
August 27, 2015
Sri Lanka has hundreds of reclining Buddhas, but the 30-ft-long one at Isurumuni Temple in Anuradhapura, with its vibrant colours, really stands out.
Sri Lanka has hundreds of reclining Buddhas, but the 30-ft-long one at Isurumuni Temple in Anuradhapura, with its vibrant colours, really stands out.
Despite opposition, authorities are proceeding with the eviction of residents of traditional houseboats docked along the Nile in Egypt's capital, as the government aims to "renovate" the area – and increase its economic value.
Houseboats on the Nile in Zamalek, Cairo
With an eye on increasing the profitability of the Nile's traffic and utilities, the Egyptian government has begun to forcibly evict residents and owners of houseboats docking along the banks of the river, in the Kit Kat area of Giza, part of the Greater Cairo metropolis.
The evictions come following an Irrigation Ministry decision, earlier this month, to remove the homes that have long docked along the river.
With the evictions looming, owners and residents of the 32 houseboats slated for removal, located between the May 15 and Imbaba bridges, sent a distress call to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s office and filed several lawsuits before administrative courts in an attempt to counter the ministry decision, as several houseboat owners told Mada Masr.
However, their attempts to stay the evictions have not been heeded. Residents of 19 houseboats have already been evicted and displaced, with their homes impounded on the docks in front of Imbaba Police Station, while three of the houseboats have already been offered for public auction. The remaining houseboats are scheduled to be moved by the first week of July.
The government’s motive for the removal has been made clear in statements from Irrigation Ministry officials, who have asserted that only residential houseboats are being targeted for removal and advised owners to turn toward commercial activities to avoid evictions.
In May, the government previewed a plan to withdraw from select sectors of the economy, including large swathes of agricultural and livestock production, construction industries and hospitality.
Its pathway to doing so was sketched out in the “state ownership policy document,” a framework plan that the Cabinet’s economic group has heralded in recent months as being inspired by an International Monetary Fund demand on the Egyptian government in 2021. The objective of the demand is to “centralize state-ownership in a single entity,” identify specific economic sectors in which state-owned companies or agencies can play a role, and to exit other sectors completely to “allow for private sector-led productivity gains.”
At the close of his eighth year in power, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi continues to push forward economic projects that place public interest as secondary to monetization. News of forced evictions and displacements have become the opening volley for any new government project. Public opposition has in large part been unable to halt the advancement of the government’s plans. Some who have resisted handing over their homes for demolition have been arrested or detained.
“Every possible option should be explored to help communities stay in one place as long as they wish. Alternative solutions to resettlement can always be found, as long as a threat to the population is undetermined,” Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, said following her visit to Cairo in 2018.
In her statement, Farha said she was shocked to learn of communities being subject to “forced eviction contrary to international human rights law.”
Three boats belonged to members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The head of the Nile Protection Administration for Greater Cairo Ayman Nour recently said in a TV interview that “The state is determined to remove all residential houseboats in Giza.” The restructuring of the Nile banks in Cairo and Giza, Nour said, aims to “restore their civilized appearance.”
For Nour, however, "civilized" means "commercially profitable."
“We will only remove residential boats,” Nour said, “leaving the commercial ones and the rowing clubs.” Nour continued to advise residential houseboat owners, in the event they don’t want their home to be bulldozed, to “take them to the authority, change their license to commercial and pay the respective fees.”
Nour added that three of the boats that have already been removed belonged to members of the Muslim Brotherhood whose assets were confiscated by a court ruling in January 2021.
Represented by “the committee to confiscate assets of terrorists and terrorist organizations,” those three houseboats were offered for public auction by the Nile Protection Administration.
“It’s become more clear to us what’s actually happening,” Omar Robert Hamilton, a houseboat resident, told Mada Masr. “The ministry wants no more residents here. They only want commercial properties.”
Hamilton explained that all houseboat residents have always argued that they have long-standing contracts with the government. “If the state wants them out,” he said, “then they should simply make them an offer. They can’t just price them out overnight, fine them relentlessly, and then confiscate their only capital as ransom.”
While the ministry has accused the residents of encroaching on state-owned lands without a license, the owners said that the ministry and other relevant state bodies have been denying them the possibility of renewing the licenses they have held for years.
In a statement on Facebook, the owners explained that the Giza governorate, the Armed Forces National Service Projects Authority, and the irrigation and agriculture ministries — the four bodies handling houseboat licensing — refused to renew licenses last year. The owners added that the projects authority is “working on a unified mechanism for renewing licenses.”
Suddenly the government decides to throw me on the street.
However, last year, the authority named the Irrigation Ministry as the sole body responsible for the license renewal process, and the latter continued to deny the owners the chance to renew before last week’s sudden decision to remove 32 houseboats.
“I am 88 years old. I sold two apartments in Zamalek in order to spend the last days of my life on the Nile, and suddenly the government decided to throw me on the street, to take away the houseboat and to take my money on top of it as well,” Ikhlas Helmy, the owner of the houseboat closest to the May 15 Bridge, told Mada Masr.
Manar Magdy, the another houseboat owner, told Mada Masr that the Giza Governorate and the Armed Forces projects authority only began to deny her license renewals last year. She adds that she had never failed to pay the fees before then.
Magdy said she paid LE20,000 ($1,060) to renew the license for navigation within Giza Governorate in 2020 and acquired the houseboat license. But in 2021, she faced a situation similar to Helmy’s.
According to Magdy, the owners received a notice from the Defense Ministry on April 21, 2021, informing them that the houseboats, the Nile docks and everything related to them now fall under the National Service Projects Authority, after which she went to the authority’s headquarters, where she was asked to bring all the previous licenses for her houseboat, which she did.
When she asked to renew the license, authority officials told her they were working on a committee to determine and unify the mechanism for issuing the licenses, and that this committee would start its work in November 2021.
But when she asked again at the end of that year, officials told her the Irrigation Ministry was now handling the licenses, while the authority only has jurisdiction over the lands on which the Nile docks are located.
Helmy and Magdy, on the other hand, stressed that their houseboats have been in their location legally, with owners paying water and electricity bills and real estate taxes regularly, while noting that the boats do not send their waste into the water but are connected to the sewage system of the Kit Kat area.
Ahmed Abdel Hady, a lawyer representing the houseboat owners, told Mada Masr that the team has filed 32 lawsuits before the administrative judiciary against the president, the prime minister and other relevant officials demanding to halt the removal decision and oblige the government to renew their licenses.
Despite opposition, authorities are proceeding with the eviction of residents of traditional houseboats docked along the Nile in Egypt's capital, as the government aims to "renovate" the area – and increase its economic value.
Having been forced to retreat and cede territory in Donbas, Kyiv has its eye on recapturing the key southern port city of Kherson.
Vladimir Putin has been upfront about his desire to rebuild Russia’s influence in the region. Former Soviet states are watching developments in Ukraine closely, with many trying to ensure futures free of interference by Moscow.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.