, and when I was a grad student it was something that I would be reprimanded for by my clinician friends as being maladaptive. I had no idea it had a name because it was just how I dealt with things.  I've catastrophized all my life. As a child I would lie awake at night and wonder how I would manage if I were to wake up in the morning and not find my parents there to care for me. Whenever I attempted something new, applying to university for example, I would spend hours imagining that I would not be accepted and think of what it would mean to my life, how would I manage to make a living, and so on. Of course, I did get accepted, but life was always coming up with new challenges to give me something to worry about.

It was when I was in grad school that one of my friends called me on my habit, gave it a name, and told me that it was a really bad thing to do. To be quite honest, I wasn't really convinced. I'd been looking at worst case scenarios all my life and a habit like that is hard to change. But when I looked up the pattern, I noticed that catastrophizing was something that was supposed to lead to a sense of inability, worthlessness and so on. But in my experience my assumption of catastrophe in every situation had led me to explore all the possibilities of what could go wrong and as many of the possible solutions as I might be able to imagine. Rather than paralyzing me, it pushed me to explore the possible futures that I might face and to try to figure out how I would deal with them.

When I was only about twelve I read about the epidemics that swept through Europe decimating the population in the Middle Ages. I became fascinated with the Black Death, probably to a certain level of concern from my parents. But I learned about the causes, the cures, the effects on the political systems and economies of Europe along the way. When we decided to move to Egypt, I took an entire series of first aid and CPR courses from St. John's Ambulance in Toronto and threw myself (quite literally) into a Bronze level lifesaving course at the neighbourhood pool. I had an idea from my travels here about the general level of first aid in Egypt in the late 80's (like nonexistent) and was going to be prepared for the worst case scenario, which in this case was needing this knowledge. And I did need it. A month after we moved here, with my training I was able to recognise and deal with my husband's  heart attack. We got him to a cardiologist and into ICU immediately, postponing my widowhood by a good twelve years. I don't want to think about all the times that the first aid training came in handy: broken arms, choking victims, a visiting child who had a crowbar fall on his head from a neighbouring construction site...you name it, it happened at our house. People used to joke that the catastrophes happened around me because I knew how to deal with them and how to get people the care that they needed to survive them.

As I've grown older, my catastrophizing has become a good and faithful friend. When the bird flu broke out and began spreading, I was worried for my African Grey parrots so I learned all I could about the vectors, the signs, the problems...and I learned that parrots don't get it. By examining the catastrophe I realised that it wasn't really a catastrophe, no matter what the press said. I did have to slaughter my chickens when bird flu broke out at a chicken farm near me, but no people got sick at all and we were well provided with chicken soup for some time. Some research on swine flu also reassured me that I was highly unlikely to perish from that as well. When life turned interesting in Egypt during January 2011, I assured my children that I would be fine where I was, and although events were at times very frightening, albeit more for the people in the center of the city than for us out in the villages, I had no intention of evacuating. Instead I threw myself into finding out as much as possible about what was going on, what possible risks might be, what possible outcomes might be...in other words, what were the worst possible scenarios.

I've continued my preoccupation with trying to prepare for catastrophe for the past year and a half. I have no input into what might happen in Egypt. Due to a wonderfully weird bureaucratic glitch, I don't have my Egyptian citizenship despite having been married to an Egyptian, being mother to two Egyptians, and having lived here for almost 25 years, and I can't even vote. It's pretty frustrating although the thought of having to choose between two totally unwanted alternatives is not terribly appetising.  I wish I could really say that I've gained some understanding of what is happening in Egypt right now, of what we can expect, but I can't. I'm watching bemused like everyone else, wondering how on earth we got here. I have my own ideas of what would be the greater catastrophe for Egypt: Morsi for president or Shafik...but even that has variables that I can't predict. I don't know how invested the military is in seeing that Shafik win the election, what they will do to ensure that, how they would respond if Morsi won, or what the reaction would be if Shafik wins and people feel that the elections are a total sham.

There are times when imagining the worst case scenarios just can't really do justice to reality.  Do I feel incapacitated, frozen, unable to make decisions or act? Not really. I am frustrated, worried, and do feel that way too much is hanging in the balance. Am I about to take off and leave? No. None of my worst case scenarios include my leaving Egypt. I love my farm, my neighbours, my animals and my life here. I'd say that my absolute worst case scenario involves me not being able to move around Egypt freely and being stuck out here...and as far as I'm concerned that isn't a bad scenario at all.

