Rabaa massacre did not occur as a separate event within the political transformation Egypt witnessed in 2013;scores of attacks and abuses by the coup security forces preceded it. Most notable are the massacres at the Presidential Guards Club, Al-Manassah, BeinAl-Sarayat, Nasr Al-Din, and the 2ndMaspero massacre.
In this context, the TV show LeqaaKhas (لقاء خاص), which is presented by Samir Al-Khaledi on Al-Magharibia TV channel, hosted Farid Al-Shayyal, Director of the Awareness for Research and Development (AWRAD), to comment on what he described as “the preliminary massacres” leading up to the Rabaa sit-in dispersal. Al-Shayyal also shed light on the Presidential Guards massacre, the subject of his foundation’s first documentary publication, and outlined the methodology used in the documentation process as well as the team’s working mechanism.
At the beginning, Dr. Al-Shayyal gave introductory remarks on the procedures followed in gathering the information for the documentaries, and the difference between such material, news reports and eye witness reports. He also pointed out the particular significance of the Presidential Guards carnage and its repercussions in Egypt and abroad, revealing that the encyclopedia’s working group comprised 40-50 young researchers who combined and revised all the material, finishing their task in nearly one year and ten months.
The symbolic significance of the Presidential Guards massacre was tackled by Al-Shayyal, who cited the reasons behind its selection as the subject of AWRAD’s first documentary publication. He noted that the bullets fired in this carnage were an early sign of the approach that would be adopted by the coup regime against its peaceful opponents, which was also intended to prepare the domestic and international public opinion for the major massacre that came a few weeks later, namely the massacre of the dispersal of the sit-ins in Rabaa and Al-Nahda squares.
Al-Shayyal dwelled on the Presidential Guards massacre, shedding light on the circumstances surrounding this event and the nature of the protesters and the motives behind their participation in the demonstrations against the military coup that had been staged against the democratically elected President Muhammad Morsi. Security forces, he maintained, took the peaceful protesters by surprise on July 5 and July 8, 2013, and fired live bullets at scores of them, leaving 140 martyred and 811 wounded, as documented by the encyclopedia, in addition to 652 political detainees.
He stressed that the largest obstacle facing the documentation team was the cover-up by authorities and the lack of cooperation on their part. Furthermore, the team had to overcome the difficulty of communicating with many of the massacre victims and their relatives because of the political manhunt that was launched in which thousands of them were seized, and the security iron fist that threatened those, from among their relatives,who communicated with the media outlets and the rights documentation bodies.
Moreover, scores of victims, Dr. Al-Shayyal noted, were dropped off the list after the security services forced their relatives to write down other causes of death. This is in addition to the pursuit of anyone who published information about them via the mass media or social network platforms.
Addressing the credibility of the information contained in the publication, Dr. Al-Shayyal said the working group relied on a clear methodology requiring communication with the direct sources of the different accounts and the corroboration of their statements by potential eye witnesses. He emphasized that the working group managed to contact dozens of witnesses and audio-visually document their statements; the video clips are archived as part of the encyclopedia’s multimedia section.
About the discrepancy between the death toll stated in the AWRAD’s publication and the governmental official statements, Al-Shayyal noted that the regime was in conflict with the protesters and was actually the perpetrator of the incident, so it intentionally sought to reduce the size of the number of abuses and the number of victims. That is why the working group was careful to circumvent such conflicting information by using its scientific tools and garnering information on abuse victims themselves.
Moreover, he explained that AWRAD’s role is not limited to counting victim figures, but the documentation process is part of a broader plan to raise public awareness, as can be understood from the name “Awareness for Research and Development (AWRAD)”. He further noted that documentary work is a historic task intended to preserve the whole truth and make it immune to distortion and alteration.
About the mechanism of restoring victims’ rights, Al-Shayyal pointed to the legal and legislative measures adopted by the Egyptian regime to protect its elements who are accused of committing this attack and the other crimes while the constitution was suspended, causing the victim’s rights to be, in all intents and purposes, lost. He affirmed, however, the rights are imprescriptible, and that the criminals would be held accountable for their crimes, sooner or later.
In conclusion, Al-Shayyal stressed AWRAD’s resolve to continue its documentary workplan intending to record the region’s events during that period through archived documents, depending on an accurate methodology that preserves for the following generations their right to neutral information on major developments in the world.
