Protest law, jail terms boost Egypt opposition

Egyptian policemen detain protester during demonstration in Cairo Restrictions on protests and 11-year jail terms for girl demonstrators are reviving Egypt's autocratic past, say activists and erstwhile supporters of the government in place after Islamist president Mohamed Morsi's overthrow. The military , the real power even after it formally appointed a civilian government, remains wildly popular, and many Egyptians care more for stability amid an economic downturn than for rowdy protests.
But even supporters of the army-installed government and secular activists who viewed it as a lesser evil after Morsi's divisive rule say it has gone too far with a law that bans all but police-sanctioned protests.
And the sight of more than a dozen white-clad women and girls behind bars on Wednesday, as an Alexandria court sentenced them to 11 years in prison for allegedly taking part in a violent protest in October, proved too much for some.
Putting the law into practice, police violently dispersed two small protests by secular demonstrators on Tuesday, arresting some of Egypt's most prominent female activists before dumping them on a desert road at night.
The activists had been protesting against a clause in the new draft constitution that allows the military to try civilians before summary tribunals.
The prosecution service has ordered the arrest of two leading secular activists, Alaa Abdel Fattah and Ahmed Maher, for allegedly inciting the protests.
Both were prominent dissidents under Morsi.
"Deja vu, I'm about to hand myself in to the authorities again on Saturday," Abdel Fattah wrote on Facebook.
He had been arrested under Morsi's predecessor Hosni Mubarak, the transitional military junta that ruled after Mubarak's overthrow and also during Morsi's year in office.
In the months since the army removed Morsi after mass protests demanding his resignation, more than 1,000 of his supporters have been killed in a police crackdown, and thousands have been arrested.
But the latest restrictions have galvanised secular activists.
Hamdeen Sabbahi, a former presidential candidate and a leading dissident under Morsi, called on the interim president to pardon the seven girls sentenced alongside 14 women and to repeal the protest law.
"I call on president Adly Mansour to use his powers to pardon the girls sentenced to 11 years," he wrote on his Twitter account.
The harsh sentences, which may be overturned or reduced on appeal, left some Egyptians who had protested against Morsi concerned that their rights were being stripped away, said Mohammed Sayyed, a cafe waiter in the upscale Cairo suburb of Maadi.
"What this means is that we as Egyptians have no rights," he said.
Gehad Gamal, an insurance agency employee, said the court's judgment revived memories of Mubarak, who was overthrown in a 2011 uprising.
"Those sentences took us back to Mubarak?s era, with restrictions on political rights," she said, adding that she too had opposed Morsi.
The government has not commented on the prison terms, says it will not reconsider the protest law for now and plans to implement it to the letter, a cabinet official told AFP.
But the increasing backlash may strain the unlikely coalition of security hawks and liberal democrats who the military appointed to lead the country ahead of elections next year, and could also provoke the very unrest the law is aimed at quelling, said analyst Issandr El Amrani.
"This strains relations inside the cabinet," said El Amrani, north Africa project director for the International Crisis Group.
"Rather than consolidate the transition, it weakens it. It alienates even supporters of the government," he said.
"For the past three years, police brutality has been the cause of much of the political turmoil. You keep going through a cycle."
Source: AFP