Egypt’s military-appointed government on Monday again postponed its latest threats to forcibly clear two camps here of tens of thousands of supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted president, raising new questions about when and how the authorities might seek to end the six-week-old standoff.
At the same time, in a new rebuke to the protesters’ central demands for an end to the military takeover and the reinstatement of Mr. Morsi, the government formally extended his detention at an undisclosed location by 15 days — a standard procedure here that often continues indefinitely.
It also took a further step toward a potential criminal prosecution of Mr. Morsi on charges relating to his activities during the revolution that ousted his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
While Egyptians broadly consider Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy to have been fundamentally illegitimate, Mr. Morsi is now under investigation related to his own escape from political imprisonment for his work in the Islamist political opposition that helped to fell Mr. Mubarak in 2011.
Among other things, Mr. Morsi is accused of conspiring with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, to break out of prison, a charge many human rights activists consider implausible.
Mr. Morsi has been kept incommunicado at an undisclosed location, a deviation from normal Egyptian judicial procedures. There has been no indication that he will be allowed access to a lawyer.
Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, a former senior intelligence official still close to the service, suggested that it was seditious and unpatriotic to even inquire about Mr. Morsi’s whereabouts.
“ ‘Where’ is nobody’s business,” he said in an interview. “Nobody is supposed to ask this question, and anybody who does is a traitor to this country because this is a matter of national security.”
With little sign of a political resolution, it was unclear why the government announced the threat to disperse the sit-ins Sunday night and then delayed it on Monday morning.
After telling journalists that the police would begin moving to choke off the sit-ins at dawn, Interior Ministry officials said Monday that the “leaks” of their original plans had drawn even larger crowds to the gatherings and forced a deferral. But the two sit-ins, which already resemble small hamlets of both tents and durable structures, did not seem to have swelled significantly.
The interim interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, is a police veteran who served in the same role under Mr. Morsi but refused to protect his party or his supporters, and human rights advocates say he is now a proponent of forceful action against the Islamists.
Egyptian newspapers speculated that the Interior Ministry was playing psychological games to demoralize the demonstrators. It was possible that the new government’s more conciliatory faction, led by Mohamed ElBaradei, the interim vice president and a former diplomat, might have persuaded its dominant leader, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, to postpone the Interior Ministry’s plans.
It also was possible that the new government felt pressure from Western diplomats who are still trying to broker a peaceful resolution.
Source: The New York Times
