-Caveat Lector-
Embattled Coptic Christians are Fleeing Egypt
By Charles M. Sennot, Boston Globe 18 January 1999
EXCERPTS:
AL KOSHEH, Egypt - On a sweltering night last summer, the bodies
of two slain Christian men were dumped in the center of the Christian
neighborhood of this remote village on the banks of the upper Nile
River.
. . .
In the weeks after the Aug. 14 murder, the victims' families and
local Christian leaders presented evidence that the killing was done
by a gang of five Muslims. But local police ignored their claims and
rounded up 1,000 Christians from the town for questioning. Christians
charge that police subjected dozens of people, including women and
small children, to beatings and torture to force statements from them
to frame a Christian for the crime. He now faces the death penalty.
Egyptian officials have reacted predictably, critics say, by
concerning themselves more with masking the perception of a Muslim-
Christian divide in Egypt than in investigating the case. The
government thus far has done nothing to reprimand the local police,
all of whom are Muslim.
Instead, they arrested a prominent Coptic bishop for speaking out
against the alleged injustices and a leading human rights worker for
doing the same. Both face charges of fomenting sectarian strife. A
five-count indictment against the bishop includes a charge of
threatening national security, which carries the death penalty.
"What happened in Al Kosheh is a very sad chapter for our
country," said Bishop Wissa, the frail, 60-year-old Coptic cleric, on
the October night he was arrested. "We have traditionally got along
with our Muslim neighbors. But the situation is deteriorating from bad
to worse. We have spoken out and now I may face the death penalty for
doing so. How can I say nothing when this is happening to our people?"
Egypt's nearly six million Copts, by far the largest Christian
population in the Middle East, have for centuries coexisted with
Muslims.... Today they are an embattled minority, and they are leaving in
significant numbers
. . ..
The Coptic church estimates that more than 1 million Christians
have left for the United States, Europe, and Canada over the last
three decades. ... There are 250,000 Copts registered with the North
American
Archdiocese of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
... the Copts have become a smaller minority. In
1975, according to church statistics, the Copts represented close to
20 percent of the total population. Today they are between 6 and 9
percent of Egypt's 60 million population. Discrimination against Copts
is rarely as dramatic as the incident at Al Kosheh. What they claim to
face in their daily lives is far more subtle.
. . .
Copts feel the discrimination in schools, especially in the
poorer neighborhoods of Cairo and small villages of upper Egypt, where
Islamist teachers sometimes distort and insult the Christian faith.
Only the Muslim faith, not Christianity, is taught in mandatory
religion classes in public schools.
As their presence dwindles, Copts are being marginalized
politically and economically. Of the 26 governors appointed by
President Hosni Mubarak, none is a Copt. None of the presidents or
deans at Egypt's universities is a Copt. And with the powerful
professional syndicates increasingly under the control of the
fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, Copts complain that they are
disenfranchised.
. . .
Copts are fiercely proud of their Egyptian identity and generally
reluctant to criticize the Egyptian government. This makes the recent
voices of protest all the more resonant.
Yet they have suffered petty discrimination for centuries. One
lingering example is the 19th-century Ottoman empire restriction
against the construction and even repair of Christian churches without
approval from the highest levels of the government.
Today, this law infuriates the church hierarchy that oversees
once-grand cathedrals and small parish churches that are crumbling.
Bishop Thomas, who oversees a diocese of 21 churches and monasteries,
says many of the properties have cracked foundations, broken steeples,
and lack plumbing.
"I don't know what kind of danger to the state repairing a toilet
poses, but apparently there are security reasons for this," said
Thomas.
. . .
...in 1980 ...president Anwar Sadat courted
Islamic fundamentalists to consolidate power against socialist rivals.
This further embittered the Coptic hierarchy, especially the church
leader, Pope Shenouda III, who charged that Sadat had replaced
nationalism with religion. In 1981, Sadat outraged Copts by putting
Shenouda under house arrest...for four years.
The Islamic militant group Gama Islamiya began targeting Copts in
1991, when it launched a terrorist campaign to overthrow the secular
government of Hosni Mubarak, which responded with a relentless
crackdown that imprisoned 20,000 militants.
. . .
Throughout the Muslim extremists' 8-year battle against the
government, militants have chosen Copts as easy and repeated targets.
