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Protests Grow on Fifth Day of Unrest in Egypt Chaos and Lawlessness Grow After Days of Unrest in Egypt
(about 13 hours later)
PORT SAID, Egypt — Large protests in the Suez Canal city of Port Said and fresh clashes in Cairo on Monday marked a fifth day of widening unrest in Egypt, a day after President Mohamed Morsi declared a state of emergency and a curfew in three major cities as escalating violence in the streets threatened his government and Egypt’s democracy. PORT SAID, Egypt — The police fired indiscriminately into the streets outside their besieged station, a group of protesters arrived with a crate of gasoline bombs, and others cheered a masked man on a motorcycle who arrived with a Kalashnikov.
In Port Said, where the police lost control over the weekend and where marchers on Monday said they no longer recognized Mr. Morsi’s authority, protesters chased away armored personnel carriers with rocks and shoes during a funeral procession for victims of the recent violence. Protesters also called for the entire city to ignore the 9 p.m. curfew. The growing chaos along the vital canal zone showed little sign of abating on Monday as President Mohamed Morsi called out the army to try to regain control of three cities along the Suez Canal whose growing lawlessness is testing the integrity of the Egyptian state.
In the capital, Cairo, police fired tear gas at protesters at the foot of the Kasr el-Nile bridge, the scene of an epic battle during the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak exactly two years ago, on what was known as the “Day of Rage.” Opposition groups have called for protests to commemorate the anniversary on Monday. In Port Said, street battles reached a bloody new peak with a death toll over three days of at least 45, with at least five more protesters killed by bullet wounds, hospital officials said.
By imposing a one-month state of emergency in Suez, Ismailia and Port Said, Mr. Morsi’s declaration deployed one of the most despised weapons of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy.  Under Mubarak-era laws left in effect by the country’s new Constitution, a state of emergency suspends the ordinary judicial process and most civil rights. It gives the president and the police extraordinary powers. On Sunday, riot police officers took up positions near Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Such violence has flared across Egypt with increasing frequency since President Hosni Mubarak was forced out by the revolution two years ago.
Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president and a leader of the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, took the step after four days of clashes in Cairo and in cities around the country between the police and protesters denouncing his government. Most of the protests were set off by the second anniversary of the popular revolt that ousted Mr. Mubarak, which fell on Friday. President Morsi had already declared a monthlong state of emergency here and in the other canal towns of Suez and Ismailia, applying a Mubarak-era law that virtually eliminates due process protections against abuse by the police. Angry crowds burned tires and hurled rocks at the police. And the police, with little training and less credibility, hunkered down behind barrages of tear gas, birdshot and occasional bullets.
In Port Said, the trouble started over death sentences that a court imposed on 21 local soccer fans for their role in a deadly riot. But after 30 people died in clashes on Saturday — most of them shot by the police — the protesters turned their ire on Mr. Morsi as well the court. Police officers crouching on the roofs of their stations fired tear gas and live ammunition into attacking mobs, and hospital officials said that on Sunday at least seven more people died. The sense that the state was unraveling may have been strongest here in Port Said, where demonstrators have proclaimed their city an independent nation. But in recent days the unrest has risen in towns across the country and in Cairo as well. In the capital on Monday, a mob of protesters managed to steal an armored police vehicle, drive it to Tahrir Square and make it a bonfire.
News reports on Monday put the overall death toll from five days of protests at over 50. After two years of torturous transition, Egyptians have watched with growing anxiety as the erosion of the public trust in the government and a persistent security vacuum have fostered a new temptation to resort to violence to resolve disputes, said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the New York-based Century Foundation who is now in Cairo. “There is a clear political crisis that has eroded the moral authority of the state,” he said.
Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Port Said on Sunday demanding independence from the rest of Egypt. “The people want the state of Port Said,” they chanted in anger at Cairo. And the spectacular evaporation of the government’s authority here in Port Said has put that crisis on vivid display, most conspicuously in the rejection of Mr. Morsi’s declarations of the curfew and state of emergency.
The emergency declaration covers the three cities and their surrounding provinces, all on the economically vital Suez Canal. Mr. Morsi announced the emergency measures in a stern, finger-waving speech on state television on Sunday evening. He said he was acting “to stop the blood bath” and called the violence in the streets “the counterrevolution itself.” As in Suez and Ismailia, tens of thousands residents of Port Said poured into the streets in defiance just as a 9 p.m. curfew was set to begin. Bursts of gunfire echoed through the city for the next hours, and between 9 and 11 p.m. hospital officials raised the death count to seven from two.
