There comes a time when mere descriptions cannot balance the horror of the dead. But lest history forget or treat them with less compassion than they deserve, we must, I fear, confront the reality. The bodies were hideously bloated and they had been burned from head to toe. One man had a laceration at the throat, caused perhaps by a knife or a bullet. A colleague saw five other corpses in a similar state but with bullet holes in the throat. Outside the mortuary, the state-hired thugs of the Egyptian interior ministry tried to frighten journalists away.
A middle-aged man whose friend had lost his son to police gunfire on Wednesday emerged from amid the screaming relatives – some of whom were vomiting on the concrete – and took me to a Sunni imam, immaculate in his red and white turban, who gently led me through two iron doors into the room of death. One of the morticians, Mohamed Doma, stared at the corpses in disbelief. So did the imam. And so did I. After walking past nine of these pitiful creatures – children of Egypt – I could see further corpses in another corridor. All, according to the medical staff, had been brought from Abu Zaabal prison.
Not that they ever reached the jail – which I went to see yesterday – beside a grotty Nile canal fringed by old cement factories 28 miles north of Cairo. The prison walls are high, its gates attached to neo-Pharaonic pillars. According to the police, the 34 prisoners – some reports speak of 36 dead men – rocked the truck when it was part of a police convoy approaching the institution. When it was forced to stop, the prisoners – and this, remember, is the story from the police, who are believed to have killed more than 1000 of their fellow citizens these past few days – grabbed one of the policemen and, in a successful attempt to rescue him, his colleagues fired a tear gas grenade into the truck which was packed with prisoners.
So many ‘security force’ stories – like Muslim Brotherhood stories – have been proved untrue over the past few weeks. Another story, from the newly obedient Egyptian press, reports that “terrorists” stopped the convoy and tried to free the prisoners. Since the prisoners all died, we may never know how or why they were slaughtered. Needless to say, the dead had become ‘terrorists’ by last night – why else would ‘terrorists’ try to free them, if indeed they did? – and, once Egyptians had absorbed the news of the equally awful massacre of Egyptian security men in Sinai, this now became the Abu Zaabal Massacre, to be remembered alongside the Rabaa Massacre, the Nahda Massacre, the Ramses Square massacre and all the other massacres that seem likely to come.
After these ghastly scenes, the statistics of the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Research make solemn reading. It says that 1,295 Egyptians were killed between Wednesday morning and Friday, 1,063 on Wednesday alone – including 983 civilians 52 security personnel and 28 bodies found under the platform of the Rabaa mosque. Thirteen policemen and three civilians were killed in an attack on the police station in Kerdasa, 24 civilians in Alexandria, six in Sharqeya, six in Damietta, 13 in Suez, 45 in Fayoum 21 in Beni Suef, 68 in Minya. This is a national rather than a Cairo tragedy. But those bodies in the morgue I suppose, represent all of them.
A freed Mubarak should feel at home in today’s topsy turvy Egypt
The lads from state security are behaving with Mubarak-era ruthlessness
On the streets of Cairo there have now appeared thousands of large coloured photographs of Barack Obama with Bin Laden’s beard attached to his chin and a Muslim prayer sign on his forehead. And to the right of Obama is that most handsome of all generals, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Minister of Defence, Deputy Prime Minister and head of the Egyptian army.Mubarak to be freed? Crazy as it may seem, his freedom would be in keeping with the mad tragedy through which Egypt is living. What would seem impossible in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution – hundreds massacred by state security, police cadets slaughtered by desert gunmen, Mubarak out of jail – has acquired a kind of normality.
So there’s no doubt who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. State television’s three channels now run a 24-hour banner in English on the top left of the screen: “Egypt fighting terrorism”. And it seems viewers are inclined to believe it. The foul killing of the 25 policemen in Sinai and their dignified military funerals this week almost pushed the killing of 36 uncharged prisoners being transported in a police van by state security men in the Delta off the newspaper front pages. Al-Ahram carried half a page of photographs of these young men and a coloured picture of their corpses lined up after the killers left them. It could be mistaken for a picture of dead Iraqi cops and Syrian civil war victims.
In a report to be published today, Human Rights Watch says it can confirm that 37 Christian
churches have been damaged across Egypt. In Minya, for example, Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers left their sit-ins after news of the mass killings at the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo reached them a week ago, and immediately attacked police stations and Christian institutions. These included a Christian-owned houseboat on the Nile in which two men – one of them a Muslim – were burnt to death. In all, foreign NGOs now believe that 121 men were shot dead in Ramses Square on Friday and that police used a machine gun on crowds, guided by television cameras attached to their vehicles.
In the topsy-turvy world in which all now seem to be condemned to live in Egypt, some Copts in upper Egypt are blaming not Muslims for their church destruction, but
President Obama. A common rumour is that Obama has a Muslim brother – and that this is one reason why the United States supposedly supported the Brotherhood.
Egyptian journalists I meet on the streets of Cairo all complain that they can no longer write freely although – to keep the book of accusations balanced – it should be remembered that more writers were prosecuted under the rule of Mohamed Morsi than in the previous 185 years of Egyptian history.
Among the few voices of journalistic sanity has been Emad Eddin Hussein in Al-Shorouk newspaper. Writing of the 36 prisoners killed in the police truck last week, he says that “the Muslim Brotherhood may have committed many crimes or brainwashed the minds of many civilians, but this does not justify their killing… The Egyptian government has to ensure the efficiency of police officers, some of whom acted very aggressively towards the Muslim Brotherhood supporters over the past days”
That is putting it mildly. The lads from state security are back in all their Mubarak-like ruthlessness, assisted – as in 2011 – by the hired thugs and ex-prisoners who are used to club protesters with iron bars. So if Mubarak does emerge from the grim confines of the Tora prison complex – wherein his Brotherhood enemies are also being held – he will find
the new Egypt of his freedom faintly familiar.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten