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Violent Protests Underscore Egypt's Fragile Religious Balance
CAIRO, June 21 (News Agencies) - At least 70 people were injured in violent protests at Cairo's Coptic Cathedral this week that have underscored the delicate balance between a Christian minority that feels increasingly oppressed and the rest of Egypt's Muslim-dominated society.
The demonstrations, which began on Sunday after a newspaper published the graphic story of a defrocked monk's alleged sexual affairs in an Egyptian monastery, have been fed by old grievances such as the millennium massacre of 20 Christians in the southern Egypt town of Kosheh.
"All Copts are oppressed here in Egypt," said one, who gave his name as Tamer, leaving the cathedral Wednesday night as Christians and riot police threw rocks, sticks and bottles at each other across the gates.
Tamer said they were simply voicing their anger that two newspapers had been able to publish pictures of the bearded former monk in compromising positions with a naked woman in a highly conservative country where such stories would not usually get past the printers.
"We want a harsh sentence," he said, referring to the editor of the two papers, Mamduh Mahran, who faces up to 24 years in jail for humiliating Christians and lighting "fires of civil strife" in a trial that begins Sunday.
BBC reported that the head of Egypt's Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, the leader of Egypt's Coptic Church, has tried to throw water on the fiery emotions fueling the riots by denying that the ex-monk had sex in the monastery, which Copts believe was visited by the Holy Family.
But the protests took on an added dimension as the violence spread into the streets with Copts disrupting traffic, kicking in the doors of a random passing car and vandalizing illuminated advertising hoardings.
"It's not just the newspaper case. Now everything is coming out," said another Christian called Mina, listing a string of grievances from last year's Kosheh massacre to Christian-Muslim riots in the 1970s which started in Cairo's al-Zawiya al-Hamraa district and spread across the country.
An Egyptian court is due to decide in six weeks time whether or not to grant a retrial for the 96 people charged in connection with the Kosheh bloodshed after all but four of them were acquitted in February, angering Christians.
As human rights activists record "unprecedented" levels of discrimination against the Christian population, small incidents can rapidly grow out of control, like the trade dispute over a piece of cloth which started the Kosheh riots, or a Christian's washing dripping on his Muslim neighbor's balcony which the government said sparked the al-Zawiya al-Hamraa unrest.
The Copts, who the government say account for six percent of Egypt's 65 million people, complain they face insults from Islamists, are not given permits to build churches and are discriminated against by the authorities in the state bureaucracy, police and army, education system, and other areas.
Christians demonstrating inside the cathedral Wednesday night also charged the local press was biased against them and was ignoring their grievances.
And as plainclothes secret police violently beat up demonstrators with rubber truncheons in the streets, the Copts added heavy-handedness by the security services to their list of complaints.
Egypt's high sensitivity towards its Christian minority was further highlighted last month when U.S.-Egyptian rights activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was sentenced to seven years in jail, partly for reporting on persecution of Copts.
Authorities, in order to prevent further unrest and appease the Christian community, have moved to shut down Mahran's newspapers and have drawn up a list of heavy charges against him ahead of a speedy trial.
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