Egypt cracks down on arts officials after Van Gogh theft

The senior official, Mohsen Shaalan, and Reem Bahir, the museum director, will face a judge on September 14, according to the AFP. Bahir’s second-in-command, another culture ministry official, and seven guards at the museum will also be tried at a later date, as part of a broad crackdown that some commentators say has revealed the […]

The senior official, Mohsen Shaalan, and Reem Bahir, the museum director, will face a judge on September 14, according to the AFP. Bahir’s second-in-command, another culture ministry official, and seven guards at the museum will also be tried at a later date, as part of a broad crackdown that some commentators say has revealed the shaky state of the nation’s government.

Describing the Egyptian government in the Al-Ahram newspaper, commentator Salama A. Salama notes that there is “no specification of duties in such an unwieldy bureaucracy” and that “no one seems to know the limits of the political and legal responsibilities of the minister and his assistants.” He goes on to suggest that a witch-hunt appears to be taking place, pointing out that allegations of serious corruption are rarely investigated in Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s government.

Salama writes that, for instance, when “the worst scandal in the history of the Ministry of Health was uncovered” earlier this year, the public attorney merely had “a chat over coffee” with the health minister. In the glare of the international coverage that the theft has caused, the Egyptian government has felt compelled to act in a clumsy show of institutional integrity, Salama argues.

Another commentator in Al-Ahram, Abdel-Moneim Said, takes the opportunity to share the juicy bit of gossip: some people believe the stolen painting may have been a fake to begin with. As has been previously reported, this is not the first time that the work has been stolen. It first disappeared in 1978, but was returned shortly thereafter and some have long believed that the work that was returned was a well-made forgery.

The larger problem, according to Said, is a general lackadaisical approach to good governance and public art in Egypt. “Without a doubt, various forms of crude behavior, clumsy speech, and poor public taste, are in part due to the lack of the beauty and taste for the arts in our lives,” he writes. The missing painting is, for him, an object lesson in this fact. That scandal has been “a disaster,” he notes, “but the bigger disaster is the theft of the buds of aesthetic appreciation from the Egyptian mentality.”