Since Jan25, I have seldom felt as down as i did in the past two days, after a peaceful march in Cairo on the evening of October 9th ended in blood and mayhem, leaving 23 civilians dead and hundreds of injured.
How it happened? My guess: the Army underestimated the resolve of the protesters + took for granted that they'd be easy to disperse or would bend to light violence. They didn't; the soldiers freaked out and went crazy, literally running people over. So not premeditated per se, only insofar that they thought they had a soft target ahead they could manhandle all they wanted.
That the protesters were mostly christian is still tangential to my story, but i'll get to it very quickly.
Now a lot of us managed to see through the dust and realize that this was a people-vs-state, revolution-vs-status quo fight. And it absolutely is. Revolution continues. The public discourse in the local media is also by and large followed suit; editorials about "Egypt is bleeding" and variations thereof abound and help drive the point.
But go outside the circles of activists (and of our Twittersphere) and you'll realise that unfortunately not everyone is getting past the easier Muslim-Christian dichotomy.
Two (three, rather) main reasons for that:
A - deep held mistrust between religious communities; there's little point in burying our heads in the sand really. By and large, Christians stay among themselves, Muslims as well. (you know i'm right). Of course it's easy to camouflage that in a game of numbers (in a country where 90% are Muslims it's easy to say that an all-Muslim group is a fully acceptable statistical event) or in "community events" for Christians but, save for a lucky few, close social circles are often religiously homogeneous, or nearly so.
B - state-sponsored incitement. Man did state television go completely insane on Sunday - with lines such as "the christians killed soldiers" and "we call upon honest citizens to go defend the army" (the absurdity of it never hit them) national television was in full incitement mode.
C - Add to the above that the amount of misinformation, as well as missing information is staggering. From the genesis of the crisis - a problem around a church/church-related building in Aswan and its permits - to the actual number of victims, particularly within the army, we don't know half the truth.
And in the absence of truth, lies (and, worse, rumours) prevail.
(just so you get an idea of the breadth of the rumours: one is that the army had killed more people and dumped their bodies in the Nile. Yep, that much.).
And what is being done to help clarify the state-vs-people narrative to the people who have fallen for the muslim-vs-christian one? NOTHING.
Worse even. While we've adopted the state-vs-people narrative, the government solutions - or rather reactions, for solutions they are not - are all in response to the presumed muslims-vs-christians axis.
The Cabinet - that lame duck of a cabinet - is adopting a "unified law on houses of worship" which we've long called for and which would theoretically resolve a few issues (though assuming the problem was really about that is a drastic oversimplification); and now there are talks of an "anti-discrimination law" which will surely both be redundant, for there are laws in that perspective, but most importantly will be hastily written overnight and adopted by said lame duck of a cabinet and will lead to an awful number of transgressions and misapplications, in the time-honoured tradition of overreacting.
Which leads me to the core of the "shit we don't want to face but will eventually have to":
1 - the reaction of the public at large.
First, your regular Muslim citizen. A numerical majority, what they have seen - especially in the absence of proper information, which is a HUGE cause of the problem - on television (according to a number of people of all walks of life i have spoken to in the past two days) can be summed up as follows:
->; christians riot;
-->; the mainstream media mourning the dead rioters;
--->; nobody mourning the dead soldiers;
---->; the state offering concessions to Christians.
if you think I'm exaggerating, just read a newspaper. Heck, just the front page of today's Al-Ahram. If you don't know any better, this is exactly the impression you'll get.
What that could possibly lead to is resentment.
Which is, well, bad.
Conversely, your average Christian: witnessing young co-religionaries being run over by APCs and armoured vehicles can only beget anger. Especially when no-one is held accountable for their death. Not unlike within Muslim ranks, there are TV stations and bearded dudes who are peddling the Muslim-vs-Christian narrative. It's a particularly easy narrative to have adopted when the audience has indeed suffered discrimination in the past.
2- the army.
The army took a severe beating on Sunday - of the kind the police has been getting since the onset of 2011. I'm not saying that it wasn't deserved, far from that - they really had it coming - but they're not acquainted to those. As of this morning, the army was refusing to release the names and numbers of the army injured and dead. Which could hint towards what was my first reaction:that they're lying and that the army has had no victims -which would go in the direction of what our sycophant of a minister of (mis-)Information had said, that "we are not sure army soldiers were attacked by protesters", a statement he pronounced after his overzealous minions on state TV had screamed that "the coptic protesters are killing army personnel".
But we do know the army suffered casualties. We've seen videos of protesters chasing soldiers - especially those they managed to snatch out of the vehicles that were running people over - and beating them. So that some soldiers would've died is not improbable.
Then why keep the numbers secret?
one explanation might be that they don't want to appear like wusses who can't defend themselves in front of an unarmed group;
But another possible explanation i heard today, and which is all the more frightening because it's also not improbable: because the army doesn't want to mine the morale of its own troops.
Because what if you're an army soldier and you hear that X of your buddies, brainless conscripts or fellow officers, were killed by protesters - how would you react when you are next sent to break up a protest?
You'll be very. Very. Violent.
(and if you add a religious resentment to your hatred of protesters, well, it'll get even uglier.)
Make no mistake: we MUST get into full crisis management mode. This is one of the nastiest events we've had to deal with, not only for the sheer amount of grief it brought, but also for its repercussions.
As we think of remedying the problems that Egyptian Christians face at home, we must keep in mind what that means to, or how it impacts the rest of the society. Solutions (not band-aids) need be found, Proper communication must be conducted to ensure that everyone understands that what is being done will be rectifying an injustice, not giving someone an unjust advantage. Which is why i am a little weary of this new anti-discrimination law -- i fear it will be misused. Because that could also turn ugly.
Then the army. We've often tried - without really meaning it - to distinguish between the SCAF (the villains) and the army (who are 'our boys'). We never believed our own lie because, let's face it, the army is the SCAF's tool of repression.
But if, as i suspect, we'll be facing on the streets an angry army that wishes to avenge its dead, then the next phase - regardless of the politics of the SCAF, which are a different discussion altogether - could be a very bloody one.
So there you have it.
Brace yourselves. Prepare for a rough landing. It's going to hurt.
