Egypt was bracing yesterday for rival protests to take place in Cairo today over a bitterly divisive referendum on a new constitution, prompting President Mohamed Morsi to order the army to help “preserve security”.
The duelling demonstrations, organised by Islamists backing Morsi and the largely secular Opposition, raised fears of street clashes like ones last week in which seven people were killed and hundreds injured.
Morsi’s decree instructing the military to fully cooperate with police “to preserve security and protect vital state institutions for a temporary period, up to the announcement of the results from the referendum” came into force yesterday.
Army officers “all have powers of legal arrest,” it says.
The military, which has urged dialogue and warned it “will not allow” the political crisis to deteriorate, has for several days kept tanks and troops deployed around Morsi’s presidential palace.
Late yesterday, soldiers merely watched as more than 100 anti-Morsi demonstrators milled around in front of the palace, an AFP correspondent said.
The rights group Amnesty International called Morsi’s security decree “a dangerous loophole that may well lead to the military trial of civilians,” recalling the 16 months of army rule that followed the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak last year, until Morsi’s election in June 2012.
The Opposition, made up of secular, liberal, leftwing and Christian groups, has said it will escalate its protests to scupper the referendum.
It views the new constitution largely drawn up by Morsi’s Islamist allies, including some who want to see Sharia law implemented one day, as undermining secular traditions, human and gender rights, and the independence of the judiciary.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said yesterday that the draft charter “contains no reference to human rights treaties and conventions ratified by Egypt, reflecting ... disdain for these agreements”.
Morsi has defiantly pushed on with the draft, seeing it as necessary to secure democratic reform.