Local news site removes article calling for slaughter of Egypt’s street children
Nasser Abdallah's article in Al-Masry Al-Youm
 

Award-winning writer and university professor Nasser Abdallah’s article calling for the mass slaughter of street children was removed from the website of the privately owned newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (AMAY) on Friday.

The article, titled “The Brazilian Solution,” outlined how in the 1990s, police forces in Brazil organized mass killings of street children in order to control their rising numbers.

The controversial article ran in AMAY’s print edition on Friday. However, later in the day, the paper released a statement online that the article was taken down from its website based on advice from its legal team, which said the article incited violence.

“The newspaper published the article based on the reader’s right to knowledge, and in an exercise of the right of free speech. But once again, with respect to the rights of the reader and society, we removed it,” AMAY’s statement said.

The article provoked an uproar among social media users, who castigated AMAY for publishing the article and lambasted Abdallah as a “fascist intellectual.”

“The Brazilian solution managed to clear the main Brazilian roads of street children and push those who remained [alive] to go back to the slums. But this success was not due to the harsh Brazilian solution, but first and foremost to the Brazilian political leadership’s will for reform,” Abdallah said in his article.

“This is the lesson that should be understood from everyone wishing to learn from the Brazilian experience,” he added.

Abdallah, a professor at Sohag University’s philosophy department, said that street children were killed en mass in Brazil just like stray dogs. The only alternative solution would have been to launch rehabilitation programs to reintegrate street children into society, which would have been too costly for the country’s ailing economy.

The writer, who won the high-profile State Honorary Award in Art in 2009, went on to draw a comparison between present-day Egypt and Brazil in the 1990s, asserting that Egypt faces the same economic hardships and a similar problem in controlling its street children population.

Abdallah is a founding member of the Writers Union, and is known for his poetry, novels, philosophical and literary studies as well as translations.

The Egyptian Coalition for Children’s Rights released an official statement after the article was published, announcing it would file a complaint against Abdallah.

According to the statement, the coalition’s legal team plans to file a complaint with the prosecutor general against both the author and AMAY for publishing an article that directly calls for the mass execution of children, in violation of all international agreements and constitutional principles.

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