Struggling after Egypt ‘s pig cull

ICC Note

Egyptian Christians are paying high price due to the discrimination that they suffer at the hands of Muslim government officials.

By Christian Fraser

08/07/2009 Egypt (BBC News)-In the half-light of dawn, the new day in Cairo is greeted with the clatter of dustbins.

The Zabaleen (Egyptian Arabic for “garbage people”) are beginning their rounds.

Since the age of eight, Magdi Mosaad has eked out a meagre living recycling Cairo ‘s waste.

Each morning he scurries around the apartment blocks, emptying the contents of festering bins into the canvas bag strapped to his back. He looks like a bee storing honey.

Big appetites

The Zabaleen are an Egyptian community of mainly Coptic Christians – vital to Cairo ‘s refuse collection. Around 85% cent of the rubbish they retrieve is sorted, recycled and resold. Tin, paper, glass – even bones are recycled for glue.

In one garage we visited in the Zabaleen neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser, they were pressing tin cans into bales, ready to be sold to the Chinese.

But this is a fragile existence in which the pigs played a crucial role.

Each month they troughed their way through 6,000 tonnes of rotting food collected on the rounds.

The fattened pigs were sold to supplement the income of the Zabaleen.

Mr Mosaad says the extra money that he raised from selling pork was vital to his family’s welfare:

“I sold pigs twice a year. To pay for mending the car and the school fees for our three young children. There is no way I can replace that income.”

As the H1N1 pandemic spread around the globe, Cairo was infected with outbreaks of panic and hysteria. The majority Muslim parliament voted to slaughter the entire pig population – 350,000 animals – even though they were not infected.

Riots

It is mostly the Christians that rear pigs in Egypt .

The government’s decision would have dire financial implications. The authorities had already sought to replace the Zabaleen with the sleek machines of the more modern European contractors.

Now they were targeting one of their other main sources of income – the pigs.

In Manshiet Nasser, there were riots as the government vets began their work.

“They made their decision without any research,” said Syada Greiss, one of the Christian MPs in parliament.

“Who would this affect, how many, what damage would it do to the local economy, what would they do to replace their lost income? There was no real thought for the implications for one of the city’s poorest suburbs. And that’s why it feels like discrimination.”