[The escalating tensions
between Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and their opponents continued to spur
street violence overnight. Egyptian officials said at least 18 people had died
in street fighting near an Islamist rally in support of Mr. Morsi near Cairo
University. State media reported that the dead included victims s from both
sides and that most died of gunshot wounds.]
By David D. Kirkpatrick, Ben
Hubbard and Alan Cowell
 |
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
Egyptian soldiers guarded the
presidential palace on Wednesday
|
CAIRO — Egypt’s top generals
summoned civilian political leaders to an emergency meeting Wednesday just
hours before the deadline they have set for President Mohamed Morsi to leave
power.
Among those called to
the meeting was Mohamed ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat
protesters demanding Mr. Morsi’s ouster have tapped as one of their negotiators
over a new interim government, Reuters reported, citing unnamed official
sources.
Mr. ElBaradei has been
an outspoken critic of Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, the
constitution they pushed to a referendum and the previous period of military
rule. He has declined to comment in his current position. News agencies
reported that top Muslim and Christian religious authorities were invited as
well.
The escalating tensions
between Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and their opponents continued to spur
street violence overnight. Egyptian officials said at least 18 people had died
in street fighting near an Islamist rally in support of Mr. Morsi near Cairo
University. State media reported that the dead included victims s from both
sides and that most died of gunshot wounds.
Police initially
reported that more than 40 Islamists were wounded by birdshot, and Islamist
witnesses later said that police had begun shooting at them as well. But after
the initial attack, the Islamists began lashing out and beating suspected
assailants. Opponents of the Islamists said they too were shooting as the
fighting continued through the night.
By morning, the area
around Cairo University was filled with burned cars, smoldering piles of
garbage, makeshift barricades, and torn textbook pages in English, French and
German. Campaign posters from last year’s historic presidential election still
hung on the walls.
A few hundred Islamists
and a smaller crowd of their opponents clustered in opposing camps, both sides
armed with clubs and sticks. A sign hung by Mr. Morsi’s supporters declared:
“To the coup supporters, our blood will haunt you and you will pay an expensive
price for every spilled drop of our blood.”
Some of the Islamists
gathered belong to more conservative factions than the Muslim Brotherhood and
said the attempts to oust Mr. Morsi demonstrated that democracy itself could
not be trusted. “Isn’t this the democracy they wanted?” asked Mahmoud Taha, 40,
a trader. “Didn’t we do what they asked?”
"We don't believe
in democracy to begin with; it’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it
and we followed them and then this is what they do,” he said. “They’re
protesting against an elected democracy.”
His friend who gave his
name as Abu Hamza, 41, said: “This is a conspiracy against religion. They just
don’t want an Islamist group to rule.”
All said they were
bracing for a return to the repression Islamists endured under the former
government of President Hosni Mubarak. “Of course. What else are they going to
do?” said Ahmed Sami, 22, a salesman.
Their opponents were
vitriolic. “God willing, there will be no Muslim Brother left in the country
today,” said Mohamed Saleh, 52, a laborer armed with long shaft of timber
labeled “martyr in the making.”
“Let them get exiled or
find rocks to hide underneath like they used to do, or go to prisons, it
doesn’t matter,” he said. “No such a thing as ‘an Islamist party’ shall exist
after today.”
The confrontation on the
streets reflected an equally bitter clash at the most senior levels of state
and military power.
“We swear to God that we
will sacrifice even our blood for Egypt and its people, to defend them against
any terrorist, radical or fool,” the armed forces said on a military-affiliated
Facebook page early on Wednesday in a posting titled “Final hours.” It was
published shortly after Mr. Morsi delivered an angry, impassioned speech
pledging to uphold the legitimacy of the elections that brought him to power
last year.
The posting quoted Gen.
Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s top officer, as saying “it was more honorable for
us to die than to have the people of Egypt terrorized or threatened.”
Mr. Morsi insisted late
Tuesday that he was the legitimate leader of the country, hinted that any
effort to remove him by force could plunge the nation into chaos, and seemed to
disregard the record numbers of Egyptians who took to the streets demanding he
resign.
But before the
president’s speech, Egypt’s generals took control of the state’s flagship
newspaper, Al Ahram, and used it to describe on Wednesday’s front page their
plans to enforce a military ultimatum issued a day earlier: remove Mr. Morsi
from office if he failed to satisfy protesters’ demands.
The military’s vow to
intervene raised questions about whether Egypt’s revolution would fulfill its
promise to build a new democracy at the heart of the Arab world. The defiance
of Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood allies raised the specter of the bloody years
of the 1990s when fringe Islamist groups used violence in an effort to
overthrow the military government.
Under the banner
headline “removal or resignation,” Al Ahram reported that the generals would
“abolish the controversial Constitution” and form a committee of experts to
write a new charter, form an interim presidential council with three members
led by the chief of the constitutional court, and put a military leader in
charge of the executive branch as an interim prime minister.
Mr. Morsi refused to
back down. In an impassioned, if at times rambling, midnight address broadcast
on state television, he hinted that his removal would lead only to more
violence.
“The people empowered
me, the people chose me, through a free and fair election,” he said.
“Legitimacy is the only
way to protect our country and prevent bloodshed, to move to a new phase,” Mr.
Morsi said. “Legitimacy is the only thing that guarantees for all of us that
there will not be any fighting and conflict, that there will not be bloodshed.”
“If the price of
protecting legitimacy is my blood, I’m willing to pay it,” he said. “And it
would be a cheap price for the sake of protecting this country.”
Mr. Morsi was responding
to the threat by the military issued a day earlier that he had 48 hours to meet
the protesters’ demands. With the clock still ticking on that deadline — set
for about 3 p.m. Wednesday Egyptian time — it still remained possible that the
sides could reach some compromise or power-sharing arrangement. But the
vehemence of the president’s speech and the official reports of arrests made
the possibility seem remote.
Faced with the huge
protests against Mr. Morsi and the growing paralysis of Egyptian politics, a
more conservative Islamists party, Al Nour, also broke with the Muslim
Brotherhood to join the call for early presidential elections. But Al Nour and
other ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, have sought to preserve the newly
approved Constitution because they cherish its provisions regarding Islamic
law, and a military-backed constitutional panel may well revise them.
Brotherhood leaders have
sounded increasingly alienated and determined to fight. “Everybody abandoned
us, without exception,” Mohamed el-Beltagy, a senior Brotherhood leader,
declared in a statement posted Tuesday on the Internet. “The police looks like
it’s assigned to protect one group of protesters and not the other,” he wrote,
“and maybe instead of blaming the thugs they will shortly accuse our supporters
of assaulting themselves in addition to their alleged assault on the
opposition.”
“They want us to go away
to prevent bloodshed,” Ahmed Aref, a Brotherhood spokesman, declared to a crowd
of Morsi supporters not long after the president’s speech. “We tried that
before in the fifties, and people’s blood was shed in prisons, detention
centers and by the hands of dawn visitors for 20 years. Do you want this to
happen again?”
“No!” the crowd cheered.
David D. Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard reported
from Cairo and Alan Cowell from London. Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh
contributed reporting from Cairo.