As I was thinking about all of this, quite serendipitously one of my children's friends posted a link to an excellent New Yorker article on the internet. Entitled Failure And Rescue, this article suggests that life is unpredictable, but that how we face our catastrophes determines how much we succeed.  He uses the story of surgery that almost went terribly wrong but ended up in success because people were aware of the possibilities of problems, recognised the signs and were able to deal with them. Sometimes catastrophizing is an adaptive trait.


copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, But Do Watch This Video

There is a video that I think everyone who has an interest in the Egyptian political scene in either the short run or in the long run should spend an hour and a half to watch. Mahmoud Salem, a blogger also known as Sandmonkey (see his blog at http://www.sandmonkey.org), spoke at the Washington Institute for Middle Eastern Affairs a few days ago. Aside from being an extremely astute and acute observer of our political scene, Mahmoud is a highly entertaining speaker. His description of Am Moussa as "that sandwich that you find in your fridge at 3:30 AM when you are hungry but you can't remember where it came from or what it's made from; but you eat it anyway" is priceless. This is one young man who, in my opinion, is a national treasure and should be watched closely. Please click on the link to see the YouTube video. It's worth every minute. copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

What a Difference a Year Has Made

It's the last day of 2011 and I honestly can't say that I'm sorry to see this year go. Last year at this time we were looking forward to a winter of visitors who would be coming to see Egypt and ride with us to get to know the countryside. The weight of the moribund political system here was a familiar feeling...you didn't talk politics, it was easier not to think about them, we just got on with our lives. As we moved into January, there was, however, an odd sense in the air. There were the protests over Khaled Said's murder, very unusual and moving protests with thousands of people lining the river and ocean walkways dressed in black and speaking to no one. Something was happening and none of us really knew what, but given the stagnant quality of life in Egypt, everyone was more curious than fearful. When the protests were announced for Jan 25 last year, I had a feeling that they were likely to be something more than normal. I took a friend from our area into town for supplies on January 24, and we basically stocked up on necessities like rice, sugar, tea, Cheetos, chocolate...you know what I mean. We ran into another friend in the grocery store who said that she'd been thinking of taking some visitors to the Egyptian Museum the next day and I told her that I couldn't really justify my feeling, but I thought maybe that the next day was not going to be the best day for a downtown trip and that they might want to keep an eye on the news. We are still laughing over the warning, but she and her family are being moved back to the US soon as her husband's company is downsizing in Egypt.

Like virtually everyone else in Egypt I was totally blown away by the events of January 25 and the following three weeks. We stayed on the farm glued to Jazeera English, CNN and BBCWorld. Time went into a strange form with calls checking in with my kids in New York twice a day when the phones were working, and manic rage when the internet and phones were cut here. Fear and anxiety for young (and old) friends in Tahrir and other protests in Egypt became the overwhelming emotions as story after story of the horrors being inflicted on prisoners, citizens, and protesters flowed in. After a while, the horrible became disturbingly normal. People I knew from internet connections were arrested and beaten, friends of friends were shot by snipers, and one of my closest young friends was attacked and nearly killed by a mob of thugs near Kasr el Aini hospital when she went to give blood. The local neighbourhood watch committees filled us with pride at the willingness of the Egyptians to care for themselves came to the fore, since it was pretty obviously that the part of our government that was supposed to be a source of order was in fact a source of disorder. I'm old enough to remember where I was when John Kennedy was killed, when the Berlin Wall was built and when it fell, what I was doing on the morning of the Cuban missile crisis, to have gone to classes in university through clouds of tear gas...I've seen plenty of excitement, thank you, in my life, but nothing ever came close to those three weeks.

Like many in Egypt, we wept with delight on February 11 when Mubarak stepped down, thinking also like everyone else that this would mean some real changes. On February 12 we drove down to Beni Suef to buy some new goats for our herd, a maie Google and two females, Twitter and Horreya. And then we began watching events unfold. Oh my, what a year. What disappointment. We did have a few brave visitors who came to see a post-revolutionary Egypt, and most of them were fascinated and delighted. But as summer came on and events became more complicated and less visitor-friendly, fewer and fewer people came to visit Egypt.

This fall has been a time of watching elections, protests, strange responses to protests, and much worry about the future of our country as it isn't clear that the military really have any intentions to follow the work of Jan/Feb to its conclusions. Tonight I understand that a prayer/vigil is planned for Tahrir to commemorate the martyrs of the struggle. Hopefully, it will be peaceful. I'm hoping for an improvement after the elections, but the signs are not so brilliant. We may have another interesting January to find our way through. Guess maybe it's time to stock up on Cheetos.




copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Parliamentary Surprises

People have been voting in Giza the past two days in the parliamentary elections. My neighbours went to a school in Abu Sir to vote as they did in the referendum, but in much larger numbers. My grooms asked for time off to vote and I told them that they absolutely had time off to do so. Later in the afternoon, I sat and we chatted about the voting process. I've read all sorts of comments on the voting results, which seem very much to favour the Islamic parties. So many people find this worrying as they are concerned that the Islamic parties might not be friendly to tourism, might insist on women wearing hijab, might not be friendly to other nationalities and so on. Personally, I feel that this is a momentous new experience for Egyptians and that we really have almost no idea what the results mean to most people. I suspect that we are going to have to just wait and see.

My grooms and gardeners were happy to talk about who they'd voted for and why. When they said that many of them had voted for Salafi's I don't mind saying that I was somewhat surprised. These guys don't seem like Salafi people, really. But when I asked them why the Salafi's or the Brotherhood, their answer surprised me. They pointed out that both parties, having been outlawed during Mubarak's years, had been unable to rack up a history of illegal political activities as had the old NDP. They were, in essence, political novices and as such deserved a chance to try to make things better. I asked about the worries that people have about the Islamic parties affecting our country's main industry, tourism, something that is the basis for our work as well. "Well, if they don't do a good job, then we can vote to get rid of them" was the response. So their votes for the Islamic parties were more a way of avoiding voting for any felool (remnants of the old regime) than they were a vote for the Islamic principles of the parties.

Things in Egypt are seriously not what they seem on the surface.


copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Hard Lesson

Living in a country during a revolution changes you whether you like or expect it or not. One of the changes that I've seen in myself is the extent to which I am interested in social and political trends in Egypt and other parts of the world. Sure, I was interested in them before to a certain extent but that interest has been honed and given new tools since the revolution. Before revolution I prided myself on the fact that I read the news from a wide variety of sources, having come to the conclusion fairly early in my life, around the time of the Viet Nam war, that no one source could be trusted implicitly. During January and February, I promised my kids to stay safe on the farm so I picked up a Twitter account that I'd opened in curiosity a year or so earlier and decided to see how it worked.

And did it ever work! From a few friends that I knew through blogging I gradually expanded my circle of informants to most of the activists tweeting in English, and from there to the frontline journalists who actually went out into the field to report on events in Egypt. Gradually the list expanded to include journalists and activists throughout the Middle East, North Africa, other parts of Africa and lately into Europe. Activists talk about what they want to do, plan to do, hope to do, and about what went wrong or right with what they've already done. It's quite enlightening and humanising to listen to their worries, fears, and dreams. The journalists tend to post a link to an article as it's published so I get a jump start on reading rather than waiting for a wire service or newspaper to pick up the article. They also post links to many of the more obscure but incredibly interesting and useful blogs, reviews, and online papers. Additionally, once you collect a reasonable amount of journalists on your Twitter feed, you get to eavesdrop on their debates, discussions and jokes that never, ever make it to a written page. This is both enlightening and highly entertaining.

On Friday evening I opened Twitter to find references to Norway's catastrophe and immediately turned on Al Jazeera English. This is my first choice for the news, again a change since the revolution when we saw here the amount of time and investment of interest and personnel that they put into their coverage of events in Egypt. Additionally, their lack of advertising is a huge comfort. This time, however, I was appalled to see them interviewing one Justin Crump, apparently some kind of security analyst from the UK, about his ideas about the bombing in Oslo. The horrific details of the shooting on the island had not come out on the news yet. Despite the interviewer's insertion of "but, but", Mr Crump quite comfortably declared that this was likely an Al Qaeda action or the action of some other Muslim terrorist, and proceeded to list all the reasons that this might be so. Disgusted to see this yet again (the broadcasts of 9/11 will live in my memory forever with their seamless condemnation of the Arab perpretrators...something that totally astonished me at the time), I turned to Twitter. There was discussion as to who might have been involved in the action and, as journalists contacted friends in Norway, suggestions of people to follow on Twitter who were in place as witnesses or who had immediate access to the ongoing investigations. I followed the breaking news and discussions avidly through the evening.

At one point, a security analyst who specialises in following the jihadist bulletin boards online tweeted that someone on one board had claimed the bombing for the Friends of the Islamic Jihad, a group that no one had ever heard of. Subsequent tweets mentioned that the claimant was not the best of sources and suggested caution, but caution was not on the agenda of the New York Times and later the BBC, who quoted the New York Times as a source. They came out with the news that it was the work of Arab terrorists and many people followed their stories as the gospel...I mean, after all, the BBC AND the New York Times couldn't be wrong? Could they ever be! Yesterday there was a day long discussion on Twitter as to whether Will McCant, the source for the bulletin board tweet was irresponsible in tweeting his information if idiots were going to pick up the information and run with it as the Word of the Almighty. I don't know that anyone ever came to any conclusions in the discussion other than the fact that no one liked what had happened and everyone was uncomfortable with the fact that once again, the ubiquitous "Arab terrorist" was going to be blamed for something, causing innumerable problems for any of us connected with the Middle East. My personal opinion is that the problem was caused by the general assumption that something seen on Twitter, or the internet in general, is by definition true, an assumption that is utterly wrong. Twitter posts and internet posts are not necessarily fact-checked or verified. They are opinion, information that could be either right or wrong, that is passed on, and they must, as such, be subject to fact-checking and verification. This did not happen on Friday night.

When the Norwegian police announced that the gunman who had been massacring young people at a political summer camp on an island near Oslo and who appeared to be responsible for the car bombing of the building in downtown Oslo was most definitely Norwegian, some of the speculation by news papers online changed to whether or not he had been trained by Muslim terrorists, not much of an improvement by my standards, and on Saturday morning many news sites still had not changed their stances in the face of the facts. The reaction by the mainstream media (often abreviated to MSM on Twitter) to the events of Friday was, on the whole, fairly ghastly. An article in The Atlantic has a very good discussion of the sudden about face that the media had to make in the light of the fact that this was in fact the act of a homegrown right wing Christian xenophobic Norwegian terrorist.

