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Blogger and political analyst Hany Fawzy from the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt – a member church of the World Council of Churches, reflects on the killing of 21 Christians by the “Islamic State” in Libya. The following reflections were written soon after the incident took place on 16 February.
What were these men thinking at that moment of terror? These men – born from the womb of Egypt’s blackest land.
A frightening scene: masked men in black and twenty-one hostages in orange colored execution garments, martial weapons positioned on their necks ready for slaughter. A cinematographic scenario for an ugly scene. Yet this scene isn’t fictional, it was filmed and broadcast; millions have watched it: thugs talking about Osama Bin Laden and victims submerged in an incomprehensible silence, differently interpreted – each from their own perspective. I wonder if one of the victims thought of what brought him to a desert a thousand kilometers away from the home, where he was born in the heart of Upper Egypt. A land whose people have for thousands of years, excelled in agriculture, tamed the violent river, created a civilization around the Nile, contemplated nature and created a mythology to explain its phenomena, planted palm trees that granted nature some stability and built obelisks – resembling the palm trees, reaching to the sky, invented alphabets, wrote and left an amazing heritage.
Yet the grandchildren of this civilization are now being slaughtered in a desert they are not familiar with – a desert which is the reverse of the civilization their ancestors had created– a desert that ticks differently, has different values, a different life-style and a different economy. These grandchildren are being slaughtered in a moment where parties they don’t know are fighting – in a villainous way - about something that is totally none of their business; something they don’t understand but which has killed them…
Twenty-two-year-old Kyrillos Bushra born in Minya, one of the murdered Egyptians, used to get 26 US dollars as a daily wage. A contemptible price he lost his life for. Kyrillos, like thousands of Egyptian unskilled workers, went to Libya seeking a better life and better income that he could not find in his village. Agriculture no longer provides a decent income, since the Egyptian state decades ago halted the development of his village. I do not think Kyrillos and his companions chose to migrate. They were almost forced to migrate. They are not like people of the middle and upper economic classes who emigrate to North America, Europe or to the oil-wealthy Gulf countries for several reasons, not including providing the minimum standard of living for their families. Kyrillos and his fellows traveled to the desert to be able to earn those few dollars – merely to be able to survive.
I don’t know if any of those backstabbed young Egyptians thought for a moment whether or not they would be considered “martyrs” in the religious sense, I don’t know if any of them were ever concerned about that. Nor do I know if any of them ever wished that they had not migrated.
The sons have become victims
Fourteen of these twenty-one young men used to share the same house. They came from Al-Our, a poor village in the province of Minya – a village that lacks basic infrastructure and suffers from a shortage of electricity and drinking water. It has one dispensary lacking real services, its roads are decaying. It is a village whose only genuine asset is its young people. They are its “high palm trees” – the principal source of income as the palm trees used to be their ancestors’ source of income. They are the hope for a slightly better future and a source of limited security in the midst of a soul-biting fear. They depart from their village, their parents, wives, siblings and children bid them farewell and hope they won’t stay away for long, wish them safety and wait for their news while they continue leading their slow and tiring days abroad. They know they are strong but they also know how hard their life there is. The pain of separation is always mixed with hope.
“The palm trees have lost their shade”. The sons have become victims in a scary bloody show. A funeral prayer is held in the church where the altar’s canopy has been covered by palm branches. The inhabitants of the village have gathered weeping for those gone and all that is gone with them. For many large families, sorrow at losing their children and fathers is now mixed with the fear of a future seeming to have become even worse through their ultimate absence. The poor village and its people are victims of politics and economy, regional and international power struggles, and a state that has failed to assume its developmental and social roles, of hate-ideologies whose members say they represent God, and of greedy elites that spare neither green fields nor dry grass.
Al-Our families, who have seen the ugliness of slaughter and the ugliness of their reality, those families who have lost their sons and most of their future, may be comforted a little that their sons are now called “martyrs”. Yet I believe those “martyrs’” children as well as all the children of Al-Our, deserve a fair chance to live in their country. The right of these children to live in dignity, social justice and freedom is far more important than our sympathy for them. Their right to have their fair share of the country’s resources is far more important than that their fathers are now considered martyrs.
The title of what I wrote “When high palm trees fell revealing the terror of the sun”, is borrowed from the late Radwan El-Kashef, a great Egyptian film director, who with these words concluded his film Arak el-balah - a tale of a village that loses its shade when its high palm trees fell revealing the terror of the sun…
“May the Lord have mercy upon those who are gone and those who are left behind…”
WCC mourns the killing of Egyptian Christians (WCC news release of 17 February 2015)
