US funded anti-Morsi protests last year: Documents

Rasa - Newly revealed documents show senior Egyptian opposition leaders who called for the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, had the financial backing of the US.

News ID: 737

Date: 30 March 2014 - 15:07

Rasa News Agency reports - US President Barack Obama had claimed that Washington did not take sides in the Egyptian political crisis that ousted Morsi in July last year.

According to Aljazeera TV channel, a review of dozens of US federal government documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley shows that Washington quietly funded opposition groups in Egypt that worked against the Morsi government.

Washington channeled the funding through a State Department program which is part of a wider effort to try to stop the retreat of pro-US secularists and defeat the Islamic movements in the Middle East.

The program was dubbed by US officials as a "democracy assistance" initiative.

The move is in contradiction to the US government regulations that ban the use of taxpayers’ money to fund foreign politicians and activists that target democratically-elected governments.

The Egyptians launched a revolution against the pro-US regime of former President Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, which eventually ended the 30-year dictatorship of Mubarak in February 2011.

In June 2012, Egyptians voted in the country's first free and fair presidential election, electing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi as their leader.

But about a year later, the Egyptian army toppled Morsi, suspended the constitution and launched a violent crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood.

On December 25, 2013, the military-appointed government listed the Brotherhood as a “terrorist” organization over alleged involvement in a deadly bombing, without investigating or providing any evidence.

In January 2014, Amnesty International criticized Egyptian authorities for using an “unprecedented scale” of violence against protesters and dealing “a series of damaging blows to human rights.”

According to the UK-based rights group, at least 1,400 people have been killed in the political violence since Morsi’s ouster in July 2013, "most of them due to excessive force used by security forces."