Egypt’s opposition defies call for dialogue, again marching on presidential palace

Egypt’s opposition defies call for dialogue, again marching on presidential palace:

CAIRO — Thousands of opposition protesters converged on Cairo’s Tahrir Square and marched on the presidential palace Friday in defiance of President Mohamed Morsi’s call Thursday night for a national dialogue.

In a televised speech, Morsi asked the opposition to engage in a dialogue Saturday at the palace. But he also called Wednesday night’s deadly clashes between his Islamist backers and liberal, secular and other government critics the work of “infiltrators” inside the opposition who had been paid to perpetrate “thuggery” and “terrorism.”

For Morsi’s opponents, who see Egypt’s first democratically elected president as an Islamist dictator in the making, Morsi’s rhetoric was combative; fanning the flames further on an increasingly polarized political crisis, now in its third week.

After the speech, anti-Morsi protesters looted and ransacked the Cairo headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi’s political base, and a smaller outlying office. And as protesters marched through the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Heliopolis on Friday afternoon, heading toward the presidential palace, many said that Morsi’s address delivered far too little, too late.

“By the time he gave the speech, people were already hitting each other,” said Mustafa Maher, a naval academy student who marched toward the palace with thousands of others after the Friday noon prayer.

“Morsi should go,” Maher added. “He hasn’t done anything for us.”

Meanwhile, the attorney general’s office said Friday that it had opened investigations into three top opposition figures. And the Muslim Brotherhood held a rival demonstration outside of Cairo’s preeminent al-Azhar mosque.

Thousands gathered to hear a sermon by the Brotherhood’s leader and Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, and to witness the public funerals of group members who were killed in the recent clashes.

The competing rhetoric and scenes of defiance as Egypt headed into its weekend underscored the extent to which the president’s Thursday night overture failed to move the country toward a political solution.

Morsi and the Islamists have squared off against a broad liberal and secular opposition over the framework of the country’s new constitution and the balance of power nearly two years after a popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak from power. Politicians and analysts say a near constant stream of protest and toxic rhetoric from both sides is cementing a dangerous ideological divide that is likely to outlive the current crisis.

In a telephone call to Morsi on Thursday, President Obama expressed “deep concern’’ about the deaths and injuries of protesters and said that “all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the White House said.

In the wake of the violence, the military’s elite Republican Guard — a discrete unit charged with protecting the palace — deployed tanks and armored trucks around the complex and ordered protesters to remain outside the perimeter.

The relatively small show of force — seven tanks, 10 armored trucks and a few dozen soldiers who set out coils of barbed wire — followed a meeting early Thursday that included Morsi; his newly appointed, young and openly Islamist defense minister, Abdul Fatah Khalil al-Sisi; Gen. Hamid Zaki, the newly appointed head of the Republican Guard, considered a Morsi loyalist; and other officials, a spokesman said.

Although the move by the Republican Guard by no means indicates that Morsi has deep or widespread support in the military, which is as divided and complex as Egypt itself, it suggested that the army remains the ultimate arbiter of power in post-revolutionary Egypt, just as it has been for decades. And it marked another political rearrangement in a turbulent transition that has seen many of them — in this case, a turnaround in the relationship between the two most powerful institutions in the country, after decades in which Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters were repressed with the backing of the military.

Some observers cautioned against reading too much into Thursday’s tank deployments, but other analysts considered it a significant moment for Morsi.

“The most plausible interpretation is indeed that al-Sisi and the incumbent high command are standing firmly by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian army at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “They chose essentially to stand with him, clearing the area of protesters.”

The Republican Guard’s move came as some protesters were calling on the military — considered a hero during the revolution that ousted Mubarak — to side with them in opposing a Nov. 22 decree by Morsi that grants him near-absolute powers until the draft constitution is adopted.

By Thursday afternoon, at least six of his advisers had resigned over the decree, and Egypt’s influential al-Azhar University, a seat of moderate Islam, was calling on Morsi to rescind it.

In his telephone call to Morsi, Obama welcomed the Egyptian president’s call for a dialogue Saturday with the opposition “but stressed that such a dialogue should occur without preconditions,” the White House said.

According to a senior administration official in Washington, Morsi’s relationship with the military seems solid. “We have not seen any cracks,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Winning military’s trust

Morsi seems to have won the military’s loyalties after an Islamist-dominated constitution-writing panel approved a draft charter that enshrines the armed forces’ sweeping powers to a degree not seen even during Mubarak’s rule.

According to analysts who have studied it, the centerpiece of the charter is the creation of a 15-member national defense council — including eight military appointees — that is essentially an autonomous overseer of military affairs.

Critically, the council has the power to approve declarations of war, a provision that analysts cast as a kind of safety valve for the United States, which remains wary of an Islamist government with ties to the Palestinian militant group Hamas that might jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

The council would handle military trials, which also are allowed for Egyptian civilians who are deemed a threat to the military. Although parliament must approve the overall budget figure, the council would handle all of its details, which are not required to be made public.

And in a provision that challenges any pretense of civilian oversight of the military, the draft charter requires that the president appoint the defense minister from among the ranks of the military.

“I think the military could not have asked for a better outcome” in a draft charter, said Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who focuses on comparative and international law. “It is hard to imagine a civilian-drafted document giving them any more autonomy.”

Viewed through the lens of the draft constitution that codifies such extraordinary powers to the military, Springborg said, Egypt’s political crisis appears to be a battle over the leftover crumbs, one in which Morsi will continue to have the upper hand.

“The real struggle for power in Egypt has to do with the military,” he said. “And as long as the Muslim Brotherhood is protecting that in exchange for the military defending it, you will get no progress. And Egypt will continue to be a military state.”

Retired Gen. Sameh Saif el-Yazl, a military analyst, called the relationship between Morsi and the military “just super.”

“And in the last few weeks, it is still improving.”

Troops vs. protesters

But the same cannot be said for relations between protesters and the security forces sent to protect the presidential palace Thursday.

“Who are you protecting?” a man shouted at soldiers through the barbed wire Thursday afternoon.

“You!” a commander yelled back.

“How are you protecting us? Where were you yesterday when they were hitting us?” the man screamed.

“You’re doing a good job,” shouted Mohamed Adel, a cashier, over the heckler. “Everyone needs to calm down.”

Ingy Hassieb and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.