Elijah went up to Dekerness last week. He posts on his flickr account a good photo coverage of the crisis…

Nasser’s land reforms distributed these fields in the small Nile Delta village of Dekerness to the peasants, who paid the government for them in crops every year between 1962 and 2004, when they paid the last installment. Civil courts have repeatedly ruled that they are the rightful owners of the land.
On the day I took these pictures, more than 1,000 soldiers descended on the village while a court official delivered an eviction notice to the peasants for 10 feddans (roughly 10.5 acres) of their land. They had come twice before. The last time, the soldiers beat and detained 22 peasants. Journalists were also assaulted and detained. Their cameras were smashed.
The apparent authority for the eviction notices is a ruling from the High Court of Values, an exceptional court Sadat created to shore up his power after the 1973 war. It is a panel comprised half of judges and half of public figures, all of whom are appointed by the president, and the president himself casts the deciding vote in the event of a tie.
The pre-revolutionary landowning family had sued the Agricultural Reform Authority, the body Nasser set up to handle agricultural reform, arguing that the lands should not have been redistributed under land reform because the family’s landholdings did not meet Nasser’s cut-off of 200 feddans. Villagers said the family had put the land in the names of their servants and distant family members.

Click on the photo below taken by Elijah to watch a slide show…