February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
CAIRO
Watching President Hosni Mubarak addressing his nation Thursday night,
explaining why he would not be drummed out of office by foreigners, I felt
embarrassed for him and worried for Egypt. This man is staggeringly out of touch
with what is happening inside his country. This is Rip Van Winkle meets
Facebook.
The fact that the several hundred thousand Egyptians in Tahrir Square reacted to
Mubarak’s speech by waving their shoes — they surely would have thrown them at
him if he had been in range — and shouting “go away, go away,” pretty much sums
up the reaction. Mubarak, in one speech, shifted this Egyptian democracy drama
from mildly hopeful, even thrilling, to dangerous.
All day here there was a drumbeat of leaks that the fix was in: Mubarak was
leaving, the army leadership was meeting and Vice President Omar Suleiman would
oversee the constitutional reform process. The fact that this did not turn out
to be the case suggests there is some kind of a split in the leadership of the
Egyptian Army, between the anti-Mubarak factions leaking his departure and the
pro-Mubarak factions helping him to stay.
The words of Mubarak and Suleiman directed to the democracy demonstrators could
not have been more insulting: “Trust us. We’ll take over the reform agenda now.
You all can go back home, get back to work and stop letting those foreign
satellite TV networks — i.e., Al Jazeera — get you so riled up. Also, don’t let
that Obama guy dictate to us proud Egyptians what to do.”
This narrative is totally out of touch with the reality of this democracy
uprising in Tahrir Square, which is all about the self-empowerment of a
long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be
deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own
leaders, who told them for 30 years that they were not ready for democracy.
Indeed, the Egyptian democracy movement is everything that Hosni Mubarak says it
is not: homegrown, indefatigable and authentically Egyptian. Future historians
will write about the large historical forces that created this movement, but it
is the small stories you encounter in Tahrir Square that show why it is
unstoppable.
I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of
young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and
neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched
me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the
aphorism that “in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.”
I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either
— and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from
kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them.
Well, Egyptians have stopped renting, at least in Tahrir Square, where a sign
hung Thursday said: “Tahrir — the only free place in Egypt.” So I went up to one
of these young kids on garbage duty — Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care
shop — and asked him: “Why did you volunteer for this?” He couldn’t get the
words out in broken English fast enough: “This is my earth. This is my country.
This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.” Ownership is
a beautiful thing.
As I was leaving the garbage pile, I ran into three rather prosperous-looking
men who wanted to talk. One of them, Ahmed Awn, 31, explained that he was
financially comfortable and even stood to lose if the turmoil here continued,
but he wanted to join in for reasons so much more important than money. Before
this uprising, he said, “I was not proud to tell people I was an Egyptian.
Today, with what’s been done here” in Tahrir Square, “I can proudly say again I
am an Egyptian.”
Humiliation is the single most powerful human emotion, and overcoming it is the
second most powerful human emotion. That is such a big part of what is playing
out here.
Finally, crossing the Nile bridge away from the square, I was stopped by a
well-dressed Egyptian man — a Times reader — who worked in Saudi Arabia. He was
with his wife and two young sons. He told me that he came to Cairo Thursday to
take his two sons to see, hear, feel and touch Tahrir Square. “I want it seared
in their memory,” he told me. It seemed to be his way of ensuring that this
autocracy never returns. These are the people whom Mubarak is accusing of being
stirred up entirely by foreigners. In truth, the Tahrir movement is one of the
most authentic, most human, quests for dignity and freedom that I have ever
seen.
But rather than bowing to that, retiring gracefully and turning over the
presidency either to the army or some kind of presidency council made up of
respected figures to oversee the transition to democracy, Mubarak seems
determined to hang on in a way that, at best, will slow down Egypt’s evolution
to democracy and, at worst, take a grass-roots, broad-based Egyptian nonviolent
democracy movement and send it into a rage.
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and THANASSIS CAMBANIS
CAIRO — Hours before the president’s speech, through dark,
downtown streets, groups of young men and women stepped over the rocks of recent
battles and walked toward the lights in Tahrir Square.
They wore their country’s colors on headbands, lanyards and T-shirts and arrived
to a celebration already begun. Popcorn was sold, dates were passed around and a
voice of the uprising, the singer Abdel Halim Hafez, floated from a loudspeaker.
Two men scaled lampposts, risking death to hang a martyr’s picture.
Other men hammered at a wooden roof, a semipermanent addition to a tent city.
Lashed to light posts were loudspeakers, so that the crowds could hear the news.
Surrounded by the architecture of their struggle, the protesters waited for
their reward.
Dozens of men from Sinai, who had camped in the square for two weeks, smiled as
they talked about finally going back home. Another man, with a cast on his arm
from the battle of the stones, said he would finally tell his wife where he had
disappeared to on Jan. 28, when he ran into a protest and never looked back.
“I cannot believe this day has already come,” said Amr Gala, an accountant,
about 8 p.m. “I cannot believe that the president will step down.” Everyone
shared his relief, and no one was worried about what came next.
“He leaves, and then we think,” said Mina George, 31.
“And then we choose,” his brother Mario added.
It all seemed unbelievable and it turned out that it was.
At first, there was serenity, as hundreds of thousands of people stopped
chanting and talking and moving. At 10:45 p.m., President Hosni Mubarak started
to speak, a tinny version of his voice leaking from speakers like the scratchy
audio from a newsreel.
For many of the protesters his words were hard to hear. Near one stage in the
square, people pulled out cellphones and banded in knots, as relatives on the
other end of the phones piped in the speech from their televisions. At another
stage, a young man in a black jacket held up a tiny radio to a microphone.
Soon, the protesters were shaking their heads. Then they started to groan or
curse, calling Mr. Mubarak a donkey. Static filled the speakers at critical
moments, as when the president tried to explain that he was transferring power
to his vice president.
It was clear what had happened. Before the speech was over, chanting filled the
square.
“Leave! Leave! Leave!”
With no reason to cheer, or even exhale, people shuffled around the square,
frowning or arguing with one another. Many said Mr. Mubarak’s speech had been a
ploy to divide the protest movement by peeling off those who thought the
president had offered his opponents enough. Other people said the coming days
would be violent.
Young men, desperate for answers, surrounded Amr Hamzawy, who belongs to a group
that was mediating between the protesters and the government. Were there any
guarantees that the president would honor his pledges, one man asked?
Their only guarantee would come from sitting in the square, Mr. Hamzawy said.
“He is stubborn, and he doesn’t want to be brought to account,” said Yasmin
Fawzi, 24, looking stunned. “If he doesn’t step down, these people won’t leave.”
Some of the protest organizers wept after the speech. “Now more people are going
to die,” said Sally Moore, one of 14 leaders of the youth movements at Tahrir.
“Mubarak wants to provoke us so that we march on the presidential palace and he
can shoot us.”
Anger turned to festivity much later in the night, as thousands poured past the
concrete barriers to demonstrate — and set up camp —in front of the Stalinist
state television headquarters, an imposing tower on the Nile that looks like a
fortress even when not protected by tanks.
“We must surround all the symbols of state power and choke them off,” said Alaa
Abdel Fattah, a blogger and activist.
A 20-year-old musician brought a drum to keep the chants in rhythm. Men and
women made beds out of blankets and sheets on the Corniche overlooking the Nile.
Mr. Mubarak’s speech had energized them.
“Yes, we are disappointed,” said Ahmed Amesh, a veterinarian. “It’s strange, now
people are asking for more. Instead of asking for his resignation, they’re
asking for the president to be prosecuted and put to death.”
After a night of swirling confusion, President Hosni Mubarak has delegated his
“powers and authority” to his deputy but not left office, the armed forces’
plans are unclear and the Egyptians who have risen up to bring down a repressive
regime are bewildered and angry.
The potential for greater violence in Egypt has risen. In a 17-minute speech on
Thursday night, Mubarak acknowledged mistakes, promised reform and said, almost
in passing, that his vice president, Omar Suleiman, was now in charge. But he
defied the demand of protesters that he quit. Once again, he gave the impression
he had not heard them at all.
If Egypt’s battered authorities had set out to choreograph treacherous muddle,
they could scarcely have done a better job.
Early Thursday evening, an immense cheer went up at Tahrir Square. The Egyptian
armed forces, issuing what they call Communiqué No. 1, declared that the demands
of the Egyptian people would be met. There was no sign of the man who has long
been their commander in chief, Mubarak.
Soon after, President Obama made a statement suggesting Mubarak’s departure was,
indeed, imminent. “What is absolutely clear is that we are witnessing history
unfold. It is a moment of transformation that is taking place because the people
of Egypt are calling for change,” he said.
Then, several hours after the army statement, Mubarak appeared on state
television. He acknowledged mistakes for the first time, vowed to prosecute
those responsible for hundreds of deaths over the past two weeks, promised
reform of the Constitution, and, without explaining why, said he had decided to
“delegate the powers and authority of the president to the vice president.”
Senior Egyptian officials later said that meant all constitutional powers had
been transferred and Suleiman was “de facto” president. A new chant went up in
Tahrir Square: “We want to understand the speech!”
Both Mubarak and Suleiman once again blamed Egypt’s paralysis on foreign powers,
attempted foreign diktats and lying foreign satellite channels out to “deface
the image of Egypt.”
The two men looked completely out of touch. How does Mubarak square his
determination to prosecute those responsible for violence with the fact he
oversaw that violence?
What do foreign powers have to do with a domestic crisis brought on by Mubarak’s
farce of a November parliamentary election, growing corruption and his long
refusal to meet growing demands for self-expression and freedom?
How can this man who would not even admit that the uprising provoked his
decision not to run in a planned September presidential election ever level with
his people?
Every concession from him has been grudging, belated and unconvincing. This
speech was no exception.
There appear to be only two possible scenarios now: an increase in the protests
so overwhelming that Mubarak, defiant soldier, is forced to go back on his vow
to stay in office — at least nominally — until September; or an army clampdown
that forces people to do what Suleiman requested — go home.
A massive rally had been planned for Friday before the speeches; how it unfolds
will say a lot about where an awakening Egypt is now headed. There is tremendous
energy invested in bringing real change, but for most people the only guarantee
of that change is Mubarak’s full departure.
A few hours before the army’s announcement, I had met a 42-year-old investment
banker, ex-Goldman, with a good job in London and a nice place in South
Kensington. He had watched the big Jan. 25 protest on TV, dropped everything,
got a leave, and came out here to devote his energy to Egyptian freedom. It was
a case, he says, of put up or shut up. There are plenty like him, professionals
fired up with their country’s potential, sick of being told what to do by an old
man. He wrote this to me Wednesday:
“It’s ironic, the West spent billions on Egypt through NGOs, government
assistance, trying to help improve our education, improve the sense of civic
responsibility, create civic society values, ownership, citizenship, human
rights; but they never realized that all they really needed to do was give us
our freedom and in literally a day and a night you saw the transformation — we
would do all these things for ourselves, by ourselves if we felt enfranchised.”
This revolution in values is startling. It’s been brought on by a sudden sense
of ownership in the place of powerlessness. Cairo was the place of pushing and
shoving and shouting and disorder par excellence. Now long lines form to enter
Tahrir Square. There are even separate garbage cans in the square for organic
waste.
I also spoke to a 24-year-old professional, Perihane Allam. She was struck by
the change in attitudes. Sexual harassment has been a big issue in Cairo. “Men
were always hitting on me in the street, saying stuff,” she said. None of that
in Tahrir Square, she told me, or elsewhere in the city these days. Dignity is
transformative. So is the discovery of an Egyptian identity cutting across class
and religious lines.
But after Mubarak’s speech, it seems all these gains are fragile.
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON — Even as pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo
have riveted the world’s attention for 17 days, the Egyptian military has
managed the crisis with seeming finesse, winning over street protesters, quietly
consolidating its domination of top government posts and sidelining potential
rivals for leadership, notably President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal.
Then came Thursday, a roller coaster of a day on which the military at first
appeared to be moving to usher Mr. Mubarak from the scene — and then watched
with the world as Mr. Mubarak clung to his title, delegating some powers to Omar
Suleiman, the vice president and former longtime intelligence chief.
The standoff between the protest leaders and Mr. Mubarak, hours before major
demonstrations set for Friday, could pose a new dilemma for military commanders.
Mr. Suleiman called for an end to demonstrations, and Human Rights Watch said
this week that some military units had been involved in detaining and abusing
protesters. But by most accounts, army units deployed in Cairo and other cities
have shown little appetite for using force to clear the streets.
Early Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition leader and the former head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, posted a message on Twitter saying: “Egypt
will explode. Army must save the country now.”
Andrew McGregor of the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington research center, said
that the military was caught between Mr. Mubarak and the protesters, and that it
was hard to predict how officers might react. “For the first time, I think
there’s the possibility of a split in the military,” said Mr. McGregor, author
of “A Military History of Modern Egypt.”
The protesters’ hopes soared Thursday afternoon, when the chief of staff of the
armed forces, Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, visited Tahrir Square in Cairo and
suggested that their demands would soon be met. He also presided along with the
defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, over a meeting of the
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Paul J. Sullivan, an expert on the Egyptian
military at the National Defense University, said it was only the third time in
Egypt’s history that the council had met; the other meetings were during wars
with Israel in 1967 and 1973.
Neither Mr. Mubarak nor Mr. Suleiman were at the meeting, and the resulting
communiqué declared that the council had met “in affirmation of support for the
legitimate demands of the people.” So it came as a shock when Mr. Mubarak said
he was not stepping down.
The military has been an anchor of Egypt’s authoritarian government for nearly
60 years. It helped usher Mr. Mubarak, a former air force chief, into office
after the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. But under Mr. Mubarak’s rule,
its role in Egyptian politics has been reduced, with the separate domestic
security services playing the role of political enforcer. Many top military
officers have kept busy overseeing the military industries that represent an
estimated 5 to 15 percent of the economy.
Assuming military leaders went along with it, the decision to leave Mr. Suleiman
in place suggests no irreversible commitment to move toward democracy. Even in
recent days, Mr. Suleiman has suggested that the country is not ready for
democracy and that the emergency rule in place for decades should not be ended
yet, a point Mr. Mubarak echoed in his speech. At 74, Mr. Suleiman has been one
of Mr. Mubarak’s closest aides for nearly two decades, serving as chief of
military intelligence and then the nation’s intelligence director until he was
named vice president on Jan. 28.
His relationship with General Enan is unclear. General Enan, 63, is a generation
younger than Mr. Mubarak. He has spent extended periods in the United States and
is closer to American commanders than the oldest Egyptian military leaders,
including Mr. Tantawi, 75, the defense minister, who were trained by the Soviet
Union.
American officials said General Enan had offered them assurances that the armed
forces would defend Egyptian institutions, not individuals, and that they would
not open fire on civilians. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has commended the
Egyptian military for what he called “exemplary” conduct amid the street
protests and said it had “made a contribution to the evolution of democracy.”
In addition to its role as the ultimate source of political power, the military
has a huge role in the Egyptian economy. Since a peace treaty was signed with
Israel in 1979, military industries have expanded in part to keep a relatively
idle officer corps content.
“Part of the strategy was to buy their acquiescence through a greater economic
role for them,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an analyst with the Century
Foundation, a research organization, who has been in Cairo during the crisis.
“Their business interests are vast,” he said, and include benefits like officers
clubs and a boat on the Nile for the air force.
After the protests began Jan. 25, the military asserted itself in domestic
politics for the first time in years, deploying in Cairo and other cities. The
initial reshuffling of Mr. Mubarak’s government, though perceived abroad as a
concession to the demonstrators, tightened the grip of the military and
intelligence old guard.
First came the advance of Mr. Suleiman, whose appointment to the vice presidency
has all but ruled out the succession of the president’s son Gamal, 47, a
well-connected businessman, removing a challenge to the military’s dominance.
Gamal Mubarak has no military background, but he was widely discussed as a
possible successor to his father, to the distress of military and security
officials.
“Suleiman hates Gamal,” Mr. McGregor said.
In the personnel changes Mr. Mubarak announced days into the protests, the prime
minister, Ahmed Nazif was replaced by the former commander of the air force,
Ahmed Shafiq. The defense minister, Mr. Tantawi, was given the additional title
of deputy prime minister while remaining commander in chief of the armed forces.
“This is a security cabinet put in place by Mubarak,” said Michele Dunne, an
expert on Egypt at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He fired all
the economic reform people and brought in others who are security minded.”
Now the military finds itself in an unfamiliar role, caught between swelling
protests and civilian leaders who appear reluctant to cede real power.
Mr. Hanna, of the Century Foundation, said the military had no training in
policing the streets in the face of angry civilians. “It is an open question,”
he said, “whether the chain of command would be respected in a situation when it
tasked a foot soldier or even a commander to kill their own people.”
Mr. Sullivan of the National Defense University said he had “never been more
worried about Egypt and the region than now.”
He said: “When you have hopes that are dashed, that’s the most dangerous moment.
All bets are off.”
Scott Shane reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo;
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — President Hosni Mubarak’s refusal to step down on
Thursday, after a day of rumors galvanized the crowds in Cairo, confronts the
Obama administration with a stark choice: break decisively with Mr. Mubarak or
stick to its call for an “orderly transition” that may no longer be tenable.
On a day of dashed hopes in Egypt, the administration’s attempts to balance the
democratic aspirations of the protesters against a fear of contributing to
broader instability in the Middle East collided head-on with Mr. Mubarak’s
defiant refusal to relinquish his office.
To some extent, Mr. Mubarak opened the door for President Obama to appeal even
more directly to the protesters, some of whom have felt betrayed by the
administration’s cautious approach, saying it placed strategic interests ahead
of democratic values. In his speech, Mr. Mubarak said he would not brook foreign
interference, suggesting that he was digging in his heels after days of prodding
by the United States for “immediate, irreversible” change.
Mr. Obama’s remarks earlier in the day, in which he celebrated the hopes of a
“young generation” of Egyptians, were broadcast in Cairo, drawing cheers from
the protesters.
“The administration has to put everything on the line now,” said Thomas
Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, who has been among
several outside experts advising the White House on Egypt in recent days.
“Whatever cards they have, this is the time to play them.”
In its first reaction, the administration offered few overt signs of a change in
policy. While criticizing the move as insufficient, it made no direct call for
Mr. Mubarak’s resignation. But in a statement, the White House called on his
government to explain “in clear and unambiguous language” how a transition of
power would take place.
Mr. Obama watched Mr. Mubarak’s speech on board Air Force One, returning from a
trip to Michigan, the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said. As soon as he arrived
at the White House, Mr. Obama huddled with his national security aides. The
administration appeared as taken aback by Mr. Mubarak’s speech as the crowds in
Tahrir Square. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta,
testified before the House of Representatives on Thursday morning that there was
a “strong likelihood” that Mr. Mubarak would step down by the end of the day.
American officials said Mr. Panetta was basing his statement not on secret
intelligence but on media broadcasts, which began circulating before he sat down
before the House Intelligence Committee. But a senior administration official
said Mr. Obama had also expected that Egypt was on the cusp of dramatic change.
Speaking at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, he said, “We are
witnessing history unfold,” adding, “America will do everything we can to
support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy.”
The chaotic events on Thursday called much of the administration’s strategy in
dealing with the Egyptian crisis into question. For days, the administration has
pinned its hopes on a transition process managed by the Egyptian vice president,
Omar Suleiman. But Mr. Suleiman followed Mr. Mubarak on television, aligning
himself squarely with his boss, urging the protesters to decamp, go back to work
and stop watching foreign satellite TV channels. That extravagant show of
loyalty may doom any chances for Mr. Suleiman to function as an honest broker in
the transition — something on which the administration had been counting, in
part because it has good relations with Mr. Suleiman, a former head of Egyptian
intelligence.
“The administration had been looking toward Suleiman to handle the orderly part
of the orderly transition,” said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy
at the Brookings Institution. “But this week, he raised doubts about whether he
had made the conversion to a democrat. And now Mubarak has dragged Suleiman down
with him, in the eyes of the protesters.”
For the administration, as for the crowds, it was a day of keen anticipation,
followed by intense confusion. CNN was on in offices across Washington, with
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other officials waiting for a
speech that they believed would be a major step forward in the crisis.
Shortly after the speech, Egypt’s ambassador to Washington, Sameh Shoukry, said
he called the White House to say that Mr. Mubarak had in fact delegated his
powers to Mr. Suleiman — a move that was hardly clear in a lengthy address that
focused more on his refusal to be ousted.
“He now has all the authorities bestowed on the president by the Constitution,”
Mr. Shoukry said of Mr. Suleiman in an interview, including command of the
military. Mr. Mubarak, the ambassador said, retains the power to amend the
Constitution, dissolve Parliament and dismiss the cabinet. And Mr. Mubarak could
always take power back.
Defending Mr. Suleiman, Mr. Shoukry said, “The vice president’s statements
indicated his desire to fulfill the reform process and continue the dialogue
with the opposition.”
Mr. Panetta’s rather firm declaration to Congress about Mr. Mubarak’s exit came
at an awkward moment. American officials said Mr. Obama was unhappy about some
of the recent judgments of American spy agencies, in particular the conclusion
that President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia would remain in power and that
Tunisian security forces would come to his defense.
Defending the C.I.A.’s work on Thursday, Mr. Panetta said that the agency last
year issued nearly 400 reports about simmering tensions in the Middle East, and
the “potential for disruption.” Mr. Panetta compared the difficulty of making
intelligence judgments to forecasting earthquakes: even mapping the fault lines
cannot give you precise information about the next earthquake.
Still, Mr. Panetta said that his agency needed to better understand the
“triggers” that can set off events like the protests in Egypt. He said that he
had asked C.I.A. station chiefs for “better collection on issues like popular
sentiments, issues like the strength of the opposition, issues like what is the
role of the Internet in that particular country” and similar topics.
Speaking to the same House panel, the director of national intelligence, James
R. Clapper, gave spy agencies a grade of “B-plus, if not A-minus” for their
recent Middle East forecasting. But, he cautioned, “We are not clairvoyant.”
President Barack Obama issued this statement on Thursday in
response to developments in Egypt:
The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but
it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient.
Too many Egyptians remain unconvinced that the government is serious about a
genuine transition to democracy, and it is the responsibility of the government
to speak clearly to the Egyptian people and the world. The Egyptian government
must put forward a credible, concrete and unequivocal path toward genuine
democracy, and they have not yet seized that opportunity.
As we have said from the beginning of this unrest, the future of Egypt will be
determined by the Egyptian people. But the United States has also been clear
that we stand for a set of core principles. We believe that the universal rights
of the Egyptian people must be respected, and their aspirations must be met. We
believe that this transition must immediately demonstrate irreversible political
change, and a negotiated path to democracy. To that end, we believe that the
emergency law should be lifted. We believe that meaningful negotiations with the
broad opposition and Egyptian civil society should address the key questions
confronting Egypt’s future: protecting the fundamental rights of all citizens;
revising the Constitution and other laws to demonstrate irreversible change; and
jointly developing a clear roadmap to elections that are free and fair.
We therefore urge the Egyptian government to move swiftly to explain the changes
that have been made, and to spell out in clear and unambiguous language the step
by step process that will lead to democracy and the representative government
that the Egyptian people seek. Going forward, it will be essential that the
universal rights of the Egyptian people be respected. There must be restraint by
all parties. Violence must be forsaken. It is imperative that the government not
respond to the aspirations of their people with repression or brutality. The
voices of the Egyptian people must be heard.
The Egyptian people have made it clear that there is no going back to the way
things were: Egypt has changed, and its future is in the hands of the people.
Those who have exercised their right to peaceful assembly represent the
greatness of the Egyptian people, and are broadly representative of Egyptian
society. We have seen young and old, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian join
together, and earn the respect of the world through their non-violent calls for
change. In that effort, young people have been at the forefront, and a new
generation has emerged. They have made it clear that Egypt must reflect their
hopes, fulfill their highest aspirations, and tap their boundless potential. In
these difficult times, I know that the Egyptian people will persevere, and they
must know that they will continue to have a friend in the United States of
America.
Mubarak Refuses to Step Down, Stoking Revolt’s Fury and
Resolve
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak told the Egyptian people on
Thursday that he would delegate authority to Vice President Omar Suleiman but
that he would not resign, enraging hundreds of thousands gathered to hail his
departure and setting in motion a volatile new stage in the three-week uprising.
The declaration by Mr. Mubarak that he would remain president appeared to signal
a dangerous escalation in one of the largest popular revolts in Egypt’s history,
and some protesters warned that weeks of peaceful rallies might give way to
violence as early as Friday.
The 17-minute speech itself underlined a seemingly unbridgeable gap between
ruler and ruled in Egypt: Mr. Mubarak, in paternalistic tones, talked in great
detail about changes he planned to make to Egypt’s autocratic Constitution,
while crowds in Tahrir Square, with bewilderment and anger, demanded that he
step down.
Mr. Mubarak seemed oblivious. “It’s not about me,” he said in his address. When
he was done, crowds in Cairo waved the bottoms of their shoes in the air, a
gesture intended to convey disgust, and shouted, “Leave! Leave!”
The reaction abroad to Mr. Mubarak’s address was more measured, but also
critical. President Obama issued a statement on Thursday night saying that “too
many Egyptians remain unconvinced that the government is serious about a genuine
transition to democracy.” European leaders also called for more fundamental
change and urged that it happen faster.
The speech came after a tumultuous day of dramatic gestures and fevered
speculation in which the newly appointed leader of Mr. Mubarak’s party said the
president had agreed to step down, and the military issued a communiqué in which
it declared it was intervening to safeguard the country, language some
opposition leaders read as signaling a possible coup d’état.
Earlier in the day, even Mr. Obama seemed to believe that Mr. Mubarak would go
further, celebrating his belief that Egypt was “witnessing history unfold.”
Instead, Mr. Mubarak, 82, a former general, struck a defiant, even provocative
note. While he acknowledged for the first time that his government had made
mistakes, he made it clear that he was still president and that reforms in Egypt
would proceed under his government’s supervision and according to the timetable
of elections in September.
Though Mr. Suleiman was already acting as the face of the government, the
announcement gave him official duties, albeit ones Mr. Mubarak can revoke.
“I saw fit to delegate the authorities of the president to the vice president,
as dictated by the Constitution,” Mr. Mubarak said. He added that he was
“adamant to continue to shoulder my responsibility to protect the Constitution
and safeguard the interests of the people.”
He echoed the contention of officials in past days that foreigners might be
behind the uprising, but he cited no evidence to support that allegation.
“We will not accept or listen to any foreign interventions or dictations,” he
said.
For hours before Mr. Mubarak’s speech, jubilant crowds, prematurely celebrating
their victory, positioned themselves next to large speakers for what they
assumed was a resignation speech. Men passed out free packages of dates.
Protesters parted only for lines of teenagers chanting: “He’s going to go. We’re
not going to go.”
At about 10:45, the crowd quieted as Mr. Mubarak started his speech, which was
transmitted via a tiny radio that someone held up to a microphone. As it wore
on, the muttering began. “Donkey,” someone said.
Soon, angry chants echoed through the square. People gathered in groups,
confused, enraged and faced with Mr. Mubarak’s plea to endorse his vision of
gradual reform. Some said his speech was intended to divide the protesters, by
peeling off those who thought he had gone far enough. Others said it reflected
the isolation of a president they had come to detest.
“Mubarak didn’t believe us until now, but we will make him believe tomorrow,”
said Ashraf Osman, 49, an accountant who joined protesters in the square.
By midnight, about 3,000 protesters made their way from the square to the Radio
and Television Building, which protesters loathe for propaganda that has cast
them as troublemakers. The building was barricaded with barbed wire, tanks and
armored vehicles. Many protesters said they planned to sleep there, in yet
another move to broaden their protests that have so far focused on Tahrir Square
and the nearby Parliament building. Some protesters also began gathering outside
the presidential palace.
“We must stop these liars,” said Mohamed Zuhairy, a 30-year-old engineer, who
had joined the crowd. “Television must reflect the real power of the
revolution.”
There were even moments of humor in a country with a well-deserved reputation
for it. Protesters joked that the defining chant of the protests — “The people
want the overthrow of the government” — had become “The people want to
understand the speech.”
In a sign of the confusion that reigned in Cairo, youthful opposition leaders
sought to dissect the series of statements from the military command, Mr.
Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman. Some believed that the army, long a player behind the
scenes, was still intent on seeking power but had not yet mustered the leverage
to force Mr. Mubarak from office.
“We are thinking there has been a clash between the army and Suleiman, and the
army wants us to raise our protests so they can take over,” said Shady
el-Ghazali Harb, a protest leader. “We think the army doesn’t want Omar
Suleiman.”
It was unclear whether the military had tried to oust Mr. Mubarak and failed or
was participating in a more complicated choreography in Egypt’s opaque system of
rule. A military statement after Mr. Mubarak’s speech had yet to be broadcast by
early Friday.
For days, the protests in Tahrir Square have gathered momentum, with some of the
biggest crowds yet on Tuesday, despite the government’s attempts to suggest that
the city was returning to normalcy. In the square, tents have multiplied, as the
protests themselves have exalted the resonant symbols of sacrifice. Pictures of
those killed adorn tents, some inscribed with notes from passersby.
“They are heroes,” said Gamal Shaaban, a 49-year-old government employee who
scrawled on one of the pictures, “You are the true people.”
“This government has no legitimacy left,” he said. “It’s lost it. It’s now the
legitimacy of the people and the revolution.”
Along with the protests, labor strikes have flared across Egypt, organized by
workers at post offices, telecommunications centers, textile factories and
cement plants. Clashes have occurred in distant parts of the country — from the
New Valley west of the Nile to Suez, a city along the Suez Canal, which provides
Egypt with crucial earnings.
Organizers have said demonstrators plan to rally at six sites throughout the
capital on Friday, then converge not only on Tahrir Square as in the past, but
also on Parliament and the television building. While organizers have said
Friday’s rallies may be some of the biggest protests yet, they spoke in darker
tones about what they may represent now, given what many view as the
determination of Mr. Mubarak to stay in office, whatever the numbers.
“He set the country on fire,” said Zyad el-Elaimy, one of the organizers. “No
one can control the violence tomorrow. Tomorrow I think a lot of people will be
killed.”
The anger was fueled in good part by expectations that Mr. Mubarak would be
making his last address to the nation. For much of the day, people traded rumors
about where he might be preparing to go to — Bahrain and Dubai were two rumored
destinations — and then by a cascade of official statements suggesting that
might be the case.
The first came from the civilian government. Around 3 p.m., Prime Minister Ahmed
Shafiq told the BBC that talks with Mr. Mubarak about his possible resignation
were already under way.
Gen. Hassan al-Roueini appeared in Tahrir Square to tell protesters that “all
your demands will be met today,” witnesses said, words that were quickly read by
crowds around him to mean that Mr. Mubarak was on the way out.
A short time later, the military, still seen as potentially decisive in the
conflict, announced that it was taking action in what sounded to many people
like a coup.
“In affirmation and support for the legitimate demands of the people, the
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces convened today, 10 February 2011, to
consider developments to date,” an army spokesman declared on state television,
in what was described as communiqué No. 1 of the army command, “and decided to
remain in continuous session to consider what procedures and measures that may
be taken to protect the nation, and the achievements and aspirations of the
great people of Egypt.”
Around the same time, Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, the chief of staff of the armed
forces, appeared in Tahrir Square to tell the protesters the same thing, to
roars of celebration.
The reports seemed increasingly convincing, to both protesters and even
high-ranking officials. Hossam Badrawy, the top official of the ruling party,
said in a television interview that he had personally told the president he
should resign. And, though Mr. Mubarak did not respond, Mr. Badrawy said he
believed he would go. “That is my expectation, that is my hope,” he added in an
interview. The news electrified protestors in the square. Wael Ghonim, a Google
executive and protest organizer whose anti-torture Facebook page helped ignite
the movement, celebrated in a Twitter feed: “Mission accomplished. Thanks to all
the brave young Egyptians.” The crowd in Tahrir Square soon swelled to half a
million.
But as night fell on a rainy day and Egyptians huddled around their televisions
in anticipation of a presidential resignation speech, confusion began to swirl.
Contradicting what had become a widespread conviction that Mr. Mubarak was on
the way out, the minister of information said the president would not resign at
all. On state television, agitated analysts speculated openly about conflict
between the president and military.
Mr. Mubarak opened his speech with words that suggested he was staying. “I am
addressing all of you from the heart, a speech from the father to his sons and
daughters,” he said. He expressed what he described as pride for them.
The response ranged from the despondent to the desperate.
“Can this man be serious or did he lose his mind?” asked George Ishak, a
longtime opposition leader. “People will not go home and tomorrow will be a
horrible day. It is a redundant speech, it is annoying and we heard it a
thousand times before.”
Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition leader and Nobel laureate, was blunter. “I ask
the army to intervene immediately to save Egypt,” he wrote on his Twitter feed.
“The credibility of the army is being put to the test.”
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and
Thanassis Cambanis from Cairo and Sheryl Stolberg from Marquette, Mich.
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By MOHAMED ELBARADEI
Cairo
WHEN I was a young man in Cairo, we voiced our political views in whispers, if
at all, and only to friends we could trust. We lived in an atmosphere of fear
and repression. As far back as I can remember, I felt outrage as I witnessed the
misery of Egyptians struggling to put food on the table, keep a roof over their
heads and get medical care. I saw firsthand how poverty and repression can
destroy values and crush dignity, self-worth and hope.
Half a century later, the freedoms of the Egyptian people remain largely denied.
Egypt, the land of the Library of Alexandria, of a culture that contributed
groundbreaking advances in mathematics, medicine and science, has fallen far
behind. More than 40 percent of our people live on less than $2 per day. Nearly
30 percent are illiterate, and Egypt is on the list of failed states.
Under the three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Egyptian society has lived
under a draconian “emergency law” that strips people of their most basic rights,
including freedom of association and of assembly, and has imprisoned tens of
thousands of political dissidents. While this Orwellian regime has been valued
by some of Egypt’s Western allies as “stable,” providing, among other assets, a
convenient location for rendition, it has been in reality a ticking bomb and a
vehicle for radicalism.
But one aspect of Egyptian society has changed in recent years. Young Egyptians,
gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many
of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in
social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the
restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.
The world has witnessed their courage and determination in recent weeks, but
democracy is not a cause that first occurred to them on Jan. 25. Propelled by a
passionate belief in democratic ideals and the yearning for a better future,
they have long been mobilizing and laying the groundwork for change that they
view as inevitable.
The tipping point came with the Tunisian revolution, which sent a powerful
psychological message: “Yes, we can.” These young leaders are the future of
Egypt. They are too intelligent, too aware of what is at stake, too weary of
promises long unfulfilled, to settle for anything less than the departure of the
old regime. I am humbled by their bravery and resolve.
Many, particularly in the West, have bought the Mubarak regime’s fiction that a
democratic Egypt will turn into chaos or a religious state, abrogate the fragile
peace with Israel and become hostile to the West. But the people of Egypt — the
grandmothers in veils who have dared to share Tahrir Square with army tanks, the
jubilant young people who have risked their lives for their first taste of these
new freedoms — are not so easily fooled.
The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the last decade,
at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives, fighting wars
to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the youth of Cairo,
armed with nothing but Facebook and the power of their convictions, have drawn
millions into the street to demand a true Egyptian democracy, it would be absurd
to continue to tacitly endorse the rule of a regime that has lost its own
people’s trust.
Egypt will not wait forever on this caricature of a leader we witnessed on
television yesterday evening, deaf to the voice of the people, hanging on
obsessively to power that is no longer his to keep.
What needs to happen instead is a peaceful and orderly transition of power, to
channel the revolutionary fervor into concrete steps for a new Egypt based on
freedom and social justice. The new leaders will have to guarantee the rights of
all Egyptians. They will need to dissolve the current Parliament, no longer
remotely representative of the people. They will also need to abolish the
Constitution, which has become an instrument of repression, and replace it with
a provisional Constitution, a three-person presidential council and a
transitional government of national unity.
The presidential council should include a representative of the military,
embodying the sharing of power needed to ensure continuity and stability during
this critical transition. The job of the presidential council and the interim
government during this period should be to set in motion the process that will
turn Egypt into a free and democratic society. This includes drafting a
democratic Constitution to be put to a referendum, and preparing for free and
fair presidential and parliamentary elections within one year.
We are at the dawn of a new Egypt. A free and democratic society, at peace with
itself and with its neighbors, will be a bulwark of stability in the Middle East
and a worthy partner in the international community. The rebirth of Egypt
represents the hope of a new era in which Arab society, Muslim culture and the
Middle East are no longer viewed through the lens of war and radicalism, but as
contributors to the forward march of humanity, modernized by advanced science
and technology, enriched by our diversity of art and culture and united by
shared universal values.
We have nothing to fear but the shadow of a repressive past.
Mohamed ElBaradei, as the director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. He is the author of the
forthcoming book “The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.”
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON — The U.S. director of national intelligence sought
Thursday to defend the intelligence community against criticism that it had
failed to more clearly warn of the recent crisis in Egypt, saying that the
buildup of potentially explosive pressures had been amply reported but that the
specific triggers to action were far harder to predict.
“We are not clairvoyant,” said the director, James R. Clapper Jr., at a hearing
of the House intelligence committee.
The intelligence community has faced criticism for failing to provide a clearer
warning, or more timely descriptions, of the fast-moving developments in Egypt.
President Barack Obama and other top administration officials have repeatedly
seemed to be scrambling to catch up with events.
But Mr. Clapper, and also Leon E. Panetta, the director of central intelligence,
suggested that it would always be difficult to know precisely when a potentially
critical situation would turn explosive — to know, for example, when a
frustrated merchant in Tunisia would set himself afire, an event that indirectly
fed into the Egyptian crisis.
“Specific triggers for how and when instability would lead to the collapse of
various regimes cannot always be known or predicted,” Mr. Clapper said, at a
hearing on worldwide threats to the United States. “What intelligence can do in
most cases is reduce the uncertainty for decision makers, but not necessarily
eliminate it.”
Mr. Panetta, in turn, said that last year nearly 400 intelligence reports were
produced on problems in the region: “the regressive regimes, the economic and
political instability, a stagnation, the lack of freedoms, the need for
political reforms.” But he, too, said that intelligence agencies needed to do
better in identifying triggering events.
Mr. Panetta listed some of the pressures for change that have been building in
the region: the “large unmet expectations of the people”; the large numbers of
youth, many of them well-educated but jobless; and the dynamic role of the
Internet.
“That’s something we need to pay a lot more attention to in today’s world,” he
said.
Another crucial factor, he said, was the role of the military.
“There’s always been a feeling that the military ultimately could control any
demonstration in any regime,” Mr. Panetta said. “But the loyalty of the military
is now something that we have to pay attention to, because it’s not always one
that will respond to what a dictator may or may not want.”
The comment had particular resonance on a day when, reports suggested, Mr.
Mubarak was poised to step down under pressure from his military.
Asked how he would rate the intelligence that the American agencies had provided
policy makers on Egypt, Mr. Clapper’s self-evaluation was not ungenerous. He
said he would grade it as a B-plus or perhaps an A-minus.
But committee members also seemed willing to give the intelligence community the
benefit of the doubt. American intelligence professionals “do not have a crystal
ball and cannot predict the future,” said Representative C.A. Ruppersberger of
Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
Indeed, shortly after Mr. Panetta told the committee that there was “a strong
likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening,” officials rushed out to
clarify that the director’s assessment was based only on press reports, not on
any inside information.
On another matter, Mr. Clapper said that Iran was pursuing “various nuclear
capabilities,” thus keeping open its options to construct nuclear weapons.
He said that the United States did not know whether Iran would build such
weapons, but it was positioning itself to do so.
“There is a real risk that its nuclear program will prompt other countries in
the Middle East to pursue nuclear options,” he said.
But as Iran decides how to proceed, he added, its “decision making is guided by
a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities
to influence Tehran,” Mr. Clapper said.
He also underscored increasing American concerns about the growing threat from
homegrown terrorists and from cyberterrorists.
February 10, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YONG
TEHRAN — Iran’s authorities have increased pressure on the
country’s political opposition days before a rally proposed by opposition
leaders in support of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
Security forces stationed outside the home of the reformist cleric Mehdi
Karroubi, one of the country’s most prominent opposition leaders, prevented Mr.
Karroubi’s son from seeing his father on Thursday, according to the son,
Hossein.
In an interview with an Arabic-language news Web site, Al Arabiya, Hossein
Karroubi, who is politically active, said that the security forces told him that
other family members, except his mother, were also barred from seeing his
father.
The elder Mr. Karroubi and another government critic, Mir Hussein Moussavi, had
submitted a formal request to the government to hold the rally on Feb. 14.
Opposition Web sites have also reported the arrest of a number of people
associated with the two opposition leaders. On Wednesday night, Taghi Rahmani,
an activist close to Mr. Karroubi, and Mohammad-Hossein Sharifzadegan, a former
welfare minister and an adviser to Mr. Moussavi, were arrested at their homes by
Iran’s security forces. The Web sites also reported Thursday that two reformist
journalists had been arrested.
On Wednesday, Iran’s top prosecutor, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejehi, said that the
request to hold a demonstration separate from the annual government-sponsored
rally to mark the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, scheduled for Friday,
was “political” and “divisive.”
“Setting a different date means that these individuals are separating themselves
from the people and creating divisions,” Mr. Mohseni-Ejehi said in comments
reported in the semiofficial news agency ILNA, referring to the opposition
leaders who called for the rally. Iran has expressed official support for the
antigovernment movements in Egypt and Tunisia, but supporters of Iran’s
opposition criticize that stance as hypocritical, given the government’s brutal
suppression of Iranian protesters who took to the streets after the disputed
re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.
“If they are not going to allow their own people to protest, it goes against
everything they are saying, and all they are doing to welcome the protests in
Egypt,” Mr. Karroubi said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this
week via an online video link.
The last opposition protests against the elections were held more than a year
ago and were halted after the government crackdown killed scores and left many
government critics imprisoned.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
February 9,
2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YONG
TEHRAN —
Iran’s chief prosecutor on Wednesday called an opposition request to hold a
rally in support of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt “divisive” and
“political.” His comments suggested that officials would not grant permission
for the rally, planned for Monday.
“If anyone really wants to support the people of Tunisia and Egypt, they should
join the regime and the people and take part in the rally on Feb. 11,” the
semiofficial news agency ILNA quoted the prosecutor, Gholam Hossein
Mohseni-Ejehi, as saying. Feb. 11 is the date of the annual government-sponsored
rally celebrating the Islamic revolution of 1979.
“Setting a different date means that these individuals are separating themselves
from the people and creating divisions,” Mr. Mohseni-Ejehi said, apparently
referring to the leaders of Iran’s Green opposition movement, Mir Hussein
Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi. They issued an open letter to the Interior Ministry
on Saturday, invoking a provision in Iran’s Constitution granting the right to
peaceful assembly.
Since claiming election fraud after the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the
2009 presidential election, Mr. Karroubi, a former Parliament speaker and Mr.
Moussavi, a former prime minister, have been labeled by Iran’s hard-liners as
leaders of a “conspiracy” to overthrow the Islamic Republic and usher in the
influence of Western powers.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other conservative figures
have portrayed the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia as a result of the people’s
“Islamic awakening.” Ayatollah Khamenei praised the protesters last Friday,
prompting some members of the Iranian opposition to say a refusal to grant
permission for their rally would be hypocritical.
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON
The Syrian government began allowing its citizens Wednesday to
openly use Facebook and YouTube, three years after blocking access to Facebook
and other sites as part of a crackdown on political activism. Human rights
advocates greeted the news guardedly, warning that the government might have
lifted the ban to more closely monitor people and activity on social networking
sites.
The move comes just weeks after human rights activists in Egypt used Facebook
and other social media tools to help mobilize tens of thousands of people for
antigovernment protests. Activists in Tunisia used the Internet in December and
January to help amass support for the protests and revolt that toppled the
government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
After the mass demonstrations began in Egypt, opposition groups in Syria created
a Facebook page called the Syrian Revolution and started a Twitter campaign
calling on people to join “day of rage” rallies last week against President
Bashar Assad. But the effort, which has generated more than 16,000 Facebook
members, did not produce the street protesters that organizers had hoped for.
Despite the ban, many Syrians had been able to use Facebook and other aspects of
the Web restricted by the government through proxy servers that allowed people
to circumvent the Syrian government’s firewall, which also blocks Wikipedia,
Amazon, Blogspot and Israeli newspapers, among other sites.
Posts on the wall on Wednesday reflected a variety of opinions, including
reminders for people to be careful about what they post to bold proclamations
that the page would help spur change. “We’re going to launch a fearless attack,”
one user wrote on the Syrian Revolution Facebook page wall. “Link to us on all
pages so that all Syrians can see this. Think. Initiate. Decide, do and have
faith in God.”
Syria’s decision was welcomed by officials from the State Department with a note
of caution, given the country’s restrictions on the freedom of speech and
freedom to assemble.
“We welcome any positive steps taken to create a more open Internet, but absent
the freedoms of expression and association, citizens should understand the
risks,” said Alec J. Ross, senior adviser for innovation to Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who helped organize a delegation of business leaders
from technology companies to meet with Mr. Assad in Syria last year. In those
meetings, the business leaders said that opening the Web would be important to
drive innovation.
Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, said she
believed that the government in Syria, in releasing controls on the Internet,
was trying to make it appear as if it were making democratic concessions after
the tumult in Egypt and Tunisia.
“While access to social media sites presents an opportunity for Syrians to
better mobilize one another, it also makes it easier for the government to
identify activists and quash protests,” said Ms. Vila, of the New York
City-based organization that began in 2008 with the mission to help support
advocates and activists using technology. Ms. Vila said there was growing
concern that the government of Sudan was closely monitoring Facebook users there
after lifting restrictions.
Abdulsalam Haykal, a leading Syrian technology entrepreneur, praised the Syrian
government’s decision as a reflection of a commitment to build confidence with
the country’s young people. “The power of social media is an important tool for
increasing participation, especially by engaging young people,” he said.
Under Facebook’s terms of service, users are required to use their real
identities and not hide behind false or anonymous accounts, a violation that can
lead to Facebook’s closing an account.
Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said Wednesday that the company was
not considering changing or re-examining its terms of service in those countries
where some users were concerned about revealing their full identity for security
reasons.
“Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture,” she said. “This leads
to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for our
users. It’s a violation of our policies to use a fake name or operate under a
false identity.” Ms. Frost said the company provided multiple options for users
to communicate privately through groups and to read updates on a Facebook page
without having to sign up for it.
Ms. Frost said that the company had always seen some traffic for Syria, but not
the number of Facebook users typical in a country, like Syria, with high
Internet usage. She said the company did not see significant changes in traffic
Wednesday. Syrian technology companies reported that it could take hours or days
for people to get full access.
A spokesperson for YouTube declined to comment on the lifting of the ban, but
pointed to Google’s Transparency report, which shows a jump in traffic to
YouTube.com from Syria.
According to D-Press, a pro-government Syrian Web site, there are about 200,000
Syrians currently using Facebook.
The New York Times
February 9, 2011
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In Tahrir Square, I saw a young man holding a sign over his
head. The sign urged President Hosni Mubarak to flee the country: “Hurry up! My
arms are tired.”
Lots of Egyptians seemed to feel the same way. They said they’re sick of Mr.
Mubarak and the entire regime — and are increasingly resentful that the Obama
administration continues to seem more comfortable with the regime than with
people power. My sense is that we’re not only on the wrong side of history but
that we’re also inadvertently strengthening the anti-Western elements that
terrify us and drive our policy.
President Obama and his aides were blindsided by the crisis from the beginning
(as were we in the news media), and I fear that they’ve mishandled it since.
When the protests began, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described Mr.
