By Omayma Abdel-Latif When US Representative Frank Wolf, co-author of a bill combating religious persecution worldwide, visited Cairo earlier this month, he hosted a reception for a number of Egyptian intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian. As the reception drew to a close, Wolf was approached by Marlyn Tadros, a human rights activist, who gave him a piece of her mind. "You know, you sound like the new crusaders," she told Wolf. "This bill is disastrous because it will undermine our work to settle whatever problems Copts are facing here." But Wolf was undeterred. Following his return to Washington, he vowed to "never let this thing [religious persecution] go -- absolutely, positively, categorically." Key Coptic figures have reacted with dismay. "What business does he have to tell us that our rights are violated?" Tadros said. "He sounded as if he had been fed false information about the situation in Egypt and when he came here he could not see for himself the true picture." Wolf co-authored the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act with Senator Arlen Specter. The bill imposes sanctions, such as a halt of non-humanitarian aid and a ban on domestic exports, on nations that exercise or tolerate religious persecution. It has been approved by the House of Representatives and Wolf is hopeful that it will be passed by the Senate. According to a report published by the weekly newspaper Al-Osbou, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry has protested Wolf's statements in a message to the US administration. "The Copts are more capable than anybody else of assessing their own problems," the message reportedly said. "They have rejected previous US attempts at meddling in their affairs and using them as a tool of pressure on the Egyptian government." According to the report, Cairo also asked Washington to stop dispatching missions whose sole target is to "tarnish Egypt's image". Officials at the Coptic Orthodox Church have repeatedly rejected any attempt at foreign intervention. "The Americans cannot get it into their heads that we do not face persecution," a Church source said. "It is too big a word to describe the situation here. We do face some problems but they will be solved only within a national framework." At his Washington briefing, Wolf denied reports that he had sought a meeting with Pope Shenoudah III, patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church. "We knew what he was going to say," the congressman said. Pope Shenoudah has said repeatedly that while every country is free to enact whatever legislation it deems appropriate, it has no right to impose such legislation on other countries. Describing the bill as "stark intervention in Egypt's affairs," Pope Shenoudah said the Church does not accept that sanctions should be imposed on Egypt because of alleged religious persecution. In an apparent attempt to defuse the strain caused by Wolf's statements, the US ambassador to Egypt, Daniel Kurtzer, denied that the congressional discussions of the religious persecution bill were an attempt to intervene in Egypt's affairs. The debate, he said, dealt with the status of minorities around the world. Kurtzer added that he is "fully convinced that Muslims and Copts co-exist peacefully with little, if any, discrimination at all." The US ambassador had earlier in the week met the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Nasr Farid Wassel, who rejected the persecution allegations as "sheer lies". Wassel told Kurtzer that "persecution does not exist in Egypt because Islam prohibits such abhorrent behaviour and whoever believes otherwise is better off coming to Egypt to see for himself." An American source told Al-Ahram Weekly that a Coptic lawyer, Maurice Sadek, who met Wolf during his visit to Cairo, made allegations of persecution. But the Congressman "was not very impressed", the source said. "He realised that while one party tells half the truth, the other party overdoes it." But Sadek, a human rights activist, said that although he talked to Wolf "about the problems of Copts, little, if anything, was said about persecution per se." Wolf himself conceded at the Washington briefing that many Copts he had spoken to agreed that "there is little, if any, systematic government persecution."
