Protesters against military rule return to Cairo square

TENS OF thousands of demonstrators returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square yesterday to protest against military rule, while in Syria the army fired bullets and tear gas at protesters taking to the streets to call for regime change.

In Egypt, fundamentalists and secular liberals participated in the demonstration, the largest for many months, against the military’s handling of the transition to democracy.

They called for the exclusion from power of all members of the ousted regime, the holding of the presidential election as scheduled on May 23rd-24th and the hand-over by the military to the new president by the end of June.

Liberals who launched the 2011 uprising did not secure fundamentalist support for a “revolution” candidate. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood and ultra-orthodox Salafists called for a “second revolution”, a demand analysts suspect is meant to exert pressure on the ruling military council to share power with the fundamentalists.

Salafists insisted on the reinstatement of their leading candidate, Hazem Abu Ismail, a popular television preacher disqualified because his mother held US citizenship, while the Brotherhood condemned the disqualification of its leading candidate, Khairat el- Shater, due to convictions for money laundering and funding the organisation while it was banned.

The fundamentalists are accused of grabbing power following their victory in the parliamentary election, assumption of the speakership and appointment of a fundamentalist-dominated commission to draft a new constitution.

In Syria, protests were reported in Damascus and outlying towns Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Deraa, cradle of the 13-month revolt. Violations of the UN-imposed ceasefire were reported. The London-based opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Syrian army lobbed mortars into the rebel-held Khaldiyeh district of Homs and raided villages along the borders with Turkey and Lebanon.

The official Syrian news agency, Sana, said a roadside bomb killed 10 soldiers near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, said the UN hoped to have 30 ceasefire monitors in Syria by next week.

However, the US and its allies have expressed reluctance to deploy 250 additional monitors due to the fragility of the ceasefire, while Russia has called for the prompt adoption of a resolution to approve the full deployment.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned that there were some powers that wanted the Annan plan to fail in order to pave the way for military intervention.

French foreign minister Alain Juppé said the international community had to prepare for the failure of the Annan plan and “envision other methods” to end the bloodshed.

During a “Friends of Syria” gathering in Paris yesterday, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said: “We need to start moving in the Security Council for a chapter 7 sanctions resolution, including travel, financial sanctions, an arms embargo and the pressure that will give us on the regime to push for compliance with . . . Annan’s six-point plan.”

Any attempt to adopt a chapter 7 resolution, which characterises the unrest in Syria as a threat to world peace and mandates tough action, would be vetoed by Russia and China, which have already torpedoed two resolutions not requiring such a strong response from the council.