22 The Guardian Weekly 05.07.

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Egypt 5 July 1994

A time for street wisdom

There is nothing in the revolutionary rule book to say that, two years after toppling a dictator, a country is entitled to enjoy peace. President Mohamed Morsi was not exaggerating when he told the Guardian last weekend that his rst year as president of Egypt had been very difcult and that he fully expected his troubles to continue. Some of these troubles have been of his own sides making. The Muslim Brotherhood made two mistakes that contributed to the shutdown of dialogue between the two camps that once shared Tahrir Square. The rst was to push for a constitution that allows for greater religious input into Egyptian legislation. This was done to keep a doctrinally strict Salast party on board, which soon switched sides anyway. The second was for Mr Morsi to issue the November 2012 constitutional declaration that gave him sweeping temporary powers, which he swiftly abandoned and has regretted ever since. There is truth in the charge that Mr Morsi confused an electoral mandate with an obligation to keep all sides on board. But nor can the opposition be given a free pass. It complains that the Muslim Brotherhood has grabbed all the power in all the major institutions of state; yet the record shows that its leaders were oered top jobs in government and repeatedly turned them down. It lays claim to a democratic mandate; yet it refuses to participate in elections it thinks it is going to lose. It claims to be non-violent; yet rival demonstrations have been red on, causing deaths and injuries. The truth, a year after Mr Morsi took oce, is that neither side accepts the others legitimacy. Certainly, there are serious concerns about Egypts election law and the danger of gerrymandering. The question is whether these concerns are so grave as to undermine free elections. Until now, elections in postMubarak Egypt have been judged, on the whole, to be fair. Nor is it right to claim that the Brotherhoods organisational capacity on the ground is so great that nothing can be done. What matters right now is how events play out on the streets. Both sides principal concern is to muster large numbers of supporters and keep them on the streets of Egypts major cities. But the tragedy for both sides is that there is a third camp, sitting in the wings, for whom civil disorder is a win-win situation. This is composed of the remnants of the old regime, who have never really gone away and are actively seizing their chance for a comeback. Mr Morsi may survive. Or Egypt could be Algeria writ large. A prolonged civil conict would not discriminate between one sect or another, or between Egyptians. Nor would it necessarily respect borders. The stability of a Middle East in which the US and Europe have less power to inuence events depends to a great extent on a stable Egypt. Both the region and the world are watching to see which way Egypt chooses.

The town whose senses are dead

The citizens of Kibuye, neat in their Sunday best, squeezed on to the pews of their only church. Their voices rose to praise life and humanity. Only the smell of death was between them and their God. As the congregation led in, the stench drew glances at the newly turned earth, rare acknowledgments of a terrible crime. It lingered as a reminder of the extermination of a section of Kibuyes population that, if the townspeople are to be believed, never occurred. There is no shortage of evidence of what happened at the church, only an unwillingness to admit it. The bullet holes speckling the corrugated iron roof, shattered windows and chipped walls, the bloody hand print of a dying Tutsi, perhaps once a member of the congregation, the thin metal toilet door sliced through by a machete in search of a victim: all testify to the murder of 3,000 Tutsis at the church on a single day in April. The service made no mention of the massacre at the church and a stadium, in which almost all the towns 10,000 Tutsis were slaughtered. One worshipper admitted there had been a slaughter, but claimed that rebels had been holed up in the church, protected by the priest. A group of boys pointed to a grave and laughed. Guilt is not universal. Across Rwanda, brave Hutus protected Tutsi friends and neighbours. The United Nations has recommended those guilty of Rwandas genocide be brought to justice. But who will give evidence in a town that refuses to admit its crime? In any case, they have achieved their aim. In towns such as Kibuye, most of the Tutsis are dead. The rest are gone, or will go at the rst opportunity. Kibuye has imposed a nal solution on its Tutsi problem. Chris McGreal
archive.guardian.co.uk

Human genetics

Life sciences
Setting rules that govern the limits of science is one of the more dicult and absorbing problems of the modern age. Last week, the British government accepted the recommendation from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to approve a radically new technique that enables women with dysfunctional mitochondria to have their own children free of the inherited abnormality that often leads to severely life-limiting disorders. The technique involves replacing damaged mitochondrial DNA often described as the battery for human cells in an embryo with healthy mitochondrial DNA from another embryo. Now parliament has to decide whether to change a rule that has banned making changes to DNA that can be passed from one generation to the next. The human dimension is easy enough to grasp. It means women who inherited a particular mitochondrial abnormality from their own mothers can be the rst generation in history to pass healthy DNA to their children. But it is also easy to see it as eugenics, a dangerous leap into the fantasy world of supermen. On the one hand, theres the powerful human instinct to alleviate individual suffering; on the other the ethical base of wider society. Would legitimising the procedure mean that helping people now was more important than exposing future generations to the unknown risks of genetic modication? It means accepting that identity is more than the sum of your genes, and that family as many children, either with adoptive parents or growing up in merged families, already know is more than your biological parents. Its at moments like this that processes become more important than outcomes. For most of us, there is no absolute certainty about the right answer. Some recoil at what feels like tinkering with the building blocks of humanity. But it can also be seen as an incremental development in a eld British scientists have made their own, openly researched and for which public consent is being sought. It is the right thing to do.

Corrections and Clarifications

A photograph that appeared on page 30 of the 17 May 2013 issue was incorrectly captioned. The image did not depict a Jewish memorial at the entrance to the Warsaw ghetto. The Guardian Weeklys policy is to correct signicant errors as soon as possible. Please give the date, page or web link: reader@guardian.co.uk The readers editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, United Kingdom.