Egypt rocked by Morsi demo clashes

Nov 23 2012

Opponents and supporters of Mohammed Morsi have clashed across Egypt, the day after the president granted himself sweeping new powers that critics fear can allow him to be a virtual dictator. At least 15 were reported injured.

Protesters burned offices of the political arm of Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group in several cities on the Suez Canal east of Cairo and in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Islamists were involved in fistfights with opponents of Mr Morsi in southern Egypt.

Tens of thousands of pro-democracy activists meanwhile converged on Cairo's Tahrir Square, angered at the decisions by the president.

The decrees include exempting himself from judicial review, as well as a panel writing the new constitution and the upper house of parliament, and the power to enact any other measure he deemed necessary to deal with a "threat" to Egypt's "revolution."

The powers are supposed to be temporary - until a new constitution and new parliamentary elections take place - and feed on the belief among the public that judicial officials appointed under ousted President Hosni Mubarak are blocking the reform of state institutions.

The president's supporters cast the decrees as the next logical step to consolidate the gains of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Mubarak, and the only way to break through the political deadlock preventing the adoption of a new constitution.

Courts dissolved both parliament and an earlier constitutional assembly earlier this year, and were weighing cases on whether to dissolve it again.

"We are going ahead and no one can stop our march. We are not a fragile nation and I am carrying my duty for the sake of God and my country. I take my decisions after consulting with everybody," the president said, according to the state-owned Akhbar al-Youm newspaper.

But many veteran activists who organised that uprising say Mr Morsi's decree puts him in the same category as Mr Mubarak, who argued his autocratic powers were necessary only to guide Egypt to a new democratic future.

Mohamed El Baradei, former head of the UN's nuclear agency, called Mr Morsi a "new pharaoh." The president's one-time ally, the April 6 movement, warned that the polarisation could bring a "civil war." One of Mr Morsi's aides, Coptic Christian thinker Samer Marqous, resigned to protest at the "undemocratic" decree.