Mubarak’s government as “stable” and “looking for ways to respond to the
legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
Then our special envoy, Frank Wisner, called for Mr. Mubarak to stay in power,
saying: “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical.” The White House
has tried to backtrack, but it has been backtracking from backtracks so much
that on Egypt its symbol might as well be a weather vane.
When well-known journalists like Anderson Cooper of CNN were being beaten up in
Tahrir Square, the White House found its voice. But now that foreign reporters
are no longer being routinely harassed, it has lost its sense of urgency. “Now”
is no longer in the White House lexicon.
America seems to favor reforms under Mr. Mubarak’s vice president, Omar
Suleiman, while perhaps throwing Mr. Mubarak himself overboard. But Mr. Suleiman
is every bit as much an autocrat as Mr. Mubarak himself, and our emphasis on
stability, order and gradualism suggests a profound allergy to popular will.
That raises a basic question: Why does our national policy seem to be that
democracy is good for Americans and Israelis, yet dangerous for Egyptians?
One answer is simple. American officials worry that Mr. Mubarak has for decades
stifled any secular democratic opposition, so the only organized dissent comes
from the Muslim Brotherhood. The fear is that if elections come too soon, before
secular groups can organize, the Brotherhood will do well.
That’s a legitimate concern, but it’s one that the Egyptian opposition is fully
aware of and has a variety of mechanisms to address. And a new opinion survey
shows that the Muslim Brotherhood has only 15 percent approval and its leaders
get just 1 percent support in a presidential straw poll (the candidate to watch:
Amr Moussa, the chief of the Arab League).
To many Egyptians, the U.S. is conspiring with the regime to push only cosmetic
reforms while keeping the basic structure in power. That’s creating profound ill
will. In Tahrir Square, I watched as young people predisposed to admire America
— the Facebook generation — expressed a growing sense of betrayal. In a country
where half the population is under 24, we are burning our bridges.
Americans, perhaps, don’t fully appreciate that the regime is mind-bogglingly
corrupt and instinctively repressive. On my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, I’ve
linked to a video that appears to show Egyptian forces shooting an unarmed,
unthreatening protester in cold blood and to another that apparently shows a
government vehicle driving through a group of protesters, striking them and
hurtling on. Those videos are heart-wrenching, and it is because of long
experience with the regime’s callousness that ordinary Egyptians don’t trust
people like Mr. Suleiman one bit. They think he’s stalling in an effort to
retain the system — and they’re probably right.
Human Rights Watch has confirmed 302 deaths in the Egypt upheavals, based on
visits to hospitals in three cities, and says the real toll may be significantly
higher. To put that in perspective, that is several times the toll when Iran
crushed its pro-democracy movement in 2009. And it’s approaching the toll when
the Chinese Army opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989. Yet
when it’s our ally that does the killing, we counsel stability, gradualism and
order.
These are Egypt’s problems to work out, not America’s. But whatever message
we’re trying to send, the one that is coming through is that we continue to
embrace the existing order, and that could taint our future relations with Egypt
for many years to come.
Many years ago, when I studied Arabic intensively at the American University in
Cairo, I was bewildered initially because for the first couple of months I
learned only the past tense. That’s the basic tense in Arabic, and so in any
Arabic conversation I was locked into the past.
The Obama administration seems equally caught in the past, in ways that
undermine the secular pro-Western forces that are Egypt’s best hope. I hope the
White House learns the future tense.
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ESSAM EL-ERRIAN
Cairo
THE Egyptian people have spoken, and we have spoken emphatically. In two weeks
of peaceful demonstrations we have persistently demanded liberation and
democracy. It was groups of brave, sincere Egyptians who initiated this moment
of historical opportunity on Jan. 25, and the Muslim Brotherhood is committed to
joining the national effort toward reform and progress.
In more than eight decades of activism, the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently
promoted an agenda of gradual reform. Our principles, clearly stated since the
inception of the movement in 1928, affirm an unequivocal position against
violence. For the past 30 years we have posed, peacefully, the greatest
challenge to the ruling National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak, while
advocating for the disenfranchised classes in resistance to an oppressive
regime.
We have repeatedly tried to engage with the political system, yet these efforts
have been largely rejected based on the assertion that the Muslim Brotherhood is
a banned organization, and has been since 1954. It is seldom mentioned, however,
that the Egyptian Administrative Court in June 1992 stated that there was no
legal basis for the group’s dissolution.
In the wake of the people’s revolt, we have accepted invitations to participate
in talks on a peaceful transition. Along with other representatives of the
opposition, we recently took part in exploratory meetings with Vice President
Omar Suleiman. In these talks, we made clear that we will not compromise or
co-opt the public’s agenda. We come with no special agenda of our own — our
agenda is that of the Egyptian people, which has been asserted since the
beginning of this uprising.
We aim to achieve reform and rights for all: not just for the Muslim
Brotherhood, not just for Muslims, but for all Egyptians. We do not intend to
take a dominant role in the forthcoming political transition. We are not putting
forward a candidate for the presidential elections scheduled for September.
While we express our openness to dialogue, we also re-assert the public’s
demands, which must be met before any serious negotiations leading to a new
government. The Mubarak regime has yet to show serious commitment to meeting
these demands or to moving toward substantive, guaranteed change.
As our nation heads toward liberty, however, we disagree with the claims that
the only options in Egypt are a purely secular, liberal democracy or an
authoritarian theocracy. Secular liberal democracy of the American and European
variety, with its firm rejection of religion in public life, is not the
exclusive model for a legitimate democracy.
In Egypt, religion continues to be an important part of our culture and
heritage. Moving forward, we envision the establishment of a democratic, civil
state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, which are central
Islamic values. We embrace democracy not as a foreign concept that must be
reconciled with tradition, but as a set of principles and objectives that are
inherently compatible with and reinforce Islamic tenets.
The tyranny of autocratic rule must give way to immediate reform: the
demonstration of a serious commitment to change, the granting of freedoms to all
and the transition toward democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood stands firmly behind
the demands of the Egyptian people as a whole.
Steady, gradual reform must begin now, and it must begin on the terms that have
been called for by millions of Egyptians over the past weeks. Change does not
happen overnight, but the call for change did — and it will lead us to a new
beginning rooted in justice and progress.
Essam El-Errian is a member of the guidance council of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt.
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
CAIRO — The sea of people pulsated with energy, galvanized by
the words of Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who got the Mubarak
treatment — 12-day disappearance, blindfolding, interrogation — before a tweet
that will one day be etched in some granite memorial: “Freedom is a bless that
deserves fighting for it.”
The fight goes on. In the Tahrir Square crowd, I ran into Ahmed el-Shamy, a
Pfizer executive. He’s 54, and like many of his generation who have known only
dictatorship since the coup of 1952, he can hardly believe his eyes. “Our youth
makes fear history,” he said.
Ghonim’s tweet and a shattering TV interview afterward got Pfizer employees and
much of Egypt re-energized in their quest for the dignity that comes with being
actors in a nation’s destiny rather than its pawns. A sign I’ve seen sums things
up: “Tahrir Square — closed for constitutional changes.”
Much of Egypt is closed, too, including the stock market and a tourism industry
that accounts for 8 percent of gross domestic product. Hosni Mubarak, to his
credit, took Egypt into the global economy. Part of the payback is that the
world gets to judge Egypt with its pocketbook. The question arises: Is this
stubborn president ready to take his country down with him?
Everything I hear suggests the army will not fire on its own people. Mubarak
does not dare order them to shoot for fear of the response. Mohammed Hussein
Tantawi, his defense minister, has strong views on this subject. He expressed
them to a senior Western diplomat during the Tunisian uprising: The army exists
to defend the nation, not a regime.
If the army won’t shoot, the protesters won’t disperse, leaving the stand-off:
Until he goes, they remain.
With each day of impasse the economy sinks further. There are strikes in Cairo
and Suez. The days of a dictatorship that won’t — or can’t — use brutality in
crisis are probably numbered. Compare the events of 1989: Berlin and Tiananmen.
It’s time for Mubarak to take a Nile cruise; he’ll be the only client. Then
Ghonim can declare liberated Egypt open for business.
At Pfizer, where El-Shamy has worked for 23 years, everyone was talking about
Ghonim, the young Egyptian representing a generation that the old Egyptian,
Mubarak, cannot comprehend. The pharaoh has lost contact.
It’s happened before: Mubarak’s anti-democratic regime, the successor to
Nasser’s and Sadat’s (but without the charisma), is the 45th in a line of houses
stretching back to 3,000 B.C. This, too, must pass.
When? They were changing political allegiance at Pfizer, saying, yes, the almost
300 dead, shot by security goons, must not die for nothing; and, yes, what
happened to Ghonim could happen to any Egyptian in Mubarak’s black-hole security
state. “My generation grew to think we can accept anything,” El-Shamy said. “But
the youth, they refresh us, remind us of dignity, fairness, freedom.”
His son, Omar, 21, was standing beside him. A media student, he’s now a Tahrir
veteran, tweeting and facebooking and googling (a tech company has made it when
it becomes a verb) from a 9th-floor apartment overlooking the square. “Maybe
Mubarak thought he’s controlled things,” Omar said. “But lies don’t last.”
As we talked, Cairo University law professors in their black robes filed past to
declare that Egypt must become a nation of laws because that’s the only kind of
nation that guarantees people rights. As Fouad Ajami has written of the Arab
condition: “The fundamentalist call has resonance because it invites men to
participate — and here again there is a contrast to an official political
culture that reduces citizens to spectators and asks them to leave things to the
rulers.”
American values and interests do not always coincide — perhaps they rarely
coincide. Diplomacy comes down to juggling them. That U.S. values are embodied
on Tahrir Square is as clear as the lines of the pyramids. I say its interests,
on balance, lie there too: in the establishment of a participatory society that
would return Egypt to its pivotal place in the Arab world and give the young
hope.
The United States no longer has the power to impose solutions. But Barack
Obama’s wavering on Egypt will not honor him. His story is the American gift of
self-empowerment: Do not deny it then to Egyptians. Give a clear message to
Tantawi. Egypt needs to move forward. For that the president needs to move out.
The credibility of Mubarak in guiding a democratic transition is zero. He is an
antidemocrat by formation and temperament. Everything offered so far — from
amnesties to constitutional reform committees — has screamed: We can run down
the clock on this.
I walked out of the square between two tanks. The gap between them was two feet
wide. You had to crouch and squirm. Women went through with little kids. Behind
us were thousands of people. One surge and we would all have been crushed. I
thought: If we can pass unscathed through the eye of this needle, Egypt can
tread the narrow path to better days. The tragedy of Mubarak is that he
underestimated his own people.
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — They were born roughly around the time that President
Hosni Mubarak first came to power, most earned degrees from their country’s top
universities and all have spent their adult lives bridling at the restrictions
of the Egyptian police state — some undergoing repeated arrests and torture for
the cause.
They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off
and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who
have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest
or abduction by the secret police.
Now, however, as the Egyptian government has sought to splinter their movement
by claiming that officials were negotiating with some of its leaders, they have
stepped forward publicly for the first time to describe their hidden role.
There were only about 15 of them, including Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who
was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as the movement’s most potent
spokesman.
Yet they brought a sophistication and professionalism to their cause —
exploiting the anonymity of the Internet to elude the secret police, planting
false rumors to fool police spies, staging “field tests” in Cairo slums before
laying out their battle plans, then planning a weekly protest schedule to save
their firepower — that helps explain the surprising resilience of the uprising
they began.
In the process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect the singularly
nonideological character of the Egyptian youth revolt, which encompasses
liberals, socialists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I like the Brotherhood most, and they like me,” said Sally Moore, a 32-year-old
psychiatrist, a Coptic Christian and an avowed leftist and feminist of mixed
Irish-Egyptian roots. “They always have a hidden agenda, we know, and you never
know when power comes how they will behave. But they are very good with
organizing, they are calling for a civil state just like everyone else, so let
them have a political party just like everyone else — they will not win more
than 10 percent, I think.”
Many in the circle, in fact, met during their university days. Islam Lotfi, a
lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, said his group used to
enlist others from the tiny leftist parties to stand with them in calling for
civil liberties, to make their cause seem more universal. Many are now allies in
the revolt, including Zyad el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was then the
leader of a communist group.
Mr. Elaimy, who was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple broken limbs
from torture for his political work, now works as an assistant to Mohamed
ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International
Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his group built ties to other young organizers
like Ms. Moore.
The seeds of the revolt were planted around the time of the uprising in Tunisia,
when Walid Rachid, 27, a liaison from an online group called the April 6
Movement, sent a note to the anonymous administrator of an anti-torture Facebook
page asking for “marketing help” with a day of protest on Jan. 25, Mr. Rachid
recalled. He wondered why the administrator would communicate only by Google
instant message. In fact, it was someone he already knew: Mr. Ghonim, the Google
executive.
The day of the protest, the group tried a feint to throw off the police. The
organizers let it be known that they intended to gather at a mosque in an
upscale neighborhood in central Cairo, and the police gathered there in force.
But the organizers set out instead for a poor neighborhood nearby, Mr. Elaimy
recalled.
Starting in a poor neighborhood was itself an experiment. “We always start from
the elite, with the same faces,” Mr. Lotfi said. “So this time we thought, let’s
try.”
They divided up into two teams — one coaxing people in cafes to join them, the
other chanting to the tenements above. Instead of talking about democracy, Mr.
Lotfi said, they focused on more immediate issues like the minimum wage. “They
are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans all the time,” they
chanted. “Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what a
shame.”
Ms. Moore said: “Our group started when we were 50. When we left the
neighborhood we were thousands.” As the protests broke up that day, she said,
she saw a man shot to death by the police. She carried her medical bag to the
next demonstration and set up a first-aid center.
By the time they occupied Tahrir Square, she and her friends had enlisted the
Arab Doctors Union — many of whose members are also members of the Muslim
Brotherhood — which set up a network of seven clinics. The night before the
“Friday of anger” demonstration planned for Jan. 28, the group met at the home
of Mr. Elaimy while Mr. Lotfi conducted what he called a “field test.” From 6 to
8 p.m., he and a small group of friends walked the narrow alleys of a
working-class neighborhood calling out for residents to protest, mainly to gauge
the level of participation and measure the pace of a march through the streets.
“And the funny thing is, when we finished up the people refused to leave,” he
said. “They were 7,000 and they burned two police cars.”
When he called the information in to the group at Mr. Elaimy’s house, they drew
up a detailed plan for protesters to gather at specified mosques, then march
toward main arteries that led to Tahrir Square. They even told Mr. ElBaradei
which mosque to attend. Then they informed the press where he would be, and
pictures of a Nobel laureate drenched by water cannons flashed around the world.
In signs of a generation gap echoed across Egypt, the young people acknowledged
some frustration with their elders in the opposition parties. “Simply, they are
part of the system, part of the regime,” Mr. Lotfi said. “Mubarak was able to
tame them.”
Even so, he said, having members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the square proved
to be a strategic asset because as participants in an illegal, secret society,
“they are by nature organized.”
That organization proved crucial a few days later when the protesters quickly
formed a kind of assembly line to defend against an onslaught of rocks and
firebombs from an army of Mubarak loyalists. One group used steel bars to break
up pavement into stones, another relayed the rocks to the front and the third
manned the barricades.
“When people have been killed, from time to time you feel guilty,” Mr. Lotfi
said. “But after the war that night, we felt more and more that our country
deserves our sacrifice.”
A few days later, seven members of the group were abducted by the police after
leaving a meeting at Mr. ElBaradei’s house and detained for three days.
The organizers disseminated a weekly schedule, with the biggest protests set for
Tuesday and Friday, to conserve their energy. And before each protest they
leaked a new false lead to throw off the police, letting out that they would
march on the state television headquarters, for example, when their real goal
was to surround Parliament.
They formed a coalition to represent the youth revolt, with Mr. Ghonim on their
executive committee. When the government began inviting them to meetings, they
held a vote in Tahrir Square to decide. About a half-dozen representatives of
youth groups participated, one person said, and they voted against negotiating
by about 70 percent.
Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the Brotherhood
members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style constitutional democracy
where civic institutions are stronger than individuals.
But they also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role of Islam in
public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey. On the question of alcohol
— forbidden by Islam — he suggested that drinking was a private matter but that
perhaps it should be forbidden in public.
Asked if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a Christian woman, he
paused. “If it is a government of institutions,” he said, “I don’t care if the
president is a monkey.”
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Labor strikes and worker protests that flared across
Egypt on Wednesday affected post offices, textile factories and even the
government’s flagship newspaper, providing a burst of momentum to protesters
demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, even as his government
pushed back with greater force against the opponents’ demands.
The protests at the newspaper, Al Ahram, by freelance reporters demanding better
wages and more independence from the government, snarled one of the state’s most
powerful propaganda tools and seemed to change its tone: On Wednesday, the front
page, which had sought for days to play down the protests, called recent attacks
by pro-Mubarak protesters on Tahrir Square an “offense to the whole nation.”
In the face of the unrest, the country’s foreign minister delivered stern
warnings that seemed to reflect the government’s growing impatience with the
protests.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit dismissed calls by Egyptian protesters and
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scrap the country’s emergency laws, which
allow the authorities to detain people without charge.
“We have 17,000 prisoners loose in the streets out of jails that have been
destroyed,” Mr. Aboul Gheit said during an interview with the NewsHour on PBS.
“How can you ask me to sort of disband that emergency law while I’m in
difficulty?”
The remarks about Mr. Biden reflected the complicated relationship between Mr.
Mubarak’s government and the Obama administration, which had urged swift steps
toward a political transition, then endorsed Mr. Mubarak’s remaining until the
end of his term later this year. Since then, Mr. Biden has suggested that the
United States still expects some immediate changes to be made.
On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, responded to the
Egyptian government’s claims that such changes were premature, saying, “What you
see happening on the streets of Cairo is not all that surprising when you see
the lack of steps that their government has taken to meet their concerns.”
That attempt to put some distance between the United States and Mr. Mubarak,
though, was unlikely to impress the protesters, who say that the Obama
administration, by continuing to back the president, also ignores their
concerns.
By nightfall on Wednesday, more than 1,000 protesters prepared to sleep outside
the Parliament building for a second night, a symbolic move that showed the
opposition’s growing confidence as the protesters expanded the scope of their
activism beyond Tahrir Square.
Reports from around the country of vigorous and sometimes violent protests also
suggested a movement regaining steam.
Security officials said that 5 people died and more than 100 were injured during
protests on Tuesday in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo. Protesters responded
Wednesday by burning police stations and other government buildings. In Asyut,
protesters blocked a railway line. Television images showed crowds gathering
again in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city.
Even protests that were not directly against Mr. Mubarak centered on the types
of government neglect that have driven the call for him to leave power.
Protesters in Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, set
fire to a government building, saying local officials had ignored their requests
for better housing. And in one of the most potentially significant labor
actions, thousands of workers for the Suez Canal Authority continued a sit-in on
Wednesday, though there were no immediate suggestions of disruptions of shipping
in the canal, a vital international waterway.
The deaths of protesters in El Kharga were a reminder of Egypt’s unsettled
security picture.
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch reported that since Jan. 28, when troops took
up positions in Egyptian cities, army officers and the military police had
arbitrarily detained at least 119 people. In at least five cases, the group
said, detainees said they had been tortured.
There were signs that the police, under the jurisdiction of the hated Ministry
of Interior, were trying to remake their image. The authorities have announced
in recent days that prosecutors are weighing charges against Habib el-Adly,
recently removed as interior minister. The charges, including murder, are
related to the killing of protesters by security officers during the unrest.
On Wednesday, some cellphone customers in Egypt received the equivalent of
marketing messages from the new minister, Mahmoud Wagdy. One read, “From the
Ministry of Interior: The police will do nothing but serve and protect the
people.” Another said, “Starting today, we will only deal through truthfulness,
honesty and rule of law.”
As Mr. Mubarak held on to power, influential groups and people seemed determined
to distance themselves from his government’s legacy. Members of a prominent
journalists’ association moved toward a no-confidence vote against their leader,
Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a former Mubarak speechwriter, the daily Al Masry Al Youm
reported on its English-language Web site.
And the recently appointed culture minister, Gaber Asfour, a literary critic,
resigned Wednesday after pressure from his colleagues, according to Al Ahram.
Outside groups, meanwhile, continued to try to take advantage of the Egyptian
uprising. In an online forum, a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda called on
Egyptians to “wage violent jihad to topple the regime in Egypt," according to
Khaled Hamza, the editor of the Web site of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s
largest opposition movement.
He bristled at the comments, saying the revolt in Egypt was nonviolent and
included “all sects, trends and religions.”
“Egyptians are capable of solving their problem without intrusion, meddling and
prying from foreign groups such as Al Qaeda and similar groups advocating the
use of violence,” he said.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster seemed to be
complemented by strikes nationwide. While many strikes seemed to focus on
specific grievances related to working conditions, labor leaders suggested they
were energized by protests against Mr. Mubarak.
Rahma Refaat, a lawyer at the Center for Trade Union and Worker Services, said,
“Most of those on strike say that we have discovered that the resources of our
country have been stolen by the regime.”
The protest against the Suez Canal Authority began Tuesday night and was staged
by about 6,000 workers. In Helwan, 6,000 workers at the Misr Helwan Spinning and
Weaving Company went on strike, Ms. Refaat said.
More than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in Quesna began a
strike while about 5,000 unemployed youths stormed a government building in
Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
Postal workers protested in shifts, Ms. Refaat said. In Cairo, sanitation
workers demonstrated outside their headquarters.
In Al Ahram’s lobby, journalists called their protest a microcosm of the
Egyptian uprising, with young journalists leading demands for better working
conditions and less biased coverage.
“Egypt before the 25th is different from Egypt after the 25th,” said Essam Saad,
who does work for the newspaper, referring to Jan. 25, the first day of
antigovernment protests. “What is happening now is going to clean up Al Ahram.
This newspaper is supposed to be the newspaper of the people, not the newspaper
of the regime and the government.”
Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from
Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Protest in Egypt Takes a Turn as Workers Go on Strike
February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Protesters demanding the overthrow of President Hosni
Mubarak appeared on Wednesday to have recaptured the initiative in their battle
with his government, demonstrating a new ability to mobilize thousands to take
over Cairo’s streets beyond Tahrir Square and to spark labor unrest.
As reports filtered in of strikes and unrest spreading to other parts of the
city and the country, the government seemed to dig in deeper. Mr. Mubarak’s
handpicked successor, Vice President Omar Suleiman, warned Tuesday that the only
alternative to constitutional talks was a “coup” and added: “We don’t want to
deal with Egyptian society with police tools.”
But the pressure on Mr. Mubarak’s government was intensifying, a day after the
largest crowd of protesters in two weeks flooded Cairo’s streets and the United
States delivered its most specific demands yet, urging swift steps toward
democracy. Some of the protesters drew new inspiration from the emotional
interview on Egypt’s most popular talk show with Wael Ghonim, the online
political organizer who was detained for two weeks.
At dawn on Wednesday, the 16th day of the uprising, hundreds of pro-democracy
demonstrators remained camped out at Parliament, where they had marched for the
first time on Tuesday. There were reports of thousands demonstrating in several
other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir
Square, a few blocks from Parliament.
By midday, hundreds of workers from the Health Ministry, adjacent to Parliament
and a few hundred yards from Tahrir Square, also took to the streets in a
protest whose exact focus was not immediately clear, Interior Ministry officials
said.
Violent clashes between opponents and supporters of Mr. Mubarak led to more than
70 injuries in recent days, according to a report by Al Ahram — the flagship
government newspaper and a cornerstone of the Egyptian establishment — while
government officials said the protests had spread to the previously quiet
southern region of Upper Egypt.
In Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, protesters set
fire to a government building and occupied the city’s central square. There were
unconfirmed reports that police fired live rounds on protesters on Tuesday in El
Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo, resulting in several deaths. Protesters
responded by burning police stations and other government buildings on
Wednesday, according to wire reports.
On Tuesday, the officials said, thousands protested in the province of Wadi El
Jedid. One person died and 61 were injured, including seven from gunfire by the
authorities, the officials said. Television images also showed crowds gathering
in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city.
Before the reports of those clashes, Human Rights Watch reported that more than
300 people have been killed since Jan. 25.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster seemed to be
complemented by strikes in Cairo and elsewhere.
In the most potentially significant action, about 6,000 workers at five service
companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority — a major component of the Egyptian
economy — began a sit-in on Tuesday night. There was no immediate suggestion of
disruptions to shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway leading
from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. But Egyptian officials said that total
traffic declined by 1.6 percent in January, though it was up significantly from
last year.
More than 2,000 textile workers and others in Suez demonstrated as well, Al
Ahram reported, while in Luxor thousands hurt by the collapse of the tourist
industry marched to demand government benefits. There was no immediate
independent corroboration of the reports.
At one factory in the textile town of Mahalla, more than striking 1,500 workers
blocked roads, continuing a long-running dispute with the owner. And more than
2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in the city of Quesna went
on strike while some 5,000 unemployed youth stormed a government building in
Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
For many foreign visitors to Egypt, Aswan is known as a starting point or
destination for luxury cruises to and from Luxor on the Nile River. The
government’s Ministry of Civil Aviation reported on Wednesday that flights to
Egypt had dropped by 70 percent since the protests began.
In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated around their headquarters in Dokki.
While state television has focused its coverage on episodes of violence that
could spread fear among the wider Egyptian public and prompt calls for the
restoration, Al Ahram’s coverage was a departure from its usual practice of
avoiding reporting that might embarrass the government.
In the lobby of the newspaper, journalists on Wednesday were in open revolt
against the newspaper’s management and editorial policies.
Some called their protest a microcosm of the Egyptian uprising, with young
journalists leading demands for better working conditions and less biased
coverage. “We want a voice,” said Sara Ramadan, 23, a sports reporter.
The turmoil at the newspaper has already changed editorial content, with the
English-language online edition openly criticizing what it called “the warped
and falsified coverage by state media” of the protests in Tahrir Square and
elsewhere.
The paper described how “more than 500 media figures” issued a statement
declaring “their rejection of official media coverage of the January 25 uprising
and demanded that Minister of Information Anas El-Fikki step down.”
Members of the Journalists Syndicate moved toward a no-confidence vote against
their leader, Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a former Mubarak speech writer, the daily Al
Masry Al Youm reported on its English-language Web site.
Several of the dozens of protesters occupying the lobby on Wednesday said the
editor of the English-language division heads to the square to join the protests
every night, joined by many of the staff.
The scattered protests and labor unrest seemed symptomatic of an emerging trend
for some Egyptians to air an array of grievances, some related to the protests
and some of an older origin.
The government’s bid to project its willingness to make concessions has had
limited success. On Tuesday, Vice President Suleiman announced the creation of a
committee of judges and legal scholars to propose constitutional amendments.
But all the members are considered Mubarak loyalists.
The Obama administration was continuing its efforts to influence a transition.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr. Suleiman on Tuesday to ask him to
lift the 30-year emergency law that the government has used to suppress and
imprison opposition leaders, to stop imprisoning protesters and journalists, and
to invite demonstrators to help develop a specific timetable for opening up the
political process. He also asked Mr. Suleiman to open talks on Egypt’s political
future to a wider range of opposition members.
Mr. Suleiman has said only that Egypt will remove the emergency law when the
situation justifies its repeal, and the harassment and arrest of journalists and
human rights activists has continued even in the last few days.
And while he raised the prospect of a coup, he also said, “we want to avoid that
— meaning uncalculated and hasty steps that produce more irrationality.”
“There will be no ending of the regime, nor a coup, because that means chaos,”
Mr. Suleiman said. And he warned the protesters not to attempt more civil
disobedience, calling it “extremely dangerous.” He added, “We absolutely do not
tolerate it.”
On Tuesday , young organizers guiding the movement from a tent city inside
Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square, showed the discipline and stamina that they
say will help them outlast Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman, even if their revolt
devolves into a war of attrition.
Many in the crowd, for example, said they had turned out because organizers had
spread the word over loudspeakers and online media for demonstrators to
concentrate their efforts on just Tuesdays and Fridays, enabling their
supporters to rest in between. And while Mr. Mubarak remains in office, they
say, there is no turning back.
Many in the crowd said discussed the inspiration they drew from the interview
with the freed organizer, Mr. Ghonim. A Google executive, he had been the
anonymous administrator of a Facebook group that enlisted tens of thousands to
oppose the Mubarak government by publicizing a young Egyptian’s beating death at
the hands of its reviled police force.
In the tearful conversation on Egypt’s Dream TV, Mr. Ghonim told the story of
his “kidnapping,” secret imprisonment in blindfolded isolation for 12 days and
determination to overturn Egypt’s authoritarian government. Both Mr. Ghonim and
his interviewer, Mona el-Shazly, appeared in Tahrir Square Tuesday to cheer on
the revolt.
Some protesters said they saw the broadcast as a potential turning point in a
propaganda war that has so far gone badly against them, with the state-run
television network and newspapers portraying the crowds in Tahrir Square as a
dwindling band of obstructionists doing the bidding of foreign interests.
Organizers had hinted in recent days that they intended to expand out of the
square to keep the pressure on the government. Then, around 3 p.m., a bearded
man with a bullhorn led a procession around the tanks guarding the square and
down several blocks to the Parliament. Many of the protesters still wore
bandages on their heads from a 12-hour war of rocks and stones against Mubarak
loyalists a few days before.
“Parliament is a great pressure point,” said Ahmed el-Droubi, a biologist. “What
we need to do is unite this protest and Tahrir, and that is just the first step.
Then we will expand further until Mr. Mubarak gets the point.”
Back in Tahrir Square, more members of the Egyptian elite continued to turn up
in support of the protestors, including the pop star Shireen Abdel Wahab and the
soccer goalkeeper Nader al-Sayed. Brigades of university employees and telephone
company employees joined the protests, as did a column of legal scholars in
formal black robes.
Many at the protests buttonholed Americans to express deep disappointment with
President Obama, shaking their heads at his ambiguous messages about an orderly
transition. They warned that the country risked incurring a resentment from the
Egyptian people that could last long after Mr. Mubarak is gone.
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar,
Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack.
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
LAHORE, Pakistan — The case of Raymond A. Davis, a former
United States Special Forces soldier who is being held in connection with the
deaths of two Pakistanis, has stirred a diplomatic furor, sending the precarious
relationship between the United States and Pakistan to a new low, both sides
say.
Mr. Davis, 36, was driving in dense traffic in this city on Jan. 27 when, he
later told the police, two Pakistani men on a motorcycle tried to rob him. He
shot and killed both and was arrested immediately afterward by police officers
who say he was carrying a Glock handgun, a flashlight that attached to a
headband and a pocket telescope.
The mystery about what Mr. Davis was doing with this inventory of gadgets has
touched directly on Pakistani resentments that members of the large American
security presence here roam the country freely and are not answerable to the
Pakistani authorities.
The Pakistani press, dwelling on the items in Mr. Davis’s possession and his
various identity cards, has been filled with speculation about his specific
duties, which American officials would not discuss. Mr. Davis’s jobs have been
loosely defined by American officials as “security” or “technical,” though his
duties were known only to his immediate superiors.
The Obama administration insists that Mr. Davis is protected by diplomatic
immunity under the Vienna Conventions and that he must be released from custody.
He was unlawfully seized on the street by the police after the shootings, the
administration says, and should have been allowed to return to the American
Consulate in Lahore in conformity with diplomatic protection.
The United States has warned Pakistan that if Mr. Davis is not released, a much
sought-after state visit by President Asif Ali Zardari to Washington, planned
for the end of March, could be jeopardized and badly needed financial assistance
could be cut.
Last weekend on the sidelines at a conference in Munich, Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
that Mr. Davis was being held illegally and must be freed, a senior American
official said.
American officials said they were concerned for the safety of Mr. Davis, who is
being held by the law enforcement authorities of Punjab Province, an area that
is becoming increasingly radicalized by Islamic militants.
The Pakistani government, facing public anger and round-the-clock press
coverage, has resisted the American demands for Mr. Davis’s release, saying the
courts will deal with him.
Religious parties have rallied round the families of the dead men, further
stiffening the reluctance of the government to free Mr. Davis.
He is being held at a police training center in Lahore under a kind of house
arrest, where he is isolated from Pakistani prisoners, according to a senior
Pakistani police investigator. He has refused to answer any questions, or talk
about his family, the investigator said.
The public furor increased Sunday when the 18-year-old wife of one of the men
Mr. Davis shot committed suicide, after saying she believed that the American
would be unfairly freed.
At the heart of the public outcry seems to be uncertainty over the nature of Mr.
Davis’s work, and questions about why his camera, according to police
investigators, had pictures of buildings in Pakistani cities.
One of the identification cards confiscated by the police after his arrest and
given to a Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, said he was a Defense Department
contractor. Another identification card said he was attached to the consulate in
Peshawar, which contradicts an initial American Embassy statement on the day of
the shooting that described Mr. Davis as a staff member of the consulate in
Lahore.
According to the Pakistani police, Mr. Davis, dressed in jeans and a checked
shirt, was driving along one of the busiest thoroughfares in Lahore when he shot
the two men through the windshield of his car. He then stepped out of his car
and photographed the dead men with a digital camera. He said at the time that he
shot in self-defense because he believed that the men were armed, the police
said.
Dr. Fahhar-u-Zamana, who conducted the post-mortem examination, said one victim,
Faizan Haider, had five bullets in his body, including two in his back. The
other victim, Muhammad Fahim, had four bullets in his body, including one in his
brain and one in his back.
The Lahore police said Mr. Haider and Mr. Fahim were armed and carrying stolen
cellphones when they were shot.
Moments after Mr. Davis shot the two men, he called for help, and a vehicle
belonging to the American Consulate in Lahore raced to the scene, driving the
wrong way on a one-way street. It ran over a Pakistani cyclist, who later died
in a hospital.
Photographs of the windshield of Mr. Davis’s white rental car, with the bullet
holes in it, were widely published in the Pakistani press, accompanied by
remarks about Mr. Davis’s accurate marksmanship.
Mr. Davis spent 10 years in the American military, starting with basic training
at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1993. He moved to special warfare training with the
Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1998, and left the Army in
2003. His only overseas posting, according to his Army service record, was a
six-month stint as a member of a United Nations peacekeeping force in Macedonia
in 1994.
After leaving the military, Mr. Davis apparently decided to take advantage of
the boom in the military contracting business. He and his wife, Rebecca Davis,
set up Hyperion Protective Services in 2006 in Nevada, a company that appears to
have sought government contracts for security services, according to company
filings in Nevada.
The company does not appear to have won big contracts, and may have been in the
business of offering just Mr. Davis’s services, according to a former Special
Forces officer who reviewed the company filings.
Mr. Davis arrived in Pakistan in late 2009, according to his visa application
from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That document described his rank as
“administrative and technical staff.”
His first assignment was apparently in Peshawar, a city on the edge of the
tribal areas. A Pakistani who worked in the house where Mr. Davis stayed
remembered him as a generous tipper who left several hundred dollars for each of
the staff members when he left last year.
Whatever the resolution of Mr. Davis’s case, there are bound to be
repercussions, Pakistani officials said. “The murders in Lahore should lead to
stricter measures directed toward putting an end to the free movement of armed
U.S. personnel on our streets,” said Saeed Khalid, a former director of the
Americas Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, Waqar Gillani
from Lahore, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
We are a long way from knowing how Egypt will turn out. The
government is using all of its power — including a promised 15 percent raise for
federal workers — to try to hang on. The opposition is courageously pushing
back, and, on Tuesday, it drew thousands of supporters to Liberation Square.
The United States and the European Union may not have been able to wheedle or
push President Hosni Mubarak from power. Still, they badly miscalculated when
they endorsed Egypt’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, to lead the transition to
democracy.
Mr. Suleiman may talk sweetly to Washington and Brussels. But he appears far
more interested in maintaining as much of the old repressive order as he can get
away with. That is unacceptable to Egypt’s people, and it should be unacceptable
to Egypt’s Western supporters.
President Obama said the right things last week when he demanded that democratic
change in Egypt start “now.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent
statements that change would “take some time” have taken the pressure off. Mr.
Obama needs to regain his voice and press Mr. Suleiman to either begin a serious
process of reform or get out of the way.
The protesters have won some important concessions. They forced Mr. Mubarak to
forsake re-election. Mr. Mubarak’s son and Mr. Suleiman, a former intelligence
chief, also will not run. On Saturday, the government opened a dialogue with the
opposition — including the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood.
More reform was promised, but it has been hard to take that seriously after Mr.
Mubarak gave himself the sole power to appoint a panel to recommend
constitutional amendments.
And while Mr. Suleiman was conciliatory in the early days of the protests, his
recent public statements have been chilling. He said he does not believe it is
time to lift the three-decade-old emergency law that has been used to suppress
and imprison opposition leaders. Most alarming, he said the country’s “culture”
is not yet ready for democracy.
Mr. Suleiman is not going to do what’s needed on his own. So the United States
and its allies will have to lay down a clear list of steps that are the minimum
for holding a credible vote this year and building a democracy.
The Egyptian government cannot choose which reforms to dole out when. Opposition
leaders must participate in all aspects of the reform process. The emergency law
must be lifted and Egyptians guaranteed freedom of speech and association. All
detained protesters must be freed and the government-allied forces who viciously
attacked demonstrators last week must be prosecuted.
The government and the opposition need to jointly set a date for elections and
establish an independent commission to oversee the process. Egyptian and
international monitors will need to observe the vote and the count. The
government and opposition will need to work together to establish criteria for
registering parties and candidates and ensure that all have access to the news
media.
Then the full debate over Egypt’s future can take place and the Egyptian people
can decide.
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration gropes for the right
response to the uprising in Egypt, it has not lacked for advice from democracy
advocates, academics, pundits, even members of the previous administration. But
few voices have been as urgent, insistent or persuasive as those of Egypt’s
neighbors.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have each repeatedly
pressed the United States not to cut loose Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, too
hastily, or to throw its weight behind the democracy movement in a way that
could further destabilize the region, diplomats say. One Middle Eastern envoy
said that on a single day, he spent 12 hours on the phone with American
officials.
There is evidence that the pressure has paid off. On Saturday, just days after
suggesting that it wanted immediate change, the administration said it would
support an “orderly transition” managed by Vice President Omar Suleiman.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Mr. Mubarak’s immediate
resignation might complicate, rather than clear, Egypt’s path to democracy,
given the requirements of Egypt’s Constitution.
“Everyone is taking a little breath,” said a diplomat from the region, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private conversations.
“There’s a sense that we’re getting our message through.”
While each country has its own concerns, all worry that a sudden, chaotic change
in Egypt would destabilize the region or, in the Arab nations, even jeopardize
their own leaders, many of whom are also autocrats facing restive populations.
Middle East allies are only one of several constituencies the administration
needs to reckon with as it responds to the turmoil in Egypt. And they are less
central to its calculations than either the Egyptian government or the
demonstrators — opposing forces the United States has been struggling to
balance.
Yet the allies cannot be ignored, officials said, since they, too, are vital to
the United States, whether as suppliers of oil, like Saudi Arabia, or as
partners with political influence in Washington, like Israel.
“I understand the concerns of everybody in the region,” Mrs. Clinton said
Sunday. She said that she had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan and that
President Obama had made calls to other leaders. State Department officials, she
said, were constantly speaking with their counterparts in the region.
Administration officials said the tense mood in many of these countries had
eased in recent days, as the United States has embraced a transition process in
Egypt that does not demand Mr. Mubarak’s immediate departure.
Still, on Tuesday, the administration stiffened its public message to Mr.
Suleiman, with the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, saying that the Egyptian
vice president “made some particularly unhelpful comments about Egypt not being
ready for democracy, about not seeing a lift of the emergency law.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. conveyed that message in a call to Mr.
Suleiman, the White House said, urging him to take specific steps toward
democracy. The strong language from Mr. Gibbs followed some criticism of the
administration from Egyptian protesters and their foreign supporters that its
public statements had been contradictory and equivocal.
On Monday, a diverse group of American specialists on Egypt and the Middle East
wrote to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton expressing concern that the United States
“may acquiesce to an inadequate and possibly fraudulent transitional process in
Egypt.”
On Wednesday, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, is to meet with Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates in Washington. The meeting, which Israeli officials
said came at Mr. Barak’s request, will be the first face-to-face contact between
top Israeli and American officials since the Egyptian uprising began.
Israeli officials, who have long viewed Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman as
stabilizing influences in a dangerous region, have made clear to the
administration that they support evolution rather than revolution in Egypt. They
believe it is important to make changes within the system rather than change the
system first and hope stability can be maintained, a senior Israeli official
said.
Mr. Suleiman is a longstanding Egyptian contact for the Israelis, and as a 2008
cable made public by WikiLeaks showed, he has been the Israeli government’s
preferred successor to Mr. Mubarak for several years.
“There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect” of Mr.
Suleiman as the successor, the cable from Tel Aviv reported.
Arab leaders have similar concerns. Speaking to Mr. Obama on Sunday, Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the Emirates’ defense chief, emphasized
the need for “stability” in Egypt, according to a statement put out by the
United Arab Emirates after the call. The crown prince “also stressed the
necessity that the period of transition in Egypt should be smooth and organized
through the framework of national institutions,” it said.
Mr. Obama also spoke last week with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
The Arab leaders all had the same message for the United States, several Arab
officials said. They thought Mr. Obama went too far last Tuesday when he said
that Mr. Mubarak needed to begin the transition in Egypt “now” — followed a day
later by Mr. Gibbs’s declaration that “now means yesterday.”
“We have been adamant that forcing Mubarak out risks instability,” said one Arab
official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing
private exchanges. In conversations with the Obama administration, Arab
officials have raised the specter of the Muslim Brotherhood, which some say has
begun to hijack the protests that began among largely secular young people in
Egypt adept at using Facebook and Twitter.
One Arab diplomat likened the democracy movement to a train fueled by university
students and human rights advocates.
“Eventually, those students will have to get off that train and go back to
school, and the human rights people will have to go back to work, and you know
who will be on the train when it finally rolls into the station?” the diplomat
asked. “The Muslim Brotherhood.”
Mrs. Clinton said the best way for Arab countries to protect themselves was to
begin addressing the grievances of their people. Noting that she warned about
the need for reform in the Arab world in Qatar last month, she said, “I could
not have been clearer about our concerns for all of these governments.”
Israel, despite its deep anxiety about Egypt, has generally heeded the requests
of administration officials not to inject itself into the debate. “Israel has
been very wise to be low-key,” Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Kerry, who has also talked to Arab leaders, said the crisis in Egypt had
caused American allies to question “what sort of longevity there is to the
notion of alliances.” But, he added, “they have to understand: this is not us
making some kind of decision; this is the people of Egypt making a decision.”
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Ethan Bronner from
Jerusalem.
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
Just when you think the Egyptian uprising is dying down, more Egyptians than
ever waited in long lines on Tuesday to get into Tahrir Square to ask President
Hosni Mubarak’s regime to go. One reason the lines get so long is that everyone
has to funnel through a single makeshift Egyptian Army checkpoint, which
consists of an American-made tank on one side and barbed wire on the other. I
can never tell whether that tank is there to protect the protesters or to limit
the protesters. And that may be the most important question in Egypt today:
Whose side is the army on?
Right now Egypt’s respected army is staying neutral — protecting both Mubarak’s
palace and the Tahrir revolutionaries — but it can’t last. This is a people’s
army. The generals have to heed where the public is going — and today so many
Egyptians voted with their feet to go into Tahrir Square that a friend of mine
said: “It was like being on the hajj in Mecca.”
The army could stick by Mubarak, whose only strategy seems to be to buy time and
hope that the revolt splinters or peters out. Or the army could realize that
what is happening in Tahrir Square is the wave of the future. And, therefore, if
it wants to preserve the army’s extensive privileges, it will force Mubarak to
go on vacation and establish the army as the guarantor of a peaceful transition
to democracy — which would include forming a national unity cabinet that writes
a new constitution and eventually holds new elections, once new parties have
formed.
I hope it is the latter, and I hope President Obama is pressing the Egyptian
Army in this direction — as do many people here. For that to unfold, both the
Egyptian Army and the Obama team will have to read what is happening in Tahrir
Square through a new lens. Mubarak wants everyone to believe this is Iran 1979
all over, but it just does not feel that way. This uprising feels
post-ideological.
The Tahrir Square uprising “has nothing to do with left or right,” said Dina
Shehata, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
“It is about young people rebelling against a regime that has stifled all
channels for their upward mobility. They want to shape their own destiny, and
they want social justice” from a system in which a few people have gotten
fantastically rich, in giant villas, and everyone else has stagnated. Any
ideological group that tries to hijack these young people today will lose.
One of the best insights into what is happening here is provided by a 2009 book
called “Generation in Waiting,” edited by Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, which
examined how young people are coming of age in eight Arab countries. It contends
that the great game that is unfolding in the Arab world today is not related to
political Islam but is a “generational game” in which more than 100 million
young Arabs are pressing against stifling economic and political structures that
have stripped all their freedoms and given them in return one of the poorest
education systems in the world, highest unemployment rates and biggest income
gaps. China deprives its people of political rights, but at least it gives them
a rising standard of living. Egypt deprived its people of political rights and
gave them a declining standard of living.
That is why this revolt is primarily about a people fed up with being left
behind in a world where they can so clearly see how far others have vaulted
ahead. The good news is that many Egyptians know where they are, and they don’t
want to waste another day. The sad news is how hard catching up will be.
The Arab world today, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian opposition leader and
Nobel laureate, remarked to me, is now “a collection of failed states who add
nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to
act, and were consistently given an inferior education. That will change with
democracy.” It will unlock all the talent of this remarkable civilization.
Indeed, it is no surprise that the emerging spokesman for this uprising is Wael
Ghonim — a Google marketing executive who is Egyptian. He opened a Facebook page
called “We are all Khaled Said,” named for an activist who was allegedly beaten
to death by police in Alexandria. And that page helped spark the first protests
here. Ghonim was abducted by Egyptian security officials on Jan. 28, and he was
released on Monday. On Monday night, he gave an emotional TV interview that
inspired many more people to come into the square on Tuesday. And when he spoke
there in the afternoon, he expressed the true essence of this uprising.
“This country, I have said for a long time, this country is our country, and
everyone has a right to this country,” Ghonim declared. “You have a voice in
this country. This is not the time for conflicting ideas, or factions, or
ideologies. This is the time for us to say one thing only, ‘Egypt is above all
else.’ ”
That is what makes this revolt so interesting. Egyptians are not asking for
Palestine or for Allah. They are asking for the keys to their own future, which
this regime took away from them. They are not inspired by “down with” America or
Israel. They are inspired by “Up with Egypt” and “Up with me.”
As Egypt Protest Swells, U.S. Sends Specific Demands
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Pressure intensified on President Hosni Mubarak’s
government as the largest crowd of protesters in two weeks flooded Cairo’s
streets on Tuesday and the United States delivered its most specific demands
yet, urging swift steps toward democracy.
Protesters, some inspired by an emotional interview with an online political
organizer on Egypt’s most popular talk show, occupied Tahrir Square, surrounded
the Egyptian Parliament and staged sporadic demonstrations and strikes in
several Egyptian cities.
At the same time, in a war of attrition with protesters for public opinion,
Egyptian officials sought once more to declare the revolt a thing of the past.
Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is leading an American-endorsed “orderly
transition” toward elections in September, said Mr. Mubarak had appointed a
committee of judges and legal scholars to propose constitutional amendments.
The committee put Egypt “on the path of peaceful and orderly transition of
power,” Mr. Suleiman said on state television.
All the members, however, are considered Mubarak loyalists: many senior judges
who owe their prominent positions to Mr. Mubarak, two legal scholars who were
members of his cabinet and two others who have already expressed support for
gradual change that would leave Mr. Mubarak in office.
