Pesticides and revolutionary spirits ruled the pages, writes Aziza Sami As the national, opposition and independent press went their respective ways in covering the presidential campaign, they featured other topics which have captured the public's interest. The weekly national magazine Rose El-Youssef devoted its opening article, "News item of the week" to the deployment of Egyptian troops along the border of Egypt and Palestine, known as the Philadelphi corridor, following Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. The situation, in which multinational forces will cooperate with Egyptian troops in monitoring the area, means, according to Rose El-Youssef, that Egypt has "aborted Israel's attempts to consolidate its own presence along the Philadelphi corridor by stationing Israeli troops and installing a waterway and an electric fence from Rafah to Eilat in order to stop alleged arms smuggling activities from Egypt to Palestine." The article, which focussed on delineating facts and figures and included no editorialising, appeared to be timed in response to the increasingly vocal opposition within Egypt to having Egyptian troops undertake "police work" for the Israelis after their withdrawal from Gaza. This opposition found expression this week in a demonstration held by the protest movement Kifaya in front of the Journalists' Syndicate. On the domestic front, the increasingly explosive issue of reform of state-owned Egyptian press institutions featured in more than one publication, including national magazines. The most arresting coverage, however, was that featured in a one-page article written by Mustafa Bakri, editor of the independent weekly newspaper Al-Osbou who while keeping the protagonists' names anonymous, revealed "the shocking figures related to self-anointed salaries and commissions received by the former chairman of a major national press institution amounting to LE3 million a month." The cosmic fortunes amassed in the span of the past 25 years by the chairman and an alleged favoured circle of family members and cronies, wrote Bakri, "is but one instance of what is now being uncovered after the recent changes which took place in the management leadership of these press institutions." According to Bakri, however, in order to keep the lid clamped on what will be a Pandora's box, "the file of rampant corruption in these institutions will be opened only after the 7 September presidential elections as requested by a very high-placed official in the state." The national weekly magazine Al-Musawwar for its part ran an interesting yet confusing interview with Minister of Agriculture Ahmed El-Leithi. The question of allegedly cancerous pesticides banned by an Agricultural Ministry committee was raised. The answers of the minister, who asserted that these pesticides would be allowed "only for crops exported to Europe where these pesticides are accepted" must surely have provoked readers even more, and left them with a proliferation of questions, the most obvious of which is how Europe can accept pesticides proven to be lethal to humans? The incredulousness of such logic was countered, but only partially, in an interview conducted by the independent weekly newspaper Sawt Al-Umma with Sherif El-Maghrabi, a major agrarian investor. Sawt Al-Umma was careful to note in its headline that El-Maghrabi, "the younger brother of Tourism Minister Ahmed El-Maghrabi, is exerting pressure to have the government circulate cancerous pesticides!" Despite the newspaper's obvious intent to disparage the younger El-Maghrabi's credibility, his answers which it quoted still must have sounded more logical to the impartial reader than those made by the agriculture minister to Al-Musawwar. More logical, definitely, than assertions that Egypt will export crops sprayed with carcigenous pesticides to Europe only because it is Europe that will accept them. According to El-Maghrabi: "Every pesticide has a negative side effect just as a medicine does." The question is how it is administered. El-Maghrabi also added that the Ministry of Agriculture Committee which banned the pesticides "is formed of only two individuals who did not investigate the pesticides which were banned, some of them for whom there exist no viable alternatives." The newspaper's recently appointed Editor-in-Chief Abdel-Qader Shuhaib, a veteran Al-Musawwar reporter and columnist before he became editor in the recent press appointments, raised the question, "how can the opposition trust the president's promises?" The apparently sceptical question laid the groundwork for what the writer postulates must be the course followed by the NDP so that the current presidential elections campaign will gain credibility. "In order to give credence to the whole process, security forces and others must not perform their usual transgressions." All of this according to Shuhaib must be done "so as not to give opportunity to those who want to exploit whatever might happen so that they can realise 'non- Egyptian' objectives. This is imperative in order to end the current crisis of confidence (between the government and the public) which can obstruct much desired political reform." The thrust of Shuhaib's argument becomes apparent when he gives weight to President Mubarak and Wafd leader Noaman Gomaa as the only serious election contenders while brushing aide as of neither consequence nor credibility "the candidate of one of the newly-formed parties (head of the Ghad Party Ayman Nour) who is trying to make us believe that he is a serious contender after Israel and before it, American media propaganda, showered itself upon him." Shuhaib's obvious antipathy to any other but President Mubarak and Al-Wafd's Gomaa as (staid and veteran) contenders is most apparent in the expression he uses to denote the new (and young) protest movements surfacing on the Egyptian political scene. "Such new groups insist on entering the electoral campaign with a revolutionary spirit," he writes disparagingly. As if the sin of being 'revolutionary' were not enough, the writer adds that (like Nour) these groups are also "aided and abetted by foreign forces".
