EgyptAir Crash Blindsides a Nation That Thought It Was Recovering

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Photo A relative of a passenger on EgyptAir Flight 804 inside a bus at the airport in Cairo on Thursday. Credit Ahmed Abd El Fattah/Associated Press

CAIRO Egypt seemed poised for a modest comeback. After years of cascading crises that had devastated the lifeblood of its economy, tourism, there were signs of a turnaround.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that he might soon resume Russian flights to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, which had been suspended after a passenger plane was blown out of the sky more than six months ago.

Then the United Nations World Tourism Organization chose Luxor, home to the famed Valley of the Kings archaeological site, as its world tourism capital for 2016.

But on Thursday, Egypt found itself in a dark, if familiar, place when an EgyptAir passenger jet disappeared from radar and crashed into the Mediterranean with 66 people on board.

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For years now, Egyptians have barely had a chance to recover from one crisis before being hit by another: a damaged economy, a diminished currency, a repressive president and a dangerous insurgency waged by a franchise of the Islamic State militant group.

This latest setback was such a shock to the nation that Egypts leaders abandoned their typical approach to crisis management: obfuscation. Instead, they offered what appeared to be a candid assessment, acknowledging that the disaster might well have been a result of terrorism. And that was even before there was hard evidence of terrorism.

Although visibly strained, Egypts civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, admitted that some Egyptian officials had made errors in dealing with the loss of the plane, EgyptAir Flight 804, and conceded that it might be linked to Islamist militants.

The possibility of a terrorist attack, he said, was higher than the possibility of a technical failure.

The initial response has been different this time, said Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York. We havent seen the kind of obfuscation that was typical of Egypt before.

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Mr. Fathis rapid acknowledgment of a possible terrorist link contrasted sharply with his governments response to the crash of a Russian charter flight over the Sinai Peninsula in October, when the government repeatedly refused to concede any connection to militancy, only to reverse its position months later.

That about-face was typical of Egyptian official reactions that have often looked like defensive crouches, and that have quietly infuriated some allies and led them to question Egypts ability to carry out transparent investigations.

Those tactics have pitted President Sisi against some of his closest Western allies. His government has publicly clashed with Italy over the case of Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student whose bloodied body was discovered on a Cairo roadside in February. Egyptian officials have aggressively countered Italian accusations that Egypts security forces were responsible.

Instead, Egypt has offered what are widely considered implausible accounts of how Mr. Regeni was killed.

Egypt also tried to shift blame for the deaths of eight Mexican tourists in an Egyptian military air attack in September. After months of Egyptian inaction over the killings in the countrys western desert, apparently the result of a mistake, Mexicos Foreign Ministry issued a statement this month accusing Egypt of failing to investigate the episode properly and of not sufficiently compensating the families of the dead tourists.

EgyptAir Flight 804, en route from Paris to Cairo, disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday morning after it abruptly turned and dropped in altitude.

The governments reputation for secrecy stoked cynicism among some of the relatives of missing passengers at the Cairo airport on Thursday. We dont know anything, said Mervat Moamen, who had come for news of Samar Ezz el-Deen, a newly married flight attendant on the plane.

Visibly frustrated, she dismissed official explanations about the fate of the plane as just propaganda.

Conspiracy theories about the crash floated in the news media, including an interview in the state-run Al Ahram paper with a self-declared expert who claimed the plane had been brought down by an electromagnetic pulse.

British officials have been working with Egypt to improve security at the Sharm el Sheikh airport, but they say it is unlikely they will reverse their flight ban anytime soon.

Tourist numbers have fallen more than 40 percent this year, and a further drop would most likely further weaken the Egyptian currency. This, in turn, would increase inflation and put new pressure on Mr. Sisi, who has responded to criticism with an iron fist this year, silencing critics and street protests through mass arrests and convictions.

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Last weekend, 152 people, mostly in their 20s, were sentenced to two to five years in prison for participating in street protests against the transfer of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. The furor over the islands appeared to rattle Mr. Sisi, catching him by surprise, and dealt another blow to his sagging popularity.

Still, analysts say, the EgyptAir crash could also give Mr. Sisis government a chance to capitalize on international sympathy provided it does not engage in the sort of defensive behavior that has alienated allies in the past. As the search for wreckage continued Thursday evening, Mr. Sisis office issued a stream of statements describing calls of sympathy he had received from the leaders of Italy, Greece, Saudi Arabia and France.

Mr. Hanna, the analyst, said there could be a more cynical explanation for the seemingly more candid approach of Egyptian officials: that they see an opportunity to blame another country, France, for the security lapses that led to the disaster. On social media on Thursday, some Egyptians, anticipating a terrorist link, called for Pariss Charles de Gaulle Airport to be shut down on security grounds, much as Sharm el Sheikhs airport was in the fall.

Blaming France, though, could alienate one of Egypts diminishing number of European friends. The French president, Franois Hollande, visited Egypt last month to sign a $1 billion weapons contract and a slew of other investment deals with Mr. Sisi.

Paradoxically, the proliferation of challenges facing Egypt may cause Western countries to strengthen their support for Mr. Sisi, despite his harsh policies, Mr. Hanna said.

It solidifies the status quo, he said. Because the country faces serious security threats with the potential to spill over into the rest of the world, other countries are loath to make a drastic change and to focus on things like human rights, politics and other freedoms.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/world/middleeast/egypt-egyptair-flight-804.html