Pambazuka - Egypt: Struggles that fuelled a revolution - 0 views
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movements social arab multinational corporations mncs egypt intervention mubarak
shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Feb 12
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Although world and Egyptian media have been fixated on the symbolic Tahrir Square, little attention has been directed towards places where many Egyptians converging on the square actually live. Bulaq, only a few hundred meters north of Tahrir Square, is one such neighbourhood. The residents of Bulaq represent the essence of why Egyptians erupted in mass protests last year. This is a community that has suffered for nearly forty years at the hands of the Sadat and Mubarak regimes, which aimed to erase the district from Cairo’s map. ‘Bulaq: Among the Ruins of an Unfinished Revolution’ is a short documentary film that shifts the focus from the square and into a community at the heart of the struggle for social justice.
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The repeal of the Emergency Law and the demand for social justice, including housing rights, have been cornerstones of the Tahrir movement.
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Nearly sixty percent of Cairo’s residents today live in so-called ‘informal areas.’ These are areas that urbanized without the guidance of a government-approved urban plan. A more accurate description of those areas is ‘improvised urbanism,’ as they continue a long tradition of improvised planning found in Cairo for centuries prior to the city’s relatively brief encounter with formal planning from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
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In the 1970s, however, Sadat envisioned the area as a new business district to showcase Egypt’s economic realignment with global capitalism. An aggressive campaign of forced evictions and relocation was commenced. Residents were forced out of their homes and given flats in concrete blocs built on the desert fringes of Cairo. This campaign continued under the Mubarak regime. One of the residents filmed narrates her ordeal when she was evicted in 1982, only to return later.
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Despite the economic hardships and the deteriorating physical environment, the community is thriving socially. The filmmaker intercuts interviews with scenes of everyday life: a woman smoking outside her home, a butcher cutting meat, a child on a bicycle, and a man who is uncomfortable with the presence of a camera and demands to know what is being filmed.
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It would have made a stronger case against government policies if the audience had the chance to hear from officials directly how they view the issue of Bulaq. The multinational developers and hotel chains that also benefit from this government policy are also unheard. An interview with the management of the Hilton Hotel overlooking the district, for example, could have been interesting.
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‘Those responsible for demolitions have to be tried,’ says one man. ‘In neighborhoods like Bulaq we love each other and work together like one family,’ says a woman. Another man confirms that ‘the owners of this place are the people living here; we own this place.’