Deadly rock slide fuels Egyptian anger

updated 3:46 p.m. ET Sept. 13, 2008

CAIRO, Egypt - For years the shantytown grew in the shadow of a limestone cliff, its wooden shacks and shoddy brick apartments creeping up and spreading over the hill. The whole time, the limestone was cracking inside, slowly and invisibly, from the slum's own sewage.

Last weekend, the cliff finally gave way. It rained giant boulders onto the poorest of Egypt's poor, killing at least 80 people in the Dweiqa slum, with whole families still believed buried under the rubble.

The disaster left many Egyptians furious at what they already considered a corrupt, inept government for failing failed to protect the slum dwellers from a calamity that experts had long predicted.

"No one cares about us, they dump us here and forget about us," said Wael Abdel-Ghani, who lives with his wife and daughter in a one-bedroom brick hovel at the top of the cliff overlooking Dweiqa.

People in the slum on the edge of the capital threw stones at officials at the disaster site, protesting that the government was not doing enough to help them.

"Everyone knew this mountain is dangerous," said Abdel-Ghani. "But because it's us who lives here, they don't care."

Egyptians are increasingly fed up with a U.S.-allied government that they consider too incompetent and corrupt to take care of its own people.

Wealthy businessmen dominate the government, led by President Hosni Mubarak for 27 years, and many feel money flows only to a thin crust of the upper class. In the meantime, 40 percent of Egypt's 80 million people live on around $1 a day, and inflation has risen above 20 percent.

Cairo a city of contrasts
The Egyptian capital has become a picture of contrasts. Billboards lining the highways advertise villas in luxury suburbs that have sprung up in the desert around the city. A Persian Gulf developer recently announced a $2.1 billion project to build villas farther back on the limestone plateau.

Yet half of Cairo's 18 million people live in dense slums that fringe the city on all sides — sprawls of rickety brick dwellings built without regulation, often by migrants who come from the countryside seeking work in Cairo.

Safety standards are mostly ignored. A ferry sank in 2006 and killed more than 1,000 people, but its wealthy owner, who is closely linked to the ruling party, was acquitted on negligence charges this year. Major train fires and collisions in recent years have killed hundreds.

When a fire erupted earlier this summer in the upper house of parliament, some Egyptians saw it as payback for the neglect they say they face.

The Dweiqa shantytown both grew up and, in the end, collapsed on corruption and incompetence.

Dweiqa is a part of Manshiyet Nasr, one of Cairo's oldest slums, which cropped up in the late 1960s in a wasteland between a centuries-old Islamic cemetery and the Muqattam plateau. Manshiyet Nasr eventually swelled to more than 1.2 million people squeezed into 2 square miles of narrow lanes and ramshackle apartments.

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