Egypt wracked by new turmoil

A violent uprising in northern Egypt left dozens dead and inflamed the rest of the country, threatening the rule of President Mohammed Mursi. The riots began in Port Said, the terminus of the Suez Canal, after a court sentenced 21 people to death for orchestrating a deadly stampede at a soccer stadium last year. They spread to two other Suez Canal cities, where protesters chanted the same slogan that was hurled against dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011: “Leave, leave, leave!” The nation’s top general, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, signaled that the military might withdraw support for Mursi’s government, warning that the Egyptian state was in danger of collapse. “The armed forces are facing a serious dilemma,” he said, as they attempt to end the violence without “confronting citizens and their right to protest.”

Mursi brought this on himself by overreaching, said Dale McFeatters in the Boston Herald. Elected with just 51 percent of the vote, he rammed through an Islamist constitution as if the Muslim Brotherhood had an overwhelming mandate. Now he is behaving like Mubarak, imposing a state of emergency that gives police the power to detain people indefinitely without charge. Yet using that “hated law” only “brought the rioters out in even greater force.” To save his presidency, Mursi must now appease the opposition.

Not necessarily, said Issandr El Amrani in NYTimes

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.com. Port Said has been a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment since colonial times. Many residents believe the central government had it in for them because of a 1999 assassination attempt against Mubarak. Now they believe that Mursi’s government scapegoated their soccer fans for the stadium stampede to placate Cairo fans who were active in the revolution. This rebellion, then, “may be as much about alienation from Egypt’s Cairo-centric politics as it is about Mursi’s performance.”

But alienation is everywhere, said Ezzedine Choukri Fishere in the Financial Times. Protesters have been killed this week in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as well. Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood has failed to grasp that Egypt is a nation of youths, many of them deeply disaffected. More than half of Egyptians are under 30, and whether they are in the opposition, the state institutions, or the Brotherhood, they “question authority, and are prepared to do so openly.” Mursi had better wake up. The current turmoil just shows “how fast the situation can deteriorate, and how bad it can get.”