Rania Khallaf has an article on Egypt’s under-reported “Nubian problem” in the new edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. It’s a bit jumbled, but worth the detour.

Here’s a taste:

According to activist Samir El-Arabi, originally from Daboud — thought to be the first village to be submerged — Nubians were furious “when the ministry was going to sell 5,000 feddans of land in Al-Qustul, Adendan and Abu Simbel in September 2004, for these areas are the closest to Nubia, the seat of one of the world’s oldest civilisations and richest cultures. The houses of the first new Nubian village to be built, Bashair Al-Khair, had been handed over to families from Kafr Al-Sheikh; four out of 100 families were Nubian. It was in response to such actions that Oddoul used the term “ethnic cleansing” at the Coptic Conference, with reference to the stance of Egyptian regimes on Nubians since Gamal Abdel-Nasser, calling for the trial of the officials responsible for the displacement and disinheritance of Nubians and describing what had happened as “crimes against humanity”. Hundreds of thousands of the three million Nubians scattered around Egypt are ready to return, he added, yet the houses built for them are being handed over to Egyptians from other governorates.

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