Cairo – A march by Coptic Christians turned deadly Sunday when protesters clashed with government forces in central Cairo, leaving at least 19 people dead and more than 200 injured in one of the bloodiest days in Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
What began as a protest against restrictions on church-building — residents in Aswan, in southern Egypt, tried to block the construction of a Coptic church last week — quickly disintegrated into violence and underscored the sectarian tensions roiling a nation that is increasingly frustrated with the temporary military government.
Hundreds of mostly Christian demonstrators, some carrying crosses and pictures of Jesus, massed in downtown Cairo, where activists said they were attacked by thugs. The clashes drew in heavily armed military police, some of whom drove armored vehicles into protesters at full speed, television pictures showed.
“Worst day of my life,” the prominent human rights activist Hossam Bahgat wrote on Twitter after seeing 17 bodies at the morgue at Cairo's Coptic Hospital.
The ruling military council announced a curfew from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. Monday. Government forces raided coffee shops around central Cairo and ordered them to close, to keep demonstrators from gathering there.
State television appeared to take the side of the security forces, calling on “honest Egyptians” to come out into the street and “protect the army from the Copts.” Activists described such statements as extremely worrisome and said they suggested an ongoing unwillingness by the ruling military to end the de facto discrimination that Egypt's sizable Christian minority faces.
The protest began when a few hundred people began marching from the Shobra district of Cairo, which has a substantial Christian population, toward the center of Cairo. Television images showed an army vehicle and police car that had been torched. Gunshots echoed on and off for hours as military police chased the protesters out of Cairo's main squares and into side streets.
The flare-up was the latest in a string of incidents demonstrating unhappiness with military rule and the increasingly strained relationship between Muslims and Christians since Mubarak was overthrown. In May, at least 12 people died in Cairo's Imbaba district when a mob attacked a church with machetes and Molotov cocktails.
“This is all happening at a time when the political class is in crisis, its confidence in the (military council) at an all-time low and the general population is so fed up of all the uncertainty and chaos that it is having buyer's remorse about the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak,” the political analyst Issandr El Amrani wrote on his blog.
© 2011 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy