Facts about Egypt as election results announced
Jun 24, 2012, 4:14 PM
CAIRO (AP) – Following is a factsheet about Egypt, where Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi has been declared the winner of a presidential election runoff:
_ Population: 82 million, along with another estimated 8 million citizens living abroad.
_ Religion: About 90 percent Muslim, 10 percent Christian.
_ Land Area: About 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles), bordering the Palestinian Gaza Strip, Israel, Sudan and Libya. Most is barren desert. The population is concentrated on about 7 percent of the land, mostly along the Nile River.
_ GDP growth in 2011: 1.8 percent.
_ Official unemployment rate in 2011: 10.4 percent.
_ Literacy: 71.4 percent.
_ Inflation in 2012: 8.3 percent, according to Central Bank of Egypt.
_ Key moments in modern history:
Egypt was a monarchy until a 1952 military coup. Its first four presidents after that came from the military, starting with Mohammed Naguib, who served briefly, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamist militants after signing the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. His vice president, Hosni Mubarak, assumed power.
Mubarak ruled for nearly 30 years, imprisoning many Muslim Brotherhood members while allowing others to run in parliamentary elections as independent candidates but not as a party. Thousands of people were tortured and some died in the country’s notorious prisons during Mubarak’s rule.
Corruption, widespread poverty and curbs on freedoms sparked the Jan. 25, 2011 uprising engineered by youth activists. Nearly 900 deaths and 18 days later, Mubarak was forced to step down, and his longtime Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, heading a council of generals, assumed power.
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