A day after Egypt barred Human Rights Watch (HRW) representatives from entering the country, the group disclosed the source of Cairo’s alarm: A report implicating senior officials, including Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, in what it called the “widespread and systematic” killings of protesters.
The New York-based group on Monday said it had conducted a year-long investigation into the violence that followed the military’s ouster of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and found that the killings of demonstrators by the police and army forces “likely amounted to crimes against humanity.”
Official statements during the killings made clear that the attacks “were ordered by the government,” the group said.
Photo: AFP
The report, released yesterday and titled All According to Plan: The Rabaa Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt, is the latest of several independent attempts by rights workers and journalists to document a series of mass killings last summer they say Egyptian authorities have failed to meaningfully investigate and which officials seem determined to make the country forget.
The worst of the violence occurred on Aug. 14 last year, when security forces used force to disperse a sit-in of Morsi supporters near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo, killing more than 800 people and possibly more than 1,000, HRW said. The group called the episode “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”
No security or government officials have been prosecuted for the killings, which set off a period of civil conflict and government repression that included the arrests of tens of thousands of people, including Islamists, journalists and leftist political activists.
The report calls for an investigation of al-Sisi, who was supreme commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces at the time, and several other sitting government officials “including [Egyptian] Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim ... and Medhat Menshawy,” who led the crackdown at Rabaa al-Adawiya.
The crackdown was not “merely a case of excessive force or poor training,” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said in the report. “It was a violent crackdown planned at the highest levels of the Egyptian government. Many of the same officials are still in power in Egypt, and have a lot to answer for.”
The report quoted survivors describing the assault.
“It was raining bullets. I smelled tear gas and immediately saw people being hit and falling down around me,” said a businessman who was at the sit-in. “I have no idea how many people were hit. We didn’t hear any warnings, nothing. It was like hell.”
Another participant described how alleged army snipers shot at demonstrators.
“They were hiding behind sandbags on top of the [military intelligence] building,” he said.
HRW said the authorities have failed to take action against any officer accountable for any of the killings, “much less any official responsible for ordering them.”
“An international investigation and prosecutions of those implicated are needed ... states should further suspend military and law enforcement aid to Egypt until it adopts measures to end its serious rights violations,” the group said.
US President Barack Obama’s administration has signaled its intention to return its full support for Cairo under al-Sisi, despite scant evidence that Egypt is becoming more democratic or inclusive.
Many rights workers and civil society advocates say the current atmosphere is more stifling and perilous than under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who was deposed in an uprising in 2011.
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