Egypt has been the subject of media attention for its role as a mediator between Hamas and Israel during negotiations to end the military assault on Gaza. By contrast, Egypt`s own very serious political strife has been largely neglected by the international media. Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the Raba`a massacre of 14 August 2014, during which at least 817 supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi were killed by security forces. According to the Associated Press, at least ten protesters were killed by Egyptian police on the anniversary of the brutal dispersal. This coincides with the release of a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch into the Raba`a massacre which concluded that the attack on protesters was a premeditated assault engineered by senior security individuals, including now-President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi. The report also compared the Raba`a massacre`s magnitude to that of China`s 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Voice of the Middle East and North Africa (VOMENA) hosted a conversation with Adam Sabra, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Mona El-Ghobashy, a political scientist and independent scholar about the socio-political landscape in Egypt a year after the Raba’a massacre.