Bloody Day of Unrest Widens the Rupture of Egyptians

The doctor’s sorrow was twofold when he found his son in the back of an ambulance, waiting to be carried in to the morgue here with a bullet hole in his chest.

Not only was his youngest son among the scores of supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi who had been killed by security officers on Monday, but the doctor had spent the last months of his son’s life shouting at him about his politics.

“All the time there were fights between me, him, his mother, his brother — all about the Muslim Brotherhood,” said the doctor, Samer Assem, 59.

The military’s early-morning assault that left at least 54 people dead might have been expected to unite Egyptians in grief and anger. Instead, Egypt’s bloodiest day in more than two years of unrest appeared to intensify the scarring arguments about who should be ruling the country and who is responsible for its plunge into turmoil.

Egyptians who not long ago were protesting side by side, even members of the same family, now rely on different sources of information, offer widely divergent accounts of what caused Monday’s carnage and argue that they are the true defenders of the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rival camps both claim that the United States is offering concrete support to their opponents.

This week, the son of the powerhouse cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi publicly criticized his father for declaring his support for Mr. Morsi and calling on Egyptians to do the same.

“Beloved Father,” Abdul Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi wrote, calling Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood “men greedy to seize power at any cost.”

The ruptures have marked Cairo’s geography, with pro- and anti-Morsi camps occupying different squares and intersections, blocking traffic, erecting tents and rigging up loudspeakers to blast their messages.

Tahrir Square, the emotional center of the anti-Mubarak uprising and home to protests against the country’s rulers ever since, feels different from the way it did even a week ago, transformed from a place where people celebrated their collective power against the authorities to a wellspring of sympathy for the military. The anger directed at the ousted Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood was unabated by the killings on Monday.

Young men searching people entering the square gave visitors red cards reading, “Game over.” Stickers were distributed that read, “No to Terrorism,” a direct swipe at the Islamists. On the edges of the square, protesters warned about foreigners.

The internecine accusations have cast an ever darker pall over a revolutionary uprising that once presented itself as a force for pluralism. Standing amid signs calling for freedom, Wael Ali, a soft-spoken tour organizer, laid out the solution to Egypt’s political crisis: shutter television stations that criticize the government, imprison the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and ban its political party from politics.

“Ever since the days of Mubarak, they were a banned group, and all Egyptians know that they are extremists,” he said. “Even psychologists have proven that they do not believe in dialogue and understanding.”

Mr. Ali stood up for the police force, a widely reviled institution that has seized on Mr. Morsi’s ouster as an opportunity to win back favor with Egyptians. And he called the army the hero of the people for toppling Mr. Morsi.

“The Egyptian people love the army, and there is no way that we could stand against them,” he said.

A half-hour drive away, supporters of Mr. Morsi have claimed the area around the Raba el-Adawiya mosque as their own. It, too, has been changed by the violence and feels diminished, with a growing sense among Mr. Morsi’s supporters that they are an embattled minority. They have played down the size of the anti-Morsi protests, and rarely acknowledge his failures in governing.

The military’s explanations of the killings on Monday fueled the sentiment. A military spokesman, contradicting dozens of witnesses who said the attack had been unprovoked, said the violence had started when Brotherhood members attacked the officers’ club of the Republican Guard.

“It was like they were talking about another country,” said Dr. Mohamed Ahmed, a trauma surgeon. “I was there when it happened. All they talked about was this soldier who died. Are we here killing ourselves, or what?”

Jehan Sami had spent the morning grieving over those shot down the street outside of the officers’ club. As Egypt fractured over the last 10 days, so did her social circle. She split with friends who had once been allies against Mr. Mubarak and the military government that succeeded him.

“Most of them are with Mubarak or Shafik,” Ms. Sami said, referring to Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Morsi. Political differences had strained her relationship with her best friend. “We don’t really talk,” she said.

The people in Tahrir were not going to change their opinion. “Just like we’re not going to change ours,” she said. “Only God takes care of us now.”

For Islam Ismail, the people in Tahrir Square were not protesting because of any claim to popular legitimacy, but because the state’s security services had mobilized them. He knew this, he said, because that crowd included members of his family, whom he called “thugs and feloul,” Arabic for the “remnants” of Mr. Mubarak’s government.

At a Cairo morgue on Monday, Dr. Assem struggled between his love for his son and his anger at his son’s political affiliations.

His son, Ahmed, 26, had been working as a photographer for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party since the revolution. He had spent most of his time in recent weeks at the Islamist protests, so when his father heard the news of the shooting, he called his son’s cellphone repeatedly until a strange man answered. The man told him that he had retrieved the phone from his dead son’s pocket.

Yet even in his grief, Dr. Assem expressed anger at the Brotherhood, which he claimed had “brainwashed” his son and was responsible for his death.

“I wish that they would be devastated,” he said. “They are criminal.”

Source: New York Times