Prosecutors Order Arrests of Islamist Leaders
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and RICK GLADSTONE
Published: July 10, 2013
Cairo — Egypt’s new military-led government took further steps on
Wednesday to cripple the Muslim Brotherhood in the week since the
country’s Islamist president was deposed and detained, issuing formal
arrest warrants for the group’s top spiritual leader and at least nine
other senior figures accused of inciting deadly protests.
The general prosecutor’s office said Mohamed Badie, the Muslim
Brotherhood’s supreme guide, along with top officials in the group’s
Freedom and Justice Party and allied Islamist political parties, were
wanted for “planning, inciting and aiding criminal acts” outside the
Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo where Mohamed Morsi, the ousted
president, was believed to be held in military custody.
Soldiers and police officers killed at least 51 people
and wounded hundreds early Monday near the headquarters, most of them
unarmed demonstrators who had been demanding the release and
reinstatement of Mr. Morsi, the first freely elected president in Egypt.
The military said armed protesters instigated the violence, the
deadliest since the the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which overthrew Mr.
Morsi’s autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates have called Mr. Morsi’s ouster
a military coup that has reinvigorated the security apparatus of the
Mubarak era. They have rejected as lies the military’s claims that it
wants to quickly return to full civilian control and create an inclusive
government.
Prosecutors said Tuesday that they had also ordered 200 people held in
custody for at least 15 days pending further investigation into their
suspected role in Monday’s mayhem and released 446 others on bail,
according to Ahram Online, the Web site of Egypt’s leading newspaper.
At the same time the new interim government appeared to be gaining more
credibility — and generous offers of financial aid — from its autocratic
Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf who were happy to see the Muslim
Brotherhood’s political ascendance blunted in Egypt. Kuwait announced it
would provide an aid package worth $4 billion, adding to the $8 billion
in grants, loans and fuel promised on Tuesday by Saudi Arabia and The
United Arab Emirates.
The donations are needed urgently because the turmoil surrounding Mr.
Morsi’s overthrow has pushed the teetering Egyptian economy closer to
the brink of collapse.
Although the interim government enlisted internationally recognized
figures to serve as its public face and promised swift elections, the
transitional plan it introduced on Tuesday was widely criticized inside
Egypt as muddled, authoritarian and rushed.
The so-called road map, in the form of a “constitutional declaration” by
the military-appointed president, elicited immediate opposition from
civilian leaders across the political spectrum, including the liberals
and activists who sought the ouster of President Morsi, the faction of
ultraconservative Islamists who joined them and the many thousands
protesting to demand his reinstatement.
The declaration, however, made clear that the government drew its
authority only from the military commander who executed the takeover,
Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. The interim president, Adli Mansour, a senior
judge, cited the general’s brief statement as the basis of his own
authority, and in confirmation the general’s words were printed as law
in the official Gazette.
“It is now officially a coup,” Nathan Brown, a political scientist
specializing in Egyptian law at George Washington University, wrote in
assessing the text.
The signs of a widening crackdown on the Brotherhood and its affiliates
intensified on Tuesday, when Brotherhood officials said that they had
lost contact with about 250 members of their leadership, in addition to
the dozens — including Mr. Morsi — known to be detained.
In the first official word about Mr. Morsi’s circumstances in custody,
the caretaker foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, said on Tuesday in an
interview on CNN that he was “not free to go around, but he is treated
very well.” Mr. Amr said he did not know Mr. Morsi’s precise whereabouts
but defended the military’s response to the protests outside the
Republican Guard headquarters on Monday. “I do not believe that the
military personnel opened fire at peaceful demonstrators,” he said.
The interim government’s new appointments, including a liberal economist
as prime minister and the diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei as a vice
president for foreign relations, appeared intended to reassure the
Western allies and donors Egypt must depend on.
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The new prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, is a prominent economist who
served as finance minister under an earlier interim government. A
founding member of the Social Democratic Party, he has criticized former
President Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi as failing to move fast enough to
open up the economy, reform Egypt’s bloated and unaffordable subsidy
programs and provide for the poor.
