Egypt may have avoided a civil war this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday, saying this was one factor to weigh as Washington decides whether to cut off most US aid to the Arab nation.
The armed forces deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on July 3 after huge street protests against his rule, clearing the way for this week’s installment of a new interim cabinet charged with restoring civilian government and reviving the economy.
Thousands of Morsi’s supporters demonstrated outside the prime minister’s office and marched through Cairo on Wednesday to denounce the new military-backed administration and show that they had no intention of bowing to army dictates.
Under US law, if the United States were to decide that Morsi was ousted in a military coup, or a coup in which the military played a decisive role, it would have to cut off most of the roughly $1.5bn in annual US aid to Egypt.
Kerry repeated the US position that it has not yet made any decision, saying it would take its time, consult its lawyers and get all the facts.
“This is obviously an extremely complex and difficult situation,” Kerry told reporters in Amman, adding that he would not “rush to judgment.”
“I will say this: That what complicates it, obviously, is that you had an extraordinary situation in Egypt of life and death, of the potential of civil war and enormous violence, and you now have a constitutional process proceeding forward very rapidly,” he added. “So we have to measure all of those facts against the law, and that’s exactly what we will do.”
The crisis in Egypt, which straddles the vital Suez Canal, has alarmed allies in the West. Washington would be forced to cut off aid to Cairo, including some $1.3bn that goes to the military, if it determined Morsi had been removed by a coup.
His comments underscored grave US concerns about the Arab world’s most populous state and suggested that President Barack Obama was in no hurry to pull the plug on the aid program.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton became the latest senior international figure to visit Egypt’s interim rulers and, unlike a US envoy who came two days ago, she also met senior figures in Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
However, Brotherhood leader Amr Darrag said the Europeans had not put forward any plan to resolve the crisis. On her last visit, in April, Ashton attempted to persuade Morsi to sign up to a power-sharing deal brokered by an EU envoy. The president did not respond.
Thousands of Brotherhood supporters are staging a vigil in a square in northeast Cairo, vowing not to move until the restoration of Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president. He has been held at an undisclosed location since his downfall.
A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of 70 Morsi backers for 15 days pending investigations over clashes that killed seven people early Tuesday, state news agency MENA said.
They are accused, among other crimes, of rioting, blocking a Cairo road bridge and targeting policemen with firearms. Wednesday’s protests were mostly peaceful, although there were scuffles when a crowd marched through the city centre and along the Nile riverbank, held back by riot police as they approached Tahrir Square, focus for anti-Morsi protests.
