Egypt's Arrest of Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Brings Ban Closer

Muslim Brotherhood rally on August 2, 2013 demanding the release and reinstatement of ousted President Mohamed Morsi., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

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Egypt's arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide brings ban closer

Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie and five others will stand trial on charges that include inciting murder.

By Raja Abdulrahim and Jeffrey Fleishman
5:52 PM PDT, August 20, 2013

CAIRO — Egypt's military-backed government moved closer to a complete ban on the Muslim Brotherhood with the arrest of the group's leader and an announcement that he and five others will stand trial within days on charges that include inciting murder.

Most of the group's senior leaders, including chief strategist and financier Khairat Shater and Mohamed Morsi, the president deposed by the military, were already in custody when officials announced Tuesday that they had arrested Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie.

The military's crackdown on the Brotherhood, starting with the raid on two pro-Morsi sit-ins last week, has been swift and ferocious. It appears to want to keep the Brotherhood, its arch-foe for decades, from regaining any momentum as it attempts to silence dissent and build support to control the nation.

Police raids on the sit-ins last week and the protests and violence that ensued killed more than 900 Morsi supporters, many of them shot with live ammunition fired by security forces.

More than 1,000 Brotherhood members have been arrested across the country in recent days. Those leaders who have so far avoided arrest have gone underground. An organization that less than two months ago was in charge of Egypt's first democratically elected government has largely been reduced to communicating through Twitter and Facebook.

Western governments and human rights groups have condemned the violence, but appear to have little leverage. The Obama administration has delayed the delivery of F-16 fighter planes and canceled joint military exercises, but denied reports Tuesday that it had secretly cut off economic or military aid.

The military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi, appears increasingly confident. It has framed its effort as a struggle against terrorism. Millions support this narrative and the Brotherhood, reeling after the attacks that dispersed the sit-ins, has been unable to muster the large street demonstrations it has promised.

Many Egyptians were uneasy with the Islamist agenda pursued by the Brotherhood during its year in power, and angered by its inability to improve the economy after the 2011 "Arab Spring" revolt against Hosni Mubarak.

Public sentiment has deepened against the group, especially after Monday's killing of 25 police officers by Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula. Although there is no evidence linking the two, the killing of the police officers came after the deaths a day earlier of at least 36 Brotherhood members who were in police custody.

The image of a shaken 70-year-old Badie, dressed in a gray tunic sitting next to a bottle of water in police custody, distilled the desperation the world's most influential Islamist organization faces against an army that appears determined to crush it.

"When the hand of oppression extends to arrest this important symbol," the Brotherhood said in a statement regarding Badie, "that means the military coup has used up everything in its pocket and is readying to depart."

Much of the group's strategy appears to have shifted to the Anti-Coup Alliance, an umbrella group the Brotherhood organized to protest Morsi's ouster July 3.

"The alliance will take a bigger role," said Ahmad Abu Zaid, a political member of the group, noting that the alliance represents a broader spectrum of the opposition to the military coup. Some who are against the Brotherhood could find the alliance a more appealing way to express their opposition to the military, he said.

Much of the opposition has now moved to the grass roots, Abu Zaid said.

"Arresting the leadership of the Brotherhood or even the symbolic leaders will not affect the activism on the ground," he said.

Officials announced that Badie and the five others, including Shater, would go on trial Sunday. Badie is also charged with attempted murder and supplying young Brotherhood supporters with weapons. State media reported that the charges stem from the June killings of anti-Morsi demonstrators during clashes outside the group's headquarters in Cairo.

Ali Kamal, a Brotherhood attorney, called the charges "fabricated."

"What they are facing are nothing but political trumped-up charges thinly painted with criminal colors," he said in a statement posted on the group's website.

The group's leaders also are facing personal tragedies: Badie's son, Ammar, was killed in protests Friday, and the daughter of prominent member Mohamed Beltagy died in a police raid last week.

Bahey eldin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, said the Brotherhood was facing a scenario similar to what it endured under Mubarak, who outlawed the group. But the current situation has proved more volatile, he said.

It is also reminiscent of its predicament in the 1950s, when then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser persecuted the group, sending it underground for decades. Only when Mubarak was overthrown in 2011 was the Brotherhood transformed from a secret opposition movement into the country's most powerful political force.

That brief period as the ruling party has left the Brotherhood stronger than it was under Nasser, said Walid Badry, a spokesman for the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood's political wing.

"In the Brotherhood's history it has been subjected to even worse and it was not affected," he said, adding that there were other leaders ready to take the place of those arrested.

In the absence of a negotiated settlement, both the Brotherhood and the military are likely to become more radical in their response to the other, Hassan said.

"We would have allowed for debate and negotiation, even within the Muslim Brotherhood, to evaluate the grave mistakes of the leadership recently," he said. "Any evaluation or open political debate … would have led to different repercussions."

Badie's replacement as supreme guide is Mahmoud Ezzat. The Ahram Online news website described Ezzat as a member of the group since the 1960s who has been arrested several times over the decades for his opposition to the government.

Ezzat, considered to be the group's ideological leader, is more radical than some of the other top Brotherhood members, Hassan said.

Despite the crackdown, the Brotherhood still retains strong support in some areas, he said, "and when a grass-roots organization goes radical it means the country is headed down the path of hell."

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

raja.abdulrahim@latimes.com

Special correspondent Ingy Hassieb contributed to this report.