Editor: Osama al-Ghazoly is a seasoned journalist who we asked to evaluate the media discourse on Izbet Bushra, paying special attention to coverage given to expatriate Coptic websites. Since some of these websites make reference to human rights reports produced in Egypt, Osama has also involved these testimonies into his analysis. The end result is a paper which evaluates the coverage of Izbet Bushra while also putting forward Osama’s personal insight into the interreligious tensions in certain Egyptian settings. The sources for the websites are listed at the end of this report.
Al-Misrī Al-Yawm, while reporting on sectarian violence in Egypt, quoted the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Hossam Bahgat, an author of a report onsectarian violence. Baghat claims that Egypt is "witnessing an expansion in the geographical scope of sectarian violence as well as an increase in the frequency of incidents related to religious communities."
While Bahgat says that the majority of sectarian clashes started as non-religious incidents, he fails to explain why they developed into sectarian clashes. Yet he recognized an "underlying tension in the society" and that whenever there is "an interaction between a Muslim and a Christian, you cannot say for sure there [was] zero influence of religious belief." He saw that security agencies were partially responsible, not for the causes of sectarian tensions, but for short-sightedness, brutality, arbitrary arrests of people from both sides, and the failure to look for the causes of violence. Bahgat accused the Egyptian government of failing to protect the rights of victims of violence and of only looking for temporary solutions that were aimed to momentarily appease the situation.
Throughout Al-Misrī ‘s article, Bahgat described the response of the Egyptian government and its security agencies to sectarian violence. No mention whatsoever is made, however, of the cause of this sectarian tension.
Nader Shukry of the US Copts Association reports a most alarming situation: A masked man shot at a Christian family in Ezbet Bushra. Although no one was hurt, the fact that this occurred in the villages of Beni Suef, in July 2009, gives rise to a sense of imminent danger. This account of the shooting, however, and of the five weeks of clashes following the Ezbet Bushra incident, is not supported by any sources at all, be they primary or secondary. Of course there are tensions and clashes occur, but how often? How violent? Who are the culprits? What are the underlying causes? These are questions which are either ignored or speculated at.
The reader of the reports that we will be reviewing here will be able to distinguish fact from mere speculation, by accepting the statements given by different individuals in different venues and at different times. The authors, including Nader Shukry, spoke about how unnecessarily difficult it is for Christians to build a church. They also stated that all the security forces want is to enforce quiet and order, usually by arbitrary and hasty arrests of people from both sides. Furthermore, they reported that reconciliation is meaningless when culprits go unpunished. Yet there is still a huge problem here—all authors of these ten reports are Copts. No matter how balanced they may strive to be, the presentation of their reports is one-sided.
Nader Shukry further reports that Fr. Abdel Qudous Hanna of Ezbet Bushra told the Arabic speaking Coptic newspaper Watanī that following the ‘reconciliation’ the security officials shut down the house where the Copts had been conducting prayers, promising to provide them with an alternative site in which to perform their religious rites. Yet according to the priest security has not kept its word. Fr. Abdel-Qodous said, “We neither have our old house to pray in, nor any other alternative. In short, we have been practically deprived of our right to pray in our village.”
When Cornelis Hulsman, from Arab-West Report, and I went to Ezbet Bushra in January 2010, we were told by villagers that Copts were given a piece of land to erect a new place for prayer. Security authorities told both sides that this would happen once the situation went back to normal.
Nader Shukry quoted a number of intellectuals interviewed by Watanī about the sectarian clashes in Upper Egypt. One of these was Baheieddin Hasan, head of the Cairo Research Centre, who attributed the clashes and the tensions leading to them to faulty government policies, especially in the fields of culture, media, and education. He stated, "That’s what comes out of the absence of a serious state policy to handle the issue, and the poor crisis management on the security, political, legislative, education, or media levels. Decades of official disregard, sidelining, and denial of rights and equality between Egyptians have brought us to where we are today,” he claimed. “Muslims grow up in a culture, both in schools and in the media, which promotes the notion that Christians are not entitled to the same rights as Muslims.”
In a conversation I had with Dr. Jihad Awdeh of Helwan University on December 27, 2009, Dr. Awdeh criticized Hassan for focusing on the role of the state while ignoring or paying little attention to prevalent social and cultural structures and inherited values that both the society and the state do not have the guts to challenge.
