An Iraqi electricians working on power cables and a tangle of wires in Baghdad. In many Arab countries, it always comes back to power outages. Photo: dpa
Baghdad / Beirut / Cairo. Samar Hassan fed up with the power cuts that plague their neighborhoods in the Lebanese capital Beirut regularly. Samira Ahmed The Egyptian, each time a sinking feeling in my stomach when her husband moved into their slum on the outskirts of Cairo in perilous heights cable to drain to electricity for the common budget. In Iraq, in turn, led angry protests from the public against the constant blackouts in bloody clashes with security forces. In June, while one protester died and dozens more were wounded - the electricity minister, had to resign.
During the summer in the Middle East from week to week will be hot and the temperatures in some places even to 50 degrees in the shade, climb the minds of the population because of the excruciating heat increasing electricity shortage. Somewhat peaceful relations and the global triumph of consumerism raise expectations with which the crumbling infrastructure in many Arab countries can not keep up.
The Affliction separates the social classes from each other. More and more members of the middle classes can afford air conditioners, refrigerators and other appliances that eat a lot of power - especially if they all crave the same time after a refrigerated room and a cold soda. For the poor, however, the current is often not even to their huts in the evening light have.
"This is a crisis that has no end," laments Samar Hassan. "We Lebanese have had enough." Like the other inhabitants of their slightly more upmarket residential area, it attaches importance to electricity around the clock. For this they must pay two bills: one that sends her to the state electricity company, and the other for the private generator operator, whose services she takes during the public power cuts in entitlement.
Mismanagement and war consequences
In Lebanon, economic mismanagement in the government sector and military implications for the current plight is responsible. Recently, the government went with television commercials in the offensive flow it would be "soon night and day," it said. The citizens of the country through its painful history of callous to such promises to be believed. "24-hours of electricity in Lebanon? I will not live to see it, "said laconically of the bank employees Radwah Malek, a middle-aged man.
In Iraq, the war that Saddam's dictatorship, the economic sanctions the UN and the mess the American occupation after 2003 Infrastructures are damaged devastating. is electricity from the socket it in this devastated country, four in the best case, six hours a day. The hopes now rest on the new Electricity Minister Hussein al-Shahristani, the appending of the reputation of an efficient maker.
"We are working on alternative projects to supply power," was the energy specialist Nasser Hussein announced that works under the new minister. The talk is of greater involvement of the private sector as well as the integration of previously purely private generator operator in the public service. But even in a country like Egypt, which was spared in the last decades of wars, is the current in the summer or the want of such an omnipresent conversation topic as the weather in Britain. A rapidly growing population and a dynamic small business are the incompetent administration of the country well before insoluble problems. The decreed because of the congestion of the network power cuts in turn are a hindrance for the further growth of small businesses and tourism.
Most severely from the current crisis, but suffer in the Nile Valley, the poorest of the poor, the many millions of inhabitants of urban slums. "The government does not forward the stream to where we live," stated the housewife Samira Ahmed. "Our men therefore draw the stream from there, where they can, but that one line is never stable." But for her and her family is the stolen electricity, the only choice
