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Still Waiting For Answers - And
Action
writer: Dan Bernard
photographer:
Mohsen Allam
Eleven low-ranking railway staffers have been
acquitted on charges stemming from the country's worst-ever rail
disaster. But as the rail authority claims to have been vindicated
and the People's Assembly demands reforms, the victims' families are
still waiting for justice.
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| The nation's worst-ever rail
disaster took the lives of more than 360 people.
Their families, still grieving, are demanding
action be taken against those who could have
prevented the accident.
| | | The grief and outrage have hardly abated since
February's train disaster in Al-Ayyat, when an onboard blaze killed
more than 360 people and brought scrutiny to the widespread safety
risks in Egypt's aging rail system. Nevertheless, the outpouring
found some release at the end of September with the surprising
resolution of a criminal case stemming from the accident. All 11 of
the railway workers who had been charged with negligence in the
incident were cleared, with a judge in the case declaring that the
low-ranking laborers had been forced to account for the failures of
officials higher up in the agencies that run the railroads.
"Judges are fed up that, whenever
an accident occurs, it is minor employees who are brought to trial
while their superiors are left free," said Judge Saad Abdel Wahed as
he issued his verdict. Friends and relatives of the defendants in
the courtroom burst into cheers, seeming to reflect the sentiment of
a general public that had watched the trial with
skepticism.
But any sense of
satisfaction that a potential injustice had been avoided was quickly
replaced by an empty feeling for the families of the victims and the
more than 60 other passengers severely injured in the Al-Ayyat
blaze. After eight months, no one has been held accountable for the
conditions that turned those third-class cars into deathtraps: two
to three times as many passengers as they were designed to hold and
not a single fire extinguisher.
Twenty high-ranking railway officials and former
officials are being investigated in connection with Al-Ayyat and
other accidents, including allegations they spent millions on their
own bonuses rather than upgrade third-class cars. However, that
inquiry is an administrative process that can only result in firing
and loss of retirement benefits for those found guilty, not criminal
penalties. No quick conclusion is guaranteed.
"This is not criminal punishment. This is not the right
way, because we have people who were killed," says Hafez Abu Se'da,
secretary-general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights,
which provided legal assistance to the 11 railway workers. "What we
need are real defendants brought before the
court."
But defenders of the
Egyptian National Railways (ENR) say the finger of blame is pointing
in the wrong direction. Michael Fahmy, former adviser to the
chairman of ENR, says workers on the scene failed to follow official
safety procedures.
"The Al-Ayyat
accident has created many complicated problems for the railway. Now,
everybody thinks there is no safety on the railways. But this is
wrong. This is not the real condition," Fahmy claims. "ENR has
developed all the safety procedures. We have rules. Perhaps this
accident was due to the silly and ignorant behavior of our staff on
the train."
Blame aside, there have
been visible signs of positive change on the rails. The ENR has put
more third-class cars in service, refurbished others, installed
thousands of fire extinguishers, and is preventing passengers from
bringing aboard fire hazards such as the butane tanks and kerosene
cookers that were blamed for the Al-Ayyat fire. The new transport
minister, Hamdy Abdel-Salam Al-Shayeb, has drawn initial optimism as
he launches studies of the national system's safety
problems.
But as it exonerated the
low-ranking workers, the court also cast doubt on investigators'
previous conclusions about the cause of the blaze. That left an
ambiguity that can be exploited by those in the railway
establishment who want a shield against wide-ranging reforms, such
as stricter accountability up the management
chain.
"After five months of trial,
they proved we are not responsible and the real reason for this
crash up until now is unknown," says Farouk Nassar, chairman of the
General Syndicate for Egyptian Railway Workers. "From the Ministry
of Transportation to the lower levels in the railways, all of them,
nobody is responsible. All of them are innocent, and they are not
involved in this crash. Everyday we make 1300 trips, and no accident
like this has ever happened before. We are aware and responsible.
This is our life, our income, our career."
Reasonable doubt
It's true that, apart from being the dead-liest
accident in the 150-year history of Egypt's rail system, the
Al-Ayyat tragedy was also unusual in its circumstances. Recent years
have seen a rash of fatal train accidents attributed to mechanical
failures and employee errors, but those incidents were derailings
and collisions.
