A LEADING member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is expected to be elected speaker of Egypt’s first freely elected parliament, set to be inaugurated today.
Saad al-Katani has resigned his post as secretary general of the movement’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice party, ahead of the session.
Freedom and Justice won 235 of the 498 elected seats, 47 per cent, in the people’s assembly. This amounted to a stunning landslide for the Brotherhood, a movement founded in 1938 that has survived by operating clinics, schools and welfare programmes for the poor and keeping a low political profile, backing independent parliamentary candidates but not running any of its own until the post-uprising poll.
The ultra-orthodox Salafi Noor party took second place with 121 seats, 25 per cent, while the liberal Wafd won 9 per cent.
Field marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawi, head of the military council, has followed the practice of the ousted regime and appointed another 10 members of parliament, among them five Coptic Christians, including two women, as both Copts and women are greatly under-represented.
The military junta has also pardoned nearly 2,000 of the 12,000 activists arrested since the uprising erupted a year ago. Among those freed was Maikel Nabil Sanad, a Coptic blogger who was detained last March when he posted a blog entitled “The army and the people were never one hand”, dismissing the military’s claim that it stood by the revolutionaries during and after the rising that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in February.
Mr Sanad refused to recognise the authority of the military court that jailed him for three years and went on hunger strike in August to protest his detention.
Meanwhile, Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo have extended the organisation’s mission monitoring Syrian compliance with a plan to end the bloodshed in the country. The league also decided to reinforce the 165-strong team and provide monitors with additional resources as clashes broke out in the restive Douma suburb of Damascus.
“There is partial progress in the implementation of promises” made by the Syrian regime, said league chief Nabil al-Arabi. Since the mission was deployed a month ago, Syrian troops and armour have withdrawn from most cities and towns and more than 4,000 of 14,000 prisoners have been freed. Anti-regime protests have continued, meanwhile, and defectors have stepped up attacks.
