CAIRO, 12 June 2007 — One man was killed yesterday in a clash between supporters of rival candidates as Egyptians voted in an election for Parliament’s upper house amid a massive crackdown on the main opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood. The violence erupted shortly after the opening of the polls for the Shoura Council, killing one and leaving three wounded, the Interior Ministry said.
Ahmed Abdel Salam Ghanem was caught in the crossfire in a clash between supporters of the ruling National Democratic Party candidate and his independent rival in the Nile Delta town of Husseiniya, Interior Ministry spokesman Tarek Attia told reporters.
The Muslim Brotherhood, defying a new constitutional ban on political activity based on religion has fielded 19 candidates as independents under their slogan “Islam is the solution.” The Islamist group said 75 of their members were arrested in four provinces yesterday. A security source confirmed the arrests.
The Islamists have also complained of being turned away from polling stations and condemned alleged fraud. “In Damietta, in the Nile Delta, ballot boxes already full arrived at the voting station in Izbat Al-Borg,” the group said in a statement.
Some 1,850 permits were granted to local and international groups to monitor the ballot, according to the Higher Election Commission spokesman, Sameh Al-Kashef. But independent election monitors said they were barred from entering polling stations and reported the closure of stations where Islamist candidates are running.
“The trend has been that all the stations where Islamists are running have been closed and observers were barred from entering,” election monitor Tarek Zaghlul from the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights told AFP.
Although voting officially started at 8:00 a.m. (0500 GMT) at the Manshiyat Al-Qanater polling station in Giza, where Brotherhood candidate Sayeed Saleh was competing for a seat, police dressed in riot gear sealed off the building and ordered voters to leave the premises. “It seems that there is no election today,” said Alya Lutfi, a 23-year-old accountant standing outside the polling station. “We are not allowed to enter to vote. I don’t understand what is going on.”
In the district of El-Galatma, in Giza, dozens of voters took to the street to protest alleged government pressure to vote for representatives of National Democratic Party. “They (election officials) are trying to force us to vote for the NDP candidate, and we don’t want that,” said one of the protesters, who would only identify himself as Ayman.
Another voter, Ridha, who also refused to give his last name, confirmed the government pressure and said he saw ballot boxes full of voting cards despite very few voters at the polling station. Despite these allegations, the Egyptian government said yesterday the elections were free from interference. “We want free and transparent elections, we respect the constitution and the laws and we don’t allow any violations in this process,” Safawt El-Sherif, speaker of the Shoura Council, told state TV.
In Cairo, an AFP reporter and photographer were barred from entering the Hawamdeya polling station, where officials said they needed special permits, contrary to Information Ministry guidelines. The Shoura Council is made up of 264 members of which 176 are directly elected and 88 are appointed by the president. Membership is rotating, with one half of the council renewed every three years.
Eleven candidates have already won their seats due to “lack of competitors,” the Higher Election Commission, which oversees elections, said in a statement. President Hosni Mubarak’s NDP is fielding 109 candidates, and despite vowing to give women a more prominent role in politics, it has put forward only one female candidate.
No Coptic Christian candidates figure on the NDP list, despite the fact that Egyptian Christians make up between six and 10 percent of the 76 million population.
The run-up to the election has been marked by “one of the worst crackdowns” on members of the Islamist group with almost 1,000 detained in six months.
Egyptian authorities launched the latest crackdown on the group in December 2006, after Brotherhood-affiliated students held a military style parade in the campus of Al-Azhar University.
The government accuses the Brotherhood of seeking to revive its military wing, but group’s leaders believe the crackdown is in reaction to its shock gains in the 2005 legislative election, which saw the group clinch one fifth of the seats in parliament. “The regime doesn’t want another success for the Muslim Brotherhood,” deputy supreme guide Mohammed Habib told AFP.
