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| The ruins of the Evangelical Church of Malawi are seen after it was ransacked, looted and burned on Thursday by an angry mob, in Malawi, south of Minya, Egypt, Saturday, Aug. 17, 2013. In the province of Minya south of Cairo, protesters attacked two Christian churches, security officials said. Many of Morsi's supporters have criticized Egypt's Christian minority for largely supporting the military's decision to remove him from office, and dozens of churches have been attacked this week. |
CAIRO (AP) --
After torching a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three nuns on the
streets like "prisoners of war" before a Muslim woman offered them
refuge. Two other women working at the school were sexually harassed and
abused as they fought their way through a mob.
In
the four days since security forces cleared two sit-in camps by
supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Islamists have attacked dozens
of Coptic churches along with homes and businesses owned by the
Christian minority. The campaign of intimidation appears to be a warning
to Christians outside Cairo to stand down from political activism.
Christians
have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Muslim majority
Egypt, where they make up 10 percent of the population of 90 million.
Attacks increased after the Islamists rose to power in the wake of the
2011 Arab Spring uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power,
emboldening extremists. But Christians have come further under fire
since President Mohammed Morsi was ousted on July 3, sparking a wave of
Islamist anger led by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
Nearly
40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been
attacked and heavily damaged since Wednesday, when chaos erupted after
Egypt's military-backed interim administration moved in to clear two
camps packed with protesters calling for Morsi's reinstatement, killing
scores of protesters and sparking deadly clashes nationwide.
One
of the world's oldest Christian communities has generally kept a
low-profile, but has become more politically active since Mubarak was
ousted and Christians sought to ensure fair treatment in the aftermath.
Many
Morsi supporters say Christians played a disproportionately large role
in the days of mass rallies, with millions demanding that he step down
ahead of the coup.
Despite the violence,
Egypt's Coptic Christian church renewed its commitment to the new
political order Friday, saying in a statement that it stood by the army
and the police in their fight against "the armed violent groups and
black terrorism."
While the Christians of
Egypt have endured attacks by extremists, they have drawn closer to
moderate Muslims in some places, in a rare show of solidarity.
Hundreds
from both communities thronged two monasteries in the province of Bani
Suef south of Cairo to thwart what they had expected to be imminent
attacks on Saturday, local activist Girgis Waheeb said. Activists
reported similar examples elsewhere in regions south of Cairo, but not
enough to provide effective protection of churches and monasteries.
Waheeb,
other activists and victims of the latest wave of attacks blame the
police as much as hard-line Islamists for what happened. The attacks,
they said, coincided with assaults on police stations in provinces like
Bani Suef and Minya, leaving most police pinned down to defend their
stations or reinforcing others rather than rushing to the rescue of
Christians under attack.
Another Christian
activist, Ezzat Ibrahim of Minya, a province also south of Cairo where
Christians make up around 35 percent of the population, said police have
melted away from seven of the region's nine districts, leaving the
extremists to act with near impunity.
Two
Christians have been killed since Wednesday, including a taxi driver who
strayed into a protest by Morsi supporters in Alexandria and another
man who was shot to death by Islamists in the southern province of
Sohag, according to security officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.
The
attacks served as a reminder that Islamists, while on the defensive in
Cairo, maintain influence and the ability to stage violence in
provincial strongholds with a large minority of Christians.
Gamaa
Islamiya, the hard-line Islamist group that wields considerable
influence in provinces south of Cairo, denied any link to the attacks.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which has led the defiant protest against
Morsi's ouster, has condemned the attacks, spokesman Mourad Ali said.
Sister
Manal is the principal of the Franciscan school in Bani Suef. She was
having breakfast with two visiting nuns when news broke of the clearance
of the two sit-in camps by police, killing hundreds. In an ordeal that
lasted about six hours, she, sisters Abeer and Demiana and a handful of
school employees saw a mob break into the school through the wall and
windows, loot its contents, knock off the cross on the street gate and
replace it with a black banner resembling the flag of al-Qaida.
