Issandr El Amrani writes: Egypt is in the grip of its worst political crisis since President Hosni Mubarak was deposed two years ago, and shifts in the three-way balance of power between Islamists, secularists and the military make the outcome more difficult to predict. The on-going crisis has dramatically increased the likelihood of protracted political and social instability. Violent street clashes between supporters and opponents of the six-month-old administration of President Muhammad Morsi have claimed eight lives and left hundreds wounded. The sacking of a number of offices of the Muslim Brotherhood, allegations of organized attacks against opposition protesters, as well as the uncompromising and increasingly belligerent rhetoric from both sides suggests the worst is yet to come. Absent a muscular effort by political leaders to contain the crisis, Egypt could be heading into a new season of political violence.

Some of the political leaders on both sides who initially staked out maximalist positions have begun to show more caution, but may lack the political authority or the political will to calm the rising anger of their supporters. In the meantime, the military is sending ambiguous messages and appears to want to remain above the fray, even as each side attempts to drag it back in — and in doing so is willing to give it concessions almost all factions opposed only a year ago.

The crisis is driven by a deeper conflict over the identity and nature of the post-Mubarak Egyptian state, and more immediately over the distribution of power within it, but its immediate focus has been the process by which a new constitution will be adopted. The target of much of the outrage of the past two weeks has been President Morsi’s assumption, in his November 22 decree, of absolute executive power until such time as a new constitution has been enacted. It was compounded by his decision to rush the approval of a draft constitution, in a marathon December 1 session by an Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly. On December 8, Morsi rescinded elements of his decree that had awarded him unfettered executive power and allowed him to ignore judicial decisions, and explained that in the event that the “no” vote prevails in the December 15 referendum on the draft constitution, a new Constituent Assembly would be chosen in direct elections. But the new announcement failed to repair the deep distrust created by Morsi’s actions. And the president refused to heed the opposition’s demand for a postponement of the referendum, which is scheduled for Saturday —leaving little opportunity to contain the immediate phase of the crisis. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Morsi captured, detained and beat dozens of his political opponents last week, holding them for hours with their hands bound on the pavement outside the presidential palace while pressuring them to confess that they had accepted money to use violence in protests against him.

“It was torment for us,” said Yehia Negm, 42, a former diplomat with a badly bruised face and rope marks on his wrists. He said he was among a group of about 50, including four minors, who were held on the pavement overnight. In front of cameras, “they accused me of being a traitor, or conspiring against the country, of being paid to carry weapons and set fires,” he said in an interview. “I thought I would die.”

The abuses, during a night of street fighting between Islamists and their opponents, have become clear through an accumulation of video and victim testimonies that are now hurting the credibility of Mr. Morsi and his allies as they push forward to this weekend’s referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution.

To critics of Islamists, the episode on Wednesday recalled the tactics of the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, who often saw a conspiracy of “hidden hands” behind his domestic opposition and deployed plainclothes thugs acting outside the law to punish those who challenged him. The difference is that the current enforcers are driven by the self-righteousness of their religious ideology, rather than money.

It is impossible to know how much Mr. Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, knew about the Islamists’ vigilante justice. But human rights advocates say the detentions raised troubling questions about statements made by the president during his nationally televised address on Thursday. In it, Mr. Morsi appears to have cited confessions obtained by his Islamist supporters, the advocates said, when he promised that confessions under interrogation would show that protesters outside his palace acknowledged ties to his political opposition and had taken money to commit violence.

Khaled el-Qazzaz, a spokesman for Mr. Morsi, said Monday that he had ordered an investigation into the reported abuses and asked the prosecutor to bring charges against any involved. He said that Mr. Morsi was referring only to confessions obtained by the police, not by his supporters.