By contrast, Train
No. 832 from Cairo to Aswan caught fire while in motion. It kept
rolling for some 10 minutes at 80 to 90 kilometers per hour, with
wind feeding the flames, because the driver was unaware of the
blaze. Passengers, who were numerous because of the Eid Al-Adha
feast, were packed so tightly they could barely react. Those at the
rear of the train were able to escape when workers stopped the
engine near Kafr Ammar village in Al-Ayyat and decoupled the burning
cars in the early hours of 20 February.
A technical committee appointed by the prosecutor
general's office traced the blaze to flammable items brought aboard
by passengers. The panel concluded that two home gas tanks probably
leaked butane that was ignited by the flame of a kerosene cooker
used for heating tea. Similar conclusions were reached by a
fact-finding committee in the People's Assembly, which faulted the
Transport Police for allowing passengers to bring aboard the items
in violation of official prohibition.
But in the trial of the 11 workers, the court
discounted the kerosene stove theory, saying it was founded on
circumstantial evidence. In the opinion of Nassar, head of the
railways workers syndicate, the cause of the fire remains a mystery,
so there is little point in continuing to try to find individuals to
blame for the incident.
"This
committee investigated thoroughly what happened and who's
responsible and everything, and they sent the report to the court to
study before the end of trial, and the court found nothing clear,"
Nassar says. "Everything is vague. That is why, at the end, they
said these people are innocent."
Nassar concedes that employee negligence could occur
"in not more than 5% of cases. But in this specific accident, it was
something very strange, because the fire started in seven cars in
less than eight minutes. It's not a matter of negligence; it's a
matter of something unknown."
The
mystery theory has currency on the street. Mourning families
resented the kerosene stove explanation as soon as Prime Minister
Atef Ebeid offered it on the morning after the disaster because it
seemed to blame the victims. One of the defendants, train master
Mamdouh Hassan Abdel-Rehim, told the court he hadn't seen anyone
making tea and doubted there was enough room to have done
so.
The Cairo University professor
who headed the technical committee, Boulos Salama, says he remains
"99% confident" that a butane/kerosene combination caused the fire.
But he noted that a day and a half elapsed before his committee
inspected the destroyed cars. Because of the slim possibility that
the wreckage was somehow tampered with while under police guard,
Salama says he respected the court's determination that the theory
fell short of the legal burden of proof.
Doubts aside, authorities are now enforcing the ban on
flammable materials. Officers of the Traffic and Transport Police
can only check the luggage of a few passengers as they board, but
the ENR now assigns on-board employees to watch for gas tanks and
cookers and notify the police of violators.
Empty boxes
The
fire extinguishers that were not available for the victims on Train
832 are now becoming more common in Egypt's third-class carriages.
According to policy, every train is supposed to carry three fire
extinguishers, and railway authority officials say they generally
place four. Train 832 fell short of even that meager standard: The
technical committee found that the 16-car train carried just two
fire extinguishers.
Fahmy doubts
that finding as well, saying someone could have stolen some of the
fire extinguishers from the wreckage before the technical team
arrived.
Lawyers in the trial tried
to pinpoint the responsibility. Two of the railway workers on trial
were prosecuted for signing reports that claimed Train 832 had
sufficient equipment. Their defense lawyers argued that the workers
were under pressure from their superiors to approve trains for
transport in order to avoid delays.
Fahmy, however, denies that such pressure occurs, as
does Nassar of the workers' syndicate. Hafez Abu Se'da of the
defense team says the pressure occurs in subtle
forms.
The fire extinguishers would
not have been close at hand anyway. Railway authority policy has
been to store the fire extinguishers not in the passenger areas, but
in the locomotive. Defense lawyers produced documents indicating
that the former railway authority chairman went so far as to forbid
placing fire extinguishers in the passenger cars because of the risk
they would be stolen.
The current
head of the railway authority, Mohamed Arafa, countered that,
telling the court that the extinguishers were kept in the locomotive
for the sake of easier access and "flexibility" for the
driver.
The policy changed after
Al-Ayyat. ENR bought 80,000 fire extinguishers and ordered employees
to distribute them throughout trains and monitor their expiration
dates, Salama says. The cost was LE 3 million, according to
testimony from Major General Reda Shehata, the new head of the
Traffic and Transport Police. While fire extinguishers were still
scarce in third-class cars a month after Al-Ayyat when Business
Today Egypt last checked, the red cans were present in every
third-class car inspected by bt during an unscientific spot check in
Cairo's Ramses Station last month.
