10 October 2011. A World to Win News Service. The political situation in Egypt has turned even more complicated and explosive in the wake of an attack on Coptic Christians. A 9 October march demanding an end to discrimination and attacks against Copts was met by a level of violence unseen since President Hosni Mubarak turned over power to the military last February. This in turn led to a fierce protest against the ruling Supreme Armed Forces Council (SAFC). The fighting that afternoon and into the night left two dozen dead and hundreds injured, according to official sources.
Although discrimination and attacks on members of the Coptic Church are nothing new, they have worsened in the last year. Fire bomb attacks on churches killed 20 people in January and 12 in May, and in March Islamic-Coptic fighting in Tahrir Square left 13 dead. With one exception, no one has even been arrested for these atrocities. The immediate incident that sparked this most recent march was the burning of a church and two Christian-owned homes in a town in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan.
While condemning the attack, the provincial governor, a general, placed the blame on the Copts for breaking the law, saying they had been praying illegally in a building not specifically licensed for Christian services as the law requires. Coptic officials pointed out that the building, burned down to prevent its renovation, had been used as a church for 80 years and that official permission is difficult or impossible to acquire. Shortly after, protests in Cairo and Alexandria demanded that the governor be fired. Some demonstrators called for the resignation of SACF head Field Marshall Mohamed Tantawi and the Interior Minister. Soldiers and riot police forcibly dispersed these early October protests. A video posted on Youtube showed them beating a priest.
On Sunday, 9 October, many thousands of people gathered in Shubra, a Cairo district with a large Coptic concentration. The majority but not all were Christians. They marched toward Maspero Square where the state-owned TV station is located. At a traffic underpass, men in civilian clothing on the bridge above began to pour down rocks on the marchers, and gunshots were heard. The crowd pushed on to Maspero Square chanting, "This is our country!" Some shouted, "The people want the fall of the Field Marshall!", the same slogan that led to Mubarak's downfall. At the square they were met with gunfire. Two armoured personnel carriers (APCs) roared out from behind military lines, their machine gun turrets whirling as they shot in all directions. Then at least one of them ploughed through the crowd, dragging a half dozen or more people under its wheels.
As the morgue in a Christian hospital began to fill with crushed bodies and gunshot victims, state television announced that the Christians had stolen army weapons and killed soldiers. The official media called on "honest Egyptians" to come defend the soldiers. But word-of-mouth and social media were also bringing people to Maspero Square and nearby Tahrir Square, ground zero for the Egyptian revolt. (Another demonstration was going on in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.) Many came to defend the Copts and demand the end of military rule. Others, chanting,"The people want the fall of the Copts" and "There is no god but Allah", came to kill Christians.
Witnesses indicate that the police and army concentrated on attacking Copts and their defenders, some of whom were throwing stones and burning police vehicles in reaction to the attacks. But there was also fighting between Copts and Moslem fundamentalists, and even soldiers and Islamics. Instead of neat battle lines, there was chaos. According to the regime, the dead included several soldiers, although later this was put in doubt. Elsewhere in Cairo, mobs attacked Christian-owned businesses.
The army imposed a curfew, but the next day, Monday, was not calm. There were outbursts at the hospital and other places as family members came to claim the crushed and mutilated bodies of their loved ones. (Survivors said they were afraid to go to state-run hospitals, or to entrust their dead to them.) Joint police-army patrols in central Cairo stopped people and demanded ID, and beat them if their names revealed they were Christian. They even did this in media offices.
That afternoon about 20,000 people marched from the Coptic hospital on Ramses Street to the main cathedral and on to Maspero Square, chanting "Muslims and Copts are one hand!", "This is not a sectarian conflict, this is a massacre!" and "Down with military rule!" Along the way neighbourhood residents passed out water bottles to the marchers.
Military spokesmen denounced a "foreign hand" behind the disturbances and warned that there would be an investigation and arrests. Those arrested, they said, would be subject to military trials.
By the day after the massacre, much of Egyptian society had become polarized between the military and its numerous supporters, and those who believe that all Egyptians should have the same rights.
Just as the military had responded to a September march demanding an end to the use of military tribunals against civilians by arresting protesters and holding them for military trial, so now the military has responded to criticism for failing to protect Copts by stepping up both violence and propaganda against these Christians. The accusation that they serve a "foreign hand" is meant to imply that somehow the Western powers are behind attempts to "destabilise" the regime. But the truth is the opposite. For decades the US has given more money to the Egyptian military than any other except Israel's, and the Western powers are counting on it to preserve imperialist economic and political domination. The real "foreign hand" at work is the Egyptian armed forces as they fight to stabilise their rule as a servant of the West, particularly Washington.