But human rights lawyers involved in the cases of the roughly 130 people who ended up in police custody Wednesday night, all or most of them delivered by the Islamists, say the police obtained no confessions. “His statement was completely bogus,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher on policing at Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights, whose lawyers were on hand about an hour after the speech when prosecutors released all the detainees without charges. “There were no confessions; they were all just simply beaten up,” he said. “There was no case at all, and they were released the next day.”

Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood said the group opposed such vigilante justice and did not organize the detentions. And in at least one case one victim said a senior figure of the group rescued her from captivity. But the officials also acknowledged that some of their senior leadership was on the scene at the time. They said some of their members took part in the detentions, along with more hard-line Islamists. [Continue reading…]

Al Monitor: Al-Masry Al-Youm spent three hours in total in the torture chambers established by the Muslim Brotherhood at the gates of the Ittihadiya Palace in the suburb of Heliopolis. The central torture chamber, which is located in front of the gate facing the Omar Ibn Abdel Aziz Mosque on al-Merghany Street, is secured with a cordon and iron barriers, where the Central Security Forces (CSF) prevent the access of any persons without the authorization of the Brotherhood.

We entered the chamber with a great difficulty, after a fellow journalist from the Misr 25 TV channel facilitated. The channel is owned by the Brotherhood. There are brigades and police officers in military uniforms, as well as others in civilian clothes from al-Nozha police station, who oversee the beatings, whippings and torture. Fifteen others from the group, distinguished by their strong bodies, are supervised by three bearded and well-dressed men who decide who will be in the chamber and who may leave, even if the person is a member of the Brotherhood.

The torture process starts once a demonstrator who opposes President Mohammed Morsi is arrested in the clashes or is suspected after the clashes end, and the CSF separate Morsi’s supporters from his opponents. Then, the group members trade off punching, kicking and beating him with a stick on the face and all over his body. They tear off his clothes and take him to the nearest secondary torture chamber, from which CSF personnel, members of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) are absent.

It is hard to determine how many locations there are, given that the torture chambers are established as near as possible to where a person is arrested. Before the interrogation process starts, they search him, seize his funds, cellphones or ID, all the while punching and slapping his face in order to get him to confess to being a thug and working for money. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Masked gunmen attacked opposition protesters camped out at Cairo’s Tahrir Square early on Tuesday, firing birdshot at them and wounding nine people, security officials said.

The attack stoked tensions just hours ahead of rival mass rallies in the Egyptian capital by supporters and opponents of the country’s Islamist president over a disputed draft constitution. The charter has vastly polarized the nation and triggered some of the worst violence since Mohammed Morsi took office in June as Egypt’s first freely elected president.

It was unclear who was behind the pre-dawn attack on the protesters who have been staging a sit-in at Tahrir for nearly three weeks, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Issandr el-Amrani and Anthony Dworkin speaking at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London today, introduced by Daniel Levy.

Ellis Goldberg writes: President Mohamed Morsi and his advisors cannot have expected that his November 22 constitutional declaration would throw Egypt into a renewed state of turmoil. That it has speaks volumes to the immense changes that have occurred in the country during the past two years. Morsi’s support for President Barack Obama’s truce initiative during the fighting in Gaza clearly reassured the U.S. president that under a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) president Egypt would keep the peace with Israel. Because this has been the dominant concern within the U.S. foreign policy elite about the Egyptian revolution, Morsi had good reason to believe that the United States and the Egyptian Armed Forces would not object to his domestic decisions.

That Morsi’s move has proven, in a deeply divided country, to have been a serious error of judgment is worth reflection. Early responses, especially in the United States, have either been self-satisfied sighs of recognition that the MB have finally revealed their true nature or, alternatively, sharp criticism of a westernized liberal minority that refused to accept gracefully the verdict of democracy mandating a stronger role for Islam, the MB, and Morsi himself.

Divisions among U.S. commentators mirror divisions in Egypt. Many Morsi supporters argue that the new constitution is the most democratic one ever produced on Egyptian soil. It guarantees the right to start parties and open newspapers without prior approval; it bans torture and espouses the dignity of the prisoner. Opponents argue, in contrast, that it is an extremely bad constitution. It gives unelected religious figures the right of prior review of legislation and it allows the Armed Forces to function independently.

