“So these are regular Egyptians, that have suffered from the same hatred and prejudices that exist in society.”
A series of events both before and after Sunday's protests have led Tadros to believe that the killing of demonstrators – who were reportedly shot at random and run down with military vehicles – was the work of radical individuals and subgroups within the army.
He recalled a telling scene that took place at a smaller Coptic protest four days before the clashes in Cairo. In that instance, too, protesters were “dispersed and beaten by the army, the soldiers and the officers.” But a video from the event shows a struggle of different attitudes within its ranks.
“We see, in one of the videos, after the initial beating of a protester, that the army officers – no human rights lovers, of course – are satisfied that the guy is beaten (enough), and try and stop it.”
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The footage shows how one officer “order the soldiers to stop. They don't.”
“He tries to stop the guy on the left. He stops him, but the soldier on the right continues to beat the protester. He turns to him, only to have the one on the left return to beating. Every new soldier arriving on the scene beats the protester.”
“The officer – for two minutes, as we see in the video – is doing his best to stop it. Again, he doesn't like the guy, but he doesn't want a dead body. And he even slaps one of his soldiers. Yet the beating continues.”
Tadros pointed to a second piece of footage, which emerged after the violence on Oct. 9, as evidence for his belief that rogue soldiers took their orders to disperse the crowd as a license to kill.
“The second video that we have, that's equally disturbing, is from after the attack on Sunday. The army soldiers are being put on their buses to return to their barracks. And we have one of the soldiers emerging from a window of the bus.”
“He shouts at the Muslim onlookers surrounding the bus, 'I shot him in the chest'” – an apparent reference to the shooting of a Christian protester. “He screams, 'I shot him in the chest.'”
“The Muslim onlookers are clapping and praising him. One of them shouts, 'By God, you are a man!'”
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Incidents of this kind lead Tadros to believe that top army officials told soldiers “to disperse (the protesters) – using force, definitely.” But “no one on the top level … could possibly imagine that the scene would be like this.”
Both Egyptian officials and Western diplomats, he said, must now reckon with the presence of criminal violence in the institution charged with ensuring the rule of law.
“If I were the Egyptian army's leaders at the moment, I would be really scared and really worried about what happened – not just the international ramifications, and internally, but because of this prospect: if the soldiers don't follow orders anymore, how do you deal with that?”
Tadros doesn't think a scenario like the one that happened on Sunday is “likely to happen in other instances” besides those involving a religious minority. Given orders to stop brutalizing a “regular demonstration,” as opposed to a gathering of Coptic Christians, he thinks soldiers “would stop.”
“But I think it has much more to do with the nature of the people they were beating – that is, that they were Christians,” he observed.
“Imagine that those soldiers had not been serving their one year in the army,” Tadros speculated. “Back in their villages, is it possible to imagine that they would have been part of the same crowds in Egyptian villages, that sometimes go and attack Christian homes and burn churches? Is that possible?”