Army Ousts Egypt’s President NYTimes By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, BEN HUBBARD and ALAN COWELL Published: July 3, 2013
CAIRO — Egypt’s military on Wednesday ousted Mohamed Morsi, the nation’s first freely elected president, suspending the Constitution, installing an interim government and insisting it was responding to the millions of Egyptians who had opposed the Islamist agenda of Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The military intervention, which Mr. Morsi rejected, marked a tumultuous new phase in the politics of modern Egypt, where Mr. Morsi’s autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown in a 2011 revolution.
The intervention raised questions about whether that 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.
In an announcement read on state television, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian defense minister, said the military had taken the extraordinary steps not to seize power for itself but to ensure that “confidence and stability are secured for the people.”
Under a “road map” for a post-Morsi government, the general said, the Constitution would be suspended, the head of the Constitutional Court would become acting president and plans would be expedited for new elections while an interim government is in charge.
The general, who had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Mr. Morsi on Monday to respond to what he called widespread anger over his administration’s troubled one-year-old tenure, said the president’s defiant response in a televised address on Tuesday had failed “to meet the demands of the masses of the people.”
The general’s announcement came after the armed forces had deployed tanks and troops in Cairo and other cities where pro-Morsi crowds were massing, restricted Mr. Morsi’s movements and convened an emergency meeting of top civilian and religious leaders to devise the details of how the interim government and new elections would proceed.
Ahram Online, the government’s official English-language Web site, said the military had informed Mr. Morsi that he was no longer head of state. There was no word on Mr. Morsi’s whereabouts.
But in a statement e-mailed by his office, Mr. Morsi rejected the military’s intervention.
“Dr. Mohamed Morsi, the president of the Arab Republic of Egypt, emphasizes that the measures taken by the General Command of the armed forces represent a complete military coup which is categorically rejected by all the free of the country who have struggled so that Egypt turns into a civil democratic society,” his statement said.
“His Excellency the president, as the President of the Republic and the Chief Commander of the Armed Forces stresses that all citizens, civilians and in the military, leaders and soldiers, must commit to the constitution and the law and to not respond to this coup that sets Egypt back and to maintain peacefulness in their performance and to avoid being involved in the blood of the people of the homeland. Everybody must shoulder their responsibilities before God and then before the people and history. “
The military had signaled early in the day that it intended to depose Mr. Morsi. By 6:30 p.m. military forces began moving around Cairo. Tanks and troops headed for the presidential palace — although it was unclear whether Mr. Morsi was inside — while other soldiers ringed the nearby square where tens of thousands of the president’s supporters were rallying.
Many of the Islamists had armed themselves with makeshift clubs, shields made of potcovers or metal scraps and plastic hard hats, and there were small scuffles with the better-armed soldiers. Some soldiers fired their weapons in the air. But the military forces held back.
Soldiers also were seen erecting barbed-wire fences and barriers around a barracks were President Morsi may have been working.
Mr. Morsi’s senior foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, issued an open letter on his Web page lamenting what he called a military coup.
Security officials said the military’s intelligence service had banned any travel by President Morsi and senior Islamist aides, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, and his influential deputy, Khairat el-Shater.
Gehad el-Haddad, a Brotherhood spokesman, vowed that the group would not bend in its defiance of the military. “The only plan,” he said in a statement posted online, “is to stand in front of the tanks.”
The Obama administration, which has been watching the crisis with increased worry, reiterated that it had taken no sides and hoped for a peaceful outcome. “We do, of course, remain very concerned about what we’re seeing on the ground,” a State Department spokeswoman, Jennifer R. Psaki, told reporters a daily briefing. “And we do realize, of course, that is an extremely tense and fast-moving situation in Egypt.”
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 and more than 300 were injured in fighting near an Islamist rally in support of Mr. Morsi near Cairo University. State media reported that the dead included victims from both sides and that most died of gunshot wounds.
Even before the military deadline expired, there were signs of a new crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. Police officials said Wednesday that they had arrested six bodyguards protecting the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader.
The police initially reported that more than 40 Islamists were wounded by birdshot, and Islamist witnesses later said that the police had begun shooting at them as well. But after the initial attack, the Islamists began lashing out and beating people suspected of being 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 efforts 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 Mr. 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 his angry, impassioned speech pledging to uphold the legitimacy of the elections that brought him to power last year.
The military posting quoted General el-Sisi as saying “it was more honorable for us to die than to have the people of Egypt terrorized or threatened.”
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, and Mona El-Naggar and Rick Gladstone from New York.
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President Mursi was chosen by the people and especially the poor people of Egypt.
Egyptians want Islam to be their guidance, but the rich elite want the booze, hookers, and freedom to steal everything in sight and leave a few crumbs to the poor.