Let us, if only for argument, grant some truth in each of these pictures. The question still is why has there been such a vast outrush of anger at Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate he was, and why has it been sustained now for more than a week and a half. There have been demonstrations not only in Cairo and Alexandria but in most of the large provincial cities, with protesters numbering in the tens of thousands. Morsi rescinded his original constitutional decree on Saturday, issuing a new one, which addressed some issues of contention. Regardless, protests have raged, with calls for fresh demonstrations on Tuesday.

For the moment we can only go on impressions, however the political divisions appear, for the first time, to be linked to social conflict. Reports from the textile capital, Mahallah, in the middle of the Egyptian Delta, are that protesters took over the city hall and declared themselves independent of what they called “the Muslim Brothers government.” Leaders of the insurgent trade union movements there have long evinced opposition to the MB, which has sought to gain control of their movement. In 1981 Assiut was the scene of an uprising designed to create an Islamic emirate by supporters of Abbud al-Zumr, one of the organizers of the assassination of Anwar Sadat and today a prominent Salafi politician. On December 6, thousands of people there marched to protest against Morsi behind a banner calling for Muslim-Christian unity. In Port Said, as elsewhere, already a week ago there were pitched battles between youth opposed to the MB and their members.

So a useful question is why, not quite two years after massive and sustained demonstrations led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, are hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Egyptians out on the streets again? If the opposition politicians are shallow and self-interested, why is anyone heeding their calls? And yet why, if the Brotherhood represents the overwhelming majority of Egyptians — whether democratic or authoritarian in their inner beings — are they faced with such massive anger? Observers of attacks on their offices and members agree that — regrettable as such attacks may be — they are largely spontaneous. The police, it is true, often do not protect the MB but they seem long since to have decided to vanish whenever violence threatens anywhere.

The answer no longer lies in a draft constitution that very few of the demonstrators, on either side, are likely to have read. Egyptians along with the citizens of a great many other places have learned what is on paper is only a part of the constitution. The other, most important, part lies in the institutions that give the constitutional language presence in everyday life. To some degree this means the habits and choices of low level officials and to some degree it means the courts. And the simple and sad reality for the Brotherhood is that a great many Egyptians distrust, dislike, or fear them and worry that, having come to control the legislature and central executive, they plan to take over the courts as well as staff many of the lower levels of the government.

President Morsi has been unable to allay this distrust, fear, and dislike and over the last week he and his allies have, through words and actions, intensified it. This may be unfair and its results may be tragic, but it remains a profoundly political issue with which he and any Egyptian politicians who aspire to lead the country will ultimately have to deal. [Continue reading…]

Ahram Online: Founder of the influential April 6 movement, Ahmed Maher, charges that President Mohamed Morsi is attempting to push an “illegitimate” constitution through at any price – and as soon as possible.

Maher posted on his official Facebook page late Sunday that although the executive branch uses the excuse that they are complying with the March 2011 constitutional declaration stipulations by insisting the referendum be held on 15 December, he argues that that declaration has already been breached several times.

Many opposition forces and activists have denounced the draft constitution as “illegitimate,” having been drawn up by a largely controversial Islamist constituent assembly, which saw fifteen – the majority of which were non-Islamist – of its 100 members withdraw.

Human Rights Watch: The law that President Mohamed Morsy of Egypt issued on December 9, 2012, grants the military authority to arrest civilians and refer them to military courts until results are announced in the scheduled December 15 constitutional referendum. Morsy should immediately amend the law to prohibit trials of civilians before military courts and require the military to promptly hand over any detained civilians to civilian prosecutors.

