Nag Hammadi crime: a destruction of the concept of the State

Written by Gamal Hindawi’s blog
Bikya Masr



By a simple calculation and from a full perspective we can discuss the long term human bleeding and the excessive depletion of the wealth, resources and the destiny of the Arab peoples. The bloody sacrifices and the tears of the movements espousing the slogans of the revolutionary process of liberation and emancipation and anti-colonial powers … and compared to the results shown day-to-day, it is the most losing deal in human history as a whole.

After decades of bitter years … and after many experiences of independence and the establishment of the so-called nation states, still some of the events that we go through and make us live with a struggle, compel us – from time to time – to revise our concepts about the phrases that we are tired of repetition and routine self-perpetuating about belonging and citizenship, social justice and the expression of these phrases on the ground of reality.

Some of the calamities that strike the national reconciliation by surprise and that affect the social fabric in its deepest infrastructure such as the one that took place in Nag Hammadi, may compel us to wonder about the semantic concept of the state in the media and political practice, and the rhetoric of the ruling Arab regime.

The State, as a ruling system, expresses the directions of the people, and in light of the notoriously illegitimate encroachment of the ruling regime and through collaboration and conspiracy with the politicized and mercenary religious system, the State has turned into a tool of suppression and dedicated to terrorize the intellectuals and to impose authoritarian ruling concepts that can not be justified and its existence is only to deprive citizens of their basic rights ensured by the constitution and the basics of belonging to their country.

Citizens’ right for freedom of choice is the main threat to the state. The peaceful transfer of power is an end to the regime that can not be offset by any arrangements for any kind of “safe exit.”

In other words, the State here has turned into a method of marginalization and exclusion rather than a tool of the formation of a coherent collective consciousness and national identity and unity. The official Arab political regime has historically failed in launching a project or a political process leading to a binary sort of the State and the Authority, with an emphasis on the primacy of the State as a unifying entity, guarantor of citizenship and fundamental freedoms and distancing itself from sectarian and ethnic divides.

We can even say that the official Arab main concern is the synthesis of the concept of the duo: the ruler and the ruled, through the establishment of a distorted concept of the State adopting delusional slogans in the interpretation and management of community-based intersections, and play its card on these intersections to ensure sustainability of dominating the national decision and control the distribution of financial income of the resources of the nation, turning a blind eye on the practice of inciting a sectarian and racial rift, which is practiced by the scholars of the Sultan under the pretext of doctrinal purity and decency and to refrain from the activation of policies aimed at sowing the seeds of belonging and consolidation in the state system and replacing it by a narrow short-hand formula that does not provide a space for the ethnic minorities and different ideological and philosophical minorities.

This produced the frightening reality, which is reflected in the emergence of sectarian slogans and racism in any friction or a mere criminal incident where its parties are different, ethnically or from different sects. This is a reflection of the tensions experienced by the citizen and that reflects the suffering of the deterioration of the limitations created by the excessive absence of social justice arising from the wrong policies of successive governments of our country.

The blood that has watered the land of NaJ Hammadi was another echo of the blood shed in Kurdistan, Darfur, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab ill structured world and was squandered by the destructive policies to national interrelation and popular communication. The policies that sought to disrupt the cohesion of community and dismantling it to ethnic or religious or sectarian references that were set to pounce on the national retreating gains under the pressure of routine weakening of the collective system, which is expressed as nation-state, which threatens and warns of civil war and dismantling the state into small-states and could lead to ethnic cleansing and genocides.

That petty criminal who raised his evil and unjust weapons in the face of his brothers is inevitably convicted and deserves the punishment that is commensurate with the heinous crime, but he shares the indictment, certainly, with the government that has suspended the principles of citizenship and justice. This obscurantist priesthood is also convicted because it did not use the enormous potential dominated by the clout nor the amount of people in spreading the values of tolerance, fraternity and unity.

The killer who committed the crime in Nag Hammadi was expressing a reflection of centuries of incitement and programmed alienation between the components of the same society and collusion between the governance and the scholars of the Sultan who incited racism and sectarianism, which contradicted by the blood of the Copt martyrs slain with their brother Muslim martyr, the security man whose blood was combined into a unity, in which the history, land, honor and determination refuses its collapse.

**translated by Mohamed Abdel Salam