U.S. suggests Egyptian military may have averted civil war
By Noah Browning and Shadia Nasralla
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt may have avoided a civil war this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday, saying this was one factor to weigh as Washington decides whether to cut off most U.S. aid to the Arab nation.
The armed forces deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi on July 3 after huge street protests against his rule, clearing the way for this week's installment of a new interim cabinet charged with restoring civilian government and reviving the economy.
Thousands of Mursi's supporters demonstrated outside the prime minister's office and marched through Cairo on Wednesday to denounce the new military-backed administration and show that they had no intention of bowing to army dictates.
Under U.S. law, if the United States were to decide that Mursi was ousted in a military coup, or a coup in which the military played a decisive role, it would have to cut off most of the roughly $1.5 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt.
Kerry repeated the U.S. position that it has not yet made any decision, saying it would take its time, consult its lawyers and get all the facts.
"This is obviously an extremely complex and difficult situation," Kerry told reporters in Amman, adding that he would not "rush to judgment".
"I will say this: That what complicates it, obviously, is that you had an extraordinary situation in Egypt of life and death, of the potential of civil war and enormous violence, and you now have a constitutional process proceeding forward very rapidly," he added. "So we have to measure all of those facts against the law, and that's exactly what we will do."
The crisis in Egypt, which straddles the vital Suez Canal, has alarmed allies in the West. Washington would be forced to cut off aid to Cairo, including some $1.3 billion that goes to the military, if it determined Mursi had been removed by a coup.
His comments underscored grave U.S. concerns about the Arab world's most populous state and suggested that President Barack Obama was in no hurry to pull the plug on the aid program.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton became the latest senior international figure to visit Egypt's interim rulers and, unlike a U.S. envoy who came two days ago, she also met senior figures in Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood.
However, Brotherhood leader Amr Darrag said the Europeans had not put forward any plan to resolve the crisis. On her last visit, in April, Ashton attempted to persuade Mursi to sign up to a power-sharing deal brokered by an EU envoy. The president did not respond.
Thousands of Brotherhood supporters are staging a vigil in a square in northeast Cairo, vowing not to move until the restoration of Mursi, Egypt's first freely elected president. He has been held at an undisclosed location since his downfall.
A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of 70 Mursi backers for 15 days pending investigations over clashes that killed seven people early Tuesday, state news agency MENA said.
They are accused, among other crimes, of rioting, blocking a Cairo road bridge and targeting policemen with firearms.
"PEACEFUL MARTYRDOM"
Wednesday's protests were mostly peaceful, although there were scuffles when a crowd marched through the city center and along the Nile riverbank, held back by riot police as they approached Tahrir Square, focus for anti-Mursi protests.
"We have only two goals, legitimacy or martyrdom," said Ahmed Ouda, 27. Another man interrupted to add: "Peaceful martyrdom!"
An interim cabinet of 33 ministers, mostly technocrats and liberals, was sworn in on Tuesday. Not one was drawn from the two main Islamist groups that together have won five elections since the 2011 uprising toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
In another worrying sign for the new government's ability to build consensus, the slate was also denounced by the April 6 youth group, which led early street protests against Mubarak.
"The cabinet included a number of ministers who failed before when they were holding former official posts along with another number of ministers who belong to the regime of ousted president Mubarak," the April 6 group said in a statement.
Ashton met interim head of state Adli Mansour, Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi and other government figures, telling reporters afterwards it was up to Egypt to choose its own path but that it should seek to reconcile feuding factions.
"I underlined the importance of a very inclusive process because this country belongs to everyone and they must feel part of that process," she said, calling for the release of Mursi.
The new cabinet is charged with implementing an army-backed "road map" to restore civilian rule, which foresees parliamentary elections in as little as six months.
Its main task is salvaging an economy wrecked by two and a half years of turmoil. For that, it has been given a lifeline of $12 billion in aid from rich Gulf Arab states.
Many of the new cabinet ministers are supporters of deep economic reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund in return for a stalled rescue loan, but investors are skeptical those reforms will be implemented soon.
Finance Minister Ahmed Galal said on Wednesday that an IMF loan was only "part of the solution" to the country's problems.
"We need time to read and study the issues and files on the ground to come up with sound and well thought-out decisions that will pave the way and build the future for governments to come," he said in a statement.
KIDNAPPED?
Mursi has not been seen in public since the army moved in and his supporters say he has been "kidnapped" - a charge denied by military spokesman Ahmed Mohamed Ali, who told Al Arabiya that the army had acted "for his protection".
Ali also accused the Brotherhood of "a campaign of incitement that attempts to depict political differences as religious differences". He said: "There is incitement to target military installations and headquarters, and this is something totally unacceptable in Egypt or in any country."
