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Egyptian convert ordered released on bail
Legal charges uncertain against arrested Christians
by Barbara G. Baker
Compass (08.12.2003)/ HRWF Int. (09.12.2003) C Website: http://www.hrwf.net/ - Email: info@hrwf.net -- The last of 22 Egyptian Christians arrested and held for torture and interrogation by security police since mid October was ordered released last week in Cairo.
Former Muslim Mariam Girguis Makar, 30, was granted bail by an Egyptian court and ordered released from El-Kanater Womens Prison on December 3. The order came 45 days after she was arrested from her home in Alexandria.
But as of noon today, she still had not been set free and reunited with her family, sources in Cairo confirmed to Compass.
She will definitely be released, they say, a source said, but the release procedures still are not finished. So maybe she will be out tomorrow.
Court authorities demanded 1,000 Egyptian pounds ($163) in bail for Makars release, indicating that charges pending against her have not been dropped.
Makar and her fellow suspects, more than half of them women, were accused of falsifying Christian identity papers for themselves and other former Muslims. All were required to pay various bail amounts to obtain release.
According to the suspects legal counsel, so far formal criminal charges are not believed to have been filed against Makar, her husband Yousef Samuel Makari Suliman or the other Christians put under arrest.
Married with two young daughters, Makar and her husband converted to Christianity while living in Cairo. They moved to Alexandria in 1999 in an attempt to change their identities as Muslims and begin a new life as Christians.
State security police in charge of the sweeping crackdown, which included both Coptic Christians and converts from Islam, accused the suspects of cooperating in schemes to change the legal identity of former Muslims by issuing them new Christian identities.
It is prohibited under Egyptian law for a Muslim to change his or her religious identity, although Christians can easily convert to Islam.
One of the detained converts who was severely beaten while under police custody was transferred to a hospital where he later died. The deceased, identified as Issam Abdul Fathr Mohammed, was in his late 40s and reportedly suffered from diabetes and other ailments.
According to an Amnesty International report released November 20, at least seven detainees were tortured to death last year while under police custody in Egypt. Torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment continues to be practiced systematically in detention centers, Amnesty charged.
Egypt cracks down against converts to Christianity
Former Muslims forbidden to change their identity papers
By Barbara G. Baker
Compass (29.10.2003)/ HRWF Int. (30.10.2003) C Website: http://www.hrwf.net/ - Email: info@hrwf.net - In a harsh crackdown over the past 10 days, Egypt's state security police have arrested and tortured a Christian couple from Muslim background, along with 11 other Egyptian citizens accused of forging Christian identity papers for former Muslims.
At least 10 more Christians have since been detained and subjected to torture in the sweep, said to be headed by two security police officers known for illegal and cruel tactics against Christian converts.
The convert couple, Mohammed Ahmed Imam Kordy and his wife Sahar El-Sayed Abdel Ghany, was arrested in Alexandria on October 18. The police action apparently came after the wife was implicated in a complaint extorted under police torture that she had helped another Egyptian woman secure false identity papers.
Two days after their detention, the two were transferred to a Cairo police station, where they were beaten, hung by their arms, and bloated with painful amounts of air blown into their bodies. They were denied any food while detained under intense interrogation in central Cairo's El-Mosky police station, where they were logged under administrative case No. 3793 for 2003.
The husband and wife were not brought before the prosecutor until October 22, four days after their arrest. Under Egyptian law, the police are required to produce accused detainees before a prosecutor within 24 hours of their arrest.
The couple reportedly told the prosecutor that they had indeed changed their own names, with the husband taking the name Yousef Samuel Makari Suliman, and the wife changing her name to Mariam Girguis Makar.
However, they declared that they did not know it was illegal for them to change their religious identity. Since it was commonly known that Christians in Egypt could convert to Islam and change their identity papers, they stated, they assumed that Muslims had the same rights.
