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Orphans' organs case closed

The state prosecutor has closed the file on disturbing allegations

that orphaned infants in Menoufiya were murdered for their organs

Cairo Times

 

A shocked country can heave a sigh of relief. As it turns out, it's

probably not true that (as Akhbar Al Yom put it) a "different kind of

human being exists in Shebeen Al Kom than anywhere else in Egypt." On

25 March, state prosecutor Raga Al Arabi announced that he was closing

the file on allegations that the custodians of an orphanage in the

eastern Delta town had killed children to steal their organs. But this

leaves two questions unanswered. First, what exactly did happen to the

25 children who died? Second, assuming the allegations were false,

what were the motives of the 10 parliamentarians who circulated the

story in the first place--and created widespread negative publicity

here and abroad in the process?

 

The whole chain of events leading to the investigation highlights the

Byzantine nature of provincial politics. The orphanage in question

first came under suspicion last year. In the summer of 1998, the

Menoufiya branch of the Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) began to

investigate the General Association for the Care of the Handicapped,

run by TV director Mohammed Abdel Aal, for alleged financial and

administrative "irregularities." These had come to the ministry's

attention thanks to the lawyer for Abdel Aal's ex-wife, Hala Zahran.

The social affairs ministry began an investigation, and got Governor

Hussein to remove Abdel Aal and appoint a new board. (Abdel Aal

responded, the ministry's local representative said, by closing the

orphanage and dumping the children on the stairs of the local MOSA

office.)

 

The investigation apparently began to lag, but that changed on 15

March. Local parliamentarian Shafiq Al Gindi suddenly announced in

parliament that he had received evidence that 25 children at the

orphanage had died the previous summer, and that their organs had been

sold to wealthy Arabs. (The state press reported that the MP had

received this information from Hala Zahran's lawyer.) The next day, Al

Gindi and nine other Menoufiya MPs took their information to Menoufiya

prosecutor Adel Said. A scandal was born. Egypt, and the world,

suddenly heard that there was something very evil going on in

Menoufiya, right under the governor's nose.

 

So what could the motives have been here? Zahran's grievances with her

ex-husband are easily enough deduced, but what's less clear is why the

MPs were so eager to get involved. The conventional wisdom--voiced by

Al Wafd editor Abbas Al Tarabili and others--points to the

long-running, well-known enmity between Governor Hussein and the

province's parliamentary delegation.

 

It's a fairly common phenomenon. MPs get themselves elected by

promising services which they expect the governor to deliver, or by

organizing local charities (orphanages, for example), that the

governor is supposed to regulate. The governor, meanwhile, is

appointed from Cairo--he's never a native of the province he's

supposed to govern--expressly to keep a tight control on things. The

governor's often from the military, security forces, or judiciary

(Hussein's a former prosecutor); the parliamentarians are more often

local businessmen or professionals. Essentially, it's a conflict

between the two sides of the regime, the part that rules by coaxing

and the part that rules by commanding.

 

So would MPs really make up a story like this out of whole cloth,

endangering the reputation of the nation, simply to remove a rival?

Twenty-five deaths in two months is suspicious (although Governor

Hussein told state newspapers on 18 March that such rates are natural

in orphanages, where many of the wards are foundling newborns who

arrive dehydrated and hypothermic).

 

Filed at Shebeen Al Kom's educational hospital are the death

certificates, whose serial numbers the MPs say are consecutive,

indicating that nobody else died in Menoufiya within the same time

period. Then there are press reports that Shebeen Al Kom's two

gravediggers couldn't recall burying the children.

 

None of this indicates that any organs were stolen. All of the

children were less than two years old, and, as health ministry

officials have pointed out, Egypt doesn't have the technology for

transplant from infant donors. Gross negligence, perhaps, but outright

murder seems unlikely. That, at any rate, was the opinion that the

press was coming round to when the state prosecutor announced on 25

March that the case was closed. One more thing--he asked journalists

not to write about issues that could harm the Egypt's reputation.

Given that the state apparatus in Menoufiya seems quite capable of

trashing the country's reputation on its own, and local journalists

are, if anything, the ones in the best position to set things

straight, that seems a strange request to make.

 

Vol. 3, Iss. 3

1 to 14 APRIL 1999

http://www.cairotimes.com/cairotimes/content/archiv03/orphorg.html