Le Nil n'est pas un dépotoir : qui pollue l'artère poignarde le corps tout entier

Before anything else, let us remember what this river is. The Nile is not a tourist attraction or a backdrop for sunset photographs; it is the reason Egypt exists at all. On its banks rose one of the oldest civilisations on earth, and from it Egyptians have drunk, farmed and lived for thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote long ago that Egypt is the gift of the Nile, and the sentence remains literally true today: a country that is mostly desert, one artery of water running through its middle, and everything standing upon it.

Now look at how some of us treat that artery. A garbage bag hurled from a bridge with a one-second flick of the hand. Waste emptied at the banks under cover of night. Bottles and plastic bags left behind after a day out on the shore, for the water to carry away. Wastewater finding its way into the channel or into the canals and drains connected to it. Each person tells himself his act is small and the river is big — and the result is that millions of "small acts" accumulate in one and the same water.

Here is the fact that makes polluting the Nile different from any other littering: the river flows. What you throw into the water at one point does not stay there; it travels on to those after you. Drinking-water stations draw from this very channel; farmland is irrigated from it; the fisherman casts his net into it. Whoever pollutes the Nile is not offending a "public view" — he is reaching, in effect, into the water glass in the home of a stranger, and into the food that will be grown with that water.

That is why the crime here is moral par excellence before it is legal. Dumping waste into the Nile is a silent assault on every Egyptian living downstream of you — an assault in which the assailant never sees his victims and they never see him, yet one that is real beyond doubt. And it carries, besides, an insult and provocation to everyone who sees a riverbank turned into a dump: this river belongs to all of us — who gave you the right to disfigure it?

Plastic in particular is an enemy of a special kind. The bag that takes one second to throw remains in the aquatic environment for many years, breaking into ever smaller fragments that are swallowed by the fish that end up on our tables. Today's pollution does not end today; it is a toxic deposit we leave in the river for our children.

The law has a clear and long-standing word here. Law 48 of 1982 on the protection of the Nile and waterways from pollution prohibits discharging solid or liquid waste into the river, its branches, canals and drains except under licence and to set standards; and the Environment Law 4 of 1994, as amended, tightens that protection and prescribes penalties. The texts have existed for decades; what is needed is for them to become a reality visible to anyone tempted to treat the river as a drain.

And let us be fair: not every form of pollution is the act of individuals. Untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are files larger than any one citizen's behaviour, and responsibility for them lies first with state bodies and enterprises; Egypt's wastewater-treatment and canal-lining projects are steps in the right direction that deserve to be built upon. But none of this exonerates the individual: the bag you hurl from the bridge carries no government agency's signature. Each of us answers for his own hand.

What do we ask of the citizen? That nothing leave your hand for the Nile or for any canal or drain connected to it: no bag, no bottle, no picnic waste, no slaughter remains. If you sit on the bank, leave it as you found it or cleaner. And if you see someone casting his waste into the water, do not walk past: a calm, firm word — and a report to the competent authorities when the act is serious. This is wrong.

What do we ask of boat owners and Nile businesses? A waste container on every vessel, and a commitment to bringing it ashore rather than over the side. The Nile is your livelihood before anyone else's, and it is absurd for river commerce to kill the river it lives on.

And what do we ask of the state? Genuine enforcement of Laws 48 of 1982 and 4 of 1994 against polluters, individuals and enterprises alike; continuation and expansion of wastewater-treatment projects; enough garbage bins along corniches and banks to make the right behaviour easier than the wrong one; and support and protection for river clean-up initiatives and their volunteers.

An entire nation lives on a single artery. That is not a rhetorical flourish but a precise geographical description of Egypt. Whoever stabs the artery — with a bag, a drainpipe or a truckload of waste — stabs the whole body, beginning with his own children. The Nile, having given us everything, holds a claim on us for protection. To whoever betrays it, we say — in the river's own voice, had it one: this is wrong.