Problems on hold

I answered my phone last Sunday to hear the disconcerted voice of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, head of the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR), complaining that Watani had that morning carried a false news item on page 5. The headline said “Sectarian events in Bemha, Ayaat: Muslim villagers burn and loot Coptic-owned homes and shops”. Before I could explain the matter, my interlocutor said: “What you printed is untrue. We at NCHR have investigated the matter and delegated a fact finding committee to the village, but it found nothing of what you printed.”
Out of deep respect to my speaker, I retained my good humour. The news item he referred to was neither false nor erroneous, it was merely one small item of two opposite pages devoted to, as their heading indicated, “Watani throughout a half-century”, with the sub-heading: “excerpts from the years 2005, 2006, 2007”. The two pages were the last of a series Watani had been printing all through 2008 recalling events the paper had reported on throughout its 50-years in the press. The last two pages included items which had—very obviously—occurred during the last three years. Among these were: a headline announcing Hosny Mubarak as president of Egypt for a fifth term; other headlines declaring the amendment of 34 articles of the Constitution; attacks with white weapons against three churches in Alexandria; obituaries of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Father Matta al-Miskeen, and Tamav Irene; terrorist attacks in Sinai, the death of Ashraf Marwan, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Moreover, an excerpt was printed from an editorial on the Washington Forum which was held in November 2005.
I have cited the items printed for the reader to judge for himself or herself whether the NCHR could be excused in its confusion. As to the NCHR’s ardour in rushing to investigate human rights violations, it brought some confusing questions of their own to my mind.
Since one of the two pages carried the story of an attack with white weapons on three Alexandria churches, why did not the NCHR send a fact-finding committee to investigate that? Or did the NCHR remember that a parliamentary fact finding committee had been at the time commissioned with conducting an immediate field investigation of the matter and submitting a report to Parliament within 30 days, but it never did. In fact the committee never moved to Alexandria in the first place, never submitted a report on the incident, and was never questioned by Parliament for failing to complete its assignment. And the NCHR never bothered to follow up on the matter from a human rights perspective. The cover-up was complete.
Why did not the NCHR—with its alleged ever-vigilant eye as was obvious through last Sunday’s phone call to me—send a fact finding committee to investigate last month’s sectarian violence in Ain-Shams and Ezbet al-Nakhl in Cairo, and last week’s violence against visitors to the monasteries in Luxor?
And since the NCHR is such a good reviewer of Watani, it could not have missed the campaign we have been launching since last July to rally support for the bill for a unified law for building places of worship. This is the fifth round in Parliament throughout which that bill has been placed on hold. Does not the NCHR realise that the absence of the unified law for building places of worship has supplied the fertile ground that breeds so many of the so-called incidents of sectarian violence—among which was the May 2007 attack on Bemha Copts which appeared to concern the NCHR only when a brief on it was reprinted in Watani in 2008?
Talk about material printed in Watani brings me to last week’s editorial which tackled the tragedy of the Assiut University student who lost her left eye in the university laboratory due to gross negligence by those in charge of the lab. No one was held accountable and the student was never compensated or even helped. Is not this some gross human rights violation that warrants action by the NCHR? Especially considering that the NCHR follows up so closely on all what Watani prints?
Finally, has the ever-vigilant NCHR forgotten that in November 2007 it had organised the Citizenship Conference which resulted in the Egyptian Declaration of Citizenship, a comprehensive report on how human rights measures and principles could be respected in Egypt. The Declaration stipulated the organisation of a follow-up conference in November 2008 and named the year 2008 the “Year of Citizenship Rights”. But November 2008 came along to witness not a follow-up citizenship conference but an international conference to tout the advanced respect of human rights in Egypt.
You see what I mean when I say the ardour is misplaced?

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