The visit that had been planned by Coptic and human rights activists to the village of Bassra in Amriya, south of Alexandria last Friday was called off
The visit that had been planned by Coptic and human rights activists to the village of Bassra in Amriya, south of Alexandria last Friday was called off. The visit had been planned in the wake of an event which had occurred in Bassra of the previous Friday and which involved threats by the Muslim Salafi villagers to the Coptic villagers and their church.
A group of Coptic activists in Cairo had appealed to a number of politicians and journalists and organised a high profile visit to Bassra. Under the theme: “I’m going [to Bassra] to visit the house of God [the church], and have lunch with my fellow Muslims [the Muslim villagers]”. It was hoped the visit would have brought to light the discrimination against the Copts, and spurred an end to the divisions and a peaceful coexistence between the Copts and the Muslims in the village.
The visit was called off in the wake of a phone call by the then president-elect Mohamed Mursi to the acting patriarch Anba Pachomeus, in which Mursi said the Bassra crisis had been brought to his attention by the intelligence authorities, and that he had given his orders to resolve the crisis.
Even though peace reigned, the Coptic activists are not happy that sectarian crises are being resolved through the personal influence of willing politicians—be that even the president—in disregard of the law.
The Bassra incident went back to Friday 22 June when the village Muslims surrounded the village church of Anba Wannas as Holy Mass was being celebrated inside. They demanded that the priest Fr Sawiris should kick out a group of Copts from outside the village who had come in buses to visit the church. They threatened that they would burn down the church if Fr Sawiris did not oblige. The small church of Anba Wannas regularly receives visitors as they stop for blessing on their way to the Western Desert monastery of Mar-Mina.
Fr Sawiris had to give in to the threats and ask the people to leave when he called the police for help and was advised to do as the Salafis wished in order to ‘solve the problem’. But as the visitors mounted their buses to head back home, the Muslim villagers hurled stones at them and their buses.
Once the visitors left, a group of Salafis and radical Isalmists went to the church and repeated the threat to the church priest, advising him to abide by their rules, lest they destroy the church.
Watani International
2 July 2012