Interestingly enough, the fact that he was a Christian Norwegian suddenly seemed to change the man from a terrorist (something that is foreign, fearful and incomprehensible) to a madman (which somehow is understandable). I don't find it understandable at all myself. There is some level of derangement in anyone who can comfortably contemplate the destruction of other people to "enlighten" others or to change history. But then the natural progression of my logic is that the sanity of most military organisations is called into question and I'm sure that many people really don't want to go there. But I would most certainly state that this individual is definitely a terrorist and, in terrorism terms, a very successful one at that. Considering the difference in population between the US and Norway, he managed to kill a larger percentage of Norway's people in his bombing and shooting than the percentage killed in the attacks of 9/11. And he seems to hold the record for the most number of people killed single handedly in a single incident.

I'm hoping (ever the optimist!) that there is a lesson learned from the past two days. One would imagine that the Oklahoma City bombing would have clued in the US that they have to watch their local non-Muslim terrorists, although the main change seemed to have been a toughening of policy against foreigners. Europe has definite issues with governments banning the wearing of niqab and taking action against halal and kosher slaughter. A Dutch friend of mine told me that this was initiated as an animal welfare bill that called for the anaesthetising of animals before slaughter so that they wouldn't be in any pain. My understanding of anaesthetics and euthanasia of animals is that drugs are prohibited in animals used for food for a very good reason, the fact that the residues are harmful to humans, so I have to first question the logic of the initial push and then wonder why it became ethnic/religious.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families in Norway who were devastated by the past few days, but I also pray to see some understanding in the world that xenophobia and extremism breed terrorists, and that terrorists come from any and every background.










2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

The Wrong People In the Wrong Place

Yesterday about 350 bloggers in Egypt wrote posts regarding the role of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. (As a personal aside, I find this propensity for supreme councils to be a bit burdensome...couldn't they have an easier name? Somehow SCAF actually does work better as a name.) Most of these posts were in Arabic, but some were in English, which meant that I could read them. I really wish I'd learned to read Arabic, but at my age, time is a bit short to reach a real level of competency.



Most of the posts were, quite naturally considering the state of affairs in Egypt, not exactly pro-military rule. Everyone is upset over the arbitrary detentions and the fact that frankly nothing much is working properly. It's true that nothing much is working properly, and I believe that the fact that our undear and barely departed fearless leader entrusted the country to the SCAF has a great deal to do with our current problems. One post, written by the son of a military man, points out that the army simply isn't equipped for the job. "And here comes the problem, the army / SCAF may be great at doing their job "protecting the people" but they're certainly not knowledgeable, trained, experienced or ready to do a totally different job: "Leading a country of 85 million people in a pivotal point of its history". It doesn't mean they're bad people, it doesn't mean they're on the "dark side of the force", it's just that you're asking a mechanic to remove your tonsils. Those inflamed, complicated, infected tonsils that have been part of your body for years and that you have to remove now, with a great deal of surgical precision." But we were left with the mechanics to remove our tonsils and to treat our cancers. Not wonderful.



This post hit home to me, being a balanced consideration both of what the SCAF was doing wrong and also a consideration of why this might be happening. I do believe that the top ranks of the military (unfortunately those who do make up SCAF) are part and parcel of the old regime. They make outrageous salaries, have incredible perks, and are basically accustomed to being immune to the normal problems of Egyptian life, living in their bubble world, much like the wealthy businessmen who did so well as long as they could call on the influence of friends in government.


It's worth looking at what the military in Egypt actually do. This is a huge institution that ingests vast quantities of poorly educated young men each year for a two year stint of work and, for much of them, deprivation. I live between two main Army bases, Beni Yusuf and Dahshur, and my farming neighbours and my staff have plenty of stories of their time spent in the military, stories of terrible food, long work hours at tedious jobs of maintenance or sometimes working at the homes or farms of the military commanders. We've all seen groups of conscripts doing basic construction work along roads or such things. One of my neighbours (someone who's moved out of his fancy house at this point) was an officer in the police and used his recruits as drivers, gardeners, handymen and general lift-and-haul personnel at his home. This didn't raise a single eyebrow anywhere as it was standard for someone of his rank. So basically, the largest portion of the army consists of poorly educated conscripts who are enrolled in a two year course of indentured servitude....they may be learning to be soldiers, perhaps will be taught the rudiments (never more than the rudiments) of driving a truck or car, some mechanical skills, or perhaps will simply water a lawn somewhere. The better educated members of society generally get assigned to higher ranks on conscription and can either do a desk job or with the right kind of connections, avoid the entire experience all together. Then you have the lifers who have gone to the military college and dived into the the military pool with the hopes of surfacing as a brigadier general someday. These people have almost nothing in common with the conscripts. When the tank commanders did not fire on the protesters in Tahrir during the revolution, this was the work of the conscripted officers. These were men who were doing their two year obligation and when looking at the protesters could think "There, but for the grace of God, go I". They knew that when their time in the military was up, they could easily be those same protesters. This could never be said of the higher ranks. They are bosses and will always be bosses....at least they hope so.

