another_liberal
another_liberal's JournalEgypt says no concessions to Morsi supporters.
Source: Al Jazeera
Egypt's interim president, Adly Mansour, has blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the "failure" of international talks aimed at resolving Egypt's political crisis, and warned supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi that the government will not make any concessions to them. "The train of the future has left the station," he said in a televised address on Wednesday night, marking the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the Eid al-Fitr holiday. "It's moving forward, and all of us have to catch it."
Earlier, the presidency announced the end of foreign-led efforts to resolve the turmoil, which has been spiralling since the army toppled Morsi on July 3. In a statement carried on state news agency MENA, it said: "The Egyptian state ... holds the Muslim Brotherhood fully responsible for the failure of those efforts [by foreign envoys] and what may be the consequences of this failure. "Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawy warned, meanwhile, that the government's decision to clear the ongoing pro-Morsi protests is "final," and urged demonstrators to leave, saying they had "broken all the limits of peacefulness". "The government's patience to bear this is nearly expired," he said, adding that any use of weapons against policemen or citizens would "be confronted with utmost force and decisiveness."
All of this follows a call by Qatar's foreign minister, Khaled al-Attiya, to release members of the Muslim Brotherhood from jail, and come amid visits to Cairo by US senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Foreign envoys from America, Europe, Africa and several Gulf Arab states have been visiting Egypt in the past month, with little success.
In a joint statement issued on Wednesday, US secretary of state John Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said they "remain ready to help in any way that we can." "The Egyptian government bears a special responsibility to begin this process to ensure the safety and welfare of its citizens," the two added. "What I see is that confrontation is mounting and that more people will turn to the streets to protest and the tendency in the armed forces to repress that will mount," said Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans, the latest foreign official to visit Cairo. "So I think there's need to be worried about the next days and weeks," he said.
(snip)
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/201387191527494149.html
Yeah, those Muslim Brotherhood people caused all of this trouble by winning Egypt's first democratic election and then insisting their democratically elected President had the right to finish his lawful term. Now they won't stop complaining or get behind the military coup which removed their government by force, and they have made the army kill hundreds of their sit-in protesters. Those mean old Muslim Brotherhood people!
Fresh diplomatic efforts to end Egypt crisis.
Source: Al Jazeera
International efforts to end the crisis in Egypt are gaining momentum as diplomats from the Gulf, the EU and the US have met the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat el-Shater, who is currently in jail. Sources told Al Jazeera's Jamal Al Shayyal that Shater met with the diplomats face-to-face but refused to negotiate with them, insisting that the delegation meet with ousted president Mohamed Morsi instead. Shayyal, reporting from Nasr City in Cairo, said that this is "a hugely significant development on the political and diplomatic front". Shater met with the foreign ministers of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and the European Union representative to the Middle East.
"We understand the meeting lasted just under an hour, and in that meeting Shater told the delegates they should not be wasting their time negotiating with him, and that Egypt has a president, and his name is Mohamed Morsi."
(snip)
Meanwhile, the MENA agency cited an "informed source" as saying the envoys seeking to mediate an end to Egypt's crisis had received permission from the prosecutor-general to visit Shater. The fresh mediation has been gathering pace at a time when the army-backed government says it will give mediation a chance. To that end, US senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are due to arrive in Cairo on Monday as diplomatic efforts to end the country's political crisis intensify.
(snip)
Meanwhile on Sunday, the Cairo appeals court announced an August 25 date for the trial of six Brotherhood officials on charges of murder and incitement. The defendants include the group's leader, Mohamed Badie. The group is accused of inciting clashes outside their headquarters on June 30, which left at least 12 people dead. Prosecutors also ordered Morsi's top aide, Rifaa Tehtawi, held for 15 days pending an investigation into charges connected to last December's clashes at the presidential palace. Tehtawi was detained last month along with the former president. Protests against the army-backed ouster of Morsi, meanwhile, continue in Cairo and elsewhere
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/2013852247398586.html
Be sure and follow the link to the original article. There is a video offered which profiles some of the protesters calling for the restoration of democracy in Egypt. Among them are two very well spoken young American women of Egyptian descent. Their comments are not to be missed.
Egypt denies entry to Yemeni Nobel laureate.
