The ongoing crisis regarding Egypt's Copts is more than a national security issue, going to the heart of the Egyptian state and the identity of all Egyptians, writes Ahmed El-Tonsi* Will the events of last Sunday be the final ones, or will we have to witness scenes of further violence? If so, when and where are the important questions that the caretaker government should endeavour to answer. Amidst all the signs of a major confrontation, even with a fixed date and place, the government did not move to defuse the tension or pre- emptively disrupt the events that were occurring. Being a caretaker government does not mean adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards a volatile and highly inflammatory crisis that had been brewing for more than a week. As such, the caretaker government was more of an undertaker, burying the dead after incidents that all the signs had predicted would occur. Moreover, the "revolutionary" government's inaction lasted until the demonstrations had almost dispersed, leaving their victims behind them. The whole landscape is cloudy, with the ongoing violence casting dark and frequently bloody shadows. It is not just the state that has been failing, giving rise to a situation of near anarchy as a result. It is also the nation's cohesion that has been suffering. State-building is a much easier process than sticking together the fragments of a nation. When a polity faces the two processes together in the aftermath of a great event like January's Revolution, things get even more complex, and quite understandably the country now faces political fragmentation. In our case, it is the nation, and consequently the state, that is subject to serious risk of fragmentation. Sectarian strife in Egypt has a long history, and it went through many phases before the revolution that we erroneously thought had buried such differences. In politics, there is no melting pot. Rather, there are political demands that actors pursue when there are opportunities to realise them. The Copts have been yearning for decades to see their legitimate demands realised. Save for a tiny minority of religious fundamentalists, there has been near universal consensus on the need to meet them. Yet, for years successive regimes and governments have not moved an inch towards meeting these demands. Some remarks on the present crisis and its ramifications should be made. First, the revolution has radicalised sections of the population with its slogans of change, liberty and social justice. In fact, there is an overlap between the revolution's objectives and many legitimate, older demands, such as for freedom of religion and related liberties. Accordingly, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) should see such long-denied demands as part of the revolution's objectives, espoused by an original and important participant in the revolution. Only the SCAF with its record in the revolution can take such a step whatever its political price. Second, the current crisis is too serious to be left to its own catastrophic logic. Nations, particularly old ones like the Egyptian, do not lose their national cohesion overnight, even with scenes of "all against all", as the philosopher Hobbes once put it. Rather, it is repeated wear and tear that does the damage. Meanwhile, the current transitional and yet-to-be- elected power structures cannot handle things alone. The present crisis needs to be addressed by a non-partisan body assigned by the SCAF to bring immediate solutions to the table and just as importantly the long-term steps that should be taken to restore national unity. Third, the state-building process has been defective as well as slow, and it has lacked a clear vision and strategies to re- establish collapsing institutions. The security apparatus has not received adequate attention from the SCAF at a time when society needs a fully-active corps of men to safeguard the state. This issue should have been considered as the number one priority in view of what Egypt witnessed in the days of the revolution and its aftermath. Radical measures should have been taken to recruit new personnel to the security apparatus in order to reverse its declining capacities. Decisions like the conscription of many unemployed new graduates could have helped inject new blood into the security services, young people having a strong motivation to serve the new era with its challenges and uncertainties. Fourth, our security apparatus has been subjected to criticism from nearly every direction, something that has had a negative impact on the morale of many of its personnel, particularly those dealing with political issues. This has been a grave problem that has fomented an apathetic attitude among many within the police force, which has been treated as part of the ancien régime. Such an apathetic attitude on the part of some sectors within the police will last as long as these are excluded from the new, post-revolutionary scene. A state cannot exist without a police force functioning as a law- enforcement body that people, upon their joining any state, have agreed should protect them and their property. This is part of the basic social contract between the people and the state. Otherwise, people would have remained in the state of nature, uncertain about themselves and the safety of their property. Such uncertainty is what we have been witnessing in today's Egypt: a state of nature where every man is against every other man. When a state cannot enforce law and order, then it is not a state in which people can claim their rights, a condition that makes null the state's power to subject its citizens to its suzerainty. Fifth, the SCAF has only reluctantly addressed growing anxieties among the Copts. Solid reasons have existed behind the mounting pressures felt by an increasing number of Copts. Living in an environment where some elements within the Islamist political trend have been exercising their muscles while espousing exclusionist slogans, it has become impossible for many Copts not to panic. When compounded with a sense of the ineffectual security measures carried out by the state, many Copts have felt that Egypt is changing for the worse and that it is not keeping its promises. According to the Western press, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Copts leaving Egypt, reaching hundreds of thousands since the January Revolution. Sixth, to its credit the January Revolution in its early phases prevented the sectarian strife from becoming open confrontation between Muslims and Copts. Such an outcome looked imminent in early January this year following the church bombing in Alexandria, itself a serious escalation in the ongoing troubles. This incident was followed by events in many other towns, those in Imbaba in Cairo being the gravest. This showed for the first time that the use of arms by the Copts was serious, and it indicated that this use should not be left without deeper analysis of how elements within the usually peaceful Copts have reached such a qualitative shift in their responses to hostility. The Copts as a community trace their calendar back to the birth of Jesus, and they rarely use arms in religious contexts. Yet, such a thing happened in Imbaba, passing apparently unnoticed except by the few who have identified this dramatic change in the Copts' attitude and behaviour. Attempts to bury differences have always been a case of too little, too late, even when Muslim institutions like Al-Azhar have tried to bring about a halt in the progression of strife. Seventh, the Coptic youth are basically the same as their Muslim compatriots in terms of their sharing the characteristics of a new generation that is utterly different from the older generation. Their voluntary participation in the revolution, despite the advice of some clergymen, was a sign that this new generation has been becoming politically active, abandoning the political apathy of the vast majority of Copts. As such, the participation by Coptic young people in the revolution should be viewed as a new development in the relationship between a growing sector of the Copts and their leadership with its classic differentiation into the religious and temporal. Such a new Coptic generation has the same frustrations as its elders. But it has raised expectations emanating from the revolution's success, together with its missionary spirit of becoming more active in achieving its objectives. In fact, this is the real challenge that we will have to address in the near future, while refraining from the traditional approaches that simply won't work. Calling upon the elders to calm the younger generation is futile, as the latter did not obey the former in a much more serious issue, namely the ousting of former president Mubarak. Eighth, the idea of foreign elements as the culprit behind civil conflict has been a notion that the security apparatus has held to for generations. This is not a eureka-moment discovery, and some Israeli officials have already confessed that they have been doing as much as they can to disturb the relationship between Egyptian Muslims and Copts. With our defective security measures and permeable borders, it would be a surprise if outsiders were not embroiled in the conflict. The idea of any state or institution intervening in Egypt's internal affairs under the guise of protecting minorities is something that should be rejected at all levels and at any cost. The ongoing crisis goes beyond state-building to nation- building. It is more than a national security issue. Instead, it is an issue that touches on the Egyptian state and the identity of all Egyptians. * The writer is a political analyst.
