CAIRO: Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood is trying to exact revenge on the judiciary for years of imprisonment and political exclusion, but is attacking the wrong target, opposition leader Amr Moussa said yesterday.
The elder statesman said that Egypt faced an exceptional “to-be-or-not-to-be crisis” worse than after its 1967 defeat by Israel, and President Mohammed Mursi would do better to pursue national unity rather than division.
Mursi appeared to back down when he agreed with senior judges on Sunday to seek a compromise on judicial reform instead of acting on proposals by his Islamist supporters to force more than 3,000 judges into retirement.
Moussa, 76, a former Arab League secretary-general and Egyptian foreign minister, said the assault on judicial independence should never have happened in the first place.
“This is not a concession. This is what should have been done from the start,” he said in an interview in his liberal opposition Congress Party’s office, saying Mursi’s climbdown came after strong public disapproval.
Asked what had prompted the campaign against the judiciary, Moussa said: “I believe it is a strange feeling of revenge, of punishment. Some say that the judges were responsible for it (their imprisonment). In fact this was not true. They got a lot of rulings from the judges that they were innocent.”
The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed for much of its nearly 80-year existence, and its members were repeatedly imprisoned, tortured and barred from most political activity under former President Hosni Mubarak, who was overthrown in a 2011 uprising.
Moussa said the Brotherhood was wrong to brand him a “remnant” of the old regime, simply because he had served Mubarak for a decade as foreign minister. That argument had not prevented many Egyptians from voting for him in last year’s presidential election, when he came fifth.
“Egypt is not divided between the Muslim Brotherhood and others, or between people of today and people of yesterday. Egypt is for all Egyptians... the previous regime is finished, is gone,” he said.
reuters