Wake up from your stupor and realize that your needs are not the poor people's needs.
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Good job Egyptian people and Egyptian military for ousting Egyptian President from the Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Morsi. M Morsi is an Islamist fanatic from the Moslem Bro who was trying to transform moderate Egypt into an Islamist country like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Morsi was a bad politician who doesn't know how to compromise with the other sector of Egyptian society. Morsi bankrupted Egypt there is no money to buy wheat for bread and gasoline for car. Morsi created conflict kept Tourist away from Egypt hurting the Egyptian economy economy.
Religious political party and Chief of State are outmoded and belong to the defunct Abbassid and Ottoman Empire . Politic should be base on reason, law and morality. The Muslim Bros and the Al Saud Salafist should be ban from election.
The Egyptian supreme judge is now the transitional president of Egypt and will organize new election.
On 24 June 2012, the election commission announced that Morsi won Egypt's presidential runoff against Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister under deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.[1] According to official results, Morsi took 51.7 percent of the vote while Shafik received 48.3 percent.[2] As he had promised during his campaign, Morsi resigned from his position as the head of the FJP after his victory was announced.[3]
After Morsi granted himself unlimited powers to "protect" the nation in late November 2012,[4][5] and the power to legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts, hundreds of thousands of protesters began demonstrating against him in the 2012 Egyptian protests.[6][7] On 8 December 2012, Morsi annulled his decree which had expanded his presidential authority and removed judicial review of his decrees, an Islamist official said, but added that the effects of that declaration would stand.[8] George Isaac of the Constitution Party said that Morsi’s declaration did not offer anything new, the National Salvation Front rejected it as an attempt to save face, and the 6 April Movement and Gamal Fahmi of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate said the new declaration failed to address the "fundamental" problem of the nature of the assembly that was tasked with drafting the constitution
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AP CAIRO, JULY 3, 2013 | UPDATED 23:43 IST Profile: Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood
Soon after the February 2011 fall of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood opened its first public headquarters in a luxury villa in Cairo, with its symbol, two golden swords under the Quran with the slogan "Prepare," displayed on giant sign on the front. It was a landmark moment: After decades as a banned organization, the Muslim fundamentalist group was declaring it was now legal, public and a powerhouse in the new Egypt. Symbolically, the headquarters was located on a plateau where many of the group's early, executed leaders were buried decades ago.
Elections made it the strongest party in parliament and elevated one of its own, Mohammed Morsi, as the country's first democratically chosen president. On Monday, that headquarters was overrun, burned and ransacked by protesters who demanded Morsi's ouster.
A look at the Brotherhood:
STRUCTURE
The Brotherhood was founded in 1928, advocating rule by Shariah, or Islamic law, and grew into Egypt's most organized, disciplined and widespread political group, with millions of members nationwide and branches across the Islamic world.
At the top is the "general guide," currently Mohammed Badie. The group's executive leadership body is the Guidance Council, made up of 16-19 members. The general guide and the guidance council are chosen by the Shoura Council, the group's version of a legislature made up of 75-90 members chosen by regional councils nationwide.
The man believed to be the most powerful member is Badie's deputy, Khairat el-Shater, a wealthy businessman who was initially the Brotherhood's candidate for president until he was disqualified because of a previous prison term. Morsi ran in his place.
The Brotherhood's members swear an oath to "listen and obey" the group's leadership and are organized into a tight hierarchy. At the base is the "usra" or "family," basically a study group small enough that its members can meet regularly, build personal bonds, and discuss the group's teachings on Islam. Each of the thousands of "families" nationwide reports up a pyramid of authority and gets instructions from above.
Families in the blood-relative sense of the word also play a major role. Brotherhood members tend to marry within the organization, socialize together in its network of mosques, clubs and schools, and raise their children in the group. Its members include a wide range of professionals - doctors, engineers, teachers and, importantly, very successful businessmen whose profits along with required dues help fund the group.
The group also runs extensive charities, providing free or cheap medical care, food and other services to the poor.
That structure helped the group survive and even spread during its years of arrests and crackdowns, particularly under Mubarak. It also made it a powerful force in elections, able to bring out many highly organized volunteers to campaign for Brotherhood candidates.
"THE BANNED ORGANIZATION"
In its early decades, the Brotherhood was involved in assassinations of Egypt's British colonial rulers and Egyptian officials. In 1954, President Gamal Abdel-Nasser banned the Brotherhood after blaming it for a failed assassination attempt against him. Leaders were executed and thousands of its members imprisoned, often subjected to torture.
In the next nearly 60 years, however, it grew, sometimes underground, sometimes semi-overt. It would test the limits of what the regimes would allow or would strike tacit deals with authorities, sometimes facing heavy crackdowns if it went too far.
