The Duweika Disaster Ten Years On – Part 3: Trials Find No-one Responsible

The BEO marks the tenth anniversary of the rockslide disaster in the area of Duweika in Cairo, with a series spotlighting one of the major urban and social events that the city witnessed in contemporary times.

Part three chronicles the legal and political proceedings around the disaster and their findings.

Initial Investigations

In reaction to the disaster, the Public Prosecutor opened an investigation with the help of a committee of geologists from the ministry of industry,[1] to examine the plateau to determine how the soil was affected by buildings and activity on it.

Initially the investigation team worked on evacuating the houses in danger and cooperating with the concerned parties to facilitate the procedures of recovering the dead from under the rubble, identifying them and helping with the burial permits.[2] The prosecution also requested the ownership status of the land from Cairo governorate to establish whether it was state property or not.

A local councilman squarely put the blame of the rockslide on the rock trimming contractor hired by the Manshiyat Nasser District, ironically to avoid its collapse.[3] Subsequently, the Public Prosecutor interrogated the contractor, but was then released pending investigations.[4]  A number of local leaders including members of the local council and parliament also gave testimonies. One of the housing officials interrogated by the prosecutor stated that the main cause of the disaster is the ignorance of the residence of shelter governmental houses built on top of the Duweika plateau, on how to deal with sewage,[5] which caused the soil limestone and pockets of soil to dissolve, and hence break off and topple down onto Ezbet Bekhit beneath it.

Then Cairo Governor, Abdelazim Wazir, was not officially questioned, but in a major newspaper interview said that the accident was not the first of its kind, where an earlier rockslide happened in 1993 that killed 69 victims in the Zabalin (garbage collectors’) area of Manshiyat ​​Nasser, and attributed the accident to the burning of garbage at the foot of the cliffs.[6] A geological report was commissioned in its wake with the recommendation to remove loose boulders from the edge of the Moqattam plateau as far back as 30 meters, resulting a project that according to him was completed in 2007. But another report issued in February 2008, seven months before the disaster, stressed the necessity of demolishing the homes located below the cliffs. The governor said he had communicated this with the residents of the area through his Deputy for Western Cairo (which Manshiyat Nasser District is part of), but according to him, the residents refused to relocate for economic and social reasons.

The Manshiyat Nasser District head however stated that a similar rockslide happened recently, but on a smaller scale and deaths were avoided after evacuating bloc number 47 of the [government built] emergency shelter housing, though without widening the evacuations to the area below the plateau.[7] This pushed the governor to issue a prosecution order to evacuate residents from their dangerous homes, and once more the governor says they rejected the order and went back to their houses.

What the governor failed to mention was that the residents did so because they were ordered to evacuate without compensation, or receive housing in al-Nahda Housing Estate, on the outskirts of Cairo, 35 kilometers away.[8] That was despite the fact that 2000 government housing units were standing empty nearby. These were part of a new 8000-unit Suzanne Mubarak Housing Estate funded by a USD 150mn. grant from the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development and implemented by the Ministry of Housing’s Central Agency for Construction. When this fact was brought to the governor’s attention, he replied that the residents were indeed going to be rehoused in the closer units, but that “fate was ahead of us.”[9]

Accusing fate resonated with the then minister of housing, Ahmed El-Maghraby, who said during a parliamentary debate on the disaster that there were plans to rehouse the Duweika residents two weeks after the disaster but “fate had beaten us.” He answered the accusations of the National Democratic Party member of failure citing a common Muslim repose to unfair accusations: “Allah suffices me, for He is the best disposer of affairs, who doesn’t believe in fate?”[10]

Instead of focusing on the hard facts at hand and investigating how an officially hired contractor was allowed to cut and trim a rock face standing immediately over a populated district, parliament members proceeded with other tangential accusations. One blamed the construction work for Emaar Misr’s luxury Uptown Cairo project for the rockslide, while another accused the housing minister of allocating the developer a number of the Suzanne Mubarak apartments as offices. Parliamentary member and later presidential hopeful Hamdeen Sabahi suggested donating half the salary of each of the MPs and half the budget of the state agencies to solve the problem of slums in Cairo. This all happened in the shocking absence of the Manshiyat Nasser MP, Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman, who also happened to be the minister of housing during the start of the Dweika Development/Suzanne Mubarak Housing Project. [11]

In the end, parliament washed its hands of the disaster, stating that it had repeatedly warned the government of the impending disaster,[12] and at the same time offered no evidence of who was politically responsible for one the largest urban disasters in Egypt’s recent history.

Court Circuits

High officials in charge of the Duweika Development/Suzanne Mubarak Housing Project managed to get out of the circle of accusations early, including the Cairo governor and the then and preceding housing ministers.

It also took 14 months for charges of manslaughter of the 119 victims of the rockslide to be brought against government officials. These were Major General Mahmoud Yassin, Deputy Governor of Western Cairo, two former heads of the Manshiyet Nasser District, the manager and deputy manager of the local Housing Department, and the heads of the local Rocks and Property Departments.[13] The charges also included injury by mistake of 55 people, and failure to move the residents out of harm’s way with prior knowledge of imminent danger.

The first round of trials took four months, when on May 26^th, 2010 the Manshiyat Nasser Misdemeanor Court sentenced the deputy governor to five years in prison with bail set at EGP 5000. [14] The other defendants were sentenced to three years prison and EGP 3000 bail, in addition to compensating the victims EGP 5001 each.

This verdict was appealed by the defendants. In the second round, in October of the same year, the Deputy Governor and the Director of the Housing Department were acquitted, while the prison sentence for the rest of the defendants was reduced to one year.[15]

A third round in the Court of Cassation saw the defense place the blame on former first lady Suzanne Mubarak, accusing her personally of building housing units in the area of Duweika, without the establishment of a proper sewage system, stating that the five officials were merely scapegoats in place of the governor and his deputies.[16] On September 16^th, 2014, days after the sixth anniversary of the disaster, the court amended the sentence to a one-year suspended prison sentence. In the end, no one was jailed for the Duweika disaster, even though all evidence pointed to it being the cause of man-made interventions, as well as complacency from district officials.

Conclusion: Officials Immune from Liability

While the Duweika disaster spotlighted what would become know as “Unsafe Areas” in Egypt (See Part II), it also showed the absence of any liability of the various government agencies responsible for managing the built environment and avoiding disasters.

Ten years on, there has been no effort to restructure administrative responsibility, or to give more room for popular control over local executive bodies. The opposite has actually happened: the seats of the Local Popular Councils remain vacant after their dissolution in the wake of the January 2011 revolution, and no elections have been held since. While their role was largely ceremonial, it still provided a counterbalance to the appointed Local Executive Councils and the heads of the districts and departments. Meanwhile local urban disasters such as buildings collapses and flash floods continue to occur with no one held accountable, and no concrete measures taken to prevent them.

Acknowledgements

Written by Yahia Shawkat and Ali Almoghazy

Translated by Lina Wardani

Main Image: Site of the Duweika Disaster in Ezbit Bekhit, Cairo, four years after the disaster – BEO

Notes and References