Although broadly committed to a transition, the Obama administration was trying
to influence many of the details. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr.
Suleiman to ask him to lift the 30-year emergency law that the government has
used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders, to stop imprisoning protesters
and journalists, and to invite demonstrators to help develop a specific
timetable for opening up the political process. He also asked Mr. Suleiman to
open talks on Egypt’s political future to a wider range of opposition members.
Mr. Suleiman has said only that Egypt will remove the emergency law when the
situation justifies its repeal, and the harassment and arrest of journalists and
human rights activists has continued even in the last few days.
Mr. Suleiman warned the protesters, most of whom are opposed to any negotiations
while Mr. Mubarak is in power, that the only alternative to talks is a “a coup.”
“And we want to avoid that — meaning uncalculated and hasty steps that produce
more irrationality,” he said, according to the official news agency.
“There will be no ending of the regime, nor a coup, because that means chaos,”
Mr. Suleiman said. And he warned the protesters not to attempt more civil
disobedience, calling it “extremely dangerous.” He added, “We absolutely do not
tolerate it.”
On the 15th day of the protests, young organizers guiding the movement from a
tent city inside Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square, showed the discipline and
stamina that they say will help them outlast Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman, even
if their revolt devolves into a war of attrition.
Many in the crowd, for example, said they had turned out because organizers had
spread the word over loudspeakers and online media for demonstrators to
concentrate their efforts on just Tuesdays and Fridays, enabling their
supporters to rest in between. And while Mr. Mubarak remains in office, they
say, there is no turning back.
The independent group Human Rights Watch said that it had confirmed more than
300 fatalities during the protests by visiting hospitals in a few Egyptian
cities. “The government wanted to say that life was returning to normal,” said
Mahmoud Mustafa, a 25-year-old protester standing in front of Parliament. “We’re
saying it’s not.”
Many in the crowd said that they were newly inspired by the interview on Monday
night with Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, who had been the anonymous
administrator of a Facebook group that enlisted tens of thousands to oppose the
Mubarak government by publicizing a young Egyptian’s beating death at the hands
of its reviled police force.
In a tearful conversation, Mr. Ghonim told the story of his “kidnapping,” secret
imprisonment in blindfolded isolation for 12 days and determination to overturn
Egypt’s authoritarian government. And on Tuesday, both Mr. Ghonim and the host,
Mona el-Shazly, came to Tahrir Square to cheer on the revolt.
Ahmed Mayer el-Shamy, an executive at the drug company Pfizer, said many of his
colleagues had come out for the first time “because of what they saw on TV last
night.”
Some protesters said they saw it as a potential turning point in a propaganda
war that has so far gone badly against them, with the state-run television
network and newspapers portraying the crowds in Tahrir Square as a dwindling
band of obstructionists doing the bidding of foreign interests.
“They have killed us with police bullets, they have sent thugs against us, and
now they have launched a propaganda campaign against us,” said Sarah Abdel
Ghany, 24. “And still millions come.”
Even early in the day, before their numbers had swelled past tens of thousands
or their brigades marched to Parliament, the core organizers were already
brimming with confidence at what they could accomplish.
“We are actually the government of the country right now,” said Walid Rachid,
27, one of the young online activists who helped kick off the revolt.
Organizers had hinted in recent days that they intended to expand out of the
square to keep the pressure on the government. Then, around 3 p.m., a bearded
man with a bullhorn led a procession around the tanks guarding the square and
down several blocks to the Parliament. Many of the protesters still wore
bandages on their heads from a 12-hour war of rocks and stones against Mubarak
loyalists a few days before.
Neither the soldiers guarding the perimeter of the square, nor the dozens
guarding the Parliament building did anything to stop them. Outside Parliament,
one soldier bent down to feed a candy bar to a small boy who was protesting
along with his father. Later, when the protesters believed they had discovered a
secret-police infiltrator in their midst, the soldiers stepped in to grab him by
the arms and lead him away. “Hosni Mubarak is illegitimate,” they chanted, “The
Parliament is illegitimate, Omar Suleiman is illegitimate.”
As night fell, and the crowd had dwindled from a few thousand to hundreds, only
a few lights remained on in the upper floors of Parliament, and about a dozen
men pulled out blankets and said they intended to sleep in the road.
“Parliament is a great pressure point,” said Ahmed el-Droubi, a biologist. “What
we need to do is unite this protest and Tahrir, and that is just the first step.
Then we will expand further until Mr. Mubarak gets the point.”
Back in Tahrir Square, more members of the Egyptian elite continued to turn up
in support of the protestors, including the pop star Shireen Abdel Wahab and the
soccer goalkeeper Nader al-Sayed. Brigades of university employees and telephone
company employees joined the protests, as did a column of legal scholars in
formal black robes.
Zyad el-Alawi, one of the central organizers, said the protesters were counting
on rallying other cities and workers around the country to join their movement.
There were reports Tuesday of other large demonstrations in Alexandria, Suez and
other cities, as well as labor strikes, including one by 6,000 workers at the
Suez Canal. Many at the protests buttonholed Americans to express deep
disappointment with President Obama, shaking their heads at his ambiguous
messages about an orderly transition. They warned that the country risked
incurring a resentment from the Egyptian people that could last long after Mr.
Mubarak is gone.
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar,
Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack.
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and MONA EL-NAGGAR
CAIRO — The television host narrated the pictures of the dead
protesters on the screen, young men with sweet smiles whom she compared to roses
in a garden.
“They went out only for the sake of Egypt,” said the host, Mona el-Shazly. “They
said what the previous generations couldn’t do, we can do.”
Her guest was the newly freed Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim. He is a
tech-savvy organizer of the antigovernment protests, secretly detained by the
authorities as demonstrations gathered force. But faced with the toll of the
uprising, he was overwhelmed.
He got up from the table in the studio and walked off camera while Ms. Shazly
took out her earpiece and followed him.
That episode on Monday night of “Ten P.M.,” broadcast on a popular independent
Egyptian satellite channel, appeared to undercut two weeks of relentless state
propaganda and inject new vigor into a protest movement that some supporters
feared had begun to wane.
Mr. Ghonim, emotive and handsome, quickly became the movement’s reluctant icon,
and Ms. Shazly, poised and defiant, its champion. When protesters converged on
Tahrir Square on Tuesday — in numbers greater than at any other time during the
two-week uprising — Mr. Ghonim and Ms. Shazly were the ones many came to cheer.
Ms. Shazly’s program had always been popular and a notch above many of her
competitors’. She had a reputation for independence.
But in recent weeks, like her competitors, she faced pressure from the Egyptian
authorities to underplay the magnitude of the protests, demands she alluded to
in recent days on her program. While some of her competitors sat on the fence,
Ms. Shazly ignored the demands and gave Mr. Ghonim a platform to talk about his
detention by the security services while allowing him to react to the pictures
of the men who had died.
Watching at home, Ibrahim el-Bahrawy, a college professor, was stunned.
“His emotions exploded,” Professor Bahrawy said. “I was very, very moved.”
On Tuesday, Professor Bahrawy quit his post in the ruling party and for the
first time traveled to Tahrir Square to join in the protests.
For the protesters, the publicity was a relief. Some of them have spoken with
regret about an early tactical mistake in their uprising: the failure to counter
the influential role of state-run television, which depicted their movement as
foreign and violent. The channel’s coverage of the protests — which often meant
ignoring them — helped President Hosni Mubarak’s government regain its balance.
Realizing the importance of the media war, the protesters have fought back,
attracting allies like Ms. Shazly and spreading their message on their own, from
locations they try to keep secret. One is an apartment near Tahrir Square where
a rotating cast of 20 or so antigovernment activists disseminate the news of
their revolt on a Facebook page named after the square.
They include wealthy children of Egypt’s ruling class who have settled for a
squat with mattresses on the floor, where they smoke cigarettes and trade
stories of the revolution. It is a small but growing effort: sitting around
laptops, they chronicle history for slightly more than a thousand fans on their
Facebook page.
They said the work was a crucial antidote to the negative press their cause had
attracted. “I think people should see with their own eyes what’s happening in
Tahrir,” said Hana el-Rakhawi, a 19-year-old high school student. Omar el-Shamy,
a 21-year-old media student, added, “The Egyptian TV is just brainwashing
everyone into believing what we are doing here is wrong, but I think that’s not
working anymore.”
Nearby, in the square, other activists distributed a fake version of Al Ahram,
the state-owned newspaper, which was a convincing enough to confuse several
protesters. A front-page headline read, “Live in dignity under the shadow of the
flag.” An article with a picture of a mummy said: “To the grandchildren of our
grandchildren in Tahrir Square. You gave me back my spirit.”
The sounds of the square are broadcast on a pirate radio station that streams
over the Internet. Two organizers with a notebook collect the phone numbers and
e-mail addresses of the protesters. Facebook pages herald new turns in the
conflict.
The latest turn came on Tuesday, hours after Ms. Shazly’s program, which has
been on a channel called Dream TV since 2006. In a recent interview, Ms. Shazly
said she landed at the network after a stint hosting a variety show on a
Saudi-owned channel. By her own estimate, she is one of the highest paid hosts
on Arabic satellite television.
She talked about the government pressure on journalists in Egypt. “They don’t
understand that a presenter is not a spokesperson for the government or the
regime,” she said. “I am not a spokesman. But you always have this problem.”
In the early days of the protests, some of Egypt’s best-known independent
channels seemed unsure how to cover the story of a revolt against the
government. “People were intimidated at the beginning,” said Hafez al-Mirazi,
who hosts his own program on satellite television and is director of the Kamal
Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in
Cairo. “They had sympathy and fear for the country. They didn’t realize there
was something else happening. Then they started to regain their balance.”
At the end of Ms. Shazly’s interview with Mr. Ghonim, he gathered himself for a
few seconds and tried to make the most of the platform she had given him. “I
want to tell every mother and every father who lost a child, I am sorry, but
this is not our mistake,” he said.
“I swear to God, it’s not our mistake. It’s the mistake of every one of those in
power who doesn’t want to let go of it.”
TV Interview of Protest Leader Revives Crowd in Cairo
Square
February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, KAREEM FAHIM and ALAN COWELL
CAIRO — Several thousand demonstrators marched on the Egyptian
Parliament for the first time and masses crammed into Tahrir Square on Tuesday
to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in a revolt buoyed by the
broadcast of an emotional television interview with a young Google executive
conducted hours after his release from secret detention.
The executive, Wael Ghonim, had been a quiet force behind the YouTube and
Facebook promotion of the protests, but became a symbol after he disappeared
nearly two weeks ago. On Monday night, he became an instant icon when the
interview was broadcast on an Egyptian satellite channel, telling his story of
detention and continued hope for change that resonated deeply with the
demonstrators’ demands for more fundamental shifts and their outrage over
repression.
In the interview, Mr. Ghonim wept over the death toll from clashes with the
government. “We were all down there for peaceful demonstrations,” he said,
asking that he not be made a hero. “The heroes were the ones on the street.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Ghonim galvanized Tahrir Square, briefly joining the
tens of thousands of chanting protesters there. “We will not abandon our demand,
and that is the departure of the regime,” he told the crowd, which roared its
agreement, The Associated Press reported.
State television responded Tuesday with an appearance by Vice President Omar
Suleiman offering placating messages of respect and reform that Mr. Suleiman
said came from Mr. Mubarak himself.
“The youth of Egypt deserve national appreciation,” Mr. Suleiman quoted the
president as saying in a statement. “He gave orders to abstain from prosecuting
them and forfeiting their rights to freedom of expression.”
Mr. Mubarak named the panel that will recommend constitutional amendments, and
endorsed other moves to create a timetable for a “peaceful and organized
transfer of power,” Mr. Suleiman said. Another panel will begin work to progress
on other measures Mr. Suleiman announced after meeting with opposition members
on Sunday.
The president “welcomed this national reconciliation,” Mr. Suleiman said,
“assuring that it puts our feet at the beginning of the right path to get out of
the current crisis.”
After demonstrating an ability to bring hundreds of thousands to downtown Cairo,
protest organizers have sought this week to broaden their movement,
acknowledging that simple numbers are not enough to force Mr. Mubarak’s
departure. The government — by trying to divide the opposition, offering limited
concessions and remaining patient — appears to believe it can weather the
biggest challenge to its rule.
But protesters continued to demand Mr. Mubarak’s ouster and deep change. Some
handed out spoof copies of the official Al Ahram newspaper with the headline:
“From the people of Tahrir, Mubarak must go.” Substantial protests were seen in
Alexandria, as well.
While some demonstrators had urged a general strike on Tuesday, there was little
indication that the call had been heeded, or widely broadcast, in the capital,
where many people live from day to day on low wages. An Egyptian state
newspaper, Al Ahram, acknowledged scattered reports of walk-outs in Suez and
other cities, including a sit-in by as many as 6,000 workers from the Suez Canal
Authority.
Momentum has seemed to shift by the day in a climactic struggle over what kind
of change Egypt will undergo and whether Egyptian officials are sincere about
delivering it. In a sign of the tension, American officials described as
“unacceptable” statements by Mr. Suleiman that the country was not ready for
democracy, but showed no sign that they had shifted away from supporting him, a
man widely viewed here as an heir to Mr. Mubarak.
Underscoring the government’s perspective that it has already offered what the
protesters demanded, Naguib Sawiris, a wealthy businessman who has sought to act
as a mediator, said: “Tahrir is underestimating their victory. They should
declare victory.”
Normalcy had begun returning to parts of Cairo on Monday. Chronic traffic jams
resumed as the city adapted to both the sprawling protests in Tahrir Square, a
landmark of downtown Cairo, and the tanks, armored personnel carriers and
soldiers out in the streets. People lined up at banks and returned to shops.
The government has sought to cultivate that image of the ordinary, mobilizing
its newspapers and television to insist that it was re-exerting control over the
capital after its police force utterly collapsed on Jan. 28. The cabinet on
Monday held its first formal meeting since Mr. Mubarak reorganized it after the
protests.
Officials announced that the stock market, whose index fell nearly 20 percent in
two days of protests, would reopen Sunday and that six million government
employees would receive a 15 percent raise, which the new finance minister,
Samir Radwan, said would take effect in April.
The raise mirrored moves in Kuwait and Jordan to raise salaries or provide
grants to stanch anger over rising prices across the Middle East, shaken with
the repercussions of Egypt’s uprising and the earlier revolt in Tunisia. In
Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Friday he would cut in half his
salary, believed to be $350,000, amid anger there over dreary government
services.
As in the past the government here has swerved between crackdown and modest
moves of conciliation.
Human Rights Watch calculated that at least 297 people have died in the protests
since Jan. 28, including 232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez. The
majority of those deaths occurred on Jan. 28 and 29 as a result of live gunfire,
the group reported, relying on hospital lists and interviews with doctors.
In one harrowing raid, the government arrested 30 human rights activists, but
released them by Sunday morning. In past years the government has managed to at
least make its version of events the dominant narrative, but in the outpouring
of dissent here that is no longer the case. Fighting still flared in the Sinai
Peninsula, where Bedouins, long treated as second-class citizens, have fought
Egyptian security forces for weeks.
David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported from Cairo and Alan Cowell
from Paris. Anthony Shadid, Mona el-Naggar, Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack
contributed reporting in Cairo.
Google Executive Who Was Jailed Said He Was Part of
Facebook Campaign in Egypt
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JENNIFER PRESTON
CAIRO — In a tearful, riveting live television interview only
two hours after his release from an Egyptian prison, the Google executive Wael
Ghonim acknowledged Monday that he was one of the people behind the anonymous
Facebook and YouTube campaign that helped galvanize the protest that has shaken
Egypt for the last two weeks.
Since he disappeared on Jan. 28, Mr. Ghonim, 30, has emerged as a symbol for the
protest movement’s young, digital-savvy organizers. During the interview on a
popular television show, he said he had been kidnapped and held blindfolded by
Egyptian authorities.
Afterward, hundreds of Egyptians took to Twitter and the Internet, calling on
him to become one of their new leaders.
“Please do not make me a hero,” Mr. Ghonim said in a voice trembling with
emotion, and later completely breaking down when told of the hundreds of people
who have died in clashes since the Jan. 25 protests began. “I want to express my
condolences for all the Egyptians who died.”
“We were all down there for peaceful demonstrations,” he added. “The heroes were
the ones on the street.”
Mr. Ghonim rejected the government’s assertions that the protests had been
instigated by foreigners or the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Islamist
opposition group. “There was no Muslim Brotherhood presence in organizing these
protests,” he said. “It was all spontaneous, voluntary. Even when the Muslim
Brotherhood decided to take part it was their choice to do so. This belongs to
the Egyptian youth.”
The release of Mr. Ghonim, who oversees marketing efforts for Google in the
Middle East and North Africa, comes as the government is trying to portray Egypt
as returning to business as usual. But in the interview, Mr. Ghonim described
the experience of what he called his extralegal “kidnapping” and imprisonment to
rally the public to continue their protests. “It is a crime,” he said, “This is
what we are fighting.”
Ending the mystery over who helped begin the social media campaign that inspired
the protests, Mr. Ghonim said that he was a creator of the We are All Khaled
Said Facebook page. That page and multiple videos uploaded on YouTube about Mr.
Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian man beaten to death by the police in Alexandria on
June 6, 2010, helped to connect human rights organizers with average Egyptians
and to raise awareness about police abuse and torture.
Mr. Ghonim, an Egyptian who lives in Dubai with his wife and two children, was
not well known outside of technology and business circles in Egypt. But his
disappearance, followed by his interview Monday night on the same program where
the Nobel laureate and diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei plunged into Egyptian politics
a year ago, appeared to have quickly turned him into a national celebrity.
Mr. Ghonim, who came across as both humble and fearless, said he was grabbed by
security police officers while getting into a taxi and then taken to a location
where he was detained for 12 days, blindfolded the entire time. He said that he
was deeply worried that his family did not know where he was. He said he was not
physically harmed.
The first word of his release came when he posted this sentence in English on
his Twitter account at 7:05 p.m.:
“Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it.”
Google then confirmed the news. “It is a huge relief that Wael Ghonim has been
released,” the company said in a message posted on Twitter and then released in
an e-mail. “We send our best wishes to him and his family.”
Since last June, the Khaled Said Facebook page has attracted more than 473,000
members and has become a tool not only for organizing the protests but also for
providing regular updates about other cases of police abuse. But the page’s
creator remained a mystery.
“We did not know who he was,” said Aida Seif el-Dawla, a human rights advocate
and professor of psychiatry who works with El Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation
of Victims of Violence and Torture in Cairo. The center became involved in Mr.
Said’s case last June after police officials presented autopsy reports saying
that he died of asphyxiation from swallowing drugs rather than the brutal
beating witnessed by several people.
She said many young people identified with Mr. Said and were outraged by his
death and how the police had handled it. She said that there were many Facebook
pages, but that it was the page that Mr. Ghonim started that gained momentum.
“It was the most popular,” she said. “It gave a space for the young people to
interact with each other and to plan together.”
The Facebook page published cellphone photographs from the morgue showing the
horrific injuries Mr. Said had suffered, YouTube videos contrasting his smiling
face with the morgue photos and witness accounts that disputed the initial
Egyptian police version of his death. The information helped lead to prosecutors
arresting two police officers in connection with Mr. Said’s death. It also
prompted Facebook members to attend both street and silent protests several
times since last June.
In addition to his work at Google, Mr. Ghonim had served as a technology
consultant for Mr. ElBaradei’s pro-democracy campaign.
Before his family lost contact with him, Mr. Ghonim had posted an ominous
message on Twitter that troubled friends and family, raising concerns about his
whereabouts: “Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is
planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.”
While friends and family searched hospitals in the area for him, several human
rights activists became convinced that he was being held by the authorities for
his role in the social media efforts and for inspiring some of the young protest
organizers to use those media to help promote the protests.
Last Friday, members of the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page, a group of
young advocates who began using Facebook in early 2008 to raise awareness about
labor strikes and human rights abuses, announced that they had designated Mr.
Ghonim their spokesman.
Habib Haddad, a Boston-based businessman and a friend of Mr. Ghonim’s, said he
spoke to Mr. Ghonim’s wife after her husband’s release on Monday. “Not sure I
ever heard someone that happy and emotional,” Mr. Haddad posted on his Twitter
account.
Mr. Ghonim was among many in Egypt who have disappeared during the revolt.
“At this point, Wael has become a symbolic figure,” said Mr. Haddad. “Moving
forward, it is going to be his personal decision if he were to embrace this
symbolic figure or not. As a friend, I care mostly about his personal safety and
his family’s safety.”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Jennifer Preston from New
York. Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Christine Hauser from
New York.
Broad Majority of Americans Sympathetic to Egyptian
Protesters
February 8, 2011
12:00 pm
The New York Times
By DALIA SUSSMAN
More than 8 in 10 Americans say they are sympathetic to the
protesters in Egypt who have called for a change in their government, and most
think the changes occurring will be mostly good for Egypt and for the United
States, according to a new Gallup poll.
A broad majority of Americans, 69 percent, are following the news about the
protests in Egypt very or somewhat closely. Among those following the situation
closely, 87 percent are sympathetic to the protesters, compared with 71 percent
of those who are not following the news closely. Those who are not paying close
attention are more likely than others to have no opinion.
The poll also finds that most Americans are optimistic about the political
changes occurring in Egypt. Two-thirds of Americans say the changes will be
mostly good for Egypt and 6 in 10 say they will be mostly positive for the
United States.
While majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents alike express
sympathy toward the Egyptian protesters and say the changes will be mostly good,
Democrats are the most optimistic. Seventy-one percent of Democrats say the
changes will be positive for the United States, compared with 59 percent of
independents and 51 percent of Republicans. Similarly, 77 percent of Democrats
say the changes will be positive for Egypt; 64 percent of independents and 59
percent of Republicans agree.
The Gallup poll was conducted nationally by telephone Feb. 2-5 among 1,015
adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Tribesmen in Jordan Issue Urgent Call for Political Reform
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Several dozen Jordanian tribesmen, historically
core loyalists to the monarchy, have issued a rare statement calling for urgent
and far-reaching political reform in Jordan. They said that without it, the
country was headed down the path taken by Tunisia and Egypt.
“Before stability and food, the Jordanian people seek liberty, dignity,
democracy, justice, equality, human rights and an end to corruption,” said the
statement, signed by 36 members of tribes, mostly Bedouins.
The statement, ignored by most Jordanian news media, was published Monday on
Ammonnews, the country’s most popular news Web site. But the site was hacked and
out of commission for four hours on Monday, restored only after about 50
journalists held a sit-in at the journalists’ association headquarters in Amman,
the capital.
“The intelligence police called us and told us they were taking down our site
because it was against national interests,” Basil Okoor, the publisher and
editor of Ammonnews, said in a telephone interview. “But we are not going to
accept this way of dealing with journalists.”
The tribesmen’s statement said, “We are on the path where the floods of Tunisia
and Egypt will reach Jordan sooner or later, whether we want it or not.” It
called on King Abdullah II to no longer appoint the members of his cabinet but
rather for them to be elected.
Jordan is a country of six million, more than half of them Palestinian, and 40
percent members of tribes, also known as East Bankers. The two groups maintain
an uneasy coexistence under Abdullah’s rule. The country has faced not only
weeks of protests over prices and subsidies but also calls for wholesale
political reform.
The king named a new prime minister last week in an effort to calm the waters.
Few consider either the monarchy or the country at imminent risk of serious
unrest. But there is a clear undercurrent of unease, and the statement was a
sign of that. It was careful not to attack Abdullah himself but it did not spare
his wife, Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian origin and has been accused of
insensitivity and of funneling business and money to her family.
The statement mentioned those concerns, calling on Abdullah to return farmlands
rumored to have ended up in the hands of the queen’s family. Referring to a
lavish party she threw in September in southern Jordan for her 40th birthday, it
said, “We reject outrageous birthdays that come at the expense of the poor and
the treasury.”
“This statement was very important because it sent a clear message to everyone,”
said Mr. Okoor, of Ammonnews. “It reflects the sentiments of the majority of
Jordanians.”
Ranya Kadri contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan.
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
I’m in Tahrir Square, and of all the amazing things one sees here the one that
strikes me most is a bearded man who is galloping up and down, literally
screaming himself hoarse, saying: “I feel free! I feel free!” Gathered around
him are Egyptians of all ages, including a woman so veiled that she has only a
slit for her eyes, and they’re all holding up cellphones taking pictures and
video of this man, determined to capture the moment in case it never comes
again.
Aren’t we all? In 40 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never seen
anything like what is happening in Tahrir Square. In a region where the truth
and truth-tellers have so long been smothered under the crushing weight of oil,
autocracy and religious obscurantism, suddenly the Arab world has a truly free
space — a space that Egyptians themselves, not a foreign army, have liberated —
and the truth is now gushing out of here like a torrent from a broken hydrant.
What one hears while strolling around are all the pent-up hopes, aspirations and
frustrations of Egyptians for the last 50 years. I know the “realist” experts
believe this will all be shut down soon. Maybe it will. But for one brief
shining moment, forget the experts and just listen. You have not heard this
before. It is the sound of a people so long kept voiceless, finally finding,
testing and celebrating their own voices.
“We got a message from Tunis,” Hosam Khalaf, a 50-year-old engineer stopped me
to say. “And the message was: Don’t burn yourself up; burn up the fear that is
inside you. That is what happened here. This was a society in fear, and the fear
has been burned.” Khalaf added that he came here with his wife and daughter for
one reason: “When we meet God, we will at least be able to say: ‘We tried to do
something.’ ”
This is not a religious event here, and the Muslim Brotherhood is not running
the show. This is an Egyptian event. That is its strength and its weakness — no
one is in charge and everyone in the society is here. You see secular girls in
fashionable dress sitting with veiled women. You see parents pushing their
babies wearing “Mubarak must leave” signs. You see students in jeans and
peasants in robes. What unites all of them is a fierce desire to gain control of
their future.
“This is the first time in my life I get to say what I think in public,” said
Remon Shenoda, a software engineer. “And what is common here is that everyone
wants to say something.”
Indeed, there is a powerful sense of theft here, that this regime and its
cronies not only stole wealth, but they stole something so much more precious:
the future of an entire generation of Egyptians, whom they refused to empower or
offer any inspiring vision worthy of this great civilization.
“All Egyptian people believe that their country is a great country with very
deep roots in history, but the Mubarak regime broke our dignity in the Arab
world and in the whole world,” said Mohamed Serag, a professor at Cairo
University. By the way, everyone here wants to give you their name and make sure
you spell it right. Yes, the fear is gone.
Referring to Egypt’s backward public education system that depends so much on
repetition, one young girl was wearing a sign urging Mubarak to leave quickly.
It said: “Make it short. This is history, and we will have to memorize it at
school.”
Grievances abound. An elderly woman in a veil is shouting that she has three
daughters who graduated from the college of commerce and none of them can find
jobs. There are signs everywhere asking about Mubarak, a former Air Force chief.
Questions such as: “Hey Mr. Pilot, where did you get that $17 billion?”
You almost never hear the word “Israel,” and the pictures of “martyrs” plastered
around the square are something rarely seen in the Arab world — Egyptians who
died fighting for their own freedom not against Israel.
When you enter the square now, one row of volunteers checks your ID, another
frisks you for weapons and then you walk through a long gauntlet of men clapping
and singing an Egyptian welcome song.
I confess, as I walked through, my head had a wrestling match going on inside.
My brain was telling me: “Sober up — remember, this is not a neighborhood with
happy endings. Only bad guys win here.” And my eyes were telling me: “Just watch
and take notes. This is something totally new.”
And the this is a titanic struggle and negotiation between the tired but still
powerful, top-down 1952 Egyptian Army-led revolution and a vibrant, new, but
chaotic, 2011, people-led revolution from the bottom-up — which has no guns but
enormous legitimacy. I hope the Tahrir Square protesters can get organized
enough to negotiate a new constitution with the army. There will be setbacks.
But whatever happens, they have changed Egypt.
After we walked from Tahrir Square across the Nile bridge, Professor Mamoun
Fandy remarked to me that there is an old Egyptian poem that says: “ ‘The Nile
can bend and turn, but what is impossible is that it would ever dry up.’ The
same is true of the river of freedom that is loose here now. Maybe you can bend
it for a while, or turn it, but it is not going to dry up.”
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — Attacks in recent days suggest that provocateurs
are trying to take advantage of the political turmoil in Cairo to spread unrest
in Sinai, the desert peninsula that lies between Israel and the main territory
of Egypt and near Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
On Monday, local news reports described a two-hour battle in the Egyptian half
of the divided city of Rafah, at the border with Gaza. The reports said that
Egyptian security forces, with the help of local tribesmen, repelled attackers
wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Two people were reported injured.
The attackers were identified as members of an Islamic group called Takfir
wal-Hijra.
That attack came as an Egyptian investigator announced that a blast on Saturday
at a north Sinai gas terminal was not caused by a gas leak, as some Egyptian
officials had suggested, but was a bombing carried out by four armed men. The
explosion temporarily halted gas exports to Israel and Jordan.
The investigator, Judge Abdel Nasser el-Tayeb, said the terminal’s guards had
testified that the men had stormed the terminal in two cars, briefly restrained
the guards and then set off the explosives by remote control, according to The
Associated Press.
Bedouin tribes, who have long complained of discrimination by the Egyptian
authorities, have clashed with the security services in recent weeks, as the
mass protests spread in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. Residents of the
Palestinian half of Rafah reported hearing gunfire from the Egyptian side late
last month in what they said were clashes between Bedouin and Egyptian forces.
Egypt closed Rafah’s Gaza crossing point, but several members of the Islamist
group Hamas who escaped from Egyptian prisons during the tumult returned to
Hamas-run Gaza via smuggling tunnels that connect the two sides of Rafah.
Egypt deployed two battalions to Sinai after securing the agreement of Israel.
Limits were placed on the number and type of Egyptian security forces allowed
into Sinai under the terms of the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty.
In recent years, Israel has warned its citizens to avoid the Sinai Desert
because of the threat of attacks or kidnapping by Islamic militants. Militants
hostile to Israel and to the Egyptian and Jordanian authorities and the West
have bombed resorts in southern Sinai.
In August, a rocket fired from Sinai hit the Jordanian resort of Aqaba, killing
a taxi driver. Remains of another rocket were found at the time just north of
the adjacent Israeli resort of Eilat.
In November, a Palestinian member of the Army of Islam, a group inspired by Al
Qaeda, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The Israeli military said at
the time that the man had been involved in directing an attack against American
and Israeli targets in the Sinai Peninsula, in cooperation with elements from
Hamas.
Iran’s Opposition Seeks Rally to Back Egypt and Tunisia
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YONG
TEHRAN — With democracy tremors rocking the Arab world, Iran’s
opposition has challenged its hard-line leaders to allow a peaceful
demonstration — ostensibly in support of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
The request to hold a rally on Monday falls short of an open call for supporters
of Iran’s “green” movement to return to the streets after more than a year, but
it is the closest that Iran’s opposition has come so far to trying to join in
the historic events.
“In order to declare support for the popular movements in the region, in
particular, the freedom-seeking movements of the people of Egypt and Tunisia, we
request a permit to invite the people for a rally,” read the open letter from
Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, two of the presidential candidates who
were defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in what they said were rigged elections in
2009. The letter, dated Saturday, was addressed to Iran’s Interior Ministry and
published Sunday on Web sites affiliated with Iran’s opposition.
While similar requests have recently been met with flat refusals or utter
disregard, the letter puts Iran’s hard-liners in a quandary. Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many other conservative figures have offered
clear and ringing support for the movements in Egypt and Tunisia. Their refusal
to grant permission for such a rally would be seen by opposition supporters and
perhaps others as hypocritical.
“This is a test for the Islamic Republic,” Ardeshir Arjomand, an adviser to Mr.
Moussavi, said in an interview with the JARAS opposition Web site on Monday.
“If officials do not give permission for this demonstration, it will be a clear
sign that they fear the people’s true beliefs,” he said. “They are afraid that
the turnout will be a show of the support for the two” — Mr. Moussavi and Mr.
Karroubi.
With just under a week to go before the proposed demonstration, the call has
provoked a large online response centering around the “25 Bahman” Facebook page,
a reference to the rally’s date in the Persian calendar. In less than 24 hours,
the page attracted a slew of comments, promotional posters, videos and more than
12,000 “likes” from online activists hoping to revitalize a protest movement
that had been subdued after an effective campaign of state violence, threats,
imprisonment of key figures and a blanket ban on access to the mainstream
government news media.
That does not mean, however, that the renewed online interest will necessarily
translate into renewed protests, opposition members say. “It’s just 12,000
clicks,” said a former reformist journalist with a derisive wag of his finger.
“It is nothing.”
“Do they expect people to come into the streets again and again? For what?”
asked the journalist, who refused to be named for fear of retribution from
Iran’s authorities.
Seemingly in tandem with the opposition leaders’ protest call, the former
president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani issued a statement on the Arab awakening
that seemed to be aimed at the hard-liners.
“The crises in Tunisia and Egypt show that they either did not hear the voices
of protest of their people or did not wish to hear them,” said the statement,
which was published on a Web site representing Iran’s conservative old guard.
“These uprisings will not be limited to just two countries,” Mr. Rafsanjani
warned, before describing the protests in Tunisia and Egypt as arising from a
“fire under the ashes” — a phrase widely used by the opposition here to refer to
their own subdued grievances.
“Everyone has been asking how these Arabs could stand firm while we got scared
and ran away,” said a young opposition supporter who helped as a translator for
foreign journalists during the 2009 election campaign.
He repeated a slogan heard often in opposition circles since the eruption of
unrest in North Africa: “Why could Tunisia, while Iran could not?” The word for
“could” in Persian sounds close to that for “Tunisia.”
“Winning for us on Feb. 14 would mean taking over the streets and staying the
night,” he said. “But if they just go home and shout ‘God is great!’ it’s no
use.”
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
CAIRO — The core issue in Egypt can be boiled down to this:
are we witnessing Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989?
Is this a broad uprising against dictatorship whose goal of democratic freedom
will be usurped by organized Islamists, as in the Iranian revolution? Or is this
the end of the Arab Jurassic Park where, from Yemen to Tunisia, aging despots
have ruled, and the start of a democratic flowering as world-changing as the
collapse of the Soviet empire?
If it’s the latter, as I believe, it’s critical to get this right; and doing so
will involve a still inexperienced U.S. president, Barack Obama, mustering all
the diplomatic craft America showed in uniting Europe in 1989 — as well as
borrowing from 1947 in the form of a Marshall Plan to back dawning Egyptian and
Arab democracy.
It will also involve Israel summoning some fraction of the courage Anwar
el-Sadat showed in his visit to Jerusalem in 1977 — the courage to set aside the
security mantra that sees in every democratic opponent of Hosni Mubarak a
potential jihadist, and to reach out to the modernizing forces in the Arab world
who know the sterility of war.
Before I get to that, let’s set out the two positions in a heated debate. Israel
and its conservative supporters have embraced the Iran analogy. They see menace
above all in the Egyptian awakening.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it this way: “Our concern is that when
there are rapid changes, without all aspects of a modern democracy in place,
what will happen — and it has happened already in Iran — will be the rise of an
oppressive regime of radical Islam. Such a regime will crush human rights and
will not allow democracy or freedom, and will constitute a threat to peace.”
Arab intellectuals have taken an opposing view best expressed by Rami Khouri of
the American University of Beirut: “We are witnessing an epic, historic moment
of the birth of concepts that have long been denied to ordinary Arabs: the right
to define ourselves and our governments, to assert our national values, to shape
our governance systems.”
The United States — Iraq-sobered, Gaza-burned — has tried the “orderly
transition” middle path. It has made clear Mubarak must go, but probably not
right now. Hillary Clinton’s nuanced iteration of Netanyahu went like this:
“Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy, only to see the
process hijacked by new autocrats.”
In other words: we’d like to see an Arab 1989 but we’ve been hurt too often not
to glimpse Iran 1979.
That last date is seared into U.S. diplomatic memory. America clung to the shah
for too long and lost Iran. That left Egypt as the alternative Muslim
cornerstone of U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East. No wonder American
concern at “losing” Egypt runs high. Outside Iran and Egypt, the two great
nation states of the Middle East, there are no more than “tribes with flags.”
A quick aside on Iran is in order. There’s been a preposterous debate in Tehran
between a regime seeking vindication in the Egyptian uprising and the opposition
Green movement whose courage in 2009 was an important precursor to Tunis and
Cairo. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, declared of Egypt: “We are happy
wherever Muslim people clench their fists against the enemies of their
religion.”
Oh, please! The truth lies with Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, who
drew a straight line between Mubarak and Khamenei — men who order that “pens are
broken and dissidents are imprisoned.”
As Yousry Nasrallah, an Egyptian movie director, put it to me: “There is nothing
inspiring to Egyptians about an Iranian revolution that puts filmmakers in jail,
crushes the opposition and tortures people — not even for the Muslim
Brotherhood!”
No, this Egyptian uprising is about the very individual rights Tehran flouted in
2009 and Western-backed Arab security states have denied: the right to vote, to
the rule of law, to freedom of expression. Almost every conversation I’ve had on
the streets of Cairo this past week returns to these themes.
Israel should welcome this awakening. It is the denial of such rights by Arab
despots that has given Iranian populist rhetoric such resonance on the Arab
street. Nothing will shrink Iranian sway faster than Arab democracy.
There’s a second reason for Israel to find hope in Tahrir Square: it is
precisely individuals who feel their existence has no meaning — the heart of the
Arab condition — who are most prone to subsume their identity in the
all-resolving jihadist death wish.
Rich Gulf states have talked the talk on Israeli-Palestinian peace but never
walked the walk. Now Obama, if he embraces 1989 over 1979, as he must, should
twist the arms of Gulf allies. He should ensure Egyptian democracy delivers by
preparing an oil-money-funded Marshall Plan for a democratic Arab world.
As for Netanyahu, he should emulate Sadat and head for Cairo to embrace Egypt’s
democratically-elected next president.
We’re not there yet, but this is a moment to think big and show courage. It’s
not only the Arab world’s 1989; it’s Obama’s.
In Egypt, U.S. Weighs Push for Change With Stability
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — Vice President Omar Suleiman of Egypt says he
does not think it is time to lift the 30-year-old emergency law that has been
used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders. He does not think President
Hosni Mubarak needs to resign before his term ends in September. And he does not
think his country is yet ready for democracy.
But, lacking better options, the United States is encouraging him in
negotiations in a still uncertain transition process in Egypt. In doing so, it
is relying on the existing government to make changes that it has steadfastly
resisted for years, and even now does not seem impatient to carry out.
After two weeks of recalibrated messages and efforts to keep up with a rapidly
evolving situation, the Obama administration is still trying to balance support
for some of the basic aspirations for change in Egypt with its concern that the
pro-democracy movement could be “hijacked,” as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton put it, if change were to come too quickly.
The result has been to feed a perception, on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere,
that the United States, for now at least, is putting stability ahead of
democratic ideals, and leaving hopes of nurturing peaceful, gradual change in
large part in the hands of Egyptian officials — starting with Mr. Suleiman — who
have every reason to slow the process.
Faced with questions about Mr. Suleiman’s views, expressed in a series of
interviews in recent days, the White House on Monday called them unacceptable.
“The notion that Egypt isn’t ready for democracy I think runs quite counter to
what we see happening in Tahrir Square and on the streets in cities throughout
the country,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said.
“It’s clear that statements like that are not going to be met with any agreement
by the people of Egypt because they don’t address the very legitimate grievances
that we’ve seen expressed as a result of these protests,” Mr. Gibbs said.
But it remains unclear how much leverage President Obama has to keep Mr.
Suleiman, a Mubarak loyalist, moving toward fundamental change, especially as
the authorities begin to reassert control in Egypt.
The United States has certainly had long ties with Mr. Suleiman, 74, who headed
Egyptian intelligence from 1993 until he was named vice president last month.
For years he has been an important contact for the Central Intelligence Agency
and a regular briefer for visiting American officials, who appear to have valued
his analysis of Egypt’s relations with neighbors and domestic challenges, as
diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks make clear.
The cables describe Mr. Suleiman as Mr. Mubarak’s “consigliere” and having “an
extremely sharp analytical mind” and serving as “the de facto national security
adviser with direct responsibility for the Israeli-Palestinian account.” One
2009 cable mentions him as a possible successor to Mr. Mubarak, to whom he has
long been extremely close.
Mr. Suleiman also frequently assured American officials that the Mubarak
government was working to keep terrorism at bay. “Egypt is circled by
radicalism,” he told Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
during a 2009 visit to Cairo.
In 2006, he told the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, that inside Egypt,
the Muslim Brotherhood posed a serious threat, saying “the principal danger” was
“the group’s exploitation of religion to influence and mobilize the public.”
Administration officials say that in recent days, Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. — who has a long relationship with Mr. Suleiman from his days on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee — has been pressing Mr. Suleiman for a clear road
map of democratic reforms, linked to a timetable.
But among the protesters and opposition groups in Egypt, there is deep
skepticism that Washington is demanding enough of Mr. Suleiman.
The administration sought amendments to the Egyptian Constitution to legalize
political parties, termination of one-party rule, and the end of extralegal
efforts to lock up government opponents and regulate the media. But much of the
opposition considers the Constitution fatally flawed, and is calling for an
entirely new document on which to base a more democratic Egypt.
Similarly, a meeting with opposition groups on Sunday led by Mr. Suleiman was
seen by many Egyptian activists as nothing more than political theater that
yielded no concrete steps toward reform. In a statement afterward —
characterized by opposition figures as propaganda — Mr. Suleiman offered some of
what the administration sought, but left himself a lot of wiggle room.
In the statement, he said a committee “will be formed from members of the
judicial authority and a number of political figures to study and recommend
constitutional amendments” and related laws. The work is supposed to be
completed by the first week of March.
But the recommendations do not appear to be binding on the government; in the
end, they would have to be approved by a Parliament that took office after an
election last year that American officials say was clearly fixed to benefit Mr.
Mubarak’s party.
The document promised that “the state of emergency will be lifted based on the
security situation and an end to the threats to the security of society.” This
is similar to what Mr. Mubarak has said for decades. The state of emergency has
never been lifted.
The statement also says that “media and communications will be liberalized and
no extralegal constraints will be imposed on them.” But “liberalized” is never
defined, nor is it clear that Egypt is willing to allow the free flow of
information over the Internet.
The White House took no issue with Mr. Suleiman’s statement; administration
officials said it looked like the setting of some clear goals. On Monday, Mr.
Obama said Mr. Suleiman’s talks with opposition leaders the day before were
making progress.
Andrew McGregor, author of a 2006 military history of Egypt, said mixed messages
coming from the Obama administration are not a surprise. “It was predictable
that the U.S. response would be confusing at first,” said Mr. McGregor, of the
Jamestown Foundation, a Washington research center. “The Obama administration
obviously wants to support democracy. But the U.S. has been backing the military
regime in Egypt for 30 years.”
Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the
administration was responding to a rapidly changing situation in Egypt.
“The facts on the ground are changing every day,” Mr. Vietor said. “When you
have a situation like this, all you can do is articulate your core principles,
like universal rights for all people, and free and fair elections.”
Protests Linger as Normal Life in Cairo Begins to Resume
February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER
CAIRO — With Egypt’s revolt entering a third week, many parts
of Cairo appeared to be resuming normal life on Monday: A.T.M.’s dispensed
much-needed cash, shops and banks were staffed — though some kept their doors
shut to customers — and the city’s drivers were snarled in a vast traffic jam.
The government met on Monday for its first formal meeting since President Hosni
Mubarak reorganized it in the early days of the uprising, announcing a 15
percent salary hike for government employees, according to news reports.
The move appeared targeted at shoring up support for Mr. Mubarak among the six
million workers on the government payroll and defuse popular support for the
ongoing protests. The newly appointed finance minister, Samir Radwan, said the
pay raise would take effect in April, The Associated Press reported; other
reports suggested that the raise might be a one-time bonus.
Still, signs that the revolt had not ended were rife. Plans to reopen the stock
exchange were postponed until Sunday. The army kept columns of armored personnel
carriers patrolling the streets, and burnt-out vehicles remained in various
squares.
Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the demonstrations, teemed with protesters and a
small army of vendors selling cigarettes, coffee — even sweet potatoes wrapped
in a list of the protesters’ demands. A dozen horse-carts, bereft of their usual
tourist trade, waited for fares at the edges of the square. One idled driver,
Muhammad Adel, said, “I am hopeful I can make some money here.” .
The crowds demanding the immediate departure of Mr. Mubarak were smaller. But
there were enough to form a human chain blocking the entrance to the Mugamma, a
huge edifice on Cairo’s central square built in the 1950s to house the city’s
labyrinthine bureaucracy — a central part of everyday life.
International financial markets were viewing the country as an increased risk.
The Egyptian pound fell 1.6 percent (from 5.84 to 5.95 to the dollar) in global
currency trading. The Central Bank, in its first auction of Treasury bills after
a weeklong closure because of the revolt, sharply reduced the size of the sale,
suggesting that demand by investors for Egyptian government debt was subdued.
On Sunday, the government announced that the transition had begun with a meeting
between Vice President Omar Suleiman and two representatives of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group the Egyptian government has sought to
repress for many years as a threat to stability. They met as part of a group of
about 50 prominent Egyptians and opposition figures, including officials of the
small, recognized opposition parties, as well as a handful of young people who
helped start the protest movement.
While both sides acknowledged the meeting as unprecedented, its significance
quickly became another skirmish in the battle between the president and the
protesters. Mr. Suleiman released a statement — widely reported on state
television and instantly a focal point in Washington — declaring that the
meeting had produced a “consensus” about a path to reform, including the promise
to form a committee to recommend constitutional changes by early March. The
other elements echoed pledges Mr. Mubarak had already made, including a limit on
how many terms a president can serve.
Leaders of the protest movement, including both its youthful members and
Brotherhood officials, denounced Mr. Suleiman’s portrayal of the meeting as a
political ploy intended to suggest that some in their ranks were collaborating.
Though the movement has only a loose leadership, it has coalesced around a
unified set of demands, centered on Mr. Mubarak’s resignation, but also
including the dissolution of one-party rule and revamping the Constitution that
protected it, and Mr. Suleiman gave no ground on any of those demands.
“We did not come out with results,” said Mohamed Morsy, a Brotherhood leader who
attended, while others explained that the Brotherhood had attended only to
reiterate its demands and show openness to dialogue.
The standoff over the meeting underscored the conflicting narratives about the
next chapter of the revolt that has shaken Egypt and the wider Arab world.
Each side claimed that it had emerged from the last two weeks as a survivor —
unarmed protesters repulsed assaults first by police officers in riot gear and
then by pro-Mubarak gangs in plain clothes, but Mr. Mubarak still emerged from a
week of demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets with
his position and his Western support still intact. And while the government
hailed what it called a return to normalcy, the protesters vowed that there was
no turning back.
To rebut Mr. Suleiman’s claims of consensus, a group of young organizers whose
Facebook page fomented the revolt — a half-dozen scruffy-looking doctors,
lawyers and other professionals in their early 30s — stepped forward publicly
for the first time. At least three had been released just the night before from
three days of extra-legal detention at the hands of Mr. Mubarak’s police, and
they vowed to escalate their movement. “The government played all the dirty
games that they had, and the people persisted,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, a
32-year-old surgeon. “We are betting on the people.”
More than 100,000 turned out again on Sunday in the capital’s central Tahrir
Square — more than expected as the work week resumed here. And some of the
movement’s young organizers, who were busy meeting to organize their many small
groups into a unified structure, said they were considering more large-scale
demonstrations in other cities, strikes or acts of civil disobedience like
surrounding the state television headquarters.
