CAIRO, 13 January 2010 (IRIN): A 6 January drive-by shooting on a Coptic Christian congregation leaving midnight mass on their Christmas Eve in Nagaa Hammadi, southern Egypt, has focused attention on decades-old tensions between Muslims and Christians in Egypt.
Six Copts and a Muslim security guard were killed in the attack which has sent shockwaves through the Coptic community and led to sporadic clashes between Christian protesters and security forces, and between Christians and Muslims.
– Everything in this country is leading up to a situation where non-Muslims are hated, denigrated, and even Our education system fills the students with nothing but hatred and fear of those who are different.
Sidhom believes anti-Christian sentiment has been sweeping this populous predominantly Muslim society since the early 1980s, when Islamic extremism began to rise. Coptic Christians make up about 10 per cent of the country’s 80 million citizens, he said.
Recent incidents include five days of riots in the village of Farshout, near Nagaa Hammadi, with Christian properties set on fire, after an alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man.
Rights groups have for years sought to address what they say are systematic injustices towards the Christian community.
In 2008, an Amnesty International report said sectarian attacks on Copts had increased in 2008 and that “sporadic clashes between Coptic Christians and Muslims left eight people dead.”
In mid-2009, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a local NGO defending the rights of minorities in Egypt, released a report on the plight of Egypt’s Copts. It said Copts suffered persecution, limits on practicing their religion and restrictions on building churches.
Egypt’s National Council for Human Rights has repeatedly called for giving Copts equal rights as far as the construction of prayer houses is concerned. There are only 4.000 churches in Egypt, according to Coptic leaders, while there are about 400.000 mosques.