But what does this huge institution actually DO? Well, it hasn't fought in a war since 1973, so that isn't its job at this point. Theoretically, its job is to be ready to fight in a war and this is the rationale for the massive military aid that the armed forces receive from the US, to use an example. I've known some of the military personnel who have come to do training with the Egyptian military, and without exception, their advice to me has always been "just hope that you never need them". A helicopter pilot noted that his students would do anything to avoid flying...a troubling habit as a pilot relies on practice to be able to do his job. If pilots of any kind don't fly for practice, when they need to do so under stress they are unlikely to be of much use. An engine mechanic had the same sort of comment...so it would appear that the zest for military work in the middle to lower management range is somewhat lacking. But there also seems to be little concern about this from the upper echelons. Perhaps they are concentrating on something else?

As a semi-outsider I have noticed an interesting pattern in the Egyptian business community in that virtually every company of any size had some sort of general or something attached to it. So the military is a business school? I wouldn't call it that as many of these individuals were there for their connections to the old regime rather than for their abilities to actually do anything. Those that I met were, on the whole, extremely rigid, not likely to consider any new practices or ideas, and tended to be happy to work in strict chain-of-command situations. When pushed to release information, or change a business paradigm, or learn something new, they were often shocked into immobility. The military, however, have extensive business enterprises. They do a lot of construction work, they own and run hospitals that, while they are meant for military personnel, are actually used for private patients, and the number of entertainment and vacation properties that are run by and for the military is rather staggering. The Egyptian military have an extraordinary number of business enterprises that go back to an initial concept that the military should be self-supporting, but now go quite beyond that.

But does all of this economic activity make them qualified to run a country? On the contrary, their interests mean that they are more concerned with protecting themselves from any interference from outside the military than they are in integrating with the rest of society. It's known that any system soon aligns itself with whatever it takes to preserve that system...no matter what the pronounced goals of any system might be said to be. Would I be surprised if it somehow is "difficult" or "inconvenient" to hold elections that might see civilian oversight of the military? Absolutely not. Their slowness to deal with old problems, and they are almost without number at this point, is hard not to notice. Out near where I live, farmers are wondering about planting and selling crops in the coming seasons as there used to be some guidance from the ministry of agriculture, guidance that is entirely lacking at this point. They don't know how the market is going to work, whether the government will pay a certain price for needed crops as in the past, or what to expect from life in general. As a result the prices of many agricultural products are rising as the farmers are hesitant to sell something that they might need for themselves. Our Egyptian farmers are wildly underrated, but I've seen them to be industrious, canny individuals who know how to coax the maximum number of food crops out of the valley's soil. They do, however, need some input from the ministry of agriculture and this doesn't seem to be forthcoming.

At this point the SCAF are in the unenviable position of being criticised quite correctly for their mishandling of the daily security issues, their inability to get ordinary police back to work, their detention and abuse of protesters, the lack of information and preparation for democratic elections, the lack of effort on the part of the ministries to assist businesses or the farmers. They were given a job that they were not prepared to do, and that many argue they had no real intention of actually doing properly. If, in fact, they have been working with honorable intentions, perhaps they should be asking for some help to accomplish this task. At the very least, they could arrange that the "bad guys" of the old regime are not appointed to current positions of power. The current policies do leave everyone asking whether they can be trusted to help to run honest elections if and when they decide that they will occur.












copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

When Is Aid Not Aid?

Sometimes having lived a long time and having a good memory is an asset. I never thought much about it and it's only recently that I've realised that I have achieved an age that actually counts as such. Perhaps it's having children hitting their thirties that suddenly makes you realise that you have become one of the "older generation". But many of the experiences I've collected, the thoughts and possibilities I've encountered, seem to be coming together now in a sort of critical mass that is presenting me with ideas I haven't examined much up to this point. I've never been terribly focused in my activities throughout my life. I've studied a variety of things, worked in a wide variety of jobs and from time to time have found myself utterly fascinated by quite an odd collection of things. When I was about 13, I ran across a reference in a book to the fact that in the Middle Ages bubonic plague changed the face of Europe irreparably when it killed off roughly 3/4 of the population in its repeated passes. I went to the library (no internet then) and read everything I could get my hands on about the Black Death and its ramifications. Because of my age, my poor parents had to okay many of the books I wanted to read and they were very understanding, although perhaps a bit bewildered at the rather macabre topic.

Lately, I've been watching the events here in the Middle East with total fascination...hardly surprising since I live here and they have the power to touch my life. I'm following the news outlets and some of the less known reports via Twitter. Much has been written about the power of social media in all the uprisings/revolutions taking place and that in itself is a source of fascination. Twitter is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools I've seen developed for communication. I became interested in it a few years ago when it was used to notify people that protesters had been taken by government forces so that efforts could be made to free them, rather than have them fall into the black hole of detention. I've listened in on debates on Twitter and read alternative witness accounts of activities. Amazing stuff for anyone interested in the social sciences.

