ALMOTAMAR.NET aLkHALEEJ tIMES - CAIRO - The Egyptian government said on Tuesday it had won 75.9 percent approval for changes to the constitution in a referendum which opponents and human rights groups say was fixed.
Justice Minister Mamdouh Mara�i said turnout in the voting on Monday was 27.1 percent. All main opposition groups had boycotted the vote in protest at the arrangements and human rights groups said the real turnout was much lower.
The independent Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) said it estimated that 5 percent of registered voters took part. Reuters witnesses said some polling stations were deserted and many others had only a thin trickle of voters.
President Hosni Mubarak welcomed the result in a brief televised address. �The constitutional reform we have achieved is not the end of the road. These constitutional changes have opened the door to a long road of hard work,� he added.
The most controversial changes give the government the means to drive out of political life the opposition Islamists, who pose the most serious challenge to Mubarak�s ruling party.
They allow Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981, to dissolve parliament unilaterally and weaken judicial oversight of polls which have been marred by irregularities.
The amendments also enshrine in the constitution the same restrictions on public freedoms which the government has imposed by emergency law since Mubarak took office in 1981.
Mohamed Habib, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country�s main opposition force, said the government had made up the results. �It is 100 percent forged... They are lying,� he told Reuters.
Abdel Halim Kandil, a leading member of the opposition Kefaya movement, said the turnout was no more than 3 percent.
�No Egyptian accepts the official results unless he is insane. Even if we accept the official results, then we must say the majority of the electorate boycotted the referendum. There is no way left but civil disobedience,� he added.
But the opposition failed to muster more than a few hundred people to any of several protests against the amendments. Over the past few months, the authorities have detained hundreds of Brotherhood members and other activists.
�Flagrant forgery�
Hafez Abu Seada, the head of the EOHR, said the official tally of yes votes might be correct but the turnout was suspect.
�Our organisation observed the referendum and our estimate for the people who voted ... is around 5 percent for the whole day. So I doubt this is a true statistic,� he told Reuters.
The independent Hesham Mubarak Law Centre accused the ruling party of inflating the number of �yes� voters and kicking independent monitors out of polling stations.
�Flagrant forgery was the main headline of the last hours of this referendum,� the organisation said in a statement.
Several witnesses and monitoring groups on Monday said they saw large groups of company workers arriving at polling stations in public buses. Supervised voting trips are a common method for adding to the yes vote in Egyptian elections.
Mara�i said the total number of yes votes was 7.17 million -- equivalent to about 9.7 percent of the Egyptian population.
The government and ruling party have promoted the constitutional changes as part of a liberalisation process, emphasising the additional powers granted to parliament.
But the opposition and rights groups said that as a whole the changes were a step away from democracy and human rights.
The United States, which gives the Egyptian government close to $2 billion a year in aid, also criticised the changes.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who campaigned vigorously for political reform in Egypt in 2005, said last Friday that she was concerned and disappointed.
But, visiting Egypt on Sunday, she gave the Egyptian government the benefit of the doubt.
�We recognise that states do this (political change) in their own way and that they do it in a way that is consistent with their own cultural circumstances,� she said. �It is not a matter to try to dictate to Egypt how this unfolds.