Today marks 10 years since the Rabaa massacre, the worst massacre in Egypt’s modern history.
I find it really difficult to talk about because of the atrocities committed by the Sisi regime that day, but something happened recently that made me want to remember it
2 weeks ago, I attended the film screening of ‘Memories of a Massacre’, a documentary that recounts in detail the Rabaa massacre, as well as days of the 2011 revolution and the political events that culminated in one of the worst acts of violence in Egypt’s history.
In all honesty, I didn’t want to attend this screening. For years I’ve distanced myself from anything to do with Egypt, not out of indifference, but out of self-preservation.
The documentary included harrowing testimonies from survivors of the massacre as well as graphic footage from Rabaa square on the day of the massacre itself, footage that I’ve tried to avoid because of the awful memories it would bring back.
I’ve spoken on here before about the many family and friends I lost that day, either to the bullets of the Egyptian army and police or those rotting away in Sisi’s prisons or those still struggling to cope mentally, and many that have had to flee the country to avoid persecution.
I heard people around me sobbing and I found myself struggling to breathe at numerous points during the film because of how distressing the footage was.
Several people I spoke to admitted they had to leave halfway through because they couldn’t handle the painful flashbacks.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A session. @ganobi
who was on the panel made the excellent point that there is an Egypt before Rabaa and an Egypt after Rabaa and that there will be no future for Egypt unless we address as a nation what happened that day.
As if to illustrate this point perfectly, a man stood up during the Q&A session and interrupted the event. He praised Sisi and compared the Rabaa sit-in protesters to Israelis occupying Palestine. He called the audience terrorists and tried to derail the whole event.
This man had seen the same harrowing scenes we all had. The inconsolable mother whose daughter was killed during the massacre. The doctor forced to abandon patients at gunpoint because the army threatened to kill him. The woman whose brother is still missing since the massacre.
Yet he was completely unmoved, callous even. I found myself asking how as a nation we could ever reconcile with people like him who after ten years, can look survivors of a massacre in the eye and tell them that he supports what happened to them, that they deserved worse?
His attitude underlined a deeper problem that Egypt faces today: a nation at war with its own history and collective memory.
The mere screening of this documentary in London, miles away from Egypt, was perceived as a threat by Sisi’s regime.
In anticipation, the regime's propaganda machine went into overdrive. Pro-Sisi media outlets dedicated whole segments to the documentary, criticising it before it even screened and vilifying anyone involved in the filming and dissemination of the documentary.
Pro-Sisi groups affiliated with the Egyptian embassy in London released a statement denouncing the documentary, and protested outside the venue where the documentary was being screened, recording & shouting at attendees as they left the screening in an attempt to intimidate them.
It was incredible to witness how fragile Sisi’s regime is in the face of the very simple act of remembrance. By all counts, the Sisi regime is fully in control of all arms of the state. Egypt is an authoritarian, dictatorship and there is no external pressure on Egypt to reform.
Yet the Sisi regime was desperate to shut down this screening, trying and failing to export its tactics of fear to wipe the memory of that day from people’s minds and to make Egyptians regret standing up for democracy and demanding their rights.
A part of me still hopes that in our collective act of recalling and testifying, we might lay the groundwork for the eventual downfall of this regime. But another part of me sees no way out, and every anniversary of the massacre feels more hopeless than the one before it.
10 years on from the Rabaa massacre, I feel nothing but despair. I’m sat in London, banned from entering Egypt and unable to even properly mourn the events of that day without the state’s authoritarian shadow looming over our memories.
The only people that have truly been able to escape the Rabaa massacre were the people killed that day. Everyone else is still stuck there. But our experiences and memories of that day couldn’t be more different.
The Sisi regime has successfully turned the act of remembering itself into a battleground. Seeing that man’s heartless reaction to the documentary reminded me that we still have a very long way to go as a nation before we come to terms with what happened that day.
I want Rabaa to be their nightmare, not ours. Every voice silenced, every moment of agony – they should be the ones weighed down by it, not us.
Until then, we hold onto those memories and we try to remember that remembering is resisting.
Rabaa, we haven’t forgotten you.
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