[The analysts say that Mr. Morsi is clearly working to install networks of allies over key parts of the state. He has named Brotherhood members as governors in 7 out of 28 provinces. In a recent cabinet shake-up, he named another Brotherhood member as minister of local development, who under the new Constitution could have new powers over day-to-day local government.]
By David
D. Kirkpatrick And Mayy El Sheikh
 |
Reuters
Items from an office of the Muslim Brotherhood’s
political party were
burned in November.
|
CAIRO — When President Mohamed
Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood pushed through a new
constitution last month, liberals feared it would enable them to put an
Islamist stamp on the Egyptian state, in part by purging nearly half the judges
on the Supreme Constitutional Court.
But those warnings are
turning out to be premature, at the very least, as the court itself made clear
last week at its opening session last week, its first meeting under the new
charter.
The president of the
court sneered with disdain at a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood trying to
address the reconfigured bench, stripped of 7 of its 18 members. “As if you
left a court to be spoken of like this!” Judge Maher el-Beheiry snapped. He had
already declared that the court, perceived as an enemy of the Islamists, “can
never forget” the Brotherhood’s protests against it during the constitutional
debate.
In the two years since
the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Morsi and the Islamists have trounced their
political opposition again and again at the polls and have accumulated
unrivaled political power.
But Judge Beheiry’s
rebuke was a vivid reminder that their political victories have not yet translated
into real power over the Egyptian bureaucracy. Mr. Morsi still appears to
exercise little day-to-day authority over the judiciary, the police, the
military and the state-run news media.
“If you think of the
main pillars of the bureaucracy, the Brotherhood has not gotten control of them
yet, and I don’t think they will completely,” said Hani Shukrallah, 62, the
left-leaning editor of an English-language state news Web site who was recently
was asked to retire by its new management. “There are so many people who are
very difficult to bring to heel,” he said. “I think we are in for several years
of turbulence where state power is diffused.”
Although Mr. Morsi has
the legitimacy of a democratic election, he has inherited the still-intact
remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian state, built on fear, loyalty and
patronage, and much of it permeated by a deep distrust of the Islamists.
Mr. Morsi and his allies
are now only beginning to attempt to exert some control over the body of the
state that would allow him to put in effect a social, economic and political
program. And his ultimate success, or failure, will help decide some of the
most pivotal questions concerning Egypt’s
future, for better or worse.
On the one hand, the
bureaucracy’s resistance could prevent the Islamists from consolidating their
power, imposing their ideology, or, as some liberals say they fear, building a
new dictatorship. But the failure to exert control could also prolong vexing
social problems, like the collapse of public security because of the withdrawal
of the police.
The analysts say that
Mr. Morsi is clearly working to install networks of allies over key parts of
the state. He has named Brotherhood members as governors in 7 out of 28
provinces. In a recent cabinet shake-up, he named another Brotherhood member as
minister of local development, who under the new Constitution could have new
powers over day-to-day local government.
His Islamist allies in
the legislature named at least 11 fellow Islamists, including at least 3
ultraconservatives, to the 27 seats on the newly empowered National Council for
Human Rights. The Constitution and other new rules give it the authority to
regulate election observers, investigate human rights violations and act as a
public ombudsman.
But Mr. Morsi’s attempts
to consolidate his power have often yielded equivocal results. He finally persuaded
Egypt’s top generals to relinquish their authority over the civilian government
last August. But in December, the Islamist-backed Constitution granted the
generals broad immunity and autonomy from civilian control, in an apparent quid
pro quo.
Brotherhood leaders
acknowledge they face deep resistance. When the president took office, the
holdover staff was destroying his faxes and mail in small acts of sabotage,
said one senior Brotherhood leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to
avoid further inflaming the tensions. In the Interior Ministry, which nominally
reports to the president, rank-and-file officers remain all but openly
antagonistic to Mr. Morsi and his party.
During the contentious
run-up to the constitutional vote late last year, the police failed to increase
security outside Brotherhood offices as one after another were vandalized and
often burned. And when protesters clashed with Islamists outside the
presidential palace, the police effectively vanished from the scene. “It seemed
like a clear mutiny,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
“It was as if the arm of
the state was striking at its own head,” the senior Brotherhood leader
complained.
The police say the
lesson they learned from the revolution against Mr. Mubarak was not to stand
against protesters on behalf of an individual president.
“It fills me with pride
that a police officer was the one who opened the improvised metal gate for
protesters during the march to the presidential palace to allow them to continue,”
said Ahmed Mansour al-Helbawi, the head of a police union that claims to have
400,000 members. “The protesters carried him on their shoulders and chanted:
‘The people and the police are one hand.’ ”
Mr. Helbawi said the
officers were no longer willing to use force against demonstrators even outside
the presidential palace. But he acknowledged that the police still show no such
hesitation when protesters approach their own headquarters.
As for the failure to
protect the offices of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, “If I
protect the F.J.P., then I must also protect the Wafd Party and the
Constitution Party and every other party there is!” Mr. Helbawi said, adding
that the police would never again “turn into the ministry of just one political
party,” as it was under Mr. Mubarak.
Mr. Morsi has tried to
extend control over the police and removed the interior minister, who presided
over last month’s debacle and was a Mubarak enforcer who had run the Cairo
district during the brutal crackdown two years ago. But Mr. Morsi replaced him
with another longtime Mubarak-era police official, Mohamed Ibrahim, in an
apparent bid to avoid an even broader police insurrection. (Groups claiming to
represent the police have still circulated anonymous calls for a police protest
over the dismissal this week.)
Mr. Morsi’s allies have
not fared much better in trying to gain control of the official state news
media, one of the most visible bellwethers of their hold on the bureaucracy.
The Islamist-controlled upper house of Parliament replaced the top officials,
but state television still provides evidence that many of the tens of thousands
who work in the state news media oppose the Brotherhood.
The host Hala Fahmy, for
example, opened a show by accusing the new government of selling out the
“martyrs” and theatrically holding up a shroud to show she was ready to join
them. She is now off the air, pending an investigation of the outburst.
“There are 40,000 people
working in the building,” said Ehab El Mergawi, a state television news
producer who is also a member of the leftist April 6 group. “And I think 35,000
out of those can’t stand the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Emad Shahin, a political
scientist at the American University in Cairo, said that so far the Brotherhood
takeover sometimes appears to be working in reverse. “You feel that the
institutions are taking over Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, “not
the other way around.”