There had been a major rift between the El Nour leadership. Instead of Emad Abdel Ghafour, the head of the party, two new faces were among us: Moustapha Khalifa, and Younes Makhioun were now representing the El Nour Party in the meeting.
The meeting started at 9am and lasted through till 9pm. The discussions around the names and the representation of the constitutional committee had lasted for 10 days. Today we were putting the final touches to it. The last touches took us over ten hours. The major players in the negotiations surprisingly were Ayman Nour (El Ghad El Thawra party) and El Sayed El Badawi (Wafd Party). They were the best prepared for this meeting because they had stayed up the night before , till the wee hours of the morning, in the Maadi Sofitel Hotel negotiating with the Political Islam parties the names to be proposed for the constitutional committee. There was a lot of rancor towards these negotiators by the remaining members of the meeting because we were excluded from this late night meeting. Anger was put aside for the better good of this extremely important historic meeting.
The negotiations were difficult and prolonged. A lunch break was taken in the afternoon. Haggling and negotiations prevailed during the lunch. Several tea breaks were taken during the afternoon discussions. This was to give us a chance to contact our party leadership for consultation on the names of the proposed members of the committee.
By 8pm we were all extremely exhausted and we finally reached consensus on the names of the constitutional committee. Fifty percent of the names agreed upon were pro a secular constitution and the remaining fifty were pro a political Islam constitutional committee.
The last tea break was taken before we were to go out to relay the breakthrough news to the hundreds of reporters waiting for us in the Ministry of Defense courtyard since noon.
We got back to the conference room for the closing session. Then Moustapha Khalifa requested to make a statement. Field Marshal Tantawi gave him the word. Mr. Khalifa in a very soft and docile voice dropped his bombshell statement. He told us that the Salafi's elected him and his party in to power solely on the premise that they will uphold Sharia in their governance. The new constitution must be written in accordance with Sharia law and nothing else. He therefore could not accept a constitutional committee that did not have a majority of 51% members belonging to political Islam! The rest is history.
This is where the Salafis stand. The political romantics who believe they are more benign than the Muslim Brotherhood are strongly mistaken. I fully agree with those calling for the disbanding of political parties whose origins are built on a religious premise. Once we have our next parliamentary elections, which will be based on a well written constitution, will we be able to take the Salafists demands in to consideration. Prior to that, they should not keep us hostage by threatening to side with the deposed President and the Muslim Brotherhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment