One year on: questions remain about killings by Egyptian security forces
(14 Aug 2014) LEAD IN A leading human rights group is calling for an international inquiry into the mass killings by Egyptian security forces last summer, saying they likely amount to crimes against humanity. The worst such incident occurred on 14 August 2013, when authorities opened fire on a sit-in of Mohammed Morsi supporters in Cairo's Rabaah al-Adawiyah square. STORYLINE Scenes of carnage on the streets of Cairo. Not the New-York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling for an international commission of inquiry into mass killings by Egyptian security forces last summer, saying they likely amount to crimes against humanity. Based on a year-long investigation into the incidents that followed the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, the HRW is calling for an inquiry into the role of the country's current President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, and at least 10 senior military and security chiefs in the killing of 1,150 protesters in the span of six weeks. The 188-page report says it found that the authorities had used excessive and deliberate force against protesters on political grounds in successive attacks on their gatherings. The worst incident of mass killings occurred on 14 August, when the authorities opened fire on a massive pro-Morsi sit-in at Cairo's Rabaah al-Adawiyah square. The HRW says the day's death toll there was at least 817 and likely as high as 1,000, higher than the toll of 624 documented earlier by the state's human rights body. Fadi al-Qadi, Advocacy and Communication Director at HRW's Middle East branch, says the organisation has called on the UN's Human Rights Council to form an independent committee to investigate "what can be described as crimes against humanity as a result of the targeting and killing protesters deliberately with live ammunition by Egyptian authorities as part of pre-planned systematic action." "Until this moment no serious accountability of any kind has been taken by the people who caused the killing of these people," he adds. "Human Rights Watch holds directly responsible the top Egyptian security officials, precisely those people who planned and gave orders to carry out directly the killing of protesters using live ammunition without giving them enough warning and without even giving them any safe exits from these sit-ins." HRW has called the Rabaah incident the "world's largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history". The Egyptian government had said the sit-ins had constituted a disruption of public order and security and accused the encampments of harbouring "terrorists". However, the HRW report says the dispersal of the large sit-in was "part of a systematic campaign by the Egyptian government to violently disperse dissent". Karim Medhat Enara, who researches criminal justice at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, says the authorities should have dealt with the Rabaah "crisis" more wisely. "If someone fires at you from one place, does that mean you have to shoot at everybody?", he says. "There was no planning at all. We have no information at all about what the planning looked like, but the main outcome of this was a large number of random killings of unarmed people." Jean-Paul Chagnollaud is the director of iReMMO, a Paris-based research institute focused on the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He remains sceptical that any particular pressure can be brought to bear on Egypt right now, not least because of the current turmoil in the region. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: / ap_archive Facebook: / aparchives Instagram: / apnews You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...
