Last week, the Egyptian government gave residents of some 30 houseboats in Cairo’s Imbaba district a few days to leave the Nile. And as of Tuesday, June 28, the backhoe loaders were already beginning their destruction work. Other houses were moved a few hundred meters away before being put up for auction. The final evictions are scheduled for July 4.
A shock for these inhabitants brutally expelled. Some no longer have a place to go. This is the case of Madame Ikhlas, as she is called in the neighborhood, an 88-year-old lady who had bought a house-boat decades ago: “They throw us in the street! Where am I going? They throw me on the sidewalk in the street? This is my house! This is my life!”
“If I get out of here, I die!”
An (almost) nonagenarian expelledat franceinfo
And beyond specific cases, it is also part of Cairo’s heritage that will disappear. Some of these houses are centuries old and you can even see them in some classic Egyptian movies. They are also present in the work of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize for Literature.
Why these serial destructions? Because President Sissi decided a few years ago to transform Cairo. Everywhere we see bridges growing, we see historic districts destroyed, people expelled sometimes relocated tens of kilometers away. In Imbaba, it is planned to transform the corniche, along the Nile, into a vast commercial esplanade. There are already several boats where you can have a coffee, organize weddings or any other festivity. It is therefore a purely commercial project that is announced.
In less than ten years, occupancy taxes have been multiplied by twenty, others have been created. From now on, the State is claiming several tens of thousands of euros from the owners of these house-boats and is refusing to issue occupancy permits to these inhabitants. Contacted several times, the authorities did not wish to answer questions from franceinfo. On the other hand, in order to win the case with the Egyptians, the media, almost all controlled by theEtat, relay the official word. This denounces these boat houses as places of prostitution or even landmarks of the Muslim Brotherhood, considered in EEgypt as a terrorist organization. But the case begins to make noise, enough perhaps for once, those expelled have finally won their case.