Cairo mourns the dead after violent crackdown

Abstract

Corpses were brought in all morning, and by noon, the dead outnumbered the living. 170 bodies, some charred, others bloodied, all wrapped in white shrouds, covered the floor of Iman mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City. Relatives of the missing poured in the door, hoping they wouldn’t recognise a name on the hastily written board by the entrance, or any of the still unidentifi ed dead. Such hopes were crushed for 36-year-old Ahmed Abdul Nasser, who sat on the fl oor by a row of bodies. A few hours earlier he had found his younger brother here, with bullet wounds in his neck and forehead. He had last seen him the previous day, when they were running from security forces near Rabaa square during the crackdown on the larger of the two pro-Morsi sit-in demonstrations in Cairo. “There were snipers on the roofs”, Nasser said. “Armoured vehicles came from one side, and they forced us all into a narrow street. Then I lost touch with my brother.” He had searched for him in hospitals across the city, before receiving a phone call from a doctor in Iman mosque. A day after the bloodshed, the mosque had turned into a makeshift morgue. Many expected the Egyptian security forces’ removal of the protesters in Cairo to be bloody, but few anticipated bloodletting on this scale. The army’s heavyhandedness was widely condemned by the international community, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) called it “the worst mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history”. By the end of the week, at least 1000 people— mostly demonstrators, but also about 100 security forces personnel, according to the government—were killed in violence across the country. As the dead were counted, the country found itself more polarised than ever, with public opinion split for or against the army, or for or against the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, the backbone of the pro-Morsi AntiCoup Alliance. The two sides had vastly different narratives of the events, differing on how many were killed, who fi red fi rst, who were the victims and who the perpetrators. Both sides, however, claimed they were protecting democracy and the 2011 revolution, which ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.