We are living in some kind of a farce - time for another revolution in Egypt

Egypt's military accused of 'complete coup' after supreme court ruling

Egypt's military-led establishment was accused last night of staging a "complete coup" after the country's supreme court ordered that parliament should be dissolved and its power handed back to the army council.

The Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that a third of the country's new MPs, winners in the first fully free parliamentary election in Egypt's history, had stood illegally.

Its head, Farouk Sultan, said this effectively meant parliament would have to be dissolved, with the whole vote having to be rerun at an unspecified time in the future.

The ruling, which means power will remain in the hands of the generals of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), was bitterly condemned.

The activists who led last year's revolution to overthrow the former president Hosni Mubarak and the Islamists whose domination of parliament was spectacularly brought to an end accused the military of using the court as a proxy to preserve the hold of the ousted leader's authoritarian regime.

In a separate ruling, the court also allowed an appeal by Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak-era general and former prime minister, against a parliamentary decree that would have banned him from taking part in the presidential election run-off vote due this Sunday.

Mr Shafiq is facing Mohammed Morsi, the leader of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood's political front. A victory for Mr Morsi would have consolidated an Islamist stranglehold on the main organs of civil power, and threatened not only the military's political grip but its many other privileges.
Essam al-Erian, a senior member of the Brotherhood's leadership, said the rulings represented the start of a "dark tunnel" for the country. Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh, an independent and self-styled "moderate" Islamist who came fourth in the first round of presidential elections, said the country had been victim of a "coup".
Wael Abbas, a secular activist and Egypt's best-known blogger, who was jailed under the regime of President Mubarak, said the decision had taken the country back to square one. "We are living in some kind of a farce," he said.
He called for the activist groups who took part in last year's Tahrir Square protests, including the Brotherhood, to set up a revolutionary council to challenge the military directly.
Mohammed el-Beltagy, a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader, also said the rulings amounted to a "full-fledged coup." "This is the Egypt that Shafiq and the military council want and which I will not accept no matter how dear the price is," he said.
Mohammed Morsi, however, said he respected the rulings."I respect the decision of the Supreme Constitutional Court in that I respect the institutions of the state and the principle of separation of powers," he said.
The FJP won just short of half the seats in December and January's parliamentary elections, with the harder line "Salafi" Islamists of the Nour Party taking another 20 per cent.
Conspiracy theorists have long suggested that the generals who emerged with interim power after the fall of their former boss Mubarak would not accept the rise to power of the Brotherhood, which the old regime had spent so many decades keeping from power.
The court decided that the "individual candidates" for whom a third of parliamentary seats were reserved had to be independent of the political parties who occupied the remaining two thirds under a proportional representation system. Most of the individual candidates were aligned to parties. Many political figures drew attention to the fact that the day before the ruling, Scaf had granted powers of arrest of civilians to the military police – civilians can already be tried in military courts. These powers can now be used to counter protests against the rulings. Mr Aboul Fotouh said: "Keeping the military candidate and overturning the elected parliament after granting the military police the right to arrest is a complete coup and whoever thinks that millions of youth will let it pass is deluding themselves."
In Egypt's three-way war between the army, secular activists and Islamists, the latest battle has been for control of the committee that will write a new constitution. Attempts to form that committee will now also have to be scrapped pending new parliamentary elections.
Mr Shafiq, who once described Mr Mubarak as his "role model", was clearly delighted as he addressed an election rally. "The message of this historic verdict is that the era of political score settling has ended," he said.
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, call for a full transfer of power to elected civilians.
“There can be no going back on the democratic transition called for by the Egyptian people,” Mrs Clinton said. “In keeping with the commitments that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces made to the Egyptian people, we expect to see a full transfer of power to a democratically elected government.”