Law No. 107 of 2012, the 11th law Morsy has issued since taking over legislative authority from the military in August, grants law enforcement powers to the armed forces without any protections against the referral of civilians for military trials. Past Human Rights Watch research, primarily during military rule, found that military involvement in law enforcement was accompanied by serious abuses including excessive use of force, torture, and sexual assault.

“Any deployment of the Egyptian military to help maintain security needs to be accompanied by guarantees to respect basic rights,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “President Morsy should be ending, not expanding, military trials of civilians.”

Al-Masry Al-Youm: Opposition parties and movements are preparing for the constitutional referendum on 15 December, with the April 6 Youth Movement mobilizing voters to reject the draft while the National Salvation Front will decide Tuesday if it would call for a boycott or a “no” vote.

April 6 launched the “Your Constitution Does Not Represent Us” campaign on Monday to educate citizens on the failures of the draft constitution and the dangers of rushing into a national referendum.

The movement urged citizens to vote against the new constitution on 15 December.

Movement member Engy Hamdy said in a statement that the campaign aims to mobilize the largest possible number of voters against the constitution, because “it contravenes the revolution’s demands for pluralism, power transition and social justice.”

“Ours is a counter-campaign to that of the Islamists,” she added. “They use religious slogans to manipulate the feelings of the masses.”

“We want a constitution that represents all Egyptians,” Hamdy continued.

AFP reports: President Mohamed Morsi has ordered Egypt’s army from Monday to take on police powers — including the right to arrest civilians — in the run-up to a vote on a constitution that has triggered bloodshed.

The decree takes effect on the eve of mass rival protests on the referendum that is to be staged on Saturday, and follows street clashes that have left seven people dead and hundreds injured.

It orders the military to fully cooperate with police “to preserve security and protect vital state institutions for a temporary period, up to the announcement of the results from the referendum,” according to a copy of the decree obtained by AFP.

Army officers “all have powers of legal arrest,” it says.

The military, which ruled Egypt between former president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011 to Morsi’s election in June 2012, has sought to remain neutral in the political crisis.

But it has warned it “will not allow” the situation to deteriorate, and urged both sides to dialogue.

Army tanks and troops have since Thursday deployed around Morsi’s presidential palace. But they have not confronted thousands of protesters who have gathered there every night.

The opposition, made up of secular, liberal, leftwing and Christian groups, has said it will escalate its protests to scupper the referendum.

It views the new constitution, largely drawn up by Morsi’s Islamist allies, as undermining human rights, the rights of women, religious minorities, and curtailing the independence of the judiciary.

Nathan Brown writes: The final draft of Egypt’s proposed new constitution, completed in late November, was produced in such a flurry of political maneuvering, threats, and shrill rhetoric that commentators and citizens alike are still trying to understand its implications. From a liberal democratic perspective, there is much to like in the document, especially compared with the one it is replacing. For example, the drafters not only specified a long list of freedoms, as their predecessors did, but also made the wording more difficult for officials to wiggle around. But the document includes just as much that causes concern. It postpones answering the question of civilian oversight of the military until the next constitution is written, years from now. And there are gaping holes and ambiguities that only politics can fill in.

And that is the critical point so often missed: political context always shapes the meaning of constitutional texts. The Arab world’s experience with apparently democratic constitutional provisions confirms the rule. Democracy has failed in the Arab world not because governments have routinely violated their countries’ highest laws (although they have occasionally cheated) but, rather, because their constitutions’ democratic promises have generally been as vague as possible and were left to parliaments to flesh out through regular statutes. European countries first developed that system to ensure that popularly elected bodies, not kings, would define basic rights. When Arab regimes copied the practice — for example, many of them proclaimed freedom of the press but explained that the freedom would be “defined by law” — the effect was that rulers could pledge all kinds of rights and let rubber-stamp parliaments rob them of all meaning.