“There is no room for hesitation, so that everybody knows the institution of the state is capable of protecting the citizens,” he said. “If I see that the homeland and its children are in danger, I will be forced to do more than that. For the sake of Egypt, I will.” When two armored personnel carriers approached a funeral Monday morning for some of the seven protesters killed the day before, a stone-throwing mob of thousands quickly chased them away. And within a few hours the demonstrators had resumed their siege of a nearby police station, burning tires to create a smoke screen to hide behind amid tear gas and gunfire.
Mr. Morsi’s resort to the authoritarian measures of his predecessor appeared to reflect mounting doubts about the viability of Egypt’s central government. After decades of corruption, cronyism and brutality under Mr. Mubarak, Egyptians have struggled to adjust to resolving their differences — whether over matters of political ideology or crime and punishment — through peaceful democratic channels. Many in the city said they saw no alternative but to continue to stay in the streets. They complained that the hated security police remained unchanged and unaccountable even after Mr. Mubarak had been ousted. They saw no recourse in the justice system, which is also unchanged; they dismissed the courts as politicized, especially after the acquittals of all those accused of killing protesters during the revolution. Then came the death sentences handed down Saturday to 21 Port Said soccer fans for their role in a deadly brawl. The death sentences set off the current unrest here.
“Why are we unable to sort out these disputes?” asked Moattaz Abdel-Fattah, a political scientist and academic who was a member of the assembly that drafted Egypt’s new Constitution. “How many times are we going to return to the state of Egyptians killing Egyptians?” He added: “Hopefully, when you have a genuine democratic machine, people will start to adapt culturally. But we need to do something about our culture.” Nor, they said, did they trust the political process that brought to power Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. He had vowed to usher in the rule of law as “a president for all Egyptians.” But in November he used a presidential decree to temporarily stifle potential legal objections so that his Islamist allies could rushed out a new Constitution. His authoritarian move kicked off a sharp uptick in street violence leading to this weekend’s Port Said clashes.
Mr. Morsi’s speech did nothing to stop the violence in the streets. In Cairo, fighting between protesters and the police and security forces escalated into the night along the banks of the Nile near Tahrir Square. On a stage set up in the square, liberal and leftist speakers demanded the repeal of the Islamist-backed Constitution, which won approval in a referendum last month. “Injustice beyond imagination,” one man outside the morning funeral said of Mr. Morsi’s emergency decree, before he was drowned out a crowd of others echoing the sentiment.
Young men huddled in tents making incendiary devices, while others set tires on fire to block a main bridge across the Nile. “He declared a curfew, and we declare civil disobedience,” another man said.
In Suez, a group calling itself the city’s youth coalition said it would hold nightly protests against the curfew at the time it begins, 9 p.m. In Port Said, crowds began to gather just before the declaration was set to take effect, at midnight, for a new march in defiance. “This doesn’t apply to Port Said because we don’t recognize him as our president,” said a third. “He is the president of the Muslim Brotherhood only.”
“We will gather every night at 9 at Mariam’s mosque,” said Ahmed Mansour, a doctor. “We will march all night long until morning.” As tens of thousands marched to the cemetery, many echoed the arguments of human rights advocates that the one-month imposition of the emergency law and reliance on the military would only aggravate the problem. The emergency law rolled back legal procedures meant to protect individuals from excessive violence by police, while the reliance on soldiers to keep the peace further reduced individual rights by sending any civilians arrested to military trials.
He added: “Morsi is an employee who works for us. He must do what suits us, and this needs to be made clear.” “It is stupid — he is repressing people for one more month!,” one man argued to a friend. “It will explode in his face. He should let people cool down.”
The death sentences handed down on Saturday to the 21 Port Said soccer fans stemmed from a brawl with fans of a visiting Cairo team last year that left 74 people dead. At a funeral on Sunday for at least a dozen civilians killed in clashes with the police on Saturday, angry Port Said residents called the sentences a capitulation to the threats of violence from hard-core soccer fans in Cairo if the Port Said defendants were acquitted. The mourners vowed to escalate their own violence in response. The police, for their part, remained besieged in their burned-out stations, glimpsed only occasionally crouching with their automatic rifles behind the low roof ledges.
“They wanted to please Cairo and the people there, so they decided this verdict at the expense of Port Said,” said Ayman Ali El Sayed Awad, 32, a street vendor whose brother was killed on Saturday by a police bullet. “And just like they avenged the Cairo people with blood and killed 30 of our people yesterday, we want the rights of our martyrs.” When one showed his head over a police building as the funeral march passed, voices in the crowd shouted that his appearance was a “provocation” and began hurling rocks. Others riding a pickup in the procession had stockpiled homemade bombs for later use.
A friend interrupted: “They were celebrating yesterday — celebrating our blood!” In a departure from most previous clashes around the Egyptian revolution, in Port Said the police also faced armed assailants. Two were seen with handguns on Monday around a siege of a police station, in addition to the man with the Kalashnikov.
