Workers Vanguard No. 1111
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5 May 2017
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Palm Sunday Massacre
Egypt: Coptic Christians Under Siege
The April 9 suicide bombings at two Coptic churches in Egypt, which killed at least 49 people and injured another 126, highlight the deep oppression of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The bombings were aimed at inflicting maximum deaths as both churches were packed with worshippers on Palm Sunday. These were the latest in a string of anti-Coptic attacks—at least 26 so far this year. Last December, during Sunday Mass, a bomb ripped through a Cairo church, killing 30 people and wounding dozens, many of them women and children. In February, following a series of killings in El Arish, a city in the northern Sinai Peninsula, 200 Coptic families were forced to flee their homes—some 90 percent of Copts in northern Sinai have been driven out.
While the April 9 bombings were claimed by the Egyptian branch of the Islamic State (ISIS), which described Copts as their “favorite prey,” Coptic Christians have been subjected to violence and discrimination on a daily basis long before ISIS ever existed. The violence is rampant in rural Upper (southern) Egypt. Particularly volatile is the province of Minya, home to the country’s largest Christian community. Attacks can be triggered by a mere rumor. Last May, a Muslim mob set fire to the homes of Christians in Minya after word spread that a Coptic man had had an affair with a Muslim woman. After the man fled with his wife and children, the mob looted and burned his parents’ home, stripped his 70-year-old mother and paraded her naked through the streets. Such assaults are almost never prosecuted. Instead, the government organizes “reconciliation sessions,” and Copts are often forced to leave their homes and villages in the name of “harmony.”
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized on the April 9 bombings to further strengthen his rule. He declared a three-month state of emergency that gives him even more sweeping powers. Since coming to power through a July 2013 coup, Sisi, who is strongly supported by U.S. president Donald Trump, has presided over one of the worst waves of repression in Egypt’s modern history. Tens of thousands of his opponents, both secular and Islamist, have been imprisoned. Torture, extrajudicial killings and disappearances are rampant. Draconian laws limiting freedom of assembly, expression and the press are ruthlessly enforced. As the economy stands on the brink of collapse—with skyrocketing inflation, food shortages and the imposition of austerity measures—Sisi is also taking aim against the combative proletariat. When 3,000 workers, most of them women, went on strike in February at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, the government arrested five female strikers, forcing an end to the strike.
Coptic oppression serves as an important pillar of bourgeois rule in Egypt. Successive capitalist governments—“secular” or otherwise—have repeatedly promoted Islamic piety and anti-Coptic chauvinism as a way to reassert their power, especially in the face of mass discontent. But Copts are not just victims; many are also part of Egypt’s working class. Alongside their Muslim class brothers and sisters, they can play a significant role in the fight for working-class rule, which can open the door not only for their liberation but also for the emancipation of women, Nubians and other minorities as well as the country’s deeply impoverished peasantry. Key to this perspective is the forging of a Marxist workers party that will struggle against bourgeois nationalism and all forms of religious reaction—including fighting for the separation of religion from the state.
Justifiably fearful of forces like the Muslim Brotherhood, many Copts falsely believe that Egypt’s bloody military will defend them against the Islamists. As Sisi prepared his coup against President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, he made a point of portraying himself as the savior of Copts. When he announced his coup on 3 July 2013, he was joined on stage by, among others, the Patriarch of the Coptic Church, Tawadros II. In fact, the military is no less the enemy of the Coptic people than the Islamists.
A vivid example is the notorious Maspero massacre of 2011. As demonstrators protesting the burning of homes and churches marched from the heavily Coptic working-class district of Shubra to the Maspero television building in Cairo, they were mowed down by military forces working in collusion with Islamists. Hundreds were injured and 28 Copts killed, including Mina Danial, a leftist activist who had been a prominent leader in the Tahrir Square protests earlier in the year. Today, as Islamist forces in the Sinai and elsewhere battle with the military, the Copts find themselves victims of violence and the vagaries of a system rife with impunity. “Nothing has changed,” one Copt told the New York Times (April 15). “It happened six years ago, it happened this week, and it will happen again.... Another president, another regime—it’s all the same.”
The largest and one of the oldest Christian communities in the Near East, the Copts make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 92 million. Having succeeded in brutally suppressing pre-Christian pagans, Christians had become the majority of Egypt by the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century. While some Egyptians embraced Islam voluntarily, many did so under the pressure imposed by the jiziah, a tax levied on non-Muslims. By the tenth century, Muslims outnumbered Christians, and Arabic replaced Coptic as the official language. Under Muslim rule, the Copts were relegated to second-class status, denied access to high government positions and, at times, subjected to organized violence. The jiziah was not abolished until 1856. Today, Islamic extremists call for it to be reinstated.
During Britain’s occupation of Egypt, which began in 1882, the British imperialists further exacerbated tensions between the Muslim majority and Copts and other minorities, including by promoting wealthy Copts into positions of power. Nonetheless, Coptic intellectuals and leaders played a prominent role in the nationalist movement against colonial rule, including in the 1919 uprising, which was brutally suppressed. Under left-nationalist strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power following the 1952 Free Officers coup that toppled the monarchy and ended the British occupation, conditions for Copts were often contradictory.
On the one hand, Nasser reaffirmed Islam as the state religion and promoted pan-Arab nationalism, which held little attraction for Egyptian Copts. On the other hand, his emphasis on an Egyptian nationalist identity that transcended the Muslim/Christian divide appealed to Copts. While few Copts served in the top ranks of the government, military and academia, Nasser cracked down hard on the Muslim Brotherhood after having earlier used them to suppress the Communists. At the same time, the bankruptcy of Nasser’s bourgeois-nationalist rule, which could not address the needs of the impoverished masses, paved the way for the rise of the Islamists.
When Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, came to power in 1970 amid declining economic conditions and growing unrest, he released the Islamists from prison in order to unleash them against the left. His 1971 Constitution explicitly made sharia (Islamic law) a principal source of legislation. When Coptic leaders protested the growing Islamization, Sadat branded them a “fifth column.” Emboldened by Sadat’s anti-Coptic stand, the Islamists began burning churches and assaulting Christians. Copts didn’t fare better under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. During the 1980s and ’90s, as an Islamist insurgency gripped the country, Egypt saw even more violence against the Copts.
In an April 9 statement titled, “Terrorism and Tyranny Are Complicit in the Crimes Against the Copts,” the Revolutionary Socialists (RS), Egyptian affiliate of the late Tony Cliff’s International Socialist Tendency, condemned the Palm Sunday massacre. The statement rightly underlined the connivance between the military and the Islamists in persecuting the Coptic people. But in doing so, the RS disappeared its own complicity. Pointing to the January 2011 uprising, the RS complained: “The Muslim Brotherhood betrayed the revolution by siding with the Military Council (SCAF), which exploited sectarianism and inflamed it with the Maspero massacre. The secular opposition has also allied itself with the military to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, paving the way for Sisi’s 2013 coup.”
Left unsaid is the fact that the RS called for a vote to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi in the second round of presidential elections in 2012, claiming that a victory for this reactionary would be “a blow against the old regime” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 2 June 2012). A year later, the RS found itself standing with the old regime, as they celebrated Sisi’s coup and described the popular mobilizations in support of the military as “the height of democracy” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 5 July 2013).
During the uprising in Egypt in 2011, we pointed to the working class, whose strikes played a major role in bringing down the despotic Mubarak regime, as the potential gravedigger of the bourgeois order. We underlined the urgent need for the proletariat to act as the defender of all the oppressed, including women, Copts and landless peasants. It is precisely this perspective that the RS opportunists reject, as they chase after one bourgeois force or another.
Despite ruthless repression, Egypt’s working class continues to wage economic struggles. According to the Egyptian Centre for Social and Economic Rights, there were over 700 “industrial actions” in 2016 alone. At the same time, the bulk of the working class remains in thrall to bourgeois nationalism and religious reaction—including Coptic workers tied to the church. What is urgently necessary is the forging of a revolutionary working-class party—section of a reforged Fourth International—that acts as the tribune of the people as it struggles to win the proletariat to the fight for a workers and peasants government. Such a perspective must be linked to the struggle for socialist revolutions in the imperialist centers, which can lay the basis for the elimination of scarcity and, with it, both religious persecution and obscurantism.
