Battle over the Nile

State renews its battle with Nile islands residents, contesting their ownership of land

Courtesy: Ibrahim Ezzat

Heba Afify

July 16, 2017

A short ferryboat ride from the area of Warraq takes you to the southern end of the island, which consists of batches of agricultural land and scattered houses, which bear a striking resemblance to a village in the Nile Delta or Egypt’s south. Deeper in, the island turns into a typical Cairo informal neighborhood with tightly stacked buildings and narrow streets that are maneuvered by motorcycles and tuk tuks.

Much like Cairo’s informal areas, Warraq Island and other Nile islands were first populated by migrants from other governorates who settled there and started to manage services on their own, until the state acknowledged them and started introducing official services.

But the lives of residents of Warraq Island, one of dozens of inhabited islands that dot the Nile’s span across Egypt, were disturbed earlier in June, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi identified their imperfect haven as his next target in the ongoing large-scale national campaign to retrieve illegally occupied state land.

On Sunday, the state attempted to hit its target. Clashes erupted between police and residents of Warraq Island on Sunday, as the state attempted to demolish buildings on the island. Police forces fired tear gas to disperse a crowd that had gathered to contest the demolition, and, in the ensuing melee, one resident was killed and 19 injured, according to the Health Ministry, while the Ministry of Interior says that 31 of its officers were wounded.

The clashes have temporarily stayed the demolition attempts.

In the conference on land reclamation held in June that first presaged a change for Warraq, the government announced that it had retrieved 118 million square meters of state land in a few weeks, an area constituting 69 percent of total land seized. Amid the announcement of success, Sisi signaled that the state would turn its attention to Nile islands, alluding to Warraq Island specifically.

“There’s an island in the middle of the Nile that stretches over 1,250 feddans. Havoc has spread in it, and people have been building on land that they seized. And now there’s 50,000 houses there. Where does their sewage go? It goes into the Nile water that we drink. We can’t allow that and hurt ourselves,” Sisi said.

Where other occupants whom the state had targeted under the umbrella of the program were allowed to pay the state what it owed and remain on the land, Sisi was adamant in his speech that he would not grant island residents the same concessions.

“Any buildings on the banks of water channels, drains or the Nile should be removed. Yes, there are residents. We should find a solution for them, but they have to be removed,” he said.

However, the legality of residents’ presence on the islands is a contested issue.

For example, Warraq Island is home to three public schools, a police unit, a water station, a post office and is equipped with official electricity meters, a common array of basic services to informal areas that serve as a tacit acknowledgement from the state of their existence.

“If it’s illegal, why did you introduce government facilities?” asks Abdel Hamid Abdallah, who provided a tour of the island on which he has lived his entire life to point out these facilities.

Most island landowners acquired their property by the acknowledged practice of “hands putting” (wad’ yad), whereby they are given ownership of a piece of land after residing on it undisputed for 15 years. Many have succeeded to have their land ownership officially registered through this mechanism.

Architect and urban researcher Ahmed Zaazaa, one of the members of the 10Tooba collective of built environment professionals, says that much like Egypt’s informal areas, the state has enabled and acknowledged habitation on the Nile islands in a way that made the legal situation murky. He says that the state’s practice has created accepted norms that contradict the law.

“It can easily be proved by law that both sides are right or wrong,” Zaazaa says.

In his conference speech, Sisi referred to a 1988 decree, which regulates construction on the Nile and prohibits building on the river banks within approximately 30 meters of the water. Another 1998 prime minister decree declared 144 Nile islands as natural protectorates, thus limiting the number of inhabitants that can take up residence on them. However, neither decree was activated, nor has the state barred building on these islands for decades.

Meanwhile, according to independent statistics that Zaazaa has compiled, the government is the number one guilty party when it comes to building on the shore of the Nile. According to an ongoing study he is conducting, the Nile bank in Giza stretches 99 km, most of which has been obstructed, leaving only 27 km of unobstructed shore.

Of the stretch of shoreline that has been obstructed, the majority of land is occupied by government buildings, housing 27 clubs of government bodies and five government institutions, according to Zaazaa.

“Why are they blaming us? They should be blaming themselves. We have electricity, water stations, a school that I went to. Warraq village is a large hometown, not a place where a few old men live,” says 68-year-old Hajj Hassan, who is known as the island’s calligrapher.

People living on Warraq largely make a living through agriculture or as handymen and small traders, surviving on minimal and generally poor quality services. They don’t want more or less.

“We are happy just like we are. We just want them to leave us alone. I have borrowed so much money in order to build houses for my kids to live near me, and now they want to take it all away and kick us out,” says 42-year-old Mona Mahmoud, a Warraq resident, as she is walking home from the vegetable market with two women who are her relatives.

As they are walking, they meet a men and kids whom they stop to greet.

“See? I know everyone here. If you point at any house, I can tell you who lives there. We have the traditions of a village. Here the men know the women and would not harass them. During the revolution and all the chaos, it was safe here. We didn’t see thugs or protests or anything. How can we move elsewhere, even if they give us palaces?” Mahmoud says.

Beyond the question of legality of buildings near the Nile, media reports have long alluded to a strong commercial interest in the Nile islands, which would seem them developed into high-end investment projects.

In June, Medhat Kamal al-Din, the head of the Egyptian Surveying Authority, told the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper that the authority has been tasked with mapping the area in preparation for the implementation of “high priority” projects. In the same story, Al-Masry Al-Youm cites anonymous sources as saying that Sisi has ordered the Nile islands to be transformed into “money and business centers.”

Hany Younes, the spokesperson for the Planning Ministry, says that the ministry has no information on plans for the islands yet, and that subsequent plans are in the initial phases of planning.

The past few months of strife is only the latest episode in a long battle between the state and Nile islands residents. Since 2005, there have been several standoffs between the government and residents of different islands, notably those living on Dahab, Qursaya and Warraq, where had the government proposed investment projects.

In 2008, the government proposed the “Cairo 2050” urban development strategy, which entailed turning Dahab Island into an investment area, a project largely known as being pushed forward by Gamal Mubarak, the younger son of deposed President Hosni Mubarak. All the plans were aborted, however, following protests by island residents.

In 2010, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in favor of the residents of Qursaya Island, acknowledging their right to remain on the island. However, the battle was renewed in 2012, when military forces attempted to forcefully evict the island’s residents. They ultimately failed to do, after one resident was killed in the clashes.

“When they build their hotels on the island, won’t they introduce a sewage system? Why don’t they do it for the residents and owners of the land instead? Are these foreigners that they will give the land to better than us?” asks Abdallah, sitting on the step of his house, across from the small field that he owns and from which he makes his living.

Meanwhile, Ahmed Ayoub, who has served as the spokesperson for the State Land and Assets Reclamation Committee since it was formed in 2016, tells Mada Masr that reclaimed lands may have one of three fates: building development and services projects, sale in open tenders, or return to the people occupying them, if residents prove that they have invested in the land in useful ways, a matter which is regulated through a set of criteria.

For Zaazaa, when it comes to areas that have been populated for decades, the government should make development plans incorporating the area’s residents and not aim to enter and evict them.

Abdallah knows one thing for sure: “I do not concede that this hometown will be taken from us. We’re not a bunch of chickens that they can shoo away. There are people here living on 2,000 feddans with their children and their cattle and their lives. Even if they price a meter at LE1 million, we won’t leave.”

https://www.madamasr.com/en/2017/07/16/feature/politics/battle-over-the-nile/

Island v megacity: the Cairo islanders fighting violent state evictions

Ruth Michaelson, the guardian.

Warraq has become a battleground as Egyptian authorities demolish houses in what locals fear will be a glossy transformation of their island

Heba Nagaa Otmorsi was at work when a relative called to say her house had been demolished. That day she had boarded a ferry from Cairo’s Warraq Island to the mainland, unaware her home was under threat.

Most families had been asleep when government forces arrived early in the morning in armoured cars. “It was our neighbours who rescued the children,” says Otmorsi. “The government said [residents] had Molotov [cocktails] and weapons. They arrested anyone who confronted them.”

Almost overnight, Warraq Island went from a lush if impoverished oasis in the centre of the Nile river to the site of a fierce battle between residents and the local Giza authorities over plans to build a new bridge – and potentially remodel the entire island itself.

The clashes last weekend left one 23-year-old protester dead and a further 19 injured after police fired tear gas to disperse huge crowds protesting against the government’s incursion.

The island, a teardrop-shaped verdant sprawl of fields, unpaved roads and squat redbrick houses, is home to roughly 90,000 people and connects to the rest of the capital by ferries, transporting residents to the nearby districts of Warraq or Shobra al Kheima on the banks of the Nile.

The new bridge will ostensibly form part of the Rod El Farrag project, designed to connect parts of central Cairo to its outlying suburbs. Yet two proposals previously submitted show that the government has considered a far larger transformation for Warraq Island, with the bridge simply the first stage of a plan to treat the land as prime real estate.

Egyptian architectural firm Cube Consultants submitted a “conceptual masterplan” proposal to the General Organisation for Physical Planning in 2010 to transform Warraq Island into “Horus Island”, complete with glossy towers, wide boulevards and a marina. The project was considered as part of Cairo 2050, a sweeping transformation plan by the former regime of Hosni Mubarak that was criticised for its potential to make millions of the city’s poorest residents homeless.

While Cairo 2050 faded into the dust with the end of the Mubarak regime in 2011, plans to radically reinvent central Cairo continue to have the ear of the Egyptian authorities. A second proposal submitted in March 2013 from Singaporean architectural firm RSP was also considered, but never came to fruition. Its vision saw Warraq Island boast a glass skyscraper, a glistening glass pyramid, and manicured riverside walkways.

After news reports of tension on Warraq Island emerged, RSP reportedly removed its design for the island from its website. It later told reporters that “the company is no longer related to the project, after the design was completed at the request of a customer”. The company has not responded to a request for comment.

A further 150 demolitions are still planned on Warraq Island, according to local newspaper Al Shorouk. Explanations from the Egyptian authorities range from claims of a lack of proper sanitation to suggestions that the island is in fact a nature reserve. However, in local reports following Sunday’s protests, the prime minister, Sherif Ismail, repeated the accusation that residents are squatting illegally on state-owned land.

Otmorsi and neighbouring families are now sleeping on blankets salvaged from their demolished houses, taking shelter under the jutting grey concrete beams of the unfinished bridge.

At first, fellow resident Hanaa Abdel Aad says the islanders were thrilled that a lifeline to the city was being built. “When they started building [it], local residents helped them. We brought the construction workers tea and water.” But support quickly faded when the government began demolishing their homes, she says.

For Warraq Island residents, the bridge now symbolises a threat to the whole island, the first step in a plan to transform it into an opulent but exclusive residential area.

“We don’t want compensation. We want our houses to be rebuilt,” insists Otmorsi. Like all of the families now living underneath the bridge, she brandishes a collection of documents that she says prove ownership of the house she bought in 2004. Her sister, who declined to be named, pointed to a stamp from Egypt’s ministry of justice on her housing contract. “So what’s this then?” she asks.

Demolishing the homes of impoverished Cairo residents to make way for redevelopment plans is not new. Further down the Nile, the Maspero Triangle redevelopment project could displace 41,000 local residents to make way for a collection of high-rises and glossy buildings designed by Norman Foster. Residents have reportedly been promised replacement housing in Egypt’s desert suburbs, but say this is an unworkable solution that would cast them far away from their jobs and families. Elsewhere, the Nile City Towers development shimmers as it overlooks the surrounding Bulaq neighbourhood, welcoming visitors to a five-star hotel, a cinema and a mall that few of the working-class residents can access. In 2012, the towers were attacked by locals, resulting in one death.

“They want to remove us, so a rich investor can come to build skyscrapers and malls,” said one island resident, who declined to be named for fear of government reprisals. “If you want to develop this place, shouldn’t you provide us with better services? Or should you remove us? I don’t want you to develop my house, I am fine with its status. Just get me water and electricity. And let me be.”

The deputy Giza governor, Alaa al-Haras, who oversees Waraq Island, told local news outlets that the authorities will meet with residents to discuss the situation, but reportedly warned that “just because we will meet, doesn’t mean that we’re scared, or that we won’t proceed [with the demolition]”. When contacted by the Guardian, Al-Haras declined to comment.

Deen Sharp, who works at the Centre for Advanced Urban Research, said the situation on the island demonstrates how, “like many states around the world, the Egyptian government is focused on constructing its cities around the needs of financial capital and the powerful rather than those of its citizens”.

One week on, the residents of Warraq Island are continuing to protest, a rare confrontation between citizens and the Egyptian state since unauthorised street protests were banned in November 2013. “The people know for sure that there will be a stab in the back from the government. We hear the officials saying that they will continue the demolition no matter what,” said Mahmoud Mohamed, a student who lives on Warraq Island.

For Otmorsi, there is nothing left to lose now that she and her entire extended family of 18 are homeless. “Is this what [President Abdel-Fatah] al-Sisi wants? What will happen to our kids? We accepted the rising prices, and the oppression…” she said, her speech trailing off as she wonders what will come next for the island.

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