Laborers’ deadly journey rocks Egypt’s self-image

Eid Shaaban drowned along the Italian coast with borrowed money in his pockets.

The unemployed 37-year-old mason and father of three set out from this village for the Egyptian port of Alexandria several weeks ago. There, he paid smugglers the equivalent of $4,500 and boarded a small fishing boat to cross the Mediterranean. The vessel capsized near a beach in Sicily. On Monday, Shaaban’s body was returned home and buried in the village graveyard.

His is a common story, a desperate man on a dangerous odyssey to a better life. It usually goes unnoticed beyond the funeral cortege.

But Shaaban was one of 27 men, many from a string of poor towns at the edge of the Western Desert, who died in the surf that day. Thirty others are still missing. They were bricklayers, drivers, cooks, men who sold their wives’ jewelry and borrowed from their fathers and cousins to raise money for the voyage.

Their deaths have gone from obituary notices to headlines, spurring a national scandal that is drawing harsh criticism of the government of President Hosni Mubarak for its failure to improve the lives of the poor despite recent economic growth.

The country’s self-image was further shaken when survivors from the sunken boats pretended to be Iraqis, hoping to gain political asylum in Italy and avoid returning to Egypt, where nearly half the population lives on less than $2 a day.

News of the disastrous journey broke in early November and reverberated into a troubling undercurrent at the annual convention of Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party. While the 79-year-old president and his son, Gamal, who is viewed as a possible successor, were extolling the country’s new nuclear power program and economic successes, details of the risks taken by two boatloads of 184 jobless Egyptian men echoed through bus stations, shopping centers and the halls of parliament.

“Today, Egypt is celebrating its nuclear [project] while her children lie like rotten fish on Italian shores,” Hamdi Rizq, a prominent columnist, wrote in the independent daily Al Masry al Youm. “Each body that lies at the bottom of the sea or floats on the surface is a slap on the face of” the National Democratic Party.

The deaths, which came as the government was attempting to calm growing labor unrest over long hours and low wages, even ignited a religious debate over the meaning of martyrdom. The grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, proclaimed that the men were driven by greed and, therefore, not martyrs. His chief religious rival, the Islamic Research Academy, decreed that the economic migrants were martyrs because they died seeking a better, more dignified life.

Back home in the villages, where boys ride donkeys loaded with the day’s harvest and canals cut through fertile fields at the desert’s rim, the clamor was quieted by grief. Veiled women wept and held hands; men arranged funeral chairs, unfolded death certificates and cleaned the faces of the newly fatherless.

Many of the men who dug the fresh graves knew the life of the economic migrant; they had worked in Libya and other countries in what has become a rite of passage in this nation of 73 million people.

“I’ve never seen prosperity in this town. We’ve watched prosperity on the TV and in the movies, but we’ve never seen it,” said Khalef Abdel Qader, whose two nephews drowned with Shaaban. “I don’t want to get into trouble, but it’s been this way since Mubarak came to power. We live in poverty and we have young men in these villages who just want a chance to live somehow better.”

Qader and other relatives sold livestock and possessions to raise money for his nephews, Ibrahim Shaaban, a father of two, and Ali Shaaban, a driver. The journey’s cost was 25,000 Egyptian pounds ($4,500) each, with 15,000 to be paid up front and 10,000 when the smuggler delivered them to Italy. The men normally would have gone to neighboring Libya -- Ibrahim had worked there several times -- but that country has tightened its borders, so they gathered with others in Alexandria to follow other options.

“We gave them money because we wanted them to live better,” said Qader, who spoke amid mourners meandering down an alley aglow in the light of a welder’s blowtorch. “The mufti who said they weren’t martyrs is a government puppet. Even if his fatwa [edict] was true, is it the right time to have issued it? He did not live among those who died. How can he know if they were martyrs or not?”

Eid Shaaban, a distant cousin of Ibrahim and Ali, lived in a two-room house with his wife and three children. The home, fringed by plowed fields and roaming cattle, has cracked walls and is sinking in damp soil. Birds skim the rooftop, and then dip, plucking small fish from a canal where women wash clothes and fetch water.

Shaaban’s wife, Noura, said her husband promised before he left that he would earn enough money to build a new house.

“He had been working in Libya. He would send home 400 pounds [$72] a month,” she said. “He came home for two weeks and then left for Alexandria. I don’t think he knew where he’d end up.”

Shaaban’s brother, Ahmed, said he borrowed 10,000 pounds and gave it to Eid. “I made my sister sell her jewelry,” he said. “We knew that if he found a job he would send money back. If he had had an income at home he wouldn’t be dead now.”

A woman with a veiled face said, “It’s not only here, but there are no jobs all over Egypt.”

A cousin, Gomaa Mabrouk, held up the laminated business card from his brothers who work as masons in Italy, two of an estimated 5 million Egyptians working abroad. They made it, he said. They are an inspiration for others in the village. He whispered: “Egyptian state television is full of lies. They say there are projects and jobs. They are lies. There is no work. Egypt is full of money, yes, but only in the hands of a few.”

Ahmed unfolded a paper that came home with his brother’s body. It bore a blue stamp. It said Eid died on Oct. 28. Ahmed and some village men buried him on Nov. 12.

Eid left few belongings behind: a blanket designed to resemble a $100 bill, a tiny leather Koran, a prayer rug and a picture of himself pasted over the bed, showing a young man with a dark mustache, combed-back hair, a crooked tie and a gray jacket that looked about a size too big.

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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.