by NTEB News Desk
(Reuters)
- Egyptian police battled thousands of protesters outside President
Mohamed Mursi's palace in Cairo on Tuesday, prompting the Islamist
leader to leave the building, two presidential sources said.
Police
fired teargas at demonstrators angered by Mursi's drive to hold a
referendum on a new constitution on December 15. Some broke through
police lines around his palace and protested next to the perimeter wall.
Several
thousand people had gathered nearby in what they dubbed "last warning"
protests against Mursi, who infuriated opponents with a November 22
decree that expanded his powers. "The people want the downfall of the
regime," the crowd chanted.
"The president left the palace," a presidential source, who declined to be named, told Reuters. A security source at the presidency also said the president had left the building.
Mursi
ignited a storm of unrest in his bid to prevent a judiciary still
packed with appointees of ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak from
derailing a troubled political transition.
Riot
police at the palace faced off against activists chanting "leave,
leave" and holding Egyptian flags with "no to the constitution" written
on them. Protesters had assembled near mosques in northern Cairo before
marching towards the palace.
"Our
marches are against tyranny and the void constitutional decree and we
won't retract our position until our demands are met," said Hussein
Abdel Ghany, a spokesman for an opposition coalition of liberal, leftist
and other disparate factions.
Despite
the latest protests, there has been only a limited response to
opposition calls for a mass campaign of civil disobedience in the Arab
world's most populous country and cultural hub, where many people yearn
for a return to stability.
A
few hundred protesters gathered earlier near Mursi's house in a suburb
east of Cairo, chanting slogans against his decree and against the
Muslim Brotherhood, from which the president emerged to win a free
election in June. Police closed the road to stop them from coming any
closer, a security official said.
Opposition
groups have accused Mursi of making a dictatorial power grab to push
through a constitution drafted by an assembly dominated by Islamists,
with a referendum planned for December 15.
Egypt's
most widely read independent newspapers did not publish on Tuesday in
protest at Mursi's "dictatorship". Banks closed early to let staff go
home safely in case of trouble.
Abdelrahman
Mansour in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the cradle of the anti-Mubarak
revolt, said: "The presidency believes the opposition is too weak and
toothless. Today is the day we show them the opposition is a force to be
reckoned with."
After winning post-Mubarak elections and pushing the Egyptian military out of the political driving seat it held for decades, the Islamists sense their moment has come to shape the future of Egypt, a longtime U.S. ally whose 1979 peace treaty with Israel is a cornerstone of Washington's Middle East policy.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, who staged a huge pro-Mursi demonstration on Saturday, are confident that enough members of the judiciary will be available to oversee the mid-December referendum, despite calls by some judges for a boycott.
Cairo
stocks closed up 3.5 percent on Tuesday as investors took heart at what
they saw as prospects for a return to stability in a country whose
divisions have only widened since a mass uprising toppled Mubarak on
February 11, 2011.
Mohamed
Radwan, at Pharos Securities brokerage, said the Supreme Judicial
Council's agreement to supervise the referendum had generated confidence
that the vote would happen "despite all the noise and demonstrations
that might take place until then".
"NO WAY PERFECT"
Prime
Minister Hisham Kandil, a technocrat with Islamist sympathies, said in
an interview with CNN: "We certainly hope that things will quiet down
after the referendum is completed."
He
said the constitution was "in no way a perfect text" that everyone had
agreed to, but that a "majority consensus" favored moving forward with
the referendum in 11 days' time.
The Muslim Brotherhood, now tasting power via the ballot box for the first time in eight decades of struggle, wants to safeguard its gains and appears ready to override street protests by what it regards as an unrepresentative minority.
It
is also determined to stop the courts, which have already dissolved the
Islamist-led elected lower house of parliament, from further
obstructing their blueprint for change.
Mohamed
ElBaradei, coordinator of an opposition National Salvation Front, has
said Mursi must rescind his decree, drop plans for the referendum and
agree on a new, more representative constituent assembly to draft a
democratic constitution.
In
an opinion piece published in the Financial Times, he accused Mursi and
the Brotherhood of believing that "with a few strokes of a pen, they
can slide (Egypt) back into a coma".
ElBaradei,
a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who once headed the U.N. nuclear watchdog,
wrote: "If they continue to try, they risk an eruption into violence
and chaos that will destroy the fabric of Egyptian society."
Despite
charges that they are anti-Islamist and politically motivated, judges
say they are following legal codes in their rulings. Experts say some
political changes rushed through in the past two years have been on
shaky legal ground.
A Western diplomat said the Islamists were counting on a popular desire for restored normality and economic stability.
"All
the messages from the Muslim Brotherhood are that a vote for the
constitution is one for stability and a vote against is one for
uncertainty," he said, adding that the cost of the strategy was a
"breakdown in consensus politics". source - Reuters
