Prominent Muslim Brotherhood Leader Is Seized in Egypt By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: October 30, 2013 CAIRO — Egyptian security forces on Wednesday captured Essam el-Erian, one of the last few prominent leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood still at large after a crackdown that began with the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, another of the group’s leaders. The seizure of Mr. Erian, a senior leader in the Brotherhood’s political arm and an adviser to the president, appears to complete the incarceration of the organization’s most visible leaders less than 18 months after they stood on the brink of consolidating power over the presidency and Parliament. He was among the most outspoken leaders of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist movement, and his arrest caps a career that has traced the group’s evolution through years of repression, internal overhauls, electoral victories and political failure. “He epitomized the swagger and overreach of the Muslim Brotherhood after the revolution,” said Mona el-Ghobashy, an Egyptian political scientist at Barnard who has studied the group. “It was like he was showing off, ‘We are the biggest party around and we are in power now.’ ” The authorities said they had arrested Mr. Erian after 26 failed attempts and finally found him in a villa in a Cairo suburb, according to state news media. Mr. Erian, who put up no resistance, looked gaunt and wore a white robe in pictures that circulated after he was detained. He faced charges including the murder of police officers, and inciting the killing of protesters. A physician by training, Mr. Erian, 59, began his rise through the Brotherhood’s leadership in the 1970s as a student, helping lead a revival of the Islamist movement in Egypt. He became part of a group of young reformers who pushed the organization to open up, embrace democratic politics, and compete in elections for Parliament and leadership of a trade association when both were dominated by allies of President Hosni Mubarak. He was elected to Parliament in 1987 and began to build a national reputation, so before the 1995 parliamentary elections Mr. Mubarak had him arrested. He was jailed for the next five years. Mr. Erian ultimately won a seat on the group’s internal governing board. But in 2009 he was pushed off the board in a purge that also expelled an ally, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh. Their removal was attributed to their relative moderation, emphasizing pluralism and individual choice. But Professor Ghobashy said it appeared more related to nonideological infighting for power among the group’s factions. “He was always very much a climber and a power player within the organization,” she said, arguing that the emergence of such characteristics was a sign that the Brotherhood was opening up after years as a tightly knit secret society. When Mr. Mubarak’s ouster in 2011 forced the group to confront the challenge of a new democratic opening, Mr. Erian chose to stick with the Brotherhood’s more conservative leaders against moderates like Mr. Aboul Fotouh, who argued that the organization should separate its religious mission from politics and allow its members to enter the electoral fray. Mr. Aboul Fotouh was expelled from the group for declaring his presidential candidacy as an individual outside the Brotherhood’s political party and against the decree of its leaders. Mr. Erian stayed with the Brotherhood, becoming the vice chairman of its newly formed political arm. As the Brotherhood gained power through parliamentary and presidential elections, Mr. Erian began to sound increasingly strident, even erratic. He publicly reprimanded Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — a hero to Islamists across the Arab world — for suggesting that Islamists in Egypt had nothing to fear from a secular, democratic government like Turkey’s. He urged Egyptian Jews who had fled the country in past decades to come home from Israel because he predicted an end to the Jewish state. He was often patronizing toward the younger, non-Islamist activists who jump-started the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. Before this summer’s protests that helped usher out Mr. Morsi, Mr. Erian denounced them as an attack on Islam. Most fatefully, in December 2012, when the police refused to protect Mr. Morsi’s office in the presidential palace from demonstrators, Mr. Erian led public calls for Brotherhood members and other Islamists to defend the building themselves, by force if necessary. In a television interview at the time, Mr. Erian told supporters to go to the palace “and surround the thugs and separate the real revolutionaries out,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch, adding, “for one or two nights and then we can arrest them all.” The appeal led to a night of bloody street fighting in the blocks around the palace that left at least 11 dead, most of them Morsi supporters. The fighting that night was the first major violence between rival political factions — as opposed to political groups and the police — in more than 50 years. It led to widespread warnings of a coming civil war and became a turning point in the events that ultimately led to Mr. Morsi’s military ouster amid enormous protests against his rule. Announcing the takeover on July 3, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the nation’s top military leader, said he was acting to protect Egypt from further descent into division and violence. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting. A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Prominent Muslim Brotherhood Leader Is Seized in Egypt.. =================================================================== nytimes/2013/10/31/world/middleeast/high-ranking-muslim-brotherhood-leader-is-seized-in-egypt.html?ref=middleeast&_r=0 Prominent Muslim Brotherhood Leader Is Seized in EgyptBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: October 30, 2013 ===================================================================
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 12:11:20 +0000