Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has ordered the retirement of the powerful head of the country’s armed forces, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, a presidential spokesman has said.
No explanation has so far been given.
President Morsi, who was elected in June, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Relations between the Brotherhood and the military have been tense since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak last year.
Before Mr Morsi was sworn in, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) dissolved the Egyptian Parliament, which is dominated by the president’s Islamist allies.
The military council, under Gen Tantawi’s leadership, also stripped the presidency of many of its powers.
Egypt’s president orders retirement of defense minister and chief of staff
AP foreign, Sunday August 12 2012
CAIRO (AP) — State TV: Egypt’s president orders retirement of defense minister and chief of staff .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19234763
might be able to make it funny:(from the BBC article)
A presidential spokesman said Gen Annan and Field Marshal Tantawi had been appointed as presidential advisers and were given Egypt’s highest state honour, the Grand Collar of the Nile.
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory
He should. He won because the top two candidates were thrown off the ballot. He was last or second to last in the field of five before Egyptian courts cleansed the ballot, paving the way to victory.
Nice looking regalia, don’t you think;)
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for the blow-back on this, I can’t see the military idly taking this.
their late muted response speak volumes
US says it anticipated changes in Egyptian military leadership
STAFF WRITER 5:15 HRS IST
From Lalit K Jha
Washington, Aug 14 (PTI) Terming the sacking of Defence Minister Hussein Tantawi by President Muhammad Mursi as Egypt’s internal matter, the US has said it had anticipated changes in the Egyptian military leadership.
Top US officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon said they were expecting the changes, but were not aware of the timing.
AT
A Brotherhood coup in Egypt
By Victor Kotsev
Egypt’s ostensibly inexperienced president Mohammed Morsi accomplished nothing short of a coup d’etat on Sunday when he replaced the men who were widely seen as Egypt’s rulers – Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi and Lieutenant general Sami Anan, among others – and shredded the latest constitutional amendment issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
The SCAF, its rule undercut by the collapse of authority in the Sinai peninsula and by last week’s cross-border terror attack (which cost the lives of 16 soldiers and caught the Egyptians unprepared despite a “detailed intelligence warning”), conceded. However, it is uncertain what its true motives and intentions are, as is the precise magnitude, in practical terms, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spectacular victory. Many eyes, both in the region and farther away, are fixed on Egypt as the intrigue unfolds.
It remains unclear what exactly transpired in the days and hours prior to Sunday afternoon’s surprise announcement. The fact that General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Tantawi’s replacement as defense minister and army chief, is nearly two decades younger than him has raised the possibility of an internal army coup. The sharp generational divide in the army’s higher echelon and the unwillingness of the older generals to share some of their power with younger colleagues has been a liability for the SCAF since the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, himself an octogenarian air force general.
As Shadi Hamid from the Brookings Doha Center wrote on his Twitter account, “What we saw today in Egypt increasingly seems like a mix of a civilian counter-coup and a coordinated coup within the military itself.”
Despite rumors of an impending army coup against Morsi, which may have something to do with his actions, for at least a couple of weeks now there were signs that the power of Tantawi and the SCAF was waning. For example, the military remained strangely silent during a number of debates surrounding the drafting of the new Egyptian constitution, despite having given itself authority over the constituent assembly with the amendment which Morsi just abrogated.
Also, the previously assertive Tantawi demonstrated some servility in the wake of the Sinai attack, when he fired his intelligence chief and several other generals at the request of Morsi. Regardless of whether his failure to respond more forcefully to the president’s early overtures sealed his fate, as some analysts claim, it was clear that something was amiss.
On the ground, something is clearly wrong with the military campaign against Sinai terrorists. The government claims to have captured “the Bin Laden of Sinai” and to have killed at least 20 militants in air strikes last week. Recent reports, however, question the veracity of all of these claims. [1] Meanwhile, in response to several deaths which occurred subsequently in the course of the military campaign, Sinai militants assassinated a tribal sheikh and his son. [2] By most accounts, the loss of government control in Sinai has progressed so far that the army will have an extremely hard time reasserting its authority.
Moreover, the economy of Egypt is also faltering, with traditional sources of income such as tourism slashed by the unrest and almost daily riots over the shortage of essential products. Clearly, Morsi and the Muslim Brother face an extremely daunting task of managing the country.
These issues, alongside the unpopularity of the military’s older leadership, may have something to do with the SCAF’s unusual acquiescence to Morsi’s schemes. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood could make an excellent scapegoat in the event of an economic collapse and a breakdown of social order in Egypt.
As the influential US-based intelligence analysis organization Stratfor wrote recently, “While Morsi may have achieved a symbolic victory in removing long-serving members of the former Mubarak regime from their military posts, the military had its own reasons for going along with the moves – reasons that are intended to increase, not reduce, the military’s influence over the civilian government.”
To be sure, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood won a major victory. Ironically, as many have pointed out, Morsi’s power now is akin to or, in theory, even greater than that of Mubarak at his height. The prominent Egyptian secular leader Mohammed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on Monday, “With military stripped of legislative authority & in absence of parliament, president holds imperial powers. Transitional mess continues.”
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