Egyptian protesters refuse generals' offer for transition

Head of ruling military council says presidential elections will be held before 30 June in televised address

guardian.co.uk, Peter Beaumont and agencies, Tuesday 22 November 2011

Protesters place a puppet depicting Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi on an
Egyptian national flag in Tahrir Square. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El
Ghany/Reuters

Egypt's ruling military struggled to quell growing protests over its slow progress in transferring power to a civilian government, as tens of thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square rejected its offer of concessions.

The country's military rulers on Tuesday afternoon suggested a deadline of July next year for a transfer of power – after a crisis meeting lasting five hours.

Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, later told the nation in a televised address that presidential elections would be held before 30 June, but did not specifically mention a date for the transfer of power.

In his brief address, he sought to cast the military as the nation's foremost patriots and angrily denounced what he called attempts to taint its reputation.

But in scenes reminiscent of the street violence that pushed former president Hosni Mubarak from power, protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square vowed not to leave until Tantawi and his council of generals immediately gave up power to a civilian transitional authority.

The protesters chanted: "We are not leaving, [Tantawi] leaves," and, "The people want to bring down the field marshal."

The forthright refusal of the generals' offer stirred memories of the response to Mubarak's attempts, played out over three national speeches, to hang on to power earlier this year.

It sets the stage for a growing conflict between the generals and activists angry at the military's reluctance to withdraw from Egyptian politics.

As pungent clouds of teargas set off stampedes, activists in and around Tahrir Square chanted: "Stay, stay, stay."

The latest street fighting in Cairo, which has begun spreading to other major cities including Alexandria, comes just a week before scheduled parliamentary elections.

The latest moves came as the US, which gives Egypt's military $1.3bn (£830m) a year in aid called for an end to the "deplorable" violence and said Egypt must go forward towards its elections.

"We are deeply concerned about the violence. The violence is deplorable. We call on all sides to exercise restraint," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

Earlier on Tuesday the army council headed by Tantawi, who served as Mubarak's defence minister for two decades, held talks with politicians on the crisis, in which at least 36 people have been killed and more than 1,250 wounded since Saturday, according to medical officials.

Aboul-Ela Madi and Mohammed Selim el-Awa, two politicians who attended the five-hour meeting with the military rulers, said the generals had accepted the offered resignation of prime minister Essam Sharaf's government and said they planned to form a "national salvation" cabinet to replace it.

Previously, the military rulers had floated late next year or early 2013 as the time for transferring power.

"Our demands are clear. We want the military council to step down and hand over authority to a national salvation government with full authority," said Khaled El-Sayed, a member of the Youth Revolution Coalition and a candidate in the parliamentary election. He said the commander of the military police and the interior minister, who is in charge of the police, must be tried for the "horrific crimes" of the past few days.

"This is the maximum we can reach. The [Tahrir] square is something and the politics is something else," Madi told Associated Press in a telephone interview. He and Awa were among 12 political party representatives and presidential hopefuls who attended the meeting with the military council. Not all parties were represented.

Madi and Awa also said the military agreed to release all protesters detained since Saturday and to put on trial police and army officers responsible for protesters' deaths.

They said the military agreed to hold presidential elections before the end of June 2012, a vote the ruling council has deemed the final stage necessary for transferring power.

The powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which anticipates a strong showing in the election, was among the five parties at the crisis talks with the military council. Three presidential candidates were also there, but a fourth, Mohamed ElBaradei, stayed away.

"Elections must be held on time and we will push for a specific timetable for the transitional period," Saad el-Katatni, secretary general of the Brotherhood's newly-formed Freedom and Justice party, told Reuters.

Presidential candidate Amr Moussa echoed the call for the election to go ahead, but said a presidential vote should take place no more than six months after the lengthy process of polling for both houses of parliament is completed in March.

Under the army's plans, parliament would name a constituent assembly to draw up a constitution within six months that would then go to a referendum. Only after that would a new president be elected to take back the powers of the military council.

In the port city of Alexandria, about 5,000 people marched to join 2,000 already demonstrating against army rule outside a military command headquarters, witnesses said.

The unrest has knocked Egypt's markets. The benchmark share index has fallen 11% since Thursday, hitting its lowest level since March 2009. The Egyptian pound fell to its weakest against the dollar since January 2005.

In a stinging verdict on nine months of army control, rights group Amnesty International accused the military council of brutality sometimes exceeding that of Mubarak.

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