Egypt Islamist candidate vows break with old ways

HAMZA HENDAWI

Asso­ci­ated Press

CAIRO — The Mus­lim Brotherhood’s can­di­date for the Egypt­ian pres­i­den­tial runoff promised Tues­day he would break sharply with the ways of ousted auto­crat Hosni Mubarak, a day after angry pro­test­ers burned down the head­quar­ters of his chal­lenger who served as prime min­is­ter in the old regime.

Islamist Mohammed Morsi appeared to be try­ing to cash in on pub­lic resent­ment of his rival Ahmed Shafiq’s ties to Mubarak at a news con­fer­ence where he offered some­thing for every­one, from the mil­i­tary to the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, women and minor­ity Chris­tians. Morsi has been scram­bling to broaden his base of sup­port ahead of the June 16–17 runoff.

“When I am pres­i­dent, the pres­i­dency will not be reduced to one per­son,” he said. “The age of super­man has failed and gone. The world is no longer like that. I am not like that.”

Morsi’s com­ments came hours after some 400 pro­test­ers chant­ing slo­gans against Shafiq stormed and van­dal­ized his Cairo cam­paign head­quar­ters. The pro­test­ers set the build­ing ablaze after mak­ing away with com­put­ers, tele­vi­sion sets and air conditioners.

Shafiq was the last prime min­is­ter appointed by Mubarak before he stepped down in Feb­ru­ary 2011 in the face of a pop­u­lar upris­ing against his auto­cratic rule. The attack on Shafiq’s head­quar­ters was rem­i­nis­cent of some of the most dra­matic scenes of the upris­ing when pro­test­ers burned down the rul­ing party headquarters.

In Cairo’s Tahrir square, birth­place of the upris­ing, pro­test­ers chanted slo­gans against both Morsi and Shafiq. Sim­i­lar protests took place in the Mediter­ranean port city of Alexan­dria and else­where in north­ern Egypt.

Morsi claimed the top spot in the first round of land­mark elec­tions last week, putting him in the runoff against Shafiq who, like his long­time friend and men­tor Mubarak, is a for­mer air force commander.

The attack on Shafiq’s head­quar­ters under­lined the depth of resent­ment felt by many toward Shafiq, viewed by crit­ics as an exten­sion of the Mubarak regime. And Morsi moved quickly to use it for polit­i­cal gain, mak­ing a host of gen­er­ous promises he said he would keep if elected.

He also used his tele­vised news con­fer­ence to fend off against charges that the group was seek­ing to gar­ner more power after win­ning just under half of all seats in par­lia­ment and revers­ing an ear­lier deci­sion not to field a pres­i­den­tial candidate.

He promised to place Chris­tians in top gov­ern­ment jobs and said he would not impose an Islamic dress code in pub­lic for women.

“Our Chris­t­ian broth­ers, they are part­ners in the nation. They will have full rights that are equal to those enjoyed by Mus­lims,” Morsi said. “They will be rep­re­sented as advis­ers in the pres­i­den­tial insti­tu­tion, and maybe a vice pres­i­dent if possible.”

Women, he said, will have full rights in jobs and education.

“Women have a right to freely choose the attire that suits them,” he said.

But his over­tures may be a hard sell for some

“It is his right to make pro­pa­ganda for him­self just as I have the right to lis­ten to his words with one ear and let them out from the next,” said Gir­gis Atef, a vet­eran of the upris­ing that top­pled Mubarak 15 months ago. “More than any­one else, the Broth­er­hood makes promises it never keeps,” said the 35-year-old Atef.

Samer S. She­hata, an Egypt expert from George­town Uni­ver­sity, said Morsi would not be able to honor all these promises. He needed to nego­ti­ate specifics with those whose sup­port he is try­ing to enlist, he added, cit­ing pro-democracy groups and can­di­dates who fared well in the first round but not enough to make it to the runoff vote, like left­ist Hamdeen Sabahi and mod­er­ate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Abol­fo­toh. They came third and fourth respectively.

“This is unlikely to win him Chris­t­ian votes or demon­strate a real com­mit­ment to com­plete equal­ity regard­less of reli­gion,” She­hata said of Morsi’s assur­ances to the minor­ity Chris­tians who have long com­plained of dis­crim­i­na­tion in mainly Mus­lim Egypt.

“In order to be more cred­i­ble, Morsi should nego­ti­ate with Sabahi, Abol­fo­toh and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary youth about con­crete com­mit­ments and posi­tions, about the specifics of the civil nature of the state, polit­i­cal and per­sonal free­doms, and con­sti­tu­tional principles.”

Morsi, 60, also praised the gen­er­als who took over from Mubarak, though he acknowl­edged that mis­takes were made while they man­aged the tran­si­tional period.

“There is not a sin­gle Egypt­ian who doesn’t like the mil­i­tary. The mil­i­tary played a glo­ri­ous rule in pro­tect­ing the rev­o­lu­tion,” Morsi said. “There were mis­takes, yes, but also pos­i­tive steps. Among those pos­i­tive steps is the elec­tions held under the pro­tec­tion of the police and military.”

He vowed there would be no clashes or charges of trea­son against the mil­i­tary, sug­gest­ing that he has no inten­tion of enter­tain­ing calls by some pro-democracy groups for the gen­er­als to be tried for alleged crimes dur­ing the past 15 months.

The groups blame the mil­i­tary for killing scores of pro­test­ers, tor­tur­ing detainees and putting at least 12,000 civil­ians on trial before mil­i­tary tribunals.

Morsi also vowed to cre­ate a broad coali­tion gov­ern­ment that is not led by a Broth­er­hood fig­ure, and said the country’s new con­sti­tu­tion would be writ­ten by a panel that is truly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the nation.

The Broth­er­hood and other Islamists, who con­trol more than 70 per­cent of parliament’s seats, packed the orig­i­nal con­sti­tu­tional panel with their own sup­port­ers in a bid to influ­ence the char­ter. How­ever, a court rul­ing dis­banded it on the grounds that it did not observe the rules of selec­tion spelled out in a con­sti­tu­tional dec­la­ra­tion adopted last year.

Posted by AP News on May 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.