CAIRO: The Muslim Brotherhood has announced its intention to field candidates in the upcoming local council elections, despite a recent spate of arrests of its members, the group announced at a press conference at its headquarters in Manial Thursday. In the press conference, which was attended by the group's leader Mohamed Mahdy Akef, its deputy leader Mohamed Habib, and Secretary General Mahmoud Ezzat, Akef said that Brotherhood members will continue to run in the local elections regardless of the arrest on Wednesday of around 90 senior members and candidates. "The Muslim Brotherhood has experienced in the last few months many violent attacks from the government as the government's crackdown on the group has been increasing day after day, Akef said. "Some members' homes have been raided at night, many young students have been savagely taken into custody just for being members of the group, and all this was done for one purpose only - to stop the group from running in the coming local elections, Akef added. He was referring to the detention by security forces last Monday of 13 university students affiliated with the Brotherhood in the coastal city of Alexandria as they collected money at the campus for the group and to help Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The students were charged with belonging to a banned organization and collecting money without permission. "Any citizen has the right to run for any local council elections, he went on, "and this right is granted by the constitution. Secondly, this anti-Brotherhood campaign led by the authorities indicates that the government has no serious intention for progress or development and is planning to remain the only power in the country regardless of any law, constitution or the peoples' right to freely choose their representatives. Akef said that the local councils were particularly riddled with corruption, and that the coming elections were postponed from 2006 to 2008 because the government was afraid it would lose most of its seats to Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The primary goal of the organization, he said, was not to seize power or to win seats in parliament, but rather to "rescue the people from the deteriorating conditions that they are going through under the current political system... Akef called on all "the Egyptian public with all its different religious affiliations and political views to participate in the coming elections. Muslim Brotherhood lawyer Abdel Moniem Abdel Maqsoud, who also attended the press conference, told Daily News Egypt that the group will run in the elections without using their famous motto "Islam is the Solution . A new political rights law that was approved by the People's Assembly last summer explicitly forbids any political activity to be based on religion, including using logos or mottos with religious implications. MP Saad Al-Katatny, who is also affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, told Daily News Egypt that, "The Muslim Brotherhood will not give up on what they believe to be their duty towards the public to represent them in the different governmental entities and elections. "The group will run so that the National Democratic Party would not be the only option, Al-Katatny added. Abdel Maqsoud asserted that the Brotherhood has a legal, constitutional right to contest seats on municipal councils. He said that he expected arrests to continue in the weeks prior to the elections, and that the group expected the votes to be rigged, citing changes to the Egyptian constitution last March that altered the election monitoring system. The new system delegates the monitoring to a government-appointed higher electoral committee, rather than the judiciary. According to Abdel Maqsoud, around 440 Muslim Brotherhood members and leaders are currently detained by the government.
