Safwat Abdel Ghany, spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), talks during a news conference in response to a call by Egyptian army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for mass protests on Friday against violence and terrorism, near the Raba El-Adwyia mosque square, east of Cairo, yesterday.
CAIRO: Egypt’s army chief yesterday called for rallies to back a crackdown on “terrorism and violence”, in comments Islamists denounced as a call to “civil war” ahead of their own protests.
With tensions already running high three weeks after the military ousted president Mohammed Mursi, General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi’s call for demonstrations raises the prospect of further deadly violence.
The US, which has close ties to the Egyptian military, said it was “very concerned” by Sisi’s call and decided to suspend a plan to supply the country with F-16 warplanes.
Sisi made his unprecedented move in a speech broadcast live on state television. “Next Friday, all honourable Egyptians must take to the street to give me a mandate and command to end terrorism and violence,” said the general, wearing dark sunglasses as he addressed a military graduation ceremony near Alexandria.
A spokesman for army-installed interim president Adly Mansour later said Egypt “has begun a war on terrorism”.
Sisi’s call for protests was aimed at “preserving the state”, said spokesman Ahmed Al Muslimani, in comments carried by the official MENA news agency.
A coalition of Islamists led by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said it would press ahead with its own rallies tomorrow.
“Sisi’s threats are an announcement of civil war,” the group said, while warning of the danger of “massacres committed under a false popular cover”. Nearly 170 people have died in political unrest since the end of June, according to a tally, many of them in clashes between Mursi’s supporters and opponents.
Huge crowds of Egyptians protested against Mursi on June 30, after just one turbulent year of his presidency. Sisi claimed he had been told by Mursi aides that removing the president would result in violence.
Presidential aides “told me if there is any problem there will be lots of violence because of armed groups, to scare me”, Sisi said in his speech. His address came just hours after a police conscript died when a time bomb exploded outside a police station in Mansura in the Nile Delta, state television and the interior ministry said.
AFP
