Once again : Sectarian mob attack in Al-Minya "Updated"

Once again sectarian mob attacks erupt in Al-Minya and once again we will find the same old headlines on how the authorities save the day using the old techniques used before despite those techniques prove that they never put an end to sectarian attacks and clashes.

This is Dimshaw Hashim village from Google Earth

On Thursday, an angry mob of Muslim men attacked, looted and torched fours houses of Christian citizens in “Dimshaw Hashim” village in Al-Minya governorate of Upper Egypt after the spread of a news about how the Christians were going to construct a church there several days prior to the attack.

Luckily only two Christian men were injured in the attack along with a firefighter according to the statement issued by Al-Minya Coptic Orthodox Diocese on the same day.
On Friday, State-owned Akhbar Al-Youm news website published news that the “security forces dispersed a fight between two groups in Dimshaw Hashim village arresting a number of people from both sides” without giving any further details.

On Saturday, security forces went and arrested 38 men from the rural village we have heard about for the first time in Cairo in that sad incident.
On Sunday, the Prosecution General ordered the detention of 19 suspect 4 days pending investigation for inciting riots and attacking others.

Update: 

It turned out all the 19 suspects are Muslim men and not mixed arrests of Muslims and Christians to force the Christian families in the village to accept reconciliation and give up their legal rights. This is a good sign for change and it sends an important message. 

This is not the first attack of its kind in Al-Minya governorate against the Christians in its rural villages over the construction of churches this year after ratifying the Church Constructions law in 2017.

It is not the first attack and it won’t be the last as long as the State and the government insist on the same old official and unofficial solutions and reactions.
Now some Christian activists expressed their fear online that the “state” may support unofficially that ugly solution of forcing the Christian families to leave the village.

Hopefully inshallah this won’t happen and the government or the state uses the law for real.
The State must make it clear that Churches will be built according to the 2017- Church Construction law whether the villagers like them or not even in Upper Egypt.

If sectarian calls begin to brew like in case of Dimshaw Hashim for days, the authorities which arrest three people for the intention of protesting must act quickly and not in a reactionary way.

There is something wrong in Al-Minya governorate and those decorative priest-and-sheikh-hand-in- hand-photos are going to make it right.

According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights “EIPR”, Al-Minya’s towns and villages had witnessed 77 sectarian clashes and attack from 2011 to 2016, this is too much.

 The EIPR study prepared by Ishak Ibrahim, in 2016 the population of Al-Minya was 5 million whereas the number of the Christians in it according to estimations could be 30%.“The number of Christians in Egypt is still a taboo we can not know”.

Poverty, disease and ignorance play along together and the weak go for the weaker in Al-Minya.
Just like other governorates in Upper Egypt, Al-Minya is hunted by an ugly past of terrorist organizations in the 1980s and 1990s.

The true solution for such problem like sectarianism demands a bold state that believes in citizenship, education, transparency and accountability.
Man, I feel that I have written this over and over.