Zyad Elelaiwy, 32, a lawyer who is one of the online organizers and a member of
the umbrella opposition group founded by Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate,
acknowledged a generational divide in the movement. Some older leaders —
especially from the recognized parties — were tempted to negotiate with Mr.
Suleiman, he said, but the young organizers determined to hold out for sweeping
change.
“They are more close to negotiating, but they don’t have access to the street,”
Mr. Elelaiwy said. “The people know us. They don’t know them.”
Mr. ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest opposition group, have
committed to follow the lead of the young organizers, he said.
Many of the protesters who gathered in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the
protests, vented anger at reports that the United States was supporting the idea
of a negotiated transition undertaken by Mr. Suleiman while Mr. Mubarak remained
in power. “The extremists aren’t here in Egypt, but they will be if the United
States persists!” said Noha El Sharakawy, a 52-year-old pharmacist with dual
citizenship in both countries.
But the young revolt’s initiators said they were unfazed because they had never
relied on Western support. “If the United States supports the revolution, it is
good for the United States,” said Islam Lofty, 32, a lawyer. “If they do not, it
is an Egyptian issue.”
Some in Washington said they welcomed Mr. Suleiman’s statement, arguing that it
echoed points that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pressed for: a clear
road map and timetable of reforms, starting with the end of one-party rule and
protections for political opponents and the news media.
Though Mr. Mubarak’s government has often made similar pledges without
delivering, American officials pursuing a strategy of slow and steady motion
toward a few clear goals suggested they were gratified.
In an interview with National Public Radio on Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton said that she and Mr. Biden had held many conversations with Mr.
Suleiman about steps toward democracy. “We hear that they are committed to
this,” she said, “and when we press on concrete steps and timelines, we are
given assurance that that will happen.”
To explain the apparent American shift from urgent demands for change to
endorsing plans for Mr. Mubarak to remain in place during a transition, Mrs.
Clinton alluded to “a debate within Egypt itself, and not just in the
government, but among the people of Egypt” over how to manage the timing of the
transition, since the existing Egyptian Constitution would set an unrealistic
deadline of two months for an election if Mr. Mubarak stepped down. That
“doesn’t give anybody enough time,” she said. She has not addressed the Egyptian
opposition’s suggestion for how to solve that problem: suspension of the
Constitution for up to a year until a transitional unity government can organize
a free election.
In an appearance on ABC News, Mr. Suleiman said little to suggest that he was
ready to move Egypt toward democracy or that he even took its youth-led
democracy movement seriously.
Insisting that a transition had already begun with his meeting with members of
the opposition, he reiterated that Mr. Mubarak would stay in power. If he left,
Mr. Suleiman argued, “other people who have their own agenda will make
instability in our country.”
Brushing aside the secular character of the youth revolt shaking Egypt and the
Arab world, Mr. Suleiman suggested conspiratorially that unspecified “other
people” and “an Islamic current” were in fact pushing the young people forward.
“It’s not their idea,” he said. “It comes from abroad.”
And when asked about progress toward democracy, he asserted that Egypt was not
ready, and would not be until “the people here will have the culture of
democracy.”
Mr. ElBaradei, who has been delegated as a negotiator for the protest movement,
rejected Mr. Suleiman’s arguments in his own Sunday talk show appearance.
“We need to abolish the present Constitution,” Mr. ElBaradei said in an
interview on CNN. “We need to dissolve the current Parliament. These are all
elements of the dictatorship regime, and we should not be — I don’t think we
will go to democracy through the dictatorial Constitution.”
Rashid Mohammed Rashid, a former minister of trade and industry, said in an
interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN that he believed it would be better for Mr.
Mubarak to finish his term as president to ensure a smooth transition.
But he also dismissed the threat of a radical Islamist takeover that Mr. Mubarak
has often used to justify his regime, in part because of the secular impulses of
the new youth movement. “I generally believe that what we have seen in the last
10 days have been initiated by the young people of Egypt, that were probably, as
I said, were restricted, despite the political reforms that have been happening,
of having a voice and a share,” Mr. Rashid said.
“Egypt is a great country,” he said. “It has a great young population. It has a
great future and I think it is time now to let the future happen by the young
people, not by history,”
Protesters in the square, meanwhile, sought to dispel the notion that their
ostensibly secular, liberal movement might contain seeds of extremism. Coptic
Christians held a Mass there while Muslims stood guard, repaying a favor that
Christian protesters did for Muslims on Friday.
Some in the square — where many have stayed for a week without going home —
acknowledged some worries about Mr. Mubarak’s perseverance, especially after the
Western powers appeared to back a political transition that left him in place.
“There is a lot of pressure on us,” said Omar el Shamy. “We are kind of scared.”
He added: “But after the work week started and they tried to get everyone to
hate us because they couldn’t get to work, the people keep coming!”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and David E. Sanger from
Washington. Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo and Rick Gladstone
from New York.
Prizing Status Quo, Mubarak Resists Pressure to Resign
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — He walks several yards to his office from his
living quarters at the presidential palace every day, dressed in his trademark
black business suit and tie. On Saturday, he conducted a meeting of his new
government’s economic team. And on Sunday, he received an envoy from Oman, who
delivered a letter from the sultan.
Egyptian, Arab and Western officials who have dealt with President Hosni Mubarak
of Egypt say that for the past week, he has veered between anger, a sense of
betrayal and stoicism. Known for a fierce conservatism that prizes stability
above all else, Mr. Mubarak has reacted to the calls for his resignation — some
from Western officials who he thought were, if not friends, at least allies —
with his usual change-resistant manner. One Arab official called it “his reflex
adherence to the status quo.”
That deep-seated aversion to change, along with Mr. Mubarak’s fierce pride and
absolute certainty that he is the only person who can provide his country with
the stability he so prizes, now occupies center stage in the Egyptian crisis, a
psychological drama to rival the clash on the streets.
At his news conference on Friday, President Obama said he thought Mr. Mubarak
had made a “psychological break” from his hold on office by announcing that he
would not run again.
The question of whether Mr. Mubarak will yield power willingly — and how and
under what timetable he might do so — are driving the Obama administration’s
national security team to assess and reassess their strategy in dealing with
him. It is being watched intently by the antigovernment protesters in Cairo,
much of the Arab world and even by members of his own government.
The protesters, along with American and Western officials, are unsure to what
degree Mr. Mubarak still calls the shots. There is speculation here and in Cairo
that Omar Suleiman, whom Mr. Mubarak named as vice president eight days ago, is
in charge now. Since a tense 30-minute phone call between Mr. Obama and Mr.
Mubarak last Tuesday night ended with Mr. Mubarak balking at American
suggestions that he leave power, most of the Obama administration’s negotiations
have been with Mr. Suleiman, according to American officials.
Still, Mr. Suleiman and other Egyptian officials have taken pains to show that
their actions are at their boss’s behest, even if he does not appear to be
publicly managing the country’s crisis.
American and Egyptian officials say that such considerations are all part of a
carefully calibrated process aimed at avoiding a direct challenge to Mr.
Mubarak’s unwavering belief that if you make concessions — like tendering a
resignation — in the face of pressure, you invite more demands. Concessions must
be made on the Mubarak stopwatch, say those who have worked with him. They
describe a man who often refuses to accept an idea when it is first presented,
but weeks later, embraces it as his own.
Mr. Mubarak, 82, has survived three wars, an Islamic uprising and multiple
assassination attempts. Two years ago, an aneurism caused the sudden death of
his 12-year-old grandson, Muhammad, a deep personal blow. Through all of that,
Egyptian and American officials said, he continues to believe that his country
can succeed only if he is at the helm to protect it from being taken over by
Islamists (He deplores the Muslim Brotherhood, who he has long believed had a
hand in the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat).
“He kept the peace for 30 years, and it is tragic that his tenure in office ends
this way,” said an Egyptian official who worked closely with Mr. Mubarak. But,
the official added, “There came a point beyond which President Mubarak became
out of touch with a significant portion of the Egyptian people.”
The traits that define Mr. Mubarak today have been on display for decades. In
1981, Bruce O. Riedel, then a young Egypt analyst at the Central Intelligence
Agency, wrote a briefing paper that, he said, concluded that Mr. Mubarak’s rise
to power would be beneficial to Washington because he was “cautious,
conservative, predictable and pro-American.”
Witnessing Mr. Sadat being gunned down in a hail of gunfire was a searing
experience for him, and he lives a cloistered life in the secure confines of the
palace in Cairo or his residence in the seaside community of Sharm el Sheik.
But Mr. Mubarak also turned his risk-aversion into a virtue, portraying himself
as heroic for being canny enough not to be lured into rash decisions. In 1970,
as chief of the Egyptian Air Force, Mr. Mubarak famously resisted intense
pressure from the Soviet Union to test Israel’s air defenses by flying combat
missions over the Sinai Peninsula. The Soviets carried out the missions
themselves, and in July of that year the Israeli military shot down five Soviet
MiG-21s.
“This is indicative of a guy who takes his victories not from doing things, but
from avoiding doing things,” Mr. Riedel said .
Now, that conservatism has run smack into the demands for change from the people
in the street. Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister and former deputy prime
minister of Jordan, said he thought that Mr. Suleiman would take the lead in
easing Mr. Mubarak out. “I think Suleiman will try to do it in a soft way, if
you want,” said Mr. Muasher, now a Middle East specialist at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “If that doesn’t work, I think
there will come a time when he will be told bluntly.”
The success of such an approach remains uncertain. Current and former American
officials who have met with Mr. Mubarak regularly over two decades describe a
man who is imperious, inscrutable and reluctant to betray emotion. He rarely
confides in anyone beyond his tight inner circle, and uses public appearances to
cultivate a regal image. He began dying his hair at a relatively early age, a
move that American observers interpreted as an effort to appear ageless to the
Egyptian public.
American diplomatic cables provided by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to
revealing secret government documents, depict Mr. Mubarak as occasionally
expansive during visits by American leaders and Congressional representatives.
During such a meeting in January 2008 with Representative Steve Israel, Democrat
of New York, Mr. Mubarak chatted easily and “engaged the visitors extensively on
the topic of food,” the cable said, saying that his favorites were Egyptian
breakfast dishes like tamiya (falafel) and beans. “He ordered up a huge tray of
freshly made tamiya sandwiches for lunch, and lustily consumed several,” the
cable said.
During that meeting, Mr. Mubarak also talked about his younger son and presumed
successor, Gamal, whom he described as a perfectionist from childhood. “As a
schoolboy, if I gave him a notebook with one line that was not straight, he
would throw a fit and demand a new one,” the cable recounted Mr. Mubarak as
saying, laughing. Mr. Mubarak said Gamal is “idealistic” and “punctual.” He
added, “If he (Gamal) says ‘meet me for lunch at 2:00,’ he means 2:00. Set your
watch by it.”
The cable also notes that Mr. Mubarak had “more than his usual difficulty in
hearing,” but that “nonetheless he initiated several phone calls.”
Several cables describe a “warm relationship” between Mr. Mubarak and Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in which they often discuss, and agree
on, the threat from Iran. A 2009 cable describes Mr. Mubarak as telling another
visitor from Washington, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, that
he had warned President George W. Bush not to attack Iraq. Iran, he said, only
started to “breathe” once the United States removed Saddam Hussein from the
scene. “Removing Saddam from power was the biggest mistake ever committed,” Mr.
Mubarak told Mr. McConnell, according to the cable.
Another diplomatic cable describes Mr. Mubarak as “a classic Egyptian secularist
who hates religious extremism and interference in politics.”
“The Muslim Brothers represent the worst, as they challenge not only Mubarak’s
power, but his view of Egyptian interests,” the cable continues. “As with
regional issues, Mubarak seeks to avoid conflict and spare his people from the
violence he predicts would emerge from unleashed personal and civil liberties.”
Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Scott Shane and Sheryl Gay
Stolberg in Washington; David D. Kirkpatrick in Cairo; and Michael Slackman in
Berlin.
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM, MICHAEL SLACKMAN and DAVID ROHDE
This article is by Kareem Fahim, Michael Slackman and David
Rohde.
CAIRO — As Egyptians turned their anger on symbols of the state late last month,
torching police stations along with the headquarters of President Hosni
Mubarak’s ruling party, they reserved a special hatred for a garish building
with black tinted windows in an upscale neighborhood, setting fire to it three
times.
It belongs to a steel tycoon and ruling party insider named Ahmed Ezz, a close
friend and confidante of Mr. Mubarak’s son Gamal. For many years, Mr. Ezz has
represented the intersection of money, politics and power, controlling
two-thirds of the steel market, leading the budget committee as a member of
Parliament and serving as an officer and loyal lieutenant in the governing
party. Public resentment at the wealth acquired by the politically powerful
helped propel the uprising already reshaping the contours of power along the
Nile.
Mr. Ezz’s world has come undone. He is treated as a liability by an old guard
intent on saving itself from fed-up and furious protesters. He is under
investigation on suspicion of corruption. His assets have been frozen and his
right to travel taken away. He has denied accusations of corruption in the past,
and his location was not known Sunday. Now his name is part of the derisive
chants in Tahrir Square, a symbol of all that was wrong with Mr. Mubarak’s
government.
“Ahmed Ezz sucks the blood of the people,” said Osama Mohamed Afifi, a student
who joined the protesters in the square on Sunday. “He is the only man who can
sell steel in all of Egypt, and he sells it for much more than if we could buy
steel from someone else like China.”
Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought
political power and political power bought great wealth. While hard facts are
difficult to come by, Egyptians watching the rise of a moneyed class widely
believe that self-dealing, crony capitalism and corruption are endemic,
represented in the public eye by a group of rich businessmen aligned with Gamal
Mubarak, the president’s son, as well as key government ministers and governing
party members.
“The people around Gamal became the wealthiest group in the country,” said Hala
Mustafa, a political scientist who quit the ruling party years ago, saying it
was not committed to political reform. “They monopolized everything.”
While Egypt’s gross domestic product grew, so did the percentage of the
population that was poor. Rumors of kickbacks and corruption swirled. There have
been multibillion-dollar estimates of the wealth of the president or his family,
but experts say those are unsubstantiated guesses.
A 2006 cable obtained by WikiLeaks described a 274-page report by an opposition
political group detailing accusations of corruption by the president’s wife,
Suzanne, as well as Gamal Mubarak and his brother, Alaa, a businessman. The
cable, from the American ambassador in Cairo, Francis J. Ricciardone, noted that
the accusations were unproven but called the report evidence of growing public
anger.
“Egyptians are becoming increasingly vocal about sensitive issues despite the
possible government backlash,” he noted.
The Mubaraks owned a five-story townhouse on 28 Wilton Place in the upscale
Knightsbridge district of London, which has served as a base for Mrs. Mubarak
and a home for Gamal Mubarak when he was working in London as an investment
banker. A local property agent said townhouses in the area had sold in recent
years for $10 million to $16 million.
Last week, a woman answering the front door of No. 28 said the Mubaraks had sold
the townhouse, but property agents said there was no record of a sale, and
neighbors said they had seen Gamal Mubarak and his family entering the house
several times recently.
Mr. Ezz, in his tight Italian suits, became the best known and most reviled
member of the group around Gamal Mubarak.
His father was a steel trader and his mother owned land in Gaza. Mr. Ezz grew up
wealthy but not rich, according to Ali Moussa, a leading businessman and a
member of the ruling party who has known Mr. Ezz since he was a child. The
family steel business grew in the early 1990s, during a period of economic
changes when the Egyptian government, at the behest of the International
Monetary Fund, carried out a radical restructuring of the country’s economy.
On paper, the changes transformed an almost entirely state-controlled economic
system to a predominantly free-market one. In practice, though, a form of crony
capitalism emerged, according to Egyptian and foreign experts. State-controlled
banks acted as kingmakers, extending loans to families who supported the
government but denying credit to viable businesspeople who lacked the right
political pedigree.
Ahmed El Naggar, director of the economic studies unit at Al-Ahram Center for
Political and Strategic Studies, said government officials sold state-owned land
to politically connected families for low prices. They also allowed foreign
conglomerates to buy state-owned companies for small amounts. In exchange, he
said, they received kickbacks.
At the same time, the government required foreign investors to form joint
ventures with Egyptian firms. Families with close ties to the governing party
formed the Egyptian half of the lucrative joint ventures.
“It’s quite clear that entire domains in the economy were dominated by a few
people,” said Eberhard Kienle, chairman of the Center for Near and Middle
Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “If you
talk to the smaller business dealer, they feel they can’t rise to the top.
Markets are being allocated politically.”
Exacerbating tensions, Egypt’s oligarchs flaunted their wealth. They built
grandiose homes in the desert outside Cairo and along the country’s coasts. They
drove brand-new Mercedes-Benzes down derelict Cairo streets with police escorts.
As the economy was privatized, Mr. Ezz’s family bought a public-sector steel
company, according to Tarek H. Selim, an associate professor of economics at the
American University in Cairo.
At the same time, Mr. Ezz took on a more active role in public life, becoming
vice chairman of a national trade federation, the head of one of the country’s
industrial cities and a member of Parliament.
At about the same time, Gamal Mubarak was becoming active in his father’s party,
and looking to inject it with fresh blood, Mr. Moussa said. By 2002, when Gamal
Mubarak took control of the party’s policy-making committee, Mr. Ezz was a
rising star in the party, and his steel company was making him incredibly rich.
By 2003, Ezz Steel controlled two-thirds of the Egyptian market, Professor Selim
said. Over the next few years, as Mr. Ezz took on important responsibilities in
the governing party, allegations mounted that he was using his position to
enrich himself and defend his near-monopoly on the steel business. Professor
Selim said complaints brought against Mr. Ezz with the Egyptian Competition
Authority were dismissed, in large part because of the high threshold for such
complaints under the law.
“The case against him was not strong,” said Professor Selim, who was an economic
adviser to the authority. He added: “There should have been more aggressive
monitoring of his activities. I think he should have been fined.”
Even without formal sanctions, the public took a dim view of Mr. Ezz’s business
dealings, which were faulted — rightly or wrongly — as raising construction
costs in Egypt, as cement prices rose along with steel prices. Mr. Ezz’s
continued ascent in the National Democratic Party worsened that perception.
In November, Mr. Ezz presided over the party’s parliamentary election campaign,
an effort that was seen as a ruthless success: amid widespread charges of
intimidation, violence and election rigging, opposition parties won only a
sprinkling of seats. Afterward, Mr. Ezz bragged about the results in the press.
Mr. Moussa, the ruling party member, said that even party members thought Mr.
Ezz had gone too far.
“He convinced everyone that we had to dominate the election,” Mr. Moussa said.
“The cabinet could have defended itself. A friend said to me: The stupid part is
we had the opposition inside the Parliament under a covered roof. He took the
opposition into the street.”
Political analysts said that the focus of investigations now, including Mr. Ezz,
is at best selective, intended not to punish corruption, but to address public
grievances without actually changing the system. Casting out Mr. Ezz, who had
tense relations with the old guard in the party, appears part of a strategy on
many fronts to try to survive, analysts said.
Prosecutors also imposed a travel ban and froze the assets of Rachid Mohamed
Rachid, the former minister of investment and trade who had for years been
hailed as an effective official committed to opening up Egypt’s fossilized,
centrally controlled economy. The accusations surfaced when he was in Dubai.
Reached in Dubai by Reuters on Sunday, Mr. Rachid declined to comment. He said
he planned to return to Egypt.
“The old guard is focused on Ahmed Ezz as being incredibly corrupt,” said
Issandr El Amrani, an independent journalist and blogger who has closely
followed the connections between money, power and politics in his writing. “Is
he more corrupt than security people, than generals, than ministers?”
Mr. Amrani pointed to half a dozen influential officials who, while he said he
had no evidence they were involved in corruption, did enhance the public
perception of an unfair playing field. Most had some connection to the National
Democratic Party, which itself was an institution whose power stemmed from its
ability to control and influence the affairs of the state.
Among those in this circle, Mr. Amrani said, were Ibrahim Kamal, a senior member
of the party who also runs an industrial group; the former minister of
agriculture, who he said was a major textile producer; a ceramics businessman,
Muhammad Abul Einen; a former housing minister, Ahmed al-Maghrabi; and his
cousin, the former minister of transportation, Mohamed Mansour. While in office
they also continued to own a large investment and development company.
Hisham Talaat Mustafa, now serving a 15-year prison term for paying to have a
former police officer kill his former lover, a Lebanese pop star, Suzanne
Tammim, was also a member of Gamal Mubarak’s inner circle. He was spared the
death penalty after a court threw it out, fueling public resentments about a
double standard.
Now, Mr. Ezz and other officials are “are being offered up to the public” as
scapegoats, said Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at
Georgetown who has interviewed Mr. Ezz. “The N.D.P. is a group of individual and
financial interests masquerading as a political organization,” he added.
“There’s little difference between Ahmed Ezz and Gamal Mubarak.”
Mohsen Rady, a former member of Parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood, went
further. “The Egyptian people are smart,” he said. “They know it’s Ahmed Ezz and
it’s Hosni Mubarak.”
But it has been dangerous to try to unearth proof of corruption in Egypt to back
up such public suspicions. Journalists who wrote about corruption by senior
government officials — particularly involving Gamal Mubarak — were fined,
sentenced to jail or beaten by plainclothes policemen. From February 2004 to
July 2006, state prosecutors filed criminal cases against 85 journalists,
according to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. Most had written about
government corruption.
“The problem is we couldn’t begin to look for evidence,” said Hani Shukrallah,
who edits the English Web site for Al-Ahram. “To even begin to seriously
research it, would put you in really great danger.”
Reporting was contributed by John F. Burns from London, and Mona El-Naggar,
David D. Kirkpatrick and Liam Stack from Cairo.
Al Jazeera Hopes Reports From Egypt Open Doors in U.S.
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER
DOHA, Qatar — “Our bureau in Cairo has been attacked.”
Phone calls and e-mail on Friday spread that short message through the Doha
headquarters of Al Jazeera, the satellite news network. It was an ominous start
to the day, made worse by the fact that the day before, three of the network’s
staff members had been arrested and others had been harassed amid the continuing
protests in Cairo, the Egyptian capital.
Still, the network’s nonstop live coverage rolled on unabated. Al Jazeera’s
Arabic- and English-language coverage has provided a worldwide megaphone for the
protests that have disrupted the Middle East, first in Tunisia and then Egypt —
and to a lesser degree, Yemen, Jordan and Sudan.
Al Jazeera stands to benefit greatly from its protest coverage, a fact not lost
on the network, which has been placing advertisements in major American
newspapers. The live reports strengthen the network’s already tight grip on its
Arabic-language viewing public, while bolstering its argument that cable and
satellite distributors in the United States should make the English version
available to American viewers.
A sense of mission — and of opportunity — permeates the Al Jazeera compound on
the outskirts of Doha, where on Friday the televised cries of antigovernment
protesters resounded through the hallways at all hours along with the ringing of
cellphones and the shouts of news anchors. Staff members were well aware they
faced stiff challenges — from opponents who wish Al Jazeera off the air and
skeptics who doubt the objectivity of a network backed by the emir of Qatar.
The network’s Cairo bureau was empty on Friday when an unknown group ransacked
it, because four days earlier the Egyptian authorities banned Al Jazeera from
broadcasting from the country.
“Since then we’ve been playing cat and mouse,” said Heather Allan, the head of
news gathering for Al Jazeera English. Remarkably, the network has managed to
transmit live from Cairo much of the time since then.
Many observers believe that by televising the uprisings, Al Jazeera is
influencing them — and tilting the Middle East toward a version of democracy in
the process.
Wadah Khanfar, director general of Al Jazeera, acknowledged that covering the
protesters around the clock “gives them some momentum.” He said that the
network’s mission statement supported democracy, but added, “we’re not adopting
the revolution.”
Similarly, Mostefa Souag, news director for the Arabic service, conceded that
protesters might gravitate toward Al Jazeera’s cameras, well aware of the
worldwide power of the images. But, he added, “we’re not here to create events.
We’re here to cover events.”
The Arabic and English news services measurably spent more time last week
showing and interviewing voices opposed to President Hosni Mubarak, but they
gave time to other points of view, as well. When the Arabic service was slow to
go live to a press briefing by the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs,
Mr. Souag rushed out of his office to ask the producers, “Why aren’t we taking
him?” (It took a few minutes for the translator to get into position.)
The Arabic- and English-language operations work in tandem, sharing materials,
bureaus and an “editorial spirit,” said Al Anstey, the English managing
director, while maintaining separate staffs and newsrooms. Last week, they also
shared Egypt theme music and a graphics package that had as its dominant image a
“Down with Mubarak” sign clutched by a protester.
By midafternoon on Friday, the crowds in Tahrir Square were swelling, and news
anchors on Al Jazeera were batting around crowd estimates — guesses, really — in
the millions. That same afternoon, an executive producer told those in the
newsroom responsible for booking guests: “Don’t make any more calls on Iran.”
Salah Nagm, the English-language news director, had decided to halt segments
about the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech on Friday praising the protesters in
Egypt. To praise Egyptian protesters after having cracked down on protests in
Iran was a “double standard,” Mr. Nagm said. And, he added, when the news anchor
diverts from the events in Egypt, “viewers lose concentration.”
In the newsroom, updates from Cairo were indicated by red flashes on computer
screens. When a correspondent spotted several hundred supporters of President
Mubarak on a bridge near Tahrir Square, she phoned a producer, who announced the
development in a mass e-mail transmission. Moments later, the news was shared
with television viewers.
Meanwhile, Ms. Allan was on the phone praising Andrew Simmons, one of the Al
Jazeera correspondents who had been detained and interrogated by the Egyptian
authorities a day earlier. “Even with a bonk on your head,” she told him, “you
made it make sense.”
A moment later, after conferring with colleagues about the status of efforts to
obtain reporter visas to enter Yemen and Algeria, she sighed. “We’ve been trying
to get into Algeria now for two and a half weeks.”
The staff in Cairo and Doha has effectively been on a war footing. At times last
week, it was so dangerous in Cairo that Al Jazeera’s correspondents there were
not identified by name, an approach the network has usually found necessary only
in Myanmar. There were widespread reports that pro-Mubarak protesters were
singling out Al Jazeera news crews.
“It’s practically impossible for us to do our jobs anymore,” one of the
anonymous correspondents said on the air on Thursday.
As with other TV networks, much of Al Jazeera’s equipment in Cairo has been
confiscated. The network, which has tried not to divulge how it has managed to
transmit pictures from Egypt, has supplemented its own images with those from
amateurs.
In the Arabic newsroom, a group of volunteers scoured Facebook and YouTube for
newly uploaded material. The uprising in Tunisia, where Al Jazeera was not
allowed to have a bureau, resulted in the “biggest use yet of citizen video” by
the network, Mr. Souag said.
In a separate interview, Mr. Khanfar went further, saying the protests in
Tunisia were “broadcast to the entire world through Al Jazeera, so there was a
sort of partnership between those people on the ground and Al Jazeera.”
“In my opinion, this is a new ecosystem emerging in media, between the so-called
traditional media and the new media,” he said. “And this new ecosystem is not
based on competition and who is going to win, it’s based on complementing each
other.”
Mr. Khanfar continued, “When our correspondents were banned, we had thousands of
correspondents through these activists.”
Mr. Khanfar said he sensed that a “technical war” had been under way against Al
Jazeera in Egypt. All week, the Arabic network’s satellite signals were
disrupted, leading about a dozen other broadcasters in the region to simulcast
the signal. On Friday morning, he said, its Web site was attacked by hackers.
Since its inception in 2006, Al Jazeera English has been fighting for access to
American viewers. Distributors have been unwilling to carry the service, but Mr.
Anstey, the managing director, said in an interview that renewed talks with the
major distributors were now under way. “There’s a growing call for Al Jazeera.
That’s clear,” he said.
Al Jazeera English has contacted Comcast, for instance, and a meeting has been
scheduled for later this month.
In an indication that perceptions of Al Jazeera may be changing, one of its
correspondents in Washington reported on Thursday that people there “are all of
a sudden very welcoming” to the network. “We’re on TVs all across the city.”
There remains a deep suspicion of Al Jazeera’s motives, however, particularly
with regard to its recent protest coverage. In an essay that appeared on The
Huffington Post, Marc Ginsberg, a former United States ambassador to Morocco and
a former contributor to Fox News, accused Al Jazeera of acting “more and more
like a ‘Wizard of Oz’ type instrument for social upheaval in the region —
whether or not it brings to power Salafi extremists is immaterial to its
mission.”
There is little disagreement, however, that Al Jazeera’s zoom-lens live coverage
of Tahrir Square can affect what happens there.
In an essay last week for Foreign Affairs, Sheila Carapico, a professor of
political science at the University of Richmond and the American University in
Cairo, wrote: “We should not forget that news stations based in Britain, Qatar
and the United States are active participants in events rather than mere
bystanders recording events. In the first televised revolution, the medium is
part of the message.”
Several people at Al Jazeera suggested the live coverage was providing the
protesters some protection from widespread harm.
What is happening now in the Middle East, Mr. Khanfar said on Friday, is a
readjustment between the voices of governments and the voices of their people,
with the people being heard more loudly. Ten minutes later, as Mr. Khanfar and
his colleagues ate dinner in a conference room, they stopped and listened
intently as Al Jazeera reported that giant screens showing the network’s
coverage had been set up at a protest site in Alexandria, Egypt.
As the protests in Cairo showed no signs of winding down, dinner was delivered
for the newsroom. Just after midnight, a female producer wearing a traditional
head scarf dozed at her desk, headphones still firmly in place. Meanwhile, the
protesters kept chanting and the anchors kept talking.
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON
After disappearing in Egypt more than a week ago, leaving an
ominous message on his Twitter account, Wael Ghonim, who leads Google’s
marketing efforts for the Middle East and North Africa, is expected to be
released by Egyptian authorities to his family on Monday afternoon, a friend of
the Ghonim family said Sunday night.
“We are not confident, but we are hopeful,” said Habib Haddad, a Boston-based
businessman and a close friend of Mr. Ghonim who has been helping lead efforts
in recent days to help locate his friend, among many in Egypt who have gone
missing in the two-week-old revolt there. “At this point in time, it is
important to be hopeful and confident but not to call for celebration yet.”
Egypt’s state-run Nile TV reported on Sunday that Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq
had called the network to announce that Mr. Ghonim would be released on Monday
afternoon. Earlier in the day, Naguib Sawiris, a prominent Egyptian businessman
who was among several others meeting with Vice President Omar Suleiman over the
weekend, said that he had been assured Mr. Ghonim would be released on Monday
afternoon.
Before his family lost contact with him on Jan. 28, Mr. Ghonim made one of his
last posts to his @ghonim Twitter page that troubled friends and family, raising
concerns about his whereabouts: “Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that
government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to
die #Jan25.”
His friends and family initially searched area hospitals for him while human
rights activists became convinced he was being held by the authorities because
he was believed to have inspired some of the young digital-savvy Egyptian
political organizers to use technology, including Facebook and YouTube, to help
raise awareness about abuse by the police and other human rights issues in
Egypt.
Soon after Khaled Said, an Egyptian businessman who had evidence of police
corruption, was killed at the hands of officers on June 6, 2010, in Alexandria,
a Facebook page was created and YouTube videos were uploaded that human rights
advocates said helped build an online community of more than 450,000 people and
inspired the protests that began on Jan. 25. It is unclear what role, if any,
Mr. Ghonim had in the social media effort to raise awareness about the case of
Khaled Said.
After his disappearance, members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which began in
2008 to use a Facebook group to help gather support for human rights causes,
told Egyptian authorities on Friday that they had designated Mr. Ghonim their
spokesman.
Google did not respond to inquiries about these developments on Sunday, but the
company has been making efforts to help locate him.
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
Tel Aviv
IN the Western study of medieval Islamic history, the institution of iqta — land
grants from the sovereign to his soldiers — once loomed large, because scholars
searched for reasons behind the Muslim failure to develop feudalism, and with it
the contractual relationships that eventually led to constitutional government.
But looking for parallels between the West and Islam — especially the classical
Islamic heartland from North Africa to Iran — has always been politically a sad
endeavor, since the region seemed so resistant to the ideas and institutions
that made representative government possible.
President George W. Bush’s decision to build democracy in Iraq seemed so lame to
many people because it appeared, at best, to be another example of American
idealism run amok — the forceful implantation of a complex Western idea into
infertile authoritarian soil. But Mr. Bush, whose faith in self-government
mirrors that of a frontiersman in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” saw
truths that more worldly men missed: the idea of democracy had become a potent
force among Muslims, and authoritarianism had become the midwife to Islamic
extremism.
One of the great under-reported stories of the end of the 20th century was the
enormous penetration of the West’s better political ideas — democracy and
individual liberty — into the Muslim consciousness. For those of us who speak
and read Persian, the startling evolution was easier to see.
Theocracy-versus-democracy has been a defining theme of the Islamic Republic of
Iran since the revolution, which harnessed both Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s
religious charisma and the secular intelligentsia’s democratic aspirations. Over
the last three decades, clerical Iran has nurtured an intense intellectual
discourse about the duties that man owes to God.
When the legitimacy of theocracy started to unravel amid the regime’s corruption
and brutality in the late 1980s, democratic ideas, including powerful democratic
interpretations of the Islamic faith, roared forth. The explosion on the streets
after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009 was just the most
visible eruption of the enormous democratic pressures that had built up
underneath the republic’s autocracy. More regime-threatening moments are surely
coming.
Today’s Arab societies — less intellectually vibrant than Iran, in great part
because their regimes have been more effective in shutting down internal debate
— have become increasingly schizophrenic. Long before the tumult in Tunisia and
Egypt, Arab liberal secular intellectuals had divided. Except for the fearless,
who went to prison, liberals who didn’t flee their homelands usually became
“court liberals,” whose views never seriously challenged the rulers.
Aware of the dismal fates of their kind in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, they
faithfully echoed the anti-Islamist, après-moi-le-déluge fears that the region’s
autocrats used in Washington whenever American officials objected to tyranny.
Democracy remained for them a cherished ideal, attainable at some future date
when the Islamists had lost their appeal and the despots their power.
The secular intellectuals in exile, however, more forcefully embraced the
democratic cause — their newspapers, books, magazines, Web sites and,
increasingly, appearances on Al Jazeera — delivered their views back home.
Intellectuals of such diverse viewpoints as Kanan Makiya, Edward Said, Saad
Eddin Ibrahim and Burhan Ghalioun opened up an ever-increasing liberal,
democratic space in foreign and Arabic publications. Yes, some mixed their
message of liberty with other “Arab” priorities: anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism
and anti-imperialism. But their support of democracy was clear, and became more
acute after the 9/11 attacks.
Understandably, the Western foreign ministries and press paid a lot more
attention to the court liberals. A revulsion against the Iraq war and a distaste
for President Bush helped to blind people to the spread of democratic sentiments
in the region. It blinded them to the fact that among Middle Easterners,
democracy, not dictatorship, was now seen as a better vehicle for economic
growth and social justice.
Most important, Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped to blind Westerners to the
momentous marriage of Islamism and democratic ideas. Men and women of devout
faith, who cherish (if not always rigorously follow) Shariah law increasingly
embraced the convulsive idea that only elected political leadership was
legitimate. Islam puts extraordinary emphasis upon the idea of justice — the
earthbound quid pro quo that a man can expect in a righteous life.
This sense of justice, which Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed so
forcefully in 2004 against an American occupation fearful of letting Iraqis
vote, has been irreversibly welded to the ballot box. Democracy for the faithful
has become a means for society to affirm its most cherished Islamic values.
The Egyptian revolt against President Hosni Mubarak and his regime has caused
many in the West to foresee a calamitous, unstoppable rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the mother ship of Sunni fundamentalism. The Brotherhood is
frightening. Prominent members have sanctified suicide-bombing against Israeli
women and children, espoused the vilest anti-Semitism and affirmed the holiness
of killing those who would slight the Prophet Muhammad.
But the Brotherhood, like everyone else, is evolving. It would be a serious
error to believe that it has not sincerely wrestled with the seductive challenge
of democracy, with the fact that the Egyptian faithful like the idea of voting
for their leaders.
In 2007, members of the Brotherhood released, withdrew and unofficially
re-released a political platform — the first ever for the organization — in
which an outsider can see the Brothers’ philosophical struggle with the idea of
parliamentary supremacy and the certainty that faithful Muslims may
legislatively transgress Holy Law. The Brothers themselves didn’t know how much
free rein to give to their compatriots — they, like everyone else, are moving in
uncharted waters.
The Brotherhood is trying to come to terms with the idea of hurriya, “freedom.”
In the past, for the Muslim devout, hurriya had denoted the freedom of a
believer to worship God; for the Arab nationalist, the word was the battle cry
against European imperialism. Today, in Egypt and elsewhere, hurriya cannot be
understood without reference to free men and women voting. The Brothers are
trying to figure out how to integrate two civilizations and thereby revive their
own. This evolution isn’t pretty. But it is real.
For the Egyptian people, the Brothers are not an enigma — they have been around
since 1928. Unlike the revolutionary mullahs of Iran, who wrote books that
almost no one outside the clergy read, the Brotherhood has spread its word to
the Egyptian public for decades.
It’s also important that Egyptian Muslims are Sunnis. Unlike Iran’s Shiites,
whose history revolves around charismatic men, Egyptians have no Ayatollah
Khomeini. The Brotherhood is an organization of laymen. It has always had a
tense relationship with Al Azhar, the great Sunni seminary of Cairo.
Although Hosni Mubarak has done his best to suck the life out of Egyptian
society, the shadows of once great parties, like the Wafds of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, and nearly forgotten forces like the Liberal
Constitutionalist Party will try to resurrect themselves in fairly short order.
Ayman Nour and his liberal Ghad Party are already established.
Once President Mubarak is gone, and if his minions don’t try to maintain the
military dictatorship, a quick transition to democracy is likely to produce a
plethora of parties, with a few in position to form a coalition.
The Brotherhood will undoubtedly be one of the big players, but it will have to
compete for votes. And, as the Brotherhood’s aborted platform clearly reveals,
the organization is going to have to do better than chanting, “Islam has all the
answers,” the easy retort of men who know they don’t have to compete for power.
What we are likely to see in Egypt is not a repeat of Iran, where
fundamentalists took undisputed power, but a repeat of Iraq, where Sunni
religious parties did well initially but started to fade, divide and evolve as
the powerful Sunni preference for laymen of no particular religious distinction
comes to the foreground. Sunni Islam has no clerical hierarchy of the holy —
it’s tailor-made for nasty arguments among men who dispute one another’s
authority to know the righteous path. If the Brotherhood can be corralled by a
democratic system, the global effect may not be insignificant.
We have a chance in Egypt to be lucky. Democratization there, like
democratization of Iran, could thwart the ideologies and fear that move poor
countries to spend fortunes on nuclear weapons. The United States is not without
influence. We can push hard for a quick transition to democratic rule. The
Egyptian Army, historically no friend of democracy or civil liberties, is now
dependent on American money and advanced weaponry. If it continues to stand
behind Mr. Mubarak, if Egyptians start to die in large numbers, Washington
shouldn’t hesitate to play hardball.
Elections should not be at the end of some long, undefined democratic
transition, which Mr. Mubarak or his minions would surely use to abort
democracy. Egypt needs elections sooner, not later. More convincingly than any
president before him, Barack Obama can say, “We are not scared of Muslims
voting.” He can put an end to the West’s deleterious habit of treating the
Middle East’s potentates respectfully and the Muslim citizenry like children.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies and a former Middle Eastern specialist in the C.I.A.’s clandestine
service, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Wave: Man, God and the
Ballot Box in the Middle East.”
Muslim Brotherhood to Enter Talks as West Backs Transition
February 6, 2011
The New York Times
This article is by Kareem Fahim, Mark Landler and Anthony Shadid.
CAIRO — As the United States and leading European nations on Saturday threw
their weight behind the Egyptians vice president’s attempt to defuse a popular
uprising , the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood said it would meet with him for the
first time on Sunday in what seemed a significant tactical shift in the nation’s
13-day uprising.
But a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood , Gamal Nasser, said the huge and
often violent demonstrations that have paralyzed Cairo and reverberated around
the Middle East would continue “until the political path can have a role in
achieving the aspirations of the protesters” — an apparent reference to their
goal of removing President Hosni Mubarak.
Mr. Nasser said mediators had brokered the encounter, which would a remarkable
first meeting between the Islamist organization — Egypt’s biggest opposition
movement — and an autocratic government that has depicted it as a bitter
adversary committed to the overthrow of the secular order.
The meeting would represent a break with decades of Egyptian policy and strike
at the core of the government’s depiction of its critical role as a bulwark
against political dominance by the popular Islamist party.
Mr. Nasser did not say where or exactly when on Sunday the new vice president,
Omar Suleiman, would meet with specified representatives of the banned Islamist
group.
“The brothers decided to enter a round of dialogue to determine how serious the
officials are achieving the demands of the people,” Mr. Nasser said. “The regime
keeps saying we’re open to dialogue and the people are the ones refusing, so the
Brotherhood decided to examine the situation from all different sides.”
“The Egyptian regime is stubborn, and cannot relinquish power easily,” he said.
In politics, you must hear everyone’s opinions."
The development came a day after American officials said Mr. Suleiman had
promised them an “orderly transition” that would include constitutional reform
and outreach to opposition groups.
“That takes some time,” Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton said, speaking
at a Munich security conference. “There are certain things that have to be done
in order to prepare.”
But the formal endorsement came as Mr. Suleiman appeared to reject the
protesters’ main demands, including the immediate resignation of Mr. Mubarak and
the dismantling of a political system built around one-party rule, according to
leaders of a small, officially authorized opposition party who spoke with Mr.
Suleiman on Saturday.
Instead of loosening its grip, moreover, the existing government appeared to be
consolidating its power: The prime minister said police forces were returning to
the streets, and an army general urged protesters to scale back their occupation
of Tahrir Square.
Protesters interpreted the simultaneous moves by the Western leaders and Mr.
Suleiman as a rebuff to their demands for an end to the dictatorship led for
almost three decades by Mr. Mubarak, a pivotal American ally and pillar of the
existing order in the Middle East.
Just days after President Obama demanded publicly that change in Egypt must
begin right away, many in the streets accused the Obama administration of
sacrificing concrete steps toward genuine change in favor of a familiar
stability.
“America doesn’t understand,” said Ibrahim Mustafa, 42, who was waiting to enter
Tahrir Square. “The people know it is supporting an illegitimate regime.”
Leaders of the Egyptian opposition and rank-and-file protesters had earlier
steadfastly rejected any negotiations with Mr. Suleiman until after the ouster
of Mr. Mubarak, arguing that moving toward democracy will require ridding the
country of not only its dictator but also his rubber-stamp Parliament and a
Constitution designed for one-party rule.
On Saturday, Mr. Mubarak’s party announced a shake-up that removed its old
guard, including his son Gamal, from the party’s leadership while installing
younger, more reform-minded figures. But such gestures were quickly dismissed as
cosmetic by analysts and opposition figures.
Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman “are trying to kill what has happened and to
contain and abort the revolution,” said Hassan Nafaa, a political science
professor at Cairo University. “They want to continue to manage the country like
they did while making some concessions.”
Mrs. Clinton’s message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime
Minister David Cameron of Britain, and reinforced in a flurry of calls by
President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Egyptian and regional
leaders, appears to reflect an attempt at balancing calls for systemic change
with some semblance of legal order and stability.
Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Mubarak, having taken himself and Gamal out of the
September elections, was already effectively sidelined. She emphasized the need
for Egypt to reform its Constitution to make a vote credible. “That is what the
government has said it is trying to do,” she said.
She also stressed the dangers of holding elections without adequate preparation.
“Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy, only to see the
process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception and rigged
elections to stay in power,” she said.
Her emphasis on a deliberate process was repeated by Mrs. Merkel and Mr.
Cameron. Mrs. Merkel mentioned her past as a democracy activist in East Germany,
recalling the impatience of protesters after the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989, to immediately join democratic West Germany. But the process took a year,
and it was time well spent, she said.
“There will be a change in Egypt,” Mrs. Merkel said, “but clearly, the change
has to be shaped in a way that it is a peaceful, a sensible way forward.”
Mrs. Clinton highlighted fears about deteriorating security inside Egypt, noting
the explosion at a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, and uncorroborated news
reports of an earlier assassination attempt on Mr. Suleiman.
American officials did not confirm that an assassination attempt had taken
place. But Mrs. Clinton referred to reports of the attempt and said it
“certainly brings into sharp relief the challenges we are facing as we navigate
through this period.”
In a statement, the Egyptian government said there had been no assassination
attempt, but added that on Jan. 28 a car in Mr. Suleiman’s motorcade was struck
by a bullet fired by “criminal elements.”
At the same Munich meeting on Saturday, Frank G. Wisner, the former ambassador
President Obama sent to Cairo to negotiate with Mr. Mubarak, appeared to take an
even softer line on the existing government, saying that the United States
should not rush to push Mr. Mubarak out the door. He said Mr. Mubarak had a
critical role to play through the end of his presidential term in September.
“You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step
forward, and the president must stay in office in order to steer those changes
through,” Mr. Wisner said.
The administration later said Mr. Wisner’s comments did not reflect official
policy. “The views he expressed today are his own. He did not coordinate his
comments with the U.S. government,” said Philip J. Crowley, the State Department
spokesman.
White House officials said Friday that they were privately pushing Mr. Suleiman
to sideline Mr. Mubarak and eliminate his executive role well before the
September elections.
But the mixed signals fueled concerns in Egypt that the administration, which
has tried to juggle endorsement of change and continued order, had effectively
turned its back on the core demands of those involved in the protest movement.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who has been chosen to negotiate on behalf
of the protesters and other opposition groups, said the American-backed plan for
a gradual transition with Mr. Mubarak remaining in power was a nonstarter. “I do
not think it’s adequate,” he said in an interview. “I’m not talking about
myself. It’s not adequate for the people.
“Mubarak needs to go,” he said. “It has become an emotional issue. They need to
see his back, there’s no question about it.”
Protesters also said that Western worries about security and orderly transitions
sounded remarkably like Mr. Mubarak’s age-old excuses for postponing change. And
they said they had waited long enough.
“We don’t want Omar Suleiman to take Mubarak’s place. We are not O.K. with this
regime at all,” said Omar el-Shawy, a young online activist. “We want a
president who is a civilian.”
There were few indications that Mr. Suleiman and other officials were making
much progress in addressing concerns of opposition groups.
Mounir Fakhry Abdel-Nour, the secretary general of the opposition Wafd Party,
said that in a meeting with Mr. Suleiman on Saturday, the vice president told
him that Mr. Mubarak’s leaving early “was out of the question.” He also ruled
out any transfer of Mr. Mubarak’s responsibilities.
Mr. Abdel-Nour said that he brought up the possibility of repealing Egypt’s
emergency law, which allows the authorities to arrest people without charges.
According to Mr. Abdel-Nour, Mr. Suleiman responded: “At a time like this?”
Negotiations between Mr. Suleiman and a group of self-appointed “wise men” who
are acting as intermediaries between the vice president and the protesters, and
trying to find a way around limits on succession in the Constitution, did not
advance significantly.
Amr Hamzawy, one of the intermediaries, said the negotiations were “gaining
traction,” but added that his group did not meet with Mr. Suleiman on Saturday.
The intermediaries, whose efforts have received the tacit encouragement of
Western governments, have forwarded a plan that would see Mr. Mubarak transfer
his powers to Mr. Suleiman and perhaps move to his home in Sharm el-Sheik or
embark on one of his annual medical leaves to Germany.
