Brotherhood won't risk confronting State

Author:
Source: The Egyptian Gazette
Date: 2009-04-25

EGYPT's Muslim Brotherhood, increasingly excluded from mainstream politics, says it will not risk open confrontation with the State by taking to the streets in large-scale protests. Mohamed Habib, deputy leader of Egypt's banned group, said the Brotherhood would not risk that path without more substantial popular support and clear objectives.Smaller opposition groups have often decried the apparent unwillingness of the Brotherhood, which seeks an Islamic state through democratic means, to use its resources to agitatemore aggressively for change in the most populous Arab country."

For the Brotherhood to go out alone, no," Habib told Reuters in an interview ."You're talking about anarchy and that is something no one accepts, in addition to the fact that it can be exploited by the mob to damage public and private property," Habib added. Habib said he saw promise in a bur- geoning social protest movement working on issues of poverty and social justice.The Brotherhood won roughly a fifth of the seats in the lower house of Parliament in 2005, but authorities have since obstructed its efforts to further its electoral gains in more recent votes for municipal councils or the upper and lower houses of Parliament."

The conviction must be born among the people that the issue of reform and change is dependent on them, more thanit is dependent on political and national forces," Habib said.He added that emerging social protest movements had the potential to snowball, fuelled by tensions caused by the massive rift between wealthy businessmen allied with the State and the vast majority of Egyptians who live in poverty."Social protest movements are strong and growing, and are full of simmering anger," he said of the movements, which focus on specific issues like rising prices or poor health services rather than on supporting openly political organisations."

If we can achieve some sort of coor- dination among the social protest move- ments... we will have laid our feet on the beginning of the path."The Brotherhood has said it prefers to focus on its extensive social service net- works and spreading their values rather than holding demonstrations of limited value.

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