A different village

By Nadia Abou El-Magd

The desert road to Al-Kosheh seemed endless. It is more than 450 kilometres long, extending south from Cairo. Finally, after more than an eight-hour drive, the long-awaited billboard appeared. "Welcome to Al-Kosheh," it said.

A heavy police presence backed by armoured cars and pointed rifles effectively closed the village, imposing a curfew and preventing inhabitants from leaving. Al-Kosheh has become a centre of trade for its neighbouring villages. However, it remains poor like many other villages, with high birth and illiteracy rates.

From the outside, Al-Kosheh does not look any different from the rest of the villages in Upper Egypt. From inside, it is certainly different: tension fills the air; black flags hang everywhere; burned, looted and smashed shops and houses abound.

It all started with a petty quarrel between a Coptic trader and a Muslim customer on New Year's Eve. The wide-scale rioting that followed resulted in the death of 20 Copts and one Muslim, as well as the looting and burning of at least 50 houses, shops and warehouses. More than 40 Muslims and Copts were injured. And about 80 have been arrested.

"They burned down my photo studio," cried Younan Eissa Fahim in anger. He was accompanied by Shahat Bekhit Bayoumi, owner of a clothes and accessories store, and Malak Fayeq Tawfiq, whose house was set on fire. The three were heading to Dar Al-Salam police station to file complaints.

"There is no Christmas this year; we are dead," Father Gabriel Abdel-Messih, a Coptic priest with the Church of the Angel Michael in Al-Kosheh, told Al-Ahram Weekly on eve of the Coptic Christmas. Instead of celebrating mass, Abdel-Messih, who witnessed the violence from inside the church, led the funeral of a 25-year-old victim, who had been found in the open fields.

Bishop Wissa, whose diocese includes several of the villages hit by the sectarian clashes, echoed the same sentiments. "We are going to pray, but we are not going to receive well-wishers for Christmas," Wissa told the Weekly. In his diocese at Al-Ballyana, 65 kilometres from Al-Kosheh, Wissa handed out lists of the names of the victims.

Last Friday, Christmas Day, Wissa went to Al-Kosheh again to comfort relatives of the victims and exchange condolences. The 61-year-old bishop looked frail and tired. He said that he had not had any sleep since the clashes started on 31 December. "Thank God that President Mubarak has sent Mustafa Abdel-Qader (local development minister), who spent hours with me. Now we are sure that the president will get the right picture and the criminals will be punished," said Wissa. "Had the president failed to intervene, we could have expected more and more victims."

The Ministry of Social Affairs has decided to pay financial compensation, ranging between LE1,000 and LE3,000, to the families of the victims and those who were wounded in the clashes.

Wissa blamed the escalation of the violence on "lax security measures." According to him, the clashes turned bloody just after Sunday prayers, with gunmen shooting haphazardly.

However, Police Maj Gen Mohamed El-Sha'arawi, the interior minister's assistant for general security, was quoted as blaming the violence on rumours and "malicious hands".

El-Sha'arawi said, though, that the latest incidents had nothing to do with what happened in Al-Kosheh in August 1998. Then, two Copts were killed in the village, whose 30,000-strong population is 75 per cent Christian. Police reacted by rounding up about 1,000 Copts and allegedly tortured dozens of them to extract confessions. A Christian man has been on trial since August 1999. Hearings will resume on 8 February. When Wissa insisted that the man was innocent, he was arrested and later released on bail.

The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) issued a statement last week, in which it blamed the Egyptian state for the latest sectarian clashes in Al-Kosheh because the state, the EOHR said, had failed to teach citizens the notions of democracy and citizenship. The statement called it a "lack of civic awareness".

The statement also blamed "the weakness of security performance and the lack of preventive security measures despite their heavy presence". Hafez Abu Se'eda, secretary-general of the EOHR, was arrested in 1998 after the organisation issued a report condemning police brutality in general, and not only against Copts. He was released on bail.

Abu Se'eda is heading an investigative team to Al-Kosheh and will issue a report about the latest incidents in two weeks. "There are many unanswered questions, one of which is why people resorted to weapons so quickly -- as if they were ready under their beds. Automatic rifles were used on a very wide scale, even by Upper Egyptian standards," Abu Se'eda told the Weekly.

However, many reports in the Egyptian press, including some by prominent journalists and intellectuals, blamed the incidents on "hidden hands" and conspiracy theories abounded. Some called for the name of the village to be changed, as 'Al-Kosheh' can mean enmity and hatred in classical Arabic. A village of peace and kindness was suggested as an alternative.

Prominent columnist and managing editor of Al-Ahram, Salama Ahmed Salama, believes that the problem with Al-Kosheh has nothing to do with its name or the outside world, but lies within the village itself. "Relying on religious leaders and security men to solve such a problem is not sufficient," Salama told the Weekly. "On the contrary, a heavy security presence sustains tension and does not alleviate it."

According to Salama, this problem needs to be addressed "frankly and courageously". "It's about time the Muslim majority learnt to change their attitude towards the Copts," he added. However, Salama anticipated this to be a long social process that requires the state's and people's cooperation.

Writer and intellectual Milad Hanna attributed the frustration of the Copts in Al-Kosheh to the unresolved outcome of the 1998 incidents. He blamed the latent anger of Muslims, which resulted in the high Christian casualty toll, on "the inability of the Al-Kosheh's Muslims to accept the status of a minority within their village, while belonging to the religion of the majority in the country as a whole."

In its editorial on Monday, Al-Ahram daily blamed "distorted religion, lack of (national) awareness and inherited customs and traditions, such as the vendetta," for what happened in Al-Kosheh. The editorial also blamed "economic and administrative factors and lax security".

Leftist writer Salah Eissa believes that there is a discrepancy between what the government espouses and the actions of some provincial bureaucrats. "The ruling political authority doesn't advocate or use discrimination between Muslims and Copts, but some provincial officials and police do," Eissa told the Weekly. Eissa believes that it is "dangerous" to put those who instigated and participated in the latest clashes on trial before a military court. He also believes that it is equally "dangerous to claim that both Copts and Muslims are innocent and point accusing fingers at external agents".

The only and lasting solution, according to Eissa, is to transform Egypt into a political society as it used to be before the 1952 revolution and set free the political and social dialectics. "Only then, will citizens identify themselves with political groups instead of religion and family," Eissa added.