Source: Al Jazeera
Egyptian authorities have barred Yemeni Nobel Peace laureate Tawakul Karman from entering the country on Sunday and put her on a flight back to Dubai, security sources said. State news agency MENA said Karman, who had previously announced her solidarity with supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi, was on a list of people who were not allowed to enter Egypt. A spokesperson for Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood said Karman had recently joined demonstrations in Cairo demanding the former leader be reinstated. Karman's Twitter feed on Sunday said the writer and activist had been held at Cairo Airport and was prevented from joining protests. She was sent back on the same plane she flew in on, the security sources said on Sunday.
The Brotherhood criticised Karman's deportation and said it was reminiscent of the rule of former autocrat Hosni Mubarak. "This is an abandonment of the gains of Egypt's January revolution. The government is reproducing the practices of Mubarak's state security," said Yasser Ali, a Brotherhood official and former presidential spokesperson.
Karman, a 34-year-old mother of three, who became a figure of symbolic importance in the 2011 Yemeni uprising, was the first Arab woman and second Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In Yemen she is called the "Iron Woman" and "Mother of the Revolution". Karman, a member of Yemen's leading Islamic opposition party, al-Islah, had denounced the army's toppling of Morsi, calling it a "coup" and a "blow to democracy".
In a statement on Friday, she said it had weakened moderate political Islam and strengthened the hand of religious fighters in the Arab world. "We can't allow this sense of disappointment in democracy to grow. This is terrifying. Rest assured the first beneficiary of the weakening currents of political Islam are violent terror groups."
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/20138501454455212.html
Nobel Peace Prize winner, champion of democracy and women's rights, first Arab woman to win the Nobel prize? To hell with all that, she doesn't bow to the rule of the military junta, so throw her out!
John Kerry needs to watch this video . . .
Before John Kerry again uses the "many millions of protesters" who rallied to oust Egyptian President Morsi as his justification for continuing aid to the coup-leading generals, he needs to watch this video.
http://www.aljazeera.com/video/middleeast/2013/07/2013731172227211968.html
Tahrir Square and its side streets can only hold about a quarter of a million people, maximum, not the several fucking millions so widely reported! If you add in the maximum capacity of the other centers of anti-Morsi protest, such as Alexandria and Port Said, it comes to a total of maybe one to one and a half million, not the fourteen to thirty million CNN's Wolf Blitzer so confidently estimated. In fact, the actual number of anti-Morsi demonstrators rallying at the end of June was probably somewhat less than a million, nation-wide.
Egypt cabinet orders end to sit-in protest.
Source: Al Jazeera.
Egypt's cabinet has tasked police to take "all necessary measures" to end protests by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, warning that their demonstrations pose a national security threat. "The continuation of the dangerous situation in Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares, and consequent terrorism and road blockages are no longer acceptable given the threat to national security," it said in a statement on Wednesday.
Morsi's supporters have been camped out in both squares demanding his reinstatement. "The government has decided to take all necessary measures to confront and end these dangers, and tasks the interior minister to do all that is necessary in this regard, in accordance with the constitution and law," the statement read.
Minutes before the statement, authorities said they had referred the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, and two other senior movement officials to a court on charges of inciting violence. The move is certain to deepen tensions between Islamists and the military, who removed Egypt's Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, from power on July 3.
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/2013731144419285305.html
Looks like this could be the end game for peaceful protests against the Egyptian generals who overthrew that nation's democratically elected government. The Coup leaders should be far more afraid of what will follow should peaceful protests become impossible.
Egypt crisis: 'we didn't have space in the fridges for all the bodies'
Source: The Guardian.
The sand-filled forecourt outside the Zeinhom morgue, Cairo's main mortuary, was a carousel of coffins. From the left-hand door, out came families carrying dead relatives to their funerals, stray dogs sniffing at their heels. Through the door on the right, in went still more bodies for their autopsies. By the end of Sunday, officials had assessed 82 corpses, as the death toll from Saturday's police massacre of pro-Morsi supporters kept rising. So too did the mourners' feelings of isolation. "If this was animals being killed, people would care," said one of those outside the morgue, lawyer Islam Taher, alluding to the indifference of mainstream Egyptian opinion to the death of Morsi supporters. "But because it's us, they don't."
