August 17, 2013, 9:38 am 1 Comment

Latest Updates on Crackdown in Egypt

By LIAM STACK

The Lede is following events in Egypt on Saturday, where Islamist protesters have taken to the streets again to demonstrate against the military-backed government that killed hundreds this week.

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4:50 P.M. Stuck in the Middle, Activists Clamor to Be Heard

Video posted online by Aalam Wassef, an activist and filmmaker encouraging Egyptians who are comfortable with neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the military to make themselves heard by banging pots and pans out their windows at 9 each night

 

As violence has plagued the streets of Egyptian cities and towns in recent days, many revolutionary activists who played a pivotal role in overthrowing President Hosni Mubarak have been left on the sidelines, unhappy with both the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-installed government that has succeeded the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi.

The Egyptian journalist Abdel Rahman Hussein posted an update to Twitter, expressing his frustration with the country’s chaotic lurch toward violence over the last several days.

Aalam Wassef, an activist and filmmaker who produced subversive Web videos during the Mubarak era under the pseudonym Ahmad Sherif, responded to that confusion and creeping sense of powerlessness on Saturday by encouraging Egyptians to literally make some noise, through a campaign called “masmou3″ or “heard.”

Khalid Abdalla, an activist and actor, also drew attention to the campaign in an update posted to Twitter. 

The campaign evokes a similar tactic employed in Turkey by residents of the neighborhoods abutting Taksim Square during protests in Istanbul in June against the demolition of Gezi Park, demonstrations that metastasized into a broader rebuke of the Turkish government. In Istanbul, residents opened their windows and made noise by banging together pots and pans to express their displeasure with the direction of the country under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Video posted to YouTube shows residents of neighborhoods abutting Taksim Square banging pots and pans out their windows to express displeasure with the government.

3:59 P.M. Witness Accounts of Standoff at Fath Mosque

Violent clashes between Morsi supporters, the police and local residents near Ramses Square in Cairo were transformed into a tense and chaotic hours-long standoff on Friday and Saturday. The showdown focused on Fath Mosque, an ornate house of worship whose minaret looms over downtown Cairo’s Ramses Square, where several hundred Muslim Brotherhood supporters, including many injured, sought refuge. 

Unwilling to allow the building to become a new de facto sit-in in support of the ousted Islamist leader, security forces surrounded the building with the intent of removing the Islamists, setting the stage for a stand-off that lasted throughout the night and into Saturday morning, when it appeared that most Morsi supporters were removed from the building. After a string of days in which security forces have killed hundreds of Islamists, reports on social media and videos posted to YouTube suggested that soldiers might have instead protected them from angry Morsi opponents gathered outside. 

Reporters from Mada Masr, an English-language news Web site in Cairo, filed a dispatch from inside the mosque on Saturday.

Inside Al-Fath Mosque, turned a makeshift hospital and morgue, Mada Masr’s reporters counted as many as 45 corpses by Friday afternoon. In the early hours of Saturday, the police attempted to evacuate the mosque, which was slowly starting to turn into a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in, several privately-owned media reported. According to the state-run Middle East News Agency, the police cleared an exit for Morsi’s supporters to leave the mosque after they were searched.

However, the website of the Freedom and Justice Party, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, maintained that protesters remained inside the mosque as of late Saturday morning. Hani Nowara, a Brotherhood member trapped inside, told the portal that there are negotiations to release some people through a back gate of the mosque. He called people to come around the mosque and end the siege of “the Interior Ministry militias.”

Reporters on the ground in the late morning of Saturday say the mosque is completely surrounded by Central Security Forces and that people clinging to the windows of the mosque suggest they are trapped inside. However, later, images of people leaving the mosque from one entrance amid chants “selmeya” (peaceful), started emerging. Mada Masr saw the army shooting gunfire in the air, presumably to disperse protesters and onlookers particularly as people were exiting the mosque.

Mada Masr reported that gunfire erupted from inside the mosque’s towering minaret before the evacuation of Morsi supporters began in earnest, and security forces returned fire. Video posted by Sharif Abdel Koddous, an Egyptian-American journalist in Cairo, shows the mosque being riddled with gunfire from the security forces, which he described to The Lede as “heavy machine gun fire.”

Video posted by an Egyptian-American journalist shows the minaret of Fath Mosque being riddled with gunfire on Saturday as supporters of Mohamed Morsi hid inside.

 

Alastair Beach, a correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, was inside the Fath Mosque compound during much of the long stand-off, which he described on Twitter as a “siege.” In a series of updates posted to Twitter, he said the mosque was surrounded by members of the Central Security Forces, or CSF, as well as military soldiers and men in plainclothes, who may have been plainclothes security agents or simply eager local residents. 

According to both Mr. Beach and Mr. Koddous, soldiers attempted to remove the Morsi supporters but were forced to retreat back into the mosque when the crowd that had gathered outside began attacking the Islamists as they exited. Mr. Beach went inside the mosque as well, and found the Morsi supporters barricaded in a back room. 

Mr. Koddous posted a series of videos to YouTube on Saturday that provide a glimpse of the tense scene at the mosque as onlookers armed with cellphone cameras mingled with Egyptian soldiers as they secured the building room by room. In text accompanying one of the videos, Mr. Koddous described the scene as “mayhem.”

Video posted to YouTube by an Egyptian-American journalist shows the scene at Fath Mosque on Saturday morning.

 

In another video posted by Mr. Koddous, soldiers appear to be leading Morsi supporters out of the mosque, surrounding them in a tight circle to defend them from a baying mob. At one point, a soldier fires his weapon into the air to subdue the crowd, and shortly afterward one bystander struck a bearded Morsi supporter in the head with what appeared to be a long wooden plank. 

Video posted to YouTube by an Egyptian-American journalist shows soldiers leading Morsi supporters out of Fath Mosque.

 

Another clip posted by Mr. Koddous shows people leaving Fath Mosque, although most are unaccompanied by soldiers and it is not clear who they are. At the end, a group of men standing outside the mosque begin to energetically chant, “The army and the people are one hand,” a pro-military slogan first heard at protests after the armed forces took power from former president Mubarak in February 2011.

12:28 P.M. Banks Will Re-Open Sunday

Banks in Egypt, closed since Wednesday, will reopen on Sunday, Reuters reported, citing the country’s central bank.

1:01 P.M. Egyptian Officials Complain of ‘Biased’ Media Coverage

Amid reports that several foreign correspondents have been harassed, beaten and detained by vigilantes and the security forces, Egypt’s State Information Service has sent a statement to international media organizations complaining of “biased” and “distorted” media coverage of the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in an apparent belief that its job is to be “supplying” journalists “with all facts about the current situation in Egypt.”

The Lede has uploaded the complete text of the statement from the state information service’s general director, Gamal Abdul Fattah, to Scribd.

Egypt’s State Information Service Statement to Foreign Correspondents

“Egypt is feeling severe bitterness towards some Western media coverage that is biased to the Muslim Brotherhood and ignores shedding light on violent and terror acts that are perpetrated by this group in the form of intimidation operations and terrorizing citizens,” said the statement, which went on to rebuke the international media for continuing to portray the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi as a military intervention into politics instead of “an expression of the popular will.”

Hours before the statement was released, several well-known foreign correspondents in Egypt were attacked in and around Ramses Square, the scene of a tense overnight standoff between the security forces, Morsi supporters and local residents. There have been several journalists injured or killed over the last several days, including an Egyptian reporter for a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates and a cameraman for Britain’s Sky News who were both shot and killed on Wednesday.

On Saturday, Nancy Youssef, an Egyptian-American correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers said in an update posted to Twitter than a police officer “urged” a crowd of men to attack her while she was reporting from Ramses Square, shouting “She’s an American!”
Matt Bradley, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was beaten by a mob and briefly detained by soldiers along with Alastair Beach, a correspondent for British newspaper The Independent. Abigail Hauslohner, the Cairo bureau chief for The Washington Post, shared news of their release on Twitter.

Patrick Kingsley, a correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian, was also detained near Ramses Square and transported to two different police stations, where he was held for over two hours before being released. He described the incident in a series of updates posted to Twitter.

Mohamad Adam, an Egyptian journalist for Mada Masr, an English-language news Web site in Cairo, was also detained by the police on Saturday after plainclothes security officers pulled over a taxi he was riding through the neighborhood of Imbaba, across the Nile from the tense scene in Ramses Square. He said he believed that he may have been pulled over because the police were suspicious that his beard was a sign of Islamist political beliefs. When they learned he was a journalist, he said their suspicion of him only grew.
— Liam Stack and Robert Mackey

10:59 A.M. Presidential Aide Says Egypt is at War With Extremism

 

Amr Nabil/Associated PressMostafa Hegazi, a political adviser and spokesman for Egypt’s interim president, Adli Mansour, spoke at the presidential palace in Cairo on Saturday.

 

Despite the deep divisions that have violently played out in Egypt’s streets over the last three days, Mostafa Hegazi, a political adviser and spokesman for Egypt’s interim president, Adli Mansour, told journalists on Saturday that Egyptians “are more united than ever” in what he described as “a war waged by the forces of extremism” in the Muslim Brotherhood, and said that the country would continue on a path to parliamentary and presidential elections in the coming months. 

Rawya Rageh, a Cairo correspondent for Al Jazeera English, posted Mr. Hegazi’s statements live on Twitter about the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Mr. Hegazi also attacked international media coverage of the continuing crackdown as biased against the Egyptian security forces, telling the gathered journalists, “We as Egyptians feel deep bitterness towards coverage of the events in Egypt.” 

He also denied reports that the military-backed government obstructed talks with the Brotherhood and walked away from a potential compromise that could have averted the violence of the last several days, an account first published by Reuters on Wednesday. To support his claim, Mr. Hegazi cited recent remarks by the government of the United Arab Emirates, which, along with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, pledged $12 billion to the military-backed government since it ousted former President Mohamed Morsi six weeks ago. 

“I admit we feel deep bitterness for the biased coverage of media and news agencies, and the question here is where are the stories of the churches that have been burned?” said Mr. Hegazi. “Where are the reports of the police officers and soldiers who were brutally killed and mutilated?”

The Lede published a post on witness accounts of sectarian attacks across Egypt over the last several days on Friday, including arson attacks on churches.

9:33 A.M. Prime Minister Proposes Dissolving Muslim Brotherhood

Egypt’s prime minister, Hazem el-Beblawi, has proposed legally dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood, according to a report in Reuters, a move that would return the group to the outlaw status it suffered under the reign of former President Hosni Mubarak.

The proposal “is being studied currently,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Social Affairs, Sherif Shawky, told Reuters. 

He also seemed to dismiss the prospect of any form of reconciliation between the military-backed transitional government and Mr. Morsi’s Islamist allies, saying, “Reconciliation is there for those whose hands are not sullied with blood.”

Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood was first banned in 1954 by iconic Egyptian strongman Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser. The group founded a political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, after the 2011 overthrow of Mr. Mubarak and registered itself as a nongovernmental organization in March.