In Tahrir Square, meanwhile, the military tightened its cordon around the
protesters on Saturday by reinforcing security checks at all the entrances. An
army officer, Brig. Gen. Hassan al-Rawaini, negotiated with protesters outside a
barricade near the Egyptian Museum, urging them to bring down the
fortifications, allow traffic to return and move their protest to the heart of
Tahrir Square.
In contrast to the pitched clashes of just days ago, General Rawaini offered a
microphone to protesters so that they could air their complaints. He tried to
reason, kissing some on the head and pinching others’ cheeks. Occasionally, he
winked.
Eventually, he and his soldiers moved past the makeshift barricade, knocking
part of it down, though protesters quickly put back up the sheets of corrugated
tin, barrels, metal rebar and parts of fences. He then toured an area strewn
with rocks from the clashes and incinerated vehicles that served as barricades.
Some protesters thought he was preparing for the army to enter and began forming
human chains across the streets. Others chanted “Peaceful!” and formed a
bodyguard around the general.
“He wants to tear down these barricades, so that the tanks can come through!”
shouted Sayyid Eid, a 20-year-old protester, as he tried to block his way.
“We’re going to die here!” yelled Magdi Abdel-Rahman, another protester.
“Listen to him! Listen to him!” others shouted back.
Tempers cooled and General Rawaini made a leisurely stroll to a makeshift health
clinic, then visited knots of protesters across the square with a retinue of
soldiers.
“We’re trying to remove the barricades and return the streets to normal,”
General Rawaini said. “If you want to protest, you can go back to the square.”
A protester shouted back, “General, we’re not going to walk away from here until
Hosni Mubarak leaves!”
Kareem Fahim and Anthony Shadid reported from Cairo, and Mark Landler from
Munich. Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger from Munich, and David D.
Kirkpatrick, Mona El-Naggar and Robert F. Worth from Cairo.
As Mubarak Digs In, U.S. Policy in Egypt Is Complicated
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
Twelve days into an uprising in Egypt that threatens to upend
American strategy in the Middle East, the Obama administration is struggling to
determine if a democratic revolution can succeed while President Hosni Mubarak
remains in office, even if his powers are neutered and he is sidelined from
negotiations over the country’s future.
The latest challenge came Saturday afternoon when the man sent last weekend by
President Obama to persuade the 82-year-old leader to step out of the way, Frank
G. Wisner, told a group of diplomats and security experts that “President
Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical — it’s his opportunity to write his
own legacy.”
Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton immediately tried to recalibrate those
remarks, repeating the latest iteration of the administration’s evolving
strategy. At a minimum, she said, Mr. Mubarak must move out of the way so that
his vice president, Omar Suleiman, can engage in talks with protest leaders over
everything from constitutional changes to free and fair elections.
It is hardly the first time the Obama administration has seemed uncertain on its
feet during the Egyptian crisis, as it struggles to stay on the right side of
history and to avoid accelerating a revolution that could spin out of control.
The mixed messages have been confusing and at times embarrassing — a reflection
of a policy that, by necessity, has been made up on the fly. “This is what
happens when you get caught by surprise,” said one American official, who would
not speak on the record. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two
years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the
possibility that Egypt,” and presumably whatever dominoes follow it, “moves from
stability to turmoil? None.”
Just hours before offering her correctives of Mr. Wisner, Mrs. Clinton made the
case at a gathering in Munich that the entire process would take time, and must
be carefully managed. “Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of
democracy,” she reminded her audience, “only to see the process hijacked by new
autocrats who use violence, deception and rigged elections to stay in power.”
Administration officials insist their responses have been more reaction to
fast-moving events than any fundamental change in objective. Over the last few
days, with Mr. Mubarak making it clear he does not intend to resign anytime
soon, they have described their latest strategy as one of encouraging Egyptian
elites to isolate him to the point where he is essentially a spectator to the
end of his own rule.
They want Mr. Mubarak to be able to leave with honor, so once again on Friday,
Mr. Obama stopped short of telling him to go for fear, as one senior official
put it, that “the more he digs in, the harder it will be at the right moment to
get him to let go.”
Transmitting the right message to constituencies who hear them differently is a
problem the administration has confronted from the start of the crisis almost
two weeks ago.
When the first protesters appeared in Tahrir Square, Mrs. Clinton, working off
the traditional American script that portrays Mr. Mubarak as a reliable ally in
need of quiet, sustained pressure on human rights and political reform, said,
“Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for
ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
One week later, that script was cast aside for the first time in three decades.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama and his top national security aides watched Mr.
Mubarak’s defiant speech, in which he refused to resign but insisted he had
never intended to run for re-election in September. It confirmed the conclusion
they had gradually reached as the protest mounted: Instability would reign until
the Mr. Mubarak got out of the way.
“He needed a push,” said one official who was in the Situation Room with the
president. When Mr. Mubarak’s speech was over, Mr. Obama called him, for what
turned into a tense 30-minute conversation.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Obama appeared in the foyer of the White House to declare
that “orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must
begin now.” He did not press Mr. Mubarak directly to resign, but Mr. Mubarak’s
loyalists clearly interpreted it that way. The next day, government supporters
were bused into the square and changed what had been a largely peaceful process
in a day of rage, stone-throwing, clubbing and arrests, the most violent so far.
By Friday, it was clear that Mr. Mubarak would not go gently, which led to the
third iteration of the White House policy. In private, the administration worked
to peel away Mr. Mubarak’s key supporters in the Egyptian elite. His defense
minister, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, went into Tahrir Square, ostensibly to
inspect the troops there, but largely to associate himself with the protesters.
His appearance, along with a visit to the square by Amr Moussa, the head of the
Arab League and a former Egyptian foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak, created
the impression of the Egyptian leader’s increasing isolation.
Mr. Obama also tried talking about Mr. Mubarak differently, almost in the past
tense. He described him as a man who had made “that psychological break” and
urged him to ask himself, “How do I leave a legacy behind in which Egypt is able
to get through this transformative period?”
Administration officials say that in phone calls and e-mails from the White
House, the State Department and the Pentagon, they have urged a “council of
elders” in Egypt to begin drafting revisions to the Constitution that could be
sped through Parliament, while encouraging Mr. Suleiman to jump-start
conversations with an array of opposition leaders, including the Muslim
Brotherhood, from which some of Al Qaeda’s leadership emerged.
“We are not trying to be prescriptive,” a senior Obama adviser said on Saturday.
“The Egyptian leadership knows what it needs to do, and they don’t need us to
lay it out in detail.”
Yet as Mr. Wisner’s comments on Saturday made clear, differing views remain
about how fast to push Mr. Mubarak. And Mr. Sulieman carries a lot of baggage,
some administration officials acknowledge.
He is hardly a symbol of change. A dozen or so Americans who visited him in
Cairo on Jan. 23 said he insisted that what had just happened in Tunisia could
never spread of Egypt. “They just did not see this coming,” said a former
American official who attended. “They could not wrap their heads around it.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr. Suleiman again on Saturday to
stress, the White House said, “the need for a concrete reform agenda, a clear
timeline, and immediate steps that demonstrate to the public and the opposition
that the Egyptian government is committed to reform.”
The next decision facing the White House is how publicly to press for Mr.
Mubarak’s resignation or sidelining.
Quiet diplomacy, one White House official acknowledged, feeds the public
perception in Cairo and elsewhere that Mr. Obama might be willing to let a
moment of revolutionary opportunity pass for fear of its impact on American
interests. To help counter that perception, Mr. Obama spent Saturday calling
leaders throughout the region, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates,
presumably, to debate how fast and how hard they urge Mr. Mubarak to step aside.
But it is a discussion many Mideast leaders want to avoid, one administration
official said, for fear that they could be on the receiving end of the next
cycle of protests — and the next hint from the White House that it is time to
go.
Helene Cooper and Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and
Mark Landler from Munich.
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Vice President Omar Suleiman of Egypt has won the
blessing of both the Mubarak and Obama administrations as the leader of a
political transition toward democracy in Egypt. But human rights advocates say
that so far Mr. Suleiman, who also is in charge of Egyptian intelligence, has
shown no sign of discontinuing the practice of extra-legal detention of
political opponents — a hallmark of President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year
rule that is a central grievance of the protesters in the streets.
“We have been seriously concerned about the arrests and harassment of human
rights workers and youth activists who are around the demonstrations,” said Heba
Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Cairo. “These are exactly the
same practices that inspired the Jan. 25 demonstrations in the first place, not
a departure.”
The continuing pattern is one reason many of the opposition leaders and
protesters in the streets say they are determined not to back down until Mr.
Mubarak leaves office: if he stays, they say, they risk imprisonment, torture
and death.
The most notable example is the long disappearance of Wael Ghonim, a Google
executive and leader of the young Internet activists who started the revolt.
Believed by many to be the anonymous host of the Facebook page that first called
for the Jan. 25 protest that kicked off the Egyptian uprising, he wrote that day
on his Twitter account, “We got brutally beaten up by police people,” and later,
“Sleeping on the streets of Cairo, trying to feel the pain of millions of my
fellow Egyptians.”
“Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow
against people,” he wrote two days later. “We are all ready to die.” He
disappeared soon after, and after a thorough search of area hospitals, his
family and human rights workers have concluded that he was taken by Egyptian
security forces.
The pattern was most evident last Thursday, when the authorities rounded up
scores of journalists and human rights workers all around Cairo. Though most
foreigners appear to have been released, many Egyptians are still out of sight
or in custody.
Around 8:45 on Thursday evening, for example, a group of about 10 young online
political organizers — part of the group that started the revolt with an online
call to protest — sat down for dinner at a coffee shop here after a meeting at
the home of Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Prize-winning diplomat who has become a
spokesman for the democracy movement.
One of the young organizers, Ahmed Eid, was talking on his mobile phone when he
saw an army officer and a police officer approaching his friends’ table. “I
thought at first that it was just to check their IDs,” he later wrote in a group
e-mail to human rights workers. “When I found that it is taking longer than
usual and that they had 3 plain-clothed men with them, I felt that they were
going to be arrested. I decided to stand afar and follow up with them over the
phone.”
After one of their wives confirmed that the group had been arrested, a human
rights lawyer went to the Haram police station to inquire about their defense.
He, too, was arrested. On Saturday night, a human rights worker said they had
been released, but there were no details given.
The government has also detained without charges and subsequently released
dozens of foreign journalists, holding many overnight.
Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood say security forces recently raided the
office of its Web site, and over the weekend they reportedly raided a Cairo
office of the pan-Arab news network Al Jazeera as well.
In another notable raid, a group of men with clubs accompanied by a handful of
soldiers stormed the Hisham Mubarak Legal Center, breaking windows, rifling
desks and confiscating two safes, a person present said. Screaming and yelling
at the roughly 35 human rights workers and civil rights lawyers present, the men
forced them to the ground and handcuffed their hands behind their backs.
“This is the real Egypt! This is the real Egypt!” one of them said, pointing to
the human rights workers prone on the floor, recalled Dan Williams, a researcher
with Human Rights Watch who was among those captured. He said the man seemed to
be saying: “The real Egypt is, we can do whatever we want with Egyptians. We
come in, we manacle you, and you sit down and you do what we say.”
Unlike the online political organizers who started the revolt, however, the 35
or so human rights workers and legal advocates were released Sunday morning,
after the potential for another violent crackdown appeared to have passed.
Mr. Williams said a white van from the security services dropped him off at a
full hotel in an outer neighborhood of the city, forcing him to risk harassment
or worse at makeshift checkpoints throughout the city as he searched for a bed
for the night.
A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak
out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all
but invisible throughout the 2010 election season. Foreign aid is the only
federal budget line that a clear-cut majority of Americans says should be cut.
And so now — as the world’s most unstable neighborhood explodes before our eyes
— does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our
government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents.
After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely
distinguish Sunni from Shia.
The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video —
even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East
battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or
no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored,
superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in
a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear
speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the
pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.
Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this
crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the
Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green
Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born
phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the
power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this
cliché.
Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away
crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared
that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole
revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher
who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on
Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling
of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly
irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the
equation.
The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The
Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet
the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim
Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29
by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the
Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he
said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist,
Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with
Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he
said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able
to feed their families.”
No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing
and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and
elsewhere. But as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on The New Yorker’s Web site last week,
“surely the least interesting fact” about the Egyptian protesters is that some
of them “may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the
tools of the new media to communicate with one another.” What’s important is
“why they were driven to do it in the first place” — starting with the issues of
human dignity and crushing poverty that Engel was trying to shove back to center
stage.
Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about
whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like
Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, “The Net Delusion,” Evgeny Morozov, a
young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of
what he calls “cyber-utopianism.” Among other mischievous facts, he reports that
there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the
population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its “Twitter
Revolution.” More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so
useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators,
police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track
(and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo
Chávez first vilified Twitter as a “conspiracy,” but now has 1.2 million
followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets.
This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage
of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of
Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western
chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue
the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out
that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only
some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.
That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do
about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many
news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone
that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience. We see the
Middle East on television only when it flares up and then generally in medium or
long shot. But there actually is an English-language cable channel — Al Jazeera
English — that blankets the region with bureaus and that could have been
illuminating Arab life and politics for American audiences since 2006, when it
was established as an editorially separate sister channel to its Qatar-based
namesake.
Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting
Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of
the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television
networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington,
D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest
American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner —
offer it.
The noxious domestic political atmosphere fostering this near-blackout is
obvious to all. It was made vivid last week when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News went
on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is “anti-American.” This is the same “We
report, you decide” Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the
confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote
his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New
York.
Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and
sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable
on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s
Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the
censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think
these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to
pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians
desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in
America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that
might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground
Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from
Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt —
Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into
the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect
between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested
in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to
a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso
facto a jihadist.
This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary
of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from
Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t
understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of
“Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe
distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled
ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come.
It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really
had no idea what was going on.
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Amman, Jordan
Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous
words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the
same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise
of Google without a ripple.
But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock
waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status
quo here for so long — oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of
the chaos that could come with change — have finally met an engine of change
that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.
Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole
Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and
oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this
region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate
regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.
This is why every government out here is now rushing to increase subsidies and
boost wages — even without knowing how to pay for it, or worse, taking it from
capital budgets to build schools and infrastructure. King Abdullah II of Jordan
just gave every soldier and civil servant a $30-a-month pay raise, along with
new food and gasoline subsidies. Kuwait’s government last week announced a
“gift” of about $3,500 to each of Kuwait’s 1.1 million citizens and about $850
million in food subsidies.
But China is a challenge for Egypt and Jordan in other ways. Several years ago,
I wrote about Egyptian entrepreneurs who were importing traditional lanterns for
Ramadan — with microchips in them that played Egyptian folk songs — from China.
When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than
low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated
cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.” They have college degrees on
paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was
just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to
better teach fractions to third graders. That has not been Hosni Mubarak’s
obsession.
I look at the young protesters who gathered in downtown Amman today, and the
thousands who gathered in Egypt and Tunis, and my heart aches for them. So much
human potential, but they have no idea how far behind they are — or maybe they
do and that’s why they’re revolting. Egypt’s government has wasted the last 30
years — i.e., their whole lives — plying them with the soft bigotry of low
expectations: “Be patient. Egypt moves at its own pace, like the Nile.” Well,
great. Singapore also moves at its own pace, like the Internet.
The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29,
many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an
apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the
diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to
talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very
powerful change engine.
I have not been to Jordan for a while, but my ears are ringing today with
complaints about corruption, frustration with the king and queen, and disgust at
the enormous gaps between rich and poor. King Abdullah, who sacked his cabinet
last week and promised real reform and real political parties, has his work cut
out for him. And given some of the blogs that my friends here have shared with
me from the biggest local Web site, Ammonnews.net, the people are not going to
settle for the same-old, same-old. They say so directly now, dropping the old
pretense of signing antigovernment blog posts as “Mohammed living in Sweden.”
Jordan is not going to blow up — today. The country is balanced between East
Bank Bedouin tribes and West Bank Palestinians, who fought a civil war in 1970.
“There is no way that the East Bankers would join with the Palestinians to
topple the Hashemite monarchy,” a retired Jordanian general remarked to me. But
this balance also makes reform difficult. The East Bankers overwhelmingly staff
the army and government jobs. They prefer the welfare state, and hate both
“privatization” and what they call “the digitals,” the young Jordanian techies
pushing for reform. The Palestinians dominate commerce but also greatly value
the stability the Hashemite monarchy provides.
Egypt was definitely a wake-up call for Jordan’s monarchy. The king’s challenge
going forward is to convince his people that “their voices are going to be
louder in the voting booth than in the street,” said Salah Eddin al-Bashir, a
member of Jordan’s Senate.
As for Cairo, I think the real story in Egypt today is the 1952 revolution, led
from the top by the military, versus the 2011 revolution, led from below by the
people. The Egyptian Army has become a huge patronage system, with business
interests and vast perks for its leaders. For Egypt to have a happy ending, the
army has to give up some of its power and set up a fair political transition
process that gives the Egyptian center the space to build precisely what Mubarak
refused to permit — legitimate, independent, modernizing, secular parties — that
can compete in free elections against the Muslim Brotherhood, now the only
authentic party.
If that happens, I am not the least bit worried about the Muslim Brotherhoods in
Jordan or Egypt hijacking the future. Actually, they should be worried. The
Brotherhoods have had it easy in a way. They had no legitimate secular political
opponents. The regimes prevented that so they could tell the world it is either
“us or the Islamists.” As a result, I think, the Islamists have gotten
intellectually lazy. All they had to say was “Islam is the answer” or “Hosni
Mubarak is a Zionist” and they could win 20 percent of the vote. Now, if Egypt
and Jordan can build a new politics, the Muslim Brotherhood will, for the first
time, have real competition from the moderate center in both countries — and
they know it.
“If leaders don’t think in new ways, there are vacancies for them in museums,”
said Zaki Bani Rsheid, political director of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, the
Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm. When I asked Rsheid if his own party was up
for this competition, he stopped speaking in Arabic and said to me in English,
with a little twinkle in his eye: “Yes we can.”
I hope so, and I also hope that events in Egypt and Jordan finally create a
chance for legitimate modern Arab democratic parties to test him.
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
As Egypt struggles to reinvent itself, many experts in the
region say that it might look to Turkey for some valuable lessons.
Arriving at a template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant
economics has been a near-impossible dream for Middle East reformers stretching
back decades. To a large extent, Egypt’s inability to accommodate these three
themes lies at the root of its current plight.
But no country in the region has come closer to accomplishing this trick, warts
and all, than Turkey. As a result, diplomats and analysts have begun to present
the still-incomplete Turkish experiment as a possible road map for Egypt.
“Turkey is the envy of the Arab world,” said Hugh Pope, project director for the
Turkish office of the International Crisis Group. “It has moved to a robust
democracy, has a genuinely elected leader who seems to speak for the popular
mood, has products that are popular from Afghanistan to Morocco — including
dozens of sitcoms dubbed into Arabic that are on TV sets everywhere — and an
economy that is worth about half of the whole Arab world put together.”
The idea is not new. President Obama’s first trip as president to a Muslim
country was to Turkey in April 2009, and he hailed its progress as a Middle East
model. (His visit there preceded his better-remembered speech in Cairo by two
months.)
Since then, the already wide distance separating these countries has grown.
Turkey’s economy and its internationally competitive companies are expanding at
a relentless pace. Meanwhile, its mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, seems on a path to win his third election in a row, having effectively
neutered a once-all-powerful military apparatus long seen as the guardian of
secularism in the country.
It has not always been this way.
Indeed, when Hosni Mubarak came to power in Egypt in October 1981, after the
assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, Turkey was still being governed by
its army, which one year earlier intervened to impose a sense of order on the
country’s fractious political scene.
But while Mr. Mubarak, a military man himself, banked upon authoritarian rule,
paying only lip service to democratic institutions and running rigged elections,
the general behind the Turkish coup, Kenan Evren, moved to withdraw from
politics. The constitution he imposed left the military considerable scope to
meddle in political affairs, but it allowed civilian institutions to bloom.
On the economic front Egypt maintained state control, with many restrictions on
foreign trade and domestic competition. By contrast, Turkey, which hopes to join
the European Union, has opened up its economy and unleashed a dynamic private
sector.
Today, with similarly sized populations of about 80 million, Turkey has an
economy that is nearly four times the size of Egypt’s.
Its recent growth spurt has been driven by Mr. Erdogan, who came to power in
2003 and focused first on reducing deficits and bringing down inflation. Only
after he demonstrated success in raising living standards did he feel confident
enough to overcome opposition from the determinedly secular army and the
cosmopolitan elite in Istanbul by introducing elements of Islam into Turkish
public life.
He has been rewarded with broad popular support at home — demonstrated in
September when Mr. Erdogan easily won a referendum that further diluted the
military’s powers — and growing influence abroad.
In responding to the Egypt crisis, President Obama telephoned Prime Minister
Erdogan twice in six days to discuss the unfolding events, and administration
officials say they have been keeping in close contact with their Turkish
counterparts at all levels.
“There’s no question that Turkey can play a role,” one administration official
said. The official, speaking on grounds of anonymity, noted that Mr. Erdogan and
Turkish leaders had publicly called for Mr. Mubarak to listen to what the
protesters on the streets of Cairo had been saying — words that might have
heartened democracy advocates in the Muslim world.
Turkey’s ability to thrive as a predominantly Muslim country that maintains
diplomatic relations — though chilly — with Israel is one that American
officials would like to see other Muslim nations develop.
But it is also true that actions taken by the Erdogan government against the
Turkish news media have been a cause for some concern, a point made recently by
the new American ambassador to Turkey, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who was
ambassador to Egypt from 2005 to 2008.
With the Egyptian military likely to play the role of political guarantor in any
transition from Mr. Mubarak’s rule, analysts suggest that Turkey might serve as
a model for introducing new political parties, writing a constitution from
scratch and ultimately stepping aside and letting the democratic process play
out (as uncomfortable as that might be) — all of which the Turkish military has
done since the 1980 coup.
“The military did not overplay its hand in Turkey,” said Soner Cagaptay, an
analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Mr. Cagaptay also said
that even though Mr. Erdogan had made gains in pushing his Islamist agenda, the
military served as an effective restraint.
“The relative moderation of Islamic parties in Turkey is due to the military,”
he said.
There are still substantial differences between the countries. For the Turkish
military, its organizing philosophy has always been preserving the secularist
traditions that Turkey’s post-World War I founder, Kemal Ataturk, set in place.
In Egypt, while the Muslim Brotherhood has been officially banned, the army has
been seen more as the defender of the authoritarian status quo rather than
secularism itself.
How the military in Egypt deals with the Muslim Brotherhood — by far the most
powerful civic force in the country — will be crucial in determining the
country’s political future.
Can it, as was the case in Turkey, encourage the formation of competing
political parties? And can it encourage the moderate elements of the Muslim
Brotherhood to come to the fore rather than its more militant factions?
Turkey may have a more direct role to play on that front. Mr. Erdogan’s party
has already established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a result of Mr.
Erdogan’s long and successful campaign to present himself as a dominant and
increasingly anti-Israeli voice in the Middle East.
According to research by Dore Gold at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
three members of the Muslim Brotherhood — two of whom serve in the Egyptian
Parliament — were on the Turkish-sponsored ship that was attacked by Israeli
forces on its way to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip in May.
“There is a great deal of ideological compatibility between the A.K.P. and the
Muslim Brotherhood,” said Mr. Gold, a former top adviser to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development
Party. “This is something to watch carefully.”
Perhaps, but in the end that could be a plus rather than a minus.
For all his Islamist sympathies, Mr. Erdogan is at root a pragmatist. As a young
firebrand he was jailed for his antisecular rhetoric but now, after working
within Turkey’s democratic framework rather than outside it, he is recognized as
perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and KAREEM FAHIM
MUNICH — The United States and leading European nations on
Saturday threw their weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing
attempts by the country’s vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, to broker a
compromise with opposition groups without immediately removing President Hosni
Mubarak from power.
The strong endorsement of a step-by-step transition in Egypt got a cool response
from protesters who filled Tahrir Square for a 12th straight day, and leaders of
opposition groups insisted that the genuine change in Egypt required Mr.
Mubarak’s departure as a first step.
Egyptian officials continued to put pressure on demonstrators, raising alarm
about the economic toll the country had suffered as a result of the standoff,
and offering further concessions by removing Mr. Mubarak’s son Gamal and other
officials from their posts in the ruling party.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking to a security conference in
Munich, said it was important to support Mr. Suleiman, a pillar of the Egyptian
establishment and Mr. Mubarak’s longtime confidante, as he seeks to defuse
street protests. Mr. Suleiman has promised repeatedly to reach out to opposition
groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, but there were few indications that
any genuine dialogue with opposition leaders had begun.
Ms. Clinton’s message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime
Minister David Cameron of Britain, was a notable shift in tone from the past
week, when President Obama, faced with violent clashes in Cairo, demanded that
Mr. Mubarak make swift, bold changes. The change appears to reflect worries that
rapid change in Egypt could destabilize the country and the region.
“That takes some time,” Mrs. Clinton said. “There are certain things that have
to be done in order to prepare.”
But Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who has been chosen to negotiate on
behalf of the protesters and other opposition groups, said the American-backed
transition plan was a nonstarter. “I do not think it’s adequate,” he said in an
interview. “I’m not talking about myself. It’s not adequate for the people.
“Mubarak needs to go,” he said. “It has become an emotional issue. They need to
see his back, there’s no question about it.”
There were tens of thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square on Saturday as a
light rain fell, and in interviews, some said they would not be dislodged until
their demands were met.
Ibrahim Mustafa, 42, waiting to enter Tahrir Square in the morning, as the
military tightened restrictions said: “President Obama better put pressure on
Mubarak to leave or things are going to get a lot worse here. He needs to get
the army to force him out of here. America is going to create another Iran here.
America doesn’t understand. The people know its supporting an illegitimate
regime.”
Human rights groups said that security officials under Mr. Suleiman, even as he
talks about leading a transition, are continuing to abduct and detain without
charges people it considers a political threat.
The most notable example is the disappearance of Wael Ghonim, a Google executive
and leader of the young Internet activists who started the revolt. Believed by
many to be the anonymous host of the Facebook page that first called for the
Jan. 25 protest and this kicked off the Egyptian uprising, he wrote that day on
his Twitter account: “We got brutally beaten up by police people,” and later,
“Sleeping on the streets of Cairo, trying to feel the pain of millions of my
fellow Egyptians.”
“Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow
against people,” he wrote two days later. “We are all ready to die.” He
disappeared soon after.
At least seven other online activists associated with the April 6th movement
remain missing after being abducted a few days ago at a cafe after leaving a
meeting at the home of Mr. ElBaradei.
Even so, the United States appears to be easing its pressure for rapid change.
Mrs. Clinton suggested that the United States was not insisting on the immediate
departure of Mr. Mubarak, and that such an abrupt shift of power may not be
necessary or prudent. She said Mr. Mubarak, having taken himself and Gamal out
of the September elections, was already effectively sidelined. She emphasized
the need for Egypt to reform its constitution to make a vote credible.
“That is what the government has said it is trying to do,” she said. “That is
what we are supporting, and hope to see it move as orderly but as expeditiously,
as possible, under the circumstances.”
Mrs. Clinton expressed fears about deteriorating security inside Egypt, noting
the explosion at a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, and uncorroborated media
reports of an earlier assassination attempt on Mr. Suleiman.
The report was mentioned at the conference by Wolfgang Ischinger, a retired
German diplomat who is the conference chairman, just as Mrs. Clinton began
taking questions at the gathering of heads of state, foreign ministers, and
legislators from the United States, Europe, and other countries.
American officials said they had no evidence that the report was accurate. But
Mrs. Clinton picked up on it and said it “certainly brings into sharp relief the
challenges we are facing as we navigate through this period.”
A senior Republican senator at the meeting, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina,
voiced support for the administration’s call for a gradual transition in Egypt,
saying that a Suleiman-led transitional government, backed by the military, was
probably the only way for Egypt to negotiate its way to elections in the fall.
“What would be the alternative?” he asked.
Mrs. Clinton emphasized that American support for Mr. Suleiman’s plan should not
be construed as an effort to dictate events. “Those of us who are trying to make
helpful offers of assistance and suggestions for how to proceed are still at the
end on the outside looking in,” she said.
But in a hectic morning of diplomacy, Mrs. Clinton was clearly eager to build
support for this position. She met with Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Merkel, and Turkey’s
foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who said the views of Turkey and the United
States were “100 percent identical.” Mr. Obama spoke by phone on Friday with
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on a deliberate process was repeated by Mrs. Merkel and
Mr. Cameron. Mrs. Merkel harkened to her past as a democracy activist in East
Germany, recalling the impatience of protesters, after the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, to immediately join democratic West Germany. But the process took
a year, and it was time well spent, she said.
“There will be a change in Egypt,” she said, “but clearly, the change has to
shaped in a way that it is a peaceful, a sensible way forward.”
Mr. Cameron said introducing democracy in Egypt “overnight” would fuel further
instability, saying the West needed to encourage the development of civil
society and political parties before holding a vote.
“Yes, the transition absolutely has to start now,” Mr. Cameron said. “But if we
think it is all about the act of holding an election, we are wrong. It is about
a set of actions.”
Mrs. Clinton highlighted the dangers of holding elections without adequate
preparation. To take part in Egypt’s new order, she said, political parties
should renounce violence as a tool of coercion, pledge to respect the rights of
minorities, and show tolerance. The White House has signaled that it is open to
a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that others warn could
put Egypt on a path to extremism.
“The transition to democracy will only happen if it is deliberate, inclusive,
and transparent,” she said. “The challenge is to help our partners take
systematic steps to usher in a better future, where people’s voices are heard,
their rights respected, and their aspirations met.”
“Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy, only to see the
process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception, and rigged
elections to stay in power,” Mrs. Clinton said.
In Cairo, however, there were few indications that Mr. Suleiman and other
officials were making much progress in addressing concerns of opposition groups.
Negotiations between Mr. Suleiman and a group of self-appointed “wise men” who
are acting as intermediaries between the vice president and the protesters and
trying to find away around limits on succession in the Constitution did not
advance significantly.
Amr Hamzawy, one of the intermediaries said the negotiations were “gaining
traction,” but added that his group did not meet with Mr. Suleiman on Saturday.
The intermediaries, whose efforts have received the tacit encouragement of
Western governments, have forwarded a plan that would see Mr. Mubarak transfer
his powers to Mr. Suleiman and perhaps move to his home in Sharm el Sheik or
embark on one of his annual medical leaves to Germany.
In Tahrir Square, meanwhile, the military tightened its cordon around the
protesters by reinforcing security checks at all the entrances off all
entrances. An army general, Brig. Gen. Hassan al-Rawaini, negotiated with
protesters outside a barricade near the Egyptian Museum, urging them to bring
down the fortifications, allow traffic to return and move their protest to the
heart of Tahrir Square.
In contrast the pitched clashes of just days ago, General Rawaini offered a
microphone to protesters so that they could air their complaints. He tried to
reason, kissing some on the head and pinching others’ cheeks. Occasionally, he
winked.
Eventually, he and his soldiers moved past the makeshift barricade, knocking
part of it down, though protesters quickly put back up the sheets of corrugated
tin, barrels, metal rebar and parts of fences. He then toured an area strewn
with rocks from the clashes and incinerated vehicles that served as barricades.
Some protesters thought he was preparing for the army to enter, forming human
chains across the streets. Others chanted, “Peaceful!” and formed a bodyguard
around the general.
“He wants to teat down these barricades, so that the tanks can come through,”
shouted Sayyid Eid, a 20-year-old protester as he tried to block his way.
“We’re going to die here,” yelled Magdi Abdel-Rahman, another protester.
“Listen to him! Listen to him!” others shouted back.
Tempers cooled and General Rawaini made a leisurely stroll to a makeshift health
clinic, then visited knots of protesters across the square with a retinue of
soldiers.
“We’re trying to remove the barricades and return the streets to normal,”
General Rawaini said. “If you want to protest, you can go back to the square.”
A protester shouted back, “General, we’re not going to walk way from here until
Hosni Mubarak leaves.”
Mark Landler reported from Munich, and Kareem Fahim from Cairo. Reporting
waa contributed by Steven Erlanger from Munich, and David D. Kirkpatrick,
Anthony Shadid andMona El-Naggar from Cairo.
February 5, 2011
9:40 pm
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — As Sarah Palin delivered a weekend
address here, paying tribute to Ronald Reagan on the centennial of his birth,
she directed a forceful line of criticism at President Obama and his
administration, though she did not mention the crisis in Egypt. But in a
subsequent television interview, she took Mr. Obama to task for his handling of
the matter.
“It’s a difficult situation,” Ms. Palin told the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“This is that 3 a.m. White House phone call, and it seems for many of us trying
to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that
call went right to the answering machine.”
The early-morning phone call that Ms. Palin mentioned was reprised from the 2008
Democratic presidential primary fight, when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton aired
a stinging television ad suggesting that Mr. Obama lacked foreign policy
experience. To drive home the point, the commercial showed a telephone ringing —
unanswered — in the middle of the night.
Three years later, Mrs. Clinton is deeply entwined in the diplomatic crisis in
Egypt as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state. (These days, if there are any 3 a.m.
phone calls, it probably means that the situation was elevated to the attention
of the White House, where the telephone is answered around the clock.)
In an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Ms.
Palin criticized the Obama administration for failing to explain “to the
American public what they know.” In an excerpt of the interview released
Saturday evening on the network’s Web site, Ms. Palin declared: “Now, more than
ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House.”
This is a transcript, provided by the network, of Ms. Palin’s response to Mr.
Brody’s question about how she believes the president has handled the situation
in Egypt:
“And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what
they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will
be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is
that that’s being done on a national level and from D.C. in regards to
understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And, in these areas that are so
volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other
countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we
need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it
is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with.
And, we do not have all that information yet.”
At her appearance here in Santa Barbara on Friday evening, Ms. Palin spoke for
about 30 minutes and did not take questions from the audience or reporters.
She spoke exclusively to Mr. Brody in a 10-minute interview following the
speech. Asked what she might do differently if she decided to run for president,
Ms. Palin said: “I would continue on the same course of not really caring what
other people say about me or worrying about the things that they make up, but
having that thick skin and a still spine.”
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and STEVEN ERLANGER
MUNICH — The Obama administration on Saturday formally threw
its weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the
country’s vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, to broker a compromise with
opposition groups and prepare for new elections in September.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking to a conference here, said
it was important to support Mr. Suleiman as he seeks to defuse street protests
and promises to reach out to opposition groups, including the Muslim
Brotherhood. Administration officials said earlier that Mr. Suleiman and other
military-backed leaders in Egypt are also considering ways to provide President
Hosni Mubarak with a graceful exit from power.
“That takes some time,” Mrs. Clinton said. “There are certain things that have
to be done in order to prepare.”
Her message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister
David Cameron of Britain, was a notable shift in tone from the past week, when
President Obama, faced with violent clashes in Cairo, demanded that Mr. Mubarak
make swift, dramatic changes.
Now, the United States and other Western powers appear to have concluded that
the best path for Egypt — and certainly the safest one, to avoid further chaos —
is a gradual transition, managed by Mr. Suleiman, a pillar of Egypt’s existing
establishment, and backed by the military.
Whether such a process is acceptable to the crowds on the streets of Cairo is
far from clear: there is little evidence that Mr. Suleiman, a former head of
Egyptian intelligence and trusted confidant of Mr. Mubarak, would be seen as an
acceptable choice, even temporarily. Opposition groups have refused to speak to
him, saying that Mr. Mubarak must leave first.
But Mrs. Clinton suggested that the United States was not insisting on the
immediate departure of Mr. Mubarak, and that such an abrupt shift of power may
not be necessary or prudent. She said Mr. Mubarak, having taken himself and his
son, Gamal, out of the September elections, was already effectively sidelined.
She emphasized the need for Egypt to begin building peaceful political parties
and to reform its constitution to make a vote credible.
“That is what the government has said it is trying to do,” she said. “That is
what we are supporting, and hope to see it move as orderly but as expeditiously,
as possible, under the circumstances.”
Mrs. Clinton expressed fears about deteriorating security inside Egypt, noting
the explosion at a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, and uncorroborated media
reports of an earlier assassination attempt on Mr. Suleiman.
The report was mentioned at the conference by Wolfgang Ischinger, a retired
German diplomat who is the conference chairman, just as Mrs. Clinton began
taking questions at the gathering of heads of state, foreign ministers, and
legislators from the United States, Europe, and other countries.
American officials said they have no evidence that the report is accurate. But
Mrs. Clinton picked up on it and said it “certainly brings into sharp relief the
challenges we are facing as we navigate through this period.”
A senior Republican senator at the meeting, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina,
voiced support for the administration’s backing for a gradual transition in
Egypt, saying that a Suleiman-led transitional government, backed by the
military, was probably the only way for Egypt to negotiate its way to elections
in the fall.
“What would be the alternative?” he asked.
Mrs. Clinton emphasized that American support for Mr. Suleiman’s plan should not
be construed as an effort to dictate events. “Those of us who are trying to make
helpful offers of assistance and suggestions for how to proceed are still at the
end on the outside looking in,” she said.
But in a hectic morning of diplomacy, Mrs. Clinton was clearly eager to build
support for this position. She met with Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Merkel, and Turkey’s
foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who said the views of Turkey and the United
States were “100 percent identical.” Mr. Obama spoke by phone Friday with Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on a deliberate process was repeated by Mrs. Merkel and
Mr. Cameron. Mrs. Merkel harkened to her past as a democracy activist in East
Germany, recalling the impatience of protestors, after the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, to immediately join democratic West Germany. But the process took
a year, and it was time well spent, she said.
“There will be a change in Egypt,” she said, “but clearly, the change has to
shaped in a way that it is a peaceful, a sensible way forward.”
Mr. Cameron said introducing democracy in Egypt “overnight” would fuel further
instability, saying the West needed to encourage the development of civil
society and political parties before holding a vote.
“Yes, the transition absolutely has to start now,” Mr. Cameron said. “But if we
think it is all about the act of holding an election, we are wrong. It is about
a set of actions.”
Mrs. Clinton highlighted the dangers of holding elections without adequate
preparation. To take part in Egypt’s new order, she said, political parties
should renounce violence as a tool of coercion, pledge to respect the rights of
minorities, and show tolerance. The White House has signaled that it is open to
a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that Israeli officials
and others warn could put Egypt on a path to extremism.
“The transition to democracy will only happen if it is deliberate, inclusive,
and transparent,” she said. “The challenge is to help our partners take
systematic steps to usher in a better future, where people’s voices are heard,
their rights respected, and their aspirations met.”
“Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy, only to see the
process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception, and rigged
elections to stay in power,” Mrs. Clinton said.
She also underlined the need to support Egypt’s state institutions, including
the army and financial institutions, which she said were functioning and
respected. Economic pressures are building in Egypt, she said, which has been
paralyzed by days of street demonstrations.
While this meeting was dominated by the political change sweeping through the
Middle East, the United States and Russia also formally put into force New
Start, a strategic arms control treaty passed by the Senate in December after a
long political battle by President Obama.
Mrs. Clinton and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, exchanged legal
documents ratifying the treaty, which puts new limits on strategic nuclear
warheads, heavy bombers, and launch vehicles. The United States and Russia have
45 days to trade details on the number, location, and technical specifications
of their arsenals. Inspection can begin in 60 days.
Relations between the United States and Russia began to thaw at this meeting in
2009, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called for the countries to
“reset” their relationship after the chilly Bush years.
In addition to the ratification of New Start, the day saw a meeting of the
Quartet, a group that deals with the Middle East and comprises the United
States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. This meeting was
intended to reaffirm support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, even
amid the turmoil in Egypt and the Arab world.
The United States was reluctant to hold the meeting, a senior Western diplomat
said, but the Europeans in particular wanted to make the point that change in
the Middle East was a new opportunity for peace, and that stagnation between
Israel and Palestine was a bad signal.
“Our analysis is because of the events in Egypt we must react and send a signal
the peace process is alive,” the European diplomat said. Another quartet meeting
will follow in the next month, he said.
Mrs. Clinton deflected a question about how the turmoil would affect Israel or
the peace process. In its eagerness to avoid the issue, the administration lined
up with Turkey. Mr. Davutoglu said, “It is better not to talk about
Israel-Palestine now. It is better to separate these issues.”
February 5, 2011
Filed at 8:37 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MUNICH (AP) — The U.S. and Russia on Saturday finalized a nuclear arms treaty
that limits the number of atomic warheads the former Cold War foes are allowed
to possess — securing a key foreign policy goal of President Barack Obama.
The New START treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate in December after Obama
pressed strongly for its passage, and Russia ratified the deal last month.
The treaty went into effect when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
exchanged the ratification papers with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on
the sidelines of an international security conference in Munich.
New START is a cornerstone of Obama's efforts to "reset" U.S. relations with
Russia.
Clinton said before the ceremony that the treaty is "another example of the kind
of clear-eyed cooperation that is in everyone's interests."
In addition to New START, she said the U.S. is in talks with Russia about how
the two countries can work together to address issues that affect their common
security, while maintaining strategic stability.
Suggestions include joint analysis, joint exercises and sharing of early-warning
data that could form the basis for a cooperative missile defense system, Clinton
said.
She said she would also talk with Lavrov about "further arms control issues,
including non-strategic and non-deployed nuclear weapons and our ongoing work to
revive, strengthen and modernize the regime on conventional forces."
Lavrov called New START "a product of the understanding that unilateral
approaches to security are counterproductive."
"The principles of equality, parity, equal and indivisible security ... form a
solid basis for today's Russian-American interaction in a range of areas,"
Lavrov said.
"The treaty that enters into force today will enhance international stability."
The New START treaty, negotiated last year, limits each side to 1,550 strategic
warheads, down from 2,200. The pact also re-establishes a monitoring system that
ended in December 2009 with the expiration of an earlier arms deal.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the treaty's entering into force as "a
historical, political milestone on the road to our ultimate goal: achieving a
world free of nuclear weapons."
______
David Stringer and Geir Moulson contributed to this report.
February 5, 2011
Filed at 3:45 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Egypt's Hosni Mubarak should do
the statesmanlike thing and make a quick handoff to a more representative
government.
Translation: Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Obama said a new era must begin now, an unsubtle message to Mubarak that he
should not cling to power until elections in September.
"The key question he should be asking himself is, 'How do I leave a legacy
behind in which Egypt is able to get through this transformative period?'" Obama
said Friday.
Obama, in office for two years, gave the 82-year-old Egyptian president some
words of advice after 30 years of iron rule. The game's up, Obama said, using
language only slightly less direct. It's time to leave.
"He is proud, but he is also a patriot," Obama said after a White House meeting
with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"What I've suggested to him is that he needs to consult with those who are
around him in his government," Obama said. "He needs to listen to what is being
voiced by the Egyptian people and make a judgment about a pathway forward that
is orderly but that is meaningful and serious."
Obama's attempt to give his most important Arab ally a firm shove off the world
stage marked a full turn from Obama's cautious appeals for calm and restraint
one week ago.
The United States has relied on Mubarak for decades and shored up his
authoritarian regime with billions in military aid. He was considered, with the
Saudi king, the most influential friend Washington could have in a volatile part
of the world and rewarded with military and other aid worth more than $1 billion
annually.
The U.S. would have preferred not to see Mubarak thrown over the side
immediately. The realization became clear this week that the crisis could end no
other way, and U.S. spokesmen began to talk about "transition" to a post-Mubarak
era.
Speaking on what Egyptian street protesters called deadline day for Mubarak to
step aside, Obama never actually said Mubarak should quit immediately. He
clearly hopes he won't have to.
Mubarak's main concession to the demonstrators calling for his head is a promise
not to run again in elections set for September. He vowed not to be driven from
his homeland and said he will die on Egyptian soil.
That wasn't good enough for demonstrators demanding that Mubarak get out
immediately, and Obama knew it.
"He has already said that he is not going to run for re-election," Obama said,
with a pause for effect. His tone was one part law professor, one part
therapist.
"Having made that psychological break, that decision that he will not be running
again, I think the most important for him to ask himself, for the Egyptian
government to ask itself, as well as the opposition to ask itself is, How do we
make that transition effective and lasting and legitimate?"
That might be as blunt as a baseball bat to American ears, but there's no
guarantee Mubarak and his inner circle will hear it the same way.
Khairi Abaza, a former Egyptian opposition politician now at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, welcomed Obama's remarks and said he interpreted them as
a direct call for Mubarak to step aside now.
"To me it was clear," Abaza said. "But the regime in Egypt is playing dumb. It
hasn't reacted at all. It's like someone who can't take a hint."
A rally Friday by nearly 100,000 protesters in Cairo and behind-the-scenes
diplomacy from the Obama administration piled more pressure on Mubarak to make a
swift exit and allow a temporary government to embark on an immediate path
toward democracy.
Two days of wild clashes between protesters and regime supporters that killed 11
people this week seemed to have pushed the United States to the conclusion that
an Egypt with Mubarak at the helm is potentially more unstable than one without
him.
Obama did not directly discuss the furious maneuvering to ease Mubarak out.
Under one scenario, a military-backed provisional government would govern until
the first elections in decades that would not include Mubarak. The United States
has hinted broadly that it would like to see the presidential election moved up
from September.
Any of that would have been unthinkable before a stunning popular revolt upended
the status quo this week in a polite, tourist-friendly police state where
Mubarak's cronies got richer as much of the country got poorer.
Obama alluded to the backroom discussions while being careful to say that the
decision will be Egypt's and not its largest foreign patron and longtime ally.
"Going back to the old ways is not going to work," Obama said.
"If you end up having just gestures towards the opposition but it leads to a
continuing suppression of the opposition, that is not going to work. If you have
the pretense of reform but not real reform that is not going to be effective."
That leaves Obama a little room to bring down the hammer later, if he must.
Steve Grand, who heads the Brookings Institution's work on U.S. relations with
the Islamic world, said he understood the president's hesitation in delivering
the final verdict on Mubarak's presidency. But he said Obama must be running out
of patience.
"He could say, 'It's time for Mubarak to go,' and it is just about time that he
says that," Grand said. "At this point, he should be on the side of change. The
people of Egypt have spoken loud and clearly, and Mubarak has shown his true
colors in these last days."
Obama has spoken to Mubarak twice as the crisis unfolded. He will probably speak
to him at least once more, to say goodbye.
Here's how he left it for now:
"My hope is he will end up making the right decision."
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — Anne Gearan covers U.S. national security policy for The
Associated Press. AP writer Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.
It's not radical Islam that worries the US – it's independence
The nature of any regime it backs in the Arab world is secondary to control.
Subjects are ignored until they break their chains
Friday 4 February 2011
16.30 GMT
Guardian.co.uk
Noam Chomsky
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 16.30 GMT on Friday 4 February
2011.
A version appeared on p38 of the Main section section of the Guardian on
Saturday 5 February 2011.
It was last modified at 00.00 GMT on Saturday 5 February 2011.
'The Arab world is on fire," al-Jazeera reported last week, while throughout
the region, western allies "are quickly losing their influence". The shock wave
was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a
western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where
demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator's brutal police.
Observers compared it to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989, but there are
important differences. Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great
powers that support the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep
to the well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as
it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up to
a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless properly tamed.
One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained its
support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the east European dictators,
until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his overthrow
while the past was erased. That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos,
Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It
may be under way in the case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try
to ensure a successor regime will not veer far from the approved path. The
current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist General Omar Suleiman, just named
Egypt's vice-president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the intelligence
services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as the dictator
himself.
A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires
(reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some
merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been
independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists,
sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.
A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and
of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of
Pakistan's dictators and President Reagan's favorite, who carried out a
programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).
"The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there
is nothing wrong, everything is under control," says Marwan Muasher, a former
Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie
Endowment. "With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents
and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground."
Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and
generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest,
tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.
The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against "a police state,
with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights
problems", ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their venality. So
said US ambassador Robert Godec in a July 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks.
Therefore to some observers the WikiLeaks "documents should create a comforting
feeling among the American public that officials aren't asleep at the switch" –
indeed, that the cables are so supportive of US policies that it is almost as if
Obama is leaking them himself (or so Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The National
Interest.)
"America should give Assange a medal," says a headline in the Financial Times,
where Gideon Rachman writes: "America's foreign policy comes across as
principled, intelligent and pragmatic … the public position taken by the US on
any given issue is usually the private position as well."
In this view, WikiLeaks undermines "conspiracy theorists" who question the noble
motives Washington proclaims.
Godec's cable supports these judgments – at least if we look no further. If we
do,, as foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes reports in Foreign Policy in Focus,
we find that, with Godec's information in hand, Washington provided $12m in
military aid to Tunisia. As it happens, Tunisia was one of only five foreign
beneficiaries: Israel (routinely); the two Middle East dictatorships Egypt and
Jordan; and Colombia, which has long had the worst human-rights record and the
most US military aid in the hemisphere.
Heilbrunn's exhibit A is Arab support for US policies targeting Iran, revealed
by leaked cables. Rachman too seizes on this example, as did the media
generally, hailing these encouraging revelations. The reactions illustrate how
profound is the contempt for democracy in the educated culture.
Unmentioned is what the population thinks – easily discovered. According to
polls released by the Brookings Institution in August, some Arabs agree with
Washington and western commentators that Iran is a threat: 10%. In contrast,
they regard the US and Israel as the major threats (77%; 88%).
Arab opinion is so hostile to Washington's policies that a majority (57%) think
regional security would be enhanced if Iran had nuclear weapons. Still, "there
is nothing wrong, everything is under control" (as Muasher describes the
prevailing fantasy). The dictators support us. Their subjects can be ignored –
unless they break their chains, and then policy must be adjusted.
Other leaks also appear to lend support to the enthusiastic judgments about
Washington's nobility. In July 2009, Hugo Llorens, U.S. ambassador to Honduras,
informed Washington of an embassy investigation of "legal and constitutional
issues surrounding the 28 June forced removal of President Manuel 'Mel' Zelaya."
The embassy concluded that "there is no doubt that the military, supreme court
and national congress conspired on 28 June in what constituted an illegal and
unconstitutional coup against the executive branch". Very admirable, except that
President Obama proceeded to break with almost all of Latin America and Europe
by supporting the coup regime and dismissing subsequent atrocities.
Perhaps the most remarkable WikiLeaks revelations have to do with Pakistan,
reviewed by foreign policy analyst Fred Branfman in Truthdig.
The cables reveal that the US embassy is well aware that Washington's war in
Afghanistan and Pakistan not only intensifies rampant anti-Americanism but also
"risks destabilising the Pakistani state" and even raises a threat of the
ultimate nightmare: that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic
terrorists.
Again, the revelations "should create a comforting feeling … that officials are
not asleep at the switch" (Heilbrunn's words) – while Washington marches
stalwartly toward disaster.
February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By VICTORIA CLARK
London
ON and off for the past few weeks, thousands of youths draped in pink scarves
and ribbons have been out protesting in Yemen’s capital, Sana, making it look as
if that country is next in line after Tunisia and perhaps Egypt for regime
change. But conditions in Yemen for ousting another elderly strongman and his
big, greedy family after decades of misrule are not proving as favorable as one
might expect.
Indeed, Ali Abdullah Saleh — a former army officer who has been president since
1978, when his predecessor was assassinated by means of an exploding suitcase —
is proving less of a klutz than his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak. Mr.
Saleh continues to excel at the business of ruling Yemen, the Arab world’s
poorest country, a task which he has often unflatteringly likened to “dancing on
the heads of snakes.” Yet, since Tunisians sent their longtime president, Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali, packing, Mr. Saleh has been obliged to change his dance
steps and quicken his pace; he has dropped income taxes, given out food
subsidies and promised to raise the salaries of soldiers and civil servants and
to provide jobs to college graduates.
On Wednesday, Mr. Saleh made two other vitally important political concessions:
he would not tamper with the Constitution in order to extend his rule beyond
2013, nor would he permit his son Ahmed to succeed him. In return, he asked the
alliance of opposition parties and civil society movements to call off a rally
planned for the next day.
They did not, but the approximately 40,000-strong gathering at Sana University
was an orderly affair. There were no angrily shouted demands that Mr. Saleh
resign, no attempts to confront hastily mustered pro-Saleh supporters, no real
efforts by the antigovernment forces to exploit the climate of anger and
frustration generated by events in Tunisia and Egypt. Security guards at the
university checked for weapons, turning away young men who had shown up armed
with planks of wood. And it was all over by lunchtime, when rally organizers
politely requested that participants roll up their banners and go home.
Given that President Saleh in 2005 pledged not to run again, and then changed
his mind, trusting him to keep these latest promises is going to require
generosity and immense restraint. A former government minister recently told me:
“When he speaks to you he gives you his full attention and you are the only
person in his world. He is very, very intelligent and he has a unique memory and
he is not a bloodthirsty person — but he is one of the best liars on this
earth.”
In the south of the country, where a separatist movement has been simmering for
four years, there is likely to be pressure to ignore Mr. Saleh’s concessions and
prolong the confrontation. The merger in 1990 of the Yemen Arab Republic in the
north — home to Mr. Saleh and the tribes who have supported him in power — and
the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen has proved a disaster for the south.
Southerners have suffered a land grab at the hands of their generally richer and
more rapacious northern brothers. What’s more, after 128 years as separate
entities (the south under British colonial rule and then homegrown Marxism, the
north as a backward theocracy and then a military republic), the two regions’
manners, customs, education and values are not the same.
Another anti-Saleh constituency is the Zaidi Shiites, in the northwest, whose
sporadically flaring insurgency has been a thorn in the regime’s side for the
past six years. The lively Yemen affiliate of Al Qaeda is Mr. Saleh’s sworn
enemy too, and though the group’s plots against him have so far failed, it would
be guaranteed to take advantage of any power vacuum ensuing from his removal.
Finally, there are the young, the students and the unemployed. Moved and excited
by events in Tunisia and Egypt, they may not be as easy to control in the weeks
to come as they have proved so far.
Abdul Ghani al-Iryani, a prominent political commentator in Sana, told me that
he believes Mr. Saleh will have to keep his promises this time: “The rules of
the game have changed — he cannot not honor his word this time. Tunisia and
Egypt have raised the bar.” He thinks Mr. Saleh has six months to prove himself
trustworthy. At the end of that time, revenues from his two main sources — Saudi
aid and minor oil exports — will not be enough to foot the civil service wage
bill, or the diesel and food subsidies.
Then he will not be worrying about polite opposition politicians but more likely
about bread-rioters, hungry and unmanageable, exploding into violence.
Victoria Clark is the author of “Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes.”
February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Pro-Mubarak forces once again clashed with anti-Mubarak forces on Friday. The
brutal set-to didn’t take place in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where as many as
100,000 demonstrators managed to assemble peacefully. The brick-throwing was on
cable television, as Fox News and MSNBC anchors continued knocking heads over
what’s worse: the dictatorship we know or a democratic rebellion we can’t
control.
On Wednesday, Thursday and again on Friday, Chris Matthews, the host of
“Hardball” on MSNBC, ridiculed Glenn Beck of Fox News for predicting a
conspiracy for world domination by a leftist-Islamic “caliphate.” On Friday
morning Steve Doocy, a co-host of “Fox and Friends,” showed a clip of Mr.
Matthews likening the Muslim Brotherhood to the Tea Party movement and then
asked L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative commentator, to explain “how the
mainstream media has been playing down the Muslim Brotherhood, which, as I
mentioned a moment ago, does have ties to terror.”
That was just another skirmish in the cable news culture wars, except that the
bickering was woven into one of the most critical — and visually riveting —
foreign news events in years. In all the confusion, contradiction and
multisource coverage in the 11 days since the Cairo uprising began, viewers of
American television have been best served by CNN.
The Egyptian crisis has played out live on television minute by minute, hour
after hour, in an incongruous clash of the modern and the ancient: the opponents
fought with stones and on horse and camel, while the watching world looks on via
satellite, Skype, Twitter and flip phone. The uprising against President Hosni
Mubarak is as compelling to watch as it is hard to parse; even more than with
most major news, it helps to have a reliable narrator.
CNN’s ratings usually lag behind the more excitable competition, but they went
up significantly this week, and for good reason. It was Wolf Blitzkrieg: even
the more spirited CNN talk show hosts like Piers Morgan and Eliot Spitzer
scrapped their planned shows (Kathleen Parker called in sick) and stayed on the
news in Egypt, and viewers stayed with CNN. Plenty of other news organizations,
including MSNBC and Fox News, are providing analysis and live reports from
seasoned correspondents who risk beatings and arrest to report the latest
developments. CNN manages to do it all without raising its voice or cluttering
the screen with ideologues and deskbound rabble-rousers.
Comedians like Stephen Colbert sometimes mock Anderson Cooper of CNN as a war
zone glamour boy and glory hound, but he hunkered down in an undisclosed
location on Thursday night and did his job in semi-darkness. Even while being
roughed up by mobs attacking journalists earlier in the day, Mr. Cooper sounded
more calm and collected than some of the cable news talk-show divas who wind up
their viewers from the safety of studio sets.
That was also the case with one of CNN’s best-known alumni, Christiane Amanpour,
now with ABC News, who talked her way through a hostile mob and into the
presidential palace on Thursday while her competitors were pinned down in their
hotel rooms or fleeing the country. ABC got the scoop, but CNN deserves some of
the credit.
It wasn’t just luck that landed Ms. Amanpour her exclusive interviews with Vice
President Omar Suleiman and President Mubarak. It wasn’t her fame or superior
ratings. Ms. Amanpour has spent most of the last 20 years as a CNN foreign
correspondent, traveling all over the Middle East, and knew Mr. Mubarak from
previous interviews. Her experience showed, both in her firm but friendly manner
with the embattled Egyptian president, and in the unruffled way she handled his
hostile supporters outside. And Ms. Amanpour’s coup illustrated something else,
namely the diminishing relevance of network anchors on the scene. It used to be
important for the news division’s top gun to show up in war zones and disaster
areas; it signaled to viewers that the story mattered and, most important, it
meant that the network could justify siphoning vast resources and technology to
tell it. Nowadays, it can take as little as a laptop and a camera phone to do
the job, and doing it well requires different skill sets: flexibility, mobility,
foreign languages and combat experience matter more than star power and an air
of authority.
The ABC anchor Diane Sawyer stayed in New York and let Ms. Amanpour do what she
does best. The NBC anchor Brian Williams had rushed to Cairo, followed by Katie
Couric of CBS. They worked hard, but in that volatile setting, the network
anchors didn’t have much to do; the best reporting was provided by
well-connected veterans like Richard Engel on NBC and Lara Logan of CBS. After
pro-Mubarak mobs began going after journalists — Ms. Couric was jostled while
trying to report live on Wednesday from Tahrir Square — she and Mr. Williams
left the country, quite wisely. On Friday Ms. Couric and Mr. Williams were both
back in New York.
It’s an unfinished and changing story, but from the beginning, the Cairo
uprising gave hundreds of thousands of unprivileged, unheeded Egyptians a voice.
So it’s fitting that covering it is giving less eminent but experienced CNN
correspondents like Ben Wedeman and Arwa Damon a chance to have their say as
well.
February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — The demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak’s government
in Egypt are rocking the relationship between the United States and its most
important Arab ally. But they are also rocking an even more fundamental
relationship for the United States — its 60-year alliance with Israel.
Obama administration officials have been on the telephone almost daily with
their Israeli counterparts urging them to “please chill out,” in the words of
one senior administration official, as President Obama has raced to respond to
the rapidly unfolding events.
But the crisis raises many questions about how the United States will navigate
its relationship with Israel — in particular the balance between encouraging the
development of a democratic government in Egypt and the desire in Washington not
to risk a new government’s abandoning Mr. Mubarak’s benign posture toward
Israel.
The unsettled outlook in Egypt has also scrambled American calculations about
nurturing peace talks back to life between Israel and the Palestinians. And it
has left both American and Israeli diplomats wondering about a broader regional
realignment in which Israel would be left feeling more isolated and its enemies,
including Iran and Syria, emboldened.
Israeli government officials started out urging the Obama administration to back
Mr. Mubarak, administration officials said, and were initially angry at Mr.
Obama for publicly calling on the Egyptian leader to agree to a transition.
“The Israelis are saying, après Mubarak, le deluge,” said Daniel Levy, a former
Israeli peace negotiator. And that, in turn, Mr. Levy said, “gets to the core of
what is the American interest in this. It’s Israel. It’s not worry about whether
the Egyptians are going to close down the Suez Canal, or even the narrower
terror issue. It really can be distilled down to one thing, and that’s Israel.”
A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said on Friday that administration
officials were reassuring the Israelis that “we fully understand Israel’s
security concerns, and we’re making clear that our commitment to Israel’s
security is unshakeable.”
Daniel Shapiro, a White House Middle East adviser, met on Tuesday with American
Jewish leaders, and Mr. Obama talked to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel on Sunday.
But administration officials must also balance support for Israel against the
real desire among many Egyptians — and others on the Arab street — for an end to
the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. “The situation tends to highlight
Israel’s strategic value to the United States as a stable and unequivocal ally
in a very unstable region,” said Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador to
Washington. He added: “The situation does reinforce the need for security
guarantees, regarding a future Palestinian state, because we see how the current
situation in the Middle East can change very rapidly.”
Supporters of Israel in the United States have been focusing on playing up the
dangers they see as inherent in a democratic Egyptian government that contains,
or is led by, elements of the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes
Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
In an e-mail on Friday to reporters and editors, Josh Block, a former spokesman
for AIPAC, the influential Jewish-American lobbying organization, suggested
“questions to ask the Muslim Brotherhood & Their Allies.”
The first question on Mr. Block’s list: “Can the Muslim Brotherhood participate
in a government where Egypt continues to fulfill Egypt’s obligations to Israel
under the Camp David Accords?”
Obama officials say that the United States cannot rule out the possibility of
engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood — the largest opposition group in Egypt —
at the same time that it is espousing support for a democratic Egypt. If
Egyptians are allowed free and fair elections, a goal of the Obama
administration, then, administration officials say, they will have to deal with
the real possibility that an Egyptian government might include members of the
Muslim Brotherhood.
American Jewish leaders have also been voicing uneasiness about Mohamed
ElBaradei, the former head of the atomic energy agency who is also part of the
opposition to Mr. Mubarak.
Malcolm I. Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group, said that
in his work as a nuclear watchdog, Mr. ElBaradei covered up Iran’s nuclear
weapons capability in the reports issued by his agency.
“He is a stooge of Iran, and I don’t use the term lightly,” Mr. Hoenlein said in
an online interview on Sunday with Yeshiva World News. “He fronted for them, he
distorted the reports.”
But many American Jews are also debating the irony of Israel, which long
promoted itself as the only democracy in its neighborhood, now voicing concerns
about the birth of a democracy next door. And that that democratic movement is
happening in Egypt — with all of its historic ties to the enslavement of the
Jewish people — is being picked apart in conversations within American Jewish
communities.
“I’ve been saying to my Israeli friends, ‘Come on guys, you’re supposed to be
the national manifestation of a group of people whose story is the story of
liberation from Egypt,’ ” said Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic who
is the author of well-read blogs in the American Jewish community. But on the
other hand, Mr. Goldberg said, “if you’re sitting in the Israeli Defense
Ministry thinking, ‘Oh my God, I have to worry about my southern border now.’ ”
Administration officials say they are keenly aware that how they manage all of
the conflicting fears, hopes and aspirations of Israelis and Egyptians could
mean the difference between war and peace.
Mr. Levy, the former Israeli peace negotiator, said: “The problem for America
is, you can balance being the carrier for the Israeli agenda with Arab
autocrats, but with Arab democracies, you can’t do that.”
Obama Said to Fault Spy Agencies’ Mideast Forecasting
February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — President Obama has criticized American spy
agencies over their performance in predicting and analyzing the spreading unrest
in the Middle East, according to current and former American officials.
The president was specifically critical of intelligence agencies for misjudging
how quickly the unrest in Tunisia would lead to the downfall of the country’s
authoritarian government, the officials said.
The officials offered few details about the president’s concerns, but said that
Mr. Obama had not ordered any major changes inside the intelligence community,
which has a budget of more than $80 billion a year. On Friday, a White House
spokesman said spy agencies had given Mr. Obama “relevant, timely and accurate
analysis” throughout the crisis in the Middle East.
But questions about the recent performance of spy agencies expose a tension that
has played out since the C.I.A.’s founding in 1947: how to balance the task of
analyzing events overseas to warn officials in Washington about looming crises
with the mission of carrying out covert operations around the globe.
Some officials have focused their criticism on intelligence assessments last
month that concluded, despite demonstrations in Tunisia, that the security
forces of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali would defend his government.
Instead, the military and the police did not, and Mr. Ben Ali and his family
fled to Saudi Arabia.
One American official familiar with classified intelligence assessments defended
the spy agencies’ Tunisia analysis.
“Everyone recognized the demonstrations in Tunisia as serious,” said the
official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing
classified intelligence reports. “What wasn’t clear even to President Ben Ali
was that his security forces would quickly choose not to support him.”
One former American official said that in recent weeks Mr. Obama urged
intelligence officials to ensure that spy agencies were devoting as much effort
to “long-term analysis” as they were to carrying out operations against Al
Qaeda, including the C.I.A.’s bombing campaign using armed drone aircraft.
On Thursday, senior lawmakers pressed a top C.I.A. official on Capitol Hill
about whether Mr. Obama had been given enough warning about the perils of the
growing demonstrations in Cairo, and whether spy agencies had monitored social
networking sites to gauge the extent of the uprising.
The same day, America’s senior military officer said in a television interview
that officials in Washington had been surprised by how rapidly unrest had spread
from Tunisia to Egypt.
“It has taken not just us, but many people, by surprise,” said Adm. Mike Mullen,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an appearance on “The Daily Show.”
Several American officials said that after Tunisia’s government collapsed,
intelligence analysts renewed their focus on gauging the impact that the chaos
could have on Egypt, America’s most important ally in the Arab world.
Some C.I.A. veterans said it was wrong to conclude that because the spy agency
had stepped up paramilitary operations in recent years, it had lost focus on the
job of analyzing global events for the White House and Congress.
“The Egypt analysts in the C.I.A. aren’t picking targets in Pakistan; that’s
just not the way the agency operates,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former C.I.A.
assistant director for analysis.
Still, Mr. Lowenthal said that intelligence officials for decades had to endure
the wrath of American presidents who blamed them for misjudging the events of
the day — and that it was their obligation to accept the criticism.
“If you are an intelligence officer, you say, ‘Yes sir, thank you very much,
sir,’ ” he said.
February 4,
2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
CAIRO —
With signs of fracturing within Egypt’s ruling elite, hundreds of thousands of
people packed Cairo’s central Tahrir Square on Friday, chanting slogans, bowing
in prayer and waving Egyptian flags to press a largely peaceful campaign for the
removal of President Hosni Mubarak.
As the uprising entered its 11th day, there was no sign of the violent Mubarak
supporters who the protesters said were organized and dispatched by the Mubarak
government over the last two days in an effort to capture the initiative.
Lurking fears among the opposition that their movement may have lost momentum
were banished by the sheer numbers of the protesters and their passion.
Some carried baskets of bread, food and water for those who camped out in the
central square overnight after days of running battles, urging the president to
depart and seeking to maintain the momentum of their protests at one of the most
decisive moments in Egypt since the 1952 revolution against the monarchy.
“Leave, leave, leave,” protesters chanted.
Tens of thousands of jubilant protesters turned out in the port city of
Alexandria, the site of bitter and deadly clashes in the last week.
Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League and a former foreign
minister serving Mr. Mubarak, appeared among the crowds, seeming to align
himself with the protest. Twice he sought to address the crowd, but both times
he was drowned out by roars of approval at what seemed a tacit endorsement of
their cause.
Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, appeared in the square — the first member of the
ruling government elite to do so — but he seemed to be concerned mostly with
reviewing the troops and did not seek to speak to the crowd, though he did chat
with some protesters.
And Mohamed Rafah Tahtawy, the public spokesman for Al Azhar — the center of
Sunni Muslim learning and Egypt’s highest, state-run religious authority — told
reporters that he was resigning because “I am participating in the protests and
I have issued statements that support the revolutionists as far as they go.”
The government had broadened its crackdown on Thursday, arresting journalists
and human rights advocates across an edgy city, while offering more concessions
in a bid to win support from a population growing frustrated with a devastated
economy and scenes of chaos in the streets.
But, after a night of scattered clashes and bursts of gunfire, an uneasy calm
gave way to what seemed jubilation on Friday as antigovernment protesters
mustered for what they have called a “Friday of departure.” Television images
showed thousands of protesters crowded beneath the palm trees of Alexandria,
Egypt’s second-largest city on the Mediterranean coast, waving Egyptian flags
and demanding Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
Just a week ago, demonstrators poured from Cairo’s many mosques after noon
prayers on the Muslim holy day to press their uprising, and there seemed to be a
similar surge on Friday. But one big difference was that last week the
protesters confronted the police at the start of a day of violence and looting.
Since then, though, the uniformed police force has largely disappeared from the
streets and the protesters have clashed with their pro-Mubarak adversaries.
On Friday, there were no immediate signs of the pro-Mubarak camp.
On one approach to Tahrir Square on Friday, two orderly lines of protesters
stretched back hundreds of yards on the Kasr al-Nil bridge, their progress
slowed by elite paratroops who threw razor wire across the bridge and searched
demonstrators as they arrived — apparently a new attempt by the military to
assert some control.
On Thursday, the authorities said that neither Mr. Mubarak nor his son Gamal,
long seen as a contender for power, would run for president. They also offered
dialogue with the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a gesture almost unthinkable weeks
ago.
For its part, the Brotherhood insisted on Friday that it had no ambitions to
field presidential candidates if those talks took place. But, speaking to
reporters in Tahrir Square, Mohammed el-Beltagui, a leading member of the
outlawed group, said that if Mr. Mubarak left, the Brotherhood — the most
organized opposition in the country — would not present a candidate for
election.
“It is not a retreat,” Mr. Beltagui said. “It is to take away the scare tactics
that Hosni Mubarak uses to deceive the people here and abroad that he should
stay in power.” A close ally of the United States, Mr. Mubarak has cast himself
for years as a bulwark against Islamic extremism.
The Brotherhood has assumed an increasingly prominent role in the uprising, but
its disavowal of long-term political ambitions seemed to contradict an assertion
on Friday from Iran that Egypt was in the throes of an Islamic revolution
similar to the tumult that ended the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in
Tehran in 1979.
“The awakening of the Islamic Egyptian people is an Islamic liberation movement,
and I, in the name of the Iranian government, salute the Egyptian people and the
Tunisian people,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said at Friday
prayers in Tehran, which were broadcast on television, Reuters reported.
On a larger scale than on previous days, thousands of people in Tahrir Square
sank to their knees at noon as loudspeakers amplified the sound of prayers
filling the air. But those in the square reflected a cross-section of society,
not just members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The minute the prayers were over, the square erupted in slogans of defiance,
urging Mr. Mubarak to go.
Many said their determination was blending with a fear that if they lost, the
protesters and their organizers would bear the brunt of a withering crackdown.
“If we can’t bring this to an end, we’re going to all be in the slammer by
June,” said Murad Mohsen, a doctor treating the wounded at a makeshift clinic
near barricades, where thousands fought off droves of government supporters with
rocks and firebombs.
On Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been authorized by the protesters to
negotiate with the authorities, said that, despite the authorities’ offers of
negotiation, no one from government had contacted him or any other opposition
leader.
At a news conference at his home in Giza, close to the pyramids, Mr. ElBaradei
said Mr. Mubarak’s adversaries had already begun drawing up a constitution and
were seeking the creation of a council of two to five members — including a
representative from the powerful military — to oversee reform over a one year
period. It was the first public suggestion of a formal proposal for transition.
“The earlier he goes with dignity the better it will be for everybody,” Mr.
ElBaradei said, referring to Mr. Mubarak.
He said the young people propelling the uprising were not interested in
retribution. “The Egyptian people are not a bloodthirsty people,” he said. The
conciliatory tone of his remarks contrasted with the demands of some protesters
for Mr. Mubarak’s execution.
“We need to move the current dictatorship and all of its apparatus to a
democracy,” he said.
Mr. ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a
Nobel laureate, took issue sharply with remarks by Mr. Mubarak in an interview
with ABC News on Thursday when he said that he was fed up with ruling but that
his precipitate departure would cause chaos.
“We as a people are fed up as well, it is not only him,” Mr. ElBaradei said.
“The idea that there would be chaos is symptomatic of a dictatorship. He thinks
if he leaves power the whole country will fall apart.”
From festive scenes of just days ago, the revolt on Thursday had become more
martial, as exhausted men defended what they described as the perimeter of a
free Egypt around Tahrir Square. Their demands have grown more forceful and the
uprising more radical. After pitched clashes of two days that left at least
seven dead and hundreds wounded, banners in Tahrir Square declared Mr. Mubarak
“a war criminal,” and several in the crowd said that the president should be
executed. Major television networks were largely unable to broadcast from the
square on Thursday.
On Friday, the mood seemed to have swung back to an atmosphere of celebration.
On Thursday, the United States joined a chorus of criticism, with Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton saying, “We condemn in the strongest terms attacks
on peaceful demonstrators, human rights activists, foreigners and diplomats.”
The government’s strategy seems motivated at turning broader opinion in the
country against the protests and perhaps wearing down the demonstrators
themselves, some of whom seemed exhausted by the clashes. Vice President Omar
Suleiman, appointed Saturday to a position that Mr. Mubarak had until then
refused to fill, appealed to Egypt’s sense of decency in allowing Mr. Mubarak to
serve out his term, and he chronicled the mounting losses that, he said, the
uprising had inflicted on a crippled Egyptian economy.
“End your sit-in,” he said. “Your demands have been answered.”
In interviews and statements, the government has increasingly spread an image
that foreigners were inciting the uprising, a refrain echoed in the streets. The
suggestions are part of a days-long Egyptian media campaign that has portrayed
the protesters as troublemakers and ignored the scope of an uprising with
diffuse goals and leadership.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said it had 100 reports of attacks on
journalists. Al Jazeera, the influential Arabic channel, said government
supporters stormed the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, searching for journalists, and two
of its reporters were attacked. A Greek journalist was stabbed with a
screwdriver and others were beaten and harassed.
Police also raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a headquarters for many of the
international human rights organizations working in Egypt. The human rights
workers were told to lie on the floor and the chips were removed from the
telephones, someone present in the building said, speaking on condition of
anonymity for fear of retribution.
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Liam
Stack, Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
Egyptians Muster for New Protest as Crackdown Widens
February 4,
2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO —
Despite a wider government crackdown, tens of thousands of Egyptians streamed
into Cairo’s central Tahrir Square on Friday, carrying baskets of bread, food
and water for those camped out there and apparently anticipating a long siege to
press for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
As the uprising entered its 11th day, with the regime seeking to seize the
initiative at one of Egypt’s most decisive moments since the 1952 revolution,
the authorities have responded with a startling blend of the oldest tactics of
an authoritarian government — stoking fears of foreigners on the streets — and
an air of sincere repentance.
Its grip on power shaken, the government broadened its crackdown on Thursday,,
arresting journalists and human rights advocates across an edgy city, while
offering more concessions in a bid to win support from a population growing
frustrated with a devastated economy and scenes of chaos in the streets.
After a night of scattered clashes and bursts of gunfire, an uneasy calm
prevailed on Friday as antigovernment protesters mustered for what they have
called a “Friday of departure” in hopes of maintaining the momentum behind
demands that Mr. Mubarak step down after three decades in power.
In a highly unusual move, the defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi,
appeared in the square on Friday — the first member of the ruling government
elite to do so. As he inspected troops there, protesters cheers him and formed a
human chain in order, they said, to prevent any hostile action against him. “We
have faith and trust in the Egyptian military,” said one of those in the chain,
Amr Makleb, 28.
Hoping to repeat their successful tactic of a week ago, when demonstrators
poured from Cairo’s many mosques to press their uprising, protesters said they
were planning a similar surge after noon prayers on Friday.
On one approach to Tahrir Square, two orderly lines of would-be protesters
stretched back hundreds of yards on the Kasr al-Nil bridge, their progress
slowed by elite paratroops who threw razor wire across the bridge and searched
demonstrators as they arrived — apparently a new attempt by the military to
assert some control.
The numbers of people arriving, though, underscored the protesters’ response to
government efforts to tamp down a revolt that will shape the country’s future.
On Thursday, the authorities said that neither President Mubarak nor his son
Gamal, long seen as a contender for power, would run for president. It also
offered dialogue with the banned Muslim Brotherhood, gestures almost unthinkable
weeks ago.
For its part, the Brotherhood insisted on Friday that it had no ambitions to
field presidential candidates if those talks took place. But Mohammed
el-Beltagui, a leading member of the organization, told Al Jazeera television
that it would negotiate once Mr. Mubarak left office. “We have said clearly that
we have no ambitions to run for the presidency or posts in a coalition
government,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
The Brotherhood has assumed an increasingly prominent role in the uprising, but
its disavowal of long-term political ambitions seemed to contradict an assertion
on Friday from Iran that the country was in the throes of an Islamic revolution
similar to the tumult that ended the rule of the Shahin Tehran in 1979.
“The awakening of the Islamic Egyptian people is an Islamic liberation movement
and I, in the name of the Iranian government, salute the Egyptian people and the
Tunisian people,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said at Friday
prayers in Tehran which were broadcast on television, Reuters reported.
On a larger scale than on previous days, thousands of people in Tahrir Square
sank to their knees in Tahrir square at noon as loudspeakers amplified the sound
of prayers filling the air. But those in the square reflected a cross-section of
society, not just members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The minute the prayers were over, the square erupted in slogans of defiance.
Propelling the protesters , many said that their determination was blending with
a fear that if they lost, the protesters and their organizers would bear the
brunt of a withering crackdown.
“If we can’t bring this to an end, we’re going to all be in the slammer by
June,” said Murad Mohsen, a doctor treating the wounded at a makeshift clinic
near barricades, where thousands fought off droves of government supporters with
rocks and firebombs.
Dr. Mohsen’s comments illustrated the changing dynamic of an uprising that has
captivated the Arab world, reverberating through Jordan, Sudan and Yemen, where
there were peaceful protests on Thursday. New calls for protests went out in
Algeria, Bahrain and Libya.
On Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been authorized by the protesters to
negotiate with the authorities, said no one from government had contacted him,
but he was still standing by.
At a news conference at his home in Giza, close to the pyramids, Mr. ElBaradei
said Mr. Mubarak’s adversaries had already begun drawing up a constitution and
were seeking the creation of a council of two to five members — including a
representative from the powerful military — to oversee reform.
But, he said, Mr. Mubarak’s adversaries were prepared to negotiate with the
authorities only after he had relinquished power. “No one wants him to be
humiliated,” Mr. ElBaradei said. “We would like to see him leave with dignity.”
His comment was in sharp contrast to some protesters who have been calling for
his execution.
From festive scenes of just days ago, the revolt has become more martial, as
exhausted men defend what they describe as the perimeter of a free Egypt around
Tahrir Square. Their demands have grown more forceful and the uprising more
radical. After pitched clashes of two days that left at least seven dead and
hundreds wounded, banners in Tahrir Square declared Mr. Mubarak “a war
criminal,” and several in the crowd said that the president should be executed.
Major television networks were largely unable to broadcast from the square on
Thursday.
The United States joined a chorus of criticism, with Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton saying, “We condemn in the strongest terms attacks on peaceful
demonstrators, human rights activists, foreigners and diplomats.”
The government’s strategy seems motivated at turning broader opinion in the
country against the protests and perhaps wearing down the demonstrators
themselves, some of whom seemed exhausted by the clashes. Vice President Omar
Suleiman, appointed Saturday to a position that Mr. Mubarak had until then
refused to fill, appealed to Egypt’s sense of decency in allowing Mr. Mubarak to
serve out his term, and he chronicled the mounting losses that, he said, the
uprising had inflicted on a crippled Egyptian economy.
“End your sit-in,” he said. “Your demands have been answered.”
Mr. Mubarak said in an interview with ABC that he was eager to step down but if
he did, “Egypt would sink into chaos.”
In interviews and statements, the government has increasingly spread an image
that foreigners were inciting the uprising, a refrain echoed in the streets. The
suggestions are part of a days-long Egyptian media campaign that has portrayed
the protesters as troublemakers and ignored the scope of an uprising with
diffuse goals and leadership.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said it had 100 reports of attacks on
journalists. Al Jazeera, the influential Arabic channel, said government
supporters stormed the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, searching for journalists, and two
of its reporters were attacked. A Greek journalist was stabbed with a
screwdriver and others were beaten and harassed.
Police also raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a headquarters for many of the
international human rights organizations working in Egypt. The human rights
workers were told to lie on the floor and the chips were removed from the
telephones, someone present in the building said, speaking on condition of
anonymity for fear of retribution.
As the day wore on, tension descended across parts of the city, which is still
guarded by popular committees that banded together after the police withdrew
last Saturday. Government supporters roamed parts of the downtown, itching for a
fight, and looters set fire to a shopping mall along the Nile that was already
looted and burned a week ago.
The menace was a counterpoint to Tahrir Square, where the literati and well-off
demonstrators mixed with the poorest of rough-and-tumble neighborhoods in scenes
of camaraderie and determination that have made the square an emblem of the
revolt. Protesters flashed V-for-victory signs at dawn, celebrating their
success in holding the square and even pushing the barricades forward in clashes
that dragged through the night.
For days, the government seemed to stagger at the scale of an uprising that
overwhelmed Egypt’s once ubiquitous security forces a week ago. The concessions
on Thursday marked its most concerted attempt to address at least some of the
longstanding demands in a country that many believe has stagnated under Mr.
Mubarak’s rule. The newly appointed prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, apologized for
the violence and vowed to investigate who instigated it. Mr. Suleiman followed
with a lengthy television interview in which he recognized what he described as
“the revolution of the youth.”
Mr. Suleiman sought to project an image of good will, offering dialogue with the
Muslim Brotherhood, which remains banned, even though it is the country’s most
influential opposition group. In a sign of the new landscape, Mr. Suleiman
referred to it by name rather than the government’s usual coded language, though
he and Mr. Mubarak have both suggested it was behind the revolt. Its followers
have played a forceful role in the protests, but its leaders have, so far, tried
to remain in the background.
Other concessions came from Egypt’s public prosecutor, who issued a travel ban
on former government ministers and an official of the ruling National Democratic
Party on suspicion of theft of public money, profiteering and fraud, state
television reported. Among the four was the hated former interior minister,
Habib el-Adly, who commanded a police force that was widely despised for its
corruption and routine use of torture.
David D.
Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Kareem Fahim and
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
February 3,
2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
CAIRO
Blood streams from a man’s face as he is carried from Tahrir Square. Stones are
hurled between antigovernment protesters and President Hosni Mubarak’s
big-bellied provocateurs. Plainclothes security goons with knives pull over
foreign journalists at checkpoints. The toll of dead and injured mounts. The
army’s Egyptian-assembled M1A1 Abrams tanks are no antiriot tool, menacing
beasts marooned.
“Cairo finito” is the verdict of one Mubarak supporter as I head down the
Corniche beside the Nile, all-seeing river.
This great city’s not finished, but the peaceful phase of Egypt’s pro-democracy
uprising is. An orchestrated riposte from Mubarak has begun, couched in
father-of-the nation concern, invoking the specter of “chaos,” deploying
busloads of thugs (and a couple on camels), promising change from the very
fountainhead of immobility — himself, no less, unyielding generalissimo of 30
years.
Nice try, Hosni. His regime is scrambling to stem the tide. Omar Suleiman, now
vice president and long Mubarak’s security guru, chose a good-cop role Thursday
after 24 hours of bad-cop thuggery. He spoke of outreach to the Muslim
Brotherhood. He said Mubarak’s son Gamal would not run in September presidential
elections. Many Egyptians aren’t buying it. Why would they? Look at the language
in which Mubarak couched his promised exit in September: “I say in all honesty,
and regardless of the current situation, that I did not intend to nominate
myself for a new presidential term.”
So, this stubborn man — who has ruled with the sweeping powers of an Emergency
Law since Anwar el-Sadat’s 1981 assassination; who has broken countless promises
to revoke that law; who has just overseen a farce of a parliamentary election
that stuffed the legislature with his National Democratic Party; who has refused
to offer any succession plan; who has allowed a coterie around his son Gamal to
amass Farouk-like wealth through sweetheart deals — had planned to step down
before his people rose up!
Of course, had Mubarak made the offer 10 days ago, things might have been
different. But it is not the way of 82-year-old despots to see beyond the web
they’ve spun. So they reap the whirlwind.
An “orderly transition” is the Obama administration’s objective. The priority
must be transition. “A new beginning” is what President Obama sought when he
came to Cairo in June 2009. That is impossible with the old extremist-breeding,
modernity-denying Arab order. You cannot carve in rotten wood.
When Obama spoke in Cairo, the audience offered polite applause until he said
this: “You must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings
of the political process above your party. Without these elements, elections
alone do not make true democracy.”
Whereupon somebody shouted: “Barack Obama, we love you!”
Remember that cry, Mr. President. This is Obama’s first major foreign policy
crisis where the United States has real leverage (not the case in Iran). If
Egypt, the Arab hub, manages a transition to some more representative order,
that victory will resonate in 2012. If the Egyptian mockery of democracy
persists, Obama’s failure will be stark.
Already we hear the predictable warnings from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu: This could be Iran 1979, a revolution for freedom that installs the
Islamists. But this is not 1979, and Egypt’s Facebook-adept youth are not lining
up behind the Muslim Brotherhood, itself scarcely a band of fanatics.
Hope for the Middle East — and ultimately Israel — lies in Egyptian reform that
would create the first peace between a Jewish and an Arab democracy.
The U.S. can no longer advance its interests through double standards apparent
to every thinking Arab. Ambivalent U.S. prodding for political opening has
produced “nothing, nothing, nothing,” in the words of one frustrated observer.
It’s time to be clear: Mubarak’s time is up.
In the swirling crowd, I spoke to two Egyptian lawyers, in their robes, from the
northern town of Tanta. Ahmed el-Biery, 34, and Ahmed Romeh, 24, had traveled to
Cairo to end “the only regime we have known.” Why their anger? “First,
corruption, a bunch of them control the whole economy” said Biery. “Second, no
laws, there are thousands imprisoned without trial. Everyone has the right to a
trial.”
Biery looked at me with his intense green eyes. “I’m here for my children, so
they live better.” That’s a very American idea. Another is this: a nation of
laws is fundamental. Mubarak has been a firm ally, kept a cold peace with
Israel, and maintained a skewed order at home. I don’t want to see him
humiliated. But Obama must stand with Biery against a corrupted, dying regime.
This is not a recipe for chaos. The Egyptian army has shown superb
professionalism. It can be the guarantor of an orderly transition. But a
Mubarak-orchestrated free September election is unimaginable. The vote must be
organized by a transitional civilian authority — and Mubarak can retire now to
Sharm el-Sheikh. He’s earned the right, just, to die on Egyptian soil.
White
House, Egypt Discuss Plan for Mubarak’s Exit
February 3,
2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON
— The Obama administration is discussing with Egyptian officials a proposal for
President Hosni Mubarak to resign immediately and turn over power to a
transitional government headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support
of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats said
Thursday.
Even though Mr. Mubarak has balked, so far, at leaving now, officials from both
governments are continuing talks about a plan in which Mr. Suleiman, backed by
Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, chief of the Egyptian armed forces, and Field Marshal
Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister, would immediately begin a process of
constitutional reform.
The proposal also calls for the transitional government to invite members from a
broad range of opposition groups, including the banned Muslim Brotherhood, to
begin work to open up the country’s electoral system in an effort to bring about
free and fair elections in September, the officials said.
Senior administration officials said that the proposal was one of several
options under discussion with high-level Egyptian officials around Mr. Mubarak
in an effort to persuade the president to step down now.
They cautioned that the outcome depended on several factors, not least Egypt’s
own constitutional protocols and the mood of the protesters on the streets of
Cairo and other Egyptian cities.
Some officials said there was not yet any indication that either Mr. Suleiman or
the Egyptian military was willing to abandon Mr. Mubarak.
Even as the Obama administration is coalescing around a Mubarak-must-go-now
posture in private conversations with Egyptian officials, Mr. Mubarak himself
remains determined to stay until the election in September, American and
Egyptian officials said. His backers forcibly pushed back on Thursday against
what they viewed as American interference in Egypt’s internal affairs.
“What they’re asking cannot be done,” one senior Egyptian official said, citing
clauses in the Egyptian Constitution that bar the vice president from assuming
power. Under the Constitution, the speaker of Parliament would succeed the
president. “That’s my technical answer,” the official added. “My political
answer is they should mind their own business.”
Mr. Mubarak’s insistence on staying will again be tested by large street
protests on Friday, which the demonstrators are calling his “day of departure,”
when they plan to march on the presidential palace. The military’s pledge not to
fire on the Egyptian people will be tested as well.
The discussions about finding a way out of the crisis in Cairo take place as new
questions are being raised about whether American intelligence agencies, after
the collapse of the Tunisian government, adequately warned the White House and
top lawmakers about the prospects of an uprising in Egypt.
During a Senate hearing on Thursday, both Democrats and Republicans pressed a
senior Central Intelligence Agency official about when the C.I.A. and other
agencies notified President Obama of the looming crisis, and whether
intelligence officers even monitored social networking sites and Internet forums
to gauge popular sentiment in Egypt.
“At some point it had to have been obvious that there was going to be a huge
demonstration,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is
chairwoman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.
She said that intelligence agencies never sent a notice to her committee about
the growing uprising in Egypt, as is customary in the case of significant global
events.
Stephanie O’Sullivan, the C.I.A. official, responded that the agency had been
tracking instability in Egypt for some time and had concluded that the
government in Cairo was in an “untenable” situation. But, Ms. O’Sullivan said,
“we didn’t know what the triggering mechanism would be.”
Because of the fervor now unleashed in Egypt, one Obama administration official
said, Mr. Mubarak’s close aides expressed concern that they were not convinced
that Mr. Mubarak’s resignation would satisfy the protesters.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour of ABC News, Mr. Mubarak said that he
was “fed up” with being president but that he could not step down for fear of
sowing chaos in the country.
“The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more
demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign
Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does
he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”
A number of high-level American officials have reached out to the Egyptians in
recent days. While administration officials would not offer details of the
alternatives that were being discussed, they made it clear that their preferred
outcome would be for Mr. Suleiman to take power as a transitional figure.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke by phone to Mr. Suleiman on Thursday,
the White House said in a statement, urging that “credible, inclusive
negotiations begin immediately in order for Egypt to transition to a democratic
government that addresses the aspirations of the Egyptian people.”
Mr. Biden’s phone call came after a mission by Mr. Obama’s private emissary,
Frank G. Wisner, was abruptly ended when Mr. Mubarak, angry at Mr. Obama’s
toughly worded speech on Tuesday night, declined to meet with the envoy a second
time, officials said.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has made three calls since the weekend to
Egypt’s powerful defense minister, Field Marshal Tantawi, who served on the
coalition’s side in the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Pentagon officials declined on Thursday to describe the specifics of the calls
but indicated that Mr. Gates’s messages were focused on more than urging the
Egyptian military to exercise restraint.
Officials familiar with the dialogue between the Obama administration and Cairo
say that American officials have told their Egyptian counterparts that if they
support another strongman to replace Mr. Mubarak — but without a specific plan
and timetable for moving toward democratic elections — Congress might react by
freezing military aid to Egypt.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a resolution calling on Mr. Mubarak to begin the
transfer of power to an “inclusive, interim caretaker government.”
Anthony H. Cordesman, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that a transition
government led by Mr. Suleiman and the military, with pledges to move toward
democratic elections, was in his mind “the most probable case.” But he said the
administration had to proceed with extreme caution.
“Everybody working this issue knows that this is a military extremely sensitive
to outside pressure,” Mr. Cordesman said.
Even as the Obama administration has ratcheted up the pressure on Egypt, it has
reaffirmed its support for other Arab allies facing popular unrest.
The White House released a statement saying that Mr. Obama called President Ali
Abdullah Saleh of Yemen on Wednesday to welcome Mr. Saleh’s recent “reform
measures” — the Yemeni president promised not to run again in 2013.
And on Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called King Abdullah
II of Jordan to say that the United States looked forward to working with his
new cabinet — recently announced — and to underline the importance of the
relationship between Jordan and the United States.
Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, declined to say whether Mrs.
Clinton had enlisted King Abdullah in an effort to ease out Mr. Mubarak. But Mr.
Crowley praised the king for responding to the unrest in Jordan.
“He’s doing his best to respond to this growing aspiration,” Mr. Crowley said.
“And we appreciate the leadership he’s shown.”
Elisabeth Bumiller, Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.
February 3,
2011
8:30 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Breathtaking, these last few days in Egypt. What started with a scent of
jasmine, the world’s biggest Arab country trying to chase out a dictator, is now
devolving into violent chaos and police-state terror. Smiling families one day,
thugs on camelback the next.
The brutal truth is this: where it ends in the cradle of civilization will not
be America’s call. The particles of political energy are scrambled; to presume
to know where they will re-align is to think the sun can be kept from rising on
a given day.
But what we have in Egypt now, Tunisia last month, and perhaps Yemen in the days
to come, is a fascinating real-time history lesson. “Stuff happens,” as the
negligently glib former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, but it
doesn’t happen in that part of the world because of American muscle. At least,
not according to script.
Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in United States tax dollars to behave in a
certain way. It’s an easy relationship when it’s all about tanks and fighter
jets. But when pressed by its own people for a thimble of self-respect, the
leadership sends out goon squads to crack the heads of journalists and everyday
citizens practicing the most powerful of American values.
President Obama was right in his 2009 speech in Cairo, when he said,
“Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.”
And President George W. Bush was right to deride those who assumed that a big
part of the world could never change. As he mused in his 2003 call to seeding
the Muslim world with democracy: “Are the people of the Middle East somehow
beyond the reach of liberty?”
The mistake, which still emanates from think tanks stocked with
neoconservatives, is assuming that democracy can come at the end of sword – or
that it can be purchased. “A liberated Iraq,” Bush said, “can show the power of
freedom to transform that vital region.”
Not even close. The dictator was toppled, tried and executed, but the dominoes
never fell, after a trillion-dollar war. Through it all, American money
continued to flow into regimes that jailed their dissidents and tortured people
trying to act on Thomas Jefferson’s ideals. Cognitive dissonance as foreign
policy.
Now that some of the dominoes appear to be falling, this has more to do with
Facebook and the frustrations of young, educated adults who can’t earn enough
money to marry than it does with tanks rolling into Baghdad, or naïve neocons
guiding the State Department.
And even when democracy has followed, it’s certainly not always been in the best
interests of human rights or regional stability. Lebanon is effectively a
Hezbollah state, Hamas runs the Gaza Strip and a Holocaust-denier is in charge
of the soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy of Iran. All of them, arguably, are in power
because their people spoke – enough of them, anyway, to paper over a government.
In the Arab world, Jefferson will never be as well-read as the Koran. Pew
Research surveys of Egyptian attitudes last year produced some startling
results. Good: A majority of Egyptians believe democracy is preferable to any
other kind of government. Bad: 82 percent support stoning women as punishment
for adultery.
