Opinions
While this month’s events might please repressed Egyptians and Hamas (Palestine) whom Mubarak suppressed as rigidly and effectively as the Israelis did, albeit without tanks and bombs, they trouble Israelis who worry about continuity of the 1979 Peace Treaty concluded with Anwar Sadat and rejected by the rest of the Arab world. Succeeding Sadat on his assassination, Mubarak imposed emergency rule and prospered thereby through 30 years of dictatorship, vote-rigging, corruption, with US providing Egypt over $1 billion yearly since 1979, enough for diversion. (On February 11th the Swiss Government froze Mubarak’s accounts but these are said to be a small fraction of his wealth. Others are considering the same. Both of Mubarak’s sons are involved in banking and finance and the family has large holdings in Egypt and elsewhere.) He was seen as a proxy for US Middle East policy which favoured and pampered Jews enabling Israel in those decades to dismantle Palestine dispersing and subduing opposition and killing many. Mubarak did little to aid oppressed Palestinians while accumulating wealth at civilian expense in the fashion of every US-installed dictator, each manipulated like puppets, with fat bribes, ostensibly for security, but really to facilitate business. (The list is too long for this space).
The demonstrations provoked the standard demagogic response with restrictions, police brutality and soon the army, when it seemed that Police may have engaged in criminal activity under the guise of crowd control. Recently Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, observed that current events in the Middle East "are driven at bottom by human insecurity, poverty, diminished or disappointed expectations, the lack of good governance, (and) corruption… the problems and grievances causing unrest in the Arab world represent a microcosm … of the broader world…Despite progress in many places, insecurity is everywhere on the rise."
The army in Cairo’s Tahrir Square quickly showed their support for change. The photographs sparkle with the red, white and black tricolour and children posing on tanks. The army’s actions spared a messy conflict and helped to persuade Mubarak’s resignation, which Vice-President Suleiman announced to cheers from a festival crowd, “In these grave circumstances that the country is passing through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave his position as president of the republic. He has mandated the Armed Forces Supreme Council to run the state. God is our protector and succour." Indeed!
And so it had been in Teheran, exactly 32 years ago on Feb 11th when the despotic Shah of Iran was deposed by public uprising. News then was spread by smuggling cassette tapes which were copied and distributed to mosques throughout Iran. The Tunisian revolution helped Egypt’s campaign which began electronically and spread worldwide via emails and social media, including NGOs such as Amnesty International. Despots have become fair game for this new media power. Just recently even Saudi women have protested in Riyadh! Who’s next? Dictatorships are not forever!
Egypt has passed Phase 1. Phase 2 is hazy. Can autocracy change abruptly to democracy, as protesters wish? Unlikely. Egyptian military has pledged to respect treaties, supervise a transition, maintain peace and order and allow parties to organise and respect the "legitimacy of the people". Not many Egyptians can have live experience of a working democracy; they need an interim arrangement they can trust, a reasonable time-table for elections, and protection from extremism, especially from Wahhabism now threatening world peace through its sponsorship of terror; the philosophy of the banned Muslim Brotherhood pervades Islamic societies. The young needs time and support to develop the political expertise needed to govern. The army can ensure this, keep their pledge, remain non-aggressive but defend the rights of the region’s peoples.
One bleak note for US/Israel’s book: Saeb Erakat, chief Palestinian negotiator aiming to discuss peace resigned last week amid deadlock in efforts to get Israel to renew talks. Obama should maintain his reservations on the Middle East at this delicate stage and any endorsement on Egyptian issues or premature interference would surely taint any plan for a measured development of confidence to govern.
Time presses on with Sunday night ironing
It is not that I dread late Sunday evening when it comes to the point-of-no-return with me having to finally iron my shirts for the work-week ahead. I listen to the hiss of steam rising from beneath the iron. I love the smell of the spray-on starch from an aerosol tin. I admire my handiwork with the iron in the sharpness of the seams and the artistry in my gliding around the hard-to-press spots by the buttons.
Perhaps it is the standing in one place that I don’t like. Or it is the to-and-fro with the iron that creates the wearisome monotony. Or maybe it is the
plain repetitiveness of ironing that made me think that the dry cleaners were worth a visit.
The next time I drove past I looked through the front glass of the dry cleaners. Inside was a bustling work space. And the shirts were nameless and lined up on a rack against a long wall. There would have been hundreds of shirts in a cosmopolitan array of colours on bronze wire hangers. The number of shirts was daunting. I thought, “Each day one of these shirts goes out into a crowded world to make commerce.”
I thought of my one-a-day work-week shirts rubbing shoulders with its denizens at the dry cleaners. There was something mass produced in the way these shirts were being laundered. There was the namelessness, the absence of a personality associated with the owner. Something individualistic and tangible was missing. I found I did not want to put my shirts in a barrel with even more crabs.
This is not what I knew when I was growing up back home. My first contact with ironing came through our next door neighbour, Miss Willimena. She was superannuated by the time I started to explore my neighbourhood as a young boy. But was she active!
For starters, I soon came to understand that Fridays were her baking days. She spent all day in front of a hot mud oven. This oven was a large mound of earth, from its appearance as if it was a nest originally built by a giant wasp. The mound had been hollowed out at the centre. A wood fire burned below this and brought the temperature up at the top. Here on trays, Miss Willimena baked cakes, currant rolls, and beautifully plaited loaves of bread. These she took to the open-air market on Friday evening on a large, wooden tray that she balanced on her head like an accomplished acrobat. She also made a heavy, starchy but deliciously sweet cake using grated cassava called ‘pone’. This was cut into four-inch by two-inch wedges which always sold out quickly at the market.
For a young boy it was a thrill to help her with the baking. I helped mostly with bringing firewood to the oven. To be rewarded with a slice of bread coated with shop butter, which was red and highly salted, was an added thrill of a lifetime. To receive a wedge of ‘pone’ was to cherish it by eating it at one sitting with slow, rapturous nibbles.
Miss Willimena’s task on Saturday was ironing. This she took in by the baskets from the villagers. These were work clothes, mostly from the maids in the village who toiled in the upper class homes of the managers in the sugar estate. The laundry had been washed and dried in the sun, hanging from lengths of wires in backyards as if from telephone poles. Pressing these kept Miss Willimena busy throughout Saturday and into Sunday morning.
Those were the days before electricity came to our village. She ironed using two flat irons that were heated on the burning coals in her coal-pot. The handles would be wrapped with cloth. Veins and wrinkles merged on her hands as she laboured.
She made her own starch. It came from the cassava that she had used to make her ‘pone’ the day before. The grated cassava was soaked in water and the fibres squeezed. The resulting liquid contained pure starch – this she put out in the sun in a wide tray. The sun evaporated the water, leaving the starch behind.
Miss Willimena ironed each item with a generous application of starch, singing hymns as she switched hot irons on the coal-pot. The folded clothes went in her wooden tray. She handed each item of clothing personally to its owner, walking through the village on Sunday afternoon.
Electricity eventually came to the village. Long after Miss Willimena died I saw the heavy irons being used as door-stops.
I think I will stick with the personal touch on Sunday nights.