Chief of Egypt’s Army Warns of ‘Collapse’ as Chaos Mounts
Amr Nabil/Associated Press
Egyptian protesters celebrated
the capture and destruction of a state security armored vehicle on
Tuesday in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
By KAREEM FAHIM, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH
The New York Times
Published: January 29, 2013
CAIRO — Reacting to Egypt’s
growing chaos, the head of the army warned on Tuesday of the “collapse
of the state” if political forces in the country did not reconcile,
reflecting growing impatience with the crisis from Egypt’s most powerful
institution.
Photo Mostafa El Shemy/Associated Press
Egyptian protesters burned a state security armored
vehicle that demonstrators commandeered during clashes with security
forces Monday night.
“The continuation of the conflict between different political forces and
their disagreement on running the affairs of the country may lead to
the collapse of the state and threatens the future of the coming
generations,” said Gen. Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, who is also the defense
minister, adding that “the attempt to affect the stability of the state
institutions is a dangerous matter that harms Egyptian national
security.”
His remarks, quoted on an official Army Facebook page, came as violence
in Cairo began to escalate. During clashes between riot police and
protesters along the Nile Corniche early on Tuesday, the fighting
spilled into one of the city’s luxury hotels, leaving the lobby in
ruins.
The worst of the turmoil, which has left at least 45 people dead, has
been in Port Said at the northern tip of the Suez Canal. Egypt’s
president, Mohamed Morsi,
has imposed a monthlong state of emergency in the city and two others
in the Suez Canal zone, calling on the army to regain control of
security.
General Sisi also said the army would protect the “vital” Suez Canal. In Port Said on Monday, street battles reached a bloody new peak with a
death toll over three days of at least 45, with at least five more
protesters killed by bullet wounds, hospital officials said.
The state of emergency imposed by Mr. Morsi virtually eliminates due process protections against abuse by the police. Angry crowds burned tires and hurled rocks at the police. And the
police, with little training and less credibility, hunkered down behind
barrages of tear gas, birdshot and occasional bullets.
The sense that the state was unraveling may have been strongest in Port
Said, where demonstrators have proclaimed their city an independent
nation. But in recent days, the unrest has risen in towns across the
country and in Cairo as well. In the capital on Monday, a mob of
protesters managed to steal an armored police vehicle, drive it to
Tahrir Square and make it a bonfire.
After two years of torturous transition, Egyptians have watched with
growing anxiety as the erosion of the public trust in the government and
a persistent security vacuum have fostered a new temptation to resort
to violence to resolve disputes, said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the
Century Foundation,
based in New York, who is now in Cairo. “There is a clear political
crisis that has eroded the moral authority of the state,” he said.
And the spectacular evaporation of the government’s authority here in
Port Said has put that crisis on vivid display, most conspicuously in
the rejection of Mr. Morsi’s declarations of the curfew and state of
emergency.
As in Suez and Ismailia, tens of thousands of residents of Port Said
poured into the streets in defiance just as a 9 p.m. curfew was set to
begin. Bursts of gunfire echoed through the city for the next hours, and
from 9 to 11 p.m. hospital officials raised the death count to seven
from two.
When two armored personnel carriers approached a funeral Monday morning
for some of the seven protesters killed the day before, a stone-throwing
mob of thousands quickly chased them away. And within a few hours, the
demonstrators had resumed their siege of a nearby police station,
burning tires to create a smoke screen to hide behind amid tear gas and
gunfire.
Many in the city said they saw no alternative but to continue to stay in
the streets. They complained that the hated security police remained
unchanged and unaccountable even after President Hosni Mubarak was
ousted two years ago. Protesters saw no recourse in the justice system,
which is also unchanged; they dismissed the courts as politicized,
especially after the acquittals of all those accused of killing
protesters during the revolution. Then came the death sentences handed
down Saturday to 21 Port Said soccer fans for their role in a deadly
brawl. The death sentences set off the current unrest in this city.
Nor, the people said, did they trust the political process that brought to power Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood.
He had vowed to usher in the rule of law as “a president for all
Egyptians.” But in November, he used a presidential decree to
temporarily stifle potential legal objections so that his Islamist
allies could rush out a new Constitution. His authoritarian move kicked
off a sharp uptick in street violence leading to this weekend’s Port
Said clashes.
