Young Coptic Christians stood in silent tribute Sunday night at Cairo’s Abbasseya Cathedral, mourning the violent deaths of 27 and wounding of hundreds in what is increasingly being referred to as the Maspero Massacre — as Egyptian army units opened fire on a peaceful protest march last week.
Meanwhile, the official line is emerging that the victims themselves — not the nation’s military rulers – are to blame for troops driving armoured vehicles at high speed into crowds and shooting marchers. China took the same tactic after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 when soldiers killed hundreds of college students demanding democracy.
Egypt’s state-run paper al-Ahram criticized “some Coptic intellectuals and public figures” for “launching a campaign accusing military rulers of committing genocide against Copts.” Editorial writer Makram Mohamed Ahmed did not address the many videotapes of the attacks on the protesters, but instead claimed blaming the army “will harm the Egyptian state.”
Ahmed writes that “the whole incident is merely a mismanagement of a crisis that paved the way for infiltrators to dominate the scene and push for escalation” — in other words, the military mismanaged the situation by killing people, but the unarmed Copts started it.
“In adopting the state narrative of blaming protesters,” observes reporter Ahmed Zaki Osman in the privately owned al-Masry al-Youm newspaper, ”and absolving the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,” the state-owned newspaper al-Ahram ”argues that the solution for sectarian strife is easy: enable Copts to build their own churches without administrative restrictions.”
Actually, that is exactly what the Copts have been asking. Currently, they must obtain a presidential edict before they can even repair existing churches — much less build new ones or any facility for church activities. The Army has vigilantly enforced such regulations — even sending armed troops to bulldoze a wall that Coptic monks put up to keep vandals out of their garden.