Egypt Broadens New Crackdown on Brotherhood

Ahmed Ashraf/Associated Press

Egypt's government accuses the Muslim Brotherhood of orchestrating a fatal attack on Tuesday.

CAIRO — Just a day after Egypt's military-backed government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, a more aggressive crackdown was already emerging Thursday, as the authorities announced dozens of arrests across the country, and the seizure of land, stocks and vehicles belonging to the Islamist movement's members.

Social and charitable groups even loosely associated with the group struggled after their funds were frozen by the state. It was a new level of disruption to a society already riven by violence and suspicion in the months since the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president and a Brotherhood leader.

Egypt's new leaders clearly signaled that they had opened a wide-ranging and possibly protracted war on every facet of the Brotherhood's activities, with the terrorism designation giving the security forces greater latitude to stamp out a group deeply rooted in Egyptian social and civic life. The government had also sought to deny the group foreign help or shelter, urging other Arab governments to honor an antiterrorism agreement and shun the organization.

But there were also indications that the government might have overreached. After widespread confusion and concern about the funds cutoff, in particular, government officials partly reversed course on Thursday night, saying that the organizations whose funds had been frozen — more than a thousand of them — would be allowed access to money to continue operating.

One of the operations caught in the whipsaw was the Islamic Medical Association, a network of hospitals founded by a Brotherhood leader in the 1970s that now serves more than two million patients a year, mostly in poor neighborhoods.

At two of the network's hospitals in Cairo, most of the local residents waiting for treatment on Thursday said they did not belong to the Brotherhood and did not regard the facilities as part of the movement's operations. Instead, they saw clean, efficient and affordable alternatives to the government's poorly managed hospitals.

A doctor at one of the facilities, Central Hospital in the Nasr City district of Cairo, said Thursday that admissions had already dropped by nearly half, with many apparently scared away by news that funding had been cut and worried that even going to the hospital would be seen by the security forces as supporting the Brotherhood. An administrator there said the hospital began turning away new patients. At another clinic, in an impoverished corner of the Shubra neighborhood, neonatal incubators were shut down to save on power expenses.

"If it goes on like this, we won't be able to take on any patients," said Medhat Omar, the administrative director at Central Hospital. There was no money to pay salaries or the mounting expenses owed to the state. "The government will not give up what we owe it."

Despite the government's about-face on the frozen funds, it was still unclear how or when cash would be freed up. And the Justice Ministry, which made the announcement, did not clarify whether the organizations would be allowed to accept new donations, which many rely on as their primary source of income.

It also remained to be seen whether the government would carry out the policy uniformly, or selectively reinstate the penalties to punish groups seen as too close to the Brotherhood.

Even so, the reversal underscored the difficulties the government faces in its current campaign against the Brotherhood, a more than 80-year-old movement that officials have tried to portray as an essentially foreign plant that secretly harbored violent ambitions.

The reality — of a movement whose members are deeply integrated into Egypt's economic and social life, and a political force that has emerged after the uprising in 2011 as the most successful competitor in democratic elections — has muddied the government's portrait of the group and stymied a campaign to eradicate it after driving it from power in July.

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