However, one thing more than anything else has come to the fore in my search for information and the explanations of the rise and falls of dictators in this region and it, oddly enough, is an old bogeyman from my youth. I grew up in California, went to Berkeley during the late 60's and moved to Canada in protest against US policies in the early 70's. I was in no fear of being drafted, but I felt very strongly that the US was completely wrong in its pursuit of the Viet Nam war. When protests and demonstrations finally seemed to reach the ears of the government, finally began to activate the hands and mouths of the legislators and the government finally acted to stop the war, we all had some hopes that someone somewhere had actually learned something.

Some forty years on as I read account after account of the amount of "aid" given to many of the dictators providing so called "stability" in the Middle East I'm reminded of something that I heard way back when I was still very young. My parents were Eisenhower supporters. My father had served as a non-combatant medical technician in WWII and brought my mother to the US as a war bride. After the war he attended Stanford University and was then hired by the Department of Defense where he did a lot of things for the US Navy that he could never discuss at home. Long after his death we've been putting together the picture of what he did from friend's accounts, journals and so on. One of the things he did, rather incidentally, was to help set up the internet in the Pacific Northwest after his retirement. Another thing was to work on modeling, making sort of prototypical computer games that would analyse tactics and strategies. He didn't like being part of a war machine and his real love was space exploration, for which he bargained with his bosses to be allowed to work. All of this explanation is to say why this statement made by President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961 has always stuck in my mind.

"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

My father was part of the military-industrial complex as much as he hated being so, and I was always aware of this conflict within him. When demonstrators were protesting the Viet Nam war, they called attention to the role of Dow Chemical in the development and manufacture of napalm, and to the development and use of Agent Orange, a particularly dangerous form of dioxin by Dow and Monsanto. Over the years, the term military-industrial complex has gone out of style and Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the military aspect was actually just a face of a culture driven by industrial imperatives. Military products are nice to produce because among other things, you can blow them up, necessitating the production of more of them.

It seems wildly obvious to me, however, that the industrial aspects of the western culture have gotten totally out of control. If you read any articles on the aid that has been "given" to many of the Middle Eastern countries, many of whom are currently involved in unrest, revolutions, and protests from unhappy citizenry, it is admitted that the major portion of this aid has been military aid. In countries with massive issues of poverty, environmental issues, poor educational systems, and hunger...they are given military aid. Brilliant. And what does this aid get the country? It gets them the right to buy arms from the aid giver at lower prices, better financing, and sometimes simply takes one government's money, passes it to another government for some quick skimming, and then puts it back in the economy of the first government when the products are "bought".

This is a self-perpetuating cycle. True, it does benefit the originator of the aid in that it helps provide employment for people in the area of the economy that produces arms or the spare parts to repair them or the means to transport them...but the bottom line here is that it's all either destructive or imaginary. No one is actually producing anything that will help someone eat, learn, or become healthier. The best possible outcome is that the arms will simply grow old, like the out-dated tear gas canisters collected by protesters in Cairo. If they are actually used in warfare, they have no beneficial purpose to anyone. So why not simply pay them to build something useful instead, like bridges and dams and new roads, hospitals or schools...or to repair the ones that are falling apart?

Let's face it, aside from a few situations like the Israelis invading Lebanon and the US invading Iraq, invasion has pretty much gone out of style. So do we need to protect against invaders? In Egypt, who is going to invade us? What would seven million Libyans or seven million Israelis do with 80 million Egyptians? We don't need tanks. We can just assign 5 or 6 Egyptians to every Israeli. And running Egypt is no piece of cake as anyone can tell you these days...not exactly a job that any decent invader would aspire to. Even more to the point, the last major military actions have been carried out by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and EVERYONE can see how well those have gone. Obviously, someone is benefiting from all that activity but it sure as hell isn't the Iraqis or Afghanis or the Americans sitting back home wondering what is going wrong with their schools, banks and economy. Someone once estimated that if the money spent on the Viet Nam war were simply converted to nickels and dropped on the country, every square inch of Viet Nam would have been covered to a depth of 3 or 4 feet. It would have been higher if they'd used something cheaper than metal.

It's time for people to stop listening to the nonsense and do as they recommend in the detective novels. (See? Even trashy novels can add your knowledge.) Follow the money. Before you let your country offer military aid to someone, check how it works. Maybe it will actually save some money just to give it to the people of your own country. Much of the billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains stashed away by autocrats all over the world has been skimmed. Want to help someone? Build some tractors, pay the shipping, and give them to the farmers..and skip the bureaucracy. Or buy books and paper and desks and ship them to needy schools. But then no one would profit except the workers who build and the farmers who need, and as we all have seen, that would never do.








copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Thoughts on Recent Events

I began this blog about 18 months after 9/11 in an effort to help friends and acquaintances of mine, mostly from the US, understand why I insisted on living in this backward, terrorist-ridden woman-hating country...that was pretty much how Egypt was described in the media back then. I looked online for webpages or information about the joys of living in Egypt (and there are many) but I couldn't find anything. So with all good intentions, I decided to write about living here as a long term resident and lover of Egyptian society and life. In March, my blog will be about eight years old.

