Egypt Traffic, Life Start Moving Again
Banks Reopen After a Week, to Lines; Roads Are Cleared Near Tahrir Square
By TAMER EL-GHOBASHY And MARC CHAMPION
Egypt's financial system, businesses and notorious traffic began moving sporadically Sunday, signaling aspects of the country are beginning to creeping toward normalcy as Egypt's regime and some opposition figures met for talks.
Reuters
People line outside Al Ahli United Bank in Cairo on Sunday, as branches of the country's banks reopened after a weeklong closure amid protests.
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak holds the first full meeting with his new cabinet despite ongoing protests for him to step down as the country's leader. Video courtesy of Reuters.
Egypt's most iconic tourist site is unusually deserted - yet another casualty of the political unrest which has dominated Egypt's agenda for the past 13 days. Video courtesy of Reuters.
Roads around Cairo's Tahrir Square?the focal point of nearly two weeks of at-times bloody protests?began to open, as large cranes removed the burned-out carcasses of cars and trucks that days earlier had been turned into barricades. The army on Saturday pushed the borders of the protest further back into Tahrir Square, freeing up a major intersection.
Banks in Egypt opened for the first time in more than a week, but only gradually due to a shortage of cash in many locations following the transportation-disrupting chaos of the past week.
HSBC, for example, opened only nine of its 100 branches. The central bank had asked it to open no more than 20 as it eased open the doors to locked-up funds. Long lines formed at a Bank Misr in the wealthy Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek. Customers were let in five at a time, one for each of the tellers on duty.
Investment bank Cr�dit Agricole said the crisis could spark outflows of funds and conversion of deposits into dollars, pressuring the value of the Egyptian pound. The bank has said the crisis is costing Egypt at least $310 million a day, primarily due to lost tourism receipts.
The Egyptian pound weakened Sunday to 5.932 to the dollar, down from 5.857 Friday. It is expected to fall more sharply when international trading reopens Monday.
The stock market, shut since Jan. 27, remains closed through at least Tuesday. The market had fallen 16% in its last three days of trading.
A senior executive at Cairo-based brokerage Pharos Holding said he was given the impression that officials want to give the banking sector time to normalize before they reopen the market. Officials said they would give two days' notice before allowing trading to resume.
Photos: Sunday Protests
Associtated Press
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Regional Upheaval
A succession of rallies and demonstrations, in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Algeria have been inspired directly by the popular outpouring of anger that toppled Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. See how these uprisings have progressed.
Clashes in Cairo
Many government employees returned to work Sunday. Employees at the ministries of culture and agriculture went to work around 10 a.m. and were told they could leave around 1:30 p.m., an hour and a half early.
Egyptians also regained the ability to text on Saturday. The government shut down the service more than week ago ahead of massive protests that spurred President Hosni Mubarak to announce that he would leave office after his term ends this fall.
Life was returning to old rhythms in the working-class neighborhoods of Kitkat and Imbaba on the west bank of the Nile. Even as protesters continued to flow into the core of Tahrir Square, many residents said they were ready for the demonstrators there to go home.
"They made their point clear and we are very grateful, but we have been through a lot, and having Mubarak as a ruler until September won't be the end of the world," Kholoud El Sayyed, a 29-year-old Egyptian living in Qatar, said at the Cairo airport.
In the working-class neighborhood of Agouza, across the Nile River from Cairo, the protests seemed to pass with little incident. Yet residents remained vexed and frightened.
"The protests set us back. People can't come to you. There's no traffic," said Ahmed Ibrahim Kamil, the owner of a small laundry, who said he has worked about two hours a day since the unrest began. "The people in the street have demands, but demands need time: If you give me laundry, I can't do it immediately. You have to wait."
In Alexandria, Egypt's second city, police were back on the streets directing traffic. Stores in the city center near the path protesters have been taking daily since violence erupted on Jan. 28 had been shuttered and boarded up. But on Sunday, goods were back in the window displays, and the KFC restaurant in the city center was busy.
The port in Alexandria, which handles 65% of Egypt's imports and exports, continued to load and unload cargo Sunday, but little appeared to be leaving or entering the gates. A senior official at the port authority said the port was open throughout the crisis, although shipments fell by 20%. A port worker said goods had been bottled up inside its gates.
According to a taxi driver who serves the port, cruise liners, ferries and a car rally that should have landed during the week had been canceled, and services hadn't yet resumed. Mathias Schmidt, a lone motorcyclist from Switzerland, got stuck in Alexandria through the week at the end of a five-year, around-the-world journey. His ferry to Venice was postponed to later this month.
In Cairo, cab drivers cruised newly open central streets eagerly seeking fares, and the shrill notes of car horns returned to Cairo after days of silence. Traffic was moderate on the route west of Cairo to the suburban outpost of Sixth of October City. Tanks continued to occupy some intersections and guarded a ransacked police station.
The Cairo airport was busier than usual, but without the long lines or crowds of the sort seen when foreigners were anxiously fleeing the violence last week.
Schools and universities remained closed. Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq said Saturday that the government hasn't yet decided when they would reopen.
The Alexandria library, a vast steel-and-glass structure built in 2002 near the site of what is thought to have been the greatest library of the ancient world, remained closed Sunday. The ancient library had been burned first by Julius Caesar, by mistake, and then on purpose by the Christian Byzantines in 391. Its modern iteration escaped the latest turmoil unscathed and is due to reopen once the government lifts its daily curfew.
Also in the city, workmen at the central Sharif police station threw bricks and roofing tiles onto the charred wreckage of a police pickup truck as the first steps toward renovation began. Police stations across Alexandria were torched when police abandoned them and fled Jan. 28, after a failed attempt to crush antigovernment protests in which dozens are believed to have died.
Since Friday's violence, however, Alexandria has been peaceful if tense, escaping the turmoil seen in Cairo's Tahrir Square. The barricades along the Corniche, the city's long seafront, were gone. Where kids recently played pickup games of football on the deserted asphalt, there was near gridlock again.
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