[With
the resignations on Thursday, nine Morsi administration officials have quit in
protest in recent days. In a day of tension and uncertainty unlike any other
since the revolt that overthrew Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago, state media
reported that Mr. Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, was meeting
with his top advisers and would deliver a public address in response to the
clashes, but by 7 p.m., he had not done so. The top scholar of Al Azhar, the
center of Sunni Muslim learning that is considered Egypt’s
chief moral authority, urged both sides to pull back from violence and seek
“rational dialogue.” ]
CAIRO —
Resignations rocked the government of President Mohamed Morsi on
Thursday as tanks from the special presidential guard took up positions around
his palace and the state television headquarters after a night of street
fighting between his Islamist supporters and their secular opponents that left
at least 6 dead and 450 wounded.
The
director of state broadcasting resigned Thursday, as did Rafik Habib, a
Christian who was the vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party
and the party’s favorite example of its commitment to tolerance and pluralism.
Their departures followed an announcement by Zaghoul el-Balshi, the new general
secretary of the commission overseeing a planned constitutional referendum,
that he was quitting. “I will not participate in a referendum that spilled
Egyptian blood,” he said in a television interview during the clashes late
Wednesday night.
With
the resignations on Thursday, nine Morsi administration officials have quit in
protest in recent days. In a day of tension and uncertainty unlike any other
since the revolt that overthrew Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago, state media
reported that Mr. Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, was meeting
with his top advisers and would deliver a public address in response to the
clashes, but by 7 p.m., he had not done so. The top scholar of Al Azhar, the
center of Sunni Muslim learning that is considered Egypt’s
chief moral authority, urged both sides to pull back from violence and seek
“rational dialogue.”
The
scale of the violence around the palace has raised the first doubts about Mr.
Morsi’s effort to hold a public referendum on Dec. 15 to vote on a draft
constitution approved by his Islamist allies over the objections of his secular
opposition and the Coptic Christian Church.
About
1 p.m. Thursday, hundreds of his supporters who had camped outside his palace
to defend it — many waking up with bandaged heads from wounds sustained from
volleys of rocks and the blows of makeshift clubs the previous night — abruptly
began to pull out of their encampment in unison, a development that suggested
that their organizers in the Muslim Brotherhood had ordered a withdrawal. It
took place just moments after several Brotherhood members camped there had
vowed to stay put until the referendum, set for Dec. 15.
The
Egyptian military, which seized power from Mr. Mubarak in February 2011, saying
it was stepping in to protect the legitimate demands of the public, stayed
silent after a statement Wednesday that it would not intervene in a dispute between
political factions. The presidential guard that deployed Thursday is a separate
unit that reports directly to the president.
Wednesday
night’s battle was the worst clash between political factions here since the
days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military coup six decades ago, and
Egyptians across the political spectrum responded with shock and dismay.
Abdel
Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a popular former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who ran
for president as a liberal Islamist and has stayed on the sidelines of the
escalating conflict between Mr. Morsi and his secular opponents, slammed the
president and the Brotherhood for calling on their civilian supporters to
defend the palace with force rather than relying the institutions of law
enforcement.
“The
palace is not a private property to the Muslim Brotherhood or Dr. Morsi; it
belongs to us, all Egyptians,” Mr. Aboul Fotouh said in a televised news
conference. He was flanked by a Morsi adviser who had just resigned and by a
well-known revolutionary poet who is the son of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
perhaps the most influential religious scholar in the Sunni Muslim world and a
spiritual guru to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Wednesday
night’s clashes followed two weeks of sporadic violence around the country that
erupted after Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement,
seized temporary powers beyond the review of any court, removing the last check
on his authority until ratification of the new constitution.
Mr.
Morsi has said he needed the expanded powers to block a conspiracy by corrupt
businessmen, Mubarak-appointed judges and opposition leaders to thwart Egypt’s
transition to a constitutional democracy. Some opponents, Mr. Morsi’s advisers
say, would sacrifice democracy to stop the Islamists from winning elections.
Mr.
Morsi’s secular critics have accused Mr. Morsi and the Islamists of seeking to
establish a new dictatorship, in part by ramming through a rushed constitution
that they say could ultimately give new power over society to Muslim scholars
and Islamists groups. And each side’s actions have confirmed the other’s fears.
