A Year After Morsi, Egypt's Turmoil Not Over

It was nothing like a year ago at Tahrir Square on 30 June when millions of Egyptians took to the streets to demand the removal of former President and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. All entrances to Tahrir, twice the ground of wide popular demonstrations that ended the rule of two presidents within three years, Morsi and ousted President Hosni Mubarak, were closed with barbed wires as army tanks stood behind.

The large Square was dark and deserted. When nearly 50 people gathered near one of the entrances to mark the occasion, waving the Egyptian flag and posters of President, and Former Defense Minister, Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi, police quickly asked them to disperse.

Egyptians had hardly started their day on 30 June, the second day of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, when news came in that bombs exploded very close to the entrance of nowhere else but Sissi’s office at the Presidential Ithadiya Palace in Heliopolis.

 Two senior police officers were killed while trying to dismantle the bombs in a rather surreal scene, without any body protection armor and surrounded by fellow police officers watching, and 13 were badly wounded.

Worse, it turned out that the group that claimed responsibility for the attacks and which was unknown until Morsi’s removal, Ajnad Misr, had issued a statement on 27 June stating that they planted bombs next to the Palace a few days earlier to kill officers, but decided not to ignite them at last minute in fear of killing civilians who had suddenly gathered nearby.

The statement specified the locations of the bombs in a garden near the palace and warned civilians, but an Interior Ministry spokesman ridiculed the statement on same day, stating it was only an attempt to scare citizens ahead of plans to mark the first anniversary of the army’s removal of Morsi.

On the dawn of same day, 30 June, and in a scenario repeated several times in the past, armed militias in Sinai stopped a microbus taxi, ordered four young army recruits to stop down, and shot them dead. Later, Brotherhood supporters demonstrated, in groups of a few hundreds, in nearly every major Egyptian city.

As demonstrations a year ago ended four days later, on 3 July, with Sissi’s declaration that he decided “to side with the demands of the people” by removing Morsi, appointing an interim president and calling for new elections, authorities were aware that worse is yet to come by Brotherhood supporters and their Islamist allies in terms of violence.

For them, 3 July marked the “military coup” Sissi carried out against Morsi.

Dozens of explosives, mostly home-made bombs, rocked all over the country, killing at least 13 suspected terrorists, policemen, and civilians. Police said two suspected militants died in an apartment in Giza while preparing explosives, one died in a car while driving next to a hospital in Abbasiya and his colleague was arrested, and later four died in the city of Fayoum, 80 km south of Cairo, at a farm allegedly owned by a Muslim Brotherhood member where 40 explosive devices were seized.

One policeman was killed in clashes with demonstrators, while a 10-year-old child died when a small bomb exploded in a train while on its way to Alexandria. Fifteen small bombs either exploded or were detonated by police in Alexandria alone.

Meanwhile, Brotherhood and Islamist demonstrators broke havoc all over the country, blocking major highways and roads in the capital and several major cities, clashing with anti-riot police. At least four demonstrators were killed.

Egyptians stayed home on 30 June and 3 July, and all plans to celebrate by the government and political parties that supported Morsi’s removal were cancelled “due to security conditions.”

While government and police officials sought to minimize the effect of the chaos caused by Brotherhood supporters, and the bombs that exploded all over the country, their relative success in bringing life to a standstill during those two days seemed to have breathed new life among Morsi’s supporters after a long year of clashes with security, arrest of thousands and hundreds of harsh court sentences.

On news websites sympathetic to the Brotherhood and social media, supporters congratulated each other, and appealed not to give up hope that they will manage to end the rule of Sissi and bring back the first democratically president to office, Morsi.

They said they should continue holding small demonstrations all over the country in order to stretch the police thin and weaken their ability to confront their protests.

One Facebook page titled, “Morsi, Egypt’s Legitimate President” said demonstrations would continue non-stop throughout the coming weeks, especially to mark days in which Islamist demonstrators were killed in large numbers in clashes with police in the immediate aftermath of Morsi’s removal on 3 July, 2013, reaching the peak with the first anniversary of the bloody dispersal by the police of the sit-ins of Rabaa and Nahda on 14 August.

Official figures released by the Health Ministry said at least 640 civilians were killed to break up the sit-ins held by Brotherhood supporters over 48 days in two main residential areas in Cairo and Giza, while Mohamed Sodan, a London-based Brotherhood spokesman, said at least 2400 people were killed. Nearly 60 Brotherhood demonstrators were killed in clashes with the army in front of the headquarters of the Republican Guard on 8 July a year ago, and over 80 were killed in similar clashes with police on 26 July.

Despite initial pledges by Sissi that he would not seek to rule the country, saying that the army sided with popular demands to remove Morsi a year ago in order to avoid a civil and religious war, the former defense minister and military intelligence chief was the most powerful candidate when presidential elections were held in late May.

He easily won the elections against a single opponent, Hamdin Sabahi, with an overwhelming 96 percent majority. Sissi said he had to bow to public pressure that called upon to run for president.

However, after a year in which Sissi was the actual decision maker in Egypt, even before officially taking over the presidency, Brotherhood protests did not stop, neither did terrorist attacks in which over 500 police and army soldiers and officers were killed.

Adding to the growing atmosphere of frustration that led several political parties to decide not to celebrate the first anniversary of Morsi’s removal was that many young people who took part in the 25 January, 2011 Revolution against Mubarak, and who also stood up to the Brotherhood when they sought to control the country on their own, were now in prison due to an unpopular Demonstration Law issued by the government in November.

Facing the daily violent demonstrations by the Brotherhood and their supporters, and a sharply deteriorating economic situation, Sissi said during his election campaign in May that the time now was not right to continue to hold demonstrations to oppose government policies.

Yet, while the first anniversary of Morsi’s removal proved that government’s repressive measures over the past year were not enough to silence opposition, the real gift to Brotherhood supporters came on 4 July when Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb announced that the government decided to partially lift the subsidy on fuel for the first time in over a decade. With an increase ranging between 60 to 80 percent in the prices of cheap, subsidized fuel to match very low incomes of the majority of Egyptians, public reaction was very angry.

Only a few hours after Mehleb announced his decision, the “National Alliance in Support of Legitimacy and Against the Coup” that gathers Brotherhood supporters issued a statement reminding Egyptians how Sissi’s coup was only making their lives much worse, and asked them to join their daily protests.