Supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohammed Mursi perform evening prayers at the Rabaa Adawiya square in Cairo yesterday.
CAIRO: Gulf states showered Cairo with $8bn in aid yesterday, showing their support for the army’s move to push the Muslim Brotherhood from power, a day after troops killed dozens of the movement’s supporters.
Military-backed interim head of state Adli Mansour named a liberal economist as acting prime minister and announced a faster-than-expected timetable for elections in six months.
Mansour’s army backers are under pressure to plot a path back to democracy less than a week after they overthrew Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.
Mansour, a judge installed as acting president when the military removed Mursi, named Hazem El Beblawi interim premier. He served briefly as finance minister in 2011. Former UN diplomat Mohammed ElBaradei, now a liberal party leader, is to be deputy president responsible for foreign affairs.
The choice of Beblawi won the acceptance of the ultra-orthodox Islamist Nour Party — sometime ally of Mursi and the Brotherhood.
El Beblawi will offer ministerial posts to members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, and Islamist Nour Party, state media reported.
“There is no objection to including members of those two parties in the government,” state news agency MENA quoted a presidential spokesman as saying.
The UAE offered a grant of $1bn and a loan of $2bn. Saudi Arabia offered $3bn in cash and loans, and an additional $2bn worth of much-needed fuel.
In a further demonstration of its support, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited Egypt yesterday, the most senior foreign official to arrive since Mursi’s removal.
The aid provides Egypt with needed funds to distribute subsidised fuel and food that sustains its 84 million people. It also buys time for Cairo to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8bn rescue loan, long stalled. The US gives Cairo $1.5bn a year, mostly in direct aid to the military.
Mansour decreed overnight that a parliamentary vote would be held in about six months, followed by a presidential election. An amended constitution would be put to a referendum.
Meanwhile, leading Sunni cleric, Ahmed Al Tayyeb, said he will retire into seclusion until the end of violence in Egypt, after bloody clashes that left 42 people dead. Al Tayyeb, who heads the Cairo-based Al Azhar, Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning, said that he would “remain in seclusion in his house until all the spilling of Egyptian blood ends and those behind it take responsibility”. The grand imam was a key party to army-sponsored talks that yielded a road map for a political transition in Egypt after the military’s ouster of Mursi on Wednesday.
Agencies
