By Latheef Farook
Egyptians will observe the tenth anniversary of the massacre of more than 1100 peaceful protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square on 14 August 2013.
This happened after the military coup that overthrew the first ever elected President Mohamed Morsi, chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party and high-ranking Muslim Brotherhood member, and installed in power his defence minister, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. who also suspended the constitution and established himself as the military ruler of the country.
As pointed out in many reports the Brotherhood was one of the main political actors to take centre stage after Mubarak was toppled. Founded in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, and using the slogan “Islam is the solution,” the group preached a gradual Islamisation of the state, alongside a strong anti-colonial narrative that soon built a strong popular base.
The Brotherhood was outlawed in 1948 and has since had a troubled relationship with subsequent regimes, one marked by brief periods of cooperation but overwhelmingly by persecution. Despite this repression, the Brotherhood evolved over the decades into one of Egypt’s most organised opposition political movements and a key civil society actor.
It is thus not surprising that despite its leadership’s initial reluctance, Brotherhood members and affiliates were instrumental to the success of the 2011 uprising. The movement heavily capitalised on the opening up of the political space after Mubarak’s overthrow.
In April 2011, the Brotherhood founded its own political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, and the following year party leader Mohamed Morsi became the first freely elected civilian president in Egypt’s modern history.
Meanwhile many described the Rabaa massacre as the worst mass killing of peaceful demonstrators in modern history, with its death toll surpassing the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989 and the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005. However Rabaa massacre did not get the same media publicity which Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989 and the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan got in the western media.
The slaughter of innocent men, women and children also marked the end of the Arab Spring and the death of democracy in Egypt in particular and the Middle East in general.
Oppressed and brutalized Egyptians under tyrant Hosni Mubarak’s regime which was protected and promoted by United States and Europe providing time for Israel to grab more and more Palestinian lands and build more and more settlements.
Egyptians came out in mass demonstrations during the 2011 Arab Spring and overthrew Hosni Mubarak
In the subsequent elections held for the first time in 61 years Mohamed Morsy was elected president.This sent alarm bells among the other tyrants,especially oil sheikhs in the gulf,and in the United States and Europe-all hellbent on protecting Israel and ensure the safety of Arab dictators.
They all got together to topple Morsy and crush rising democracy. The task was entrusted to three Gulf countries-Saudi Arabia,Kuwait and United Arab Emirates,who have now become collaborators of US-European Israeli conspiracies against the Middle East region.
The three together spent eleven billion dollars to create food and fuel shortage tand created mass unrest which toppled President Mohamed Morsy .The plotters promptly staged a military coup and installed defense minister Abdel Fattah Sisi in power .
Egyptians once again came out in massive peaceful demonstration and merely demanded that the constitution be upheld and the legitimately elected government , President Morsy, be reinstated.
Sisi and his military responded by indiscriminately killing peaceful demonstrators. In the early hours of 14 August 2013, Egyptian forces descended upon Rabaa Square in Cairo, mounting a vicious assault against pro-democracy activists holding a sit-in to protest against the military coup that had unfolded six weeks earlier.
Protesters demanding Morsi’s restoration gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square where they staged a sit-in, refusing to leave until their demands were met. El Sisi’s forces massacred all of them inside mosques.
The hopes of a new Egypt that followed the 25th of January revolution gave way to a regime more brutal and repressive than the one the 2011 uprising overthrew. With the success of Sisi’s coup, Egyptians faced an empowered and rejuvenated military system that knows it can take brutal measures against its own people with impunity.
The Rabaa massacre was also one of the most visually documented atrocities in modern history, with photographs and videos capturing the near full extent of devastation and culpability; the corpses piled up in mosques, the wailing protesters dragging away lifeless bloodied bodies and the scene of snipers stationed on rooftops making no attempt to conceal their positions as they pick their shots with ruthless calm.
One of them massacred was 17 year old Asmaa el Bektagy. Asmaa became one of the hundreds of people shot by snipers, burned alive, and crushed by bulldozers in a mass killing perpetrated by the Egyptian security forces on the morning of 14 August 2013. Dying on a hospital floor, the teenager’s eyes float around serenely as panicked protesters and medics try to save her life. Captured on camera and included in Nicky Bolster’s Memories of a Massacre, the scene of the young woman’s end is incredibly moving.
Writing about the massacre and a documentary on it columnist Shafik Mandhai said “ a friend of Asmaa el-Beltagy describes her as a butterfly who flew away “without saying goodbye”, in what is a fitting metaphor for her last moments alive.
Despite that body of evidence, Bolster’s documentary is a rare English language testament to the massacre. In her film, which was produced by Noon Films, the veteran filmmaker who honed her craft with productions for the BBC, ITN, Netflix, and Apple TV, amongst others, constructs a narrative that bravely places the Rabaa massacre as the concluding chapter of a process of counter-revolution.
Indeed, Sisi’s sense of impunity did not disappear at Rabaa. A decade later, tens of thousands of Egyptians remain in jail cells, where they are kept without any semblance of a fair trial or conviction. Once amongst their number was former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who died in court on 17 June 2019 while on trial for espionage.
Rabaa did not happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of the deep state’s counter revolutionary efforts.