Coptic evictions test Egyptian Islamists

Islamists who dominate Egypt’s new parliament face their first major test in handling sectarian relations, one of the thorniest areas in the country’s domestic politics.

Parliament’s human rights committee is preparing to present a report and recommendations on the eviction of eight Coptic Christian families from their village near Alexandria.

The eviction provoked the anger of liberal deputies, who have called for measures to end long-established practices under which sectarian disputes have been settled informally and without recourse to the law in ways that are often unfair to the Christian minority.

“Expulsion and collective punishment are not accepted in local or international law,” said Emad Gad, a deputy from the Egyptian Social Democratic party.

The presentation of the parliamentary report on the violence in the village of Sharbat will highlight the Islamist majority’s handling of sectarian issues.

The election of an assembly with an Islamist majority drawn mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood and from ultraconservative Salafi Islamists had dismayed Egyptian Christians, an estimated 10 per cent of the population. They fear the Islamisation of politics would aggravate discrimination against them and further marginalise them in public life.

The concerns have persisted despite assertions by Islamists from both groups that both their religious beliefs and the country’s constitution oblige them to reject discrimination.

Earlier attempts to make a statement in the assembly about the eviction sparked controversy when Saad al-Katatny, the Islamist speaker seemed to ignore the request to do so. Mr Gad said Mr Katatny has since assured him that the Freedom and Justice party, the party of the Muslim Brotherhood, would back the committee’s recommendations.

The families from Sharbat were expelled from the village as part of an informal settlement negotiated by police and local religious leaders after disturbances at the end of January, sparked off by rumours of a sexual relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman.

Thousands of angry Muslims attacked and looted shops owned by the man’s family and by other Christian residents of the village, according to a report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a civil society group.

The evictions mark the third time in recent months that Christian families have been ordered to leave their villages after sectarian strife. The rationale is always the inability of local authorities to ensure their safety.

Under the informal arrangement negotiated in the village, Muslims, headed by an ultraconservative Salafi sheikh, would form a committee to sell off the property of the Christians on their behalf and to collect debts owed to them in the village. The Christians were told their safety could not be guaranteed if they returned even to accompany buyers purchasing their property.

“It is a complicated issue, and the families fear for their lives if they go back to the village,” said Ishaq Ibrahim, the researcher who wrote the EIPR report. “But the position of the [parliamentary committee] has to be based on principles and the rule of law regardless of whether it will be possible to implement it or not.”

Sectarian tensions have been on the rise in Egypt, with increasingly frequent eruptions of violence. The regime of Hosni Mubarak, the president ousted by a popular revolt last year, was generally seen to have mismanaged the issue, leaving it in the hands of state security, the political police which controlled and manipulated much in public life. Attacks against Christians have usually gone unpunished, with authorities resorting to informal reconciliations to avoid facing the anger of local Muslim populations if they insisted on applying the law.

But attacks against Christians and churches have become more frequent in the past year amid the continuing turmoil after the revolution, prompting Coptic youths to shed the traditional quiescence of their community and to hold protests calling for the arrest and trial of perpetrators of violence.

In October, some 25 people, mostly Christians, were killed when military police fired live ammunition and drove armoured vehicles at a Coptic demonstration in front of the state television building in Cairo.