The Duweika Disaster Ten Years On – Part 2: Forced Evictions

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 two chronicles the urban-social aftermath of the disaster, seeing a spike in forced evictions and relocations in remote areas of the city under the pretext of saving residents from so-called unsafe areas

Introduction

“Aren’t we citizens of this country? Aren’t we human beings, why are we evicted for the sake of others to replace us?”

A statement that I have heard from many residents in different neighborhoods in the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). Forced evictions and resettlement are threats which residents face in their everyday life, in a megalopolis of 22 million inhabitants, spread over the three governorates which are Cairo, Giza, and Qalubia[1] .

Migration, mobility, and resettlement are contemporary phenomena related to cities. It is in cities where people make many choices in order to make their living, reduce their daily commute, and avoid traffic. Neoliberal policies produced a neoliberal urban identity that constructed not to waste time and be efficient as much as possible. People mobile inside their cities in their everyday life not according to their own free-will, but follow the political and economic structures that are a result of the urban policies of the nation-states.

According to International Law and the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR), forced eviction is: “the permanent or temporary removal against their will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of and access to appropriate forms of legal or other protection” [2]

This article questions the meaning of forced evictions, how it is implemented in Egypt in the last few years, and, its relationship with gentrification.

Forced Eviction or, Urban Development?

The 1992 earthquake in Egypt was a significant reason of migration and mobility within the GCR. The earthquake was 5.8 R strong and its center was located 35 kilometers south of the center of the GCR. On October 12th, 1992, 350 houses collapsed, 9000 others were cracked including 216 mosques and 2350 schools, which caused 50,000 inhabitants to be homeless, and left 545 persons dead, and 700 injured[3]. Following the crisis, inhabitants did have to resettle within the city, and new neighborhoods were urbanized to accommodate the new homeless citizens. Most were new housing estates on the outskirts of the city: Masakin al-Zelzal in Moqattam, and al-Nahda in Al-Salam.

The same happened almost 16 years later, where in the morning of September 6th, 2008, a massive part of the Moqattam Plateau in Duweika, broke off and collapsed on tens of homes in Ezbit Bekhit below, killing at least 119 people and leaving 55 injured (See Part I). The first administrative response was the establishment of the Informal Settlements Development Facility (ISDF) that started to survey the urban areas in Egypt, classifying 404 areas home to 850,000 inhabitants as “unsafe”. Their criteria were loosely based on UN-Habitat’s international criteria of housing deprivation, outline four levels: 1) Areas that threaten life, 2) Areas of unsuitable shelter, 3) Areas exposed to health risks, 4) Areas of instability due to insecurity of tenure.[4] Though, ISDF strategy was supposedly to upgrade and not evacuate the areas, though form the early days after the rockslide, more than 1000 families were evicted from their homes.

Forced evictions in their implementation are commonly associated with violations which include:[5] 1) residents being evicted by force by police or central security forces, where, in some cases, military forces joined them after the Egyptian revolution of 2011. 2) The evictions included arresting some of the inhabitants with no legal reasons. 3) Use of tear gas and force against civilians including children. 4) Evictions happening in the early morning when residents are still asleep. 5) No options given to the residents in advance of the eviction. 6) Inhabitants are being left at social housing at new settlements after literally being loaded in trucks, they have to be sheltered into those new units, where at time the units are not enough forcing families to share units, moreover, they are not given any legal proof of their occupancy[6].

According to a source from Cairo governorate, 13,000 families were relocated of the southern and eastern areas by 2012. Most (10,519 families) from Manshiyat Nasser and Duwieqa, 1114 families form Ezbit Khairallah, 583 from Istabl Antar, 133 from El-Sehleya, 715 from Dar al-Salam, and 8 families from Batn al-Baqara. They were rehoused far from the city center in Al-Awla Bel-Re’aya Housing and the Haram City estates in the satellite city of 6th of October, as well as the Nahda Housing Estate to the east of Cairo, and in the Suzanne Mubarak/New Duweiqa Housing Estate in Manshiyat Nasser.

Fig 1: Egyptian Urban Action – July 2012 – by the author

Ramelt Bulaq

In August 2012, a young man named Amr El-Boni was killed by a police officer inside the Nile City Towers, an incident that sparked riots that lasted hours between the residents of the neighborhood, Ramlet Bulaq, and the police[7]. In a few days, the residents discovered that the Cairo governorate issued a decree to expropriate their homes[8]. 52 young men from Ramlet Bulaq were arrested, jailed, and three of them were sentenced to 25 years in prison on riot related charges. While no one was punished for the death of Amr El-Boni. According to interviews with residents of the neighborhood, they also received threats from the police to leave the neighborhood[9]. They also mentioned how after its construction, the Nile City towers’ administration was trying to buy their houses in order to build an extension to the towers.

May 15th Housing      

After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, government employees at 15th of May City Agency, a new satellite settlement to the south of Cairo, illegally rented out public housing units to hundreds of families, who thought they received legal tenure.[10] They paid the employees a monthly rent, until one morning in 2012, the military forcibly evicted them. In addition to the use of force and teargas, as well as arrests, the eviction forces threw their furniture and personal belongings from the balconies. The families protested in front of the Cabinet in Downtown Cairo, as well as in front of the presidential palace in Heliopolis, but have never been compensated or rehoused[11].

Warraq Island

The Committee to Retrieve State Land headed by former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb as a result of Presidential Decree 57/2016, started with ten members representing different government entities, including members of the Ministries of Defence and Interior[12]. In the same year, PD 378/2016 followed to ensure the responsibilities of the committee, and to take any required legal action against objectors to its work. The committee’s official mission is first to survey occupied state-owned land; second, to survey the land plots to decide on their legal and administrative status; third, to research eviction decrees; fourth, to propose solutions for reclaiming state-owned land; and fifth, to facilitate the implementation of the reclamations and the eviction of any occupants, as well as to update the database of state-owned lands.

Between July 5th to 20th, 2017, 57 persons were arrested from different governorates in Egypt[13]. On July 16th, 2017, Warraq Island was occupied by security forces who tear down some housing buildings that upset the families and caused clashes resulted of the death of a young man, Sayed Hassan El-Gezawy, AKA Sayed Tafshan, besides the arrest of a number of other young men.

Warraq Island inhabitants have proof of their legal ownership to the lands, which made everyone suspicious about the forced eviction that seems be for the sake of gentrification. In April 2018, the government designated the island as a “New Urban Community”, effectively transferring management as well as ownership of any state-land to the state-owned New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA)[14]. This will in all probability mean the eviction of the 120,000 inhabitants as NUCA has powers to expropriate land within its jurisdiction. The whole process is unacceptable to the residents, and the compensation will never be fair[15].

Gentrification

A question about the state’s urban agenda is raised after all of what was discussed above. The urban agenda reflects a number of economic policies that will have consequences to the social, economic, and political lives of the city’s inhabitants. These policies are causing a number of struggles that are not managed by laws and none of the citizens are protected, no matter what their gender, race, or social class is.

These policies are not isolated from the global urban agenda and the neoliberal changes in the world. In 1964, Ruth Glass, a British sociologist, coined the term “gentrification,” that means the urban process of replacing working class residents in one area with higher earners[16]. Since the 1940s and until 1970s, many parts of London and New York City were gentrified, and it is still in process. David Harvey and Neil Smith analysed this phenomenon and related it to the political economy and the new forms of Capitalism, and how the economic value makes its own profit based on construction investment using the working classes and the poor via what they termed “accumulation by dispossession.” Gentrification processes have taken different forms around the world, but mean the same thing: forcing the poor to resettle somewhere else and bring in higher earners who can afford the new rents and the lifestyle of the newly made-up or developed neighbourhoods.

In Egypt, between 2008 and 2010, the secretive Cairo 2050 Vision’s documents were leaked. The project contained visions and visualizations of a number of “urban revitalization” projects for entire neighbourhoods in the Greater Cairo Region, to transform Cairo intro tourist and heritage capital[17]. The project included development projects for: Bulaq, Bulaq al-Dakrur, Nazlet al-Samman, Warraq Island and others. All the projects had skyscrapers for mix-use buildings for offices, recreational, and residential units with large tracts of green areas. The catastrophe was about how these projects would be implemented in high-density urbanized neighbourhoods that already had millions of inhabitants. After the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the project disappeared, and no officials mentioned it for some time. But the governmental has been attempting to realise the plan in pieces: an expropriation decree for Ramlet Bulaq, an expropriation and redevelopment plan for the Maspero Triangle, an announcement to develop Nazlet al-Samman, a plan to redevelop North Giza including Imbaba District and Warraq Island.

In the summer of 2015, the Sustainable Development Strategy[18] – Egypt 2030 was announced, and officially adopted in February 2016. The strategy has three main themes that are economic, environmental, and social, including 10 different pillars. The urban pillar is included within the environmental theme, that has some urban development plans including: Warraq Island development strategy, which I mentioned above how it is only about gentrification. Social justice is not to be expected in the contemporary urban agenda of the Egyptian state, that is publicly announcing their plans for investment and revitalization without mentioning the poor and the social middle classes and their needs. With this agenda, the number of forced eviction are to be expected in different geographical arenas, for example, the fight of July 26^th street not to be forcefully evicted, though the engineers ensured the buildings’ safety, but the government decided to demolish parts of them and ignore the fact that many of them are classified as ‘unique architectural buildings’ on the list of the National Organization of Urban Harmony, the residents were not able to stop any of the demolitions as the they were forced to evict and accept the same compensation of Maspero Triangle residents. In the recent moment, Egyptians are confronted with a threat of being forcibly evicted according to the series of urban decision that are being taken by the Egyptian authorities.

Acknowledgements

Written by Omnia Khalil

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

Notes and References