The running street battles in the early hours of Tuesday were the deadliest in a week. Before that, more than 90 people were killed in the first five days after Mursi's removal, more than half of them shot dead by troops outside a Cairo barracks.
In the lawless Sinai peninsula bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, a policeman was killed when gunmen opened fire on a police station in El-Arish city, security sources said.
Two security checkpoints in El-Arish airport were also attacked but there were no immediate reports of casualties.
At least 14 people, mainly security personnel, have been killed there since Islamist militants called for an uprising against Egypt's military after Mursi's exit.
(Additional reporting by Alexander Dziadosz, Ulf Laessing, Maggie Fick, Andrew Torchia, Yasmine Saleh, Edmund Blair, Omar Fahmy in Cairo, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia and Arshad Mohammed in Jordan; Writing by Crispian Balmer and Peter Graff; Editing by Andrew Roche)
Egypt’s Army, Hardened in Bureaucracy, Not War
By - Jul 17, 2013
The Egyptian army has come forth to save democracy by destroying it. A man in uniform, Abdelfatah al-Seesi, gave himself the right to oust and hold in detention an elected president. Say what you will about the Free Officers who toppled the monarchy in 1952, they had been men of their time. They had known political protest, and they had known war.
Gamal Abdel Nasser had imbibed the political currents of his time. He had fought and fought well in the war for Palestine. He had carried within him the grievance of a military that had been dispatched into a war it wasn’t prepared to fight.
As for Anwar Sadat, he had known the life of the street. He had taken part in the assassination of an ancien regime politician known for his sympathy for the British occupation; he had been cashiered from the army, knew adversity and had been imprisoned. All of the hopes -- and frustrations of Egypt -- were to be found in the men who went out on July 23, 1952, to upend the monarchy.
Abdelfatah al-Seesi is a product of a different army and a different world. He is a man of the barracks, and the commissaries and business interests, of the officer corps. He graduated from the military academy in 1977; he would rise in the armed forces in a time of peace. He has known no combat; he served as a military attache in Saudi Arabia, and attended the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania.
There is nothing remarkable about al-Seesi; he is said to be religiously devout. It was President Mohamed Mursi himself who chose him as commander of the armed forces, promoting him over 200 more senior officers. This is no Mustafa Kemal Ataturk emerging out of war and national distress.
Craven Coup
A craven civilian leadership that had been unable to trump the Muslim Brotherhood at the ballot box was glad for the gift of his coup. It is a “hiccup,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the darling of liberals abroad, of the coup. ElBaradei had a front-row seat, as the new military master issued the declaration that ousted Mursi. And the needed religious cover was at hand: the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar and the Coptic pope. Tribute had to be paid to the street -- or more precisely to Tahrir Square -- and representatives of the Tamarod (Rebellion) movement who had gathered the petitions that called for an end to the Mursi presidency were present, too.
In truth, there was no urgency to the coup. Mursi wasn’t about to run away with the republic. The man reigned but didn’t rule. The police were a law unto themselves, the judiciary was defiant, and the army was untouchable.
The issues of war and peace -- the accommodation with Israel, the traffic with the U.S. -- were beyond Mursi’s writ. The intelligence services were supreme in their own domains. The deep state that Hosni Mubarak had bequeathed was intact.
True, Mursi had secured the passage of a constitution last December, and 64 percent of the voters had given their approval. But countries don’t live by constitutions, and the ratified constitution was in the main an anodyne document with the boilerplate provisions of prior declarations. This land had never been governed by constitutional provisions. Successive regimes have lived and functioned outside the law, and the pharaonic leadership at the helm needed no validating constitutional mechanisms.
The true powers in the land could have permitted Mursi the full run of his four-year mandate. The country could have dealt with it. But the land was set on the boil, and the coup was the easy way out.
Egypt has been perennially prone to violent shifts of opinion and preferences. It makes political deities and breaks them: Its broad middle class has been brittle and given to superstition and conspiracy theories. Modernism has been on the defensive for decades now, and the country has been bereft of the saving graces of participatory politics.
Secularists Rule
After tyranny came an infatuation with the maximalism of rebellion. Moderation quit the land. An unknown military officer was now the redeemer. The national maladies will endure. There is no way the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood could be extirpated.
But the secularists now wanted the old, burdened country to be theirs and theirs alone. The newly formed cabinet is composed of ministers of a decidedly secular bent. Some retreads from the Mubarak era have found their way into the new government.
Augusto Pinochet was a cruel and wicked man, the aftermath of his coup against Salvador Allende a time of merciless official terror. But grant Pinochet his due: He assumed the responsibility of his power and he remade the economy. By the early signs, General al-Seesi intends to rule behind the facade of civilian power. He can be forgiven the sense that the crowd - - all those good secularists and self-styled liberals -- had pined for his rule.
(Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “The Syrian Rebellion.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment