Dispatches from Cairo #5: Bloody Sunday

The fifth installment of my Dispatches from Cairo series is now posted on The Daily Organ.

Sprinting away from a military charge on Sunday night I had a sinking “here we go again” feeling. The sense of déjà vu only intensified as I spent the evening following the tags #tahrir and #maspero on twitter, and learned of the 24 confirmed deaths, the 200 wounded, and that the curfew had been reinstated, if only temporarily.

Back in January and February these nights were common; nights where we’d stay awake in groups, calling friends across town, and debating worst-case scenarios. What was different in this case was that it was so unexpected. Sunday, the first day of the Middle-Eastern working week, has not traditionally been marked by excessive violence but last night proved to be an exception. 

“Bloody Sunday”, as it has already come to be known, began early in the evening outside the Maspero building in Downtown. The building houses the headquarters of the state television station, and was the destination of a peaceful march-turned-sit-in by thousands of Coptic Christians.

Copts constitute an estimated ten percent of Egypt’s population, and they suffer much discrimination, legal and otherwise. Their specific grievance in this case was that a church in a village called Merinab in the Aswan governorate was attacked after the governor, Mustafa al-Seyyed, claimed that it had been built without planning permission.

Sectarian violence is common in Egypt, and has been especially so since the revolution, with sporadic attacks on churches being perpetrated by plainclothes thugs, and the general lack of personal security impacting minority groups most seriously. Fears for the future also play their part, with Copts fearful of the possibility of an Islamic state.

However, this was no ordinary incidence of sectarian violence. The exact sequence of events is hard to pinpoint. State TV claims that the Copts were armed, and attacked first, and rumours once again abound of “foreign influences”, but later reports suggest it was the army who attacked first. This version appears to be backed up by images and videos appearing on social media websites showing protesters being brutally beaten, and armed vehicles driving directly at groups of unarmed individuals.

Furthermore, these clashes were not as simple as Muslim versus Copt. Many Muslims came out in support of the Copts, and by the end of the night the violence appeared to be of a civilian versus military character. January’s chant of “The people want the downfall of the regime” has been replaced with “The people want the downfall of Tantawi”, General Tantawi being the head of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which currently runs the country. 

Grievances against SCAF include continued military tribunals for civilians, and on-going disputes about election laws, as well as allegations of corruption due to their strong ties to Mubarak’s regime.

Opposition to the army is growing, and Sunday’s clashes mark the largest outbreak of violence since Mubarak stepped down in February. On Twitter, one phrase was much re-tweeted: Today's Martyrs are not Muslims, or Copts - they're Egyptian. And their Own Army Killed them.

It is in the military’s interest to portray Sunday’s events as a particularly violent outbreak of sectarian violence, and if they succeed in spinning it as such, they will be able to use it in their on-going propaganda war against reform and progress, and to justify claiming for themselves increasingly draconian powers for “security reasons”. Whether they succeed in doing so, will depend on how events unfold over the next few days.