Egyptian president poised to grant military broader police powers

Mohammed Morsi

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi appeared to be preparing Saturday to grant the military powers to “protect vital institutions” and arrest people deemed state security threats until a new constitution is approved and parliamentary elections are held, according to a report Saturday in the state-run newspaper al-Ahram.

The move was approved by Morsi’s cabinet, the newspaper said, and would require the president to issue a decree for it to take effect

In Egypt, large crowds of opponents of President Mohamed Morsi marched on his palace to increase pressure after he rejected their demands. The two camps in the country's divide appeared at a deadlock.

The report was followed by a statement from the nation’s armed forces saying that they support Morsi’s call for national dialogue, which, if ignored, would “result in catastrophe.”

“The armed forces are following the current events with sadness and concern” about divisions in the country that pose “a grave danger,” the statement said. “These divisions defy the fundamentals of the Egyptian state, and threaten its national security.”

Morsi was holding a national dialogue session at the presidential palace Saturday aimed at resolving more than two weeks of political crisis in which the president and his Islamist backers have been pitted against a broad coalition of liberals and secularists.

In a sign of divisions within their ranks that Morsi’s government has sought to exploit, at least one opposition figure, Ayman Nour, joined the session along with Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of al-Azhar, Egypt’s preeminent Islamic institution.

But other key opposition leaders rejected Morsi’s invitation to participate in discussions, which unfolded a day after thousands of opposition protesters converged on the presidential palace, breaking through barbed wire barricades and chanting slogans against Morsi in defiance of his call to bridge the country’s expanding political divide.

Morsi’s critics said his speech to the nation Thursday and demonstrations by his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood on Friday did more to fan the flames than quell them.

The competing rhetoric and scenes of defiance underscored how the population has been polarized as it struggles to define the balance of power in the country nearly two years after the forces now opposing each other joined hands in the mass uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Amid calls for a delay to the scheduled Dec. 15 vote on a contentious draft constitution, Egypt’s High Election Commission said Friday that it would postpone overseas voting on the charter. The move raised hopes among some that Morsi might be moving toward making concessions.

But a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, which backs Morsi, said Friday night that a delay to next week’s vote would be possible only if the opposition heeded the president’s invitation to dialogue.