Mr. Beblawi, 77, is ideally suited to negotiate with the International
Monetary Fund over a package of changes tied to a pending $4.8 billion
loan, a deal that seemed out of reach after Mr. Morsi’s ouster but is
still considered essential to save the economy. With a Ph.D. from the
Sorbonne, Mr. Beblawi has written three books on Middle East economics,
worked as a senior official of the United Nations and advised the Arab
Monetary Fund. He resigned after four months as finance minister under
the previous military-led transitional government — after Mr. Mubarak’s
ouster — after soldiers shot dozens of mostly Coptic Christian
demonstrators and the generals blamed them for scaring their troops.
Before the current crackdown, Mr. Beblawi had also welcomed the
overthrow of Mr. Mubarak as providing an opportunity for Islamists to
enter the democratic process. “The positive thing that resulted from
this was that it gave a chance for the Muslim Brotherhood and political
Islam, which have always been persecuted and wrongfully treated for a
long time,” he said in an interview published last month in an English language-newspaper here.
Mr. ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Prize for his work with the United
Nations’ nuclear watchdog, was the new government’s first choice for
prime minister. But his appointment was opposed by the ultraconservative
Islamist Al Nour party, which had agreed to back Mr. Morsi’s ouster.
After Mr. ElBaradei’s rejection — while he was on his way to his
swearing-in, the Islamist party’s leader said — the government cycled
through two other candidates before persuading Mr. Beblawi to take the
job.
The new “constitutional declaration” laid out an election schedule that
analysts called implausibly speedy. The plan calls for a panel of 10
jurists — 6 judges and 4 law professors — to present a sweeping package
of amendments in just one month. A group of 50 representatives of
various government institutions, parties, guilds and social groups —
including 10 who are either women or young — will then review the text
for two months. But it is not clear what power they have to make changes
or how they will make their decisions. A national referendum on the
charter is set for a month after that, with parliamentary elections
within the next month.
Analysts faulted the plan as repeating and even compounding the missteps
that botched Egypt’s first attempt to build a democracy. The compressed
schedule leaves too little time for negotiation and consensus among
Egypt’s already polarized political factions, they say, and the rush to
elections all but ensures that the process will again become caught up
in partisan feuds.
But this time the process is even more opaque and unrepresentative. It
is unclear who will select the panel of 10 jurists or the 50 who will
review their work on the new charter. Nor is the precise role of those
50 explained. Although normally representatives of the public settle on
broad principles for experts to draft into a charter, the new plan calls
for the experts to finish their work before the debate can begin, said
Zaid al-Ali, an analyst at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental group.
During the interim period, the declaration puts almost unchecked power
in the hands of the president himself, who can issue legislation,
constitutional declarations and ill-defined states of emergency. The
declaration includes negligible protections for basic rights, including
free speech or assembly.
It grants the military autonomy outside the president’s control. It
appears to preserve provisions grounding the Constitution in
specifically Sunni Islamic law — said to be the priority of the
ultraconservative Islamists who backed the military takeover, although
they disputed whether those provisions were adequate. And the
declaration vests much of the power to shape Egypt’s next permanent
charter in the highly conservative judges left in place after decades of
authoritarianism.
The young organizers of the recent protests that preceded Mr. Morsi’s
ouster said they were surprised by the charter and rejected it. The
National Salvation Front, the coalition formed by Mr. ElBaradei and
others in opposition to Mr. Morsi, said it had not been consulted and
demanded unspecified changes.
Al Nour, the ultraconservative Islamist party, said the text broke
promises it had received before the takeover, including guarantees about
preserving provisions touching Egypt’s “identity.” In a statement
denouncing both the mass shooting and the president’s provisional
charter, Al Nour accused the interim president of acting “extreme” and
“dictatorial.” The party complained that the transition plan allowed him
“to control all tools for amending the Constitution.”
“What, if anything, have the country’s new authorities appeared to have
learned from the mistakes of the past,” Mr. Ali wrote in an analysis.
“Not much.”
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