Military might has Christians fearing the worst

Ruth Pollard
15/10/2011

“Hide your cross,” the cab driver told Vivian Meleka as he wound his way through the crowded streets of the Egyptian capital. It was the morning after the worst violence since the February overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak and Cairo was a city on edge.

The 30-year-old Coptic Christian, who has just completed a master’s degree in international relations and human rights law, refused. It was her time to finally say ”enough”.

The night before she had witnessed scenes at the Coptic Hospital in Cairo so horrific that, for a moment, words fail her.

”I cannot begin to describe what I saw – there was bodies all over the place, blood on the floor, there were people outside attacking the hospital, throwing rocks at it,” Ms Meleka says.

”There was just piles of people. I was also told by a friend of mine … that one of the priests came up to her with pieces of a skull and brain from one of the victims in his hand.”

Twenty-five died and more than 320 were injured on Sunday when a Copt protest against the failure of the government to investigate an attack last month on a church in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan was overrun by provocateurs and a show of extreme force from the Egyptian military.

The footage of soldiers driving armoured personnel carriers at speed into the crowds is almost unbearable to watch. Many of the victims were crushed to death. Others were shot and killed.
To hear many from this minority community explain it, the simmering sectarian tensions that had been kept under wraps by the brutal Mubarak regime finally boiled over on Sunday.

And they say the military – an organ of the state that was once the Coptic community’s greatest protector against the excesses of extreme Islam – has now turned against them.

Copts make up 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80 million population, and with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extreme Salafists, their minority status is, increasingly deeply felt, Ms Meleka says.

There have been a series of anti-Copt incidents that have occurred since the revolution that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the local governors have failed to act upon, says Ziad Abdel Tawab, the deputy director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

On March 4 in Atfih, 21 kilometres south of Cairo, the Two Martyrs Church was attacked and burned; on March 8 Christians in the eastern Cairo suburb of Muqattam protested at the vandalism and clashed with Muslim demonstrators. Twelve people died in the ensuing violence, Human Rights Watch said.
In May, violence outside a Coptic church in Cairo’s Imbaba neigbourhood left 12 dead.
”This leaves Copts feeling betrayed – the problem is there is no investigation after the incidents, there is no judicial mechanism,” Mr Abdel Tawab says.

”There are no laws … to make sure that those who have committed the violations are being punished and no one is looking at the root cause of the violence.”

One of the main conclusions to be drawn from these incidents, he says, is that Christians do not have the right to build their places of worship in the same way that Muslims do.

Indeed when the army took control of the country after Mr Mubarak was overthrown by popular demonstrations, its leadership promised to pass a law that would ensure all religions had the same rights to build and renovate their places of worship.

”As with many promises that have been made by the post-revolution government, this promise was not kept and instead these incidents keep on taking place,” Mr Abdel Tawab says.

He is also quick to point out these tensions existed before the revolution: ”This time, the difference is the army has been running over people and killing them deliberately because they belong to a certain religion … the army itself has become sectarian mercenaries.”

Heba Morayef, a Cairo-based researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, says it is horrifying that such extreme violence occurred after the government promised to act against officially sanctioned impunity and sectarian violence.

”It really just highlights the fact that the military leadership is destructive for Egypt’s transition to democracy.” Part of the problem is that the military ”lacks the political understanding to tackle complex policy areas like sectarian violence”, she says.

Ms Morayef says those soldiers responsible for Sunday’s violence against the Coptic protesters must be punished: ”One of the very basic things the military could have done was issued an apology and offered condolences to the families.”

Instead, Major General Adel Emara, a member of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, denied the soldiers had run over protesters or used live ammunition in the clashes. To the disbelief of all those who witnessed the violence and the many thousands who had viewed the footage on news channels and YouTube, he then accused protesters of ”savage” attacks on the military.

The violence on Sunday has cast a further shadow over preparations for parliamentary elections – a crucial next step along the path to democracy for a country that until February had been under the rule of one man for 30 years.

The elections are scheduled to begin on November 28 and run over three rounds, with the new assembly expected to convene in March. Senate elections follow, a new constitution will be drafted, and presidential elections will be held in 2013. Registration opened this week for political parties and the process has already been tainted with evidence of bribery.

”There are a number of reports of violations on the first day of registration, with employees within the registry itself asking for bribes to register parties,” Mr Abdel Tawab says.

Add to that the rules for registration have yet to be confirmed, so political parties, for example, do not know if they can register as a coalition of parties.

”Parties are really afraid that the registration period will end and they still will not have an answer,” he says.

For many in the Coptic community, the future remains troubled. ”The situation will get worse if the government does nothing,” Dr Sameh Fawzy, a political scientist and deputy director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, says.

”The government should apply the rule of law … it is not enough any more to resort to empty and artificial reconciliation processes between Christians and the Muslims who attack them.”
However, Dr Fawzy believes the election is a golden opportunity for the military to show it can run a successful election and hand over power, cementing their role as a legitimate organisation in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Meanwhile Vivian Meleka has no intention of removing the cross. ”That incident actually made me want to find the biggest cross I could possibly find and wear it. I refused to take it off … don’t ask me to hide my religion and my identity,” she says.

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