Hazem Zohny and Mahienour el-Massry report for Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition:
The murder of Alexandrian farmer Hassan Shendy is riddled with all the markings of a mystery novel’s opening scene. Shendy was found with his limbs bound by his son in the field lying face down after a night’s disappearance. The back of his galabeya bore a chilling message: The turn is on Salama Korayem to be shot, oh leaders of peasants.
Korayem owns the farmland adjacent to the Shendy family’s in el-Maamoura, Alexandria. Shendy himself was not shot, but beaten to death, and investigations are still underway to determine who is responsible for the murder of the 52-year-old family head.
Suspicions currently center on the owner of a car with Giza license plates. The family claims two men arriving in the car the day before his death threatened Shendy, telling him to abandon the land or risk being harmed. “After that Hassan went to visit his brother and stayed there until midnight,” says Nasser Shendy, the victim’s uncle, “But he never returned.”
Mansour Ammar, the family’s attorney, stated that “we have identified the car and are currently waiting for Giza police to arrest the owner.”
The family is accusing police and state security branches and associations of being responsible for the murder, adding that the farmers of el-Helaleya, an area of increasingly contested land in el-Maamoura, have been under mounting pressure over the last two years to give up their lands.
Currently, the accused comprise the Amal Association for the Alexandria State Security Officers, the Kafr el-Sheikh Officers Association, and the Social Association for the Counselors of the Cassation Court.
According to the Egyptian Peasant Solidarity Committee, rising pressures and mounting threats led to other farmers in the area to give up their nine acres of land to an association of the Alexandria state security officers. The committee notes a similar scenario in an adjoining piece of land where the Kafr el-Sheikh Officers Association attempted seizing ten acres.
However, in the latter case the farmers sued, presenting documents proving that the land belonged to the General Authority for Agrarian Reform, and could not be reclaimed as lands administered by the Ministry of Endowments.
“This is exactly the point,” says Mahmoud Shendy, the victim’s cousin, “Our land is not an endowment. It is ours as decreed by the agrarian reform.”
The farming families of el-Helaleya have worked these lands since they were handed out as the so-called endowments of Khedive Ismail’s land reforms, allowing peasants to farm them in exchange for a rental fee. But, after 1952, the Agrarian Reform Law divided these lands amongst the farmers, and allowed them to own them after an extended period of lease. After 1973, however, Sadat reallocated some of these lands the Ministry of Endowments.
In a final turn in the ever-changing laws, a 1986 amendment stated that these lands are to be returned under the General Authority for Agrarian Reform.
For farming families like the Shendys, misinformation and confusion have led them to continue paying rent to the Ministry of Endowments for their lands, despite the 1986 law. They and other neighboring families are suing the government for continuing to demand rent, an initiative coinciding with the mounting pressures to evict them.
The real incongruity, according to the Egyptian Peasant Solidarity Committee’s website, is that “even if these lands did fall under the Ministry of Endowments, it is not in the state’s authority to dispose of them or sell them. And yet, the authorities are selling these lands bit by bit to a number of police associations by using threats and intimidation.”
For the family of Hassan Shendy, grief and anger marks the fate of their land. For one of the victim’s relatives, he will be content to leave “if they give us decent compensations and present us with papers showing that this land belongs to the Ministry of Endowments.”
But not all of the Shendys are inclined to compromise. “How can we ever be compensated for the murder of a family member?” asks a grim looking Nasser, the victim’s uncle. “We will never leave. Not until they kill every last one of us.”