An Egypt Arrest, and a Brotherhood on the Run By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL Published: August 20, 2013 CAIRO — Egypt’s authoritarian government has harassed and repressed the Muslim Brotherhood for most of its existence. But for the last three decades the authorities stopped short of touching the group’s revered leader, the supreme guide, who oversaw the country’s most effective social, political and religious organization despite its outlawed status. On Tuesday, the new government installed by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi provided the latest signal that it was breaking the old rules. Security forces armed with automatic rifles hunted down even the supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, 70, in a nondescript apartment where he had taken refuge, and then provided footage of the arrest to a friendly satellite network. It was the capstone of a sweeping campaign of arrests and shootings that has damaged the Brotherhood’s core organization more than any crackdown in eight decades, sending the group into a confused retreat deeper underground than ever before. “We came close to annihilation once under Nasser, but this is worse,” said Gehad el-Haddad, a Brotherhood official now on the run, referring to former President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s attempt to smash the group after he came to power in 1954. Communicating over the Internet to avoid surveillance, Mr. Haddad said Brotherhood members now talk of “the good old days” under President Hosni Mubarak. With the arrest of Mr. Badie, most of the Brotherhood’s top leaders are in prison, along with the former president, Mohamed Morsi. Many of its second- or third-tier leaders are dead or missing, Mr. Haddad said, and those still at large are living on the run. They change locations every 24 hours, avoid showing their faces at demonstrations or public places, and stay off cellphones for fear that they might be tracked. Many are consumed by the loss of those killed or missing in the crackdown, which left dead more than 1,000 Morsi supporters and the children of several Brotherhood leaders — including Mr. Badie, who lost his son. Communication to the group’s grass-roots network has been all but cut off, Brotherhood officials and local members said. “Asking about the structure of the organization now is like asking a dying man how his career is doing,” one Brotherhood leader said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of arrest. Devastated by the assault, the group has backed off its vow of a “million martyrs,” ending its six-week campaign of organizing demonstrations and sit-ins against the military takeover that ousted its ally, Mr. Morsi. Instead, on Tuesday, the group began calling Morsi supporters to organize their own “decentralized” protests. More street demonstrations or sit-ins “are always an option if the coup leaders’ frenzy goes down,” Mr. Haddad said, but the Brotherhood “held the banner for 48 days” and “it is with the Egyptian people now.” The Brotherhood’s retreat is a victory for General Sisi. At least for now, it appears that his new government’s brutal force has begun to take control of the streets of the capital. But in the long term, the Brotherhood retains deep roots in Egypt, especially in the countryside, and by forcing it back underground the military-backed government virtually eliminated any hope of fulfilling its public pledges to include it in the political process. It has also foreclosed the chance to use the Brotherhood’s more pragmatic leadership to channel and control the broader and more fractious Islamist movement, as Mr. Mubarak once did. And it risks further alienating a generation of Islamists, or driving some to violence. It was in Egyptian jails during earlier crackdowns, historians say, that Brotherhood members disillusioned with its nonviolent politics nurtured the ideology that now guides Al Qaeda. Some in the Brotherhood suggest that by taking out the insular conservatives who came of age in those earlier crackdowns, the crisis could begin a transition to a younger and more moderate generation. The crisis “is creating a new tier of youth leaders,” Mr. Haddad argued. “It happened at Rabaa,” the six-week sit-in that some described as a kind of Islamist Woodstock before the police burned it down. But as the Brotherhood scrambled Tuesday to choose a new leadership, the role of supreme guide automatically passed by seniority to Mahmoud Ezzat, a veteran of the group known as its “iron man” for his conservative ideology and intolerance of dissent. He was in hiding on Tuesday, and Brotherhood officials declined to disclose the names of other new leaders. The Brotherhood has often turned inward and squelched dissent in times of crisis, and Mr. Ezzat’s elevation was an early indication that the crackdown could “push the group into the control of the hard-liners” instead of younger reformers, said Khalil al-Anani, a scholar of the Brotherhood at the Washington-based Middle East Institute who is now in Cairo. The new government’s drive to suppress the Islamists appeared to gain momentum on Tuesday. State news media reported that the government was bringing back a Mubarak-era constitutional provision barring political parties based on religion. That potentially would outlaw Islamist parties, including the Brotherhood’s political arm — the biggest vote-getter in recent elections. The government also began investigating charges, filed by a law professor, against Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal former diplomat who resigned as interim vice president last week in protest against the mass shootings. The charges of “betraying the public trust” would carry only a small penalty, and Mr. ElBaradei had left for a home in Vienna. But along with a stream of state-media attacks against him, the case sent a signal that the government would prefer he stayed in Vienna and was a warning to other dissidents as well. Outside Cairo, tamping down the opposition proved more difficult. Protests against the military-led takeover continued in cities and towns around the nation. But a prominent Brotherhood member in the Nile Delta province of Dakahleya complained the organization was in a state of confusion. The regular meetings of the group’s local cells, known as “families,” have been disrupted by the need to send supporters to the Cairo protests, he said, speaking anonymously for fear of arrest. And now the group’s leaders have gone silent or offered only platitudes. “They tell us the same thing we tell each other: stay steadfast,” he said. Brotherhood members had believed “the ridiculous illusion” that General Sisi would never dare kill so many in the streets, he said, and his willingness to take so many lives threw them off course. “Sisi is like a train now, and it will hit anyone and anything in its way,” he said, and “the problem is that those people out there cheering for him don’t understand that the train will get them next.” But like the Brotherhood’s leaders, he said its members had had no choice but to continue the fight as best they could, or face a return to imprisonment and torture. And he promised “a lot of decentralized action.” “Even if Dr. Morsi himself addressed us on television and told us to stop protesting and go home, we won’t do it,” the Brotherhood member said. “It’s now beyond ‘the principle of obedience’ and the group: now it’s about all the blood that was shed.” David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London. Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:08:18 +0000
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