What’s next: a caliphate across the north of Africa, and surrounding Israel?
Hardly. This fantasy fear of the paranoid right ignores the many differences in
the Islamic world: Sunni from Shiite, petro-wealthy from poverty-stricken, Arab
from Persian. Visit Turkey, as I did with my family a few months ago. To think
that a prosperous, majority-Muslim and democratic Turkey will somehow go back to
medieval values is absurd.
Perhaps, then, the baby steps of new democracies, with tiny Tunisia as the
model, is the best hope. Unfortunately, recent history makes that option seem
the least likely.
America has often been forceful in its naïvete. Just after World War I,
President Woodrow Wilson became the first president to try to light a fire of
democracy in the broken pieces of the Ottoman Empire with his “14 points of
light” speech. The old imperial powers of Europe scoffed.
And then, George W. Bush cited Wilson in his call for a “global democratic
revolution” led by the United States.
Bush’s belief “was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal,”
wrote Caroline Glick in The Jerusalem Post last week. Certainly no fan of Obama,
either, this hard-line Israeli editor by way of Chicago and Harvard criticized
the United States for being clueless for too long.
In long-repressed states of the Arab world, what began as a modern keystroke
revolution – and thus a peaceful one – may yet be put down with the classic
tools of an old-fashioned dictator: clubs and thugs, as universal as those
western values.
But in the Internet age, no authoritarian can keep his own people from knowing
the truth. Millions of Egyptians are disgusted with their leadership. They have
hope. They want change. And we should stand with them with the tools of an open
society: ideas and technology, and maybe a deft diplomatic nudge. Beyond that,
it’s out of American hands.
President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt could have done many things after he announced he would
not run for office again. He could have resigned and let his vice president lead
an interim government, as the Obama administration reportedly is urging him to
do. He could have opened serious negotiations with antigovernment protesters
leading to free and fair elections.
Instead, Mr. Mubarak is making a ruthless bid to retain power. On Wednesday,
mere hours after he went on national television in a futile attempt to silence
demands for his ouster, men armed with clubs, rocks, knives and firebombs began
a bloody assault on protesters. They were obviously encouraged, likely even
orchestrated, by the Mubarak regime.
On Thursday, the brutal crackdown went even further. As fighting between
protesters and the armed gangs escalated, Mr. Mubarak’s supporters attacked and
detained foreign journalists, punching them and smashing their equipment. News
outlets were shut down. Two New York Times reporters were among those held and
eventually released. Human rights workers were also threatened and detained.
These are the familiar tactics of dictators who want to brutalize their citizens
without witnesses. We fear Mr. Mubarak is planning to unleash even more violence
— antigovernment protesters have called another demonstration for Friday. There
is speculation that the fighting is being provoked so Egyptians will rally
around the government and support a crackdown to restore order.
Mr. Mubarak’s attempt to blame the opposition and foreigners for the mayhem — he
told ABC News that the government is not responsible — is patently absurd. He
has ruled the country with an iron hand for nearly 30 years. Mr. Mubarak has
lost the legitimacy to continue governing Egypt, but he has chosen survival over
his people. He told ABC that he had to stay in office to avoid chaos. In fact,
his continued presence ensures only more chaos and instability.
As the street battles raged, the government made conciliatory sounds. It
promised that Mr. Mubarak’s son would not run for president and called for
dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, the best organized opposition group. It
promised to prosecute those behind the violence. The protesters, long accustomed
to the government prevarications, are unlikely to be placated.
An important question is what role the army — which gets nearly $1.5 billion in
annual American aid — is prepared to play. Will it reinforce Mr. Mubarak’s
repression of a transition to a new order in which the aspirations of the
protesters — fed up with poverty, lack of jobs and education, the excesses of
the elite, official corruption and government repression — will be addressed?
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Thursday that the army has a
“clear responsibility” to protect the protesters and “to hold accountable those
responsible for these attacks.”
So far, it’s unclear where the army stands. As the anti-Mubarak movement grew,
some soldiers displayed sympathy for the protesters and manned checkpoints at
Liberation Square, or Tahrir Square, to screen for weapons. On Monday, the army
announced it would not use force against those demanding Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
But when the melee erupted on Wednesday, the military largely confined itself to
guarding the Egyptian Museum and extinguishing firebombs. On Thursday, after
shots were fired — the source was unclear — the army moved to separate the
combatants, but the violence continued. These mixed messages threaten to damage
the army’s credibility and its status as the country’s most respected
institution.
The cost of the turmoil is being felt. Tourists are fleeing. The economy is
paralyzed. Egypt and its people need a quick transition to an era of greater
political and economic freedoms. The violence is making that transition harder.
February 3,
2011
The New York Times
By DANIEL MING and AARON GLANTZ
Hundreds of
people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San
Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent
of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its
leaders says.
“We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie
Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland.
Ms. Surasky said she hoped a new political order in Egypt would help speed the
end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which her group
opposes. The group’s views differ markedly from statements about the Egyptian
protests coming from the Israeli government and many other Jewish-American
organizations, which caution that the demonstrations in Cairo could ultimately
threaten Israel.
The unrest in Egypt is merely the latest issue to pit a number of Bay Area
activists against prominent Jewish organizations, as well as against some
Israelis who have come to see the Bay Area as a locus for Jewish opposition to
Israel’s government.
One prominent Israeli research organization, the Reut Institute, recently
described the Bay Area as “one of the very few geographic locations that drive a
global assault on Israel’s right to exist.” In October, the Anti-Defamation
League placed Jewish Voice for Peace — which has called for an international
boycott of companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian
territories — among “the top 10 anti-Israel groups in America.”
The divisions have heightened tensions among Bay Area Jews. During one
altercation last year, a pro-Israel activist attacked two representatives of
Jewish Voice for Peace with pepper spray. Last March, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the
editor of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish magazine based in Berkeley, received death
threats, and his home was plastered with signs accusing him of “Islamo-Fascism,”
after he announced that he planned to give an award to a United Nations official
who led an investigation into Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza.
“What’s happening is outlandish; the era of civil discourse has disappeared,”
said Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce of Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco’s largest
synagogue.
The activists say they are not working against Israel, but against Israeli
government policies they believe are discriminatory. In the past week, many of
these activists have cast the Egyptian demonstrations as an opportunity to alter
the Middle East, including Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
“When you look at the Middle East, in one way or another it’s all about what’s
happening in Palestine,” said Barbara Lubin, co-founder of the Middle East
Children’s Alliance, a group in Berkeley that organizes aid missions to Gaza,
which remains under an Israeli blockade.
Ms. Lubin said she hoped that if President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was removed,
Israeli policies toward Gaza “would become more lax” and allow her organization
to carry out its work in support of the Palestinians.
Rabbi Lerner has been an outspoken supporter of the demonstrators in Egypt. His
recent editorial, headlined “Jewish Prayers for Egypt’s Uprising,” was the lead
opinion article on the Web site of the television network Al Jazeera on Tuesday.
He said in an interview that American Jews had an interest in letting “the
people of the Arab world know that a very large section of the Jewish people
support the liberation of the Egyptian people and of all Arab people.”
Such views concern Israel’s defenders locally and abroad.
“Nobody defends Mubarak,” said John Rothmann, a talk show host for KGO radio in
San Francisco and the former President of the Zionist Organization of America in
San Francisco.
Mr. Rothmann added, however, that it was important to remember that Mr. Mubarak
had maintained peace between Egypt and Israel for nearly three decades.
“He may be a barbarian, but he’s our barbarian,” Mr. Rothmann continued. “You
need to have an alternative, and we have never been able to create one.”
Eran Shayshon, a Reut Institute senior analyst, said in an e-mail that Israelis
were watching Bay Area Jewish activists closely because “campus dynamics and
consumer trends originating in California often reverberate throughout North
America and beyond.”
In fact, Jewish Voice for Peace has grown significantly since Israel’s invasion
of Gaza, its leaders say.
The 23-day operation in December 2008 and January 2009, named Operation Cast
Lead by the Israel Defense Forces, left 13 Israelis and at least 1,300
Palestinians dead. It drew strong criticism that Israel used excessive force
against civilians.
“Cast Lead was a radicalizing moment for a lot of Jews,” said Sydney Levy,
director of campaigns for Jewish Voice for Peace. Mr. Levy said Jewish
discontent with Israel typically subsided after a conflict ended. That did not
happen after the most recent Israeli incursion, he said, “mostly because the
siege of Gaza continues today.”
Jewish Voice for Peace’s mailing list has risen to 100,000 from 35,000 since the
start of the Gaza conflict, according to the organization; the number of
chapters has grown to 27 from 7. From 2008 to 2009, the group’s operating
budget, fueled by donations, grew 44 percent.
“We, as Jews, have a unique responsibility to change the viewpoint of the people
who are in our community,” said Rae Abileah, a San Francisco resident and
advocate for Jewish Voice for Peace’s youth wing.
Jewish Voice for Peace has been at the center of several attention-grabbing
episodes.
In November, during a convention of Jewish philanthropic organizations in New
Orleans, Ms. Abileah and others drew international attention when they heckled
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel during a speech.
“I’m a 28-year-old young Jewish woman, and the settlements betray Jewish
values!” Ms. Abileah shouted. One man grabbed her in a chokehold while another
tried to gag her by stuffing a seat cover in her mouth.
Much of the recent scrutiny of Bay Area Jewish activists has focused on efforts
to impose an international boycott on Israel. The campaign is modeled after the
boycott of South Africa in the 1980s over apartheid.
Last spring, students at the University of California, Berkeley, with the
backing of Jewish Voice for Peace, mounted a divestment campaign singling out
companies that provide “military support for the occupation of the Palestinian
territories.” The effort ended after Akiva Tor, Israel’s consul general in San
Francisco, came to the campus and held a private meeting with student senators.
By supporting the boycott, Jewish Voice for Peace “puts themselves beyond the
pale,” wrote Mr. Shayshon of the Reut Institute, because some leaders of the
boycott movement “have explicitly talked about the goal of dismantling Israel.”
Members of Jewish Voice for Peace say they are simply concerned about human
rights of all peoples in the Middle East — whether in Israel, the Palestinian
territories or the streets of Cairo.
“Egyptians deserve a democracy just as Americans do, just as Israelis do, just
as Palestinians do,” Ms. Surasky said.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
AMMAN, Jordan — King Abdullah II, struggling to stave off growing public
discontent, widened his political outreach on Thursday and met with the Muslim
Brotherhood for the first time in nearly a decade. He also asserted in a
statement that he would fight corruption and foster broad national dialogue.
The statement from the royal court said, “The king reaffirmed in a meeting with
a delegation from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front that it is
important for them to work together to press political reform that will increase
the role of citizens in decision making.”
A Muslim Brotherhood leader, Zaki Bani Rshead, said earlier in an interview in
his Amman office that the newly appointed prime minister, Marouf al-Bakhit, had
offered the movement a role in his government but that it had turned him down.
“We refused because we want the prime minister to be elected, not appointed by
the king, and we want real elections,” he said. “We are willing to be a partner
but in a real government.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is estimated to have the support of 25 to 30 percent of
Jordan’s six million people. It was expected to lead modest demonstrations on
Friday calling for democratic steps, although others who had taken part in past
weeks said they would hold off and see the nature of the new government.
On Tuesday, after weeks of low-level protests demanding change here — and after
huge street revolts brought political upheaval to Tunisia and Egypt — Abdullah
fired his cabinet and appointed Mr. Bakhit prime minister. The king publicly
instructed him to pursue democratic reform and reach out to a broad range of
constituents. Mr. Bakhit has held many consultations in preparation for forming
his government, in itself a rare step here.
Abdullah, who turned 49 on Sunday and has been on the throne for 12 years, is
clearly shaken by the events regionally and in his own country. He has been
paying surprise visits in recent days to poor areas and villages and ordering
assistance to the families he encountered. Thursday’s statement acknowledged the
failure of recent efforts at reform, placing blame on “people who put their
personal interests above the public interest, fear of change and hesitation in
making decisions.” It said the king expected the new government to start a
comprehensive national dialogue that includes all segments of society.
It added that a new electoral law should be drafted that would attract political
parties to take part in elections and that all the country’s issues should be
discussed publicly “with transparency, openness and clarity.” It vowed tough
punishment for anyone involved in corruption, saying, “no one is above the law.”
Few predicted imminent danger to Abdullah given the long devotion to his family
among Jordanians. But complaints against the king, once largely unheard of, have
been growing markedly.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
SANA, YEMEN — Thousands of pro- and antigovernment demonstrators held
peaceful protests in this impoverished capital city on Thursday, playing out the
themes that have rocked nations across the Arab world as some demanded the
president step down while others supported their embattled leader’s announcement
that he will leave office when he completes his term.
Yemen’s tribal culture and its heavily armed population raised fears of violence
as events here seemed to unfold at a consolidated pace, with all sides trying to
draw lessons from popular uprisings in Tunisia and then Egypt. But the events
appeared to end peacefully one day after the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
tried to take the steam out of the opposition’s plans by announcing he would not
run — and his son would also not run — when his current term expires in 2013.
“I came here today to take part in the rally against extremism and to promote
democracy,“ said Sadiq al Qadoos, a pro-government demonstrator joined by
thousands who were camped in Sana’s Tahrir, or Liberation, Square. “And to show
I am against chaos.”
The antigovernment opposition crowd, riled up and sensing momentum, had hoped to
demonstrate in Tahrir, but instead moved to the campus of Sana University, where
the crowd chanted “The people want to topple the regime.”
There was no doubt that Yemen’s opposition had been inspired by the popular
revolt in Tunisia that forced the president to flee into exile. Opposition
protesters wore pink bandanas referencing what has become known as the Jasmine
Revolution.
But the day’s events also demonstrated that everyone has watched carefully how
the battle to control the course of change has played out in Egypt. Yemen’s
opposition tried to pick up momentum and the president and his supporters sought
to avoid what they may have perceived as the missteps of Egypt’s president,
Hosni Mubarak, and its ruling party. The pro-government supporters came into
central Sana in droves from outside the city and Mr. Saleh had made his
announcement before what was billed as Yemen’s Day of Rage.
“In an attempt to avoid the mistakes made by Mubarak by responding too little
too late, the Yemeni government sought to try to get out ahead of the
opposition,” said Christopher Boucek, a Middle East associate at Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
But as Mr. Boucek pointed out, events are so fluid, reactions so unpredictable
and societies so different, it appeared that Mr. Saleh’s effort may have
backfired by emboldening the opposition. “While Saleh’s announcement was an
effort to reduce tensions in advance of Thursday’s scheduled protests, it
appears to have had the opposite effect,” he said noting the size and energy of
the opposition crowd.
But what many feared would explode in violence tapered off on a peaceful note
around lunch time and both sides kept away from each other for the most part.
Opposition protesters went on their way promising to return every Thursday until
their demands were met.
“This requires the opposition to be prepared to continue with its demands and
political rallies,” said Yayha Al Shami, a member of the political bureau of the
opposition socialist party.
The peaceful if heated events of the day followed the announcement on Wednesday
by Mr. Saleh that he would not run again and that he would suspend his campaign
for constitutional changes that would have allowed him to remain president for
life.
“No extension, no inheritance, no resetting the clock,” Mr. Saleh said Wednesday
during a legislative session that was boycotted by the opposition. “I present
these concessions in the interests of the country. The interests of the country
come before our personal interests.”
He ordered the creation of a fund to employ university graduates and to extend
social security coverage, increased wages and reduced income taxes and offered
to resume a political dialogue that collapsed last October over elections. In
answer to opposition complaints that voter records are rife with fraud, he said
he would delay the April parliamentary elections until better records could be
compiled.
But it remained to be seen whether Mr. Saleh, whose term ends in 2013, was
simply trying to siphon vigor from the antigovernment protests. A week earlier,
the opposition staged the largest protests against Mr. Saleh, who has ruled for
32 years. He promised in 2005 not to run again, but then reneged and secured
another term.
“The president didn’t say anything new,” said Muhammad al-Qutabi, a spokesman
for the opposition. “What he offered today didn’t even meet the opposition’s old
demands.”
“He’s been making promises for 32 years and never kept one,” said one, Shawki
al-Qadi. “When he promised to fight poverty, we got poorer. When he promised to
leave office, he made amendments to stay forever.”
Governments around the region have been shaken as momentum has gathered across
North Africa and the Middle East for deep, radical change in countries with
leaders long backed by the United States.
Tunisia’s president has been ousted, President Mubarak remains embattled even
after declaring that he would step down after finishing his term in September,
and King Abdullah II of Jordan has fired his government. In Syria, calls for a
“day of rage” this weekend against the government of President Bashar al-Assad
were spreading on Facebook, which is formally banned in the country, and on
Twitter.
Yemen’s stability has been of increasing concern to the United States, which has
provided $250 million in military aid in the past five years. Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a visit to Sana, the capital, in January, urged Mr.
Saleh to establish a new dialogue with the opposition, saying it would help to
stabilize the country.
Mr. Saleh has been seeking to stave off unrest, recently promising to raise
salaries for civil servants and the military, in a country where many people
live on less than $2 a day.
On Tuesday, the state news agency, Saba, reported that the president had ordered
retailers to stop charging the military and security forces for food and
gasoline.
The Yemeni opposition, which has promised to hold protests every Thursday for
the next month, has not demanded Mr. Saleh’s ouster thus far, but rather reforms
and a smooth transition of power through elections. Fears of violence run high
in this country, where the potential for strife is difficult to overstate.
The poorest of the Arab countries, Yemen is troubled by a rebellion in the north
and a struggle for secession in the formerly independent south. In recent years,
an affiliate of Al Qaeda has turned parts of the country into a refuge beyond
the state’s reach, from which it has launched terrorist attacks against the
West. A remarkably high proportion of citizens are armed.
“It is still possible to make changes peacefully because the opposition is still
leading the Yemeni street,” said Mr. Qadi, the opposition lawmaker. “Once it
starts leading itself, then the situation will be very difficult.”
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and Michael Slackman from Berlin.
Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Muhammad
al-Ahmadi from Sana, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
WASHINGTON — A parade of prospective Republican presidential candidates have
been visiting the Middle East in recent months, making pilgrimages that are the
first steps in a methodical process of building credibility in foreign policy.
But as the diplomatic crisis in Egypt has intensified this week, elevating
foreign affairs above domestic political skirmishes, the potential Republican
candidates and the party’s leaders in Congress have, with only a few exceptions,
had little to say.
As a result, President Obama has had the moment practically all to himself — for
better or worse — as he gingerly proceeds without a sustained counterargument on
a matter that could reshape United States foreign policy for years. The lack of
debate underscores the relative absence of muscular Republican voices on foreign
affairs in general — a sharp contrast to way things were four years ago, when
President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy was a flashpoint between the two parties
at this point in the election cycle.
To some degree, the silence from Republicans reflects a lack of substantive
differences, especially on Egypt. House Speaker John A. Boehner set the tone on
Sunday, saying: “Our administration so far has handled this tense situation
pretty well.” And in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said on
Tuesday that “America ought to speak with one voice, and we have one president.”
Party elders have largely agreed. On Wednesday, James A. Baker, the former
secretary of state, said of the Obama administration, “They’ve been handling
this Egyptian crisis quite well, frankly.”
The delicate nature of the situation in Egypt, where events have moved fast and
turned violent over the past week, helps explain the measured Republican
response. But the crisis has illustrated a broader pattern in which Republicans
have been strikingly unwilling or unable to draw sharp contrasts with the
administration on foreign policy — including Iraq and Afghanistan — and have
instead taken aim mainly at Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda.
While it is hardly rare for opposition candidates to have limited foreign policy
experience — take, for example, Senator Barack Obama as he started his candidacy
four years ago — the president’s Republican rivals so far do not even have a
high-profile issue, as Mr. Obama did with Iraq, on which they can offer national
security policies and values that contrast with those of the White House.
The escalating crisis in Egypt has attracted fresh attention to foreign policy
at the very time that prospective Republican contenders are trying to establish
their credentials as prospective commanders in chief. Gone are the days when the
early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire were the only obligatory stops on
the campaign trail. Particularly for candidates who want to appeal to
evangelical voters, Israel, Jordan and points across the Middle East are now
important stops as well.
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, completed his 15th visit to
Israel this week. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi is set to leave on Saturday
for a trip to Israel that is scheduled to include a meeting with Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, made a
similar visit last month, and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota,
has led a trade delegation to Israel.
While most of these potential Republican contenders have offered mild criticism
of how the United States has handled the Egypt crisis, particularly Mr. Obama’s
delay in distancing himself from President Hosni Mubarak, the tenor of the
remarks has been muted in comparison with the Republican reaction to the
administration’s health care law or economic policy.
In a policy sense, Republicans, like Democrats, are walking a fine line between
supporting a quick transition to a new government in Egypt and the concern, felt
especially keenly in Israel, that the removal of Mr. Mubarak could lead to
instability and the possible rise of an Islamist government.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who seldom goes more than a few days
without criticizing the administration, has been silent about Egypt.
Nor have the sounds of disagreement been heard on Capitol Hill, where Republican
advisers urge party members to keep dissent to a minimum and continue to focus
on domestic issues like health care, government spending and jobs. Instead, most
of the alternative foreign policy views to those of the administration have come
by way of the Fox News Channel, where several potential Republican contenders
also serve as paid analysts.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who is considering a presidential bid,
has been among the most critical voices. “I don’t think they have a clue,” Mr.
Gingrich said of the White House’s stance toward the Mubarak government in an
interview on Fox News with Greta Van Susteren. “It’s very frightening to watch
this administration.”
Robert Kasten Jr., a former Republican senator from Wisconsin who has traveled
extensively in Egypt and was scheduled to be in the country this week in his
role as a trustee at American University in Cairo, said that strong Republican
voices have been lacking in the Egypt discussion. An effort to show unity, he
said, may have sent the impression that Republicans think the president had
handled the situation flawlessly.
“The major issues of the day among most Americans are the economic issues, and
the Republican congress wants to keep the focus on those issues, but foreign
policy is so important,” said Mr. Kasten, who served on the Foreign Affairs
Committee. “The administration and the president are trying to be too cute and
trying to have it all ways. They are going to end up with all sides being
disappointed with them.”
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and J. DAVID GOODMAN
CAIRO — Security forces and gangs chanting in favor of the Egyptian
government hunted down journalists at their offices and in the hotels where many
had taken refuge on Thursday in a widespread and overt campaign of intimidation
aimed at suppressing reports from the capital.
By evening, it appeared that none of the major broadcasters were able to provide
live footage of Tahrir Square, the epicenter of antigovernment protests. Al
Jazeera and Al Arabiya television networks said their journalists had been
hounded from the street and from the vantage points above the square where
cameras had been placed, and both CNN and BBC appeared to be relying only on
taped footage of the square. Jon Williams of the BBC said via Twitter that
Egyptian security had seized the news agency’s equipment from the Cairo Hilton
“in an attempt to stop us broadcasting.”
The Egyptian state news agency had earlier asked foreign reporters and crews to
move out of all the hotels near the square.
The Committee to Protect Journalists was investigating at least two dozen cases
of reporters being detained. According to the group, the government told the
journalists that they were not being arrested, but rather were being taken into
“protective custody.”
Some journalists were attacked so viciously that they required hospitalization.
The Fox News Channel said Thursday that two employees, correspondent Greg Palkot
and cameraman Olaf Wiig, had been “severely beaten” on Wednesday. The two men
spent a night in the hospital and were released Thursday, but had yet to appear
on television.
A reporter for Al Arabiya was beaten by a group of pro-Mubarak demonstrators on
Wednesday. His injuries were significant enough that he remains hospitalized,
though his condition is not critical, Nakhle El Hage, director of news for the
network said.
ABC News said that a group of “angry Egyptian men” carjacked one of its news
crews and threatened to behead them.
Representatives of human rights groups were also targeted. Egyptian security
police raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, detaining as many as 16 people,
including some of the country’s most prominent human rights activists and
several foreign researchers. Near Tahrir Square, a group of journalists were
stopped in their car on Thursday by a gang of men with knives and turned over to
military police, who held them briefly.
The Washington Post said its Cairo bureau chief and a photographer who had been
detained were released by Thursday evening. But two other employees — a
translator and a driver — remained in custody. Two reporters working for The New
York Times were released on Thursday after being detained overnight in Cairo.
The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, strongly rebuked the Mubarak government
and its supporters, calling the harassment of journalists “completely and
totally unacceptable.” Speaking to reporters traveling with the president, he
said that “any journalist that has been detained should be released
immediately.”
Al Arabiya broadcast a plea to the Egyptian army to intervene after its
headquarters in Cairo came under sustained attack from pro-Mubarak demonstrators
wielding sticks and knives. “They destroyed some equipment outside the building,
and they said they would come in and destroy everything,” said Nakhle El Hage,
the channel’s news director, in a telephone interview from Dubai.
He said at first the army responded by deploying more soldiers to secure the
building, but a short time later the troops left. Mr. El Hage said the station
called the army, which told them informally that they should leave the building.
“The message we got from the army is that ‘you’re left on your own,’” he said.
The journalists were then forced to flee a nearby hotel as a group of
pro-Mubarak men broke into the station’s office. About four were reporting by
phone from the hotel, while others were hiding out at home or with friends.
“The crews have never been as scared as they are now,” Mr. El Hage said. “I have
correspondents who covered Lebanon and Gaza, but this is a different
experience.”
Two employees of Al Jazeera were dragged out of their car on the road from the
airport to central Cairo and were detained; in the early evening, three of its
journalists were still being held. A spokesman for the network also said its Web
site had faced “security issues.” Earlier in the day, the site was out of
service in Egypt as well as in the United States, though it appeared to return
later. The attacks on journalists started almost as soon as violent clashes
began on Wednesday near Tahrir Square, as orchestrated waves of pro-government
forces swept in, using rocks, bats, and knives and Molotov cocktails against the
antigovernment protesters.
The cellphone service provider Vodafone acknowledged that the government had
invoked emergency powers to force it to send out text messages.
Some of the messages appeared to include calls for people to turn out in support
of the government, and were sent before the violent clashes. Images of the
messages were posted online.
“The armed forces appeal to the sincere men of Egypt to face the traitors and
the criminals and protect our country and our beloved Egypt,” read one message
received just after 10 a.m. on Sunday.
Egyptian state television also began showing images from Tahrir Square on
Wednesday for the first time since the protests began. The coverage was focused
on supporters of Mr. Mubarak and on scenes of pitched street battles. It
appeared likely that the government was trying to paint a violent image of the
antigovernment protesters.
“This has gone beyond censorship. This is now about ridding Cairo of all
journalists working for foreign news media,” Jean-François Julliard , secretary
general of Reporters Without Borders. “State-controlled television has been
broadcasting soap operas and cooking shows for the past few days until today.”
The Egyptian government has sought to control information flow in the country
since large-scale protests against Mr. Mubarak and his subordinates began in
late January. But before Wednesday, overt harassment of reporters had been
scattered, and attempts to control the gripping images and narratives from Cairo
mostly failed. Wednesday’s attacks appeared to be the most coordinated and
widespread effort so far to block foreign reporters from doing their jobs.
“The Egyptian government is employing a strategy of eliminating witnesses to
their actions” in a “series of deliberate attacks on journalists,” Mohamed Abdel
Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday.
Reporters Without Borders said it had received dozens of confirmed reports of
violence against local and international journalists in Egypt on Wednesday, and
Ms. Dowlatshahi said the group expected an increase in attacks.
Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said the police shouted insults during the
Thursday raid. He said was speaking with one of the group’s researchers, Dan
Williams, during the roughly 30-minute encounter and that he and a translator
could hear much of what was said.
“Why do you come here to ruin our country?” one man shouted at Mr. Williams.
“You’re from the Mossad, you’re a spy.”
“No, I’m not; I’m from Human Rights Watch,” Mr. Williams responded.
He and several others, including two of the country’s prominent human rights
activists, Ahmed Seif and Khaled Ali, were then led out of the sixth floor
office and downstairs. There, a large group of pro-Mubarak protesters had massed
in front of the group’s downtown offices, about a 10-minute walk from the
central Tahrir Square, preventing anyone from leaving and cursing at the
foreigners.
“It was pretty clear that the mob who had gathered outside didn’t have any idea
what office they were protesting against, that they had just been dropped
there,” Mr. Bouckaert said.
Some of the Egyptian activists argued with the crowd as they were being
detained.
The crowd shouted back: “We are the real Egyptians. We love Egypt.”
So far no contact had been established with any of those who were detained.
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and J. David Goodman from New
York. Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting from New York and Brian Stelter
from Doha, Qatar.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
CAIRO — The Egyptian government broadened its crackdown on Thursday to the
international news media and human rights workers, in an apparent effort to
remove witnesses to the battle with antigovernment protesters.
With fighting between pro- and antigovernment forces escalating throughout the
day, armed supporters of President Hosni Mubarak attacked foreign journalists,
punching them and smashing their equipment. Men who protesters said were
plainclothes police officers shut down news media outlets that had been
operating in buildings overlooking Tahrir Square.
An informal center set up by human rights workers in the square was seized, and
a group of journalists was stopped in their car near the square by a gang of men
with knives and briefly turned over to the military police, ostensibly for their
protection. Two reporters working for The New York Times were released on
Thursday after being detained overnight in Cairo.
Two Washington Post staffers were among two dozen journalists detained by the
Interior Ministry on Thursday morning, the paper reported. The moves appeared to
be part of a systematic effort by government security agencies to round up
foreign journalists, seize their equipment and stop their reporting.
The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, condemned the Mubarak government’s
harassment of journalists, calling it “completely and totally unacceptable.”
Speaking to reporters traveling with President Obama, Mr. Gibbs said that “any
journalist that has been detained should be released immediately.”
The concerted effort to remove journalists lent a sense of foreboding to events
in the square, where battles continued between the protesters and the Mubarak
supporters, who human rights workers and protesters say were being paid and
organized by the government. People bringing food, water and medicine to the
protesters in the square were being stopped by Mubarak supporters, who
confiscated what they had and threw some of it into the Nile.
In the afternoon, the fighting spread beyond the square to the October 6th
Bridge, which rises above the Egyptian Museum. Shots were heard, and a surgeon
assisting the antigovernment protesters said three people were killed. “It was
the police or the army, we don’t know,” said the surgeon, Mohamed Ezz. “Only
they have guns.”
After the shots were fired, the army moved in to separate the combatants,
witnesses reported.
That followed a night of gunfire and a day of mayhem Wednesday that left at
least five dead and more than 800 wounded in a battle for the Middle East’s most
populous nation. With the violence rising, the United Nations ordered the
evacuation of much of its staff on Thursday, while more than 4,000 passengers
made their escape through Cairo airport, The Associated Press reported.
The government offered a series of conciliatory gestures in an effort to blunt
international condemnation of the bloody crackdown in Tahrir Square on
Wednesday. The newly appointed prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, apologized on
Thursday for the violence and vowed to investigate who had instigated it “I
offer my apology for everything that happened yesterday because it’s neither
logical nor rational,” he said.
The vice president, Omar Suleiman, said on state television that neither he nor
the president’s son, Gamal, who some thought was being groomed to succeed his
father, would be a candidate for the presidency next September.
Egypt’s public prosecutor issued a travel ban on former government ministers and
an official of the National Democratic Party on suspicion of theft of public
money, profiteering and fraud, state television reported. Among the four was the
hated former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, who commanded a secret police
force that was widely despised for its corruption and routine use of torture.
A government spokesman, Magdy Rady, denied that the authorities had been
involved in the violence. “To accuse the government of mobilizing this is a real
fiction. That would defeat our object of restoring the calm,” Mr. Rady told
Reuters. “We were surprised with all these actions.”
Officials in Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party were at pains Thursday to
absolve the president of any role in the violent crackdown Wednesday on
antigovernment protesters. Speaking with one voice they blamed the violence on
thugs hired by a group of rich businessmen eager to support the government.
But opposition leaders dismissed that explanation as a smoke screen, saying it
was highly unlikely that anyone would take such a fateful action without the
approval of the president himself.
The outcome of the widening unrest is pivotal in a region where uprising and
unrest have spread from Tunisia to many other lands, including Jordan and Yemen,
forcing their leaders into sudden concessions to their suddenly vocal foes and
stretching American diplomacy.
In Sana, the Yemeni capital, on Thursday, thousands of protesters assembled,
some for and some against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The demonstrations were
peaceful, in marked contrast to the chaos that ruled in Cairo on Wednesday when
Mr. Mubarak struck back at his opponents, unleashing waves of supporters armed
with clubs, rocks, knives and firebombs in a concerted assault on thousands of
antigovernment protesters in Tahrir Square. Calls for new protests in a number
of Middle East countries were circulating on Twitter, including: Algeria, Feb.
12; Bahrain, Feb. 14; and Libya, Feb. 17.
In the clashes on Wednesday, the Egyptian military did nothing to intervene. But
on Thursday for the first time, a thin line of soldiers backed by tanks and
armored personnel carriers appeared to have taken up positions between the
combatants and to be urging Mr. Mubarak’s supporters, numbering in the hundreds,
to avoid confrontation.
For their part, several thousand antigovernment protesters, far fewer than in
previous days, called for peaceful protest. “An Egyptian will not attack
another,” some chanted from behind makeshift barricades thrown up to seal access
to the square. “No bloodshed.”
When one man shouted an insult at a Mubarak supporter around 100 yards away,
another, Mahmoud Haqiqi, told him: “Don’t say that. Stay quiet. Tell them we are
here for their sake.”
After hours of bloody clashes starting on Wednesday with rocks, iron bars and
firebombs into the night, the confrontation seemed to escalate early Thursday
morning when the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire rang out over Cairo.
It was unclear whether the shots came from the pro-government demonstrators or
from the military forces stationed in the square.
Two people were killed by the gunfire and 45 people were wounded, said a doctor
at a nearby emergency clinic set up by the antigovernment demonstrators. After
the initial volleys, soldiers fired into the air, temporarily scattering most of
the people in the square.
More than 150 people have died in the uprising, human rights groups say.
By midmorning on Thursday, as the protesters’ numbers again began to swell, the
antigovernment side held its ground in Tahrir, or Liberation, Square — the focus
of the clashes — milling around and chanting slogans on the 10th day of the
campaign to oust Mr. Mubarak.
Volunteers arrived carrying water, yogurt, bananas and medical supplies for the
makeshift clinics that sprung up to tend the wounded. In the absence of any
municipal services or authority, others tried to sweep the square of debris,
using brooms, shovels and sheets of cardboard.
The violence on Wednesday and Thursday seemed to have hardened the protesters’
demands, going far beyond the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. “The people want the
execution of the president,” some chanted. “Mubarak is a war criminal.”
Some low-level clashes continued, but nothing on the scale of the volleys of
rocks and Molotov cocktails of the earlier fighting.
Early Thursday, the square was littered with rocks and makeshift barricades,
with smoke drifting overhead. Troops guarded the Egyptian Museum, Cairo’s great
storehouse of priceless antiquities dating to the time of the Pharaohs and a
huge emblem of national pride.
As the fear of further clashes gripped Cairo, foreigners, including many
Americans, continued their exodus.
In a statement, the American Embassy, which has ordered the compulsory
evacuation of some diplomats and their families, said that more than 1,900
American citizens had been flown out of Egypt since Monday and more would leave
on Thursday.
There was no indication that the antigovernment side was in a mood for retreat.
On Thursday, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood — the biggest organized opposition
group — again rejected a government offer to negotiate once the protesters had
left Tahrir Square.
Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Islamist organization, told Reuters the
movement was calling for the removal of “the regime, not the state.”
“This regime’s legitimacy is finished, with its president, with his deputy, its
ministers, its party, its Parliament. We said this clearly. We refuse to
negotiate with it because it has lost its legitimacy,” he said.
Only two days after the military pledged not to fire on protesters, it was
unclear where the army stood. Many protesters contended that Mr. Mubarak was
provoking a confrontation in order to prompt a military crackdown.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who was designated to negotiate with the government on behalf
of the opposition, demanded on Wednesday that the army move in and protect the
protesters. The deployment of plainclothes forces paid by Mr. Mubarak’s ruling
party — men known here as baltageya — has been a hallmark of the Mubarak
government, and there were many signs that the violence was carefully
choreographed.
The preparations for a confrontation began Wednesday morning, a day after Mr.
Mubarak pledged to step down in September while insisting that he would die on
Egyptian soil. The president’s supporters waved flags as though they were headed
to a protest, but armed themselves as though they were itching for a fight.
Several wore hard hats, one had a meat cleaver, and two others grabbed the raw
materials to make firebombs from their car.
Some of the Mubarak supporters arrived in buses. When they spoke with one
another, they referred to the antigovernment protesters as foreigners or
traitors, and to Mr. Mubarak as Egypt’s “father.”
Several people interviewed independently said that ruling party operatives had
offered them 50 Egyptian pounds, less than $10, if they agreed to demonstrate in
the square on Mr. Mubarak’s behalf. “Fifty pounds for my country!” said Yasmina
Salah, 29.
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and
Anthony Shadid from Cairo, Michael Slackman from Berlin, and J. David Goodman
from New York.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and J. DAVID GOODMAN
CAIRO — Security forces and gangs chanting in favor of the Egyptian
government mounted a campaign of intimidation against journalists and
representatives of human rights groups on Thursday.
By Thursday evening, both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya said they were unable to
provide live footage from Tahrir Square.
Egyptian security police raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, where many
nongovernmental organizations operate, said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies
director for Human Rights Watch. The police ordered the two dozen local and
foreign activists at the center to lie on the floor and disable their mobile
phones. From 12 to 16 of the activists, including a foreign researcher for Human
Rights Watch and another from Amnesty International, were then brought
downstairs and forced into a civilian van, which drove away accompanied by a
police vehicle..
The Egyptian state news agency on Thursday asked foreign reporters and crews to
move out of all the hotels near Tahrir Square in Cairo, the focal point of
antigovernment protests.
Near the square, a group of journalists were stopped in their car on Thursday by
a gang of men with knives, and turned over to military police, who held them
briefly.
The Committee to Protect Journalists was investigating at least 10 cases of
reporters being detained. According to the group, the government told the
journalists that they were not being arrested, but rather were being taken into
“protective custody.”
The Washington Post bureau chief and a photographer were among those detained.
Two reporters working for The New York Times were released on Thursday after
being detained overnight in Cairo.
The United States protested the actions against reporters.
“There is a concerted campaign to intimidate international journalists in Cairo
and interfere with their reporting,” Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of
state for public affairs, said Thursday morning in a statement via Twitter. “We
condemn such actions.”
The television channel Al Arabiya broadcast a plea to the Egyptian army to
intervene after its headquarters in Cairo came under sustained attack from
pro-Mubarak demonstrators wielding sticks and knives. “They destroyed some
equipment outside the building, and they said they would come in and destroy
everything,” said Nakhle El Hage, the channel’s news director, in a telephone
interview from Dubai.
He said at first the army responded by deploying more soldiers to secure the
building, but a short time later the troops left. Mr. El Hage said the station
called the army which told them informally that they should leave the building.
“The message we got from the army is that you’re left on your own,” he said.
The journalists were then forced to flee a nearby hotel as a group of
pro-Mubarak men broke into the station’s office. About four were reporting by
phone from the hotel, while others were hiding out at home or with friends.
“The crews have never been as scared as they are now,” Mr. El Hage said. “I have
correspondents who covered Lebanon and Gaza, but this is a different
experience.”
Two employees of Al Jazeera news network were dragged out of their car on the
road from the airport to central Cairo and were detained. A spokesman for the
network said its Web site had faced “security issues.” Earlier in the day, the
site was out of service in Egypt as well as in the United States, though it
appeared to return later. Jon Williams of the BBC said via Twitter that Egyptian
security had seized the news agency’s equipment from the Cairo Hilton “in an
attempt to stop us broadcasting.”
The attacks on journalists started almost as soon as violent clashes began on
Wednesday near Tahrir Square, as orchestrated waves of pro-government forces
swept in, using rocks, bats, and knives and Molotov cocktails against the
anti-government protesters.
The cellphone service provider Vodafone acknowledged that the government had
invoked emergency powers to force it to send out text messages.
Some of the messages appeared to include calls for people to turn out in support
of the government, and were sent before the violent clashes. Images of the
messages were posted online and first reported by The Guardian.
“To every mother-father-sister-brother, to every honest citizen preserve this
country as the nation is forever,” read one message.
With Internet services largely restored in the country, many Egyptian bloggers
began posting in earnest.
Egyptian state television also began showing images from Tahrir Square on
Wednesday for the first time since the protests began. The coverage was focused
on supporters of Mr. Mubarak and on scenes of pitched street battles. It
appeared likely that the government was trying to paint a violent image of the
antigovernment protesters.
“It’s clearly a media strategy that’s being implemented,” Tala Dowlatshahi, a
spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders. “State-controlled television has been
broadcasting soap operas and cooking shows for the past few days until today.”
The Egyptian government has sought to control information flow in the country
since large-scale protests against Mr. Mubarak and his subordinates began in
late January. But before Wednesday, overt harassment of reporters had been
scattered, and attempts to control the gripping images and narratives from Cairo
mostly failed. Wednesday’s attacks appeared to be the most coordinated and
widespread effort so far to block foreign reporters from doing their jobs.
“The Egyptian government is employing a strategy of eliminating witnesses to
their actions” in a “series of deliberate attacks on journalists,” Mohamed Abdel
Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday.
Reporters Without Borders said it had received dozens of confirmed reports of
violence against local and international journalists in Egypt on Wednesday, and
Ms. Dowlatshahi said the group expected an increase in attacks.
Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said police shouted insults during the
Thursday raid. He said was speaking with one of the group’s researchers, Dan
Williams, during the roughly 30-minute encounter and that he and a translator
could hear much of what was said.
“Why do you come here to ruin our country?” one man shouted at Mr. Williams.
“You’re from the Mossad, you’re a spy.”
“No I’m not; I’m from Human Rights Watch,” Mr. Williams responded.
He and several others, including two of the country’s prominent human rights
activists, Ahmed Seif and Khaled Ali, were then led out of the sixth floor
office and downstairs. There, a large group of pro-Mubarak protesters had massed
in front of the group’s downtown offices, about a ten-minute walk from the
central Tahrir Square, preventing anyone from leaving and cursing at the
foreigners.
“It was pretty clear that the mob who had gathered outside didn’t have any idea
what office they were protesting against that they had just been dropped there,”
Mr. Bouckaert said.
Some of the Egyptian activists argued with the crowd as they were being
detained.
The crowd shouted back: “We are the real Egyptians. We love Egypt.”
So far contact had been established with any of those who were detained.
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and J. David Goodman from New
York.
February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
CAIRO — The Egyptian government broadened its crackdown on Thursday to the
international news media and human rights workers, in an apparent effort to
remove witnesses to the battle with antigovernment protesters.
With fighting between anti- and pro-government forces escalating throughout the
day, armed supporters of President Hosni Mubarak attacked foreign journalists,
punching them and smashing their equipment. Men who protesters said were
plainclothes police officers shut down news media outlets that had been
operating in buildings overlooking Tahrir Square.
An informal center set up by human rights workers in the square was seized, and
a group of journalists was stopped in their car near the square by a gang of men
with knives and briefly turned over to the military police, ostensibly for their
protection. Two reporters working for The New York Times were released on
Thursday after being detained overnight in Cairo.
Two Washington Post staffers were among two dozen journalists detained by the
Interior Ministry Thursday morning, the paper reported.
The concerted effort to remove journalists lent a sense of foreboding to events
in the square, where battles continued between the protesters and the Mubarak
supporters, who human rights workers and protesters say are being paid and
organized by the government. People bringing food, water and medicine to the
protesters in the square were being stopped by Mubarak supporters, who
confiscated what they had and threw some of it into the Nile.
In the afternoon, the fighting spread beyond the square to the October 6th
Bridge, which rises above the Egyptian Museum. Shots were heard, and a surgeon
assisting the antigovernment protesters said three people were killed. “It was
the police or the army, we don’t know,” said the surgeon, Mohamed Ezz. “Only
they have guns.”
After the shots were fired, the army moved in to separate the combatants,
witnesses reported.
That followed a night of gunfire and a day of mayhem Wednesday that left at
least five dead and more than 800 wounded in a battle for the Middle East’s most
populous nation. With the violence rising, the United Nations ordered the
evacuation of much of its staff on Thursday, while more than 4,000 passengers
made their escape through Cairo airport, The Associated Press reported.
The government offered a series of conciliatory gestures in an effort to blunt
international condemnation of the bloody crackdown in Tahrir Square on
Wednesday. The newly appointed prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, apologized on
Thursday for the violence and vowed to investigate who had instigated it “I
offer my apology for everything that happened yesterday because it’s neither
logical nor rational,” he said.
The vice president, Omar Suleiman, said that the president’s son, Gamal, who
some thought was being groomed to succeed his father, would not be a candidate
for the presidency next September, state television reported.
Egypt’s public prosecutor issued a travel ban on former government ministers and
an official of the National Democratic Party on suspicion of theft of public
money, profiteering and fraud, state television reported. Among the four was the
hated former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, who commanded a secret police
force that was widely despised for its corruption and routine use of torture.
A government spokesman, Magdy Rady, denied that the authorities had been
involved in the violence. “To accuse the government of mobilizing this is a real
fiction. That would defeat our object of restoring the calm,” Mr. Rady told
Reuters. “We were surprised with all these actions.”
Officials in Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party were at pains Thursday to
absolve the president of any role in the violent crackdown Wednesday on
antigovernment protesters. Speaking with one voice they blamed the violence on
thugs hired by a group of rich businessmen eager to support the government.
But opposition leaders dismissed that explanation as a smoke screen, saying it
was highly unlikely that anyone would take such a fateful action without the
approval of the president himself.
The outcome of the widening unrest is pivotal in a region where uprising and
unrest have spread from Tunisia to many other lands, including Jordan and Yemen,
forcing their leaders into precipitate concessions to their suddenly vocal foes
and stretching American diplomacy.
In Sana, the Yemeni capital, on Thursday, thousands of protesters assembled,
some for and some against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The demonstrations were
peaceful, in marked contrast to the chaos that ruled in Cairo on Wednesday when
Mr. Mubarak struck back at his opponents, unleashing waves of supporters armed
with clubs, rocks, knives and firebombs in a concerted assault on thousands of
antigovernment protesters in Tahrir Square. Calls for new protests in a number
of Middle East countries were circulating on Twitter, including: Algeria, Feb.
12; Bahrain, Feb. 14; and Libya, Feb. 17.
In the clashes on Wednesday, the Egyptian military did nothing to intervene. But
on Thursday for the first time, a thin line of soldiers backed by tanks and
armored personnel carriers appeared to have taken up positions between the
combatants and to be urging Mr. Mubarak’s supporters, numbering in the hundreds,
to avoid confrontation.
For their part, several thousand antigovernment protesters, far fewer than in
previous days, called for peaceful protest. “An Egyptian will not attack
another,” some chanted from behind makeshift barricades thrown up to seal access
to the square. “No bloodshed.”
When one man shouted an insult at a Mubarak supporter around 100 yards away,
another, Mahmoud Haqiqi, told him: “Don’t say that. Stay quiet. Tell them we are
here for their sake.”
After hours of bloody clashes starting on Wednesday with rocks, iron bars and
firebombs into the night, the confrontation seemed to escalate early Thursday
morning when the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire rang out over Cairo.
It was unclear whether the shots came from the pro-government demonstrators or
from the military forces stationed in the square.
Two people were killed by the gunfire and 45 people were wounded, said a doctor
at a nearby emergency clinic set up by the antigovernment demonstrators. After
the initial volleys, soldiers fired into the air, temporarily scattering most of
the people in the square.
