Perhaps not since Egypt built the great pyramids of Giza, or more recently tamed the Nile with the Aswan High Dam, has the government embarked on as challenging a national project: wiping out smoking in public places.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in a Cairo taxicab, restaurant, office, lobby, coffeehouse, cafeteria or university, or even at the zoo, knows just how ubiquitous smoking is.
“There is a movement to be tobacco-free in the whole world,” said Ehab Assad, a tobacco control officer in the Egyptian Ministry of Health. “We cannot be away from this.”
Assad said that as a first step the government late last month banned the shisha, or water pipe, in cafes of the crowded Khan el-Khalili marketplace. But just a few minutes after the government boasted of the ban, hawkers were swarming tourists at the Khan, waving restaurant menus, offering what else but shisha. They were selling apple, orange, lemon and cherry-flavored, tobacco-filled pipes for 10 Egyptian pounds, or about US$1.80.
Such is the early fate of the antismoking effort. Shisha is back in the Khan after a brief ban, and all around Cairo there is confusion as to what exactly the government is planning. “The End of Shisha?” read a headline last month on the news Web site Al Masry al Youm. So far, smoking continues unabated.
“It won’t work,” said Ahmed Mabrouk, 28, who took long, slow drags from a water pipe in the historic El Fishawy Cafe, nestled in the winding alleys of the Khan. “People love smoking shisha.”
Egypt, like many developing countries, has a smoking problem. Tobacco is cheap, and pastimes are few. A pack of Cleopatra cigarettes costs US$0.45, making smoking an affordable pursuit in a country where half the population lives on less than US$2 a day.
Shisha, brought to Egypt by the Ottoman Empire, has been here only about 200 years, a nanosecond for an ancient society, but long enough to have been embraced as part of the culture. Poor people smoke on the street and in alleys; wealthy people sit in cafes and restaurants.
Reliable statistics are notoriously difficult to come by in Egypt, but there is growing sentiment in the government that the political benefits that come from cheap tobacco — keeping people happy and their hands busy — have been offset by a recognition that the health costs associated with smoking are a burden on the state, health officials said.
In 2007, parliament banned smoking in public places. The law was never enforced. One reason, health officials said, was that it was not clear who had enforcement responsibility. Another was the lack of political will. Yet another was the persistent and institutionalized inability of government agencies to communicate well and work together, health officials said.
“Some say that the population suffers lots of problems, and if we prohibit this, they will reject it,” said Aisha Aboul Fotouh, a consultant to the health ministry.
Health officials warned in 2006 that the communal aspect of smoking shisha — friends sharing the same pipe and shopkeepers reusing the same water between customers — were conduits for passing tuberculosis. The WHO said that in Egypt, 31.6 per 100,000 people had the disease in 2005, and the rate of new cases that year was estimated at 25 per 100,000 people.
The warning, like the law, was ultimately unheeded.
So this year health officials decided to turn to Egypt’s main power: the National Democratic Party, the governing political party of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Assad and his supervisor, Sahar Latif, the general secretary of the National Program for Combating Smoking, said they sent a letter to the party asking for political support.
The party delivered.
It set an example by having, for the first time, a smoke-free gathering for its recent annual convention, Assad said. But it also hit on a way to persuade people to put down their pipes. While the country was in a panic over swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus, having already shut schools and culled hundreds of thousands of pigs, the government began telling people that shisha was being banned to prevent spread of the flu.
“If you tell them that shisha is harmful, they say ‘See you later,’” Assad said. “But they are so worried about H1N1, if you tell people they can get H1N1 from shisha, they will stay away from it.”
True?
“Eh,” Mabrouk said, flicking his hand dismissively as he smoked in El Fishawy Cafe.
Not even swine flu could come between Egyptians and their shisha, it seemed.
“This is just going to give some people more authority now to go after those poor citizens who take out their daily worries with the smoke they blow out of their mouth,” said Saad Eddin Muhammad, 48, an electrician, as he stood in a tiny shisha house in the Zamalek neighborhood.
In response to the national party, five governors issued differing orders. In Alexandria, for example, health officials said cafes had one month to make plans before they had to end shisha smoking indoors. In Cairo, the governor banned shisha at the Khan, but relented under pressure from shopkeepers whose businesses were crippled, local merchants said. The compromise was that all water pipes were to be fitted with disposable tubes and mouthpieces, merchants said.
But the ban was reversed and health officials were not notified. The reversal was not the product of a government process, but a top-down decree, said political analysts and social commentators.
“The main issue here is that we don’t have democracy. Accordingly, our responsible ministers are not elected; accordingly, they don’t really care about what they do to their own people,” said Alaa al-Aswany, a best-selling author and social critic.
“I am telling you that the shisha will continue,” he said.
Latif and Assad of the health ministry are determined to make good on that 2007 law. They said they were training 100 inspectors to begin carrying out the law, first in places like hospitals, where there is apparently still a smoking problem, and then in cafes. Assad said they would offer incentive pay to prevent the inspectors from taking bribes to look the other way, a problem that plagues enforcement across the bureaucracy.
“It’s a difficult mission, but we try,” Latif said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MONA EL-NAGGAR
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
RSS