Tens of thousands of mourners — some wearing the long beards associated with Islamists and others in affluent dress — carried the coffins toward the cemetery on a road along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Then the funeral procession passed the Grand Sky Resort, which belongs to the police. Earlier, a man accosted had an Egyptian journalist working for The New York Times. “If I see you taking pictures of protesters with weapons, I will kill you,” he warned.
It was unclear how the clashes began, but the police were soon firing heavy volleys of tear gas into the funeral march. The gas attacks caused the pallbearers to drop coffins, many witnesses said, and the bodies spilled into the streets, a serious indignity here. Defending their stations, the police fought back, and in Cairo they battled their own commander, the interior minister.
Soon, thousands of mourners who had already passed the police club returned to attack it. Gunfire rang out, some from automatic weapons. Officers with rifles and tear-gas cannons could be seen on the roof of the resort, crouching and scurrying and sometimes firing their weapons. Brotherhood leaders say Mr. Morsi has been afraid to name an outsider as minister for fear of a police revolt, putting off any meaningful reform of the Mubarak security services. But when Mr. Morsi recently tapped a veteran ministry official, Mohamed Ibrahim, for the job, many in the security services complained that even the appointment of one insider to replace another was undue interference.
Outside, protesters threw rocks, at least one incendiary bomb, and some of the still-smoking canisters of tear gas back at the police. One thrown canister set fire to a palm tree in a nearby cemetery, and another fire of unknown origin broke out inside the police club. By the end of the night, at least three protesters were seen carrying handguns and one an automatic rifle. In a measure of the low level of the new government’s top-down control over the security forces, officers even cursed and chased away their new interior minister when he tried to attend a funeral Friday for two members of the security forces killed in the recent clashes.
Similar battles broke out around police stations all over Port Said, with heavily armed officers defending them from the roofs. The first protester wounded by live ammunition was carried into the central hospital at 3:30 p.m., and by 4 p.m. the odor of tear gas and the sound of gunfire had permeated several neighborhoods around police stations for hours. Outside the police club, officers armed with automatic rifles had moved from the roof to confront opponents on the pavement, and were firing gas straight into the crowd. “What do you mean we won’t be armed? We would be disarmed to die,” one shouted, on a video recording of the event.
But despite the facts on the ground, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior said in a televised interview around the same time that the Port Said police were unarmed and that tear gas was used only briefly about three hours earlier. The spokesman, Gen. Osama Ismail, blamed the gunfire on “infiltrating saboteurs” and suggested that civilians may have fired the tear gas. In an attempt to placate the rank and file, Mr. Ibrahim issued a statement to police personnel sympathizing with the pressure the protests put on them. Later, he promised them sophisticated weapons.
“Are there any police forces there to begin with?” General Ismail said. “This is only a small group pushing back against intense shooting.” “That can only be a recipe for future bloodshed,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which monitors police abuses.
Mr. Morsi had already deployed army troops to secure vital facilities around the city, and they stood unmolested outside the prison and certain administrative buildings. But the soldiers made no effort to control the streets, and watched without intervening as besieged police officers battled civilian mobs. By turning to the military, Mr. Morsi signaled that he understood he could not rely on the police to pacify the streets, Mr. Bahgat argued.
In his speech on Sunday night, Mr. Morsi praised and thanked the police and the armed forces for their work battling the chaos. He also renewed his invitation to his political opponents to join him in a “national dialogue,” beginning with a meeting on Monday evening. But it was far from clear that Mr. Morsi was fully in command of the military either. The new Islamist-backed Constitution grants the general broad autonomy within the Egyptian government in an apparent quid pro quo for turning over full power to President Morsi in August. Mr. Morsi’s formal request for the military to restore order was “not so much an instruction as a plea for support,” Mr. Bahgat said.
But Mr. Abdel-Fattah, the political scientist, was skeptical that such a dialogue could restore trust in the government. It remains to be seen whether the military retains the credibility to quell the protests. The soldiers stationed in Port Said did nothing to intervene as clashes raged on in the streets hours after curfew Monday night.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Port Said, and Kareem Fahim from Cairo.

Analysts close to the military say its officers are extremely reluctant to engage in the kind of harsh crackdown that would damage its reputations with Egyptians, preferring to rely on its presence alone.
Near the front lines of the clashes, residents debated whether they would welcome a military takeover. “The military that was sent to Port Said is the Muslim Brotherhood’s military,” said one man, dismissing its independence from Mr. Morsi.
But others said they still had faith in the institution, if not its top generals. “In the military, the soldiers are our brothers,” said Khaled Samir Abdullah, 25. Pointing to the police, he said, “those ones are merciless.”

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.