Posted on 12/10/2004 2:23:50 AM PST by miltonim
CAIRO, Egypt, 4 January, 2000 (Newsroom) – Investigators from the state security prosecutor’s office in Cairo have begun official inquiries in Al Kosheh, where at least 20 Christians were killed over the weekend in the worst sectarian violence to hit Egypt in two decades.
The Health Ministry sent a team of surgeons on Monday to treat the wounded, who numbered more than 44, according to witnesses. Security police have put the village of Al Kosheh, about 250 miles south of Cairo, and surrounding hamlets under curfew and cordoned off the area to outsiders.
According to media reports, the violence that began on New Year’s Eve resulted from a financial dispute between a Muslim and a Christian shopkeeper in the village. It escalated when the Muslim and his brothers attacked the man’s shop and those of other Christians. Residents said that for three days, religiously motivated killing, rioting, and looting tore through the predominately Coptic Christian village and spread to the nearby hamlets of Dar el-Salam and Awlad Toq Garb.
Witnesses in Dar el-Salam said protesters who claimed that Christians had attacked Muslims damaged and burned scores of Christian-owned shops and offices. They said police opened fire to disperse the demonstrators, some of whom fired back, and that more security forces were called to restore order.
The Coptic Orthodox bishop of the region, Bishop Wissa, reported that a village church and 50 houses, shops, and warehouses were burned in Awlad Toq Garb. On Tuesday, he conducted funeral services for the Christian dead. He maintains that 25 Christians have been killed and 10 are missing.
Pope Shenouda, spiritual leader of the Orthodox Coptic Church, as of Tuesday had not made a public statement on the violence in Al Kosheh. According to his emissary, Bishop Marcos, the church is waiting for the government to complete its own investigation of the events. State investigators arrived in the village on Monday.
Egyptian officials said 21 people were arrested for looting and arson. They also said three people were arrested on Sunday night for driving around with a loudspeaker and telling villagers that their tap water had been poisoned.
Prime Minister Atef Obeid assembled his key cabinet ministers on Tuesday to discuss how to stop further communal violence in the Al Kosheh region. According to the state-run Al Ahram daily, the ministers were expected to come up with "radical solutions" to prevent a repeat of the "distressing events which go against the tolerant nature of Egyptian society."
The village of Al Kosheh is no stranger to religious tensions. It drew international attention in 1998 when police brutally interrogated some 1,000 Christians in a murder investigation of two Copts killed in the village during a gambling brawl. Official inquiries exonerated the police. In fact, the same top two security officers during the first Al Kosheh incident, General Sayed Abu Maali and Mahmoud Zakar, have remained in their posts.
Bishop Marcos, whom Pope Shenouda sent with another church official to the area on Monday to investigate, believes that the local security forces could have prevented the sectarian violence from spinning out of control if police had acted quickly and decisively when the problems began last Friday.
The head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, Hafez Abu Saada, agrees. "The security of the Sohag governorate should have taken control of the situation after the first clash last Friday," he said. "The police ought to have secured the village; instead they left it."
Bishop Marcos said that the government should replace those responsible for Al Kosheh’s security as one of the first steps toward redressing the situation. He said that villagers have not been able to trust the officers because of their past record. With the latest rampage of killing and destruction, they will be even less inclined to do so.
"Healing is possible between the area’s Christians and Muslims, not just starting with the clergy but also among social and political leaders and their followers," said Marcos. But "the anger of the Christians must first be absorbed."
Some Protestants in the area who asked not to be named assert that the Copts may have unwittingly helped stoke the flames of communal tensions. They said the international attention provided to Al Kosheh and the Orthodox Church over the past two years may have made some in the village and in the church hierarchy a little "cocky."
They cited an award given recently by the Washington-based Freedom House Center for Religious Freedom to Bishop Wissa for his human rights and religious freedom efforts. They also pointed to the fresh construction of an Orthodox church in Al Kosheh. Church building in Egypt requires permission from the country’s governors and is not easily obtained.
