Statement by Egyptian Rights Groups Calling for Dismissal of Interior Minister and Cessation of Violence by Muslim Brotherhood

[Logo of Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. Image from cihrs.org] [Logo of Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. Image from cihrs.org]

Statement by Egyptian Rights Groups Calling for Dismissal of Interior Minister and Cessation of Violence by Muslim Brotherhood

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the below signatories and published by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies on 29 July 2013.]

Rights Groups Demand Dismissal of Interior Minister, Call on Muslim Brotherhood to Refrain from Violence and Turn Over Those Responsible

The undersigned organizations are severely alarmed by the massacre that took place on the Nasr Road in Cairo at dawn on Saturday, July 27, after police forces attacked demonstrators supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The attack left 80 dead according to official reports, while the Brotherhood estimated the casualties at 120. Another nine citizens were killed in clashes at Raml Station around al-Qaid Ibrahim Mosque in Alexandria, and MB supporters had detained andtortured citizens inside the mosque.

The political circumstances of the massacre are well known, but the common denominator between it and other similar incidents is the lack of real accountability for the perpetrators of past killings, assassinations, and torture. The current interior minister is the same minister who was appointed during the tenure of the Brotherhood and who was responsible for the massacres in Port Said and Suez in January that left 50 people dead. Instead of being held accountable and prosecuted for this crime, he and his men were praised the following day in an official speech by deposed MB President Mohamed Morsi. He was further rewarded by the current interim president by retaining his post.

The Egyptian security forces’ recurrent use of excessive, lethal violence in the face of political protest will only exacerbate the political ills that led Egyptian society to rebel against the policies of Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and the Muslim Brotherhood. According the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, law enforcement may only use firearms against individuals in self-defense or in the defense of others against an imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent a serious, life-threatening crime, or to arrest a person who constitutes a serious threat and resists authority or to prevent his escape, and then only when less violent methods prove insufficient to achieve these goals. In general, lethal firearms may not be intentionally employed except when unavoidable to protect life (principle 9). The minister of interior has failed to comply with these standards.

Under the rule of President Morsy, leaders, members, and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in torture in a mosque and near the walls of the IttihadiyaPresidential Palace, and killed and assaulted peaceful protestors, artists, media personnel, and rights workers. They also set siege to the Supreme Constitutional Court and prevented judges from working for nearly month, and they are suspected of having assassinated several young opposition activists. There has been no accountability for these crimes, neither under Morsy nor the current interim president; indeed, the MB has continued to commit these crimes after its fall from power. One prominent Brotherhood leader even publicly threatened that terrorist activity would only stop in Sinai if President Morsy were reinstated, an unprecedented admission that the MB has not definitively renounced violence as a means of achieving political objectives. It is also consistent the practice of political violence, which the Brotherhood did not disavow even while in power.

The undersigned organizations fear that the justice system in Egypt remains incapable of ensuring justice for society and for victims given the lack of political will to do so, as was seen first under the SCAF and later under the Brotherhood. The state’s cursory approach to the massacre at the Republican Guards Club on July 8, 2013 casts doubt on the state’s ability to deal responsibly with the latest massacre and to hold the perpetrators accountable. As such, this latest massacre joins a long series of killings documented by rights groups since the January 2011 uprising, including during the uprising itself and the killings which occurred at Maspero, at Mohammed Mahmoud Street in 2011 and 2012, in Port Said in 2012 and 2013, in front of the Cabinet building, at the Ittihadiyya Presidential Palace, and in Muqattam.

If the current violent political polarization continues amid the continued absence of political will to achieve justice – which results in the incapacitation of the justice system – Egyptians can hope for nothing more than that future massacres reap fewer victims.

As such, the undersigned groups demand the following:

  1. The interior minister should be dismissed and held accountable for his actions. During his tenure, his subordinates have committed two massacres: one in Port Said in January 2013 and one against demonstrators on the Nasr Road two days ago. The minister’s responsibility is not mitigated by the fact that some demonstrators first shot at the police or local residents or that they cut vital roads or built cement barriers to obstruct traffic.
  2. Members and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood who reject political violence and incitement to religious and sectarian hatred must take action to persuade their colleagues and leaders to renounce these methods and to turn over those who engage in violence or carry weapons during political activities to the proper law enforcement bodies.
  3. The role of human rights organizations in uncovering and documenting the facts of the latest massacre should be facilitated.

Signatories

  1. Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
  2. Arab Penal Reform Organization
  3. Arabic Network for Human Rights Information
  4. Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Aid
  5. Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
  6. Group for Human Rights Legal Assistance
  7. Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners
  8. Land Center for Human Rights
  9. The Federation of NGOs Against Violence Against Women
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412