Hundreds of protesters were in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for a sixth day on Wednesday, demanding that Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi rescind a decree they say gives him dictatorial powers.
Five months into the Islamist leader’s term, and in scenes reminiscent of the popular uprising that unseated predecessor Hosni Mubarak last year, police fired teargas at stone-throwers following protests by tens of thousands on Tuesday against the declaration that expanded Mursi’s powers and put his decisions beyond legal challenge.
Protesters say they will stay in Tahrir until the decree is withdrawn, bringing fresh turmoil to a nation at the heart of the Arab Spring and delivering a new blow to an economy already on the ropes.
Senior judges have been negotiating with Mursi about how to restrict his new powers, while protesters want him to dissolve an Islamist-dominated assembly that is drawing up a new constitution and which Mursi protected from legal review.
Any deal to calm the street will likely need to address both issues. But opposition politicians said the list of demands could grow the longer the crisis goes on. Many protesters want the cabinet, which meets on Wednesday, to be sacked, too.
Mursi’s administration insists that his actions were aimed at breaking a political logjam to push Egypt more swiftly towards democracy, an assertion his opponents dismiss.
“The president wants to create a new dictatorship,” said 38-year-old Mohamed Sayyed Ahmed, who has not had a job for two years. He is one of many in the square who are as angry over economic hardship as they are about Mursi’s actions.
“We want the scrapping of the constitutional declaration and the constituent assembly, so a new one is created representing all the people and not just one section,” he said.
The West worries about turbulence in a nation that has a peace treaty with Israel and is now ruled by Islamists they long kept at arms length. The United States, a big donor to Egypt’s military, has called for “peaceful democratic dialogue”.
Two people have been killed in violence since the decree, while low-level clashes between protesters and police have gone on for days near Tahrir. Violence has flared in other cities.
WRANGLES
Trying to ease tensions with judges, Mursi assured Egypt’s highest judicial authority that elements of his decree giving his decisions immunity applied only to matters of “sovereign” importance, a compromise suggested by the judges in talks.
That should limit it to issues such as declaring war, but experts said there was much room for interpretation. The judges themselves are divided, and the broader judiciary has yet to back the compromise. Some have gone on strike over the decree.
The fate of the assembly drawing up the constitution has been at the centre of a wrangle between Islamists and their opponents for months. Many liberals, Christians and more moderate Muslims have walked out, saying their voices are not being heard in the body dominated by Islamists.
That has undermined the work of the assembly, which is tasked with shaping Egypt’s new democracy. Without a constitution in place, the president’s powers are not permanently defined and a new parliament cannot be elected.
For now, Mursi holds both executive and legislative powers. His decree says his decisions cannot be challenged until a new parliament is in place. An election is expected in early 2013.
“If Mursi doesn’t respond to the people, they will raise their demands to his removal,” said Bassem Kamel, a liberal and former member of the now dissolved parliament that was dominated by Mursi’s party, a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He said Tuesday’s protest showed that Egyptians “understood that the Brotherhood isn’t for democracy but uses it as a tool to reach power and then to get rid of it”.
Protecting his decisions and the constituent assembly from legal review was a swipe at the judiciary, still largely unreformed since Mubarak’s era. In a speech on Friday, Mursi praised the judiciary as a whole but referred to corrupt elements he aimed to weed out.
One presidential source said Mursi wanted to re-make the Supreme Constitutional Court, a body of top judges that earlier this year declared the Islamist-led parliament void, leading to its dissolution by the then ruling military.
Both Islamists and their opponents broadly agree that the judiciary needs reform, but Mursi’s rivals oppose his methods.
The courts have dealt a series of blows to Mursi and the Brotherhood. The first constituent assembly, also packed with Islamists, was dissolved. An attempt by Mursi in October to remove the unpopular general prosecutor was also blocked.
In his decree, Mursi gave himself the power to sack the prosecutor general and appoint a new one, which he duly did.
Mass anti-Morsi rally in Egyptian capital
One person has been killed and hundreds injured after after an estimated 200,000 people crammed into Tahrir Square in the Egyptian capital to protest against President Mohamed Morsi, who last week granted himself sweeping powers.
In the biggest protest against Egypt’s new president thus far, people demanded an end to Morsi’s new powers on Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday morning.
One person died of a heart attack after inhaling tear gas as protesters and riot police clashed in Cairo near Tahrir Square, the focal point of the uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago.
“The people want the regime to fall,” the crowds chanted.
In the Mediterranean city of Alexandria protesters attacked the local office of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, while In Mahalla, north of Cairo, anti-Morsi protesters held a large rally.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abel-Hamid, reporting from Cairo on Tuesday night, said there were no indications that Morsi was going to rescind the decree extending his powers.
“We are hearing reports of different influential Egyptians who are trying to come up with a solution, some sort of common ground that would be acceptable,” she said.
‘Emergency session’
A rival rally in Cairo by the Muslim Brotherhood in support of the president was called off to “avoid potential unrest” but that has done little to heal the division among supporters and foes of Morsi.
“The Muslim Brotherhood stole the revolution” read one banner in Tahrir.
Another said the president was “pushing the people to civil disobedience”.
“The Muslim Brotherhood are liars,” read another.
The demonstrations come a day after Morsi met the country’s senior judges in a bid to defuse the crisis over the decree, which has sparked deadly clashes and prompted judges and journalists to call for strike.
On Monday, Morsi met with the nation’s top judges and tried to win their acceptance of his decrees. But the move was dismissed by many in the opposition and the judiciary as providing no real concessions.
The senior judges who met Morsi were in an “emergency session” on Tuesday night, according to our correspondent, “trying to come up with one united stance”.
Presidential spokesperson Yasser Ali said Morsi told the judges that he acted within his rights as the nation’s sole source of legislation, assuring them that the decrees were temporary and did not in any way infringe on the judiciary.
He underlined repeatedly that the president had no plans to change or amend his decrees.
‘Assault on independence’
According to a presidential statement late on Monday, Morsi told the judges that his decree meant that any decisions he makes on “issues of sovereignty” are immune from judicial review.
The vaguely worded statement did not define those issues, but they were widely interpreted to cover declaration of war, imposition of martial law, breaking diplomatic relations with a foreign nation or dismissing a cabinet.
Morsi’s original edict, however, explicitly gives immunity to all his decisions and there was no sign it had been changed.
The statement on Monday did not affect the immunity that Morsi gave the constitutional assembly or the upper chamber of parliament, known as the Shura Council.
It also did not affect the edict that the president can take any measures he sees as necessary to stop threats to the revolution, stability or public institutions. Many see that edict as granting Morsi unlimited emergency powers.
Morsi, who has been in power since June, has said the decrees are necessary to protect the “revolution” and the nation’s transition to democratic rule.
The judiciary, the main target of Morsi’s edicts, called the decrees a power grab and an “assault” on the branch’s independence.
Source: Al Jazeera And Asharq-e.com