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July 6, 2005 Now and then, one hears about tyranny and human rights abuses in Egypt. A writer who has been too critical of the government or has slandered Islam has been jailed. Or a rowdy mob of demonstrators has been arrested and detained summarily. Prisoners have been abused or beaten. There has been an extrajudicial killing. I don't doubt that there are incidents. But for the average Egyptian on the street these incidents mean nothing. The average Egyptian is not arrested, detained, beaten or tortured. Generally, he's not even questioned. One can walk around free as a bird in Egypt, without fear of any kind, either from the police or from assailants. There is crime in Egypt, but most of it amounts to petty theft. It stands to reason that you don't leave baggage or other valuables unattended in Egypt, or anywhere for that matter. Sometimes someone may shortchange you, but you can almost sympathize when a poor man tries to make an extra junaih. Egyptian policemen are friendly as can be. They never harass anyone, as far as I know. Once when I was cycling along in biking shorts, which you are not really supposed to wear in Egypt, I was stopped by the police, and I was a little alarmed, but it wasn't about the shorts at all. They just introduced themselves and had me come over to their guardshack for a friendly chat. They didn't even ask for ID. They were strictly passing the time of day. Later on, whenever I saw them on the street, they'd wave and smile. This is the warm, sunny kind of atmosphere that you find there. On another occasion, when I went into a police station to inquire about something, they invited to sit down and have coffee. According to the United Nations Demographic Yearbook published in 1998, the murder rate in Egypt for 1996 was 0.5 per 100,000. The figure for the US was 9.4 per 100,000 for the same year, but the official US figure was 7.3 per 100,000. So let us assume that the US figure was correct. What do these figures mean? Let us suppose that the US has about 295,000,000 people. With a murder rate of 7.3 per 100,000, if that rate is still approximately correct, we can expect about 21,535 murders to occur in the US in one year. if the US enjoyed a murder rate like Egypt's, with 0.5 murders per 100,000 per year, we could expect 1,475 murders instead. So we see that in the US, 20,060 more people die in a year than would die if US could lower its murder rate to equal that of Egypt. It goes without saying, though I could not find the pertinent statistics, that other violent crimes follow a similar trend. Thus, we would expect kidnappings, rapes, muggings, armed robberies and residential burglaries to be about 15 times as frequent in the US as in Egypt. These are not just meaningless statistics. They accord well with the mellow, genteel, merry nature of most Egyptians. I suppose that since my figures came from the UN, someone will say, "The UN hates us! They hate our liberties! They're always bowing and scraping before the foreigners. We're the good people! It's not those dirty rats overseas!" This argument is not tenable, however, because the UN did report several countries with murder rates signficantly higher than those of the US, like Colombia, Russia, El Salvador, Bulgaria, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and others. Does the UN hate El Salvador and Kazakhstan too? Egypt is a safe, safe place. If an occasional writer gets jailed, my heart goes out to him. But I'm really glad about those thousands of people who are still walking around unmurdered, unraped and unrobbed. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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