Joseph Assad of Freedom House, who led a congressional delegation to Egypt last month, disagrees, arguing that international attention has improved conditions for Coptic Christians. "What’s been reported to us by Protestants and Orthodox is that things have gotten better," he said. "People are able to repair churches. More permits are being given. President Mubarak told the delegation that Christians would no longer have to get repair permits. That’s a big change in a policy."
Members of the delegation sent a letter to President Mubarak on Monday asking him to dispatch troops trained in controlling mobs and to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, including police officers who reportedly escalated the violence by wounding three Christian farmers passing by the shop on Friday.
Milad Hanna, a Coptic advocate for religious tolerance, and others contend that the role of the police in Al Kosheh is the pivotal issue the government must tackle to redress Egypt’s communal discord. "The government is not doing its homework. It’s satisfied with police reports and the work of the security forces," Hanna argued. "But it’s not addressing the political and social imbalances in the country. It’s like putting ointment on cancer when chemotherapy is what’s needed."
The government bears much responsibility for the violence last weekend, Assad argued, because it failed to adequately investigate or discipline police responsible for the arrest, torture and abuse of more than 1,000 Christians in Al Kosheh during the murder investigation in August and September 1998.
"Local police -- none of whom was held accountable in the brutal anti-Christian dragnet in Al Kosheh in 1998 -- must not be entrusted with protecting the same besieged community today," said Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. "These police are abusive, inept and may themselves harbor hatred and intolerance of the Christian minority in the area. Moreover, the fact that Egypt has so far denied justice to the Christians of Al Kosheh after they were assaulted by police in 1998 may have signaled to extremist elements in the Muslim community that the Christian minority can be attacked and driven from their homes with impunity."
Freedom House is deeply concerned that the Egyptian government consistently downplays the seriousness of violence against Christians in Upper Egypt, Shea said. The government initially portrayed the latest wave of violence as an isolated and random incident involving far fewer deaths than those reported by local human rights defenders and the international media. If the Egyptian government fails to take appropriate police action and legal means this time, she warned, the situation may spin out of control.
Outlying provinces suffer from a lack of economic resources and development as well, Hanna said. He believes that sectarian tensions would ease if more government funds were pumped into depressed areas to raise the standard of living and to make such communities economically viable.
Hanna and Abu Saada also raised questions about why the violence erupted at the start of the new year and millennium just days before Muslims celebrate the end of their holy month of fasting, Ramadan, and Egypt’s Christians celebrate their Christmas. Orthodox Christians observe Christmas on January 7 this year. Ramadan ends the next day.
"In the past we have seen increased violence in that part of the world toward the end of Ramadan," said Assad of Freedom House.
Abu Saada dismissed Hanna’s concern that an upcoming trial in February might have had something to do with the unrest. Two Christians will be tried in connection with the murder of the Christian gamblers that sparked the first Al Kosheh incident in 1998.
Egypt often comes under fire from exiled Coptic groups who allege official persecution of their minority, a charge the government denies. It says its mainly Muslim population of nearly 64 million includes some 6 million Copts. Coptic leaders say their community numbers 10 million. Many villages in Upper Egypt or the southern part of the country have a high percentage of resident Copts. Sectarian violence between private Muslims and Christians, at least on the scale of the Al Kosheh clashes, is rare. The U.S. Coptic Association and the Egyptian government agree on one point: There is no evidence of involvement by Muslim militant groups in the latest violence in Al Kosheh.
Islamic militants, for their own part, have included Christians as part of their campaign to overthrow the Mubarak government and set up a strict Islamic state. In one of the worst previous periods of violence, 25 Copts were killed by Islamic militants in Assuit province between March 1992 and March 1993. Dozens of their stores were burned. In February 1997, Muslim militants killed 10 Christians in a church in the southern village of Abu Qurqas. That attack was seen at the time as the work of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, Egypt’s largest militant group.
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