[With military
helicopters circling well into the night, a new round of mass street violence
convulsed downtown Cairo. Rival crowds of protesters hurled rocks, missiles,
Molotov cocktails and fireworks at each other in Tahrir Square, the spiritual
center of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and the 6th October Bridge, a heavily
traveled elevated highway that spans the Nile River. “This has become a gang war,
a street battle,” said Hisham al-Sayyed Suleiman, 50, an anti-Morsi
demonstrator.]
By Ben Hubbard, David D. Kirkpatrick and Rick Gladstone
 |
Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
Enormous
and defiant protests continued across Cairo.
|
CAIRO — Islamist supporters of
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s newly ousted president, held enormous and defiant
protests across Cairo and elsewhere on Friday demanding his reinstatement and
engaging in sometimes deadly clashes with security forces and anti-Morsi
demonstrators that threatened to further deepen the country’s polarization.
News agencies quoting
Health Ministry data said at least 17 people were killed in political violence
nationwide, most of them in Cairo. Witnesses said they saw at least five
pro-Morsi demonstrators killed and many more wounded in gunfire outside the
Republican Guard compound where Mr. Morsi was believed to be detained, as
thousands confronted a phalanx of armed soldiers, armored vehicles and barbed
wire ringing the facility.
“Where’s Morsi?” they
screamed. Others denounced Egypt’s defense minister, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi,
who ordered Mr. Morsi removed from power Wednesday night. “Traitor, traitor,
traitor! Sisi is a traitor!,” they cried.
With military
helicopters circling well into the night, a new round of mass street violence
convulsed downtown Cairo. Rival crowds of protesters hurled rocks, missiles,
Molotov cocktails and fireworks at each other in Tahrir Square, the spiritual
center of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and the 6th October Bridge, a heavily
traveled elevated highway that spans the Nile River. “This has become a gang war,
a street battle,” said Hisham al-Sayyed Suleiman, 50, an anti-Morsi
demonstrator.
Tens of thousands of
people also faced off in the streets just north of Cairo’s famous Egyptian
museum and in front of the Ramses Hilton, a few hundreds north of Tahrir Square.
The immediate catalyst
for the violent confrontation in central Cairo was over who had the right to
Tahrir Square, the central theater of the 2011 revolution that led to the
toppling of Mr. Morsi’s autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, and has been the
main spot for aggrieved Egyptians ever since. Thousands of Islamists who had
been protesting elsewhere in the city marched across the 6th October Bridge
intending to enter Tahrir Square, but crowds celebrating the military’s removal
of Mr. Morsi rushed to keep them out.
“I don’t see this ending
soon, because the Islamists keep saying they want Morsi or death,” Mr. Suleiman
said. “The only hope is for security to come and pick them all up.”
The pro-Morsi crowds,
numbering in the tens of thousands, reflected the resilient power of the Muslim
Brotherhood to organize mass rallies in the aftermath of the military
intervention that deposed Mr. Morsi, the Islamist who was Egypt’s first freely
elected president. The Muslim Brotherhood called the protests the “Friday of
Rejection” and insisted that Mr. Morsi must be reinstated as the rightful head
of state.
“We will bring him back
bearing him on our necks, sacrifice our souls for him,” said Mohamed Badie, the
spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who appeared at a mass pro-Morsi
rally at the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, stirring the crowd into impassioned
anger. “We will bring back the rights of the Egyptian people who were wronged
by this disgraceful conspiracy.”
Mr. Badie said the
widespread news media reports that he was among the Islamist leaders arrested
in a post-Morsi crackdown by security forces were false. But in the aftermath
of Mr. Morsi’s ouster, hundreds of Islamists were detained, and even though a
few senior Muslim Brotherhood aides were released on Friday, all indications
pointed to a worsening divide between Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and his
critics — including the powerful military that deposed him.
An interim president
installed by the military, the former chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional
Court, Adli Mansour, took a further step on Friday to disempower the vestiges
of Mr. Morsi’s government by formally dissolving the Shura Council, the
country’s only operating house of Parliament, which had been dominated by the
Islamists. The constitutional court had disbanded the lower house last year,
one of many challenges Mr. Morsi had faced in his troubled tenure.
Islamists also expressed
rage at how their ability to convey their narrative in the news media had been
marginalized or eliminated in the two days since Mr. Morsi was deposed. Despite
the interim government’s pledge of inclusiveness, Islamist television
broadcasters were shuttered, and state television barely covered the breadth of
the pro-Morsi demonstrations on Friday.
Egypt’s military
commanders have justified the ouster of Mr. Morsi by saying they felt compelled
to bring the country back together after millions of Egyptians demonstrated
against him, claiming he had sought to monopolize power, neglected the economy
and worsened divisions in society.
But if anything, the
forced removal of Mr. Morsi seemed only to add a bitter new divisiveness into
Egyptian politics.
The army’s re-entry and
the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood members in particular made many fear that they
had not only lost their political power but could also face the same repression
they endured under President Mubarak.
Protester Hussein Nada,
43, said he had spent eight years in prison under President Mubarak because he
was a member of the Gamaa al-Islamiyya, an Islamist group. He named the four
different prisons he had spent time in while counting them on his fingers.
“They hung me up, they
beat me, they used electricity — all the means of torture they had,” he said.
“Anyone from the
opposition who came to power could decide to put us all back in prison,” he
said. “As soon as the army came back, they put hundreds on the arrests list, so
we fear we could lose all we’ve gained.”
Early on Friday, in a
sign of the potential resistance to the new order, armed Islamists struck at
four security force positions in the restive Sinai Peninsula, killing one
soldier and wounding two in a rocket attack on a police post in Rafah on the
border with Gaza Strip, according to news reports that quoted security
officials. Separate rocket attacks were said to have been aimed at military
checkpoints at El Arish airport in Sinai.
The Associated Press
quoted an Egyptian official as saying the border crossing to the Gaza Strip had
been closed indefinitely.
At the same time, the
military’s move against Mr. Morsi, which has drawn a mixed regional response,
seems to have created a degree of isolation within the broader African
continent. News reports said the African Union, the Pan-African representative
body based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, resolved to suspend Egypt from all its
activities in line with rules on the interruption of constitutional rule.
The prospect of more
confrontation also raised concern at the United Nations. Navi Pillay, the top
United Nations human rights official, said in a statement from Geneva that a
“concerted effort is needed by all parties to establish sound political and
legal institutions.”
“There should be no more
violence, no arbitrary detention, no illegal acts of retribution,” she said.
“Serious steps should also be taken to halt, and investigate, the appalling —
and at times seemingly organized — sexual violence targeting women protesters.”
In a sign that the
anti-Morsi backlash may have overreached, a Mubarak-appointed prosecutor
general, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, who had been dismissed by Mr. Morsi and was
among those reinstated to his office on Thursday, resigned less than 24 hours
later, apparently sensitive to the appearance of engaging in political
retaliation.
In a statement reported
by Ahram Online, Mr. Mahmoud said he had decided to resign to “avoid the
embarrassment of making judicial decisions against those who removed me from
office.”
Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick reported
from Cairo, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Mayy El Sheikh and Kareem Fahim
contributed reporting from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London.
