Cairo’s Administrative Court ruled Saturday in favor of residents of an island in Giza who had been threatened with eviction from their homes.
The court verdict quashes a prime ministerial decree which would have removed the roughly 5,000 inhabitants from their homes on El-Qorsaya island.
Many of the roughly 1,000 fishermen and 4,000 farmers who constitute El-Qorsaya’s population have lived on the island for generations since the island was first inhabited in the 19th century.
Last year, bulldozers protected by army troops arrived on El-Qorsaya — which lies in a prime location in Cairo — amid rumors that it would be converted into a tourist complex.
The islanders responded by launching a media campaign against the plans, residents saying that as farmers and fishermen they would be unable to sustain their way of life away from the island.
The court case was launched in 2007.

A rights group representing families from the threatened island of El-Qorsaya has questioned the neutrality of the court hearing the case.
Residents of El-Qorsaya received eviction notices last year, when bulldozers under army protection began work on one side of the island.
Islanders suspect that their homes will make way for a tourist complex or golf course and have responded by challenging the eviction order in a case against four government bodies including the Prime Minister and the governor of Giza.
Hearings in the case began last Sunday, Jan. 13. The Egyptian Center for Housing Rights (ECHR) alleges that the 2nd District Administrative Court, which heard the case, demonstrated clear bias against the islanders.

Residents of the island of El-Qorsaya have vowed to continue their campaign to resist eviction from their homes despite reports published by the state-owned Al Ahram newspaper that plans to build a tourist complex on the island have been scrapped.
According to the report, which appeared on the newspaper’s front page on Wednesday and which is entitled “Government cancels plans for tourist project on El-Qorsaya, upholds residents’ rights,” the Agricultural and Irrigation Committee of the People’s Assembly together with government representatives had decided to cancel plans for the construction of a tourist complex.
The report states that the decision was made after MP Muhammad Aboul Enein and Azab Mostafa made urgent appeals to the Committee about islanders’ fears that they would be expelled from their land.
The article claimed that the government has succeeded in “presenting a model of democracy for the protection of citizens’ rights.”
Artist and El-Qorsaya resident Muhammad Abla is more circumspect.
He told Daily News Egypt, “This report is simply false. This PA committee doesn’t have the authority to make these sorts of decisions, it can only make recommendations.”
He also questioned why the decision had not been reported in any other newspapers, and said that the campaign to save the island would continue until the report is verified.

Sarah Carr reports on the solidarity conference with the Qursaya Island residents:

“I was born here, my father was born here and my grandfather was born here. The army came to frighten us when it should be protecting us. We cannot sleep at night, cannot work without worrying that at any second something might happen to us,” said one resident.

“I was born on this land and I’ll die here. We have never asked for anything from the state, and we want nothing from it now — except that it leaves us alone,” one resident said.

“I’m a farmer. If I leave the island what will I do? I don’t know any other trade. Should I sit on a balcony and hunt birds?” he added.

I gave a training session in the morning to a group of local and Arab human rights activists on internet campaigns, part of a workshop organized by HRINFO, then had to rush to Abdeen to see the Kafr Elw residents.

Later I met with the Qursaya Island residents at the Press Syndicate.

… and the Real Estate Tax Collectors celebrating their strike victory.

I heard horrific tales from the Kafr Elw residents about police assaults, still saw impressive militancy among the women, who basically are leading the fight now against the government while their husbands have taken the back seat for fear of arrest.

I felt frustration and sheer alienation are spread among the Qursaya Island residents vis a vis Mubarak’s central government, but heard the phrase “we will die on our island, rather than give it to the government, army or anyone else” more than once.

I met again with the Real Estate Tax Collectors. But this time it was different. Last time I saw them was in front of the Ministerial Cabinet, where they were camping… they were exhausted, disheveled, yet resilient, as they slept night after night surrounded by the pigs in downtown Cairo… Tonight, they felt like heroes, and they were heroes having achieved victory in a bitter fight, in their first strike since 1919.

“I walk today in the street, with my head up high,” said Amr, one of the strikers. “I wouldn’t have been able to look into the faces of children if I came back home after the strike with nothing. I won. We won. I tell the people in the street I was one of the Real Estate Tax strikers, and they tell me poetry. I feel our victory is a victory to all civil servants and all Egyptians.”

As I was taking the elevator to the Syndicate’s ground floor on my way out, there were two of the building’s staff workers (either waiters or janitors) chatting about the “beto3 el-3aqariya” (the guys from Real Estate):
“They stayed for more than a week in the street,” said one.
“I know,”
“Seems everybody is doing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The e3tissamat (sit-ins)!”
“Oh, I know. I know.”
“It’s the only language the government understands.”

