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CAIRO (AFP) - The Egyptian authorities yesterday suspended the activities of the country's only Islamist party until an internal power struggle is resolved, just months ahead of parliamentary elections. It included the opposition Labor Party's newspaper Al-Shaab, which the government press has accused of inciting violent demonstrations against an allegedly blasphemous novel. The government Parties Committee was ruling on a power struggle between breakaway factions within the party, which have declared two different candidates for chairman against the existing one, Ibrahim Shukri. The party's Secretary General Adel Hussein, a Shukri supporter who has alleged that the security services orchestrated the party split as a pretext for a crackdown, appealed yesterday for support from other opposition parties. "We will see how we will resist politically, but it should be a collective resistance with the other parties, because if we are eaten today, the others will be eaten tomorrow," Hussein said, who is also a journalist for Al-Shaab. On Monday he had warned the government against taking any "stupid decision" against the party. The Parties Committee said in a statement that it had decided not to recognize any of the Labor Party factions until the rift is resolved, "whether via the courts or via an amicable agreement." The party split followed accusations in Egypt's government press that it was using the bi-weekly Al-Shaab to incite students at Cairo's Al-Azhar university to demonstrate against the recent republication of an allegedly blasphemous novel by Syrian writer Haidar Haidar. Some 50 students were injured in clashes with police last week when protests against the book turned violent and more than 100 were arrested, though they were later released. In late April, Al-Shaab published an article inciting Muslims to kill the author of the controversial novel, which it accused of defaming Islam, along with Egyptian officials responsible for republishing it. But Egypt's top Muslim scholar, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of Al-Azhar, denounced Al-Shaab's campaign as "provocative," in an interview published yesterday in the weekly Rose al-Yusef magazine. "Those who provoked the unrest and the students who threw rocks at the police should be held accountable," he said, despite branding Haidar's novel as blasphemous, immoral and a danger to society on Wednesday. The Labour Party started out as a socialist-orientated movement when it was founded in 1979, but allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood for the 1987 parliamentary elections and formally adopted an Islamist line at its general congress in 1989. It has no members in parliament, which is dominated by President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party, but uses Al-Shaab newspaper to voice its opinions. The paper's journalists have been sentenced to prison terms and fined in two separate libel cases within the past year. The Parties Committee is chaired by the speaker of Egypt's Advisory Council - a non-legislative Senate - and includes the Ministers of the Interior, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs as members as well as three judges appointed by the state. |
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