From the beginning, I chose to avoid discussions of local politics, partly because I'm not an Egyptian citizen, not for want of trying but because of some utterly inane bureaucratic hitch in the Mogamma that prevents me from being given citizenship even though my husband and children carry it. As someone without formal citizenship I was very aware of my precarious position under a regime that was notoriously touchy about criticism and I had no wish at all to be deported or barred from entering the country that I consider my only home. In addition, I don't read or write Arabic and I really felt that it was rather inappropriate for me to be sounding off about things here that I could only partly understand for lack of complete information...and I was quick to find a group of much younger Egyptian bloggers who were doing an infinitely better job, at great personal cost.

I chose instead to try to talk about aspects of daily life here that could give the country a more human face, things that anyone could relate to in terms of family life, philosophy, those smaller things that keep us going when the larger events threaten to trample our souls and that are universal to all people. Sometimes I feel that maybe I did too good a job as I get a lot of email from people who for various reasons want to come here to live and work. I always have to point out that Egypt has never been without its problems (no country is), that it is essential to learn to speak (at least) Arabic so that there is a possibility of communication, and that this isn't Indiana with pyramids. Egypt has its own culture and way of life and doesn't need to have anyone else's imposed upon it. With my children grown and studying in the US, I had a constant pressure to remember to be tactful as they were not keen on hopping a flight to try to dig their old mother out of one of the Egyptian prisons.

With the January 25 protests and in the days following, I found myself sitting by the television at the farm, following events on Twitter and the net, and biting my tongue almost off. My son and daughter are still in New York studying and working, and they pointed out the wisdom of not being in Tahrir given my citizenship and the knee surgery that I underwent last summer. (I'm not so nimble on the ground although I am still fine on horseback.) I was devastated like everyone when Mubarak unexpectedly did not step down on Thursday night and cheered with most Egyptians when he finally left on Friday. And again, I was constantly asking myself if it would have been right for me to be there or not. A large part of my spirit says "Hell, yes!", while the part that probably keeps me alive, fed and safe, says "Maybe no". In the end, the deciding vote was cast by my work and lifestyle which meant that if I disappeared a group of people who depended on me for their living and a bunch of animals to whom I am terribly attached, would be set adrift with no one to provide for them. In addition, I actually hold my farm in trust for my daughter and I need to protect that trust. So discretion won out, at least for the short term.

Watching the revolution from the safety of the countryside was rather surreal. Out here the main difference in life was that many of us had a very hard time getting hay and feed for our animals. In our area people helped each other out with supplies so that no one would suffer too much. Thankfully, I'd withdrawn a reasonably large amount of cash from the bank before they all closed during the protests, and this helped a lot. I still had staff responsibilities even if the banks were closed, and animals could care less about politics...they simply want to be fed. Out here the neighbourhood watch was quickly instated and extremely efficient. At the height of the problems you had to go through about 6 checkpoints to get near my farm. If the driver and/or passenger wasn't recognised, they had to show ID, declare who they were coming to visit, and they had to call that person to verify the fact. Even now the checkpoints are in place and cars are carefully vetted. We could hear the tanks rolling around in the desert for much of the revolution. I understand that some archaeological warehouses were raided the first night that the police vanished, but things were quiet here other than the odd time the villagers caught people who had been stealing from stores in the Pyramids Road area trying to smuggle their loot through this area.

My staff, like many rural Egyptians, are mostly at the lower end of the educational scale with many of them illiterate. Even those who could read were incredibly confused. They were accustomed to reading the usual newspapers and watching state TV, so when Al Jazeera began showing what was actually happening in the streets, they didn't know what to think as the government newspapers and TV shouted out that A) Nothing was happening at all; B)There were small protests instigated by foreign powers variously and sometimes simultaneously identified as Israeli, Iranian, Hamas or simply "foreign"and C) Al Jazeera was lying about everything just to make Egypt look bad. I guess that the unspoken word there was that Qatar was also trying to bring down the Egyptian state. When the government satellite cut Al Jazeera Arabic, we would let people come to the house to see it in English, as that hadn't been cut. I spent hours talking to them about what was happening, what was hoped and why it was so important to them...and how it might change their lives but that it would not be an easy road.

Family and friends were, naturally, concerned. My children offered me a flight to NYC, but I declined saying that I felt safe and I wouldn't miss this for the world. As long as it was possible we spoke to each other daily. I don't want to think about my long distance bill. When the net returned after being cut off for a bit, reception out here was still a bit dicey and it took days to respond to people who were writing worried about me. And at the end of it all, I felt drained, happy, bewildered, concerned and frustrated. It's taken a week at least to work out all those emotions.

