campus memorial for Omar Aly Mohsen

I’ve just returned to my office for the on-campus memorial for Omar Aly Mohsen, our graduating Economics major who died at the Port Said football massacre (under conditions so extremely suspicious that perhaps the word “suspicious” is too mild).

Before the memorial I ran into one of my students who knew Omar quite well (I never met Omar, nor did I recognize him from the many photos on posters around campus today; we have 5,000 undergraduates and I only teach about 10% of them as they pass through).

Omar’s family was sitting in the front row, three in front of me. There was a somewhat young-looking woman who still looked old enough to be his mother, and that’s who I concluded it was. She visibly had the toughest time with the ceremony.

First President Anderson spoke, and I was glad to hear her say that AUC is consulting with human rights groups about possible legal action over what happened to Omar. I doubt it will do any good in the end, but the University needs to take a stand against the public butchering of students.

Then Sherif Kamel, Dean of the School of Business (since Omar was a student in that School). Sherif has had a tough year. First one of his Economics faculty died suddenly of a heart attack, then his Assistant Dean (and my personal friend) Steve Everhart was killed in Iraq in June while consulting for one of Baghdad’s universities.

Then Abdelkarim Seghir from Tunisia, the young Associate Dean of Business (Steve Everhart’s replacement), who knew Omar quite well and was able to speak at length of his personality.

And then the head of Cairo’s impressive new Children’s Cancer Hospital. He happened to be on campus today on pre-scheduled business. But ironically, it turns out that he knows Omar’s father and uncle very well, and was among those who went to the morgue to identify Omar’s body. (He broke down in tears at that point in his speech.)

We also had speeches from several of Omar’s student friends, and a Qur’an recitation from a young man with a beautiful voice. And a speech from the head of the labor syndicate on campus (Omar was one of the students who helped fight most strongly for the demands of campus workers last fall during a series of campus protests).

After one of the speeches, a large portion of the crowd broke into chants calling for the downfall of SCAF. That lasted for several minutes, following which the chant leader (a middle-aged man) broke down in tears and had to be led away by a friend.

I’m unable to find any photos of Omar on the web for some reason; otherwise, I would post one here to help make the loss more concrete to readers of this blog. There is unanimous agreement about Omar’s infectious smile.

Watching his family made me think, of course, that there are more than 70 other families going through exactly the same thing right now.