The over reaction to the visit of Abba Makarious, Bishop of Minya, to family of the Coptic man who was killed in police station Magdy McCain in order to offer his consonances in Magdy’s death was very strange to me, especially as the Coptic MP Nadia Henary was there offering her sincere condolences as well. In fact, I didn’t find any official reactions to Coptic clergy against any torture incidents. No religion supports torture, but church has always tried to keep pace with the regimes though they never stopped violating rights of the poor, women and Copts.
I made a study about sectarian attacks in Egypt from 1978 to 2010. I found out that 320 Egyptian Christians were killed in sectarian attacks during that period, but nobody was found guilty except one man called Kammouny who killed several Copts on Christmas eve in Nag Hammadi. The bombing of Saints church in Alexandria in 2011 killed 23 people and wounded 79, but no serious investigations were carried out by the prosecution till today. Moreover, a Coptic old man called Eskandar Tos, 67 years old, was killed in 2013 and his sons reported police dozens of times, but it took police 100 days to start the investigations and the results are not revealed yet! The problem is that the killers were filmed killing the man and they are known, but no lawsuit was even filed!
The Copts couldn’t get their rights in many cases, which makes them seek help from the church instead of the state. The church also played an important political and national role at the revolution of June 30. Yet, the people can’t ignore many situations related to their consciousness like stripping an old woman nude in the streets by fanatics, attacking and looting several churches and Coptic properties. I tell those who criticized the visit of Bishop Makarious to the family of Magdy McCain that priests and bishops in Latin America defended human being through the so called liberation theology. We have church leaders like Bishop Makarious, Nadia Henry and William Sidhom Jesuit to do the same in Egypt.
