From The Holy Mountain (71 page)

Slack discipline among the
limitanei
exacerbated the region's security problems. When he came to Antinoe, Moschos visited Phoebamon the Sophist, who told him the following story:

In the district around Hermopolis there was a brigand chief whose name was David. He had rendered many people destitute, murdered many others and committed every kind of evil deed. One day while he was engaged in brigandage on the mountain [behind Hermopolis], together with a band of more than thirty robbers, he came to his senses. Conscience-stricken by his evil deeds, he left those who were with him and went to a monastery.

He knocked at the monastery gate [and in due course] the porter emerged and asked what he wanted. The robber chief replied that he wanted to become a monk, so the porter went inside and told the Abbot. The Abbot came out and when he saw that the man was advanced in age, he said to him: 'You cannot stay here, for the brethren labour very hard. They practise great austerity. Your temperament is different and you could not tolerate the rule of the monastery.' The brigand said he could put up with these things, but the Abbot was persistent in his conviction that the man would not be able to. Then the brigand said to him: 'Know, then, that I am David the robber chief; and the reason I came here was that I might weep for my sins. If you do not accept me, I swear to you and before Him who dwells in Heaven, that I will return to my former way of life. I will bring those who were with me, kill you all and even destroy your monastery.' When the Abbot heard this, he received him into the monastery, tonsured him and gave him the holy habit. Thus he began spiritual combat [against the demons and devils of temptation] and he exceeded all the other members of the monastery in self-control, obedience and humility.

'There were about seventy persons in that monastery,' adds Moschos, 'and David benefited them all, providing them with an example.'

I was still reading about Moschos's journey through the badlands of Upper Egypt when the car was brought to a halt at a heavily guarded checkpoint some fifty miles north of Asyut. From slits in the brick turret surmounting the police bunker, the barrels of three machine guns covered the three approaches to the road junction. An officer barked into his walkie-talkie; a pair of conscripts paced nervously around the bunker, fidgeting with the safety catches of their ancient Enfield rifles. One of them looked no older than sixteen. His boots were old and scuffed, and one of them had no laces. He was clearly very frightened.

Mahmoud got out and talked to the two boys, offering them imported American cigarettes. By the time he returned to the car he had discovered why we had been held up.

'They say that it is too dangerous to go on without a guard,' he said. 'The police killed seven militants last weekend. Then yesterday the militants ambushed and killed three policemen not far from here. The militants need to get another four before they get even. Until then the whole district is on alert. They say we'll have to wait here until someone is free to escort us on.'

'How bad do they say the situation is around here?' I asked.

'They say it is very bad,' replied Mahmoud, shaking his head gravely. 'Very bad indeed.'

Our escort drove up less than fifteen minutes later. I had expected a single conscript with an old gun; what we got, rather alarmingly, were six heavily armed paramilitary policemen in a souped-up Japanese pick-up. We had to struggle to keep up. Every time we neared a village, the pick-up driver increased his speed, while one of the guards would flick off his safety catch, balance on the back-flap and search the rooftops for snipers. Before long we turned off the main Upper Egypt road and headed into the town of Sanabu. This was the place that the
Gema'a al-Islamiyya
had attacked two years before, initiating the current campaign. Two convoys of armed activists had swooped down early in the morning. By the time they withdrew, seven Coptic farmers had been hunted down and murdered in their fields; seven others were shot dead in the streets. I had read brief agency reports on the massacre, but wanted to know more. What had precipitated the attack? Had it been completely unexpected?

We drove fast through the narrow streets of the old town, our escort frantically scouring the rooftops and windows for guerrillas, their rifles raised and their fingers on the triggers. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that there could not be a better way of attracting the attention of the
Gema'a al-Islamiyya
than to travel in a black government limousine with an escort of trigger-happy paramilitaries. If it hadn't been for the difficulty of getting through the police roadblocks, it would surely have been safer to have come anonymously in Ramazan's beaten-up old Peugeot, and perhaps to have pulled on one of his dirty old
gelabiyas
while I was about it. As it was, any self-respecting
Gema'a
active service unit must now have been alerted to the fact that a foreigner was in the area, charging around Sanabu in a ludicrously opulent government Mercedes.

Eventually we came to a halt at a makeshift roadblock in a small square at the centre of the town. The roadblock was made up of a pair of logs balanced on two battered old oildrums. Behind it stood a line of tall men in
gelabiyas
and white turbans, each holding a gun. Behind the men rose the facade of a Coptic church.

'These are village guards,' explained Mahmoud. 'Come on. If you want to do an interview, make it quick.'