The couple named two Coptic priests who they said had helped them change their religious identity, both of whom have died in the past three years.
Although lawyers intervened to obtain the couple's release on bail, the wife was sent to prison October 23 for a month while the case is under investigation. Her husband was ordered released but remains under charge. The couple has two teenage daughters.
Meanwhile, 11 more arrests were reported, including the arrests of three Coptic women who had converted to Islam several years ago but have since returned to their Christian faith. The three, identified as Soheir Hosni Sedky, Fawzeya Azmy Estafanos and Marina Morcos Shenouda, face charges of bribing government employees and obtaining false identity papers.
In addition, Compass has obtained the names of eight government employees known to have been arrested in connection with the case. Two of them, Reda Zaghloul and Amal Wadi'I, are women.
Another, a Christian named Aziz Zakhary Armanios, was employed in security directorate offices in Beni Swef, a governate in southern Egypt. Armanios was arrested in Cairo on accusations of preparing Christian identity papers for 2,800 Egyptian Muslims who had become Christians. His detention has been ordered extended for 45 days by the prosecutor.
Detainee Samir Sa'ad has been identified as a Coptic Christian who had converted to Islam and then tried to return to Christianity. An employee in the civil records office in Dokki, Cairo, Sa'ad was reportedly tortured to confess the names of Muslims who had converted to Christianity.
An additional 10 Christians have been detained in the widening sweep of arrests said to be organized by Lt. Sayed Zaky, a criminal investigation officer known for following illegal procedures in detaining Christians.
Although Lt. Zaky informed the prosecutor that the newly accused Christians had been arrested off the street, local sources confirmed that in fact they were taken forcibly from their homes in the middle of the night. "They were breaking down doors, searching their homes, abusing the parents in front of their children, all in a very humiliating way," the sources said.
Those arrested are reportedly being tortured by Lt. Walid El-Dossoky, assigned to the state security police headquarters in Lazogly. Because of El-Dossoky's long-term reputation for inflicting cruel torture upon particularly the women Christian converts, numerous complaints have been filed to human rights organizations against him.
Although Egypt's Coptic Christians make up more than 10 percent of the national population, the government is accused of blatant "religious apartheid" for its discriminatory laws favoring the Muslim majority.
While Christian citizens who want to convert to Islam are free to adopt Muslim names and change their official religious identity, these rights are denied to Muslims who convert to Christianity. Under the law, it is not illegal for an Egyptian to convert from one religion to another, but in practice, Muslims who become Christians face arrest, torture and ongoing threats to their lives.
In the face of such persecution, many such converts have tried to change their religious status without government permission, leaving themselves open to the charge of falsifying official documents.
In the wake of this latest crackdown, a group of former Muslims who have converted to Christianity issued an anonymous declaration from Cairo on October 26.
"We are between the jaws of the constitution and the legislation," the Christian converts stated, noting the dilemma between constitutional guarantees of freedom of belief and Islamic law demanding that unrepentant apostates be executed.
Asserting their rights as Egyptian citizens to equal treatment under the laws of the land, the converts demanded that all cases of falsified identities against Christian converts be dropped unconditionally.
"The Egyptian government is itself responsible for this illegal action," the declaration stated, "because it has deprived us of one of our basic legal rights, to embrace a new faith and change our name, our identity and our official papers. Give us our rights, and we will not falsify these things."
"Is it logical," the converts asked, "that the person who chooses a religion other than Islam is accused of blasphemy, and the opposite is not applied?"
In fact, the statement noted, Egypt's Christians were all being given the freedom to change their beliefs. "But here Muslims are persecuted, because they are not enjoying that same right!"
Egyptian police protect Coptic girls kidnappers
Christian father denied access to teenage daughter
By Barbara G. Baker
Compass (27.10.2003)/ HRWF Int. (30.10.2003) C Website: http://www.hrwf.net/ - Email: info@hrwf.net - An Egyptian Coptic Christian teenager kidnapped a month ago by Muslims who claim shes converted to Islam is being refused direct access to her Christian family, her elder brother near Cairo asserted today.
