By Sarah El Sirgany
CAIRO: It’s easy to find a person to blame for everything that goes wrong. In the Imbaba clashes, this person is Abeer Fakhry, the woman whose rumored holdup in a church for converting to Islam, sparked sectarian clashes that escalated beyond control.
When 12 people are killed, a church is burnt and properties worth millions of pounds are damaged, the details of Fakhry’s story become irrelevant. What led to all that isn’t simply an interfaith romance, but a problem of deep rooted and long ignored sectarianism, troubling lack of security, and the still unsolved issue of illegal gun ownership. Add to that chauvinistic vigilantism and you’ve got an explosive situation, to which a trigger like Fakhry’s story is just side note.
In spite of all that, many analysts and leaders interviewed in this paper have opted to blame Fakhry. A group of lawyers thought the best action they can take is to file an official complaint accusing her of marrying two men at the same time. If we take the religious element out of the story told by the woman who identified herself as Fakhry in an online video, it will sound like something we’ve grown used to. A woman flees her house— married or not — and wants to marry another man against her family’s will. In response, the family locks her up in their house, in a relative’s home or in a trusted house of worship. Unfortunately, no one, including those men who were so enraged with the infringement on her individual freedom, will object.
Those who now love to hate Fakhry don’t want to acknowledge what a friend described as the “despotic” way in which many families here deal with their offspring, especially women. Socially, we are in a transitional phase where people in my generation have believed in certain liberties as God given rights, and more and more are willing to exercise these rights. Meanwhile, for many in the parents’ generation, rights, such as taking decisions affecting one’s personal life, are unthinkable. Bottom line is, if we want to blame Fakhry, we have to blame her family too and most Egyptian families while we are at it.
But again, all of this became irrelevant after the way the clashes escalated. As ultra conservative Muslim men, Salafis, surrounded the Marmina Church in a misguided attempt to “free” Fakhry, heavy gunfire was exchanged. A fact-finding commission said Wednesday it wasn’t able to know who fired the first shot, but it said that the burning of another church in the same neighborhood on the same night was done by “thugs.”
Before the commission made any announcements, the military council was quick to blame it all on the remnants of the ousted regime, using the now notarized term “el-felol,” which literally means remnants. Like blaming Fakhry, this also distracts from the real problems, especially that these “felol” have become the go-to culprit of any problem, from attacks on protesters to workers’ strikes. And yet they remain more elusive than the businessmen and officials wanted for investigations or trials and no one seems to know their whereabouts after fleeing the country. The fact that the “felol” have been blamed for almost every single problem the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the government have faced and yet not one has been caught, has turned the word into a mythical being, as horrifying and supernaturally powerful as the villain in any children fairytale.
In the aftermath of a fatal incident that could be repeated, giving explanations that don’t yield solutions will only exacerbate the problem. With the public shocked with the brutality, scared by the lack of security and stressed beyond control, the soil is rife to sell extreme measures. But we must not be robbed into adopting or even promoting such measures, because that would not lead to any solutions. Thirty years under Mubarak should’ve taught us that. The military announced on Sunday that it arrested 190 people and would refer them to military courts. Then more were arrested, but Prime Minister Essam Sharaf said that suspects would be referred to the State Security Emergency Court. Many cheered both decisions, seeing it as the only adequate deterrent.
What if those arrested were innocent? What if the real culprits were still free? How will we know for sure what happened if the investigation was hasty and secretive as typical of the military prosecution’s work? My questions were left unanswered as I asked them to those advocating the extraordinary measures, represented in that case with military trials — State Security Emergency Courts aren’t that much different. Some online commentators were even calling for strict martial laws.
The overlooked point here is that we are yet to try the ordinary law. One of the main complaints, under the Mubarak regime and in the months following his ouster, was that laws weren’t applied in cases of sectarian strife. Murderers were let go after cosmetic reconciliation sessions. Had those who attacked the church in Atfih been pressed with arson charges, as specified in our penal code, a sense of justice would have started to prevail. We have the laws that penalize actions like murder, arson and battery in our penal code. We just need to apply them. When they fail and our civilian courts fail to deal with such issues then we can discuss extraordinary measures.
Proper, transparent investigations would be the first step towards addressing and hopefully finding solutions. We need the police force to be working in full capacity and patrolling the streets, not just the main ones in upscale neighborhoods. A probe should be initiated to find out why the police and/or the army were late in their response, arriving on the scene more than three hours after the clashes started. Once people feel secure, it would be easier to get them to relinquish the guns they’ve bought for cheap prices in an appalling phase of gun abundance on the streets. A crackdown on illegal ownership and selling of weapons is also needed.
And that’s only the security side of the problem; the social and political perspectives need to be addressed too. Commentators such as political analyst Wahid Abdel-Maguid and Bahy El-Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, have noted that the current government is still dealing with sectarianism the same way the ousted regime used to. I agree; we need to think outside this claustrophobic, conspiracy-tainted box the Mubarak regime has put us in.
Maybe then, we could finally reach the security we are hoping for and the government would be able to catch the “felol.”
Sarah El Sirgany is the Deputy Editor of Daily News Egypt.
