If the ring road is built tothe south the city’s explosive population growth virtually guarantees the Great Pyramids will be engulfed.. Tokyo – We learnt a lesson in respect and dignity at the kendo club last week, a lesson I will take with me as I prepare to leave Japan this month. Dr Zulficar said the authorities were angry at Unesco’s intervention, and complaine d that re-routing the road would cost an extra $50m (£32m).Less than 20 years ago the Great Pyramids were well outside Cairo. Subsequently two sarcophagi, mummies and pottery from Egypt’s Roman period had been found close to the almost complete road. The archaeologist, who Dr Zulficar will not name, said he had been told to make borings every 300 metres along the route, being given no labour and only one week in which to report his findings So he simply said nothing had been found And the SAC never told Unesco it had given permission. In 1986 the SAC, statutory guardian of Egypt’s heritage, gave its permission for construction of the ring road after salvage excavations had shown therewere no remains in the construction area.Not so.

“You can’t chop up thissite just as if it’s a salami,” he said.But what upsets him most is what a young archaeologist from the Supreme Antiquities Council told him. He said Egypt was in breach of the World Heritage convention, which underpins the listing of sites, and its own heritage law, passed in 1983. Dr Zulficar believes this pollution threatens the mud bricks which make up the pyramids there. At the site’s southern end, Dahshur, a military factory continuously belches out thick black smoke. He also found army camps and, in the “buffer zone” surrounding the site a new complex of flats for 15,000 people.Development should be strictly controlled in the buffer zone and banned altogether inside the site, apart from the most exceptional circumstances. He found the dual-carriageway ring road was virtually complete It is carried on a high embankment 200 yards wide.

There were other, smaller new roads and two large rubbish dumps, one inside the World Heritage site and one just outside. Egypt did not send a representative, but Professor Mohammed Nur El Din, chairman of the government’s Supreme Antiquities Council, sent a letter suggesting that a tunnel under the site would solve the problem.Dr Zulficar, Unesco’s director of operations for heritage and an Egyptian, has paid four visits to the site this winter “I was shocked and horrified at what I saw,” he said. Although these pyramids are not as impressive as nearby Giza’s they also date back to the Pharoahs’Old Kingdom, from 2,700 to 2,200 BC.Last week Unesco’s Spanish director general, Frederico Mayor, wrote to President Mubarak demanding that the ring road be re-routed north of the Great Pyramids.Unesco’s World Heritage committee met in Thailand this month and passed a resolution voicing its concern. This followed a plea from Unesco’s director-general after an article in The Independent last October which exposed the threat. But the authorities have now come up with an even worse solution, in Unesco’s eyes: to route the road two miles further to the south.There, it will still run right through the World Heritage site and threaten buried tombs and ruins around the Abu Syr and Zawiyat al Aryan pyramid fields. It runs right through the officially designated World Heritage site, less than two miles south of the three Great Pyramids and the Sphinx.

The road’s construction may already have covered tombs, and is attracting chaotic development which is likely to leave the pyramids encircled by urban sprawl by the year 2000.President Mubarak has already ordered a suspension of construction work on the section of road nearest the 4,700-year-old pyramids. Since these sole survivors of the seven ancient wonders of the world are the most august monuments on a list including Stonehenge and the Acropolis, the hope is that this threat will shame the Egyptians into action.The 66-mile ring road is nearing completion. Unless President Hosni Mubarak orders a complete re-think on the route of the Cairo ring road, Unesco will threaten to scratch the Great Pyramids and other nearby ruins off the list of World Heritage sites.
“That is the only sanction we have,” Said Zulficar, a senior official with the organisation, told The Independent. The UN’s culture and heritage arm is accusing the Egyptian government of vandalism and bad faith because of its treatment of the world’s most famous ancient monuments, the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. The Russians signed another multi-million-dollar contract with Baghdad in August to resume oilfield and refinery projects which were interrupted by the sanctions.. “This is important,” said one Russian source,” because Russia is now at the top of the list of Iraqi debtors.”More than 20 foreign countries are owed several billion dollars by the Iraqis for projects abandoned after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Russia was President Saddam Hussein’s main arms supplier following the signing of a friendship treaty in 1971, but in thelate 1980s the French began to competeand overtook the Russians in supplying air-defence systems, naval hardware and aircraft.Iraq has agreed to give Russia a “preferential trade status and priority payment” before other suppliers, as well as starting to pay for the new contracts as soon as the UN sanctions are lifted and Iraqi oil sales are allowed again.

Last month the Russian Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, signed a big arms and military-equipment deal with Iraq’s deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz.This followed an unpublicised meeting in July between Mr Kozyrev and Mr Aziz in St. Petersburg, attended
by senior military and intelligence officers, and extensive contacts between the two sides in Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus as well as Iraq and Russia.The Russians are to supply Baghdad with heavyequipment to replace armour, air defences and radar systems destroyed during the Gulf war.The deal also includes modernising Iraq’s forces and rebuilding airbases.Groups of Iraqi officers from the Air Defence Corps are to be trained in Russia for work on communications and signal intelligence. Moscow is ready to resume arms supplies to Iraq once United Nations sanctions have been lifted, according to Russian and Iraqi sources. Colonel de Kock was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison, visits are limited, and he can telephone only from a pay phone after a prison officer has dialled the number.He is not allowed alcohol, but can keep a television, as long as it is battery powered His new cell does not have electricity.. Colonel de Kock even mounted an alarm system, saying someone had tried to get into his cell one night.The Colonel was enjoying what one police lieutenant said, with great understatement in an affidavit, “greater freedom of movement and more privileges than an awaiting-trial prisoner would, in my experience, normally have”.However, his life of luxury ended on 8 December when it was discovered by Captain Kobus Swartz. He also made calls to Chief Mangosuthu’s Inkatha Freedom Party, with which Third Force members in the security forces were alleged to have worked to attack supporters of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.