Ingy Nagy Edwar, 19, is reportedly being held against her will by a Muslim couple in the Haram district of Giza governate, adjacent to Cairo. State security police officials temporarily detained her father and other male relatives a few days after her disappearance, showing them an alleged declaration of conversion to Islam signed by the girl.
According to Nagy Edwar Nagy, his sister disappeared on September 27, the day after she had celebrated her 19th birthday at their family home in El-Maryouteya El-Haram.
The girl was last seen by her father, who sent her off from the local bus station to visit an aunt living in Cairos Heliopolis district. When she never arrived, her family discovered the girls mobile telephone had been turned off. They began to search for her.
We called all of our family members and her friends to ask about her, but in vain, Nagy said. For two days we searched for her in the hospitals, from Giza to Heliopolis.
Finally, on the evening of September 28, Nagy went to report her disappearance at the local police station, where he said he was treated very rudely. The police forced him to wait four hours until they registered his report. Then he was told he had to come back the next day for the official document number.
Dismayed at the authorities response, Nagys father, Edwar Nagy Sedra, went himself to the police to report that his daughter was missing. But he was treated in a very bad way, given that he is a 65-year-old man, his son said. A retired English teacher and school vice-principal, the father was detained overnight on accusations of trying to interfere with his daughters conversion to Islam.
Sedra was shown his daughters conversion declaration, No. 16289 for 2003, in the El-Omraneya administrative office. The police also produced written complaints, one signed by Ingy and another by Abdel Gaber Abdel Moteleb Mohammed Kandyl, rejecting any attempted interference by her father in the girls decision to become a Muslim. Ingy is believed to be staying in the home of Abdel Gaber and his wife.
Although Sedras nephew and son-in-law who had accompanied him to the police station were released, they had their identity cards confiscated. They were ordered to report to the prosecutors office the next day, where the case was transferred to the State Security Directorate.
That same day, the Giza State Security Directorate held a hearing on the girls case, producing Ingy dressed in an Islamic veil. She was not in a normal mood, Nagy stated. When we started crying, she was laughing hysterically.
During the session, Ingys father and other relatives present were treated by the authorities as suspects under accusation, rather than plaintiffs in the case, Nagy said.
During a second hearing on October 18, two Coptic priests were present to ask Ingy about her alleged decision to convert to Islam, as required under Egyptian law. But the girl did not come, sending word instead that she was very sick, bleeding from her nose and mouth.
Ingys family believes the girl is being given drugs which affect her moods, making her personality different from what we know, Nagy said. During the first two weeks of October, Ingys family spoke to her by phone several times, confirming this suspicion. In each phone call, she was in a different mood, Nagy said. Sometimes she was very aggressive, which is inconsistent with her normal personality, and some other times very quiet.
Nagy stated that his youngest sister had been afflicted by an unstable psychological status since their mothers death two years ago. She had a good, loving relationship with the whole family, which Nagy said included two older sisters, but she was deeply attached to our mother. The girl had been living alone with her father and Nagy since the second of her sisters married last year and moved to Cairo.
There is no reason or legal pretext under which she could be permitted to stay at this Muslim mans house, her brother stated. And which law says that her own parent is not allowed to see her?
Under Egyptian civil law, a daughter under the age of 21 cannot change her religion or marry without the legal permission of her father.
We are not asking for anything except our right to a fair application of the law, Nagy said. How can the police and the state security officials enforce such a case, when all these procedures are illegal? he questioned.
A third hearing on Ingys case has been set for Saturday, November 1, when her father will press for his parental rights to regain custody of his daughter.
She told me by phone she wants to commit suicide, Nagy told Compass last week. She is going through a hard, hard time.
