CAIRO: Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood warned yesterday that it will defend its headquarters, as opposition activists planned a march on the building where they have previously clashed with the ruling party's activists.
The Brotherhood has seen about 30 of its offices across the country attacked in widespread protests against President Muhammad Mursi.
Primarily, “the protection of private and public property is the responsibility of the police,” the group’s secretary-general Mahmud Hussein told a press conference.
“But the owner of every house has the right to defend it using all means. If the police don’t carry out their responsibility, we will protect our property with all we posses,” he said.
Activists, including often violent Black Bloc protesters, have called for a demonstration outside the Brotherhood’s Cairo headquarters on Friday, almost a week after they clashed with the hard-liners and police guarding the building.
Hussein cut short the chaotic press conference after angry journalists kept drowning him out. Some reporters said they and colleagues had been assaulted during the clashes last Saturday. The confrontation marked a new low in relations between the increasingly secretive group and a hostile domestic media, which has complained of censorship under Egypt’s new leaders.
The Brotherhood, well organized despite decades of persecution by overthrown president Hosni Mubarak and his predecessors, was the winner of parliamentary and senate elections last year.
But its critics accuse it and Mursi of mirroring the tactics used by Mubarak, overthrown in 2011, against the opposition.
In a separate development, Egypt has granted the Muslim Brotherhood non-governmental organization status, a minister said yesterday, a day after judges said the movement had no legal standing.
As a registered civil society organization, the Brotherhood would be forced to disclose its funding. Social Affairs Minister Nagwa Khalil said the group received NGO status on Tuesday. “The ministry follows all the activities of registered groups,” the official MENA news agency quoted her as saying.
Meanwhile, Syrian actress Ragda sparked a melee in a Cairo poetry convention after she praised Syria’s President Bashar Assad, angering some in the crowd, witnesses said.
The actress, who lives in Cairo, read a poem praising the dictator and condemning the Muslim Brotherhood during the convention on Wednesday. An hard-liner in the crowd who took umbrage at the poem attacked her, witnesses said, setting off a melee in which people hurled fire extinguishers at each other.
Brotherhood warns opposition ahead of march
