Frosty
Reception for US Religious Freedom Commission in Egypt
Vickie
Langohr
(Vickie
Langohr teaches political science at the College of the Holy Cross.)
March 29, 2001
What if you had
a party and no one came? On March 22, members of the United States
Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) -- visiting
Cairo on a fact-finding tour -- waited in vain for members of
Egyptian political parties and civil society groups to arrive at the
commission's welcoming gala. The press variously put the Egyptian
attendance at zero or two, with one of the two reported guests
subsequently denying her presence. This was only the last in a
series of snubs experienced by the commission, which met with
President Hosni Mubarak, the head of the Coptic Church, and the
Sheikh of al-Azhar but otherwise was almost universally boycotted by
both Christians and Muslims. The USCIRF delegation, headed by former
assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, went to Egypt to
investigate claims that Egyptian Copts are victims of persistent
mistreatment ranging from discrimination in public life to
religiously motivated attacks on their life and property. But the
delegates got a frostier reception from Egyptian human rights
activists -- some of whom have encouraged forthright discussion of
the Coptic question -- than from the Egyptian government, which
flatly denies the existence of discrimination.
EVANGELICAL
ORIGINS
The USCIRF was created in 1998 by the
International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), ostensibly to advise the
president, the State Department and Congress on religious freedom
worldwide. Commission staff is on the US government payroll.
President Bill Clinton, other Democrats and business interests
opposed the original formulation of IRFA, which mandated imposition
of economic sanctions on countries found by the US to persecute
religious minorities. The compromise bill -- whose overwhelming
passage lent the USCIRF its current "bipartisan" patina -- granted
the president authority to waive sanctions that are "not in the
national interest," effectively pulling the teeth out of the
legislation. IRFA also established a parallel Office on
International Religious Freedom inside the State Department, which
issues annual reports identifying "countries of particular concern"
-- violators of religious freedom. The 1999 and 2000 reports named
Burma, China, Iran, Iraq and Sudan in this category.
The
impetus to make the US government a crusader for religious liberty
came from the Christian right, and the USCIRF -- despite its current
multi-faith composition -- still bears the imprint of its
evangelical and partisan origins. During its first year, in addition
to Sudan and China, the commission focused on Russia, where the
government limits the activities of Mormon and other missionaries.
In the waning years of the Clinton administration, the USCIRF
skirmished repeatedly with the State Department over the latter's
refusal to expand the list of "countries of particular concern" or
enforce tougher sanctions against the countries so designated.
Heavily backed by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and other deeply
conservative Congressional Republicans, the USCIRF embarked on a
public relations offensive last summer to accentuate its
disagreements with the administration. Writing in the right-wing
Washington Times on January 1, Abrams blasted the administration for
not tightening "IRFA sanctions" on Sudan, China and Iran, and
suggested that new IRFA measures target France. Commission member
Nina Shea (who was not a member of the Cairo delegation) also works
as director of the conservative Center for Religious Freedom, which
focuses exclusively on Christian religious freedom. (The Center's
website boasts that Newsweek credited Shea with making "Christian
persecution Washington's hottest cause.") As George W. Bush is
indebted to the religious right, the USCIRF hopes that phrasing
concern for human rights as concern for religious freedom will find
a more receptive audience than it did under
Clinton.
PRESSURE ON MUBARAK
Since Hosni
Mubarak will come to Washington on April 2, many Egyptian observers
feel the timing of the USCIRF visit is not accidental. In July 1999,
the occasion of Mubarak's last visit, the USCIRF, echoing the
regular allegations of Coptic immigrant groups, issued a statement
averring that Copts were "finding it increasingly difficult to
practice [their] faith freely." Egyptian analysts assert that the US
is seeking leverage over Mubarak during his trip, particularly with
an eye to influencing Egypt's positions on the Palestinians and
US-led sanctions on Iraq.
The USCIRF's presence in Cairo put
the government, and the religious officialdom whose positions depend
on it, between a rock and a hard place. The government's reception
of the Commission was roundly attacked in the parliament -- with the
Coptic head of the opposition Wafd party's delegation leading the
charge. But as Egypt is the second-largest recipient of US aid,
totaling $2.1 billion in 1999, Mubarak could hardly refuse to see
the commission. In an effort to obscure this point, the government
repeatedly argued that the USCIRF is a private body unconnected to
Congress. The Sheikh of al-Azhar, Sayyed Tantawi, Egypt's
highest-ranking Muslim leader and a presidential appointee, also
gave an interview to the commission, using his time to stress that
Copts reject interference in their internal affairs and dissociate
themselves from the claims made by Coptic emigres on their behalf.
The position of Coptic officialdom has been kept purposely more
vague. Pope Shenouda, the head of the Coptic Church in Egypt, met
with the delegation but did not take a public stance on its
activities. Sources close to him attacked the USCIRF for making
Copts a political football.
