Millennium bash fails to impress Egypt

Millennium bash fails to impress Egypt
DEUTSCHE PRESSE AGENTUR

CAIRO, DEC 25: Jean Michel Jarre must have suspected that his staging of the millennium celebrations at the pyramids of Giza would pose problems.

``Our project has got to a scale as if one had to make the film Apocalypse now in a single night,'' the French musician said, referring to the Francis Ford Coppola film about the Vietnam war which is legendary for the massive problems and costly delays in its production.

A few days before the millennium changeover, the pyramid spectacle is threatening to become Jarre's version of what Coppola went through. Jarre started out planning a 12-hour multi-media opera. But massive public criticism, especially from Islamic fundamentalists, forced the organisers, out of respect for the fasting month of Ramzan, to shorten the main show to two and one half hours.

So very little is left over from Jarre's original idea, which was meant to reflect on Pharaonic tradition and to stage a show following the sun's path at night - from sundown until sunrise. The organisers also faced problems with their plan to give the 136-metre-high pyramid of Cheops a golden crown. The idea was quickly attacked from two sides: Islamic clerics charged that the golden crown was meant, in a plot by dark forces, to be a ``symbol of free masonry Zionism''.

Monument preservation specialists warned that the metal crown, weighing three tons, could harm the 4,600-year-old pyramid.

In the end Culture Minister Farouq Hosny announced that the controversial plan to install the cap was being abandoned. He noted that the decision would not influence his show because installing the cap was only supposed to last for four minutes.

Meanwhile the Giza plateau has been turned into a huge construction site. In addition to a stage the size of 18 football fields, workers are also setting up 15 huge heated tents with wooden floors. They will house 7,500 guests who are paying 400 dollars a head to watch the spectacle while eating a dinner catered by a five-star hotel. Guests can even enjoy a glass of wine with their meal, something normally forbidden during Ramzan ... if the government does not at the last minute instruct otherwise. Whether the guests really will get the best seats for their money has been called into question, because the acoustics at the huge party site are turning out to be more difficult than expected. It could be that the 50,000 people in the standing area directly in front of the stage will enjoy better acoustics.

Many Egyptians shrug their shoulders at all the fuss. While the culture ministry is promoting the show with the slogan ``the third millennium for the world, the seventh for Egypt'', Muslims say the second millennium is far from over.

We are still in the year 1420 of the Islamic calendar. For the Coptic Christian minority, it will be the year 1716. In the travel bureaux in Cairo, what is being promoted is not the millennium celebration, but special Ramzan season trips to Mecca.