Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Egypt’s military tightens reins as Islamists claim election win
CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood declared early today that its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, won Egypt’s presidential election, a day after the ruling military issued an interim constitution that defines the new president’s authorities and gives itself the lion’s share of power.
With the parliament dissolved and martial law effectively in force, the generals granted themselves considerable authorities. They will be the country’s lawmakers, control the budget and will control who writes the permanent constitution that will define the country’s future.
But as it claimed victory over Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, in the election, the Brotherhood challenged the military’s power grab. The group warned
that it did not recognize the dissolution of the parliament or the military’s interim constitution — or its right to oversee the drafting of a new one.
At a pre-dawn news conference today declaring the win, officials from the fundamentalist group that was banned for decades and repeatedly subjected to crackdowns under Mubarak’s rule were ebullient and smiling, as supporters chanted, “Down with military rule.”
“Thank God who guided the people of Egypt to this right path, the path of freedom and democracy,” Morsi told the crowd at his campaign headquarters. He promised “to Egypt in all its factions, Muslims and Christians” to “be a president for all Egyptians ... a servant to them” and seek a “civil, democratic, constitutional and modern state.”
Final official results are due on Thursday, and the Shafiq campaign challenged the Brotherhood’s victory claim, saying it was “deceiving the people.” A campaign spokesman on the independent ONTV channel said counting was still going on with 19 of 27 provinces completed and Shafiq slightly ahead so far.
The Brotherhood’s declaration was based on results announced by election officials at individual counting centers, where each campaign has representatives who compile the numbers and make them public before the formal announcement.
The Brotherhood’s early, partial counts proved generally accurate in last month’s first-round vote.
The group said Morsi took 51.8 percent of the vote to Shafiq’s 48.1 percent out of 24.6 million votes cast, with 98 percent of the more than 13,000 poll centers counted.
Morsi “is the first civilian, popularly elected Egyptian president,” the group proclaimed on its website. There was no immediate comment from the Shafiq campaign.
Shafiq, who is a former air force commander, was seen as the generals’ favorite in the contest. His opponents feared his election would be a continuation of the military-backed, authoritarian police state that Mubarak ran for nearly 29 years.
Sunday night, the Brotherhood rejected last week’s order by the Supreme Constitutional Court dissolving the parliament, where it was the largest party, as a “coup against the entire democratic process.” It also rejected the military’s right to declare an interim constitution and vowed that an assembly created by the parliament last week before its dissolution will write the new charter.
However, the Brotherhood has no power to force recognition of the parliament-created constituent assembly. Lawmakers are literally locked out of the parliament, which is ringed by troops.
The race to pick the new leader was deeply polarizing. Critics of Shafiq, an admirer and longtime friend of Mubarak, see him as an extension of the old regime that millions sought to uproot when they staged an uprising that toppled the man who ruled Egypt for three decades.
Morsi’s opponents, in turn, fear that the Brotherhood will take over the nation and turn it into an Islamic state, curbing freedoms and treating minority Christians and women as second-class citizens.
While each has a core of strong supporters — each got about a quarter of the vote in the first-round voting among 13 candidates last month — others saw the choice as a bitter one. The prospect that the generals will still hold most power even after their nominal hand-over of authority to civilians by July 1 has deepened the gloom, leaving some feeling the vote was essentially meaningless.
“Things have not changed at all. It is as if the revolution never happened,” Ayat Maher, a 28year-old mother of three, said as she waited for her husband to vote in Cairo’s central Abdeen district. She said she voted for Morsi, but did not think there was much hope for him. “The same people are running the country. The same oppression and the same sense of enslavement. They still hold the keys to everything.”
The weekend election followed a series of developments last week that turned the transition period overseen by the generals on its head.
First, the military initiated virtual martial law in the country, giving military police and intelligence agents the right to arrest civilians for a host of suspected crimes, some as minor as obstructing traffic. Later came the court ruling dissolving the parliament and allowing Shafiq to stay in the race despite legislation barring Mubarak regime figures from running for office.
State TV said the ruling military council had issued the interim constitution, expected for the past several days. It gave no details, saying those would be revealed by the generals at a news conference today.
But according to a copy of the document obtained by The Associated Press, the generals would be the nation’s legislators and control the budget. They also will name the 100-member panel tasked with drafting a new constitution, thus ensuring the new charter would guarantee them a say in key policies like defense and national security as well as shield their vast economic empire from civilian scrutiny.
The president will be able to appoint a Cabinet and have the powers to approve or reject laws.
The Egyptian president can only declare war with the approval of the military, the declaration says. The rules stipulate that the next president will take the oath of office in front of the constitutional court in the absence of the parliament. The declaration gives the military, the president and the prime minister the right to object to constitutional articles that run counter to “national security interests.”
The generals, mostly in their 60s and 70s, owe their ranks to the patronage of Mubarak and are led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the ousted leader’s defense minister of 20 years. All along, activists from the pro-democracy youth groups that engineered the anti-Mubarak uprising questioned the generals’ will to hand over power, arguing that after 60 years of direct or behind-the-scenes domination, the military was unlikely to voluntarily relinquish its perks.
Earlier Sunday, the Brotherhood’s parliament speaker, Saad el-Katatni, met with the deputy head of the military council, Chief of Staff Gen. Sami Anan, and told him the group does not recognize the dissolution of the parliament, according to a Brotherhood statement that pointedly referred to el-Katatni by his title.
El-Katatni insisted the military could not issue an interim constitution and that the constituent assembly formed last week would meet in the “coming hours” to go ahead with its work in writing the permanent charter.
Trying to rally the public in the last hours of voting, the Brotherhood presented a Morsi victory as the last hope to prevent total military control.
“We got rid of one devil and got 19,” said Mohammed Kanouna, referring to Mubarak and the members of the military council as he voted for Morsi after night fell in Cairo’s Dar el-Salam slum. “We have to let them know there is a will of the people above their will.”
Security was tight in Cairo on Sunday, with heavier-thanusual army and police presence and army helicopters flying low over the sprawling city of some 18 million people.
Few voters displayed an air of celebration visible in previous post-Mubarak elections.
“It’s a farce. I crossed out the names of the two candidates on my ballot paper and wrote ‘the revolution continues’,” said architect Ahmed Saad el-Deen in Cairo’s Sayedah Zeinab district.
State TV reported Sunday night that election turnout was only 40 percent to 45 percent in some governorates. Authorities twice extended the voting by an additional hour, until 10 p.m., in hopes that more people would turn out after the day’s heat wave subsided.
Meanwhile, in an audio message released Sunday, al-Qaida’s leader urged Egypt to establish Islamic rule and to cancel its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
He said the goal was to stop Israel from turning Jerusalem into a Jewish city.
The fate of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive and difficult issues in Israel-Palestinian peace efforts. Israel claims the whole city, while Palestinians want the eastern part, including its holy sites, for the capital of the state they hope to create.
Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian, issued his 10th message to Egypt since taking over al-Qaida’s leadership after founder Osama bin Laden was killed in an American raid in Pakistan last year.
Al-Zawahri also said in the message that Egypt’s ruling military council takes orders from the United States and called on the Islamic movements to unite against what he described as “the secular American schemes that only seeks evil for Egypt.” Information for this article was contributed by Hamza Hendawi, Maggie Michael, Sarah El Deeb, Lee Keath and Maamoun Youssef of The Associated Press and by Tarek El-Tablawy, Ahmed A. Namatalla, Mariam Fam, Ola Galal and Zaid Sabah of Bloomberg News.