Civil Society

The Egyptian Ferry Disaster:
Incompetence and Lack of Transparency Enrages the Egyptian Public

By Blake Hounshell

On the night of Friday, February 3, the passenger ferry Al-Salam 98 sank beneath the Red Sea. According to Al-Ahram, only 378 people survived the accident out of an estimated 1,400-some total passengers and crew.

From the moment of the boat’s registration and inspection, the situation was handled with all-too-typical incompetence by the authorities and by the Al-Salam Maritime Company, owners of the doomed ferry. The vessel itself—a thirty-five-year-old hand-me-down from Italy whose heyday was long past—should have been deemed suitable only to haul livestock or cargo.

As the Al-Salam left Duba in Saudi Arabia, survivors reported that the ship was already listing slightly. The fire that ultimately caused the accident apparently began shortly after departure, within a comfortable distance of the shore. Rather than turning back, the captain decided to plow on ahead. The captain of a nearby vessel, Al-Salam 98’s sister ship, the Saint Catherine, claimed that he was inexplicably told by company management not to assist the struggling ferry.

These initial errors were compounded by the Egyptian government’s response. Mysteriously, news of the accident was relayed to the Egyptian authorities through a radio operator in Scotland and not through the Sofaga maritime station that was responsible for monitoring such ferries or through listening posts in other regional Arab states. It was several long hours before the Egyptian rescue operation kicked into gear, perhaps in part because certain key decision makers needed to be awakened in order for any response to be initiated.

As news of the accident spread, the families of the passengers, anxious to hear news about their loved ones, gathered in Sofaga on the Egyptian coast. Worry and anxiousness turned to anger in the growing crowd of around 1,000; neither the boat company nor the government was providing information on the victims.  Later, in a stunning display of insensitivity, the government erected a screen outside of the morgue and asked family members to identify their relatives via the video of their drowned visages. Over the next few days, disturbing stories about corruption in the licensing, registration, and inspection process slowly began dribbling out into the media, fuelling public anger.

It became clear that the Egyptian authorities had failed to ensure that Al-Salam 98 was both seaworthy and in compliance with safety regulations. The crew was forced to battle the fire with water rather than the usual carbon-dioxide fire extinguishers, for instance. To make matters worse, the ship had no pumps that could be used to drain the water.

Although the government-friendly press played its assigned role in pointing figures everywhere but at the Egyptian regime, Arab satellites and the more independent publications such as the Egyptian daily, Al-Masri Al-Yom (The Egyptian Today), have been outspokenly critical of the government in their coverage.  For instance, Al-Masri Al-Yom columnist Magdi Mehanna wrote that angry families "stayed in Safaga for three consecutive days waiting for a single official to come and talk to them about their relatives or about compensation."

"No one showed up," he continued, "because officials were too busy paying attention to the national football team."

For its part, the popular satellite channel Al-Jazeera replayed ad nauseum footage of angry families sacking the boat company offices in Sofaga and clashes with the Central Security Forces. The crowd was chanting “down with the Interior Ministry, down with Mubarak" in an echo of the Kefaya (Enough) movement's street protests that were often broadcast during 2005.

Such coverage found a receptive audience in Egyptian living rooms and coffee shops. If there is a silver lining to this tragic incident, it is the apparent growing eagerness of the Egyptian public to demand accountability from their public officials, as illustrated in the popular outcry that followed this disaster. The regime must accept that the media environment has changed, and that it can no longer control information and perceptions as it once did.

That the Egyptian public was paying close attention to the Al-Salam 98 case was demonstrated by the great outpouring of private donations to the families of the victims. Government paper Al-Ahram played up this fact in its coverage as evidence of the decency and generosity of the Egyptian people. Naturally, this came at the expense of self-criticism or soul-searching. The regime had dispatched its agents in the press to try to contain the public relations disaster, and promised the usual sorts of investigations.

Nevertheless, accidents happen, and even in mighty America the ineptitude and unpreparedness of Homeland Security officials contributed to an avoidable tragedy in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

But what is clear from the Al-Salam 98 tragedy is that the corrupt, decrepit Egyptian system—one of whose hallmarks is the suppression of information as well as the close holding of important decisions—is ill-equipped to respond to accidents and incidents with aplomb and transparency. With the latest news heralding the arrival of bird flu in Egypt, we are justified in fearing that the next disaster will be catastrophic, and that the spread of the disease is being under-reported in the same manner as the ferry case.

So far, the government has not exactly conducted itself with aplomb. To take one comi-tragic example, the Ministry of Health and Population's first attempt to set up a hotline for questions about bird flu hardly inspired confidence when it was discovered that one of the publicized numbers was actually the home phone of the executive chef of the Grand Hyatt!

Feeling safe yet?