from government forces were expected to see no changes Friday, September 9, as first results from a landmark presidential election showed victory for President Hosni Mubarak. Hundreds of Coptic women disappear every year, human rights watchers say, and local police stand accused of refusing to intervene.
At the same time, security officials allegedly prevent Christian parents from having contact or private access to their daughters once they have been located, instead leaving them in the custody of the Muslim "protector" who abducted them, church watchers and human rights groups say.
Years of censorship and fears to criticize the government has apparently added to the desperate situation for minority Christians. Three months after his 20-year-old daughter disappeared while on an errand from work, Coptic Christian Rezk Shafik Attallah is convinced that she has been kidnapped by a former police constable. However his daughter, Marianna Rezk Shafik Attallah, has not been seen since she left work May 30 in El-Fayoum, 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Cairo, Christian news agency Compass Direct, reported.
Police have allegedly obstructed efforts by her fiancée and father to find her. Officials deny the claims saying that the young women went "of her own will" with former policeman Ali Mahmoud Abdel Rasoul who took her 250 miles (400 kilometers) south to Sohag.
FREE WILL
"If she went of her own free will,” Hosni told Compass Direct, “then why didn’t she come to say that [to us]?” The incident has underscored concern about Muslim fundamentalism in the country.
Yet in a surprise move Pope Shenuda III, the spiritual leader of the country’s 6 million Coptic Christians, has reportedly spoken in favor of re-electing Mubarak as their is no moderate choice. Shenuda said the president has consistently preserved the fragile peace between Muslims and Christians, and is a "leader of passionate wisdom and tolerance."
Germany’s respected Der Spiegel magazine said on its international website it understands Shenuda. "It might be not such a bad idea after all" if at least one of the frontrunners, Ahmed al-Sabahi "won’t be Egypt’s next president," it said.
The 90-year-old Sabahi, who is hard of hearing and walks with a cane, is one of nine candidates running against President Hosni Mubarak in Wednesday’s election. Sabahi, head of the Umma Party, has been in politics since 1933, when the country was still ruled by former King Fuad.
"SABAHI’S PSALMS"
His most recent book, "Sabahi’s Psalms," was published three weeks ago and contains his entire esoteric campaign platform, including his promise to introduce Islamic Sharia law and a plan to develop an "Islamic economic system."
Christians have urged Mubarak’s government to do more against Islamic extremism amid reports that Coptic girls are lured into shopping malls from where they are kidnapped and forced to abandon their faith in Christ.
But they are outnumbered by Muslims, Mubarak’s main voters base, and apparently not on top of his political agenda. Mubarak says that in his fifth term he will focus on creating 4 million new jobs, build 3,500 schools, train 400,000 new teachers and lift the emergency law in place since 1981.
"Most of the public servants his supporters have planted in his audiences are unlikely to ask uncomfortable questions, like why Mubarak hasn’t done these things in the past and how he intends to finance his acts of charity," The Voice Of America (VOA) network commented.
NO INTEREST
And with Egyptian media showing little interest in Egypt’s Coptic Christians, Rezk Shafik Attallah is on his own pleading for attention and help in the search for his daughter, news reports suggested. On August 11, a security officer called the father, suggesting that he buy a cell phone so that the police could contact him whenever they learned his daughter’s whereabouts.
Attallah scraped together enough money to buy the phone and gave the police his number. Soon afterwards the officer called, telling him that his daughter was in Alexandria and promising that if he went to meet her, he could bring her back home, Compass Direct reported.
The father traveled the 200 miles (320 kilometers) north to Alexandria, where he was allegedly told by a police officer: “Your daughter is across the street from you.” Spotting a veiled woman, the father approached and tried to speak with her, but she ran away from him and got on a bus. When he followed and tried again to speak with her, other passengers thought he was harassing the woman and started beating him, finally forcing him to get off the bus.
"They are enjoying torturing that poor father," a human rights activist was quoted as saying. And with no changes expected soon, families of Coptic women remain on their own. (With Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from Egypt).
