Remembering the Rabaa Massacre

How the West responded to the killing of one thousand demonstrators on a single day in Egypt.

(Photo: Aaron Rose)

by Daniel Wickham

August marked the one-year anniversary of one of the most heinous massacres in recent decades. According to the findings of a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Rabaa dispersal in Cairo was “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators on a single day in recent history,” surpassing China’s 1989 clearing of Tiananmen Square and Uzbekistan’s Andijan massacre.

In 2013, the only comparable atrocity was the Ghouta chemical weapons attack in Syria, which also took place a year ago in August. But whereas Ghouta rightly elicited unequivocal and universal condemnation throughout the West, bringing Britain, France, and the United States to the brink of war with the Assad regime, the Rabaa massacre was met with a far more tepid response.