Militants firebombed churches and gunned down Copts working in the
wheat and sugar cane fields along the Nile. Perhaps the most dramatic
case occurred on Feb. 12, 1997, in Abu Qurqas, a small town on a wide
bend in the Nile River in upper Egypt near Minya. While a Coptic
student prayer group was gathering in St. George's Church, gunmen whom
police believe to have been Gama Islamiya militants opened fire,
killing nine people.
The church now has armed guards stationed at a steel gate that
leads to its courtyard. On a recent visit, a reporter was permitted to
enter the town only with an armored troop carrier flanked by six
soldiers carrying automatic rifles.
Inside, Emad, 28, an accountant and youth leader of the church,
suspiciously eyes the security officials who appeared in the church.
. . .
When asked about the relationship between Muslims and Christians
in Egypt, Emad retreated into an uncomfortable silence.
... A recent spate of roberies of Coptic jewelry stores is beleived to
have been
a key source of financing for the Gama Islamiya. And Copts complain they
must pay "gezia," a kind of protection tax, which Islamists say is
grounded in Koranic law. Copts who have resisted have been threatened
with death. Some have been killed.
. . .
... in Al Kosheh, the problem was the government, not the
militants. This is why the case there resonates so powerfully among
Copts. Based on dozens of interviews with victims, police ran
roughshod over the Christian part of town from the morning the bodies
were found last Aug. 15 through to the end of September.
Victims claim that police threatened to rape several women. They
described in chilling detail being subjected to electric prods, of
being hung from window grates and in some cases a ceiling fan for
hours during questioning. Evidence of rope burns, bruises, and small
red scars from the prods were visible on the bodies of more than a
dozen victims interviewed by the Globe.
Boctur Abu Yameen, 60, was the first arrested as a suspect. He
said the police also detained members of his family, including his 11-
year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, who were threatened and beaten
while police tried to force them to confess that their father was the
killer. Yameen was held for 34 days without any formal charges before
he was eventually released.
"They began shocking my ears first, and then I was stripped and
the prods were placed on my genitals," he said. "They said things I
cannot repeat about the Lord Jesus."
A Copt, William Artori, has been convicted of the murder and is
sentenced to death. The church and human rights activists say Artori
was wrongly accused and that the only two witnesses against him were
tortured into making statements that they have since recanted. The
five Muslim men whom the Christians suspect of carrying out the murder
- one of whom is reportedly a relative of a high-ranking officer in
Egypt's intelligence agency - were briefly questioned and remain free.
The Egyptian government has found no wrongdoing by police,
according to press reports. Officials say claims of torture were
exaggerated and that they have convicted the right man. Osama El Baz,
a senior adviser to president Mubarak, adamantly denies that
Christians face discrimination. In an interview ...El Baz cited
Egypt's "proud history of religious tolerance."
. . .
El Baz believes the case has attracted interest because
of an orchestrated effort by conservative American Christian groups
and Washington lobbyists for the Israeli government to draw attention
to the "persecution" of Christians in many Muslim countries and China.
. . .
... a report by the respected Egyptian Organization for
Human Rights found that the Al Kosheh case "constituted grave
violations of the rights, freedoms, and human dignity of the people."
In an October interview, the group's secretary general, Hafez Abu
Seda, qualified his findings" Police brutality is widespread against
Muslims and Christians, even if this is an exceptionally dramatic
case. Systematic police brutality...has been an issue for all of
Egypt."
Still Seda, who is Muslim, sharply criticized the government for
doing too little to respond to the events in Al Kosheh. His criticisms
of the government landed him in one of Egypt's worst prisons in the
weeks after the Globe interviewed him. The government charged that his
report was an "act harmful to Egypt." The International Commission of
Jurists has come to his defense, calling his detention "an attempt to
silence the voice of a major and internationally recognized human
rights group."
If the Egyptian government is in fact trying to silence those who
speak out against police brutality, it is not working in Al Kosheh. On
a Sunday afternoon last fall at the Church of the Angel, the Christian
families of Al Kosheh gathered in the courtyard behind a huge steel
gate. Some 400 angry parishioners clamored to tell a reporter their
stories of torture, arbitrary arrest, and vicious attacks on their
faith by police.
[Editing by Dr. Joseph Lerner, IMRA]
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