Pyramid Shadows Hide Persecution

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Aimee Howd

Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak gets $2 billion from the United States for his efforts in the Middle East peace process but tolerates attacks on Christians in his land.

Unresolved reports of detainment and torture of hundreds of Christian families plagued Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's private meetings during his visit to Washington in June. Publicly, Mubarak was feted for his foreign-policy record as a valuable player in the Middle East peace process. Privately, President Clinton, State Department officials and roughly a dozen members of Congress are said to have asked the leader to look into a disturbing domestic problem officially denied by his government, outrages at El Kosheh.

That story began obscurely on Aug. 14, 1998, with the murder of two Coptic Christians in the small town of El Kosheh about 35 miles north of Luxor in upper Egypt. It might have ended just as obscurely. But the brutal police investigation that commenced the next day has become the largest blemish on Egypt's human-rights record in decades.

In an apparent attempt to avoid arresting Muslim suspects, officers rounded up Christian men, women and children in groups of 50 and 60 throughout the months of August and September and dragged them into the police headquarters in an effort to force confessions to the murders.

The family of Boctor Abu Al-Yameen Michael, in particular, was targeted for a forced confession. Sources say police quickly had plotted to rape his 15-year-old daughter and blame the crime on the murdered men to create a credible motive of revenge so that they could frame Boctor for their deaths. The local bishop, Anbar Wissa, was able to hide the girl before the police carried out their plan, say sources knowledgeable about the incident, but the rest of her family was stripped and brutally tortured with electric wires and shocks to their genitals and feet. Her 11-year-old brother, Romani, was hung from a ceiling fan and police turned the switch on and off until he lost consciousness. But that was only the beginning.

Such insanity results from Egypt's harsh political climate, experts say. Internal battles with radical Islamists seeking by force to create an Islamic republic have kept the nation in a state of emergency for 20 years. Political rights and civil liberties have been undermined for all, but for none so much as the Coptic Christians.

Within the 70 percent Christian village of El Kosheh, Muslim and Christian had lived peaceably for years. While a majority of Egypt's 60 million citizens are Muslim, the nation is home to 6 million to 10 million Christians, the most of any nation in the Middle East. They mostly are Coptic Orthodox, a faith well-established before Arabs invaded in the seventh century. The Copts long have been treated as second-class citizens as part of the government's carrot-and-stick strategy for keeping Islamic fundamentalists manageable. And so Egypt's Christians remain among the more than 50 percent of the world's people living under regimes that restrict the free practice of religious faith.

In the wake of two fact-finding Missions led by Paul Marshall, a senior Fellow of the Center for Religious Freedom, the human-rights organization Freedom House has concluded that Coptic Christians regularly are "subjected to persecution and discrimination by Islamic extremists, and in some cases, even by local government authorities."

Onerous policies of the Egyptian government toward Christians documented by Freedom House include restricting building or repairing churches; denying equal rights to Christians concerning conversion, marriage, parenthood and education; and effectively restricting Christians from senior government, political, military or educational positions. More to the point in the case of El Kosheh, say the Freedom House fact-finders, the government does little to prevent persecution and abuse of Copts at the local level, whether by terrorists, other members of the community or the government's own security forces.

Apart from the policies of the Central government, the report finds, "local police forces routinely harass or persecute Christians, especially converts, out of sympathy with or fear of Islamic radicals." Many of the protections once provided in Egypt's secular constitution are being eroded subtly as Koranic law, or shari'a, becomes the interpretive authority for state law. "Though people often deny it publically," says Marshall, "there is an atmosphere of fear among many Christians in Egypt, and they are subject to attack."

Under such constraints, most Coptic Christians were afraid to protest their treatment by the El Kosheh police. But finally two Coptic pastors took their concerns to Bishop Wissa, who intervened on behalf of his parishioners. Police assured him his entreaty had been heard, but the arrests continued. Finally he took his concerns to higher levels of government, and human-rights organizations joined him in El Kosheh to document the outrages. Detaining their victims for up to three days, human-rights groups have reported, police tortured and abused up to 1,200 Christian "infidels" before the roundups ground to a halt in mid-September.