“Let me tell you a joke.” Hesham el-Gabry leans forward, holding a steaming glass of tea between his thumb and forefinger. “America promotes freedom.” A brief pause, before he leans back in his seat, a thin smile on his face. “Pretty good, huh?”
Sitting in the middle of his vast but desolate souvenir shop, the 50-year-old merchant is slowly but surely going out of business. “This place is nothing more than a tomb.”
Shortly after 11 September, the neighborhood where el-Gabry’s business once flourished—a section of quaint Garden City streets with the US Embassy at its core—was effectively sealed off by a series of blockades and armed security forces.
Nine years later, the blockades are still in place, and the security forces have snugly fit into their routine of questioning, and in some cases patting down visitors to the area.
For a country constantly asking itself why it has enemies, some answers might be found in Garden City.
“I used to have five to seven hundred customers a day. They were literally coming in by the busload,” el-Gabry claims, nodding toward the wide open door of his establishment, which has a view consisting mainly of the wall surrounding the embassy across the street. “Now, I’m lucky if I get one customer a month.”
According to el-Gabry, his store, Karnak Bazaar, a family business dating back several generations, is the oldest business establishment in Egypt—or at least, the first to receive an official permit.
He says was forced to gradually let go of the 52 employees who once tended to his store. “Now it’s just me and Raafat,” he mutters. In a corner across the bazaar, the grey-haired Raafat turns away from the television at the mention of his name and waves feebly. El-Gabry waves back.
Besides employees, el-Gabry was also forced to part with his car, as well as a plot of land, and a smaller business in another neighborhood, in order to make ends meet.
Off the top of his head, el-Gabry lists 12 different business that have folded in the wake of the barricades being set up.
Forty-six-year-old Abdel Hamid Hassan can attest to this claim. “Ever heard the expression ‘beating a dead horse’?” he asks, shaking Al-Masry Al-Youm’s hand. “I’m the horse.”
Hassan spends most of his time wandering up and down the street, trying to find a cure for his “boredom.” He doesn’t have to worry about leaving his fruit and vegetable stand unattended since “there’s no business anyway. Nobody will put up with security checkpoints just to buy fruits and vegetables.”
Hassan, el-Gabry, and the rest of the neighborhood’s merchants and business owners joined forces in an attempt to bring those who they felt were responsible to justice. “We tried to sue the American embassy, but they told us that these security measures were taken by our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so we sued them instead,” he explains.
Six years later, the case has yet to reach the courts. In the meantime, the grocer next to Hassan’s died, unable to pay for medication for the depression and diabetes that struck him shortly after the barricades arrived.
To his left is a derelict establishment of dusty, cracked windows and cobwebs hanging from the neon sign above its permanently locked door: Fresh Flowers. “That store was famous,” Hassan grumbles, “they used to film movies there in its heyday. And you know how things ended for its owner? Business disappeared, debts mounted, and towards the end, the old man lost it. He’d sit there in his shop, surrounded by wilting flowers, talking to himself. He died recently.”
“Real estate prices [in this area] have plummeted since the blockade,” says el-Gabry. “Properties that were worth LE50,000 or LE60,000 per square meter are now virtually worthless and their owners can’t even give them away.”
“[This is] my friend, Kamal,” el-Gabry introduces the lanky newcomer—an elderly man with exhausted eyes centered in a map of worry lines. “He is in the process of shutting down his leather goods store.” Kamal has apparently just received a court summons for the taxes he has failed to pay.
“How do they expect me to pay taxes for a store that’s been forced to go out of business?” Kamal asks.
In the meantime, efforts by the US embassy to compensate its neighbors have been labeled by business owners as a “joke,” according to el-Gabry.
“They tried to trick us with this whole ‘beautification’ nonsense,” he says of the initiative taken by the embassy a few years ago, which seemingly culminated in repainting lampposts and replacing wooden barriers with iron ones. On two occasions, the embassy extended invitations to business owners, many of whom showed up.
“Nothing happened,” is el-Gabry’s blunt summarization of the first meeting. Another invitation came with the instatement of new ambassador Margaret Scobey in 2008. El-Gabry, like most other business owners, chose not to attend. “All they have for the likes of us is hollow apologies and empty promises.”
Sawsan Salem, who manages an art gallery down the street from el-Gabry’s Karnak Bazaar, expresses similar feelings. Salem also responded to the former ambassador’s first invitation, in the hope that an understanding could be reached. She left disappointed.
“When I met the ambassador, I explained our crisis to him and asked what was being done about it,” she recalls. “He just walked away. On my way out I asked him again, and he gestured to some Egyptian police officer in the corner and told me to talk to him.”
The experience shook Salem’s faith in the possibility of the situation being resolved, as well as the US government’s intentions. “America is supposedly all about human rights and their government always complains Egypt doesn’t care about human rights. How can they possibly justify what they’re doing?”
“This street used to have 25,000 cars a day going back and forth,” she says. “Now, it’s blocked up, and the traffic’s been split between the corniche and Kasr el-Ainy. Those endless traffic jams are because of the embassy. I don’t understand why they can’t move out,” Sawsan says.
“Of course we don’t believe the embassy. We never did,” says Hajj Ahmed, an elderly man who also owns a failing fruit stand. “But we were certain of their lies when they fed us that ‘beautification’ drivel.” Hajj Ahmed’s stand has existed on the same corner for over 40 years, a fact which only emphasizes the “humiliation of being stopped, questioned, and searched by some kid in a uniform.”
Worse yet, he claims, is the fact that the trucks bringing in his produce are no longer allowed past the barricades. As a result, the old man is often forced to carry several cases of fruit and vegetables on his back up and down a lengthy street.
“And why?” he asks angrily. “All because of the Americans. Because Americans do whatever they want, and yet we’re all expected to love them somehow, and to accept the fact that their ‘rules’ govern our lives.” Hajj Ahmed refuses to believe that the tight security measures were imposed by the Egyptian government—“If so, then it was at the US embassy’s request, so they can avoid claiming responsibility.”
However, Samir Sabry, the lawyer representing the Garden City business owners claims otherwise. “The US embassy is not offering any compensation, and the security measures were indeed taken by the Egyptian government.”
“When this started, we asked the US government for compensation,” Hassan explains, recalling a brief meeting with the embassy’s top-ranking Egyptian employee. “We were told that the US government couldn’t offer compensation to any individual or organization outside of their borders. So, they have no problem taking, just giving back.”
El-Gabry remains objective: “Personally, I like Americans. They’re friendly,” he says. But he is desperate for any solution to the ongoing crisis. “I offered to sell this place to the embassy. I told them they could do whatever they wanted with it, turn it into a nice big bathroom for the ambassador,” he recalls. “Their response was that that wouldn’t be right.”
Ultimately, el-Gabry has resigned himself to the fact that he, as well as the other business owners, are virtually powerless against the US embassy. “Hope? No, absolutely not,” he sighs.
Al-Masry Al-Youm’s numerous attempts at contacting the US embassy went unanswered.
