At least one student at Cairo’s al-Azhar University suffered birdshot injuries on Sunday a day after a student was killed in clashes. The campus agriculture faculty was set on fire and security forces armed with teargas, birdshot and rubber bullets stormed dormitories during midterm exams the government is determined to hold despite the promise of unrest.
Also on Sunday, a powerful explosion struck a military intelligence headquarters in the Nile Delta town of Bilbeis injuring four, state media reported. The blast came just days after an explosion ripped through a security building in nearby Daqahliya province and killed 16, an attack blamed by the government on the Muslim Brotherhood group of deposed president Mohamed Morsi, even though an al-Qaeda-inspired group in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula later claimed responsibility.
The latest incidents came during a weekend of violence-marred protests staged by opponents of the military-backed interim government amid signs of escalating rhetoric and a further hardening of positions on both sides of the country’s political divide. They follow the government’s designation of the Brotherhood a terrorist group in what many see as a precursor to an even wider crackdown on one of the country’s oldest and largest political organisations.
“We don’t understand politics,” said Mohamed Dahshan, an independent Egyptian analyst in Cairo. “Politics are war. We seem to have this idea that winning politically means total physical annihilation of your opponent.”
The Brotherhood has hardened its rhetoric against the interim government and its backers in Egypt’s security forces, judiciary and economic elite that galvanised public opinion and brought down Mr Morsi in a coup last July.
“There is no place for latecomers, no amnesty for silent witnesses, and no excuse for those who fail to act,” the Anti-Coup Alliance, an umbrella organisation that is largely controlled by Brotherhood supporters, said in a statement released on Saturday.
“None of these crimes will be time-barred. They will also be recorded in history, a shame on all those who committed them or kept quiet about them.”
Analysts suggested both sides were locked in a zero-sum game and viewed the conflict as an existential fight to the end.
“The Brotherhood is very comfortable in this milieu, this cosmic battle between good and evil,” said HA Hellyer, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think tank. “When it comes to the Brotherhood, the government genuinely sees it as an organisation willing to burn the country down. And [The military and government] genuinely believe that dissent is akin to treasonous activity at a time that the country is fighting a war on terror.”
Anti-government protests erupted on campuses in the southern Egyptian city of Assiut and the Nile Delta cities of Mansoura and Zagazig, Mr Morsi’s home town. A bomb was reportedly defused outside the branch of Azhar University in Damietta, also in the Delta.
Video uploaded to the internet and broadcast on channels sympathetic to the Brotherhood showed hundreds of protesters chanting slogans and marching near al-Azhar’s main Cairo campus – among the Sunni Muslim world’s most venerable institutions – amid the popping of teargas canisters.
Organisers said they were determined to prevent the government from using exam season to showcase its grip on power.
“From the very beginning of the coup until now we have lost of lot of students in the protests,” said Yousef Salehen, a 21-year-old student of English and Islamic studies at Azhar University, who attended Sunday’s protests. “We are doing a strike and we are encouraging students not to take tests. This is going to be very embarrassing for the government because the students are being peaceful. There are more security forces than students on campus.”
Five people were killed in protests against the Brotherhood’s terror designation on Friday, but despite the deaths of hundreds of its supporters, the jailing of its leadership and the banning of all protests not authorised by the Ministry of Interior, the group has defiantly called for more street protests and for a boycott of a January 14-15 referendum on a new constitution drafted without the Brotherhood’s input.
“Because of the decimation of both the Brotherhood’s strategic and political leadership they seem to be stuck in a loop of ill-thought street actions,” said Mr Dahshan. “There’s no one able to give directions so they’re stuck on doing the same thing they’ve been doing the last six months even though everyone realises that it’s not advancing their cause and maybe even counterproductive.”
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By Borzou Daragahi – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/997f068e-7084-11e3-b9cc-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2othhNe5z. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.
Protesters and police clash after Friday prayers in Cairo