I was drained as many of the young people who were involved in this revolution were those who I'd been following online for many years. After a while they feel like friends, although I'd never met them, and concern for their safety and relief when they were released from custody was enormous. I was delighted with the outcome inasmuch as our unesteemed head of state departed finally with his family. The cronyism, corruption, and violence were never far from anyone's sight, so I was cheering for the revolution from day one. I think everyone in Egypt is a bit bewildered at this point. This is the first time in probably over eight thousand years that Egyptians have had a say in their government. They have gone through any number of systems of monarchy to military dictatorship and now finally have a chance to have the people of the country speak for their needs. In a sense, they have the chance now to reinvent democracy on their terms. There certainly isn't much in the way of baggage to encumber them since everyone acknowledges that what existed here was certainly not any kind of real democracy. Everyone is looking about asking where to go from here, but they are not simply looking. This afternoon a neighbour took Catherine (a friend of my daughter who is staying here and helping me) into Zamalek for a meeting of a group of people who are wanting to help to rebuild Egypt. There are many groups of this sort on Facebook that I know of and quite likely many more being organised offline. People are collecting money and hospital supplies to help the victims of violence during the protests, they are establishing food banks, going out and sweeping and repairing the streets, directing traffic and taking care of neighbourhood security. Many of the police are either on strike (the lower ranks do get appallingly bad wages and working conditions) or in hiding.

While in many respects, the country seems to be quite normal in these post-revolutionary times, in many others it is not. The stock exchange has been closed indefinitely for some time now. I don't understand stock exchanges when everything is terrific, so I have nothing to say about that now. The strikes that are being held are totally understandable in that no one has had the freedom to complain about anything for longer than anyone can remember, but they are definitely inconvenient at times. Banks were closed all last week and we have had no assurance that they will open this week. This is primarily because the employees of the National Bank are on strike. But the strikes are not indefinite, they come and go causing temporary problems. These are growing pains and I remember being inconvenienced plenty of times by strikes in Canada. In Egypt, people simply have not become accustomed to any labour unrest. A group of my neighbours got together on Friday morning to check out the situation for horseback riding in the desert here, something that is important for both our sanity and some of our budgets. On Friday it was fine, but one neighbour reported seeing soldiers jogging in the desert on Thursday morning. No one is quite sure what that means.

My theory is that Egypt works on a special chaos filter and very close to the red line at the best of times, so when things aren't quite normal...they really aren't that far off normal. On February 12, Catherine and I drove down to Beni Suef (with the ever protective Mohamed of course) to buy some goats to improve our flock. We picked up two males (one Alpine/Syrian cross and the other Saanen/Syrian cross) and three females (all Saanen/Syrian cross) to breed with our flock of baladi goats. The males were named Google and Twitter while the females were dubbed Mona, Zeinobia, and Nadia, after three of my favourite Twitter posters during the protests. We saw nothing unusual other than a couple of burned cars on the side of the road, a couple of tanks and a four year old boy in the village where we bought the goats who picked up a stone and brandished it at us shouting "Horreya" (Freedom)...only to be firmly scolded by his mother who told him that was enough. The revolution is over.

But is it over? Not really. The military leaders are the same military leaders who were in power under Mubarak, while the cabinet is largely made up of the same old gang of suspects. There is still an awful lot of housecleaning to do. Much of the frustration I mentioned has to do with the influence of other countries in Egypt's affairs through the use of the aid given, primarily to the military. Most of the US aid was given in the form of credit that could be spent in the US arms industry to buy tanks, planes, guns and tear gas canisters...though oddly enough many of the latter were way beyond their expiration dates apparently. Wonder where the money for the new tear gas went...or are there huge warehouses of the stuff lying about? Basically the aid went to prop up a regime that was everything the US government claims to hate. They've gone into Iraq and Afghanistan to rid the poor citizens there of repressive regimes supposedly...while causing major collateral damage to both countries. When the protests in Egypt began, the leaders of the free world sided with Mubarak, although no one can believe that they were unaware of the real situation here. Maybe they only lead the "free" world and don't really have anything to do with the oppressed world except to sell the governments there arms. At any rate, the Egyptians "freed" themselves and with a much lower cost than we would have had with help from the US military.

During the protests there was much discussion of the "Tunisia" effect referring to the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime only a short while earlier. Of course, there are still issues there as the "interim" government of Tunisia has also kept on entirely too many of the old regime. Within days of February 11, protesters in Bahrain marched to demand reform and more voice in their government, perhaps a constitutional monarchy rather than what currently exists. Like the Egyptians, they marched without weapons, chanting in peace, and when the government soldiers, mercenaries for the most part unlike the Egyptian army, encountered the protesters, they were fired on with tear gas canisters at point blank range. The army's responses to peaceful protest has been so violent in Bahrain as to be termed a massacre at times. And the governmental tactic has been to ban the press, penning them in the airport so that there can be no international oversight...except that there is no such thing as no oversight anymore. Telephones shoot videos and can transmit them abroad. The protesters across North Africa (Libya is fighting a vicious battle with largely foreign troups as well against the citizens) are for the most part following the nonviolent doctrines of Gandhi and the governments opposing them fail to realise that they'd get further by allowing discussion and participation than by reacting with violence. Watching the idiocy of the regimes' responses is wildly frustrating. We all know that they have huge stakes to protect, but the violent approach in the long run simply does not work. Soldiers might be able to shoot 10, 20, 100 people...but can they hold out over 1000 or 1,000,000? What the Egyptians learned early in February is that you are as free as you can imagine, or you are as oppressed as you allow yourself to be, and that lesson seems to be one that is easy to learn.


Photos of Tahrir by Zena Sallam

copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani