Egypt’s Cover-Up: Rabia Massacre One Year Later

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/egypts-massacre-later.html

Egypt’s Cover-Up: Rabia Massacre One Year Later
By contributors | Aug. 15, 2014
By Sarah Leah Whitson
Published in: Open Democracy

“Forget about Morsy, forget about Rab`a,” my Egyptian neighbourhood grocer told me the other day, expressing the loyalty to the president, Abel Fattah al-Sisi, shared by many of his countrymen back home. “We are saved from these people.”

Yet, one year later, there is no forgetting the massacre in Rab`a Square, in which Egyptian security forces killed at least 817 protesters, and probably as many as 1,000, in one of the largest mass killings of protesters in recent history. And there is certainly no forgiving.

The killings, and those of hundreds of other protesters in July and August last year, were the linchpin of the terror campaign of the military-backed government which followed the army’s removal of Mohamed Morsy, Egypt’s first—and still only—democratically elected president. The campaign appeared designed to send a single message to the Muslim Brotherhood and its backers: democracy, if that means a real political contest among diverse views, is finished in Egypt.

Systematic and deliberate

The Human Rights Watch report on these killings, just released, reveals the systematic and deliberate way police and soldiers ruthlessly fired on at least 80,000 overwhelmingly peaceful protesters in Rab’a Square. Our year-long investigation included interviews with more than 200 witnesses, monitoring of the protests themselves, visits to the hospitals and morgues, and a review of the physical and video evidence.