“Injustice beyond imagination,” one man outside the morning funeral said
of Mr. Morsi’s emergency decree, before he was drowned out by a crowd
of others echoing the sentiment.
Photo Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
Egyptians on Monday mourned the death of Mohammed
Yousra, 27, one of seven people killed in clashes with the police in
Port Said.
“He declared a curfew, and we declare civil disobedience,” another man said.
“This doesn’t apply to Port Said because we don’t recognize him as our
president,” said a third. “He is the president of the Muslim Brotherhood
only.”. Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood and its party could not be reached.
The group had recently moved offices because of security threats, and at
the new office, neighbors said Brotherhood officials had not appeared
since the start of the unrest.
As tens of thousands marched to the cemetery, many echoed the arguments
of human rights advocates that the one-month imposition of the emergency
law and reliance on the military would only aggravate the problem. The
emergency law rolled back legal procedures meant to protect individuals
from excessive violence by the police, while the reliance on soldiers to
keep the peace further reduced individual rights by sending any
civilians arrested to military trials.
“It is stupid — he is repressing people for one more month!” one man
argued to a friend. “It will explode in his face. He should let people
cool down.”
The police remained besieged in their burned-out stations, glimpsed only
occasionally crouching with their automatic rifles behind the low roof
ledges.
When one showed his head over a police building as the funeral march
passed, voices in the crowd shouted that his appearance was a
“provocation” and people began hurling rocks. Others riding a pickup in
the procession had stockpiled homemade bombs for later use.
In a departure from most previous clashes around the Egyptian
revolution, in Port Said the police also faced armed assailants. Two
were seen with handguns on Monday around a siege of a police station, in
addition to the man with the Kalashnikov.
Earlier, a man accosted an Egyptian journalist working for The New York
Times. “If I see you taking pictures of protesters with weapons, I will
kill you,” he warned.
Defending their stations, the police fought back, and in Cairo they battled their own commander, the interior minister.
Brotherhood leaders say Mr. Morsi has been afraid to name an outsider as
minister for fear of a police revolt, putting off any meaningful reform
of the Mubarak security services. But when Mr. Morsi recently tapped a
veteran ministry official, Mohamed Ibrahim, for the job, many in the
security services complained that even the appointment of one insider to
replace another was undue interference.
In a measure of the low level of the new government’s top-down control
over the security forces, officers even cursed and chased away their new
interior minister when he tried to attend a funeral on Friday for two
members of the security forces killed in the recent clashes.
“What do you mean we won’t be armed? We would be disarmed to die,” one shouted, on a video recording of the event.
In an effort to placate the rank and file, Mr. Ibrahim issued a
statement to police personnel sympathizing with the pressure the
protests put on them. Later, he promised them sophisticated weapons.
“That can only be a recipe for future bloodshed,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which monitors police abuses
.
By turning to the military, Mr. Morsi signaled that he understood he
could not rely on the police to pacify the streets, Mr. Bahgat argued.
But it was far from clear that Mr. Morsi was fully in command of the
military either. The new Islamist-backed Constitution grants the general
broad autonomy within the Egyptian government in an apparent quid pro
quo for turning over full power to Mr. Morsi in August. Mr. Morsi’s
formal request for the military to restore order was “not so much an
instruction as a plea for support,” Mr. Bahgat said.
It remains to be seen whether the military retains the credibility to
quell the protests. The soldiers stationed in Port Said did nothing to
intervene as clashes raged on in the streets hours after curfew Monday
night.
Analysts close to the military say its officers are extremely reluctant
to engage in the kind of harsh crackdown that would damage its
reputation with Egyptians, preferring to rely on its presence alone.
Near the front lines of the clashes, residents debated whether they
would welcome a military takeover. “The military that was sent to Port
Said is the Muslim Brotherhood’s military,” said one man, dismissing its
independence from Mr. Morsi.
But others said they still had faith in the institution, if not in its
top generals. “In the military, the soldiers are our brothers,” said
Khaled Samir Abdullah, 25. Pointing to the police, he said, “those ones
are merciless.”