Violence in Egyptian society reaches alarming levels

Nadia Abou el-Magd, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 21. 2009 1:18AM UAE / May 20. 2009 9:18PM GMT

CAIRO // When a well-known columnist and TV presenter, Khairy Ramadan, told viewers that he was living in a constant state of fear, he was not referring just to himself. In a country long known for its safety, ordinary Egyptians are growing increasingly terrified by a particularly vicious spate of violent crimes.

“I’m afraid. When going to work, coming back. When I wake up or sleeping, when my kids are late at school or the club, throughout the day, I’m really afraid,” Ramadan wrote in the independent newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm on Sunday.

Ramadan, 45, a father of three, is a co-host of state-owned Channel Two’s talk show The House is Yours.

“The danger is everywhere, and killing has been taking place lately for the most trivial reasons … not only in the street, but it can reach you at home,” Ramadan said. “Just a quick look at the crime pages in the newspapers, we will know that killing has become a daily routine,” he added, saying that poverty and lack of security are not the only explanations.

He blamed the Egyptian psyche and its recent tilt towards “haphazard violence, increasing psychological problems, growing hatred and a desire to get rid of life which could motivate to homicide or suicide”.

“It’s a different Egypt, in which violence is becoming its most prominent phenomenon, that is expressing itself every second everywhere,” Tarek Abbas, a prominent columnist, said in an interview. “As if I woke up to find myself not by the Nile I know, breathing different air and eating not from my land and dealing with different people, becoming scared from things that didn’t use to frighten me.”

He said he has been concerned by Egypt’s increasing violence for the past year. The news of a man being killed on an Alexandria street by two men as shocked passers-by watched recently, prompted Abass to pen a column titled, “Strange O Egypt” in Al-Masry al-Youm on Saturday.

In recent days a young man killed his two young cousins to, according to the defendant, “burn the heart of my uncle who insulted me and kicked me out from working with him”. After a man fought with his wife, he threw his two children into a well and covered it just to get back at her. Another killed his ex-wife, her fiancé and her parents in front of his children, enraged that she was to remarry.

These violent crimes have become the talk of the town in newspapers and talk shows.

“I’m not going to move to my new villa in Sheikh Zayed until we figure out a new security system,” said Sherene, 44, a mother of two. “We have been scared since the killing of two girls last year who live not far from us.”

Heba el Aqad and Nadine Khaled, two female university students in their early twenties, were brutally murdered in their apartment on the outskirts of Cairo in November by a 19-year-old thief, who confessed he needed money “to buy drugs”. He was sentenced to death.

“Everyday a new murder crime inside the family, streets, school, work and transportation. What’s going on?” asked last week’s headline of the weekly issue of the opposition newspaper Al Destour. The paper reported that more than 150 brutal murders have occurred since the beginning of the year.

The National Council for Human Rights, a state-affiliated watchdog, issued its annual report this month, warning of a “rising level of violence, barbarous murders, in an unprecedented way in Egypt’s history”.

“The whole system is wrong,” said Sherif Awad, a sociologist at Cairo University. “The family is not performing its role; the government is not carrying out its duties; the society is not capable of containing its sons, and the media is provoking the poor with its ads about villas etcetera … These crimes are a very serious indicator of the problems in our society which we have to try to solve before the fire of anger engulfs Egypt.”

Moufid Shehab, a minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs, acknowledged that “the government is hated by the people as if we belong to an enemy state”. He blamed those feelings on “the government’s and media laxity and failing to reveal to the people the government’s achievements”.

While some try to defend the government, others are critical of both the authorities and the Egyptian people.

“It’s amazing that the public opinion here is outraged about a murder crime here and there, but don’t move while car accidents are killing 6,000 Egyptians every year,” said Abdalla Kamal, editor of the state-owned Rose el-Youssef.

Unemployment is about nine per cent and rising, Rachid Mohammed Rachid, the trade minister, told Reuters on Saturday. And one-fifth of Egypt’s 80 million population live on less than US$1 (Dh3.6) per day.

President Hosni Mubarak has asked the government this week to grant public sector employees a 10 per cent raise, up from the five per cent announced two weeks ago.

“Poverty is not the only reason behind such crimes,” said Soheir Lotfy, a sociologist with the National Center for Criminal and Social Research. “There is also the poverty of values.”

nmagd@thenational.ae