[The battles that raged
on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a
sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of
secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled
their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist
movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.]
By Kareem
Fahim and David
D. Kirkpatrick
 |
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
Egyptians in central Cairo ran from tear gas during clashes with the police
on Friday. Protesters took to the streets in several cities. More Photos »
|
CAIRO — Protests erupted
across Egypt on
Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters
over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an
already divided nation while raising a specter, the president’s critics
charged, of a return to autocracy.
In an echo of the
uprising 22 months ago, thousands of protesters chanted for the downfall of Mr.
Morsi’s government in Cairo, while others ransacked the offices of the
president’s former party in Suez, Alexandria and other cities.
Mr. Morsi spoke to his
supporters in front of the presidential palace here, imploring the public to
trust his intentions as he cast himself as a protector of the revolution and a
fledgling democracy.
In a speech that was by
turns defensive and conciliatory, he ultimately gave no ground to the critics
who now were describing him as a pharaoh, in another echo of the insult once
reserved for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.
“God’s will and
elections made me the captain of this ship,” Mr. Morsi said.
The battles that raged
on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a
sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of
secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled
their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist
movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The crisis over his
power grab came just days after the Islamist leader won international praise
for his pragmatism, including from the United States, for brokering a
cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.
On Friday, the State
Department expressed muted concern over Mr. Morsi’s decision. “One of the
aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly
concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution,” said the State
Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
She said, “The current
constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a
constitution that includes checks and balances, and respects fundamental
freedoms, individual rights and the rule of law consistent with Egypt’s
international commitments.”
But the White House was
notably silent after it had earlier this week extolled the emerging
relationship between President Obama and Mr. Morsi and credited a series of
telephone calls between the two men with helping to mediate the cease-fire in
Gaza.
For Mr. Morsi, who
seemed to be saying to the nation that it needed to surrender the last checks
on his power in order to save democracy from Mubarak-era judges, the challenge
was to convince Egyptians that the ends justified his means.
But even as he tried,
thousands of protesters marched to condemn his decision. Clashes broke out
between the president’s supporters and his critics, and near Tahrir Square, the
riot police fired tear gas and bird shot as protesters hurled stones and set
fires.
Since Thursday, when Mr.
Morsi issued the decree, the president and his supporters have argued that he
acted precisely to gain the power to address the complaints of his critics,
including the families of protesters killed during the uprising and its
aftermath.
By placing his decisions
above judicial review, the decree enabled him to replace a public prosecutor
who had failed to win convictions against senior officers implicated in the
killings of protesters.
The president and his
supporters also argued that the decree insulated the Constituent Assembly,
which is drafting the constitution, from meddling by Mubarak-era judges.
Since Mr. Mubarak’s
ouster, courts have dissolved Parliament, kept a Mubarak loyalist as top
prosecutor and disbanded the first Assembly.
But by ending legal
appeals, the decree also removed a safety valve for critics who say the
Islamist majority is dominating the drafting of the constitution.
Mr. Morsi and the Muslim
Brotherhood, the movement he once helped lead, both frustrated with their
inability to build consensus, have been accused of conveniently dismissing
critics of all types as loyalists of the former government.
In an interview this
month, Essam el-Erian, the vice chairman of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice Party, said as much, asserting that the “the majority” of secular or
liberal opposition figures were in fact Mubarak loyalists.
Mr. Morsi was more
forgiving of the opposition on Friday, saying that he wanted a “real opposition
with awareness” while raising the threat of meddling by foreign enemies and a
“few” Mubarak loyalists.
Another article in Mr.
Morsi’s decree, that gives him broad powers to confront unspecified threats —
including to “the revolution” — has played into decades-old fears of the
Brotherhood as an insular, authoritarian movement shaped by decades as an
underground secret society.
But Mr. Morsi may have
miscalculated the public’s support for the courts, which include judges seen as
independent and who have taken stands against both Mr. Mubarak and the
Brotherhood.
In Tahrir Square on
Friday, derision for the Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s decision was widespread.
The Brotherhood’s members were called American agents by one group of chanters,
and fundamentalists bent on turning Egypt into Afghanistan by another.
One sign melded Mr.
Morsi’s face with a youthful picture of Mr. Mubarak. “Mohamed Morsi Mubarak,”
it said.
“They believe only in
Islam,” said Dr. Ali Abdul Hafiz, a former Brotherhood member and now a
strident opponent of the group. “Our affiliation is with our country. We want a
modern state. How can we believe the Muslim Brotherhood will take it for us?”
As he spoke, some of
Egypt’s leading opposition figures entered the square, including Hamdeen
Sabahi, a charismatic Nasserist politician, and Mohamed ElBaradei, a former top
United Nations nuclear official. Earlier in the day, the two men had joined
other prominent figures in a rare show of unity that belied a record of
divisions that have rendered the secular-minded opposition largely incoherent.
In the last
parliamentary elections, Islamists won 75 percent of the seats. The Parliament
was dissolved, but its influence remains in the Constituent Assembly, which is
dominated by those who are from parties based on political Islam. Despite
repeated complaints about the tenor of the constitution, Mr. Morsi’s weak
opponents have found no way to derail its progress.
But Mr. Morsi’s secular
opponents, too small a minority to vote down the charter, have resorted to
threats of a boycott to delay or influence it, and within the past week as many
as a quarter of the Assembly members walked out to protest a rush by Islamists
to complete the work.
But on Friday, sensing a
moment of overreach by Mr. Morsi, his critics have found new energy. Omar
Ashour, a professor of Arab politics at the University of Exeter in Britain,
suggested that it was unlikely the opposition would quickly yield. “At this
point, I don’t see the 60-year-plus heads of parties are in the mood to talk,”
he said in an e-mail analyzing the crisis. “They’d rather show strength via
their youth in the streets.”
Mr. Morsi’s supporters
acknowledge that the administration made a mistake in presenting his decree,
without first reaching out to his opponents. Even the president’s advisers were
blindsided: one adviser, Samir Morcos, told the state newspaper that he learned
of Mr. Morsi’s decree on television. He was reported to have quit in protest.
On Friday the president
tried to paper over the differences by focusing Egyptians on the future.
“I don’t seek to grab
legislative power,” Mr. Morsi said. “We’re moving on a clear path, we are
walking in a clear direction. And we have a big, clear goal: the new Egypt.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo,
and Helene Cooper from Washington.
