The residents of al-Meadessa street have no idea when the rocks will fall: It could be at night while the neighborhood is sleeping or during the day when children are up playing on the roof. However, they do know that the clifftop towering 20m above their ramshackle homes is slowly crumbling and that eventually it will collapse down upon them — as it has already done a few kilometers along the road, killing more than 100 people who were living below.
“Every minute of every day, we live in fear,” said Umm Rahman, a mother of three. “We want to get out of here now, but there’s nowhere else to go.”
Most Egyptians will never have heard of al-Meadessa street, a tangle of electrical wiring, scattered construction debris and steep mounds of domestic waste nestled deep within one of Cairo’s poorest informal settlements in the shadows of the Mokattam mountain. However, the struggle being waged here has laid bare the staggering obstacles ahead for the architects of the new Egypt after the fall of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak — and raised divisive questions about what the country’s revolution really stands for.
HAPHAZARD
Al-Meadessa is home to 150 families, part of a 12 million-strong community of Egyptians living in the sprawling, unplanned slum areas — known as ashwaiyat, literally meaning random or haphazard — that have mushroomed during the past three decades as a result of sharp demographic growth, a widening chasm between rich and poor and the indifference of the regime. Most live in homes that are unfit for humans or at grave risk of floods and, such as Umm Rahman and her neighbors, rockslides.
Despite up to 1 million apartments lying empty across the capital as a result of years of property speculation under Mubarak, a dearth of affordable housing means that most have nowhere else to go. However, now Egypt’s ashwaiyat community is beginning to raise its voice.
“In the past we were living without any respect for our lives,” said Zamzam Mohamed Abdel Nabi, a 35-year-old resident of al-Meadessa, who has been leading a local campaign demanding that the government rehouse them. “Currently we’re optimistic that things could change, but the state is still fragile and we don’t want to profit from the situation.”
Her dilemma is a common one among the 44 percent of Egyptians living below the poverty line: With old certainties dissolved and the nation in flux, now appears to be the perfect time to press for a better standard of living from a revolution that has already transformed the state’s political apparatus.
However, the country’s ruling generals have cracked down harshly on what they call “sectoral” interests, insisting that Egypt is too unstable at the moment to meet the vast array of social expectations that have exploded since Mubarak’s fall.
Strikes and protests have been outlawed on the grounds that marginalized groups should stay quiet until the transition to civilian democracy is complete.
‘HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY’
It is an argument that cuts little ice with Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, who visited Cairo before the publication of an Amnesty report highlighting the appalling conditions of Egyptian ashwaiyat and calling on the interim government to seize “an historic opportunity ... to ensure that the millions of underprivileged people are treated with dignity and their human rights respected.”
“The revolution was as much about poverty and inequality as it was about political freedoms and repression of the civil kind,” Shetty said. “The authorities cannot say they’ll first deal with the political issues and then the socioeconomic issues — these have to be addressed together.”
In recent weeks the lack of affordable accommodation has hit the headlines after residents of el-Nahda and el-Salam cities, who claim they were illegally evicted in the midst of this year’s anti-government uprising, occupied the street in front of central Cairo’s radio and television building, clashing several times with security forces. Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf recently announced US$25.5 million of funding for upgrading slum areas, but compared with the scale of the problem it represents little more than a drop in the ocean.
Under Mubarak the authorities unveiled a grand vision of urban development in the capital named Cairo 2050, which aims to create an “internationally competitive” city and includes plans to “redistribute” millions of poorer residents.
Public records suggest that much of the land currently occupied by ashwaiyat is likely to be sold to luxury property developers, raising fears that Cairo 2050 is aimed more at property tycoons than at housing solutions for some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Whether the plan will continue to be implemented remains to be seen.
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