EGYPT'S COPTIC
QUESTION
Egypt's Christians, the overwhelming majority of
whom are Copts, are variously estimated at between six and ten
percent of the population. The Coptic issue has long been
politically sensitive. The 1994 attempt of Saad Eddin Ibrahim's Ibn
Khaldun Center to include discussion of the Copts in a conference on
minorities in the Arab world raised such a furor that the conference
was relocated from Cairo to Cyprus, although subsequent annual
conferences in Cairo have raised Coptic concerns. Ibrahim, currently
on trial for unrelated charges, has alleged that his attention to
Coptic concerns is a primary reason that he has been targeted by the
government. He declined to meet with the USCIRF, saying that he
feared jeopardizing his ongoing legal case.
Almost all Copts
living in Egypt reject being classified as a "minority," but they do
suffer from many of the disadvantages experienced by religious
minority populations worldwide. While Muslim religious holidays are
national holidays, Coptic holidays are not. Coverage of Coptic
religious ceremonies on state-owned television, while it has
increased over the past few years, remains rare compared to Islamic
programming. Copts seeking to add on to existing churches or build
new ones require special government permission. Ottoman-era
regulations from the 1850s still restrict where churches can be
located, forbidding church construction within a certain number of
meters of existing mosques or graveyards, for instance. Copts are
severely under-represented in politics. The exceptions -- such as
former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali, who had been
minister of state for foreign affairs, and current minister of the
economy Youssef Boutros Ghali -- prove the rule. Only three
Christians serve among the 444 elected politicians in the new
parliament. Two of the three are wealthy entrepreneurs, and wealth
may be the best chance for Coptic candidates to break into the upper
echelons of political power.
More pernicious than political
under-representation of Copts is the charge that they are singled
out as victims in communal violence. The most recent such charge
stems from two separate incidents in the southern Egyptian village
of al-Kosheh, two-thirds of whose inhabitants are Copts. After two
Copts were killed in al-Kosheh in August 1998, the police
investigation rounded up over 1,000 Copts, many of whom were
tortured. Hafez Abu Saada, secretary-general of the Egyptian
Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), was imprisoned as the EOHR
prepared to issue a report on the incident documenting police
misconduct. A commercial dispute between a Muslim and a Christian in
the same village in January 2000 escalated into a bloodbath in which
21 Christians and one Muslim were killed. Last month's court ruling
that acquitted 92 of the 96 defendants in the case sparked much
anger in Egypt and abroad.
"RELIGIOUS FREEDOM" OR HUMAN
RIGHTS?
Some human rights activists argue that the
al-Kosheh incidents are not cases of religious persecution per se,
but manifestations of a larger problem in Egypt: a lack of respect
for the rights of both Muslim and Christian citizens. Abu Saada
turned down a December 1999 award from the Washington-based Center
for Religious Freedom for EOHR's coverage of al-Kosheh, saying that
while the award was meant for those defending the case of religious
freedom, EOHR did not see and had not reported al-Kosheh as a case
of religious persecution. Similarly, some activists have explained
the acquittal of almost all of the defendants in the second
al-Kosheh case as a result of inadequate police work which could not
connect specific defendants to particular crimes, leaving the judges
with no option but to acquit. Such sloppy investigations, they
contend, dog many attempts to bring abusers of human rights to
justice. But many other human rights organizations see the issue
differently, arguing that the pervasiveness of Islamist discourse
advanced by Islamist groups and the government alike has led many
Muslims to see Copts as second-class citizens, creating a climate in
which they are victimized even more easily than their Muslim
neighbors. They argue that police behavior in the al-Kosheh cases
was unique in several ways, particularly in the widespread torture
of women rounded up in the police investigation.
While
different human rights groups disagree on the causes of al-Kosheh,
they were almost unanimous in refusing to meet the USCIRF mission on
the grounds that this body has no internationally recognized legal
status and that the US is particularly unqualified to investigate
ostensible violations of religious freedom. Five of Egypt's most
prominent human rights groups explained their refusal to meet the
committee in a statement which highlighted US "double standards in
the matter of human rights," manifested by its "devoting attention
to religious freedoms in the Middle East while supporting shameful
violations of the rights of the Palestinian people." The statement
called attention to US obstruction of the latest plea from the
Palestinians for UN protection. (On March 28, the US did veto a UN
Security Council resolution establishing a UN observer force in the
Occupied Territories.) The groups also focused special attention on
the dubious record of Abrams as assistant secretary of state for
Latin American affairs, as well as his recent statements on Israel
and the intifada. In articles Abrams posted on the website http://www.beliefnet.com/, he
criticized a US Protestant church delegation because it had
condemned the Israeli response to the current uprising and supported
the Palestinian right of return. These questions of credibility will
haunt the USCIRF as it moves on to stops in Saudi Arabia and
Israel-Palestine.

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