For Egypt’s Copts, always another fire around the corner

A Coptic Christian walks through his village in Upper Egypt’s Minya Governorate, 9 April 2017. © Roger Anis

CAIRO — ‘When there is humanity,’ reflects Egyptian photojournalist Roger Anis, last November, ‘you forget about politics, religions, divisions — about everything.’

Perhaps, for you too, that sentiment evokes the enduring message of the 1955 Bertrand Russell–Albert Einstein Manifesto, which, in the shadow of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on the precipice of a merciless US-led death spiral in Vietnam, called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and war altogether. ‘We appeal, as human beings, to human beings,’ its signatories urged: ‘Remember your humanity and forget the rest.’

Anis himself was urgently responding to the weaponisation of religion — in particular, to the brutal legacy of radical Islamist sectarianism against Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community, who make up 10% of the country’s 100 million people and are the largest religious minority and Christian group in the Middle East. Over the past few years, Copts have been routinely targeted by the blowback of Washington’s Operation Iraqi Freedom — in the shape of ISIS, the world’s deadliest terrorist organisation. The Egyptian outpost of ISIS’s ‘global jihadist project’ has claimed hundreds of lives — young and old, Christians and Muslims, civilians and soldiers and policemen — by suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and other ambushes across the mainland as well as in the Sinai Peninsula.

For instance, the Egyptian army — the largest in the Arab world, and the second-largest recipient of US military aid after Israel — is currently embroiled in a ‘hidden war’ against the ISIS-linked insurgency in North Sinai. Thousands of families have been displaced, scores of them Christian. In the mainland’s Western Desert, last November, seven Copts were shot dead and 19 more wounded when, as Timothy E Kaldas of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy clarified, ‘ISIS successfully executed a [second] attack on the same road, next to the same monastery, one year apart.’ The 2017 attack left 28 Copts dead and at least 20 wounded. And, back on a Libyan beach in early 2015 — a few months after the grisly murder of American journalist James Foley — ISIS-affiliated militants carried out the mass beheading of 20 Egyptian Coptic migrant workers. The infamous execution video, ‘A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross,’ shows the terror of the hostages — so-called ‘infidels’ — as they were made to kneel against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea in Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits.

‘It feels nonstop,’ Anis told me, referring to the latest carnage. ‘There’s no change. Nothing but fear and sadness . . . I mean, Copts have realised that there’s always going to be another fire around the corner.’

Facing peril

The cover story of last month’s Harper’s, ‘The Vanishing’ by longtime war correspondent Janine di Giovanni, chronicles the murderous persecution and consequent mass exodus of Iraq’s deeply rooted Christian community—in essence, the cultural loss and human cost of the weaponisation of religion.

‘After working and living alongside them over many years, I had learned how Christians throughout the Middle East survived brutal dictatorships: often endorsing the regimes in return for protection,’ di Giovanni wrote, continuing: ‘As they did in Iraq under Saddam, as they did in Maaloula, in Syria, where Christians would tell me quietly that they preferred Bashar al-Assad to theoretically worse alternatives. Then came the American invasion of Iraq. The country’s unravelling. The Syrian civil war. The bloodshed in the West Bank and Gaza. The attacks on Christians in Egypt. Finally, the rise of the Islamic State, a group that’s certain to return in some new form even as President Donald Trump boasts of its defeat. Christians in the Middle East who have survived all this are likely to face peril once more.’

Egypt’s very own dictator, the US-backed Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, holds a political record that’s stained with unprecedented bloodshed. The worst massacre in modern Egyptian history took place in August 2013 in east Cairo when then-defence minister Sisi presided over the army’s killing of an estimated 1,000 protesters at a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in. (The Brotherhood’s leader, Mohammed Morsi, had recently been ousted from the Egyptian presidency by the same counterrevolutionary forces.) Four years later, in November 2017, dozens of militants — reportedly brandishing the ISIS flag — shot dead over 300 ‘heretical’ worshippers at North Sinai’s Sufi-affiliated Rawda mosque. This second carnage marked the ‘greatest loss of life in a single incident’ on Egyptian soil since the 2013 sit-in, as well as the deadliest terror attack and sectarian incident in recent memory.

Against that bloody backdrop, pro-Islamist forces and anti-Christian populists have cast a menacing shadow over the Coptic community, all too often exploiting the precarious-at-best protection provided by the regime. ISIS calls Copts their ‘favourite prey’ and kills them in repeat ambushes. Mob violence was unleashed against Copts after ‘[Muslim] Brotherhood officials singled [them] out, and particularly the Coptic Pope Tawadros, for being complicit’ in the Sisi-led coup that ignited the 2013 sit-in and consequent massacre. And, as H A Hellyer of the Atlantic Council and the Royal United Services Institute has pointed out, Copts have long faced a ‘scourge of sectarianism’ that is, in part, perpetuated by structural failings at both the state and Muslim religious establishment level.

Hundreds remember six slain Coptic Christians during their funeral service at Prince Tadros church in the city of Minya, Egypt, 3 November 2018. ISIS claimed responsibility for the bloodshed. © Roger Anis

Forget divisions

All things considered, Roger Anis’s ‘remember your humanity’-inspired reflection is actually more than an impossibly idealistic vision bereft of any real-life precedents. Here, in the photojournalist’s words, is one of those precedents, spoken in the aftermath of November’s ISIS-claimed ambush on Copts young and old (above image).

At first, I didn’t want to cover this latest attack [last November] because it’s the same story over and over again . . . And, well, because it affects me personally: My family is Christian and I’ve been following these attacks as a photojournalist since the 2011 revolution. But I happened to be on assignment near Minya [the Upper Egyptian city where the victims lived, 160 miles south of Cairo] and, after many hours of restless contemplation, I knew that I had go to the funeral the next morning.

I went to the church at 9 am. Police officers surrounded the vicinity. ‘No more journalists are allowed inside,’ they told me at the gates. I thought to myself, maybe this is a sign that I should go do my other assignment. I stood in restless contemplation once again until I noticed two women in Islamic dress, crying and pacing nearby.

‘We’ve tried three times, but they won’t let her inside the church,’ one of the women told me, motioning toward her friend’s niqab and adding that the officers had indicated that her full-face veil would upset the mourning Christians due to its feared association with fundamentalism and, by extension, with the ISIS-linked militants who had perpetrated the deadly ambush. ‘I just want to say goodbye to my dear friend,’ the woman in the niqab cried, motioning toward the church.

Shortly after, I returned to the gates. ‘I’ll go in as a Christian,’ I told the officers. They agreed, but told me to leave my camera outside.

There were hundreds of people inside the church, weeping while standing shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall. I spotted one of my colleagues at the back of the church. He loaned me his camera and I began making my way through the crowd.

As I looked around the space, I heard these soaring, wailing cries. I turned around and saw two women who were holding each other. I immediately recognised one of them as the woman in hijab who I had spoken with near the church gates. She gripped the hand of the second woman, whose forehead was pressed against her shoulder.

Suddenly the scene erupted. ‘Shut up, shut up!’ shouted a woman who was weeping nearby. ‘Let us pray! It’s all because of you!’ A few more women, also presumably Christian, gathered around, calming down the one who had shouted. ‘We completely understand your anger,’ the woman in hijab replied, while softening her own cries and hushing those of her friend’s. ‘We’re so sorry.’

Moments later, my eyes met with one of the Christian women who had helped calm the scene. ‘See that lady?’ she whispered, motioning toward the one whose forehead was pressed against the shoulder of the hijab-wearing woman. ‘She took off her niqab so she could come say goodbye to her friend.’

I stood stunned and speechless, remembering the woman’s desperation at the church gates. This is the hidden truth, I thought to myself, that politics, religions, divisions are not what matter. It’s all about humanity. My eyes met with those of the two Muslim women who wept for their slain Christian friend. I raised the camera at my side and waited for their unspoken permission to capture the moment, to keep it close.