Despite recent security problems in the Sinai area, the government proposed a new project in May to develop the banks along the Suez Canal in Ismailia. According to the project’s page on Facebook, it purports to: “Establish an integrated economic, architectural, spatial and logistic region along the canal between the ports of east of Tafriaa to the north and Ain Sokhna and Suez to the south, to be an international center for providing logistic and industrial services with low costs and high efficiency.”
Despite recent security problems in the Sinai area, the government proposed a new project in May to develop the banks along the Suez Canal in Ismailia. According to the project’s page on Facebook, it purports to: “Establish an integrated economic, architectural, spatial and logistic region along the canal between the ports of east of Tafriaa to the north and Ain Sokhna and Suez to the south, to be an international center for providing logistic and industrial services with low costs and high efficiency.”
The study foresees that the project will make Egypt an international transit center, which will bring it 20-25 times more than its current returns of passage tariffs when all the project’s stages are completed. Egypt’s revenues are expected to reach an annual 100 billion dollars and the population will be redistributed geographically and in terms of residential areas through establishing more integral architectural projects and solving the problems of unemployment and housing.
Hope for development
The project has been proved highly controversial due to a bundle of accompanying laws which will be issued to facilitate its implementation. They provide for canceling the president’s powers in eastern Port Said to be governed by the people’s assembly, monitoring councils and the central accountability apparatus and declaring the Suez region a free area to be managed by the armed forces, the canal’s authority and the port’s authority.
Tarek Hasanin, the canal authority’s official spokesperson, stressed that the authority is the main entity of the project since it depends on the passage of ships and the northern and southern gates, adding that there are no objections to the authority’s part as long as the project does not include the land allocated to expanding and deepening the canal, the maps of which were submitted to the project’s officials.
“Leave my canal alone”
Badri Farghali, Port Said (leftist) MP, described the project as a new occupation of Egypt. Consultant Tarek Bushra said the new law’s articles imply that Egypt is not willing to control the canal region. Dr. Istishhad Banna, Economics Professor and daughter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, stressed the need to return to the old law proposed by Salah Hasballah, former Minister of Housing, considering the new project dangerous to Egypt especially since the project’s law provides for appointing 15 individuals to manage it without setting clear selection criteria.
Such concerns provoked many political and legal activists in Ismailia and led them to launch the “Leave Suez Canal Alone” movement whose main aim, said its founder Sharif Kamal, is rejecting the project and lobbying the public opinion against it through publications and conferences as it will separate the canal from Egypt and pave the way to a new occupation through a group of Arab brokers and investors. In addition, job opportunities offered will be a start to exclude the best Egyptian youth as the case of free zones investments.
Dr. Soad Hamuda, Director of the pharmacists syndicate in Ismailia and member of the movement, described the project as treason. “Our project aims to establish an emirate or a small state for the Muslim Brotherhood to be adjacent to Palestinian Hamas Movement. If the Egyptian people opposed and pursued them in the streets and brought their president and instructor down, which is expected, they would separate from Egypt in their own state and thus the Zionist entity would secure its borders with the help of its friends, the Muslim brothers,” she explained.
Rejected accusations
The criticisms leveled at the project included security concerns that the area might become out of the Egypt’s sovereignty and thus controlled by investors in addition to accusations against the Muslim Brotherhood that the project has a political agenda. Ahmad Ismail, member of the Shura Council in Ismailia and member of the Transport Committee that was one of the first committees to discuss the project, totally rejected these accusations and doubts. “These discussions were held in cooperation with the related experts and officials, not ordinary people who have neither expertise nor vision,” he said.
Ismail explained that the project has not been submitted to the Shura Council yet and stressed that the draft which Boshra talked about is totally false since it is comprised of mere proposals, from which the best will be chosen.
Project opponents do Israel a favor
Ismail praised his party’s statement that accused the project’s opponents of doing Israel a favor. “The Zionist state stressed through its former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that developing Sinai is more harmful to Israel than the fall of an atomic bomb on it. Thus we should fight this project which is just the start of developing and building Sinai,” he explained.
He added that if the project’s aim was to separate the canal and occupy it by the Brotherhood, the other three development projects in the countryside, Northern Coast and Marsa Alam would also be occupational attempts. “One of the most important canal’s development laws stipulates that the land should not be owned by any investor whose contribution would be in exchange for thirty years of benefit refuting thus any doubts over a new form of occupation,” he explained.
Ismail said a consultative seventy-one-member committee will be formed to manage the project according to competence standards. Its aim is provide facilitations for investors who prefer one-stop shops stressing that this committee will have full powers to administrate the project in close and direct coordination with the armed forces.
