Muslim Brotherhood Accepted Western Plan While Sisi Rejected It

Paul Taylor reported from Paris, France that:

Western allies warned Egypt's military leaders right up to the last minute against using force to crush protest sit-ins by supporters of the ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi, arguing they could ill afford the political and economic damage.

A violent end to a six-week standoff between Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces that toppled Egypt's first freely elected president seemed likely once the new authorities declared last week that foreign mediation had failed.

But the United States and the European Union continued to send coordinated messages to army commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Interim Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei during the four-day Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday that ended on Sunday, pleading for a negotiated settlement, Western diplomats said.

"We had a political plan that was on the table, that had been accepted by the other side (the Muslim Brotherhood)," said EU envoy Bernardino Leon, who co-led the mediation effort with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

"They (the government) could have taken this option. So all that has happened today was unnecessary," Leon told Reuters in a telephone interview. 

The last plea was conveyed to the Egyptian authorities on Tuesday, hours before the crackdown was unleashed.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was unusually forthright in condemning the imposition of a state of emergency - a throwback to the nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule under U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, toppled by a popular uprising in 2011.

"In the past week, at every occasion ... we and others have urged the government to respect the rights of free assembly and of free expression..." Kerry said.

Washington also enlisted key Arab ally and aid donor Saudi Arabia to tell Sisi he needed to find a peaceful, inclusive solution "to retain international financial and political support", a person involved in the diplomatic exchanges said.

Flanked by the foreign ministers of Qatar, a major financier of Mursi's government, and the United Arab Emirates, a supporter of the military takeover, U.S. and EU negotiators sought to coax both sides into a series of mutual confidence-building measures. They would have begun with prisoner releases and led to an honorable exit for Mursi, an amended constitution and fresh elections next year.

The diplomatic source said Western mediators tried to persuade Sisi that Egypt would suffer lasting political polarization and economic hardship if there was a bloodbath.

Sisi and the hardline interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, were explicitly warned that ElBaradei would resign if they chose force over negotiation, robbing the military of its principal source of liberal, civilian respectability, the source said.

"The hardliners have a remarkable ability to ignore reality," the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the diplomatic exchanges.

The mediators warned that any move to break up the sit-ins would likely cause hundreds of deaths and drive many conservative Salafi Muslim activists, initially supportive of Mursi's overthrow, to join forces with the Brotherhood in fierce opposition to the authorities.