It is thus important to view the new Egyptian constitution as a political document — a product of specific circumstances that will not merely shape a future set of circumstances but also function within them. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The tumultuous road to a stable democratic system of government in Egypt is passing through one of its most decisive stages these days, with most of the main political actors revealing their amateurism more than anything else. This is a hard but necessary learning process, as the main protagonists refuse to accept that hard-line and absolutist positions are inappropriate during this delicate transition.

For all the heartening talk about their shared commitment to democratic pluralism, the dominant Muslim Brotherhood and most of the other leading Egyptian political groups are demonstrating the problems arising from a fast transition from autocracy to democracy, without a transition period in which people and organizations learn how to function in a democratic system. Personality has much to do with this.

The Muslim Brotherhood leaders who have spent much of the last 25 years in and out of jail were catapulted into the presidency without any previous experience in managing national politics. President Mohammad Mursi is revealing his inability to act as the president of all Egyptians and the shepherd of a historic constitutional transition in which basic governance institutions are being built. Unlike Nelson Mandela who spent decades in jail and then showed his compassion, flexibility and statesmanship when he became president of South Africa, Mursi seems focused on pushing through his agenda (presumably also the Brotherhood’s) and is unable at this stage to act as the magnanimous leader of all Egyptians.

He has made five main mistakes so far: unilaterally issuing the constitutional decree in November that shielded him from all judicial oversight; being two days late in addressing the nation after mass demonstrations turned into clashes around his presidential compound; refusing to make any meaningful gestures to the significant opposition that has been expressed to his constitutional moves; ramming through the referendum on the draft constitution in two weeks; and not working with his colleagues to tone down the response of Muslim Brotherhood supporters to the anti-Mursi demonstrations. [Continue reading…]

Egypt’s Daily News reports: President Mohamed Morsy used his legislative powers to pass a law on Sunday, enacting stricter penalties against street vendors who violate the law.

Under the new law, numbered 105/2012, vendors can now be sentenced to six months imprisonment, be fined up to EGP 5,000 and have their goods confiscated.

The new measures in prison time and fines represent a significant jump from what had been implemented in the past.

Prior laws stipulate that vendors sell their goods in designated areas throughout Cairo. However, many street vendors operate unlicensed, often without repercussions.

Egypt’s informal economy stands as a valuable source of income to many citizens and accounts for anywhere between 20 and 50 per cent of the total economy.

(For those in the U.S. who have forgotten his name, Mohamed Bouazizi was the Tunisian street vendor whose death sparked the Arab Spring.)

The Guardian reports: The Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, has scrapped a decree that had generated widespread unrest by awarding him near-absolute powers. But he insisted a referendum on a new constitution would go ahead as planned this week.

The announcement, which is unlikely to placate Morsi’s opponents, came after Egypt’s military warned that failure to resolve a crisis over the drafting of the constitution would result in “disastrous consequences” that could drag the country into a “dark tunnel”.

Selim al-Awa, an official who attended a “national dialogue meeting” called by Morsi at the presidential palace in Cairo but boycotted by his opponents, said the Islamist-dominated discussion recommended removing articles that granted the president powers to declare emergency laws and shield him from judicial oversight.

Earlier Egypt’s military had issued a statement saying: “Dialogue is the best and only way to reach consensus. The opposite of that will bring us to a dark tunnel that will result in catastrophe and that is something we will not allow.” Failing to reach a consensus was “in the interest of neither side. The nation as a whole will pay the price,” it added.

State radio and television interrupted programmes to read the military statement. A Muslim Brotherhood official welcomed the army’s “balanced” line. Former Arab League chief Amr Moussa, now an opposition leader, said that the army was reacting to an “enormously dangerous” crisis.

The statement came ahead of a new law to be issued by Morsi that will grant the armed forces the power to arrest civilians, alongside police forces, until a constitution is passed. The law makes the army responsible for the protection of state premises and maintaining security, and allows it the use of force if necessary to carry out these duties.

Steven Cook writes: Morsi’s decisions last month to grant himself powers above any court, retry the deposed leader Hosni Mubarak, and rush the passing of a new Brotherhood-driven draft constitution — and his party’s unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of millions of Egyptians — result from a worldview that should be familiar to Egyptians.

The Brothers, like the Free Officers who came to power in 1952 and produced Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Mubarak, are what the Yale anthropologist James Scott calls “high modernists.” High modernism, which places a premium on scientific knowledge and elites with special skills, is inherently authoritarian. It might seem a strange designation for the Brotherhood, since most observers think of it as a religious movement. But in reality, the group has used religion to advance a political agenda. To suggest that the organization’s leaders are dilettantes when it comes to Islam would be an overstatement, but the majority of them are first and foremost doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and engineers. They think of themselves as a vanguard that is uniquely qualified to rebuild Egypt and realize its seemingly endless quest for modernization. Moreover, they believe that the people entrusted them with the responsibility to do so as a result of free and fair elections in late 2011 and 2012.

With the Brotherhood in control of the now-dissolved People’s Assembly, Shura Council, Constituent Assembly, and the presidency, this vanguard thought it could choose a path for Egypt within the councils of its own organization. There was no need for consensus or negotiation, hence Morsi’s August 12 decision to decapitate the national security establishment and his subsequent efforts to place sympathizers in influential positions within the state-controlled media. In a television interview broadcast on November 29, he even called his recent decree an effort to “fulfill the demands of the public and the revolution.” There is, he implied, no reason to question his decisions, which were in the best interest of Egypt.

Morsi’s miscalculation — which both he and the Brotherhood later compounded — was to think that everyone understood the results of the Egyptian elections the way the Brothers did. In other words, that they gave him and his party a mandate to rule with little regard for those who might disagree. The Brotherhood’s discrediting of the tens of thousands who turned out in protest as felool (remnants of the old regime) and thugs was not only positively Mubarak-esque but also reinforced Morsi’s “Brothers know best” approach to Egypt’s political problems. It is easy to dismiss the opposition’s charge that Morsi is the “new Mubarak” as hyperbole from a group of people who have become well-versed in manufacturing outrage. Still, they have a point. Both men share the high-modernist worldview, which did not bode well for political reform under the previous regime and does not augur well for democracy in Egypt’s future.

Khalil al-Anani writes: To understand the underlying factors behind Morsi’s latest decree, one needs to discern his personality and worldview.

Indeed, the story of Morsi in power resembles his journey within the Brotherhood. He has strived to portray himself as a “self-disciplined” leader with serious character. He is not a “smiling” politician. It was part of his political persona.

Politically speaking, Morsi always acted like a “man-on-a-mission.” He was one of the average members in the Brotherhood, but became a self-made success, and, as we know, is now president of Egypt.

A hard worker and devotee to the conservative wing that has controlled the Brotherhood since the end of 1990s, Morsi in a few years (2000-04) proved himself as a trustful and loyal cadre to the Brotherhood leadership.

He was always ready to deliver and do the jobs that others might resist. Surprisingly, yet understandably, he became the Head of the political division of the Brotherhood at the expense of the shrewd and politicized figure, Essam al-Eryan, who was alienated and marginalized.

Morsi was also responsible for accommodating and containing discontent among the Brotherhood youth that surfaced in 2007 and ’08.

From 2005 to 2010, Morsi exemplified the most resilient and resistant character of the Brotherhood in the face of the Mubarak regime, which gave him added power and confidence.

After the revolution, Morsi’s ikhwani career became more visible. He was selected to be the head of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).

Morsi, and not the Supreme Guide, represented the Brotherhood in negotiations with Omar Suliman only a few days before the downfall of Mubarak.

Ironically, the promotion and emergence of Morsi reflected his organizational commitment and acquiescence to the Brotherhood leadership and objectives.

After becoming president, Morsi maintained his style as a “man-on-a-mission.” For many, he is acting as the Brotherhood’s man in the presidency, rather than the president for all Egyptians.