Here’s a reuters report about the island:

Egyptian army weighs in on disputed Nile island
By Jonathan Wright
QURSAYA ISLAND, Egypt, Dec 12 (Reuters) – The Egyptian flag flaps in the breeze between two army tents, an unwelcome symbol of state power in a confrontation between the government and the independent-minded inhabitants of an island in the Nile.
Under army protection, dredgers are working round the clock to reshape Qursaya island, a low-lying undeveloped expanse of reeds,farmland and country houses just a short ferry ride from the bustling center of the Egyptian capital Cairo.
When a squadron of soldiers armed with assault rifles landed in surgeon Muhammad Moustafa’s garden on the eastern shore late in November, the islanders reacted quickly.
Grabbing clubs and staves, they rushed to the river bank and confronted the landing. Some dug shallow graves while others wrapped themselves in white shrouds and lay in the mud, trying to send the message they would die sooner than leave the land.
They were already on high alert because for the past few months state officials have been refusing to accept rent from the Qursaya families, many of whom have been living there for generations and have converted the land from swamp to farmland.
The islanders say successive governments have tried to intimidate them into leaving and they suspect the authorities will cite rent arrears as grounds for evicting them. They say army contractors have already covered two acres (0.8 hectares) of farmland with rock, destroying a rice crop.
The land nominally belongs to the state, but many of the 5,000 inhabitants have squatter’s rights and ample documentation showing they have paid their bills and fulfilled obligations.
‘RIFLE AND BAYONET’
Now they suspect the government, backed by the army as the only force capable of removing them, intends to make the land available to a large investor with plans for luxury hotels.
The case illustrates popular mistrust of a government often seen as beyond accountability, impervious to dialogue and usually biased towards the interests of big business.
“The government believes the Nile wasn’t created for ordinary people. It was created only for the nobility,” said Muhammad Moustafa,
who has lived on the island for 22 years with his wife Brigitte, a Swiss consular official.
“We speak Arabic. They speak in the language of the rifle, the bayonet and the cattle prod,” he added, speaking of his attempts to obtain an explanation from the army officers who led the landing in his garden last week.
Muhammad Abla, an artist who has been living and working on Qursaya for the past 12 years, said finding someone to listen to their case was one of the hardest aspects of the crisis.
“The authorities don’t speak to us at all. It’s as if we don’t exist. Nobody pays us the slightest attention,” he added. “We just want them to reveal what they are doing and make us feel that we are not just numbers. We are also human beings, and whether they are poor, middling or rich, the people living here should be treated humanely,” said Moustafa.
Cabinet spokesman Magdy Rady did not respond to Reuters’ questions about the government’s intentions. An army spokesman told Reuters the army was responding to encroachments on the Nile but he declined to elaborate further.
CONCERTS AND WORKSHOPS
In the meantime the islanders are living on edge, watching the army closely, starting legal action and trying to mobilize Egyptian public opinion in their favor. A few independent newspapers have covered the conflict but the large state-owned media have largely ignored it.
Muhammad Abla is organising concerts and painting workshops to draw attention to the dispute. Prominent lawyer Amir Salim, who represented imprisoned opposition politician Ayman Nour, told Reuters he had agreed to represent the islanders.
The poorer inhabitants say the threat from the army is not just to their homes but also to their livelihoods, in a country where fertile land is scarce and jobs are hard to find.
Muhammad Hamid Ali, who lives off both fishing and farming, said that when he came to the island in 1970 from southern Egypt the land was waste and he reclaimed the land he now farms.
“Now that we’ve cleaned the island and made it beautiful, if a guest came and sat down and saw how lovely it is, should he be able to throw me out of my house and my land?” he asked.
“If they throw us out where will they put us? Will they build a lake in the mountains for me to fish in? Will they give us some land to live off? I’d have to turn to crime,” he said.
The islanders said they were especially angry that the army had deployed for civilian, possibly commercial, purposes.
“Look at them,” said boatman Ibrahim Mustafa, nodding towards the military encampment. “They’ve planted the Egyptian flag on the island as if they’ve liberated it from Israeli occupation. But really they’re taking it from the people.”

You can find also find some pix of the island taken here.

And here’s a documentary about the island, made by Egyptian artist Muhammad Abla:

Bayonets fixed, the soldiers scrambled onto the island in the middle of Cairo, rolled out barbed wire and set up camp. The reasons why they did so are as murky as the Nile waters that flow around them.
Al-Qursaya island is home to 5,000 people, mostly farmers who have lived there for generations. It is one of the last undeveloped pieces of land in the mega-city’s ever-expanding concrete sprawl.
The army’s arrival in September heralded that of mechanical diggers swaying atop barges as they set about expanding the island, which can only currently be accessed by a small ferry.
More ominously, the farmers have been told to stop paying rent as the land “will be cleared,” according to the only official document any of the residents has seen.
Officials have spoken vaguely about transforming the area into a public park, but no one on Al-Qursaya believes them.
They fear that their homes and livelihood will be taken from them to make way for yet another tourist development dreamed up by wealthy men who straddle the worlds of business and politics.
And in Egypt, no explanation is needed when the all-powerful military is involved.
Sociologist Sameh Nagib says the army is increasingly involved in development projects and that “for tourism, for roads, there is always a struggle for the land.”
“The army is a major landowner in Egypt. If there’s a problem with a road project the army gets involved — they say the army owns it,” says the American University professor, who is based in Cairo.
But beyond so-called projects of national interest such as roads, Nagib says that the government, pushing a programme of liberal economic reforms, “wants foreign investors.”
“Because the value of real estate has tripled in recent years, because of all this the army’s involvement is accelerating,” he says.
One analyst who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue said that President Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal — a former merchant banker widely seen as being groomed to be the next president — could be currying favor with the army.
One question mark over Gamal’s inheritance is that he would be the first president from a non-military background, and “this could be Gamal’s way of winning the army over. Maybe he’s giving them a bigger cut with the businessmen,” the analyst says.