THE EGYPTIAN interior ministry has announced a purge of nearly 600 senior officers, who were said to be either loyal to the former regime or accused of killing protesters during the 18-day uprising against it.
The dismissals meet a chief demand of the thousands of Egyptians camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and key sites in Alexandria and Suez.
Among those fired are 505 major-generals and 82 brigadiers, including 37 against whom charges have been laid. While this could be the most thorough restructuring of this sensitive ministry, activists will wait to see how prosecutors and the judiciary deal with the accused.
Egypt’s ruling military council has also nodded to the democracy movement’s demand for parliamentary elections to be postponed from September to give post-uprising political parties more time to organise and campaign.
The decision was announced yesterday by an unidentified army officer who said balloting could be in November. “Procedures [for the registration of candidates] will begin in September, possibly the middle of the month,” he said. Campaigning will follow.
Soon after assuming power in mid-February following the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak, the generals fixed September for the assembly election and pledged to schedule the presidential poll before the end of the year.
However, political groups that emerged from the uprising rejected this time-frame, claiming that it would give the country’s most organised political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, a major advantage.
Activists argued that the assembly election should be 12-18 months from the mid-February fall of Mr Mubarak. Thus the new ruling represents only a partial victory for the protesters.
The generals are also likely to have been motivated to make this modest concession by Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month which falls in August this year. Since little work is done during Ramadan, particularly when it falls during the simmering summer, it would be difficult to prepare for a September election.
Meanwhile, prime minister Essam Sharaf has begun consultations for his promised cabinet reshuffle. If he retains figures who held positions in the ousted regime or in the former ruling National Democratic Party, the reshuffle is likely to be dismissed by the revolutionaries, who have vowed to continue mass action until their demands are fully met.
Now that they are camped in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and staging sit-ins in iconic sites elsewhere, the revolutionaries are not only on the offensive but united in purpose. When they are not protesting, though, they are hopelessly disunited. Instead of forging a national front, they have formed competing political parties, most with similar agendas. Fearing marginalisation, these small factions have established uneasy, incompatible electoral alliances ahead of the elections.
The most curious of these opportunistic alliances is between the Brotherhood and its historical rival, the secular Wafd party, which has been joined by other secular groupings.
Political confusion reigns. Even postponement of the parliamentary poll may not enable the revolutionaries to form a common front.