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88,000 mosques, one sermon
by Emad Mekay
Inter Press Service (25.07.2003)/HRWF Int. (28.07.2003) C Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - The same official sermon will be delivered in 88,000 mosques across Egypt from this week. The government move is a part of extensive new censorship, with penalties for mosques and preachers that do not toe the official line.
As of this Friday, no preacher will be free to deliver his own sermon, according to a statement from the Awaqaf (religious endowments) ministry. Friday is the holy congregation day at mosques when preachers give their views on religious and political issues.
The sermon will now be written and distributed by officials from the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The regime has been fighting Islamic groups trying to topple his secular pro-Western rule for the past 15 years.
Preachers who do not stick to the text (provided every Friday) would be deprived of bonuses and will be subject to an investigation by the legal affairs department at the ministry, according to the statement from the Awaqaf ministry.
The plan also provides for removing independent preachers and replacing them with imams paid for and appointed by the regime.
Preachers at all newly appropriated mosques will be asked to attend state-run religious indoctrination courses. Preachers will only be appointed after clearing an examination and passing a security test.
Developing the content of Islamic speeches in mosques, especially those delivered during Friday's noon prayers, and improving the image of Muslims in and outside the country were among the major aims of this plan, says Awaqaf minister Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq.
Abdel Monem Abul Fotouh, a member of the guidance council of the Muslim Brotherhood says the move means that the security apparatus, and not a religious institution will run the mosques.
The campaign is part and parcel of the pressure the United States places on our regimes to try and limit the Islamic movement, he told IPS. At the same time as the government and foreign countries are calling for economic liberalization and economic freedom, they want to place restrictions on freedom of expression and religious freedoms in mosques.
Under the authoritarian regime of Mubarak, mosques were among the few venues available for expressing views that do not conform to the official line. The government, increasingly intolerant of opposition, says mosques have become hotbeds for extremist views.
The government earlier stepped up its campaign against extremist groups and against independent Islamic preachers and schools after the September 11 attacks. It took over the management of thousands of mosques and Islamic centers and placed them under the close watch of its intimidating security apparatus.
Mubarak has ruled Egypt with an iron fist under an emergency law since the assassination of former president Anwar Sadat at the hands of Islamic groups in October 1981. Mubarak's officials claim he has won his three seven-year election terms by 95 percent or more--much like Saddam Hussein.
Mubarak has since thrown thousands of opponents behind bars, ordered summary military trials where there was little chance of receiving justice, and executed dozens of opponents.
He has been working particularly to control all Islamic outlets, including the prestigious al-Azhar University, originally a bastion of Islamic learning.
The President appoints the Grand Imam of al-Azhar--usually from the pro-government ranks of the preachers. The deans of Islamic colleges are handpicked by the government on the recommendations of the security apparatus.
State-controlled media has reduced its religious programming to less than five percent. The shows that remain are devoted to non-political issues like the pilgrimage to Mecca, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, and personal matters.
The regime has also targeted the non-violent but outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamic movement in Egypt. For nearly 15 years, Mubarak's security apparatus hunted down members of the group, who often come from the middle classes. Dozens have been jailed after military trials, and others detained for months without trial.
The decision to move private mosques into the hands of the government was based on recommendations by the security, says Mohammed Morsi, an Egyptian journalist with al-Gomohoria daily.
But some critics say that confining the space for religious freedom could backfire, as it may drive people into the arms of non-official religious groups. Critics also argue that the government needs to take the deteriorating economic situation into account in order to fight extremism. Young men turn to violence not because they go to mosques, but due to official atrocities and the weak economy.
Egyptians have traditionally been averse to official mosques, and distrusted official messages. It is not clear how they will react to the new plan.
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Families of murdered Egyptian Christians still await justice for millennium murders
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (27.01.2003) The families of the 21 victims of inter-religious violence in El-Kosheh, Upper Egypt, heard today they would have a further wait for justice.
