The poor of Egypt's capital city see no point voting in elections on Sunday, writes MICHAEL JANSENin Cairo
THE City of the Dead is dead in the morning. Imam al-Lesi Street is lined with dusty a row of one-storey houses that are both tombs and homes.
Marble plaques give the names and dates of the deceased who inhabit these rooms; the living are squatters who do not identify themselves.
The doors of some buildings are open while others are bricked up or shut and padlocked. The street is hard, unpaved grit. An empty bus careens by. A woman in a blue caftan appears at the door of a house flanked by two stunted trees, the first person to appear.
A widow from upper Egypt, Raya has lived here for 30 years. Life manifests itself in wooden frames for armchairs stacked outside a workshop, a satellite dish perched on a roof, laundry drying in an alcove, chickens scratching in an alleyway.
A wall encloses a small mosque. Men are away at work, children at school, women busy with chores.
Only the dead enjoy repose. An elderly man sits on a chair reading the Koran at the gate of a tomb room. He is mourning his son, who died last week.
At the end of the street is a rank of shops selling faded fruit and limp vegetables. The people who live here cannot afford the rent of flats in the poorest quarters of the living. Yet, in the square bedecked with posters and banners advertising candidates standing for Sunday’s parliamentary election, men sit at tables drinking tea and coffee and smoking fragrant water pipes.
Two at a table across the street from the larger cafe are eager for a chat. They introduce themselves as Sayyed Muhammad Abdel ’Al and his uncle Hag Subhi Abdel ’Al. Glasses of tea are brought while the Haj draws smoke through the bubbling bowl of his pipe. Sayyed says they are “guardians of the quarter”.
The issue stirring people here is the sale of the government hospital to a private concern. “The people don’t have money for treatment,” he observes. “They also sold the Imam Shafei girls’ school. People are very angry.
“Voters won’t be paid by candidates. The Watani [the ruling National Democratic Party or NDP] is strong here. We are for President Hosni Mubarak. We love Hosni Mubarak.”
What about Gamal, his son and rumoured successor? “No!”
Or Omar Suleiman, the head intelligence, who is another possibility? “No,” the men reply in unison. “Only Hosni Mubarak.” But he is 82 and had an operation last year.
The City of the Dead springs to life at night. Cafes are packed – men only. Repairmen tinker with car engines and motor bikes.
People are walking in the streets, easy in the company of the ghosts of this quiet quarter, the oldest in Cairo.
Sayyed and Hag are waiting. In a beat-up old car we charge into the dark in search of the campaign convoy of Nasr Shurbaggi, an independent seeking one of the 508 elected assembly seats.
We track him to the jammed streets and bright lights of the vibrant quarter lying beneath the massive walls of the citadel, fortified in the 12th century by Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria who defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hittin in Palestine in 1187.
“Nasr Shurbaggi for people’s assembly, Nasr Shurbaggi,” blasts the amplifier mounted on the back of a lorry. Drummers strike their instruments between calls to back Shurbaggi, a smiling man with a gleaming bald crown surrounded by a fringe of dark hair.
He stops to shake hands, pledges to repair roads, ensure that the living are not evicted from the City of the Dead and return the hospital to the public sector. As he speeds away in his battered orange car, a youth shrugs “bullshit”.
Most of the living will not vote on Sunday. They should have registered 10 months ago but are wary of police stations, where they receive voting cards.They do not believe there is any point in voting. The dead, however, may cast the proxy ballots that will decide the contest.