Friday, April 11, 2008
Egyptian opposition party condemns crackdown
Egyptian opposition movement Kefaya on Thursday slammed a wave of arrests of its members for involvement in violent protests earlier this week, saying the authorities were behind the unrest. The movement, whose popular demonstrations calling for President Hosni Mubarak to step down grabbed the spotlight in 2005, said that 61 of its members had been arrested, including former chief George Ishaq, on Wednesday night. The arrests came after two days of unrest, sparked by a call for a general strike to be held on Sunday.
At least one person was killed and 300 arrested in the rioting in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla. "George Ishaq was arrested on the orders of the magistrate for incitement to strike, calling for demonstrations and involvement in the troubles in Mahalla," a security official said. Kefaya leader Abdelwahab al-Missir told journalists in Cairo that the authorities were behind the violence in Mahalla as "agents were employed to create chaos and justify the massacre." (AFP)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Egyptians vote amid poll boycott
Egyptians have begun voting in local elections boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition group, after a second day of protests over food prices and poor wages.
Only 30 per cent of seats are set to be contested on Tuesday as the ruling party of Hosni Mubarak, the president, has already won 70 per cent of the seats by default.
The Muslim Brotherhood had pulled out of the elections and called on Egyptians to boycott the polls in protest at the disqualification and imprisonment of most of its candidates by the authorities.
The results will be announced over five successive days beginning on Wednesday.
Police were stationed outside Cairo polling stations, with the state-run Middle East News Agency (Mena) saying the interior ministry had set up "a tight security plan... to guard the polling stations from the outside". (Al Jazeera)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections
Monday, April 7, 2008
Brotherhood to boycott Egypt polls
Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood has said it will boycott municipal elections after being permitted to field only 20 candidates for thousands of seats.
Mohammed Habib, the group's leader, said on Monday: "We call on the Egyptian people to boycott the municipal elections because of the executive's disregard for justice."
The National Democratic Party (NDP) of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president, is set to field a candidate for every one of the 52,000 council seats that will be contested in Tuesday's election.
Many Muslim Brotherhood candidates have been jailed amid a government crackdown or barred from registering.
The organisation is officially banned from political office in Egypt but many of its members run as independent candidates in elections. (Al Jazeera)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections
Friday, April 4, 2008
Cairo detains another 27 Brotherhood members
Egyptian authorities detained 27 members of the Muslim Brotherhood on Friday, including a leading member of the opposition group's politburo, ahead of key local elections, a security official said. "Security forces detained 27 members of the Brotherhood, including Mohammad Badie who belongs to the guidance bureau," the official told AFP.
Four of those held had intended to stand in the April 8 municipal elections.
According to senior Brotherhood leaders, 821 members of the group have been detained in recent weeks.
The Brotherhood says President Hosni Mubarak's regime fears another success for the group, which won 20 percent of parliamentary seats in 2005. The group is officially banned and its MPs have to sit as independents.
Traditionally dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party, the municipal polls are expected to draw fierce competition after a constitutional amendment was passed in 2005. (AFP)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections
Thursday, April 3, 2008
147 Brotherhood activists detained
The Egyptian state prosecutor on Wednesday ordered 147 detained members of the Muslim Brotherhood to be investigated on rioting accusations, a judicial official said, in the latest crackdown on the country's largest opposition group.
The detainees, who have not been formally charged, are also accused of holding unauthorized demonstrations after a flurry of protests in northern cities, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members demonstrated across the Nile Delta on Tuesday, accusing the government of preventing them from participating in municipal elections set for April 8.
The demonstrators hurled stones at police, who responded by firing tear gas.
The 147 were detained Tuesday after the demonstrations, but the government did not announce accusations against them until Wednesday. The Brotherhood's Web site reported that the demonstrations were followed by dozens of arrests but did not give a total figure for those currently in custody. (AP)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections, Free Speech
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Brotherhood holds protests in Egypt
Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members have demonstrated across northern Egypt, accusing the government of preventing them from participating in forthcoming local elections.
Nine Brotherhood members were arrested on Tuesday, four in the town of Tanta, were supporters clashed with police, and five more in Qalyubiya province.
Nearly 3,000 members of the organisation protested in Zagazig, 100km northeast of Cairo, 2,000 demonstrated in the port city of Alexandria and 1,500 marched at Damanhur in the Nile Delta.
Around 700 demonstrators took to the streets in Tanta.
At least 10 activsts have been seriously injured in confrontations with the police.
The Brotherhood says more than 100 members have been arrested.
The government postponed the 2006 local elections for two years, after the group unexpectedly won 88 seats in the 454-member parliament in 2005 elections. (Al Jazeera)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections, Free Speech
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Human Rights Watch slams 'shameless' attempts by Egypt to rig elections
Egypt's "shameless" roundup of Islamists ahead of municipal elections is a bid to fix the vote and casts serious doubt on its legitimacy, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Sunday. Egyptian authorities have detained without charge some 800 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition group, including about 150 would-be candidates in the April 8 local election.
The arrests, combined with ongoing military trials of Islamists, are part of a bid by President Hosni Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to fix the elections, the New York-based rights group said in a statement.
"These ongoing mass arrests of opposition activists, on top of the military trial, are a shameless bid to fix the upcoming elections," said HRW's Middle East director Joe Stork. "President Mubarak apparently believes that the outcome of the elections cannot be left up to voters."
"The government has not charged any of the 800 detained Muslim Brotherhood members with actual crimes," Stork said. "It should release them now and allow fair elections." (AFP)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections, Human Rights Watch
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Iranian reformists request Tehran vote recount (Reuters)
Reformist opponents of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requested a recount on Wednesday of votes cast in Tehran in last week's election after conservatives swept to victory, a news agency reported.
Reformists seeking social and political change have complained Friday's vote was stacked against them even before voters went to the polls because many of their candidates were barred from running by a pre-election vetting process.
Conservatives, who say they are committed to the Islamic Republic's ideals, won more than 70 percent of seats so far decided in the 290-member parliament. Runoff ballots in some areas will be held in April or May. (Link)
Labels: Fair Elections, Iran
Monday, March 17, 2008
Mubarak challenger loses appeal (Al Jazeera)
A Cairo court has rejected a request to set jailed Egyptian opposition politician Ayman Nour free on health grounds.
Egypt's supreme administrative court issued the decision against an early dismissal for his request to be set free on Monday, upholding an original sentence of five years.
Nour, 43, a liberal who challenged Hosni Mubarak, the president, in Egypt's first multi-candidate presidential elections in 2005, is diabetic and has had heart problems.
Amir Salem, a human rights activist and Nour's principal lawyer, said that Nour "has been awaiting his appeal in his prison cell, spending his time writing letters to human rights organisations". (Link)
Labels: Egypt, Fair Elections
Iran reformists question counting in election (Reuters)
Staunch opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad complained on Monday about vote counting in Iran's parliamentary election, in which conservatives have retained their grip on the assembly, a news agency reported.
Full results from Friday's vote have yet to be announced, but the Interior Ministry said conservatives who call themselves "principlist" for their loyalty to the Islamic Republic's values had 74 percent of seats decided so far. Parliament has 290 seats.
"We have complaints about the method of counting votes," the spokesman of the reformist National Trust party, Esmail Gerami-Moghaddam, told Iran's ISNA news agency.
"We want the Interior Ministry to announce the result of vote counting at each station through their Web site," he said. (Link)
Labels: Fair Elections, Iran
Iran Rejects Criticism of Election (AP)
Iran dismissed Western criticism of its parliamentary elections, pointing Monday to 60 percent turnout in an election that saw conservatives win a majority, although reformists were largely barred.
Reformists say the deck was stacked against them because the cleric-led Guardian Council threw out most of their candidates on grounds they were insufficiently loyal to the values of Islam and Iran's 1979 revolution.
The United States called the election "cooked" because of the disqualifications. The European Union said the vote was "neither fair nor free" and that the barring of candidates was a "grave violation" of international norms. (Link)
Labels: European Union, Fair Elections, Iran
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