CAIRO: The American Coptic Assembly said in a statement last week that the Coptic community in the United States and across the world had sent 4,350 letters to American President Barack Obama in the past week, asking him to take a stand to protect the Copts in Egypt. According to a statement from the religious group, the letters included a list of the problems that the Copts suffer from in Egypt.

The statement added that Copts abroad “cannot forget their brothers and sisters in Egypt, which demonstrates that Copts are not passive.”

For his part, Mamdouh Nakhla, Head of the Kelma Center for Human Rights told Egyptian newspaper al-Dostour that the letters sent by the Copts to Obama is a “good step,” viewing it as a kind of pressure on the regime to resolve the issue of Egyptian Copts. In his comments, he also called on moderate Muslims to send similar letters, as legally, “they could be considered as a legal and permitted international cooperation and diplomatically within the framework of international legitimacy.”

Rafiq Habib, a Coptic scholar, said that sending many letters to the President is an “expression of the spread of bullying by resorting to foreign institutions, to the point where it became normal, after it had been a taboo.”

Habib added that such a move has many negative consequences and “as a part of the national community resorts to foreign institutions could broaden the crisis and the wounds between groups [within] the country, especially as it came against another party, and exports negative images about the other party, resulting in a new problem, namely, that the Muslims look to the Copts as belonging to the West.”

Habib said the West “does not have to solve the problem because religious tension and intolerance are social and the west does not have the tools to deal with them and all that the West is doing is to use them as means to pressure the Egyptian regime, while the latter [government] will respond to some demands and rejects others.

He added that the Coptic issue comes in at the bottom of the agenda of many Western countries and Western interference is “detrimental to the relationship between Muslims and Christians” in Egypt. “The Copts are the first losers and then the national community.”

The ongoing protests and letters being sent to Washington comes on the fallout of the Christmas Eve attack at a Coptic church in Nag Hammadi on January 6. The shooting left 6 Copts and one Muslim security guard dead. It has sparked widespread concerns over further sectarian violence in the country.

**reporting by Mohamed Abdel Salam

BM

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