Historically, the Copts, who comprise about ten percent of the country's population, included many landowners and figures in the urban elite. Their roots in Egypt go back much further than Islam – their language comes from the ancient Egyptian tongue. The Coptic church arose through a break with the other streams of Christianity in the fifth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Copts were often associated with others in what was once Egypt's large Christian population (Armenians, Greeks, Italians and many other settler communities) whose Westernized culture was both linked to the country's oppression as a British colony and kept Egyptian intellectual life tightly linked to the rest of the world. The 1952 military revolution led by Gamal Nasser that overthrew London's puppet king and drove out the British occupation forces also largely pushed Copts out of public office and much of public life.
Since then official attacks on the Copts have always been a way to hide political and economic reliance on foreign powers (in Nasser's case the US and USSR at various times) by upholding first "Arabism" and later Islam as Egypt's identity and soul, in opposition to the concept of an Egyptian nation.
In some Western countries, historically anti-Semitism served to promote an identity between antagonistic classes against an illusory common enemy. Anti-Coptic propaganda and pogroms have played a similar role at times in Egypt, but the result and often conscious aim has also been to substitute an illusory religious identity (Islamic culture versus some vaguely-defined secular/"Western" life style) for any project for real national liberation.
Actually, Nasser's successors, his fellow military strongmen Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, courted the Coptic church, even while also courting Islamics, seeing both religions as bulwarks against social unrest. The Coptic church officially supported Mubarak and instructed its followers to do likewise – in the name of avoiding an Islamic regime. If the church has not enjoyed the same relations with today's ruling generals, at least to some extent that is because its officials fear that the armed forces are ready to feed them to the Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the Pope of the Coptic Church, Shenuda III, blamed "strangers... infiltrators" for attacking the security forces.
It is revealing that although today's Coptic demonstrations often contain a strong religious current, the regime and its supporters lump Copts together with political radicals and secularists in general. That says something about how dividing lines are forming.
The Wafd party, historically the main proponent of parliamentary democracy, has unleashed an invective against the Copts that is matched only by the official media and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Wafd newspaper condemned the Copts for "aggression" against the armed forces that imperils the country's transition to "democracy".
The Muslim Brotherhood was both built up and persecuted during previous regimes. Like the armed forces, it officially condemned violence against Copts. But like the military, its criticism of both sides, Copts and their killers, is far from even handed. A Brotherhood spokesman bluntly declared that "all Egyptian people have legitimate demands, not just our Coptic brothers. This is certainly not the right time to demand them", repeating the argument that any protests against the military endangers the transition to a parliamentary regime, specifically by disrupting preparations for the first round of elections in late November. They said the same thing about demonstrations for women's rights a few months ago – to slightly veil the fact they they actually oppose equal rights for women. The women were also brutally attacked.
While there are major differences between the Brotherhood (which says it is for a "civil" and not religious state) and the Salafists (Muslim fundamentalists) who have been in the forefront of the attacks, and while the relationships between the Brotherhood, the Salafists and the military are complicated and unpredictable, there is a consensus among many reactionary forces that the new state is going to be Islamic in some form or another. In that case, Copts are not going to get equal rights with Muslims (for instance, the law forbids Muslims to convert to Christianity but not the other way). In some form or other, more than ever Islam will be a major source of legitimacy for the state and promoted as the country's social "glue".
That, of course, is meant to exclude and repress anything "anti-Islamic", including revolutionary thinking and forces, not just Coptic Christianity. One of Egypt's most prominent bloggers pointed out that with this unrestrained attack against a relatively isolated religious minority, the military was demonstrating what it could do to any serious threat to its rule. But this is being done in the name of Islam, as if it represented a change, a recovery of the people's dignity, even a part of "the revolution" the military claims to represent. It is not openly presented as part of an economic, political and ideological package that represents continuity with Egyptian society as it was under Mubarak and his precursors.
Despite the fall of Mubarak and the intense, vibrant political life that victory has enabled people to enjoy, Egypt remains a country whose economy is structured principally by the interests of US and European capital. Its people share a common national identity and need their nation to break free of foreign domination if the society is to be transformed in their interests – if they are to be fulfilled as human beings and not merely consoled by religion – and if they are to play their role in transforming the whole world.
It is important to note that the military and the Islamics have found common ground with some (but not all) supposedly secular forces like the pro-Western Wafd. Some people fear that the only alternatives are between a pro-US military regime and an Islamic regime. It is becoming clearer that the electoral process that is supposed to become the centre of all political thinking and activity for the next several years could result in a combination of both.
None of the official "choices" the electoral process is offering can satisfy the aspirations that have brought enormous numbers of people into the streets. Masks are dropping. In September the armed forces bowed to orders from the US to protect the Israeli embassy. Even some people who were against the attack on the embassy were very happy after an angry crowd forced the Israeli ambassador to flee. Now the military's unleashing of Islamic violence to rally a section of the people around it is profoundly disturbing even to many who once chanted "The people and army are one!" Events themselves are pushing many people to take stands they had once never intended to take.
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