I jumped out of the car and was ushered hurriedly into the priest's house beside the church. The paramilitaries stayed outside with their guns levelled, but the leader of the village guards came into the presbytery with Mahmoud and me. With his scarf and dark glasses removed I saw that he was a surprisingly old man, at least sixty. He kissed the priest's hand and sat down beside him. When the two men had introduced themselves, using Mahmoud as an interpreter, I asked them about the events which had led up to the massacre. Slowly the story emerged. It was a tale of almost Sicilian viciousness.

It had all begun several years before, when a Copt decided to sell his house. One of the leading Muslim families in the village, who also happened to be local commanders of the
Gema'a,
had wished to buy it. But they had offered an insultingly low price, and were outbid by a relatively wealthy Copt named Munir who owned the local garage. Gemal Haridi, the head of the Muslim family, made it clear that if he was magnanimous enough to let the sale go ahead between the two Copts, his family would at least expect a considerable cut of the purchase price. Munir refused to pay. Two weeks later, Munir's son, an engineer aged twenty-five, was shot dead as he bent under the bonnet of a car in his father's garage. In the same attack Munir was shot in the foot. He had to have the foot amputated. But he still refused to pay.

Haridi then got some
Gema'a al-Islamiyya
hitmen to murder another relative of Munir who worked in Asyut. The assassins ambushed him as he was walking to work at the Asyut Medical Centre. They were armed with long sickles and killed him by holding him down and cutting off his head. Then they cut his body to pieces. Still Munir remained intransigent: he would not pay a piastre to men who had killed his son and his cousin. The Copts of Sanabu were proud of his resistance, and many others also stopped paying Haridi protection money. Haridi beat up several Copts as a warning. There was no change. Slowly the tension rose. Haridi encouraged the local Muslims to spit at the Copts when they passed them in the street; the Copts sneered back. Haridi decided that the Copts were getting above themselves. They needed to be taught a proper lesson.

Early in the morning of
24
April
1992,
Gemal Haridi gathered together a small task force of his extended family and a group of
Gema'a
henchmen from Asyut. He equipped them all with automatic weapons and they hijacked several cars on the main Asyut-Cairo highway. Then they split up. One convoy attacked the fields near the Coptic hamlet of Manshit Nasser, where all the Coptic villagers were engaged in the harvest. The Muslims hunted the harvesters through the stooks and haystacks. Seven Copts were killed, all members of a single family whose fields happened to lie nearest the road. The second convoy, led by Haridi, drove into the town centre of Sanabu. At point-blank range, they shot the Coptic doctor as he opened up his surgery. They killed the Coptic headmaster, hunting him through the school before gunning him down in front of his pupils, riddling his body with more than eighty bullets. Then they killed five Coptic shopkeepers in their shops, before jumping back in their cars and heading on to Asyut. It all took less than an hour.

'I heard the shots as I was getting dressed,' said Amba Dawood, the priest. 'We had been expecting violence, so I was not surprised. From all over the town you could hear the sound of screaming.'

'Every family who had lost one of their members was crying,' said Abdil Mesiyah Tosi, the head of the village guards.

'What about the police?'

'They came, but it was too late,' said Tosi. 'They knew Haridi had already killed three people and was demanding money, but before this they had not intervened at all or offered us protection. By the time they came everything was over.'

'Had you done anything to protect yourselves? Bought guns or anything?'

'No,' said the priest. 'We have always believed that God will retaliate for us.' 'And does He?'

'Of course. Gemal Haridi is in jail now. The other big
amir
of the terrorists in this area, Arafa Mahmoud, was killed by the police one year ago. They ambushed him as he was coming out of a mosque. When they tried to arrest him he resisted, so they shot him dead.'

'So are your relations with the local Muslims improved at all?'

'The majority of Muslim families here are fanatics,' said Tosi. 'After the massacre they did not even come to see what had happened to us.'

'But it is a little better now,' said the priest. 'Since Arafa was killed and Haridi put in jail they have become a little more friendly. These two men were scaring the Muslims and telling them not to deal with the Copts.'

'And the government?' I said. 'Is it helping?'

'Now the government is doing everything possible to crush the
Gema'a,'
said the priest. 'The only trouble we have is when we request to repair our church. I applied to make improvements to it three years ago and still the government has not given us permission. No acknowledgement. Nothing. When the sheikhs ask for something for their mosques the government gives them whatever they want. They are trying to appease the Muslims. But with the Copts they don't even respond.'

'But do you think the worst is over?'

The two men hesitated.

'No,' said Tosi. 'In this village it is a little better, but beyond here it is still very bad. We are still very scared to go to Deir ul-Muharraq, for instance. Many fanatics are living there.'

'It has become a feud between the local Muslims and the police,' explained Amba Dawood. 'If they have the chance, any of the people in that area will try to kill a policeman. In that area there are still shootings every day.'

'So are the Copts leaving?' I asked.