Human Rights Watch: Many of the at least 74 pro-Morsy protesters killed in clashes with Egypt’s riot police and plain clothed men who stood alongside were shot in the head or chest. They were killed on July 27 over a period of several hours during clashes on a road near the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya in eastern Cairo.

Human Rights Watch interviewed seven witnesses to the violence and reviewed extensive video footage of the events. Medical staff interviewed by Human Rights Watch judged some of the deaths to be targeted killings because the position of the shots would likely result in death.

The New York Times reports: In the attack on Saturday, civilians joined riot police officers in firing live ammunition at the protesters as they marched toward a bridge over the Nile. By early morning, the numbers of wounded people had overwhelmed doctors at a nearby field hospital.

One doctor sat by himself, crying as he whispered verses from the Koran. Nearby, medics tried to revive a man on a gurney. When they failed, he was quickly lifted away to make room for the many others.

McClatchy reports: A brief visit to a field hospital – one of three treating casualties – showed the brutality of what had taken place. A McClatchy reporter counted 27 dead laid out on the hospital’s floor, and as she left, three more bodies arrived, adding to a frantic and horrific scene. At least three of the dead had been shot in the head, and the gaping wounds left the victims’ brains exposed.

Over and over, hospital workers would move a body to the ground and search the pockets for an identification card. When they found one, they wrote the deceased’s name on an arm. They then tied the body’s hands and toes together, to prevent arms and legs from flopping around as the corpse was moved. Often the workers had put a white wrap around the head to cover the gunshot wounds. Piles of national identification cards and personal belongings, like bloodied shirts and pants, were piled up nearby.

The only movement was that of doctors who seemed to jump around the corpses, reaching for bandages and the plaster needed to prepare shrouds, where the deceased’s name would be written again. One man who’d been assigned to clean blood from the floor shuffled through the scene, armed with a mop and a bucket that appeared to hold more blood than water. Over and over he went over the same spot near one head, as the blood kept pouring out.

Doctors said the injuries could only have come from professional marksmen. Ebtesan Zain, a gynecologist, said she came to help her fellow doctors only to discover she was not needed – everyone she encountered was dead.

“Those injuries had to be done by snipers. It couldn’t be anything else,” Zain said. “They were shooting directly in the head between the eyes and in the chest.”

Reuters reports: Thousands of supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood stood their ground in Cairo on Sunday, saying they would not leave the streets despite “massacres” by security forces who shot dozens of them dead.

Sarah Carr writes: Every time I go to the Rab3a sit-in I think that it would be an almost impossible task to clear the people crammed into it; surely not even the Interior Ministry and armed forces would want to take on that task, not because they are concerned about loss of life but because of the logistical difficulty, and the political fallout internationally (the July 26 protests demonstrated that the anti-terrorism crowd seem to care about what the international community thinks).

So I did some cursory reading (Wikipedia, what else) on how Tiananmen Square was cleared of the pro-democracy protesters on June 4 1989 and so far there have been close parallels between the events that led up to that clearing, and events in Egypt. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The bloodied and mangled bodies of more than a dozen supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi lined the floors of an improvised hospital in eastern Cairo on Saturday after a night of clashes between security forces and demonstrators calling for Morsi’s reinstatement left at least 46 people dead and hundreds wounded, according to the Ministry of Health.

Medics at a field hospital embedded in a pro-Morsi sit-in in eastern Cairo said they had received 37 bodies and treated hundreds of wounded in rooms that were crowded Saturday with wailing relatives and strewn with battered equipment and bloodied sheets.

Saturday’s violence erupted hours after Egypt’s interior minister and interim president warned that a nearly month-long sit-in by Morsi’s supporters and others “blocking” roads and bridges would soon be broken up.

“These sit-ins will be ended soon, within the limits of the law,” Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told the al-Hayat television station.

“We cannot accept this security chaos, and the road blocking and the bridge blocking,” interim president Adly Mansour said in a separate call to the station. “We can’t accept the attacks on public property. The state has to enforce its sovereignty.” He urged Morsi’s supporters to “go back to your homes,” adding that if they did, “no one will pursue you.”

On Friday, millions of Egyptians took to the streets, heeding a call by the nation’s military chief to support the security forces’ “mandate” to confront violence and “terrorism” — words that rights groups and Morsi’s supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood interpreted as signaling an imminent crackdown.
[…]
Grief and shock mingled with outrage in the chaotic rooms of the makeshift hospital at the Brotherhood-led protest camp in eastern Cairo on Saturday.

“Tell everyone in the village he is a martyr,” one man sobbed into a cellphone while waiting to take the body of his brother from a room that had been converted into a morgue.

Doctors and witnesses said the wounded began streaming in around 11 p.m. on Friday, as separate groups of protesters on a nearby highway and outside Cairo’s al-Azhar University came under attack.

At first, most of the victims were suffered from the suffocating effects of tear gas, then later, birdshot wounds, doctors said. By 4 a.m., a flood of people with gunshot wounds arrived, as security forces and plainclothes “thugs” clashed with pro-Morsi demonstrators on roads leading to the protest camp, witnesses and doctors said. Many victims were afraid to go to official hospitals because they feared arrest, doctors said.

Mohamed Elatfy, an emergency room doctor who practices in Britain but was visiting family in Egypt, said he hurried to help after he saw an appeal for doctors at the field hospital while watching al-Jazeera late at night.

At the time of Morsi’s ouster, he said, he was “totally against the regime.”

“It was a failing regime,” he said. But Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the chief of the armed forces, “is calling for a civil war,” he said. “And to be honest, I can’t understand why some Egyptians are calling for a bloodbath. I was watching the marches yesterday, and I was in shock.”

Omar Encarnación writes: To understand the swift and dramatic demise of Egypt’s first democratically elected leader and what it might portend for the country’s future, it helps to take a broad comparative perspective. The manner in which the country’s military deposed President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, is by no means an isolated case. In fact, it fits rather perfectly within the model of a civil society coup, a concept I first described in a 2002 World Policy Journal essay that explained the brief removal from power of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez by a coalition of business, labor, and civic groups. Other scholars have subsequently applied the idea to other coups, such as those in the Philippines in 2001, in Ecuador in 2002, in Thailand in 2006, and in Honduras in 2009. All of these cases show that civil society coups are not the fix for democracy that they purport to be, which looks to be true in Egypt as well.

Endemic to new democracies, civil society coups entail the removal from power of an elected leader through sustained protest, usually with the aid of the military. Indeed, it is the partnership between civil society and the military — not usually known for acting in concert — that distinguishes a civil society coup from an ordinary one. More often than not, those behind the coup justify it by claiming that they intend to rescue democracy, which is paradoxical since they are, in fact, uprooting it. This is Tocqueville’s civil society gone rogue; rather than working patiently and discreetly toward improving the quality of democracy, it turns angry and restless and plots for sudden and radical political change.

In my original essay on Chávez’s removal from office, I identified three preconditions for a civil society coup. The first is the rise to power of a leader whose commitment to democracy is at best suspect. The second is a political apparatus that fails to meet public expectations about economic growth and stability, usually because of its corruption, incompetence, and neglect of the country’s basic needs. The third is the emergence of civil society actors — trade unions, religious associations, and civic groups — rather than formally organized political forces, which have either disintegrated or which never fully developed in the first place, as the main opposition to the government. The combined result of these conditions is the emergence of an adversarial relationship between an invigorated civil society and a delegitimized political system against a background of widespread societal discontent and the collapse of the rule of law. Under such conditions, disputes and political crises are solved on the streets rather than in the legislature.

All of these conditions materialized in Egypt. [Continue reading…]