BEHEIRA: A declaration of love is scrawled in paint on the wall above the woman’s bed: “A + A, the dream of my life.
Below it, the woman (who has requested to be referred to as A to disguise her identity for security reasons) is recumbent on a bed with sheets sporting children’s cartoon characters. The images do little to cheer the oppressive starkness of the room’s grey, unfinished walls, its murky lighting and lack of air.
Nineteen-year-old A’s doctor has told her to have 25 days of bed-rest after her leg was broken by a police officer, who, she says, also beat her on the back with a rock.
Sitting next to her, Dr Mona Hamed from the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence asks whether she has been feeling upset since the assault, perhaps crying more than usual.
“I’ve always cried just by myself for no reason. God made me like that, she replies.
Before we went to see A in her room, other women in the village of Ezbet El-Baroudi, in the Delta governorate of Beheira, told us that A was most disturbed by the incident when the police descended on the village one morning last week.
A’s sadness is palpable. Hamed asks her whether, when she is able to move again, she would be able to come to El-Nadeem for counselling.
“I’ve never been to Cairo, but I’ll try, she replies.
Outside, hoards of barefoot children bowl about Ezbet El-Baroudi’s single lane road, excited by the visitors. One girl has drawn a watch on her wrist.
Another stands next to an El-Nadeem center doctor staring at him intently as a woman gives her account of what happened.
In the early hours of Tuesday, June 4, four of Ezbet El-Baroudi’s male residents were arrested by police as part of a planned land eviction operation.
Other men in the village fled to escape arrest.
As the police set about their business, some of the village women sought sanctuary in the fields around their homes until police officers fired gunshots in the air, frightening them away.
The women returned to their homes, where they stayed until 7 am the next day. However, when they went back to their fields they were attacked by men wearing civilian clothing, a mixture of civilians and police officers.
These same plain-clothes operatives then broke into the women’s homes – a traumatizing invasion of privacy in a conservative rural society such as this.
The women showed us damage to two doors they say was caused when the police stormed their houses.
A said that the women were violently attacked at random, and that it was a frenzied assault. She told Hamed that the police officer who attacked her was attempting to drag her by her hair out of a house into which she had fled. But she says she fell over, and the policeman hit her on the back with a rock while she lay on the ground.
Another woman, S, had just arrived home with her mother from the fields when she was attacked.
“Four police officers hit me while people standing around swore at me, she said. “They took me to the police station and released me at 2 am.
S’s 45-year-old mother was hit with a thick stick during the assault and she showed Daily News Egypt a rectangular, purple bruise running the width of her lower back. Her arm was broken when she raised it in order to protect her head from the blows.
The struggle over Ezbet El-Baroudi’s land began in the late 1990s, but it is part of a saga stretching back to 1952, when Agricultural Land Reform Law 178 was enacted.
According to Bashir Saqr of the Organization for Solidarity with Egyptian Farmers, at the time Law 178 was passed, one third of Egypt’s 2.5 million square hectares of cultivable land was owned by 11,000 estate holders (0.4 percent of landowners), whose domination enabled them to charge tenant farmers rent equivalent to 75 percent of their income.
Under Law 178, landowners were allowed to keep a maximum of 200 feddans (subsequently reduced to 100 feddans in 1961), which they could pass on to their children. Any land over this amount had to be sold on the open market within seven years.
Land belonging to the family of Mohamed Ashraf El-Baroudi was seized in this way.
This “excess land was distributed to farmers and rented to them by the Agricultural Reform Body.
In 1974, a law returned the “excess land to its original owners. While farmers were not immediately forced to leave the land, they now paid rent to the original owners rather than the State.
Saqr alleges that in 1986 Zeinat El-Baroudi, a relative of Mohamed El-Baroudi, managed through illegal means to have the status of the land that was sequestered in the 1950s changed from agricultural reform land (to which she had no claim) to “excess land in order to allow her to claim ownership of it.
“She gradually sold off portions of the land, Saqr told Daily News Egypt. “But when one of the buyers went tried to register the land he was told that El-Baroudi in fact had no right to the land, and so could not sell it.
Saqr told Daily News Egypt that, in response, Sheikh El-Balad (the village headman) of Kafr Mahallet, Daoud Ahmed Khattab, drew up false rent contracts, which he then used in court to claim that Ezbet El-Baroudi’s farmers had not been paying their rents.
The court accepted Khattab’s claim and issued an eviction order.
The men who attacked Ezbet El-Baroudi’s women last week were – according to the testimony of one woman who spoke to El-Nadeem – both farmers who stand to benefit from their eviction and members of the police, acting in concert.
She said that as she was being attacked by police officers, men who had bought the land from Zeinat El-Baroudi said to her, “What have you benefited from [resisting the eviction] except scandalizing yourselves in newspapers? (A reference to an article published in Egyptian daily Al-Badil that listed the names of those injured and detained during last week’s assault.)
An anonymous comment on the electronic version of the Al-Badil article suggests that the land of Ezbet El-Baroudi was bought legitimately by Khattab in 1999 and that on the day of the evictions villagers “threw stones at the police causing serious injuries.
Saqr dismisses this claim, saying it is “highly unlikely.
This is not the first time that the police have used violence to intimidate women in connection with land disputes.
In March 2005, police laid siege to the village of Sarando, also in the Beheira governorate, and beat women and children (leading to the death of one woman) in connection with an ongoing dispute between landowner Salah Nawar and villagers.
According to Human Rights Watch, Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Ammar oversaw a raid on Sarando at 4 am on March 5, during which seven men were arrested, and houses broken into.
El-Nadeem told Daily News Egypt that Ammar was also involved in the attack on Ezbet El-Baroudi. A woman detained last week says she was assaulted by Ammar.
Fayyad told Daily News Egypt that land disputes resulting in incidents such as Sarando and Ezbet El-Baroudi will only be stopped with a “comprehensive remedy.
“This is a multi-faceted problem – political, economic, social. Solving it requires a government with the vision and courage to put in place a comprehensive, equitable remedy which realizes justice for all parties involved, Fayyad said.
S, the villager who was attacked with her mother, was the most visibly angry of the Ezbet El-Baroudi villagers who spoke to El-Nadeem doctors.
“What are you doing here? What do you want? If you really want to help go and stop them carrying out the eviction order in the next village [Ezbet Moharram]. You’ve come here too late, she said.