Another Muslim intellectual, Salah Eissa, denounced the reconciliation sessions as “pain killers" that only give momentary relief while giving the “deadly ailment" a chance to "eat up the body of the nation". Eissa was more concrete when he recommended that the parliament should come up with "a unified law for building houses of worship" for the Muslims and Christians of Egypt. Dr. Emad Gad, a prominent Coptic intellectual, agreed with what Eissa said about the unified law for building houses of worship and blamed governors for failing to pay sufficient attention to Copts in their areas. Other intellectuals also called for a unified law for building houses of worship, according to Nader Shukry, quoting the Watanī article. Among these were Nabeel Abdel Fattah from Al Ahram, Dr. Mostapha El Fiki, chairman of Foreign Relations Committee in the parliament, and Dr. Abdel Muti Bayyomy from Al Azhar University.
Journalist William Wassef, quoted by Shukry, said that, "While the state conveniently turns a blind eye," Muslim "clerics", he claims, "not only describe Christians as unbelievers, but also urge worshipers to be offensive to them.” As to the security officials, he said, “Such sectarian attacks take place as they look on and procrastinate." Dr. Bayyomy rejected this generalization which concerned the clerics, saying that "most of them call for tolerance".
Although the Free Copts website addresses the issue of sectarian clashes in Egypt in a rather emotional and even one-sided way, content analysis will show that it adopts the same basic arguments put forward by the authors of all ten reports reviewed here. Most all people interviewed therein take the following stance: The futility of reconciliation sessions, the need to recognize equal religious rights of Muslims and Christians in Egypt, and the impact of procrastination on security issues. Free Copts, along with almost all Egyptians, recognizes that the events in Khanka in 1972 were the starting point of sectarian tensions in Egypt.
Guirguis Bushra from Copts United interviewed Fr. Hanna of Ezbet Bushra for the Al Bashsyer online publication. In this interview Fr. Hanna was very critical of the security forces and of the way they handled the situation in Ezbet Bushra. Here he states that all villagers in Ezbet Bushra are good neighbors. Muslims and Christians, all over Egypt, are peaceful fellow citizens and they all are the loving children of President Mubarak; for him it is the security forces which are to blame for all the troubles.
This very interview has been summed up, in a far less balanced way, on the "Bent el Halal" Coptic website. Similarly, the Canadian Coptic association published an article by Safwat Yussef, editor in chief of Nida'a Al Watan, that puts the clashes in Ezbet Bushra, Ezbet Guirguis, Ezbet Rizkalla, and Thoma village into a supra-sectarian context reminding his readers of Coptic champions of liberty, like naval officer Awny Azer and Stephen Decatur. He warns against reconciliation sessions, provocative rumors, and government procrastination when it comes to the need for a unified law for building houses of worship; all of these are threats to national unity. He refers to Muslims, however, as "our brethren".
Osama Eid, on the Free Copts website, dealt with the Ezbet Bushra incidents from a constitutional perspective demanding that the Copts should insist on their rights as Egyptians citizens and warns them against giving in to security or bureaucratic pressures. He gave a list of sixteen Copts arrested by security. As other reports claimed that security resorts to arresting people from both sides—an old security practice in Egypt—one should ask where are the names of Muslims arrested in the same incident? This is inconsistent with the national spirit of the piece written by Osama Eid.
The "Copts Rights" website sees the events that took place in Ezbet Bushra as a downright aggression. Muslim villagers and security forces preyed on the Copts whose only crime was that they prayed in a place bought by bishop Istiphanos with the consent of the security forces. Circumstances changed suddenly, they report, with the return of Father Kastour whereupon the security forces prevented the Copts from either praying in that house or visiting his residence.
In conclusion I would say that the ten reports have these points in common:
· The need for parliament to pass a unified law for building places of worship.
· Instigators and Perpetrators of sectarian violence must not be allowed to get away with it.
· Justice comes before reconciliation.
· Inflammatory sermons from Muslim clerics and flaws in the cultural, educational and media systems are at the roots of sectarian troubles.
Yet, the supra-sectarian spirit that imbued most of the reports should not be an excuse for complacency, because there is a persistent call for change in the way the problem of escalating sectarian tensions is being dealt with by all major players in the society.
Editor: The ten website reports reviewed by Osama al-Ghazoly are listed here:
العربية