Demonstrators call for unity following sectarian clashes

EGYPT:TENS OF thousands of Egyptians demonstrated yesterday in Cairo, Port Said and Alexandria, calling for national unity in the wake of sectarian clashes that killed 13 people this week.

During Muslim communal prayers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the preacher urged the restoration of harmony between Muslims and Christians and blamed “suspicious hands . . . attempting to halt the revolution” launched on February 11th with the toppling of former president Hosni Mubarak.

At the television building a few hundred meters from Tahrir, Muslims joined Coptic Christians who have been staging a sit-in to protest the torching of a church as a result of a disputed romance between a Christian man and Muslim woman.

Demonstrators also rejected proposed constitutional amendments seen as undemocratic, and called for the boycott of a referendum on the amendments set for March 19th.

In a poll conducted by the government, 57 per cent of respondents rejected and 37 per cent supported the six amendments . Rejection would deal a blow to the timetable fixed by the military, which has assumed presidential powers, for parliamentary and presidential elections. The generals want both to take place well before the year’s end while the democracy movement insists they should be held in a year or 18 months to give time for new parties to organise and a free press to emerge.

Meeting one of the demands of the democracy movement, the generals have ordered the release of 60 political prisoners who have served 15 or more years of their sentences. Among those to be freed are cousins Aboud and Tarek al-Zamor, convicted in 1984 of involvement in the assassination of president Anwar Sadat. The men should have been released several years ago but were held indefinitely on the orders of the interior ministry.

The general prosecutor has partially realised a second demand of the movement by ordering the detention of four senior members of the interior ministry for involvement in the shooting dead of 300 Egyptians during protests on January 28th, and misuse of public funds.