CAIRO: Egypt’s army-installed government is expected to announce that foreign mediation designed to end the country’s political crisis has failed, a state-run newspaper said yesterday.
Al-Ahram newspaper, citing official sources, also said the government would declare that Muslim Brotherhood protests against the army’s overthrow of President Mohammed Mursi were non-peaceful — a signal that it intends to end them by force.
The report appeared hours after two senior US senators delivered a strong message to the military, saying it should release political prisoners and start a national dialogue to return Egypt to democratic rule.
The Republican senators — Lindsey Graham and John McCain — also described the removal of the Islamist Mursi as a coup — a definition the military and interim government have bridled at.
Egypt has been in turmoil since Mursi’s overthrow on July 3, following huge demonstrations against his rule.
The country’s first freely elected president, Mursi is now being detained at an undisclosed location and thousands of his supporters remain camped out at two protest sites in Cairo.
Envoys from the United States, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates have been pushing to resolve the crisis and avert further bloodshed between Mursi’s backers and the security forces.
But the Al-Ahram report dashed hopes of a breakthrough and cast the blame on the Muslim Brotherhood’s intransigence.
It said the interim government would announce “the failure of all US, European, and UAE delegations in convincing the Brotherhood of a peaceful solution to the current crisis”.
The government had allowed the envoys to visit jailed Brotherhood leaders in order to give a peaceful solution a chance. But it now considered Mursi’s overthrow a fait accompli and would proceed with its own “road map” for elections in nine months, al-Ahram said.
The government announcement also set the stage for a showdown with pro-Mursi protesters camped out at Rabaa and Al Nahda in Cairo, saying they were non-peaceful gatherings.
The security forces last week promised the protesters safe exit if they quit the camps, but warned their patience was limited. They may, however, hold off any action until after Sunday, the end of Eid Al Fitr, the holiday that marks the close of the month of Ramadan.
The latest development put the brakes on a mission by Graham and McCain, sent to Cairo by US President Barack Obama to help resolve the crisis in a country that is instrumental in Washington’s Middle East policy.
The two men urged the government to free political prisoners and start a dialogue with the Brotherhood. They also appealed to the Brotherhood, many of whose leaders have been jailed, including the deposed president, to avoid resorting to violence and to join the dialogue. “The people who are in charge were not elected. The people who were elected are in jail. The status quo is not acceptable,” Graham told a news conference. REUTERS
