In a 1994 assesment of environmental health risks prepared for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), American and Egyptian experts identified three leading environmental health risks for residents of Cairo: particulate matter air pollution, lead and microbiological diseases from environmental causes. The report also identified a number of less serious threats to human health, grouping them as middle, middle/lower, lower and uncertain risks. Ozone air pollution was one of two health risks in the “middle” category. The material presented below is drawn almost exclusively from this report.
Sahar was only ten years old when her family, along with almost 5,000 Egyptian working-class families, was relocated from her neighborhood in the center of Cairo to a public housing project in al-Zawiya al-Hamra, in northern Cairo. The relocation project was part of Sadat’s open-door policy (infitah), which strived to “modernize” the country by accelerating economic growth, promoting private investment, attracting foreign and Arab capital, and enhancing social development. [1] Sadat’s new policy brought about many changes in the urban environment aimed at creating a “modern” city to meet the emerging demands of investors and tourists.
An increase in media attention paid to environmental pollution, and a 1994 USAID report on environmental risk assessment in Cairo, [1] reflect and have engendered a growing concern for the environment in Cairo. While grassroots political action is rare, [2] there is an awareness among the general population of issues of environmental pollution. While responses to environmental pollution have ranged from the creation of ad hoc social movements and voluntary associations to individual actions in cooperation with neighbors or fellow workers, these techniques have yet to have much impact.
“Itfaddalu ma‘ana,” Umm Ibrahim shouts across the alley to the next roof, “please eat with us.” “Shukran, Allah yikhalliki,” promptly comes the answer from Abu Samia and his wife, “thank you, may God keep you.” It is a sunny Friday afternoon in December, and both families have decided to eat lunch on their rooftops where Umm Ibrahim and Umm Samia keep their chickens. [1] Behind Umm Ibrahim’s house, two palm trees sway in the breeze, many neighbors are napping and the children, who often fill the alley with their games, are quiet. As the afternoon progresses, the sun sets behind one of the upscale 25-story apartment blocks further down the street.
Descriptions of Cairo are dominated typically by the stark imagery of an extremely concentrated population mass near asphyxiation. From this perspective, one need look no further than its inhabited rooftops, its streets choked with traffic and pollution and its crowded cemeteries, where the living reside with the dead — all confirm the most obvious symbols of overpopulation. Indeed, Cairo has a population concentration that makes it, along with Bombay, one of the densest metropolitan areas in the world. Despite the rapid modernization of urban infrastructure (subway, elevated highways, sewer and telephone systems), Cairo appears to be stricken by disorder and incoherence. To many, Cairo evokes all the dangers of urban excess, inextricable chaos and spiraling poverty.
The last four months in Algeria have left more than 650 civilians dead and significantly more wounded. During the month of Ramadan alone (January 10-February 7, 1997) the latest wave of car bombings and massacres killed more than 350. As many as 60,000 have died in the civil war triggered when the army seized control of the country in January 1992, canceled the upcoming legislative elections that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win, forced out the ostensibly constitutional regime of President Chadli Benjedid, banned the Islamic opposition groups (primarily the FIS and the Armed Islamic Group) and detained thousands of their sympathizers in Sahara desert camps.
Aswad, Barbara and Barbara Bilge, eds. Family and Gender Among American Muslims: Issues Facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and Their Descendants (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
Ayubi, Nazih. Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).
Boyarin, Jonathan. Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Center for Economic and Social Rights. Unsanctioned Suffering: A Human Rights Assessment of UN Sanctions on Iraq (New York, May 1996).
Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine. Beyond Rhetoric: Perspectives on a Negotiated Settlement in Palestine (Washington, DC, August 1996).
On Bahrain
Naseer Aruri, The Obstruction of Peace: The US, Israel and the Palestinians (Common Courage, 1995).
Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).
“Palestine: Diplomacies of Defeat,” special issue of Race & Class 37/2 (October-December 1995).
Edward Said, Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (Vintage, 1996).
Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo (Pluto/Transnational Institute/MERIP, 1995).
What is up in Egypt? In Cairo, Mustafa Bakri, was deposed as editor-in-chief of al-Ahrar following the failure of the mutiny he led in the halls of the Liberal Party to depose of its leader, Mustafa Kamal Murad. Bakri stormed the party headquarters with 600 armed followers and had himself voted president. For a few days, two versions of al-Ahrar competed for space on the newsstands. Bakri’s paper made a vain stab at seeking Mubarak’s support by turning even more obsequious than the state-run press. Meanwhile, deposed party head Murad published his own loyalist edition attacking the Bakri cult of personality before the police finally moved in and ended Bakri’s short reign. What triggered the coup?
On August 13, the Jordanian government lifted its subsidies on wheat. When bread prices immediately doubled, residents of the southern town of Karak demonstrated against the move, calling for a reversal of the policy and the resignation of the prime minister. The protests deteriorated into riots that lasted two days and ended only when the army occupied the town and enforced a strict curfew.
Less than five years ago, the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein established a “safe haven” in Iraqi Kurdistan following Iraq’s brutal suppression of an uprising against the regime during March-April 1991. The mood among the majority of Iraqi Kurds was highly optimistic: A certain measure of self-rule had been forced on the central government in Baghdad, a goal for which they had been fighting for almost half a century.
Michel Khleifi, born in Nazareth in 1950, studied theater and cinema at INSAS in Belgium, where he currently resides. In 1980, Khleifi directed his first film, Fertile Memory (al-Dhakira al-Khasiba). Khleifi received international acclaim following Wedding in Galilee (‘Urs fi al-Jalil, 1987), which won the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His other films include Maloul Fete sa Destruction (Malul Tahtafil fi Dimariha, 1984), Canticle of the Stones (Nashid al-Hajar, 1990) and L’Ordre du Jour (1993).
In June 1996, Bashar Tarabieh, a resident of the US, visited his family in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. On August 19, three days before he was scheduled to return to the US, he was arrested at 2:15 am by Israeli security service and police agents. Charged with spying for Syria, burning down a local council building in 1993 and again in July 1996, Tarabieh was held in the interrogation section of Jalameh prison near Haifa. On August 26, through an agreement worked out among the judge, prosecutor and his lawyers, Lea Tsemel and Hassan Jabareen, Tarabieh was transferred to a hotel in Acre for 48 hours and then released. Since 1994, Tarabieh has worked as a consultant for Human Rights Watch which actively publicized and protested his arrest.
Azmi Bishara was a young rising star in the Communist Party of Israel (Rakah) for several years. Since leaving the party after the upheavals of 1989, he and other Arab intellectuals periodically considered establishing a new Arab political party with a progressive-nationalist orientation. After much debate and several false starts, al-Tajammu‘ (Democratic National Assembly) was established in March 1996, shortly before Israeli elections. Al-Tajammu‘ includes former members and supporters of the Communist Party, the Covenant of Equality (an Arab-Jewish movement founded in 1991), the Progressive Movement (including Muhammad Mi‘ari, former MK of the Progressive List for Peace), Abna’ al-Balad (Sons of the Village) and others.
With the recent election of the Netanyahu government, the issue of settlements has again emerged in the media as an issue in the “peace process.” Settlement leaders have proposed spending $4 billion to expand settlements by as many as 120,000 housing units to accommodate an additional 500,000 people by the year 2000. Ariel Sharon recently proposed immediately allowing 100,000 new settlers to settle the West Bank. The new government has already transferred $6.5 million for the construction of bypass roads, and announced the immediate construction of 3,800 new housing units on the West Bank. Netanyahu claims that the Oslo agreement’s wording is loose enough that this in no way violates the final status negotiations.
