Morsi accused of plotting with Hamas ahead of massive rallies in Egypt

The Egyptian army announced it is detaining ousted President Mohamed Morsi over alleged links with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in connection with his escape, along with other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, from prison in 2011 during the revolution, which saw the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak. In addition to conspiring with Hamas, the army is holding Morsi for allegedly killing prisoners and officers, as well as kidnapping officers and soldiers, and setting fire to the prison. A top Egyptian court ordered Friday that Morsi be held for 15 days pending an investigation. Morsi has been detained at an undisclosed location since his removal from office on July 3. The judicial order was issued ahead of planned major rival protests for Friday. Earlier in the week, army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for Egyptians to take to the streets to show support for a military mandate to stop "violence and terrorism." Meanwhile, after receiving a legal opinion from lawyers, the U.S. administration has concluded it is not legally required to determine whether the Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi was a coup. If the United States were to designate the events as such, it would be legally required to halt financial assistance to Egypt, a move the administration is concerned could further destabilize the country. A senior official remarked, "The law does not require us to make a formal determination as to whether a coup took place, and it is not in our national interest to make such a determination."

Syria

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that over 100,000 people have been killed in the nearing two and a half year long conflict in Syria. Ban told the United Nations it is "imperative to have a peace conference in Geneva as soon as possible." Additionally, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated the Obama administration’s commitment to a long-delayed peace conference. Later Thursday, Kerry met with senior members of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, which pushed for the committed delivery of military support from the United States. The National Coalition also announced Thursday it will meet on August 3 and 4 in Istanbul for discussions on forming a provisional government hoping to "strengthen" the group’s position. Meanwhile, Syrian opposition fighters have reportedly overtaken multiple Syrian regime positions in the north and south of the country. According to activists, rebel fighters killed over 150 soldiers in Khan al-Assal on Monday and Tuesday. According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 51 of the soldiers and officers were executed.

Headlines

• Tunisia’s unions have called for a general strike for Friday in protest of the assassination of opposition leader Mohamed Brahimi in Tunis Thursday, the second Popular Front politician to be killed in less than six months.
• The U.S. announced the easing of sanctions on medical equipment and humanitarian aid on Iran in a move seen by many analysts as a good will gesture ahead of President-elect Rowhani’s entering office.
• An estimated 28 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Thursday, the deadliest of which was a car bombing in a busy market in Muqdadiya, about 50 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Arguments and Analysis

‘"Combating Terrorism" Does Not Justify an Extralegal Mandate‘ (Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies)

"The undersigned rights organizations express their grave concern over the statement made by the Minister of Defense, on behalf of both the armed forces and the police, calling on the Egyptian people to grant him a mandate to ‘combat terrorism’.  The most prominent causes for concern over this statement are as follows:

-Current Egyptian legislation includes provisions which clearly criminalize all acts of terrorism.  Not only is Egyptian law sufficient in this area, but some of these laws exceed the legitimate grounds for combating terrorism by criminalizing acts which should be protected as forms of freedom of expression.

-Even if loopholes were to be found in the laws currently in place, addressing the matter would not require a ‘popular’ mandate allowing the army and the police to act outside the law.  Rather, the matter should be dealt with by reinforcing the rule of law.  This could be achieved by the interim president — who holds broad exceptional powers — issuing the appropriate legal amendments after consulting with the vice president, the prime minister, and legal and rights experts."

‘Special Report: How the Muslim Brotherhood Lost Egypt‘ (Edmund Blair, Paul Taylor, and Tom Perry, Reuters)

"Exactly when the military decided it would overthrow Mursi is disputed. Senior officers said that General Sisi, up until the last day of his ultimatum for the president to accept a power-sharing agreement, continued to hope Mursi would agree to call a referendum on the continuation of his rule. That would have given a constitutional fig-leaf to his departure.

A senior army colonel said the military had acted to save the country from civil war. ‘This has nothing to do with the army wanting power, but with the people wanting the army to be involved. They trust us, you know, because we will always be with the Egyptian people, not with a person or a regime,’ he said.

The military now faces the same conundrum it failed to solve in 2011-12: how to make Egypt work without taking responsibility, and hence unpopularity, for painful reforms?

In their first temporary stint in power, the generals presided over a period of economic stagnation, unabated human rights abuses and scant reform. They seemed almost relieved to hand the poison chalice to Mursi upon his election, even though they did not trust the Brotherhood with all the levers of power.

This time, it’s different, said the colonel. The army will not govern and there will be a short, sharp transition to elected civilian government. Yet despite a sudden infusion of $12 billion in Saudi, UAE and Kuwaiti aid, the starting conditions look worse than for the previous period of military rule."

‘Syrian refugees: no way home‘ (Editorial, The Guardian)

"In parts of Turkey, Syrian refugee families are having more babies and sending more children to school than the locals, in admittedly sparsely populated border regions. In Egypt, middle-class refugees who made it to Cairo and other cities face a prejudice which is a consequence of Egypt’s own political divisions rather than anything they have done. It is not that arrangements in the host countries are ungenerous, or that international organisations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have not done a decent job.

Rather it is that life in this sort of exile, pushed out of one society and held at arms length by another, is inherently miserable. People may not starve but they have no employment or status, and while personal security is better, it is far from perfect. Refugees, however, are not just victims. They can also in time become actors in the societies to which they have moved. Lebanon learned that when Palestinian refugees started to play a role, often an aggressive one, in the country’s politics, a process which helped bring on a terrible civil war. Now Lebanon is looking after 600,000 Syrians and the strain is telling.

Who can say how the vexed relations between Sunnis and Shias in Lebanon or between moderate Sunnis and Islamists will be affected by this influx? In Jordan, there are similar memories of how the clashes with the PLO led to a traumatic internal war. The parallels are of course incomplete, but they are a reminder that refugees rarely turn their backs on the conflict that displaced them."

–Mary Casey & Joshua Haber