21 Christians and one Muslim were killed in violence which broke out in January 2000, the worst massacre of Egyptian Christians in decades. An earlier verdict which acquitted the 96 murder suspects was overturned and a retrial, which began in May last year, was due to have given its verdict today.
Amid heavy security in a session which lasted only five minutes, Judge Lotfy Suleiman announced the postponement to February 27 this year at Sohag Criminal Court. Contrary to expectations, not one of the 96 defendants was in court.
Egypt's Coptic Christians have expressed their disappointment at today's events.
Mamdouh Nakhla, a lawyer and General Manager of Al Kalema Human Rights Centre in Cairo, represents several of the families of those murdered.
In a statement issued today, he said the lack of a verdict reflected current regional sensitivities: "This delay is primarily due to political and social considerations, as the general environment is not suitable for pronouncing such a verdict, due to the tense and volatile situation in the Middle East in general." He went on to say that he hoped the verdict in February would be "satisfactory to all parties concerned."
Bishop Wissa of Baliana Diocese, which includes the village of El-Kosheh, told CSW that the further delaying of this murder case was in itself "an injustice". Referring to concerns that the postponement of the verdict reflected the current political climate, he commented: "A murder investigation should not be related to international politics."
Mervyn Thomas, Chief Executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: "We share in the disappointment of all those concerned that the outcome of this trial has yet again been delayed.
"The killers of the 21 who were murdered are still at large, and must be brought to justice as soon as possible. Their families have already waited for too long."
Notes to editors
The violence in El-Kosheh, which erupted over the Millennium weekend, stemmed from a dispute between a Muslim trader and a Christian shop-owner on Friday December 31 1999. Muslim-owned kiosks and Christian-owned shops were damaged or destroyed that day as the violence escalated. While Saturday remained relatively quiet, Sunday saw the brutal murders of 21 Christians amid further violence. The lone Muslim killed was shot by a stray bullet in a neighbouring village. Nobody claimed that Christians killed him.
During the violence, local security forces either stood by passively or became actively involved in the attacks. It is thus widely believed that the local security police bear responsibility for the escalation of the violence.
The Egyptian Government tried to hide the sectarian nature of the incident. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak blamed subversive foreign elements for instigating the fighting, saying that the culprits behind the clashes were "pushed from abroad".
An Egyptian State Security Court acquitted 96 murder suspects on February 5 2001. The Sohag Criminal Court found only four defendants guilty, but only of lesser crimes connected with the massacre.
A penalty of 10 years imprisonment was handed down to Mayez Amin Abdel Rahim, a Muslim found guilty of possession of an illegal weapon during the riots. The other three, all Muslims, were found guilty of deliberately setting alight a truck trailer. One was sentenced to two years imprisonment and the other two were given one year sentences.
This verdict shocked and outraged Egypt's Christian community. Coptic Bishop Wissa, whose diocese includes El-Kosheh, said that the verdict served as a green light for Muslims to kill Christians. Coptic Pope Shenouda III condemned the verdict and told reporters in Cairo at the time: "We want to challenge this ruling. We don't accept it."
The office of Egypt's Prosecutor General, Maher Abdel Wahid, formally contested the Sohag court's verdict on February 22 2001. "There is no doubt that 21 people were killed, and the killers must be brought to justice", he told the Al-Ahaly newspaper on February 27. Cairo's Court of Cassation, the highest appeals court in Egypt, announced it would hear the appeal, and on July 30 it overturned the initial verdict and ordered a retrial which opened on May 7 2002.
The El-Kosheh massacre was Egypt's worst clash in decades between the country's predominantly Muslim citizens and Coptic Christians, who comprise approximately ten percent of the population. Dubbed 'El-Kosheh II', the riots were preceded by a controversial murder investigation in the same village 16 months earlier, when police were accused of rounding up and torturing over 1,000 Coptic villagers to force confessions, implicating a Christian as the culprit.
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