Close-up:
This weekend’s
photo essay
Legal Briefs
Alistair R Brownlie
Is Egypt doomed
to be the
lost revolution?
World Press Digest
New Zealand’s recovery
It used to be a cult.
But now it’s a full-
blown religion
The Cafe 2
Colin Stewart and
John Cameron
Press Digest
The reconstruction of residential Christchurch following the February earthquake will require up to 12,500 full-time workers, reports the New Zealand Herald, and the prime minister John Key says there could be a number of skills shortages, particularly of concreters, carpenters and joiners. There is talk of labour being imported from Asian countries to overcome the shortages.
Earthquake recovery minister Gerry Brownlee claims it is likely that more than 11,000 houses in the city have been damaged to a level exceeding the payment cap for compensation. There are fears that 10,000 of them will have to be demolished.
Meanwhile, a new body, the Earthquake Recovery Authority, has been set up to lead and co-ordinate the rebuilding of the city with the aim of making Christchurch ‘the most earthquake-safe city in the world’, according to mayor Bob Parker.
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Is Egypt doomed
to be the lost
revolution?
Alan Fisher
They were back on the streets of Cairo again on Friday, returning to the chants that removed a president and changed a country. There is a concern, a deep concern, among many of those who braved the cold, the violence, and desperate uncertainty through January that the revolution, and the gains that were promised, could be lost.
Tahrir Square has become known the world over as the centrepoint of the drive for democracy. Soon after Mubarak left office, the army cleared the area, ostensibly to get traffic moving again, to get Cairo back to work. A few protestors wanted to stay. They were worried that they could not see the change, could not feel the difference.
On Wednesday, the ruling Supreme Military Council issued a revised constitution which mandated that 50% of the parliament should consist of workers and farmers. For some it was a Mubarak-era move which simply ensured the traditional forces in the country would retain the power they always enjoyed. Some youth groups called for a new protest, but others were not so sure. The alliance which had effectively marshalled forces to change the future were undecided about what they should do now.
Eventually an agreement was reached that the future could be pushed and demanded by a return to the past. And so Tahrir Square, which has been empty for weeks, was set as the location for a new protest – they called it a day to ‘Save the Revolution’. Some authority figures dismissed it as a token, predicting there would be a few hundred, maybe a thousand or two at the most. There was a series of widely distributed posters and notices which falsely claimed that the protests had been postponed.
But they came in their tens of thousands, packing the square once more. They carried posters of former regime officials behind bars. They demanded that Hosni Mubarak, who was until recently under ‘house arrest’ in his mansion in the coastal resort of Sharm-el-Sheik, should be put on trial and the money that was systematically stolen by government officials over 30 years and more should be returned to the people. The military may have been in control for seven weeks, but the villains in this new protest remain the same.
These things are synonymous with the 30 years of Mubarak’s security state rather than with the new dawn of democracy that was promised.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
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