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Protests Heat Up Across Egypt

June 28, 2013

by Edward Yeranian

Supporters and opponents of beleaguered Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi held demonstrations in different parts of Cairo, and elsewhere in Egypt, two days before an opposition rally is expected to draw an even larger turnout.

A few thousand Morsi supporters gathered in front of a mosque in the outlying Cairo district of Nasr City during Friday prayers. Many carried banners proclaiming support for the president and the crowd broke into periodic chants of “Islamic rule, Islamic rule.”

At the same time, anti-Morsi protesters chanted slogans calling for the president to resign, marching from at least three Cairo districts towards the city's iconic Tahrir Square.

In Egypt's second largest city of Alexandria, several thousand opponents of the president gathered in a seaside district, chanting slogans in favor of toppling the government. Protesters also demanded that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group stop meddling in politics. Reuters news agency reports that at least 36 people were wounded in clashes in Alexandria.

Battles between Morsi supporters and opponents in the provincial regions of Fayyoum, Sharqiya and Dhekeliya left at least three dead and 300 wounded in the last 48 hours. At least one Muslim Brotherhood political office was attacked and burned, near Cairo.

A new opposition movement calling itself “tamarud” or “rebellion” claims to have gathered 15 million signatures asking the president to step down. There is worry that young tamarud members will clash with the president's supporters who say that he was “democratically” elected and must remain.

Said Sadek, who teaches political sociology at the American University in Cairo, said that the situation in the country is “explosive.” But the fundamental conflict is economic.

"Political Islam reflects class struggle in the country. It's not religious," he said. "They are using religious terminology to cover up for socio-economic differences and rivalry and competition. It's a pure political conflict, that [Morsi] is incompetent, that he doesn't deliver, he doesn't know how to manage the country, he is dividing the country, he is not delivering the objectives of the revolution."

Societal conflict in Egypt will not be resolved by street protests, Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institution said, adding that little will come out of the this cycle of protests:

"It's an essential political stalemate and the protests will not offer deliverance from that kind of stalemate, because the regime has its crowds," said Ajami. "The opposition has its crowds, and let us not forget that Morsi has on his side that very elusive but nevertheless very powerful prop in a situation like that: legitimacy.....The protests will tell us of the unease in the country and of its divisions and the morning after the protests we shall return to the same stalemate."

Egypt's army officials told cadets recently that the military would only intervene in the country's political conflict if violence were to break out in the streets.