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"Nothing
More to Lose": Landowners, Tenants, and Economic Liberalization
in Egypt
Karim El-Gawhary
Law 96/92
is one of the cornerstones of Egypt's economic liberalization program.
With it the days of Nasserite regulations, designed to protect small
tenants, are numbered. In place since 1992, the new law has gradually
reorganized the relationship between landowners and tenants. In
the first five years, the rent for land was tripled without much
resistance from the tenants. From October 1997 on, the rent will
be determined solely by market forces. All old rent contracts will
be cancelled and tenants will lose any rights to the land. With
many facing eviction, it remains unclear how the landowners will
react to the law.
Economic liberalization is now hitting the
Egyptian countryside. After decades of Nasserite regulations favoring
small land tenants, a new law will "reform" the relationship between
landowners and tenants in favor of the first. It will more fully
integrate the Egyptian countryside into the global market because
it gives owners the right to dispose of their land as they see fit.
These rights constitute a precondition for modernizing production
methods in the countryside and planting more risky export crops.
With agrobusinessmen able to invest and extract more income from
the land, economists hope that Egypt will be able to decrease its
annual agricultural deficit of $2.7 billion.
Black flags, set up at many villages and fields as a sign of anger,
express the other side of the story. The reform will come at a high
price to small tenants, who are threatened with eviction from their
fields. This could mean the end of relative social peace in the
Egyptian countryside because most tenants have little left to lose.
Without alternatives, they will just be added to the army of unemployed
with many of them possibly ending up in the growing slum areas of
Cairo or Alexandria.
Kamshish, a village with 25,000 inhabitants in the lower part
of the Nile Delta (about an hour north of Cairo), is a case in point.
Farmers here are quite experienced in disobeying authorities as
the village is famous for its history of conflict between large
landowners and small peasants that reached its peak in the 1960s.
Kamshish may very well return to old times. The new law means
that the 500 tenant families in Kamshish face eviction. "We would
rather die than be evicted from our land," is the response heard
in many houses. "Where should I go? I do not have anything else
besides this half an acre of land, and all these years I have not
saved a penny," says 'Abdel Rasul, one of the threatened tenants.
"Should I send my children to steal?" he adds pointing to half a
dozen of his children, who play barefoot around the hut where the
family lives under one roof with its livestock.
For Egypt's "left" the law may provide a chance to breathe new
air into their cause. After little action during the first four
years after the law was passed, mobilization against the law has
been in full force since the start of the year. In Cairo, organizations
like the Land Center for Human Rights or the Farmers Union of the
leftist Tagammu' Party have been working to transform the farmers'
despair into political action. Opposition parties including the
Tagammu', the Nasserites and the Islamist-oriented Labor Party joined
forces to call on the government to delay the implementation of
the law for another five years. "People who seriously believe that
tenants will give up their land are dreaming," says Karam Saber,
director of the Land Center, an institution run by voluntary lawyers
and researchers to defend the rights of farmers. "So far tenants
have confined themselves mostly to writing petitions or collecting
signatures, but the mood is becoming more radical as we come closer
to the October deadline." His organization is currently considering
a strategy of nonviolent strikes and sit-ins.
While organizations in Cairo try to mobilize farmers and discuss
nonviolent strategies, farmers, in some areas, have taken matters
into their own hands. Small sporadic riots have taken place in the
Delta and Southern Egypt. In early July, several thousand tenants
gathered for a protest march in two villages in the southern province
of Minya. In the confrontations that followed, the crowd burned
the houses of local landowners, blocked main traffic thoroughfares
as well as a train track and set fire to a public bus. Police regained
control of the situation, but not before three people died and another
20 were injured. One day later, the tenants of al-Attaf, a village
in the Nile Delta, set the local branch office of the agricultural
ministry on fire in an attempt to destroy official records establishing
land ownership. More than 160 people were arrested. In other incidents
landowners resorted to violence. On July 28, in the village of Qamaruna,
northeast of Cairo, a 70-year old farmer and his wife were beaten
to death by a landlord and his son after refusing to pay the rent
increase. According to the Land Center, these confrontations cost
the lives of 15 people while more than 300 were injured. Hundreds
of farmers and protestors have been arrested for protesting the
new law and nearly 200 remain in prison. Many observers believe
that this is only the beginning.
In Kamshish, too, the situation is tense. The local police have
been reinforced. Rumors circulate of a coming police raid to search
for illegal weapons, a common sight throughout Egypt's countryside.
"If they indeed come to take away our land, what do I have to lose,
then? So I do not care if I end up in prison," warns one of the
tenants there. "God has put us in different circumstances--you are
rich, I am poor, but how can it be right that you take away the
little bread I own?" asks another.
For some time, many tenants have refused to face the reality of
the law. "Something like this after all those years I burned my
skin out in my field," growls 64-year-old 'Abdel Ghanim, who looks
as if he is 20 years older. "But we're slowly waking up here," he
announces. Many farmers only began to believe that the law would
come into effect when the state agricultural bank announced that
there would not be any more loans to tenants without the agreement
of the landowner. "That was the point when we knew it would get
serious." "We simply could not imagine that water would flow upriver,"
adds an older tenant, showing his fear that the new law will bring
back the period when a single big landowning family determined the
fate of the village. At that time, whoever refused to submit ended
up in the private prison of the patron.
It is unclear whether or not today's farmers can be easily mobilized.
The opposition is doing all it can to exploit their anger through
the press and by organizing countless small meetings in the countryside.
The government's response to this has been one of intimidation.
Tenant meetings are regularly besieged by the police and those who
dare to come are harassed. "We have started announcing our meetings
only a few hours in advance so that the riot police have no time
to mobilize," says one activist against the law.
Farmers are not the only ones who get into trouble with the police.
In mid-June a journalist, a veterinarian and two lawyers were arrested
after the police found documents in their houses that criticized
the new law. According to the police report, they had organized
meetings against the law, led campaigns to collect signatures and
sent letters to the president. They are now charged with incitement
and distributing propaganda that threatens public security and harms
the public interest. On September 25, the four were given another
45-day prison sentence without a trial, despite several appeals
from national and international human rights groups. Egyptian human
rights activists believe that the four will remain in prison until
the situation calms down.
On the political level the government is trying to play down the
severity of the problem. "Ninety percent of the issue is already
solved and for the rest there will be a solution by October," stated
President Hosni Mubarak at a recent press conference. For the government,
the law is a test case of how economic liberalization can be forced
through against the will of large parts of the population. Many
of the old Nasserite laws are under scrutiny. A new law to reform
apartment rents that have been fixed for decades and a new labor
law that gives entrepreneurs the right to lay off workers are also
in the pipeline.
As the resistance of the tenants increases, the government has
belatedly recognized the need to address the situation. A month
ago it promised to compensate tenants who lose their land with a
plot of land reclaimed from the desert. Mahmud Gabr, a researcher
at the Land Center, dismisses the idea: "To compensate all the tenants
we would need twice as much land as has been reclaimed since the
beginning of the reclamation program in the fifties." More over,
farmers would need substantial capital because newly reclaimed land
requires continuous investment for the first five years while returns
only rise gradually. This may be a lucrative business for big investors,
but it is hardly an alternative for small farmers with no savings.
As one farmer puts it: "If you send me out there with just my galabiya,
I starve." Several weeks ago the Ministry of Agriculture proposed
giving tenants long term credits under favorable conditions so they
can buy the land and allocated $33.3 million for that purpose. With
costs of around $35,000 per acre, however, billions would be needed
to implement this plan.
While the government is trying to blur the issue, the conflict
continues to simmer as the October ultimatum draws nearer, a potential
time bomb with both social and communal explosives. In Upper Egypt,
landowners are in many cases Coptic Christians while their tenants
are Muslims. Here economic conflict could quickly turn into religious
strife. An indicator of what this could mean occurred last year
in the village of Kafr Demian, inhabited by 1,000 Copts and 3,000
Muslims. A crowd of several hundred Muslims raided Coptic houses,
killed their animals and burned down their stables. The attack was
triggered by rumors of an illegal church construction, but the real
reason seems to have been of a more economic nature. Tensions rose
sharply after it became clear that the mainly Muslim tenants would
have to give back their rented land to its Coptic owners after the
October deadline. Karam Saber from the Land Center also expects
a rise in vendettas between families. "In many parts of Upper Egypt
we still have blood feuds and the law will break open old family
wounds." His colleague Mahmud Gaber predicts revenge attacks such
as poisoning wells, burning crops or opening irrigation canals to
flood fields. As a farmer in Kamshish warned, "Once the avalanche
starts, it will be hard to stop. Then there will be war in the land
of Egypt."
Karim El-Gawhary is MERIP's regional program
coordinator in Cairo.

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