Egypt’s rich may do business as usual, but their children are protesting

In New Cairo – a satellite city to the east of the capital – life, on the surface at least, seems to have barely changed The grass is cut as finely as ever on the Katameya Heights golf course, and cigars are still being smoked discreetly in the clubhouse. Glancing around the lobby, one could be forgiven for thinking nothing had ever disturbed this gated citadel of Cairo luxury; indeed the ladies’ day Valentine’s tournament is to go ahead as scheduled. There is just one tactful nod to the turmoil that has shaken Egypt to its foundations in the past fortnight: a short letter to members, pinned to a noticeboard by the fountain. “Welcome back – we hope you and your families are all safe,” it reads. “The 18-hole operating hours are as follows.” Barack Obama claims this country “is not going back to what it was”, but in New Cairo – a satellite city to the east of the capital, home to dozens of high-walled residential compounds – life, on the surface at least, seems to have barely changed at all. “Things are back to normal: food is in the shops, the gates are secure, all the cafes are open,” says Wael Hassan, a 34-year-old marketing manager who lives in Al Rehab, one of the oldest private communities in the area. “Naturally people were inconvenienced by the troubles, and no one likes instability. But thankfully things are OK now.”In the nearby courtyard of Costa coffee, a neighbour of Wael’s agreed. “People get tired of revolutions pretty quickly, and when you’re in a self-contained bubble like this it’s hard to associate images on TV with anything that’s happening in real life. So we waited it out and then came out to play; we knew all this disruption wouldn’t last for long.” Yet as Egypt’s pro-change uprising enters its third week, a return to normality in places such as New Cairo is exactly what those camped out 15 miles away in Tahrir Square desperately want to avoid. Carved out of the desert in piecemeal fashion over the past two decades as part of an ambitious and highly controversial urban expansion programme, this elite neighbourhood for many symbolises everything that is wrong with the Mubarak regime. “The corruption and crony capitalism that New Cairo was built on goes to the heart of this government’s contempt for the Egyptian people,” says Hamdy Fakharany, an activist lawyer who has been challenging land sales in the area through the courts. Last year he won a landmark victory after proving that desert plots in Madinaty – a 13sq mile New Cairo compound worth £1.9bn developed by a company with close ties to the Mubarak family – was sold by the Egyptian government at a fraction of the market price. Now judges have ordered the sale agreement to be annulled, threatening similar development contracts with the same fate and throwing the entire district’s future into chaos. “When they sold off our public land to their friends, they did it because they knew they could get away with it – they were not afraid of the people,” says Fakharany, who believes that up to 26,000sq miles of desert land has been misappropriated in Egypt over the past few years, the cumulative size of five nearby Arab countries. “My court cases, and now this revolution, means they can’t be that complacent anymore.” The nepotism that marked New Cairo’s astonishing growth in recent years is not the only reason it has come to symbolise Egypt’s perceived backsliding under Mubarak. As a refuge for the upper classes fleeing Cairo’s demographic explosion, New Cairo also stands as a glaring example of the growing divide between rich and poor that characterised the government of the prime minister Ahmed Nazif – an economic reformist, and one of those who lost his job in Mubarak’s recent reshuffle. Nazif oversaw a replacement of progressive fiscal policies with a flat-rate income tax, refused to raise the minimum wage above £3.50 a month, and presided over a rise in the proportion of those living below the poverty line – who now account for 40% of the population. And yet, despite the contrast between New Cairo and the plethora of poor, redbrick ashwa’iyat (informal neighbourhoods) nearby, attitudes to the current protests do not split neatly along class lines. “Lots of people from here travelled to join the demonstrations, even when their parents told them not to,” says Salma Tariq, a 26-year-old New Cairo resident. “Yes our families have done well out of the regime and you might think that we have an interest in preserving the status quo, but in reality the youth here have the same frustrations as anyone else in Egypt: we want freedom, we want to stop being afraid of the police, we want a chance to shape our own future.”When the uprising started many of the young men in this neighbourhood split into groups and alternated between going to the protests and staying home to defend our properties from looters. Some people I know were fleeing the country, and one got on a private jet to Greece – but these were the minority. As the labourers tending to half-built villas begin to drift back to work, and upscale franchised coffee chains roll back their shutters, the rhythms of life in New Cairo are slowly returning to normal. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has been altered. “Look at those protesting in Tahrir: you have the poor, but you also have young people who are the cream of the elite,” says Prof Ahmed Okasha, a psychiatrist based in New Cairo. “This revolution has changed the character of the Egyptian people and broken their fear; that applies as much to this town as it does to anywhere else. Some here will cling on to their privileges, but their children are with the protesters. No one will be able to go on pretending nothing has happened for long.” Egypt Middle East Jack Shenker guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry