UPDATE JULY 7th
CAIRO — As President Mohammed Morsi huddled in his guard's quarters during his last hours as Egypt's first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country's top generals, the New York Times reported Saturday, citing unnamed senior advisers with the president.
The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and Cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors.
The aides said they already knew what Morsi's answer would be. He had responded to a similar proposal by vowing to die before accepting what he considered a de facto coup and thus a crippling blow to Egyptian democracy.
The abrupt end of Egypt's first Islamist government was the culmination of months of escalating tensions and ultimately futile U.S. efforts to broker a solution that would keep Morsi in his elected office, at least in name if not in power. A new alliance of youthful activists and Mubarak-era elites was driving street protests. A collapsing economy put new pressure on Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, the once-outlawed Islamist group that had finally come to power after the ouster of the former president, Hosni Mubarak. And an alliance between Morsi and the nation's top generals was gradually unraveling.
The State Department had no comment Saturday on the details of the U.S. role in Morsi's final days. Separately, President Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated that the United States is not aligned with and is not supporting any particular Egyptian political party or group and again condemned the ongoing violence across Egypt, the White House said in a statement.His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson, to say that Morsi refused. When he returned, he said that he had spoken to Susan Rice, the White House national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said.
Senior Brotherhood officials said Morsi's adamant response to the last proposal — a combination of idealism and stubbornness — epitomized his rule. It may also have doomed his presidency.
Morsi never believed the generals would turn on him as long as he respected their autonomy and privileges, his advisers said. He had been the Muslim Brotherhood's designated envoy for talks with the ruling military council after the ouster of Mubarak. His counterpart on the council was Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
The Brotherhood was naturally suspicious of the military, its historical opponent, but Sissi cultivated Morsi and other leaders, one of them said, including going out of his way to show that he was a pious Muslim.
The two grew so close that Morsi caught his advisers by surprise when he promoted Sissi to defense minister last summer as part of a deal that persuaded the military for the first time to let the elected president take full control of his government.
But the generals' exit, however, only redoubled the criticism from Morsi's opponents that the Islamists were monopolizing power. Morsi failed to broaden his appeal among the sectarian opposition amid complaints that he and the Brotherhood were monopolizing power. And when the protests took off last fall, Sissi signaled that his departure from politics might not be permanent.
Without consulting Morsi, the general publicly invited all the country's fractious political factions — from social democrats to ultraconservative sheiks — to a meeting to try to hammer out a compromise on a more inclusive government. Morsi quashed the idea, advisers said, to avoid drawing the generals back into politics.
Sissi said publicly last week that he continued after that to try to broker some compromise with the opposition and to ease the political polarization. It was at that point, Morsi's advisers say, that they first suspected Sissi of intrigue.
Morsi, they say, often pressed Sissi to stop unnamed military officials from making threatening or disparaging statements toward the president in the news media. Sissi merely that said newspapers and media exaggerate, and that he was trying to control the tensions toward the president inside the military, one adviser said.
Yet Morsi insisted to his aides that he remained fully confident that Sissi would not interfere, almost until the end of his presidency. He was the last one in the inner circle to acknowledge last week that Sissi was ousting them.
The Muslim Brotherhood official watched a boy wave an Egyptian flag and listened to cars honk celebrating the army’s kicking the Islamic movement out of power and jailing its leaders.
The Brother, a mid-level official in the organization that for less than a year ran Egypt’s
government, looked like anyone in the upscale neighborhood, a man in early middle age wearing polo shirt and slacks, sipping his iced coffee late at night.
He expected his time would soon come. He participates in party committees and has ties to senior leadership. He knew there was a list of 300 leaders wanted for arrest and banned from travel.
The Brother had not reported to work in three days, had sent his wife and child abroad, and was spending most of the time among the safety of the thousands of Brotherhood supporters in Cairo’s Nasser City demanding Egypt’s first truly democratically-elected president, Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi, be reinstated.
He was certain state security listened to his phone calls.
“It is not a good feeling when you worry about being arrested every day. This is worse than Mubarak. It’s like 1954 when in one night, they arrested 18,000 Brotherhood members,” he said.
The 85-year-old political Islamist group has been clandestine for most of its existence, with
its leaders regularly jailed. Its members’ loyalty is marked and enduring: the Brother told his story to a reporter with the permission of his superiors in the Brotherhood.
The man has made discrete enquiries about getting political asylum abroad.
“I don’t want to live in a country where I lose my basic rights,” he said. “My only crime is I was against the Mubarak regime.”
As the Brother spoke, he glanced at news on his smartphone of an attack on Brothers in the city of Zagazig, north of Cairo. He said gangs were chasing Brotherhood supporters in the street. “There was a massacre tonight,” he said.
And he smiled ruefully at the military’s ability to bring the organization down.
“They played a dirty game,” he said.
As he sipped his coffee, unsure of what would come next, the Brother was most of all defiant. He provided a window into the religious party’s mindset in the wake of its stunning humiliation at the hands of the protestors, political opponents and their longtime nemesis in the military.
The Brother did not see any mistakes on the part of the Brotherhood, other than not moving quickly enough against its enemies. “Some members of the Brotherhood favored incremental change over radical change. Morsi was patient and friendly while his enemies aggressively moved against him,” the Brother said.
He imagined what could have been if the courts had not blocked the Brotherhood’s original candidate for president, Khairat el-Shaiter, from running in the June 2012 election. “He would have been more forceful,” the Brother.
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| General Abdel Fattah al-Sis |
He believed Morsi was outplayed by the military’s chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who
dissolved the government and whom Morsi originally thought he could trust.
“Morsi was kind. He was not corrupt and sometimes in politics you are punished if you are a kind man,” he said.
Still, the Brother paid tribute to Morsi for not backing down as it became clear the protests held on June 30 would prove his undoing. He claimed in the protests’ wake, Morsi refused the army’s offers to leave for Turkey or Qatar and “told them do your military coup but I will not surrender.”
The Brother quoted an Oliver Stone movie about American football to explain why Morsi refused to back down. “On any given Sunday you may win or lose, but if you lose act like a man,” the Brother said. “These are our values.”
The Brother knew that a restoration of power to the Brotherhood was not likely to come soon. The party had a secret plan for their followers to disrupt the nation’s capital with demonstrations Friday, but he believed it would be a long war for the Brotherhood to get justice. But they could absorb the crackdown by the military.
“This is how we have lived under Mubarak, before Mubarak and under the king,” he said. “We can wait a year or two years. Our millions will not fly away. There will be a payback.”
