Spectator's Journal: Egypt's Human Wrongs
Aikman, David
S ECTATOR' S JOURNAL by David Airman Egypt's Human Wrongs Cairo I n the early hours of August 14 last year, two Coptic Christians were bludgeoned to death in the small Egyptian village of...
...Of Egypt's 28 provincial governors and 15 university presidents, none is Christian...
...The human-rights movement in Egypt has been set back more than 5o years," he wrote, "roughly to before the days of eminent progressive thinker Mahmoud Azmi, who played a pioneering role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...This time they had an arrest warrant for Mustafa Zeidan, the EOHR lawyer who had written up the original report on El-Kosheh...
...Not a single Egyptian official, he complained, had even visited the village to investigate the complaints he had passed on...
...Once you begin drifting away from human rights, there is no end...
...Congress...
...Perhaps, though, the killer was not a Copt at all, but a Muslim, or several Muslims, in a village where 70 percent of the population is Christian...
...The Cairo Times, an English-language weekly,described Abu Seada's arrest as "the most serious campaign against the human rights movement in Egypt since it began 13 years ago...
...What happened next was an astonishing media attack on the Egyptian Office of Human Rights (EOHR...
...The interrogations went on...
...What makes Egyptians at both official and unofficial levels so hyper-sensitive to human-rights criticism is the reality that Coptic Christians, almost ten percent of the population, are essentially second-class citizens who are haphazardly tolerated...
...The usually independent weekly Al-Osboa in late November ran a copy of a check for $25,703 that had been paid to the EOHR by a British parliamentary committee...
...The Egyptian government claims that human-rights conditions "have improved tremendously" in recent years, but native Christians disagree...
...Commenting on the International Religious Freedom Act passed by the House and Senate last fall, Salaheddin Hafiz, managing editor of the prestigious Cairo daily Al-Ahram, opined that Americans had "turned the gentle and tolerant tenets of Christianity into Nazi racism, fascist extremism, and McCarthyite ignorance...
...Unfortunately, Egyptian human-rights organizations have no legal status in their own country...
...a senior Coptic bishop had been arrested and charged with disturbing the public order, and letters of protest and complaint about El-Kosheh and its aftermath had descended upon Cairo from human rights groups all over the world and members of the U.S...
...The following week, it was the turn of another Egyptian human-rights group, the Egyptian Human Rights for National Unity, to be blasted by Al-Osboa...
...Over dinner in December, a prominent Egyptian news executive fell back on a common Middle Eastern theory that Monica Lewin-sky was part of a major Jewish plot, contrived in part by Israel's Mossad, to bring down Bill Clinton...
...But no sooner was Abu Seada out of custody than Cairo's police went on the offensive again...
...In fact, the payment was part of a support program arranged well Christian Copts continue to be brutally singled out...
...By mid-December, the most respected human-rights observer in Egypt had been picked up by police in Cairo and held for four days as a common criminal...
...He imagines himself," snickered Al-Osboa, "as Martin Luther and sometimes Nelson Mandela, and he wants to put Egypt's Copts and African-Americans in the same category...
...The second was far more dramatic: the December 2 arrest in Cairo of EOHR's president, Hafez Abu Seada...
...If it is not a real democracy, neither is it a Syria or Iraq...
...To their credit, some Egyptian newspapers were outraged by the defamatory tactics ofAl-Osboa and the crude response by Egyptian security authorities...
...Or perhaps it was prompted by the prisoner's itinerary...
...After an Internet alert, world protests again poured in...
...He went on: "In this contrived clash between Christianity and Islam, it is imperative to search for Zionist hands...
...Salama A. Salama, a columnist for A/- Ahram Weekly, was even more scathing...
...Some of the women were stripped naked and threatened with rape if they didn't reveal who the murderer was...
...The country's principal Coptic newspaper, El-Wattani, ran the headline: "A few policemen have turned their police center into a slaughter house...
...Within days, the Egyptian Office of Human Rights, Egypt's best-known non-governmental organization (NGO) dealing with human rights, had written up its report and sent it to both Egyptian newspapers and foreign human-rights organizations monitoring the situation...
...Translation: The EOHR had merely obeyed foreign and hostile paymasters when its original El-Kosheh report came out in late September...
...In Upper Egypt particularly, Christian villagers have been brutally murdered and assaulted by Islamic militants, often with official indifference to the crime...
...The American Spectator • March 1999 65...
...An intense suspicion of and hostility towards Jews is not far below the surface...
...It ought to have been a simple enough matter to investigate...
...The U.S...
...Meanwhile, Bishop Wissa began to speak out against what had taken place in ElKosheh and the deafening silence fromprovincial and Cairo officials...
...Egypt, some native journalists have written, is ruled by a system of "soft authoritarianism" rather than the one-man dictatorship or oligarchies that reign elsewhere in the Arab world...
...The bishop got off lightly...
...And only six of its 44o members of Congress are Christian (all of them appointed...
...T he El-Kosheh affair has underlined the tenuous concept of human rights in Egypt and the risks faced by its activists...
...After two hours of questioning he was booked on charges that ranged from "using a place of religion to slander police work," to "hiding proof of a crime" (the bishop asserted that villagers had told him who they thought the real murderer was...