Standing room only
The role of overcrowding in the tragedy is beyond
dispute. Workers' syndicate head Nassar says that, on the books, the
rule on capacity was to allow half as many standing passengers as
there were seats, and no more - meaning a car with official seating
capacity of 88 could hold no more than 122 people. The rule was
habitually ignored, Nassar says, but now the railways are enforcing
it, starting with the long trips to Upper Egypt.
"It's under control now," Nassar
asserts.
ENR loyalist Fahmy says
the high level of overbooking in the Al-Ayyat case was a one-time
event due to the holiday travel volume. He says the February tragedy
resulted not from systemic problems, but from the failures of the
police and railway workers on site. ENR's procedure in cases of fire
is to pull the emergency brake, uncouple the burning car from the
rest of the train, then attempt to suppress the fire, in that order.
Railway personnel never pulled the emergency brake, Fahmy notes, and
it took 10 minutes to uncouple the cars.
"These people did not respect the rules of the
railways," Fahmy claims. "This Al-Ayyat problem is not typical.
There were many mistakes on the part of the staff or railway
inspectors or police." Asked if ENR management bore any
responsibility, Fahmy says ENR's only mistake was having incompetent
staff.
In the acquittals, the
suggestion by the judge and defense lawyers that the real culprits
were still at large left hanging the implication that Prosecutor
General Maher Abdel Wahed should reopen his investigation and pursue
criminal charges against higher-ranking officials.
It's still an open question. At
press time, staff in the office of the prosecutor general had not
responded to bt's questions on the subject.
Abu Se'da of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
thinks the state will respond positively to public
pressure.
"Up until now, there is
no indication that [the prosecutor general] has started a real
investigation," Fahmy claims. "But the pressure from the newspapers
and public opinion is still asking for the real defendants. So if we
increase this pressure, I think they will."
The root evil
The deepest root cause of the tragedy, observers agree,
is a lack of money. Providing long-distance travel as a public
service requires low fares. The railways' expenses exceed revenues
by 30%, Nassar says, and the system's accumulated debt is some LE 17
billion, according to Ebeid.
In its
report in May, Parliament's fact-finding committee sharply
criticized the Ebeid government for its "massive delays" in
implementing "urgently needed safety measures." The system needs to
manufacture 500 coaches in the next two years alone, the committee
estimated. While granting that the railway system's problems stem
from decades of neglect, the report condemned members of government
for allegedly being "woefully ignorant of the need to reform the
rail network at any cost."
Suggestions for expensive improvements will only
accumulate in coming months. Experts named by Transport Minister
El-Shayeb have completed a study assessing risks and recommending
upgrades at railroad crossings, and a comprehensive study of railway
safety is due from Ain Shams University by year's end. Input is even
coming from overseas: The French railway SNCF this summer signed a
memorandum of understanding to provide the ENR with technical
assistance on safety and modernization issues including signals and
management structure.
Where will
the money come from? The People's Assembly has rejected introducing
private-sector management, but argued that the public would tolerate
an increase in ticket prices as long as the hike went to obvious
improvements in safety and quality.
El-Shayeb is also studying how to cut the system's
expenses. One measure already in process is to overhaul more coaches
in Egypt instead of buying new ones from abroad. Nassar says ENR
hopes to refurbish all its third-class cars by
May.
One member of Parliament
suggests that the railway authority should look at its biggest
untapped asset - real estate.
Faika El-Refaie, a member of the budget and economic
committees, notes that the Railway Authority owns abundant swaths of
land adjacent to its tracks and stations. The authority should
partner with private firms to develop retail and entertainment
complexes on some of those parcels, El-Refaie suggests, opening a
new revenue stream.
"How many years
has the board of directors of the rail authority introduced plans?
And they always say, 'We presented the plans to the prime minister,
or the minister, and the minister said we don't have enough
resources.' That's always the excuse," El-Refaie says.
"But that is not an excuse. Why
didn't you search for new resources? Why didn't you exploit the
resources that you had for many years? Not using the resources of
the authority, not establishing entities to produce the money to
implement their plans - that lack of vision is the main source of
all these problems. If they had planned well, we could have avoided
a lot of accidents, including this [Al-Ayyat] accident, as
well."bt
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