Now,
the distrust and animosity between Islamists and their secular opponents have
mired the outcome of Egypt’s promised transition to democracy in debates about
the legitimacy of the new government and its new leaders’ commitment to the
rule of law.
The
fighting Wednesday began when the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups
summoned thousands of their supporters to a rally in the support of the
president outside the palace in the Heliopolis neighborhood, where a small
group of his opponents had begun a sit-in the night before. The Islamists
chased away the protesters, tearing down their tents and beating those who
resisted, protesters said. And a few hours later, around 6 p.m., thousands of
the secularists returned to try to retake the battleground.
Riot
police officers initially tried to disperse the antagonists with tear gas,
protesters said, but they soon retreated. A chaotic melee of thrown rocks and
Molotov cocktails engulfed several blocks of Heliopolis, one of the most
affluent neighborhoods in the capital, and the fighting was punctuated by the
occasional blast of a shotgun. The source of the gunfire could not be
determined, but secular protesters showed journalists birdshot wounds and large
white pellets fired from the guns.
By
Thursday morning, the soldiers of the presidential guard were nailing
barbed-wire barriers into the streets surrounding the palace to hold back
protesters and keep the factions apart. Rubble, broken glass and projectiles
made from broken paving stones littered the streets for blocks. Car windshields
were broken, and a handful of burned-out wrecks littered the streets. Splotches
of white paint hid graffiti mocking Mr. Morsi that had covered the palace walls
after the secular protest on Tuesday night.
A
few dozen protesters stood by the barbed wire chanting slogans against Mr.
Morsi and the Islamists. “The people want the fall of the supreme guide,” they
said, referring to the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, and the army must
choose “between the revolutionaries and the killers.”
On
the other side of the tanks and barbed wire, hundreds of Islamists milled
around an encampment of more than a dozen tents. A sound truck drove through
the crowd blaring prayers and patriotic music. Words written on its back
declared, “Protect Egypt — yes to the constitution for stability!”
Many
demonstrators said they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood from other
provinces who had shown up to defend Egypt’s democracy from a conspiracy by
foreign powers, corrupt businessmen and cynical opposition leaders. Their
secular opponents were thugs and street children who had been paid to fight,
they insisted, arguing that democracy demanded respected for Egypt’s first
freely elected president.
In
a token of the deep suspicions since Egypt’s revolution, some maintained that
Mr. Morsi could not rely on the police force to defend him and his palace
because its leaders were holdovers from the old government trying to position
themselves to be on the winning side of the political battle.
“We
must take our freedom; it will not be given to us on a golden platter,” said
Mohamed Hassan Awad Rashid, 54, a schoolteacher and member of the Muslim
Brotherhood from Sharqiya in the Nile Delta, who said he had arrived Wednesday
and would stay until the referendum. “If we don’t complete our revolution now,
then we are digging our own graves.”
A
crowd of other supporters nodded at his determination to stay until the completion
of a referendum. But about half an hour later, the order for a pullout was
given, and soon after virtually all the Islamists were gone. State media
reported that by 3 p.m., the presidential guard would enforce an evacuation of
the area.
Mohamed
ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat, was chosen Wednesday as
coordinator for the newly unified secular opposition. He urged Mr. Morsi and
his allies to “see what is happening in the Egyptian street, the division, the
polarization. This is something that leads us to violence and worse.”
“The
ball is in his court,” Mr. ElBaradei said at a news conference in which he
threatened a general strike or other action to try to stop the referendum.
“Bullying will not yield any results for this country.
“The
people of Egypt will be gathering everywhere,” he added. “We will not finish
this battle for our freedom and dignity until we are victorious.”
Mr.
Morsi did not respond to the clashes. His party said it held Mr. ElBaradei and
other secular leaders responsible for any violence.
But
the Brotherhood’s leaders appeared to speak for the president. The group issued
its own statement defending the need for Mr. Morsi’s actions to fight off
“treacherous plots” against Egypt’s nascent democracy.
“We
are confident that the Egyptian people who made this great revolution that
impressed the whole world will not abandon democracy or their revolution,” the
group said, “and must support the president they chose freely for the first
time in history.”
Mai
Ayyad contributed reporting.