By
the time the Islamists ordered them out, fire was raging at every
corner of the 115-year-old main building and two recent additions. Money
saved for a new school was gone, said Manal, and every computer,
projector, desk and chair was hauled away. Frantic SOS calls to the
police, including senior officers with children at the school, produced
promises of quick response but no one came.
The Islamists gave her just enough time to grab some clothes.
In
an hourlong telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manal, 47,
recounted her ordeal while trapped at the school with others as the fire
raged in the ground floor and a battle between police and Islamists
went on out on the street. At times she was overwhelmed by the toxic
fumes from the fire in the library or the whiffs of tears gas used by
the police outside.
Sister Manal recalled
being told a week earlier by the policeman father of one pupil that her
school was targeted by hard-line Islamists convinced that it was giving
an inappropriate education to Muslim children. She paid no attention,
comfortable in the belief that a school that had an equal number of
Muslim and Christian pupils could not be targeted by Muslim extremists.
She was wrong.
The school has a high-profile
location. It is across the road from the main railway station and
adjacent to a busy bus terminal that in recent weeks attracted a large
number of Islamists headed to Cairo to join the larger of two sit-in
camps by Morsi's supporters. The area of the school is also in one of
Bani Suef's main bastions of Islamists from Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood
and ultraconservative Salafis.
"We are nuns.
We rely on God and the angels to protect us," she said. "At the end,
they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led
us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking
us," she said. A Muslim woman who once taught at the school spotted
Manal and the two other nuns as they walked past her home, attracting a
crowd of curious onlookers.
"I remembered her,
her name is Saadiyah. She offered to take us in and said she can
protect us since her son-in-law was a policeman. We accepted her offer,"
she said. Two Christian women employed by the school, siblings Wardah
and Bedour, had to fight their way out of the mob, while groped, hit and
insulted by the extremists. "I looked at that and it was very nasty,"
said Manal.
The incident at the Franciscan
school was repeated at Minya where a Catholic school was razed to the
ground by an arson attack and a Christian orphanage was also torched.
"I
am terrified and unable to focus," said Boulos Fahmy, the pastor of a
Catholic church a short distance away from Manal's school. "I am
expecting an attack on my church any time now," he said Saturday.
Bishoy Alfons Naguib, a 33-year-old businessman from Minya, has a similarly harrowing story.
His
home supplies store on a main commercial street in the provincial
capital, also called Minya, was torched this week and the flames
consumed everything inside.
"A neighbor called
me and said the store was on fire. When I arrived, three extremists
with knifes approached me menacingly when they realized I was the
owner," recounted Naguib. His father and brother pleaded with the men to
spare him. Luckily, he said, someone shouted that a Christian boy was
filming the proceedings using his cell phone, so the crowd rushed toward
the boy shouting "Nusrani, Nusrani," the Quranic word for Christians
which has become a derogatory way of referring to them in today's Egypt.
Naguib
ran up a nearby building where he has an apartment and locked himself
in. After waiting there for a while, he left the apartment, ran up to
the roof and jumped to the next door building, then exited at a safe
distance from the crowd.
"On our Mustafa Fahmy
street, the Islamists had earlier painted a red X on Muslim stores and a
black X on Christian stores," he said. "You can be sure that the ones
with a red X are intact."
In Fayoum, an oasis
province southwest of Cairo, Islamists looted and torched five churches,
according to Bishop Ibram, the local head of the Coptic Orthodox
church, by far the largest of Egypt's Christian denominations. He said
he had instructed Christians and clerics alike not to try to resist the
mobs of Islamists, fearing any loss of life.
"The
looters were so diligent that they came back to one of the five
churches they had ransacked to see if they can get more," he told the
AP. "They were loading our chairs and benches on trucks and when they
had no space for more, they destroyed them."
