Cairo: One year after Egypt’s military-backed government cracked down on a mass Islamist camp in Cairo, the country continues to grapple with the aftermath.
On August 14, 2013, security forces backed by armoured vehicles and bulldozers raided the camp, set up near the mosque of Rabaa Al Adawiya in eastern Cairo by backers of Islamist president Mohammad Mursi since he was deposed by the military more than a month earlier. Leaders of the protesters had vowed to continue the sit-in until the reinstatement of Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.
Egyptian authorities said the clampdown was inevitable, alleging that some protesters had weapons and that the vigil posed a threat to national security.
One year after the sweep, reports conflict over the actual death toll. According to the state-backed National Security for Human Rights, 624 protesters and eight policemen were killed.
The self-styled National Alliance for Legitimacy Support, led by Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, put the toll at 2,800. Independent rights groups estimated the dead at around 1,000.
The New-York Human Rights Watch (HRW) called the crackdown “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history”.
“Security forces gave little to no effective warning and opened fire into large crowds, leaving no safe exit for nearly 12 hours,” the watchdog said in a report released on Tuesday, a day after Egyptian authorities barred its Executive Director Kenneth Roth from entering the country to launch the report.
Citing “a few instances” in which demonstrators in the sit-in fired on police, HRW said the act “could not justify the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of protesters”.
The dawn-to-dusk crackdown triggered a bloody mayhem across the country. Mursi’s followers ran on the rampage, torching police stations and churches to avenge the Christian minority’s backing of the Islamist president’s removal. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Al Baradei resigned his post as vice president in protest against the security clampdown. The then interim president Adly Mansour declared a state of emergency and imposed a night-long curfew in several flashpoint cities including Cairo.
Egypt has since experienced a series of deadly attacks mainly targeting security forces.
In September, Interior Minister Mohammad Ebrahim survived an assassination attempt in Cairo claimed by the Al-Qaida-linked group Ansar Bait Al Maqdis. In December, 16 people, mainly policemen, were killed in a car bombing on a security headquarters in the northern city of Mansoura. The government blamed the attack on the Muslim Brotherhood and designated it as a terrorist organisation.
Meanwhile, thousands of the Brotherhood’s senior leaders and followers have been rounded up in the worst crackdown on the 86-year-old group. Earlier this week, an Egyptian court issued an irreversible ruling dissolving the group’s Freedom and Justice Party.
The Brotherhood-led alliance has called for an “uprising of retribution” on the anniversary of the Rabaa Al Adawiya dispersal. Government of the incumbent President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, the architect of Mursi’s removal, has vowed to “deal firmly” with any attempt to destabilise the country.
Over the past year, several bids launched by public Egyptian figures to defuse tensions between state authorities and the Brotherhood have gone nowhere. Each side has blamed the other for the debacle and ongoing unrest.
“The Rabaa Al Adawiya sit-in was an attempt on the part of the terrorist Brotherhood to display its power and encourage its regional and international allies—the US, Qatar, Turkey, Hamas and Iran- to interfere in Egypt,” said Amr Abdul Samea, a writer in the semi-official newspaper Al Ahram. “This event (the removal of the vigil) marks the interim authorities’ victory on the last attempt by the battalions of terrorism to undermine the state and change its identity.”
During the Brotherhood’s one year in power, its secular opponents accused it of seeking to monopolize power and heavily Islamize Egypt.
Analysts warn against ongoing divisions in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country of 85 million people. “We have reached a dead-end and a crisis for which there is no will to resolve it,” said Fahmi Heweidi, a moderate Islamist writer. “The crisis is addressed sometimes by denial and at other times by sustained oppression taking the shape of continued detentions, property confiscation and tough court rulings,” he added, referring to a series of anti-Islamist measures.
“This dead-end can lead to the emergence of young Islamists, who have no trust in the possibility of peaceful change and favour violence, vengeance and underground action.”