On Friday 28 June, Taher had pitched camp with his childhood friend Mohamed Fahmy, a 28-year-old unemployed commerce graduate from a small village in eastern Egypt, at the Rabaa Adawiya sit-in in east Cairo, near where Saturday's massacre took place. On Sunday, exactly a month later, both arrived together at the the Zeinhom morgue – but this time Fahmy was dead in a battered brown coffin, shot through his right temple by a police marksman, after a night-time pro-Morsi march on Saturday morning turned into a massacre. "Suddenly, he had a bullet through the front of his head, and a hole out the other side," said Taher, holding out a picture taken on his phone of a brain-dead Fahmy breathing his last hours earlier. "He didn't have any weapons. He just had his bare chest."
State officials said Saturday's deaths took place after pro-Morsi protesters fired first – and even claimed that police only used teargas to disperse them. But protesters told of a state-initiated bloodbath and a subsequent cover-up. "We asked them to record his death as a murder by police," said Ashraf Mamdouh, loading the body of his brother-in-law, Hegazy Zakaria, into a van that would take him to his funeral in a village outside Cairo. "But they forced us to accuse anonymous sources."
Inside the morgue, the scene had been one of mayhem. "We didn't have enough places in the fridges to fit all the bodies," said Dr Hazem Hossam, an official at Zeinhom. "We had to do autopsies on the floor. At some points we had to ask families to help us with the process. It was chaos."
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/28/egypt-crisis-cairo-massacre-morsi
"But they forced us to accuse anonymous sources."
Ah yes, the ever deadly, and oh so convenient, "anonymous sources." Funny how they never seem to shoot anyone but protestors. Such good shots too, almost always right through the head.
Egypt official warns Brotherhood again.
Source: Al Jazeera.
Egypt's interior minister has pledged to deal decisively with any attempts to destabilise the country, a thinly veiled warning to supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi occupying two squares in Cairo in a month-long stand-off with the security forces. Sunday's warning came as authorities said that the death toll in weekend clashes between Morsi's backers and security forces near one of the sit-ins had reached 72, in the deadliest single outbreak of violence since the July 3 military coup.
"I assure the people of Egypt that the police are determined to maintain security and safety to their nation and are capable of doing so," Mohamed Ibrahim told a graduation ceremony at the national police academy. "We will very decisively deal with any attempt to undermine stability," said Ibrahim, who is in charge of the police. In an apparent show of support for the police, a smiling military chief, Abdel Fatah el Sisi, turned up at a graduation ceremony on Sunday broadcast live on state television, receiving a standing ovation from the recruits. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim hailed him as "Egypt's devoted son".
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid, reporting from Cairo, said his comments come off the back of events over the past week, beginning with the "popular mandate" given to the army to "fight terrorism". "By association, the police also got the same mandate. We've already seen them co-operating on the ground, and we've already heard they will be co-operating together in the coming days."
However, in one of the first signs of doubt from within the interim cabinet installed after the military takeover, Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Ziad Bahaa El-Din said the government must not copy the "oppressive and exclusionary policies" of its foes. "Our position must remain fixed on the need to provide legal guarantees not only for the members of the Brotherhood, but for every Egyptian citizen. Excessive force is not permitted," El-Din wrote on Facebook. And in another sign of unease, the Tamarud youth protest movement, which mobilised millions of people against Morsi and has fully backed the army, expressed alarm at an announcement that the interior minister was reviving the feared secret political police shut down after Mubarak was toppled.
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/201372812425783294.html
"We will very decisively deal with any attempt to undermine stability."
After all, there are few things more "stable" than a crowded graveyard full of murdered protesters.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks' resumption put in doubt by both sides.
Source: The Guardian
Moves towards a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were mired in rumours, rebuttals, criticism and confusion on Sunday in an indication of the political and diplomatic swamp facing key negotiators and their mediator, the US secretary of state, John Kerry. In a high-profile dismissal of the embryonic process, Israel's former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, wrote on Facebook that there was "no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not in the coming years, and what's possible and important to do is conflict-management". Naftali Bennett, economics minister, insisted construction on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would continue, regardless of talks.
The comments by two crucial partners in the Israeli coalition are a sign of deep hostility within the government over the agreement for preliminary talks forged by Kerry on Friday. Meanwhile, a veteran Palestinian negotiator, Yasser Abed Rabbo, denied that a firm decision had been taken to enter talks, saying further clarification was needed on a framework and the Palestinians were still discussing terms with Kerry. According to a Palestinian source, Kerry had written a letter giving a US assurance that the basis of territorial talks would be the pre-1967 border, but it was not clear whether the letter had been delivered. "If we have well-defined terms of reference and a clear time frame – by which we mean the end of the year – we will go into talks," the source said.
Among the few formal statements of the day, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told cabinet colleagues that resuming the diplomatic process was "a vital strategic interest of the State of Israel, first of all because we want peace". However, any agreement would be put to a referendum of the Israeli public, he added. The Israeli president, Shimon Peres, congratulated his Palestinian counterpart on "a brave and historic decision to return to negotiations". He added: "Don't listen to the sceptics, you did the right thing."
Among the sceptics were Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza, which described any engagement in talks by the Palestinian leadership as a "betrayal". There was no firm indication of when preliminary talks in Washington might begin. Kerry said in his statement on Friday that if everything went "as expected" the first meeting would take place "within a week or so". The main sticking point continues to be the Palestinian demand that the pre-1967 borders form the baseline for territorial negotiations, a guarantee which Israel refuses to give. If Kerry fails to persuade the Palestinians they have firm US backing on the issue, talks may fail to get off the ground. There is also disagreement over the timeframe. Israel is pushing for negotiations to last up to a year, fuelling concern among critics who believe Netanyahu is seeking to give the appearance of diplomatic co-operation while stalling for as long as possible on any outcome.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/21/israel-palestinian-peace-talks-doubt
Tzipi Livni is representing Israel's government at the talks? How serious can Netanyahu be if he chooses a negotiator who not long ago had to cancel a trip to London for fear (reportedly) of being arrested on war crimes charges?
Israeli-Palestinian talks: speculation mounts on possible breakthrough
I'm beginning to feel a little like a child's yo yo. Maybe this is really good news, so I'm very happy! Maybe this is baloney and hot air, so I feel let down and used. Who knows at this point? Anyway, here's part of the article and a link:
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has convened a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah amid mounting speculation about an imminent breakthrough in US efforts to persuade both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to return to the negotiating table. Abbas will report on his latest meetings with the US secretary of state, John Kerry, in Amman this week and confer with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the main political factions on proposals for the resumption of talks.
Israel's president Shimon Peres further raised expectations in a statement which said: "From the latest information at my disposal, Secretary Kerry has succeeded in progressing the chance for opening peace talks.... The coming days are crucial and we are within touching distance." Both parties, he added, were "making an effort to overcome the final obstacles". Thursday's meeting of the Palestinian leadership follows a statement issued by Arab League diplomats in Amman on Wednesday endorsing new negotiations, and an assessment by Kerry that the gaps between the two sides had significantly narrowed.
"Through hard and deliberate work, we have been able to narrow those gaps very significantly," Kerry told a press conference. "We continue to get closer and I continue to be hopeful that the two sides will come to sit at the same table." However, he added: "There is still some language that needs to be worked out".
An Arab League statement said: "The Arab delegates believe Kerry's ideas ... constitute a good ground and suitable environment for restarting the negotiations." It added that "any future deal must be based on a two-state solution and through establishing an independent Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 borders with a limited exchange of lands in the same value and size."
(snip)
The remainder can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/18/israeli-palestinian-talks-mahmoud-abbas
Netanyahu spokesman denies Israel agreed to 1967 border formula
Source: Reuters
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied on Tuesday an official's remarks that Israel had agreed to resume peace talks based on the borders of a Palestinian state being drawn along lines from before a 1967 Middle East war, and agreed land swaps. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said "the report is untrue," calling Reuters with the statement after initially declining to comment on what the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official had said that, were the Palestinians to accept the formula, it would be announced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry now in Jordan, who would also describe the future Palestine as existing alongside a "Jewish state" of Israel.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/18/us-palestinians-israel-formula-idUSBRE96H0CN20130718
It was a wonderful dream, while it lasted.
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