Abdel-Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, initially gave it some room to maneuver, and the group formally renounced the use of violence in 1973. The Brotherhood and other Islamist movements established strong networks in the universities, although Sadat arrested many when student activists began to denounce his rule. They were later freed by Mubarak, who took power after Sadat's 1981 assassination.
Under Mubarak, the group made forays into parliamentary elections, although the regime's rigid control and vote-rigging ensured opposition victories were minimal. It was allowed to run candidates under recognized opposition political parties in the mid- 1980s. In the early 1990s, it performed strongly in union elections, winning control of the leadership of several. Mubarak lashed back, suspending union leaderships and arresting Brotherhood members.
In the 2000s, the group pushed back into politics, running candidates as independents in parliamentary elections. Moderates in the group argued that the Brotherhood accepted the principles of democracy, and that the only way Egypt could be truly democratic was if the group was legal and allowed to compete freely. Its biggest victory came in 2005, when its candidates won a fifth of parliament's seats, despite clashes when Mubarak's security forces tried to block opposition voters.
The stunning showing prompted a new backlash. Mubarak's regime accused the group of plotting violence and money-laundering, jailing some of its top leaders, including al-Shater. Mubarak also rolled back promised political reforms, passing constitutional amendments that solidified his party's grip on elections.
When mainly leftist and secular youth called for massive protests against Mubarak on Jan. 25, 2011, the Brotherhood's leadership declined to join. However, young members did, and after a few days the leadership backed the protests. Still, even during the height of the 18-day uprising, Brotherhood officials met with Mubarak's intelligence chief, raising accusations they were willing to strike a deal if the ban on the group was lifted.
Soon after Mubarak fell on Feb. 11, 2011, the military rulers who took power lifted the ban. It quickly formed its first political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, initially led by Morsi.
IDEOLOGY
The organization calls for rule by God's law in Egypt, although it is often vague. Members say the group tolerates a range of opinion, but all on the conservative end of the scale.
Two figures hold a powerful sway over the Brotherhood's thought: Hassan al-Banna and Sayed Outb.
Al-Banna, a former teacher, founded the Brotherhood to resist both Britain's colonial rule and secularism in Egyptian society. Deeply conservative, he was a strong organizer and emphasized the idea that preaching and activism will spread the word of Islam. He was assassinated in 1949.
Qutb, a secular writer-turned-Islamist, rose in the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. He advocated a hard-line view that Islam must transform society and that a society that did not follow its precepts was in the "Jahiliya," or pre-Islamic pagan age. His ideology had a strong influence on modern-day jihadist groups. He was executed by Abdel-Nasser's regime in 1966.
The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party's platform calls for Egypt to be a "civil, democratic state with an Islamic basis," saying it accepts the precepts of liberal democracy, such as free elections, the transfer of power and the will of elected bodies in establishing law. But the group, along with other Islamists, put clauses into the post-Mubarak constitution strengthening requirements that laws passed by parliament must not contradict Shariah.
At the same time, many in the top leadership are seen as religious hard-liners, and the ultraconservative Salafi ideology has made strong inroads into the group recently.
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White Nubian and Millions of poor Egyptians against the crooks, thieves, and the hookers.
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The reason the Egyptian military supported the Egyptian people and deposed The Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was because he declared holy war on Syria and called for a Syrian invasion. The Egyptian army didn't want Al Qaeda terrorist in Egypt.
Previous Egyptian President Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak should have learned from the Europen International bankers and create their own opposition just in case they lose power to be replace by their own other side of the coin. When Mubarak fell there was a vacuum occupied by the Muslim Bros. You need the Republican-Democrat, Labor party-Conservative party duality in Egypt to keep out the Islamist crazy.
The Muslim Brotherhood remain the most organized party in Egypt despite the deposal of its leader Mohammed Morsi as the country’s president, says Tarek Osman, author of “Egypt on the Brink.” He discusses the religious and political group’s chances in a future election.
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Smart and adorable Egyptian kid. He understand politic better then some adult. Yes Mursi was an Islamo fascist in the making. With time the Muslim Bro would have infiltrate the Egyptian army, police and spy agency and become strong enough to declare the Islamic Sharia state of Misraim/Egypt.
quote:Originally posted by mena7: Smart and adorable Egyptian kid. He understand politic better then some adult. Yes Mursi was an Islamo fascist in the making. With time the Muslim Bro would have infiltrate the Egyptian army, police and spy agency and become strong enough to declare the Islamic Sharia state of Misraim/Egypt.
Many Egyptians want sharia. That's why they voted for Morsi.
On the other hand many other Egyptian don't want sharia. The country is split.
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