Egypt: Government Contempt for Basic Political Rights
(New York, August 28, 2003) -- The Egyptian government's decision to charge
five anti-war activists under emergency legislation shows its contempt for
the most elemental right to peaceful dissent, Human Rights Watch said today.In letters sent today to President Mubarak and Prosecutor General Maher `Abd
al-Wahed, Human Rights Watch urged them to release engineer Ashraf Ibrahim
from detention and to halt politically motivated legal proceedings against
him and four others. The charges against Ibrahim include "communicating with
foreign human rights organizations.""These charges testify to the poor state of political freedoms in Egypt
today," said Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa
Division. "The emergency laws under which these men were charged are so broad
and vague that they allow the government to criminalize virtually any manner
of political dissent at will."The five activists are charged with spreading false information about Egypt
abroad and membership in a banned "revolutionary socialist group." The
indictment also accuses Ibrahim of "sending false information to foreign
bodies-foreign human rights organizations-which include, contrary to the
truth, violations of human rights within the country.""This blatant attempt to punish peaceful dissent and intimidate others
unfortunately demonstrates what constitutes the truth when it comes to
exercising political rights in Egypt today," said Stork.Ibrahim, an opponent of the US-led war in Iraq, has been jailed since he
turned himself into the authorities on April 19 following a police raid on
his home. The other four co-defendants went into hiding when the indictments
were announced on August 7. They are Nasr Farouq al- Bahiri, a researcher for
the Cairo-based Land Center for Human Rights; Yahya Fikri Amin Zahra, an
engineer; Mustafa Muhammad al-Basiuni, unemployed, and Remon Edward Gindi
Morgan, a student.The case has been referred to a Higher Emergency State Security Court. These
tribunals, created under the emergency law, allow no appeal to a higher
judicial body; their verdicts can only be overturned or modified by the
president of the republic.Article 80 (d) of Egypt's Penal Code carries a prison sentence of up to five
years on any Egyptian who "deliberately discloses abroad false or tendentious
news, information, or rumors about the country's internal situation," or who
"carries out any activity aimed at damaging the national interest of the
country." The defendants were also charged under Article 86 bis of the Penal
Code, passed in a package of anti-terrorist legislation in 1992; it punishes
anyone who founds or joins an organization or association "impairing the
national unity or social peace." -keralamonitor.comFrom mean streets to clean streets - US program battles garbage and corruption complaints in Baghdad
The Washington Post 29 Aug 2003
BAGHDAD -- They're talking trash in Sadr City, the sprawling, impoverished Shiite Muslim neighborhood in north Baghdad. A small army of garbage collectors is shoveling rubbish into piles to be hauled onto dump trucks, tractor-pulled flatbeds and donkey carts. It's a U.S.-funded effort to exhibit municipal progress in the capital, where people complain they've never had it so bad, service-wise. Along with efforts to improve such services as electricity, water and sewerage, and refurbish schools, the sanitation scheme is designed to reduce tensions over the rundown state of Baghdad.
On the one hand, the two-week-old program has yielded results. All over Baghdad, workers are sweeping up,
sometimes using palm fronds to clear dirt and fetid waste from street after street.At the same time, the effort to graft American-style urban management onto a society where corruption has
long been an under-the-table means of survival has given rise to instant exploitation by contractors in charge
of hiring and overseeing the workers. Families desperate to obtain the $3 daily salary are sending tykes out in
the street to join the garbage brigades.So the word in Sadr City -- which once was called Saddam City, after deposed president Saddam Hussein -- is
that the idea is good but the implementation is faulty. "Picking up the garbage is good. We need that," said
Adel Sabbar, a demobilized soldier who was scraping up trash on a median strip. "But they say we're
supposed to get $3 a day, but I'm getting 2. If I complain, the team leader says he will give the job to
someone else. Take it or leave."The team leader wasn't around. Rahim Daraji, the Sadr City district administrator, said he had "heard" of such
practices but that it was hard to pin down the scope of the problem. "We deal with the men in charge of
groups of workers. The workers themselves, we don't see. We're not responsible for payments to them," he
said.In any case, the system of contracting private foremen to handle trash collection was born of necessity, U.S.
officials say. Postwar looting deprived the city of half of its fleet of 1,400 dump trucks. To get collection rolling,
the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, through nine local district councils, organized private truck owners
and work-gang entrepreneurs to build an instant sanitation workforce. The program costs $437,000 a week to
employ 20,000 day laborers and truckers to collect an estimated 20,000 tons of waste. Drivers and
experienced sanitation workers earn up to $150 a month."There was a lot of anger over trash collection," said Susan C. Tianen, an employee of the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers from Los Angeles who is in charge of the program. Tianen said that in some neighborhoods trash
had piled up two stories high. "From the beginning the coalition collected trash, but we had to get a regular
system up and running," she said.Tianen asserted that the effort was the first citywide trash collection campaign in Baghdad. In the past, she
said, wealthy people had to give tips to ensure trash collection and the poor did without. Baghdad residents,
however, have a different recollection. Residents of wealthy neighborhoods said they indeed gave tips to
ensure clean curbs but that trash collection was regular. In Sadr City, trash was collected, although the local
method of just putting out bags of garbage in random spots meant that the streets were always littered with
someone's waste.During the Hussein era, garbage was hauled to giant dumps where ragpickers rummaged the rubbish for
metal, glass and other recyclable items. The bulk of garbage now is hauled to a dump outside Baghdad where
there is less chance of toxic seepage into the water table, Tianen said. Scavengers are still at work, however.
Eventually, the occupation authority hopes to install waste separation and recycling facilities and a modern
landfill to keep toxic material from leaking into the underground environment. "There had been plans for such
projects before, but nothing ever came of them," she said. The occupation authority's program follows the recent American fashion of privatizing municipal services. In effect, Baghdad's current crop of garbage collectors is composed of private businessmen. Tianen said that anyone caught skipping regular pickups or subcontracting the work will be fired. Skimming off salaries is also
forbidden, and no one younger than 15 is supposed to be hired as a garbage collector.Soldiers stationed across Baghdad are supposed to be on the lookout for abuses, Tianen said. In Sadr City, at
least, no one seemed to take the notion of military enforcement seriously. "I was going to go to a tank to
complain, and the soldiers waved me away," said Mohamed Qassem, a street sweeper.The cleanup crews seem unwilling to police the use of child labor. Hazem Hamed, a chubby boy who said his
father had provided a tractor for garbage duty, complained that a contractor was withholding half of the $25
weekly rental fee for the vehicle. When Hazem was asked how old he was, the young men standing around coached him. "Say 15," they said. Hazem said he was 15.
