Egypt: Morsi Supporters Clash With Rivals

Morsiland: Prepared For Long Haul

Updated: 4:58pm UK, Tuesday 13 August 2013

By Sam Kiley, Middle East Correspondent, in Nasr City

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood stands united. The government is divided. But can either, or both, prevent their country from falling apart?

The Arab world's most populous nation already has a vicious Islamic-cum-criminal insurgency in the Sinai which, after two rockets were fired at the Israeli city of Eilat, could spread into the Jewish state and strain a peace treaty that has endured for decades.

Cairo is now a city of schism.

Liberals such as Mohammed al Baradei, the Nobel Laureate, now serving as Vice President in an interim government brought in after a military coup, has been showing discomfort over plans to use force to end Brotherhood mass sit-ins, especially around the Raba'a al Adawiya Mosque.

Nabil Fahmy, the foreign minister, has said that the right to peaceful protest should be preserved in Egypt.

But Egypt's military and Interior Ministry has a hard line element that hails from the days when the Brotherhood was banned, its leadership locked up, and they held the keys to a secular modern future for Egypt. They want to sweep the protestors off the streets of Cairo.

For now it would appear that the "civvies" are winning the day, and holding back the sabres.

That is just as well.

Their gathering around Raba'a Square is on a gigantic scale. It's not a sit-in, nor a demonstration. It's a town, fast growing, inside a city.

The streets ring with hammer blows and the rasp of saws. Wooden framed buildings, some of them two stories high, are shooting up in the central reservation on what was a four-lane highway.

After weeks of camping and bloody massacres, which just over two weeks ago left 74 dead and hundreds wounded, the citizens of "Morsiland" are setting up for a long haul.

The perimeters are now secured with sandbag walls and concrete blockades manned by young men in motorbike helmets armed with staves.

Polite and reserved, they are no match for the might of Egypt's armed forces or the police. Their aim, rather, is to try to keep right on their side.

Visitors are welcomed, volunteers spray pedestrians with cooling water vapour in the midday heat, others dab passers-by with sweet smelling oil.

Now that Egypt's upper house has been dissolved by the armed forces after the coup, some of its senators from the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party sit by the side of the road while a new wood and tarpaulin "senate" is re-erected around them.

More than 300 people have been killed; most of them have been supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi, who remains in military detention.

If the Brotherhood is stockpiling medicines and manning a field hospital ahead of any future attack, why are there so many women and children on the streets here?

"Men come here with their wives and families. No one forced them to come here but everybody feels that there is no dignity in life without freedom," said former senator Ashraf Mozayen.

Be that as it may, one doesn't have to be a total cynic to question why a children's playground has been built by pro-Morsi campaigners on an intersection - the wrong side of the barricades.

Still, the military will also be pausing before ordering an assault because of the sheer size of Morsiland.

Tens of thousands of people are camped on streets which radiate in all four directions away from the mosque for half a mile at least.

A civilian movement that, for now, eschews violence, the Brotherhood has proved itself more effective in opposition than when Morsi, a Brotherhood member, was in power.

Taking over an economy on its knees he focussed on filling government and administration posts with Islamists. Instead of re-igniting industry and tourism he appointed a member of Jamaa Islamiya, the movement behind the murder of more than 50 tourists in Luxor, as governor of Luxor.

He put himself above the law at a time when law and order was disintegrating and ruled by decree before a parliament could be sworn in.

Many Egyptians were glad to see him gone.

But the Brotherhood is proving that it's still the most effective civilian organisation in the country.

Morsiland has showers and toilets capable of handling thousands - all improvised. Urinals are fashioned from water coolers.

There are street-side laundries - kitchens feeding anyone in need with mountains of donated food.

Dr Hashem Ibrahim, a consultant laser surgeon who now runs the main field hospital which has treated the dead and wounded from two massacres already, said: "We have enough (donated) medicines for five hospitals - 500 volunteer doctors and paramedics - we are ready for anything."

The choice now lies with the hardliners in government.

If they elect to clear pro-Morsi demonstrators from the streets, there will be blood.

It could force many into the camp of the radicalised mainly Bedouin and Palestinian groups operating in the Sinai, where Egypt's armed forces are already locked in a dangerous conflict they do not have under control.

Egypt then risks an insurgency - and would look back on Morsiland with nostalgia.

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