Morsi’s power decree incites anger in Egypt

Protecting revolution, Islamist leader says

Egyptian protesters mass Friday in Tahrir Square in Cairo, a day after President Mohammed Morsi granted himself sweeping new powers that raise fears of a dictatorship.
Egyptian protesters mass Friday in Tahrir Square in Cairo, a day after President Mohammed Morsi granted himself sweeping new powers that raise fears of a dictatorship.

— Opponents of President Mohammed Morsi were reported to have set fire to his party’s offices in several Egyptian cities Friday in a spasm of protest and clashes after he granted himself broad powers above any court, declaring himself the guardian of Egypt’s revolution, and used his new authority to order the retrial of Hosni Mubarak.

In the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party clashed with followers of Morsi, an Islamist, who won Western and regional plaudits only days ago for brokering a cease-fire to halt eight days of lethal exchanges between Israeli forces and militants in the Gaza Strip.

At least 100 people were wounded in violence that broke out in several places, according to security officials.

Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, portrayed his decree assuming the new powers as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and to protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. It was necessary, he said, to overcome gridlock and competing interests. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman.

“We are, God willing, moving forward, and no one stands in our way,” Reuters quoted Morsi as saying Friday in a suburban Cairo mosque after Friday prayer.

“I fulfill my duties to please God and the nation, and I take decisions after consulting with everyone,” he said. “Victory does not come without a clear plan, and this is what I have.”

He spoke as state television reported that his party’s offices in the Suez Canal cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia had been burned as his political foes rampaged. Thousands of people protesting Morsi’s power grab gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo — the focal point of protests that swept away Mubarak a year ago.

Security forces pumped volleys of tear gas at thousands of pro-democracy protesters who clashed with riot police on streets several blocks from Tahrir Square and in front of the nearby Parliament building. Young protesters set fire to tree branches to counter the gas, and a residential building and a police vehicle also were burned.

Elsewhere in the capital, the president’s supporters massed in even larger numbers outside the presidential palace, where Morsi said his aim was “to achieve political, social and economic stability.”

“I am for all Egyptians. I will not be biased against any son of Egypt,” he said on a stage outside the presidential palace, adding that he was working for social and economic stability, Reuters reported. “Opposition in Egypt does not worry me, but it has to be real and strong.”

Sounding defensive at times and employing some of the language favored by his autocratic predecessor, Morsi justified his power grab as necessary to move Egypt’s revolution forward.

“The people wanted me to be the guardian of these steps in this phase,” he said, reminding his audience that he was freely elected after a contest “that the whole world has witnessed.”

“I don’t like, and don’t want — and there is no need — to use exceptional measures,” he said. “But those who are trying to gnaw the bones of the nation must be held accountable.”

Outside a mosque in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, anti-Morsi crowds threw stones and firecrackers on Brotherhood backers, who shielded themselves with prayer rugs; at least 15 were injured. The protesters then stormed a nearby Brotherhood office.

In the southern city of Assiut, ultraconservative Islamists and former jihadists outnumbered liberals and leftists in rival demonstrations. The two sides exchanged insults and scuffled briefly.

Morsi’s new powers prompted one prominent adversary, Mohamed El-Baradei, to say on Twitter: “Morsi today usurped all state powers & appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.”

“An absolute presidential tyranny,” Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of the dissolved Parliament and prominent political scientist, wrote in an online commentary. “Egypt is facing a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition.”

Morsi issued the decree Thursday at a high point in his 5-month-old presidency, when he was basking in praise from the White House and around the world for his central role in negotiating a cease-fire that the previous night had stopped the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

But his political opponents immediately called for demonstrations Friday to protest his new powers.

“Passing a revolutionary demand within a package of autocratic decisions is a setback for the revolution,” Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a more liberal former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a former presidential candidate, wrote online.

And the chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court indicated that it did not accept the decree.

In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland released a statement saying, “The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns for many Egyptians and the international community,” and noting that “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.” The statement called for resolution “through democratic dialogue.”

Morsi’s advisers portrayed the decree as an effort to cut through the deadlock that has stalled Egypt’s convoluted political transition more than 20 months after Mubarak’s ouster. Morsi’s more political opponents and the holdover judicial system, they argued, were sabotaging the transition to thwart the Islamist majority.

The liberal and secular opposition has repeatedly threatened to boycott the Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly. (It is led by Morsi’s allies in the Freedom and Justice Party. Members were picked by the Parliament, where Islamists won a nearly threequarters majority.) And as the assembly nears a deadline set under an earlier interim transition plan, most secular members and the representatives of the Coptic Church have walked out, costing it up to a quarter of its 100 members and much of its legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Constitutional Court — which Mubarak had tried to stack with loyalists and where a few judges openly fear Islamists — is poised to issue a decision that could dissolve the current assembly and require a new one. Another court had already dissolved an earlier assembly and, on the eve of Morsi’s election in June, the Constitutional Court dissolved the Parliament, citing technical issues of eligibility.

After the dissolution of the Parliament, leaders of the council of generals who had ruled since Mubarak’s ouster seized all legislative power and control of the budget.

But in August, Morsi won the backing of many other generals and officers for a decree that returned the army to its barracks and left him in sole control of the government, with executive and legislative authority.

Thursday’s decree frees Morsi, his decrees and the constitutional assembly from judicial oversight as well.

In a television interview, Morsi’s spokesman, Yasser Ali, stressed that the expanded powers would last only until the ratification of a new constitution in a few months, calling the decree “an attempt to end the transitional period as soon as possible.”

On the website of the state newspaper Al Ahram, a prominent jurist, Salah Eissa, urged citizens “to take to the street and die, because Egypt is lost,” adding, “immunizing the decisions of the president with a constitutional declaration is a forgery and a fraud.”

Nathan Brown, a scholar of the Egyptian legal system at George Washington University, summed up the overall message: “I, Morsi, am all powerful. And in my first act as being all powerful, I declare myself more powerful still. But don’t worry — it’s just for a little while.”

Information for this article was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim, Alan Cowell and Mayy El Sheikh of The New York Times and by Maggie Michael and Aya Batrawy of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/24/2012

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