Sisi stabbed Morsi in the back: Brotherhood

Emre Kızılkaya ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, dismisses criticisms that ousted Cabinet excluded liberals and Christians.

Egypt’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, “stabbed” President Mohamed Morsi in the back when he overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood-linked leader, a senior brotherhood official has said, while expressing dismay at the international community’s silence.

“The army shocked us. We felt betrayed. I think that al-Sisi was smart enough to betray his president,” Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, a leading figure of the brotherhood, told daily Hürriyet in a recent interview. Dardery was elected from the Justice and Freedom Party, the political wing of the brotherhood, with more than 120,000 votes in parliamentary elections.

The biggest mistake Morsi made was that he did not move fast enough against the remnants of the corrupt Mubarak system, according to Dardery.

“We really asked him so many times to move fast against the remnants of the old regime. Because of the corrupt elements of the regime, in the police, in the judiciary, he really needed to act faster. But he seemed to have trusted them,” Dardery said. “He chose al-Sisi, appointing him as a minister. Imagine, a minister who works under the prime minister puts the president in jail, appoints a puppet president, cancels the Constitution and dissolves the elected upper house of the Parliament and that is shamefully supported by the U.S. and the EU.”

Al-Sisi was also named as first deputy prime minister and defense minister in the newly appointed interim government.

Dardery dismissed criticisms that Morsi excluded liberals and Christians in the political process. “If we aren’t inclusive, we wouldn’t have won Egyptian support the past six times. By appointing 12 Coptic Christians, Morsi broke another record which was good for inclusiveness. Is it the ‘illiberal democracy’ that the Muslim Brotherhood practices in Egypt?” he said.

Deep state force

“I won’t argue that President Morsi’s first year in office was mistake-free. There were many [mistakes], not by choice, but forced on him by the deep state. The president himself admitted that he did make certain mistakes in his speech before the coup. I also won’t argue that the coup has no popular support. Without doubt, there is significant resentment among a considerable portion of the population toward the president. Nevertheless, these cannot justify a military coup,” Dardery said.

He also accused Washington and Brussels over the political turmoil. “We didn’t expect the military to intervene. And we didn’t expect that the U.S. and the EU would be silent. Then, we saw the policemen who tortured us in the past on the shoulders of Tahrir protesters on June 30. Without the outside support and the military, June 30 would have just been another 1 million-man march out of another 24 million-man marches,” he said. “And considering the fact that in Cairo alone there are 1 million homeless children, it’s not hard to organize one such march if you have enough money. Now we learn that the army had given some opposition leaders [promises] to intervene if they succeeded in attracting large crowds.”