...The scale and brutality of the arrests shocked even Egyptians, long familiar with national police methods...
...The police are harsh and rough against everybody," he says...
...Richard Lugar that three Egyptian Christian converts were finally freed from jail and permitted to leave the country...
...64 March 1999 The American Spectator before the El-Kosheh incident surfaced...
...While it is a simple matter for any Egyptian Christian to legally change his religion and official identification to Muslim, it is virtually impossible — and almost suicidal—for any Muslim to register with the police as a Christian...
...But the El-Kosheh police authorities, their superiors, and the government in Cairo itself have managed to turn an obscure rural murder into the most serious blot on Egypt's human-rights record in decades...
...By December 6, the foreign pressures had apparently moved the bovine Egyptian security authorities to release Seada...
...Egyptian Christians, said the story, had been "subjected to horrific crucifixion rituals," then "raped and tortured by security forces during a crackdown on the ancient Coptic community...
...Even though NGOs have been technically permitted to exist in Egypt since 1994, internal security emergency laws, imposed by President Mubarak in 1990 to counter Islamic terrorism, effectively prevent any public airing of issues the government is uncomfortable facing—especially in the human-rights field...
...S ECTATOR' S JOURNAL by David Airman Egypt's Human Wrongs Cairo I n the early hours of August 14 last year, two Coptic Christians were bludgeoned to death in the small Egyptian village of El-Kosheh, in Sohag province, not far from Luxor...
...He was then released on bail...
...The New York-based Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of Jurists were among several foreign organizations that immediately protested the arrest to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak...
...The day after his release Seada flew to Paris where, by previous arrangement, he addressed a summit of human-rights defenders...
...Noor believes there may have been some exaggeration by the villagers of what happened in El-Kosheh, but not sufficient to warrant the Egyptian government's attack on the country's human-rights activists...
...Menes Abdul Noor of Cairo's Kasr El Dobara Evangelical Church, one of the largest evangelical Christian churches in the Middle East...
...Though Abu Seada was not mistreated in confinement, his head was shaved and for a time he shared a cell with common criminals...
...These latter have sometimes been arrested by Egyptian security police, held incommunicado for weeks andmonths, and subjected to horrific tortures and beatings...
...Torture began to be used against Muslim converts to Christianity in 199o, says Rev...
...The identity of the killer or killers may never be known for sure...
...The High State Security Prosecutor initially ordered Abu Seada held for 15 days on three charges: "receiving money from a foreign country in order to damage the national interest, spreading rumors which affect the country's interests, and violating the decree against collecting donations without obtaining permission from the appropriate authorities...
...Perhaps, as some villagers asserted, the murderer was their cousin, a fellow Copt who may have spent the night drinking and card-playing with them...
...president, the executive explained, had been too sympathetic to the Palestinians...
...As one Cairo-based Western diplomat put it, "the Egyptian police are not designed to investigate, they are designed to keep order...
...Some were tied, spread-eagle fashion, to a metal grill for up to three days, with electrodes attached to different parts of their bodies to jog their memories...
...The price of treason," sneered the caption...
...Finally, on September Io and a few days later, Egyptian human-rights delegations traveled to the village to investigate...
...In 1990 it was only through the vigorous and persistent protests of Sen...
...But the damage was done...
...Headlining its story "The Trojan Horse of Egypt," the paper savaged EHRNU's president Moris Sadik in terms reminiscent of Komsomolskaya Pravda during the Cold War...
...In fact, last year's 5oth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, to which Egypt was a signatory, was featured in Egyptian newspapers throughout December, even as the government was clumsily cracking down on its own human-rights activists...
...Though Egyptians are almost universally friendly and warm towards foreigners and tend to see themselves as torchbearers of cultural sophistication and attainment within the Arab world, they can lurch into unaccountable paranoia when explaining themselves to the outside world...
...The El-Kosheh affair might still have been swept over by the sands of Egyptian daily life had it not been for a lurid and exaggerated account of the incident by a reporter for the British Daily Telegraph...
...As the arrests and tortures continued, two Coptic pastors in the village contacted their local bishop, Anbar Wissa, who protested immediately to the local police chief...
...ut officially approved media snarling B was merely Cairo's first response to El-Kosheh's publicity...
...Within two weeks of the murder, the local police set in motion a round-up and interrogation of literally hundreds of the villagers, almost every single one of them fellow Copts...
...As letters of outrage began to hum across Egyptian government fax machines from the British parliament and U.S...
...Others were beaten and gouged with instruments that left huge red welts all over their backs...
...Congress, Cairo's often prickly sense of vulnerability to foreign criticism surfaced rapidly...
...DAVID AIKMAN is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...In fact, as Egyptian human-rights activists themselves aknowledged, rapes and crucifixions had been threatened but never carried out...
...First, Bishop Wissa was summoned to police headquarters in Sohag province and held for a day...
...The El-Kosheh murder itself might have never made it into the Egyptian press but for the extraordinarily clumsy and brutal actions of the investigating authorities...
...Though none of the detainees was held for more than a week, most of them were subjected to beatings or torture of a kind rarely encountered anywhere on such a huge scale...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