More than 150 people have died in the uprising, human rights groups say.
By midmorning on Thursday, as the protesters’ numbers again began to swell, the
antigovernment side held its ground in Tahrir, or Liberation, Square — the focus
of the clashes — milling around and chanting slogans on the 10th day of the
campaign to oust Mr. Mubarak.
Volunteers arrived carrying water, yogurt, bananas and medical supplies for the
makeshift clinics that sprung up to tend the wounded. In the absence of any
municipal services or authority, others tried to sweep the square of debris,
using brooms, shovels and sheets of cardboard.
The violence on Wednesday and Thursday seemed to have hardened the protesters’
demands, going far beyond the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. “The people want the
execution of the president,” some chanted. “Mubarak is a war criminal.”
Some low-level clashes continued, but nothing on the scale of the volleys of
rocks and Molotov cocktails of the earlier fighting.
Early Thursday, the square was littered with rocks and makeshift barricades,
with smoke drifting overhead. Troops guarded the Egyptian Museum, Cairo’s great
storehouse of priceless antiquities dating to the time of the Pharaohs and a
huge emblem of national pride.
As the fear of further clashes gripped Cairo, foreigners, including many
Americans, continued their exodus.
In a statement, the American Embassy, which has ordered the compulsory
evacuation of some diplomats and their families, said that more than 1,900
American citizens had been flown out of Egypt since Monday and more would leave
on Thursday.
There was no indication that the antigovernment side was in a mood for retreat.
On Thursday, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood — the biggest organized opposition
group — again rejected a government offer to negotiate once the protesters had
left Tahrir Square.
Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Islamist organization, told Reuters the
movement was calling for the removal of “the regime, not the state.”
“This regime’s legitimacy is finished, with its president, with his deputy, its
ministers, its party, its Parliament. We said this clearly. We refuse to
negotiate with it because it has lost its legitimacy,” he said.
Only two days after the military pledged not to fire on protesters, it was
unclear where the army stood. Many protesters contended that Mr. Mubarak was
provoking a confrontation in order to prompt a military crackdown.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who was designated to negotiate with the government on behalf
of the opposition, demanded on Wednesday that the army move in and protect the
protesters. The deployment of plainclothes forces paid by Mr. Mubarak’s ruling
party — men known here as baltageya — has been a hallmark of the Mubarak
government, and there were many signs that the violence was carefully
choreographed.
The preparations for a confrontation began Wednesday morning, a day after Mr.
Mubarak pledged to step down in September while insisting that he would die on
Egyptian soil. The president’s supporters waved flags as though they were headed
to a protest, but armed themselves as though they were itching for a fight.
Several wore hard hats; one had a meat cleaver, and two others grabbed the raw
materials to make firebombs from their car.
Some of the Mubarak supporters arrived in buses. When they spoke with one
another, they referred to the antigovernment protesters as foreigners or
traitors, and to Mr. Mubarak as Egypt’s “father.”
The anti-Mubarak demonstrators had organized themselves to try to avoid
violence. Men held hands in long chains to keep the two groups apart. Others,
with effusive apologies, searched those entering the square for weapons. Some
stepped in with whistles to break up arguments that had started to grow heated.
Several people interviewed independently said that ruling party operatives had
offered them 50 Egyptian pounds, less than $10, if they agreed to demonstrate in
the square on Mr. Mubarak’s behalf. “Fifty pounds for my country!” said Yasmina
Salah, 29.
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and
Anthony Shadid from Cairo, Michael Slackman from Berlin, and J. David Goodman
from New York.
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO — The future of the Arab world, perched between revolt and the contempt
of a crumbling order, was fought for in the streets of downtown Cairo on
Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of protesters who have reimagined the very notion of
citizenship in a tumultuous week of defiance proclaimed with sticks, home-made
bombs and a shower of rocks that they would not surrender their revolution to
the full brunt of an authoritarian government that answered their calls for
change with violence.
The Arab world watched a moment that suggested it would never be the same again
— and waited to see whether protest or crackdown would win the day. Words like
“uprising” and “revolution” only hint at the scale of events in Egypt, which
have already reverberated across Yemen, Jordan, Syria and even Saudi Arabia,
offering a new template for change in a region that long reeled from its own
sense of stagnation. “Every Egyptian understands now,” said Magdi al-Sayyid, one
of the protesters.
The protesters have spoken for themselves to a government that, like many across
the Middle East, treated them as a nuisance. For years, pundits have predicted
that Islamists would be the force that toppled governments across the Arab
world. But so far, they have been submerged in an outpouring of popular dissent
that speaks to a unity of message, however fleeting — itself a sea change in the
region’s political landscape. In the vast panorama of Tahrir Square on
Wednesday, Egyptians were stationed at makeshift barricades, belying pat
dismissals of the power of the Arab street.
“The street is not afraid of governments anymore,” said Shawki al-Qadi, an
opposition lawmaker in Yemen, itself roiled by change. “It is the opposite.
Governments and their security forces are afraid of the people now. The new
generation, the generation of the Internet, is fearless. They want their full
rights, and they want life, a dignified life.”
The power of Wednesday’s stand was that it turned those abstractions into
reality.
The battle was waged by Mohammed Gamil, a dentist in a blue tie who ran toward
the barricades of Tahrir Square. It was joined by Fayeqa Hussein, a veiled
mother of seven who filled a Styrofoam container with rocks. Magdi Abdel-Rahman,
a 60-year-old grandfather, kissed the ground before throwing himself against
crowds mobilized by a state bent on driving them from the square. And the charge
was led by Yasser Hamdi, who said his 2-year-old daughter would live a life
better than the one he endured.
“Aren’t you men?” he shouted. “Let’s go!”
As the crowd pushed back the government’s men, down a street of airline offices,
banks and a bookstore called L’Orientaliste, Mr. Abdel-Rahman made the stakes
clear. “They want to take our revolution from us,” he declared.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition force, has entered the fray.
In a poignant moment, its followers knelt in prayer at dusk, their faces lighted
by the soft glow of burning fires a stone’s throw away. But Mr. Abdel-Rahman’s
description of the uprising as a revolution suggested that the events of the
past week had overwhelmed even the Brotherhood, long considered the sole agent
of change here.
“Dignity” was a word often used Wednesday, and its emphasis underlined the
breadth of a movement that is, so far, leaderless. Neither the Brotherhood nor a
handful of opposition leaders — men like Mohammed ElBaradei or Ayman Nour — have
managed to articulate hopelessness, the humiliations at the hands of the police
and the outrage at having too little money to marry, echoed in the streets of
Palestinian camps in Jordan and in the urban misery of Baghdad’s Sadr City. For
many, the Brotherhood itself is a vestige of an older order that has failed to
deliver.
“The problem is that for 30 years, Mubarak didn’t let us build an alternative,”
said Adel Wehba, as he watched the tumult in the square. “No alternative for
anything.”
The lack of an alternative may have led to the uprising, making the street the
last option for not only the young and dispossessed but also virtually every
element of Egypt’s population — turbaned clerics, businessmen from wealthy
suburbs, film directors and well-to-do engineers. Months ago, despair at the
prospect of change in the Arab world was commonplace. Protesters on Wednesday
acted as though they were making a last stand at what they had won, in an
uprising that is distinctly nationalist.
“He won’t go,” President Hosni Mubarak’s supporters chanted on the other side.
“He will go,” went the reply. “We’re not going to go.”
The word “traitor” rang out Wednesday. The insult was directed at Mr. Mubarak,
and it echoed the sentiment heard in so many parts of the Arab world these days
— governments of an American-backed order in most of the region have lost their
legitimacy, built on the idea that people would surrender their rights for the
prospect of security and stability. In the square on Wednesday, protesters
offered an alternative, their empowerment standing as possibly the most
remarkable legacy of a people who often lamented their apathy.
Everyone seemed joined in the moment, fists, batons and rocks banging any piece
of metal to rally themselves. A man stood on a tank turret, urging protesters
forward. Another cried as he shouted at Mr. Mubarak’s men. “Come here!” he said.
“Here is where’s right.” Men and women ferried rocks in bags, cartons and boxes
to the barricades. Bassem Yusuf, a heart surgeon, heard news of the clashes on
television and headed to the square at dusk, stitching wounds at a makeshift
clinic run by volunteers.
“We’re not going to destroy our country,” said Mohammed Kamil, a 48-year-old,
surging with the crowd. “We’re not going to let this dog make us do that.”
From minute-by-minute coverage on Arabic channels to conversations from Iraq to
Morocco, the Middle East watched breathlessly at a moment as compelling as any
in the Arab world in a lifetime. For the first time in a generation, Arabs seem
to be looking again to Egypt for leadership, and that sense of destiny was
voiced throughout the day.
“I tell the Arab world to stand with us until we win our freedom,” said Khaled
Yusuf, a cleric from Al Azhar, a once esteemed institution of religious
scholarship now beholden to the government. “Once we do, we’re going to free the
Arab world.”
For decades, the Arab world has waited for a savior — be it Gamal Abdel-Nasser,
the charismatic Egyptian president, or even, for a time, Saddam Hussein. No one
was waiting for a savior on Wednesday. Before nearly three decades of
accumulated authority — the power of a state that can mobilize thousands to heed
its whims — people had themselves.
“I’m fighting for my freedom,” Noha al-Ustaz said as she broke bricks on the
curb. “For my right to express myself. For an end to oppression. For an end to
injustice.”
“Go forward,” the cries rang out, and she did, disappearing into a sea of men.
Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By RAVI SOMAIYA
The online group Anonymous said Wednesday that it had paralyzed the Egyptian
government’s Web sites in support of the antigovernment protests.
Anonymous, a loosely defined group of hackers from all over the world, gathered
about 500 supporters in online forums and used software tools to bring down the
sites of the Ministry of Information and President Hosni Mubarak’s National
Democratic Party, said Gregg Housh, a member of the group who disavows any
illegal activity himself. The sites were unavailable Wednesday afternoon.
The attacks, Mr. Housh said, are part of a wider campaign that Anonymous has
mounted in support of the antigovernment protests that have roiled the Arab
world. Last month, the group shut down the Web sites of the Tunisian government
and stock exchange in support of the uprising that forced the country’s
dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee.
Mr. Housh said that the group had used its technical knowledge to help
protesters in Egypt defy a government shutdown of the Internet that began last
week. “We want freedom,” he said of the group’s motivation. “It’s as simple as
that. We’re sick of oppressive governments encroaching on people.”
Anonymous also mounted strikes late last year, characterized by some of its
supporters as a “cyberwar,” against companies like MasterCard, Visa and PayPal
that had refused to process donations to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.
The F.B.I. said last week that it had executed 40 search warrants “throughout
the United States” in connection with that campaign. The strikes by Anonymous,
known as “distributed denial of service” attacks, could lead to criminal charges
that carry 10-year prison sentences, the F.B.I. said. Arrests have been made and
equipment seized in Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and France,
according to British and American officials. They declined to provide further
details.
Barrett Brown, who is helping to organize a legal defense for those who might be
prosecuted, said further raids were expected.
Mr. Housh said “these arrests aren’t going to have any effect.”
Just hours after the raids, he said, about 600 people, including many who had
been arrested and then released, were back online and coordinating efforts in
Egypt.
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER, MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI
This article is by Helene Cooper, Mark Landler and Mark Mazzetti.
WASHINGTON — After days of delicate public and private diplomacy, the United
States openly broke with its most stalwart ally in the Arab world on Wednesday,
as the Obama administration strongly condemned violence by allies of President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt against protesters and called on him to speed up his exit
from power.
Egypt’s government hit back swiftly. The Foreign Ministry released a defiant
statement saying the calls from “foreign parties” had been “rejected and aimed
to incite the internal situation in Egypt.” And Egyptian officials reached out
to reporters to make clear how angry they were at their onetime friend.
Separately, in an interview, a senior Egyptian government official took aim at
President Obama’s call on Tuesday night for a political transition to begin
“now” — a call that infuriated Cairo.
But the White House was not backing down. “I want to be clear,” said Robert
Gibbs, the press secretary. “ ‘Now’ started yesterday.”
The Obama administration seemed determined Wednesday to put as much daylight as
possible between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mubarak, once considered an unshakable
American supporter in a tumultuous region, with Mr. Gibbs once again raising the
specter of a cutoff of American aid to the Mubarak government if the Egyptian
president failed to bend.
“There are things that the government needs to do,” he said. “There are reforms
that need to be undertaken. And there are opposition entities that have to be
included in the conversations as we move toward free and fair elections.” Those
elections are currently scheduled for September, but the State Department
spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said, “The sooner that can happen, the better.”
The open rupture between the United States and Egypt illustrates how swift and
dramatic changes in Cairo are altering the calculus of the entire region and the
administration’s foreign policy agenda. Besides Egypt, there were upheavals this
week among other close American allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, and in the
long struggle to reach a Middle East peace. Israeli officials expressed concern
that Mr. Mubarak’s abrupt exit could jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between
Egypt and Israel.
Even as the White House was trying to react to the latest flare-up of violence
in Egypt on Wednesday — Mr. Gibbs pointedly criticized attacks against the media
in Egypt and against “peaceful demonstrators” — officials at the Pentagon, the
State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House were
running various scenarios across the region in an effort to keep up with events.
What would the covert American war in Yemen look like if the supportive Yemeni
president were to be forced out? Will Mr. Mubarak’s successor duplicate his
support of the Middle East peace process? Will the shifts in the region benefit
Islamic extremists, who will try to capitalize on unrest, or will it show the
Arab street the power of a secular uprising?
“A full range of events are being discussed in many buildings throughout
Washington,” Mr. Gibbs said.
As evidence of how far the rift has gone, a senior Egyptian official reached out
to a reporter to criticize Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“There is a contradiction between calling on the transition to begin now, and
the calls which President Mubarak himself has made for an orderly transition,”
said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Mubarak’s primary
responsibility is to ensure an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. We can’t
do that if we have a vacuum of power.” He said that the Egyptian government has
“a serious issue with how the White House is spinning this.”
For the Obama administration and the Egyptian government, the flip from allies
to open confrontation has been fast. When former President George Bush was
briefed ahead of his recent call to Mr. Mubarak — a call Mr. Bush volunteered to
make because he was an old friend — Mr. Bush was given no instructions to push
the leader toward the exit, according to people familiar with the conversations.
“No one wanted the vacuum of power that would happen if Mubarak left too soon,”
said a former senior official who was consulted by the White House.
Now, though, administration officials are calling for visible steps from the
Mubarak government. At a minimum, the Obama administration wants to make sure
that political opponents of Mr. Mubarak are included in negotiations — which the
United States wants to see begin at once — over how to restructure Egypt’s
political system in a way that will take into account the grievances of the
protesters.
American officials do not want a repeat of past promises from the Mubarak
government for free elections that were followed by a shutting of the process to
its opposition. After watching Mr. Mubarak’s statement — in which he fell far
short of sweeping reform — Mr. Obama decided to toughen his own language
further, demanding that change begin immediately. “The language was crafted
after he spoke,” a senior administration official said.
“They want something better than when Mubarak said, ‘I want my Parliament to
amend the articles of the Constitution relating to the presidential elections,’”
said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert at the Center for American Progress.
“If you’re the opposition, you’re thinking: ‘This is the Parliament which was
elected in sham elections? No way.’ ”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Egypt’s vice president, Omar
Suleiman, in the afternoon to reinforce Mr. Obama’s call for Mr. Mubarak to
begin a transition immediately. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike
Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both called their counterparts on
Wednesday as well. Officials said the administration is worried about a call for
even larger protests on Friday, and said Wednesday’s clashes had narrowed Mr.
Mubarak’s options.
Mr. Obama’s private emissary to Mr. Mubarak, Frank G. Wisner, abruptly left
Cairo on Wednesday evening after only two meetings, one with the president and
one with Mr. Suleiman.
“We felt that he had done what he could do,” the official said. “They had a
conversation, and we felt that it had gone as far as it could.”
For the United States, the unfolding crisis is about much more than just a rift
with an ally.
With the popular revolts in Egypt and Yemen — and a government already deposed
in Tunisia — American counterterrorism officials are concerned that radical
factions in those countries could find a new foothold amid the chaos. The United
States is heavily reliant on foreign partners, and officials and outside experts
said that losing Mr. Mubarak or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen would deal
a short-term blow to its counterterrorism campaign.
Or perhaps not.
“There’s part of this that’s dangerous to Al Qaeda,” said Juan Zarate of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was a top counterterrorism
official during George W. Bush’s administration. “If the street protests lead to
a peaceful, pluralistic transition, that does huge damage to the Al Qaeda
narrative,” he said. That narrative holds that authoritarian pro-American
governments should be deposed by violent jihad.
Still, some cautioned that it could take months or years for the long-term
impact of the recent uprisings to be revealed. Citing Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution
of 2005, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University pointed out that the uprising
had the immediate impact of bringing down the country’s Syria-backed government
and causing the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, but six years later
the militant group Hezbollah is now Lebanon’s de-facto government.
Experts said Mr. Saleh might be able to navigate the shoals of popular unrest
more expertly than President Mubarak.
Described by American officials as a wily survivor, Mr. Saleh has spent years
dealing with strife inside Yemen, from Shiite separatists to militants linked to
Al Qaeda. Some in Washington questioned whether the pledge he made Wednesday to
step cede power in 2013 was sincere, or a clever tactic to appease his enemies
in Yemen.
“Saleh is used to dancing in the snake pit,” Mr. Zarate said.
As Crisis Unfolds Overseas, Diplomats Gather in Washington
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON — Nearly all the top United States diplomats from around the world
met here on Wednesday, summoned by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to
consider new strategies to energize diplomacy and streamline development, but
their arrival coincided with one of the most tumultuous moments for American
diplomacy in recent memory.
The extraordinary convening of top diplomatic minds had been meant to take place
at a slow time of year, Mrs. Clinton wryly told the meeting of nearly 300
ambassadors and heads of mission in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the State
Department.
“What better time to pull you from your posts and responsibilities?” she asked,
to laughter.
Reflecting the ferment in the Middle East, there was one notable absentee:
Margaret Scobey, the ambassador to Egypt, who remained in Cairo.
The meeting, in fact, came at a time of high challenge for the department on
many fronts beyond Cairo and other embattled Arab capitals, a part of the world
where many career diplomats have seen service. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
pose extreme demands. Congressional pressure for budget cuts is unusually sharp.
And the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures continues to complicate
diplomats’ day-to-day work.
Mrs. Clinton called the meeting a “first-ever in American history
all-hands-on-deck ambassadorial conference.”
The department’s various bureaus have long convened ambassadors in their
respective regions on a regular basis. These days, owing to post-Sept. 11
security concerns, these assemblies often occur in Washington.
This week’s meeting, other than two major speeches, was closed to the press. But
Craig Kelly, who until September was a deputy assistant secretary of state and
involved in WikiLeaks-related issues, said Wednesday that he could not imagine
that the unauthorized disclosures of sensitive diplomatic cables were not a
major topic both of working groups and corridor talk.
“The key is not so much the water already under the bridge,” said Mr. Kelly, now
a vice president with the Cohen Group, a consultancy in Washington.
“For the future, I think it’s very important that we convince the world that
we’ve taken the sort of technical steps adequate to protect sensitive
information,” he said..
The current global get-together, said Howard B. Schaffer, a former ambassador to
Bangladesh and retired career diplomat, can be “enormously useful,” allowing the
ambassador to India to speak face-to-face with the ambassador to Pakistan, for
example, and to renew contacts in Washington.
Several ambassadors shoe-horned in other business here in Washington. John R.
Beyrle, ambassador to Russia, attended President Obama’s signing of the new
Start treaty; Ambassador James F. Jeffrey testified about Iraq on Tuesday before
a Senate committee. Another diplomatic luminary, here from Beijing, had a rather
different mission. Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman Jr. delivered his letter of
resignation to Mr. Obama and is said to be contemplating a presidential campaign
of his own.
The assembly was addressed by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. The choice of speaker, and the words he used, underscored the unusually
close relationship Mrs. Clinton has forged with Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates, who has vigorously defended the need for a well-financed State
Department. Admiral Mullen called such financing “absolutely mandatory.”
Mrs. Clinton seemed to suggest that, given the budget battles ahead, it might
not be a bad time for a few hundred people with honed diplomatic skills to be in
Washington. “There is a great deal of push coming from the new Congress,
particularly the House,” to cut State Department and the United States Agency
for International Development budgets to 2008 levels,” Mrs. Clinton told the
ambassadors, “despite the fact that we are about to inherit an overwhelming
responsibility in Iraq.”
Indeed, as the military mission there winds down, the American staff overseen by
the Embassy in Baghdad is slated to more than double within the year, from an
already substantial 8,000 to about 17,000.
“We know that there are those in the Congress who have even advocated
eliminating all foreign aid, eliminating A.I.D.,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And it’s
going to take some outreach and education to discuss with them and lead them
through our rationale.”
The meeting was nominally convened to help diplomats better understand, and
prepare to implement, the results of a signature project of Mrs. Clinton’s: the
first quadrennial review of American diplomacy and development, an exercise
modeled on the long-time practice of the Defense Department.
The 18-month review produced a 210-page report, issued in December, that
reflects Mrs. Clinton’s goals of placing heavier emphasis on resolving
conflicts, while reinvigorating the Agency for International Development, which
saw its staff shrink 38 percent from 1990 to 2007.
She has promised to do so while saving money, a task made more difficult by the
growth of her department that began under President George W. Bush.
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON — Once a month or so, a coterie of aging diplomats convenes at the
elegant Metropolitan Club of New York. Over lunch in a glass-enclosed restaurant
overlooking Central Park, they engage in verbal thrust and parry over the
foreign policy issues of the day.
The man who sits at the head of the table is Frank G. Wisner, a bald,
barrel-chested, martini-drinking (he gave up cigars, friends say) 72-year-old
retired ambassador and businessman. Like his lunch mates, he is of a distinct
class in Washington: a corps of foreign policy realists who came of age in an
era when American power reigned supreme, and who have the heft and experience to
troubleshoot the crises of the moment.
When the United States and Iran headed into a stalemate on nuclear issues during
the administration of George W. Bush — who had branded Iran part of the “axis of
evil” — Mr. Wisner was among several well-connected former officials pursuing a
“track two” process of back-channel communications to find a way out. (The
effort fizzled.)
When Mr. Bush was contemplating war in Iraq, Mr. Wisner joined with Edward P.
Djerejian, another fellow former ambassador, to publicly warn against it. Yet
when Mr. Bush needed help bringing Kosovo to independence, his State Department
deployed Mr. Wisner as chief negotiator there. (He was successful.)
“He’s one of the supreme American diplomats of the last 30 to 40 years,” said R.
Nicholas Burns, who oversaw the Kosovo talks as under secretary of state.
This week, Mr. Wisner, whose stints around the globe have included four
ambassadorships, one of them to Egypt, was briefly President Obama’s man in
Cairo, charged with prodding an old friend, President Hosni Mubarak, to make his
exit. How much effect he had was unclear. On Wednesday, as Mr. Mubarak resisted
Mr. Obama’s demand for an immediate peaceful transition and each side dug in its
heels, Mr. Wisner left the country.
“He wasn’t sent there to flatter him and hold his hand,” said Leslie H. Gelb,
the longtime diplomat and journalist who co-founded the lunch club with Mr.
Wisner. “He was sent there because he has a very close relationship with
Mubarak, and because that’s the kind of person who can best deliver some hard
messages.”
An imposing presence with a resonant voice whose last posting was as ambassador
to India, Mr. Wisner has spent the years since his retirement in 1997 operating
at the nexus of diplomacy and business. For more than a decade, he was vice
chairman of the insurance giant A.I.G.; he left in 2009, just as the company was
getting bailed out by American taxpayers, and joined the lobbying firm Patton
Boggs.
He is well known in foreign policy circles, but not beyond them. Unlike the late
Richard C. Holbrooke — the Obama administration envoy to Pakistan and
Afghanistan, who was one of Mr. Wisner’s best friends — he does not crave the
limelight. But he is respected enough that his name is being bandied about as a
possible Holbrooke replacement, a job friends say he would be unlikely to take.
“He’s not a flashy fellow in the sense that Dick was,” said Morton I.
Abramowitz, another longtime diplomat who knows Mr. Wisner well. “But he’s very
solid, he studies the issues, he’s a very serious guy who works very quietly,
very effectively and knows how to deal with people.”
Mr. Gelb put it this way: “Dick saw being a public figure as part of the power
he needed to do what he wanted. Frank was much more of an inside man.”
But as did Mr. Holbrooke, Mr. Wisner relished the frisson of the diplomat’s
life. He has been married twice to upper-crust French women; Mr. Wisner’s
current wife, from whom he is separated, was once married to Pal Sarkozy, the
father of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
He is accustomed to being dropped into chaotic situations. During the
administration of the first President Bush, Mr. Wisner was sent to the
Philippines to help stabilize the administration of President Corazon Aquino.
She had survived several coup attempts by rogue elements of the Philippine
military, and Mr. Wisner’s office in the United States Embassy was part of the
old American governor-general’s suite.
Cigar in hand, he loved to take visitors out on the giant veranda overlooking
the bay and describe the sweep of American interactions with the Philippines,
back to the days of the Spanish-American War.
Here in Washington, news that Mr. Obama had tapped Mr. Wisner revived memories
for some of an even more colorful Frank Wisner: Mr. Wisner’s father, a
freewheeling if mentally unstable cold-war-era spy who helped found the modern
C.I.A. and ran its clandestine service. The elder Mr. Wisner’s clandestine
exploits were said to have included masterminding an anticommunist coup in
Guatemala in 1954. He suffered a mental breakdown after the Soviets crushed the
Hungarian revolution in 1956 and never quite recovered; in 1965, he committed
suicide.
His son chose a more conventional path, the Foreign Service. He graduated from
Princeton University in 1961, learned Arabic and pursued a career that took him
from Algeria to Vietnam at the height of the war there, to Zambia, Egypt, the
Philippines and India, with tours every so often back in Washington.
“I told Frank, ‘The title of ambassador does not suffice for you, Frank. We need
to call you Pasha,’ ” said Mr. Djerejian, using the honorary title. “He reveled
in the role of being an ambassador. He loved the substance and the trappings of
the role, and was very enthusiastic about representing the United States
abroad.”
At the monthly lunch meetings, Mr. Wisner plays the role of enforcer when the
discussion gets too rowdy. The high-powered attendees include J. Stapleton Roy,
an East Asia specialist and three-time ambassador, and Mr. Holbrooke before his
death.
Mr. Gelb says they met for a time at an Albanian restaurant, which everyone
liked, until Mr. Wisner insisted they move to the Metropolitan Club. Mr. Gelb
decided it was a waste of time to negotiate.
“A Zambian minister once told me it was always easier to agree with Frank than
to let the meeting go on for four days,” he said. “He has that kind of
persistence.”
Mark Landler and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO — Just hours after President Hosni Mubarak declared Tuesday night that
he would step down in September as modern Egypt’s longest-serving leader,
President Obama strongly suggested that Mr. Mubarak’s concession was not enough,
declaring that an “orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful,
and it must begin now.”
While the meaning of the last phrase was deliberately vague, it appeared to be a
signal that Mr. Mubarak might not be able to delay the shift to a new
leadership.
In a 30-minute phone call to Mr. Mubarak just before his public remarks, Mr.
Obama was more forceful in insisting on a rapid transition, according to
officials familiar with the discussion.
Mr. Mubarak’s 10-minute speech announcing he would step down came after his
support from the powerful Egyptian military began to crumble and after American
officials urged him not to run again for president.
But Mr. Mubarak’s offer fell short of the protestors’ demands for him to step
down immediately and even face trial, and it could well inflame passions in an
uprising that has rivaled some of the most epic moments in Egypt’s contemporary
history. The protests have captivated a broader Arab world that has already seen
a leader fall in Tunisia this month and growing protests against other
American-backed governments.
Mr. Mubarak, 82, said he would remain in office until a presidential election in
September and, in emotional terms, declared that he would never leave Egypt.
“The Hosni Mubarak who speaks to you today is proud of his achievements over the
years in serving Egypt and its people,” he said, wearing a dark suit and seeming
vigorous in the speech broadcast on state television. “This is my country. This
is where I lived, I fought and defended its land, sovereignty and interests, and
I will die on its soil.”
In Tahrir Square, crowds waved flags as the speech was televised on a screen in
the square. “Leave!” they chanted, in what has become a refrain of the
demonstrations.
“There is nothing now the president can do except step down and let go of
power,” said Mohammed el-Beltagui, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s
most powerful opposition group, which has entered into the fray with Mr.
Mubarak. Those sentiments were echoed by other voices of the opposition,
including Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate, and Ayman Nour, a longtime
dissident.
The speech and the demonstration, whose sheer numbers represented a scene rarely
witnessed in the Arab world, illustrated the deep, perhaps unbridgeable, divide
that exists between ruler and ruled in Egypt, the most populous Arab country and
once the axis on which the Arab world revolved.
The events here have reverberated across a region captivated by an uprising that
in some ways has brought a new prestige to Egypt in an Arab world it once
dominated culturally and politically. King Abdullah II of Jordan fired his
cabinet after protests there on Tuesday, and the Palestinian cabinet in the West
Bank said it would hold long-promised municipal elections “as soon as possible.”
Organizers in Yemen and Syria, countries with their own authoritarian rulers,
have called for protests this week.
In his speech, Mr. Mubarak was pugnacious, accusing protesters of sowing chaos
and political forces here of adding “fuel to the fire.” He fell back to the
refrain that has underlined his three decades in power — security and stability
— and vowed that he would spend his remaining months restoring calm.
“The events of the past few days impose on us, both citizens and leadership, the
choice between chaos and stability,” he said. “I am now absolutely determined to
finish my work for the nation in a way that ensures its safekeeping.”
American officials were clearly disappointed by Mr. Mubarak’s effort to stay in
office for the next eight months, but Mr. Obama, saying, “It is not the role of
any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders,” stopped short of demanding that
Mr. Mubarak leave office immediately.
But if Mr. Obama pushed Mr. Mubarak, he did not shove him, at least in his
public remarks. He commended the Egyptian military for its “professionalism and
patriotism” in refusing to use force against the protesters, comments that
clearly undercut Mr. Mubarak’s efforts to maintain control. He praised the
protesters for their peaceful action, and he reinforced that “the status quo is
not sustainable.”
Mr. Obama was clearly hopeful that Mr. Mubarak would decide to leave office
sooner. But he warned there would be “difficult days ahead,” a clear signal that
he expected the transition period to be lengthy, and messy.
The uprising, though, seems to have brought a new dynamic to political life
here, on display in the scenes of jubilation and protest in Tahrir Square. The
government suffered what could prove a fatal blow to its credibility as police
authority collapsed Saturday and Mr. Mubarak’s officials met the early protests
with half-hearted measures. On Monday, the army said it would not fire on
protesters, calling their demands legitimate and leaving Mr. Mubarak with few
options.
Protesters defied a curfew that has become a joke to residents and overcame
attempts by the government to keep them at bay by suspending train service,
closing roads and shutting down public transportation to Cairo. Peasants from
the south joined Islamists from the Nile Delta, businessmen and street-smart
youths from gritty Bulaq to join in the bluntest of calls at the protest: that
Mr. Mubarak leave immediately.
“Welcome to a free Egypt,” went one cry.
“No one would have imagined a week before that this would happen in Egypt,” said
Basel Ramsis, 37, a film director who returned from Spain for the uprising. “I
had to be here. We all have to be here. The Egyptian people can change Egypt
now.”
As the uprising has spread, thousands of foreigners have sought to flee the
country in chaotic scenes at the Cairo airport. The United States ordered all
nonemergency embassy staff members and other American government personnel to
leave the country, fearing unrest as the protests build toward Friday, when
organizers hope for even bigger crowds in what they portray as a last push.
But most of Cairo slumbered, its streets free of chronic traffic jams and its
shops shuttered out of anxiety or respect for a strike called to coincide with
the protest. Crowds walked miles to the rendezvous. Others woke up in the
square’s muddy patches, where they have slept for days.
Ayman Ahmed ventured alone, carrying a cardboard placard with the lyrics of a
song by Abdel Halim Hafez, an Egyptian icon.
“And we won when the army rose and revolted,” it went, a song he knew by heart,
“when we ignited a revolution and fire, when we fought corruption, when we
liberated the country, when we realized independence, and we won, we won, we
won.”
He passed slogans scrawled on bridges, lampposts and the statues of lions before
the Kasr al-Nil Bridge. “Mubarak is a thief,” one read. “Mubarak is a coward.”
But, perhaps most poignantly, one declared, “Egypt is mine.”
In the long years of Mr. Mubarak’s rule, Egypt was spared the brutality of
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the delusions of the Baath Party in Syria. But his
brand of despotism produced an authoritarianism that suffocated his people, a
bureaucracy that corrupted the most mundane transaction and a malaise that saw
Egypt turn inward.
“I’ve always said that my age is 60, but I haven’t lived for 30 years,” said
Leila Abu Nasr, walking with her husband, Sharif. “We could have done so much
more.”
Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets of Alexandria, Egypt’s
second-largest city, and other protests gathered in the Nile Delta, in the south
and along the Suez Canal.
In an ominous sign that the unrest had not ended, about 250 pro-Mubarak
demonstrators attacked the crowd of several thousand in Alexandria with knives
and sticks, witnesses said. A dozen people were injured in the melee that
followed, medical officials on the scene said. The army fired warning shots to
separate the groups.
The very desire for sweeping change on the part of the protesters may present
the greatest challenge in the transition period Mr. Mubarak declared Tuesday
night. Mr. Mubarak promised changes, but the Parliament responsible for them is
completely dominated by his party.
The opposition may similarly be at a disadvantage. Organized by young people and
driven by the poor and dispossessed in the country of 80 million, the uprising
has stunned even the most critical of his government. The Muslim Brotherhood has
so far stayed in the background, and other opposition leaders, like Mr.
ElBaradei and Mr. Nour, have struggled to cultivate support.
Several activists said Mr. Mubarak’s gesture might have been enough had it been
made a week ago. But each day in the square, new cries have rung out — a new
constitution, the removal of the ruling party and a trial of Mr. Mubarak and his
cronies.
“It’s not just about President Mubarak,” said Mustafa Mohammed, 32, a laborer.
“Of course, he has to go. But the whole regime has to go with him.”
The accumulated miseries of all his years in power seemed to underline the anger
on Tuesday. Naser Muftah, a factory worker, said he had to go by the name Nader
because bureaucrats fouled up his identity card, and he could not change it.
Walid Kamel, a lawyer, said his clients were treated like dogs anytime they
entered a police station.
Each seemed to bathe in the sense of empowerment represented by the square. From
those kneeling in the mud for noon prayers and the couples walking by, with no
fear of harassment, the message was the same: They would prove to the government
that they were better than it had so long portrayed them.
“You see all these people, with no stealing, no girls being bothered, and no
violence,” said Omar Saleh. “He’s trying to tell us that without me, without the
regime, you will fall into anarchy, but we have all told him, ‘No.’ ”
Reporting was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim and Liam
Stack from Cairo; Nicholas Kulish from Alexandria, Egypt; and David E. Sanger
from Washington.
February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
RAMALLAH, West Bank
I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he
begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years
is no longer relevant.”
That pretty much sums up the disorienting sense of shock and awe that the
popular uprising in Egypt has inflicted on the psyche of Israel’s establishment.
The peace treaty with a stable Egypt was the unspoken foundation for every
geopolitical and economic policy in Israel for the last 35 years, and now it’s
gone. It’s as if Americans suddenly woke up and found both Mexico and Canada
plunged into turmoil on the same day.
“Everything that once anchored our world is now unmoored,” remarked Mark Heller,
a Tel Aviv University strategist. “And it is happening right at a moment when
nuclearization of the region hangs in the air.”
This is a perilous time for Israel, and its anxiety is understandable. But I
fear Israel could make its situation even more perilous if it succumbs to the
argument one hears from a number of senior Israeli officials today that the
events in Egypt prove that Israel can’t make a lasting peace with the
Palestinians. It’s wrong and dangerous.
To be sure, Hosni Mubarak, Israel’s longtime ally, deserves all the wrath being
directed at him. The best time to make any big, hard decision is when you are at
your maximum strength. You’ll always think and act more clearly. For the last 20
years, President Mubarak has had all the leverage he could ever want to truly
reform Egypt’s economy and build a moderate, legitimate political center to fill
the void between his authoritarian state and the Muslim Brotherhood. But Mubarak
deliberately maintained the political vacuum between himself and the Islamists
so that he could always tell the world, “It’s either me or them.” Now he is
trying to reform in a panic with no leverage. Too late.
But Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is in danger of becoming the Mubarak
of the peace process. Israel has never had more leverage vis-à-vis the
Palestinians and never had more responsible Palestinian partners. But Netanyahu
has found every excuse for not putting a peace plan on the table. The Americans
know it. And thanks to the nasty job that Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV just did in
releasing out of context all the Palestinian concessions — to embarrass the
Palestinian leadership — it’s now obvious to all how far the Palestinians have
come.
No, I do not know if this Palestinian leadership has the fortitude to close a
deal. But I do know this: Israel has an overwhelming interest in going the extra
mile to test them.
Why? With the leaders of both Egypt and Jordan scrambling to shuffle their
governments in an effort to stay ahead of the street, two things can be said for
sure: Whatever happens in the only two Arab states that have peace treaties with
Israel, the moderate secularists who had a monopoly of power will be weaker and
the previously confined Muslim Brotherhood will be stronger. How much remains to
be seen.
As such, it is virtually certain that the next Egyptian government will not have
the patience or room that Mubarak did to maneuver with Israel. Same with the new
Jordanian cabinet. Make no mistake: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing
to do with sparking the demonstrations in Egypt and Jordan, but
Israeli-Palestinian relations will be impacted by the events in both countries.
If Israel does not make a concerted effort to strike a deal with the
Palestinians, the next Egyptian government will “have to distance itself from
Israel because it will not have the stake in maintaining the close relationship
that Mubarak had,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster. With the big
political changes in the region, “if Israel remains paranoid and messianic and
greedy it will lose all its Arab friends.”
To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why
Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be
talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking
themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds
for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea
and the Jordan River.
What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by
a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of
history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But
that’s over.
“Today your legitimacy has to be based on what you deliver,” the Palestinian
prime minister, Salam Fayyad, explained to me in his Ramallah office. “Gone are
the days when you can say, ‘Deal with me because the other guys are worse.’ ”
I had given up on Netanyahu’s cabinet and urged the U.S. to walk away. But that
was B.E. — Before Egypt. Today, I believe President Obama should put his own
peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and
demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital
for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to
delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story
as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.
February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
Jerusalem
ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares.
They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they
say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills
will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.
But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim
assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition
group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that
Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through
violence or gradual co-optation.
Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the
Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with
Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it
comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s
control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist
Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country
surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western
analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence
in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small
comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a
tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.
The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim
world’s widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the Israeli
intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the Holocaust to
blackmail the West.
Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the
Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naïveté: the same prediction,
after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their predicament
in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is
Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains
David.
Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and
diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the
Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and
Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.
That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian alliance
collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty that same
year. The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world
without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by
Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom
Kippur.
Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts — from the first Lebanon war in
1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 — have been asymmetrical confrontations against
terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic,
diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the
Arab world.
For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also
psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict
with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with
Egypt — for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a
land-for-peace agreement.
Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the
improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s
prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to Tel Aviv on his
peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day. Begin, Israel’s
most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula,
an area more than three times the size of Israel.
Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis craved,
the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the Sinai coast
experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in one corner of
the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized Sinai proved that
Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel reasonably secure.
The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel’s borders that hasn’t been fenced
off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to
close.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a
contributing editor to The New Republic.
A Diplomatic Scramble as an Ally Is Pushed to the Exit
February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER, HELENE COOPER and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
This article is by Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and David D. Kirkpatrick.
WASHINGTON — Last Sunday at 2 p.m., a blue-and-white Air Force jet left Andrews
Air Force Base bound for Cairo. On board was Frank G. Wisner, an adroit
ex-diplomat whom President Obama had asked hours before to undertake a supremely
delicate mission: nudging President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt out of power.
What exactly Mr. Wisner would say was still in flux as he flew to Egypt,
administration officials said Tuesday; he talked with senior officials in
Washington several times during the nearly 14-hour flight. By the time Mr.
Wisner met with the Egyptian leader on Tuesday, the diplomat knew what message
he would deliver. And Mr. Mubarak had already lost the backing of his other
crucial pillar of support: the Egyptian military, which declared it would not
open fire on the demonstrators who were demanding his ouster.
The story of how Mr. Mubarak, an Arab autocrat who only last month was the
mainstay of America’s policy in a turbulent region, suddenly found himself
pushed toward the exit is first and foremost a tale of the Arab street.
But it is also one of political calculations, in Cairo and Washington, which
were upset repeatedly as the crowds swelled. And it is the story of a furious
scramble by the Obama White House — right up until Mr. Obama’s call Tuesday
night for change to begin “now” — to catch up with a democracy movement
unfolding so rapidly that Washington came close to being left behind.
“Every time the administration uttered something, its words were immediately
overtaken by events on the ground,” said Robert Malley, Middle East and North
Africa program director for the International Crisis Group. “And in a matter of
days, every assumption about the United States relationship with Egypt was
upended.”
In Cairo, the protests prompted Mr. Mubarak to surround himself even more
closely with current and former military leaders, including his new, hastily
named vice president, prime minister and deputy prime minister.
But instead of protecting him, there is increasing evidence that over the last
three days the military establishment — one of the most respected institutions
in Egyptian society, and the crucial factor in deciding control of the streets —
may have been moving toward pushing Mr. Mubarak out.
The first sign of the military’s deteriorating support came Saturday when
rank-and-file troops ordered to buttress the retreating police instead began to
cheer on the protesters. Then on Monday night, the military leadership appeared
to break away, announcing that the military respected the people’s legitimate
demands and that it would not use force against peaceful demonstrators.
A short time later, Mr. Mubarak’s closest aide, Omar Suleiman, the chief of
Egyptian intelligence and the newly named vice president, invited opposition
groups to negotiate over constitutional reforms.
Back in Washington, the administration was struggling to balance its ties to Mr.
Mubarak, its most stalwart ally in the Arab world, with its fear of ending up on
the wrong side of history.
But days of watching the protests mushroom on the streets of Egyptian cities
convinced administration officials — some facing their first national security
crisis in these roles — that Mr. Mubarak probably would not weather the
political storm.
Former President George Bush, whose ties to Mr. Mubarak were cemented by the
Egyptian leader’s commitment to supply Arab troops during the Persian Gulf war
in 1991, called Mr. Mubarak, on his own initiative, to discuss the crisis,
officials said. It was not clear what Mr. Bush told Mr. Mubarak.
At a two-hour meeting at the White House last Saturday, Thomas E. Donilon, the
national security adviser; William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff,
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta; and other officials coalesced around a
strategy to start trying to ease Mr. Mubarak out, an official said.
Mrs. Clinton, officials said, suggested that the administration send Mr. Wisner,
a former ambassador to Egypt who knows Mr. Mubarak well, to deliver a message
directly from Mr. Obama to the Egyptian leader. Officials said Mr. Wisner urged
Mr. Mubarak to declare publicly that he would not run for re-election. But Mr.
Wisner has extended his stay in Cairo, officials said, and may have a follow-up
meeting with Mr. Mubarak if events seem to demand a quicker exit.
At the Saturday meeting, the officials also agreed that Mrs. Clinton would start
calling for “an orderly transition” when she taped a round of interviews for the
Sunday talk programs. Administration officials were already smarting from not
coming out more fully in support of the protesters earlier. In particular, Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been criticized for an interview with
“NewsHour” on PBS on Thursday, in which he answered “no” when the host, Jim
Lehrer, asked if the time had come for Mr. Mubarak to go.
“They took a little while to catch up, but by Sunday morning they understood
that it was over, and since then, they’ve understood how to make it happen,”
said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings
Institution.
Still, administration officials were grappling with their public message versus
their private message. Senior officials say that as Mr. Wisner traveled to
Egypt, Obama officials in Washington were working on his message to Mr. Mubarak:
to announce that he would not run for re-election (he did that), and to promise
that his son would not run for election (he did not do that).
“No one wanted it to seem as if we were pushing him out,” one administration
official said. “That would not serve American interests. It was important for
President Mubarak to make the decision.”
Two hours after Mr. Wisner’s plane left Andrews Air Force Base, White House
officials sent an e-mail to more than a dozen foreign policy experts in
Washington, asking them to come in for a meeting on Monday morning. “Apologies
for the short notice in light of a very fluid situation,” the e-mail said.
The Roosevelt Room meeting, led by Benjamin Rhodes, the deputy national security
adviser for strategic communications, and two other National Security Council
officials, Daniel Shapiro and Samantha Power, examined unrest in the region, and
the potential for the protests to spread, according to several attendees.
Significantly, during the meeting, White House staff members “made clear that
they did not rule out engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of an
orderly process,” according to one attendee, who like others interviewed for
this article spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to talk
publicly about the meeting. The Muslim group had been suppressed by Mr. Mubarak,
and Bush administration officials believed it was involved in terrorist
activities. It renounced violence years ago.
Several times, two other attendees said, White House staff members said that Mr.
Obama believed that Egyptian politics needed to encompass “nonsecular” parties:
diplomatic-speak for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Adding to the pressure against Mr. Mubarak, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts,
the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called on the president to bow
out gracefully and “make way for a new political structure,” in an Op-Ed article
in The New York Times. Mr. Kerry did not coordinate his message with the
administration, an official said, but the White House welcomed his initiative.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Donilon was hunkered over a sprawling spreadsheet on his
desk, crossing out names of more than 100 leaders and other officials in the
Middle East and the United States. The spreadsheet — “matrix,” one White House
aide called it — was full of Mr. Donilon’s notations and asides, as he went
through which person at the State Department, the Pentagon, and White House was
to call which foreign counterpart.
Mr. Obama himself spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, King
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey,
among other leaders.
American officials had also been in close contact with Vice President Suleiman,
who may be playing a particularly pivotal role in managing the transition of
power. American and Egyptian officials who know him well describe him as both a
cunning operator and Mr. Mubarak’s closest aide. He is also considered the
figure with the largest base of support in Egypt’s security forces because his
work as intelligence chief built him deep ties with the internal security police
and the military.
The momentous events in Cairo leave many questions. Will the protesters tolerate
Mr. Mubarak’s staying on, even in a lame-duck capacity? Early indications were
negative. How will Egypt prepare for credible elections, after nearly 30 years
in which the political opposition was ruthlessly suppressed?
As Stephen P. Cohen, a Middle East expert, put it, “How can you have a
transitional government that is acceptable to both the military and the people
in the streets, and that is not a coronation for the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Also, how will an extended period of turmoil in a country at the heart of the
Arab world affect stability across a region already being rocked by unrest from
Yemen to Jordan? And for the United States, can an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak
serve American interests in the Middle East?
On Tuesday night, that too remained unanswered. But Mr. Obama, addressing the
nation from the White House after a 30-minute phone call with Mr. Mubarak, said,
“What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief
that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must
begin now.”
Mark Landler and Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and David D.
Kirkpatrick from Cairo.
Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt
The White House
Grand Foyer
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release February 01, 2011
6:44 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Good evening, everybody. Over the past few days, the American
people have watched the situation unfolding in Egypt. We’ve seen enormous
demonstrations by the Egyptian people. We’ve borne witness to the beginning of a
new chapter in the history of a great country, and a long-time partner of the
United States.
And my administration has been in close contact with our Egyptian counterparts
and a broad range of the Egyptian people, as well as others across the region
and across the globe. And throughout this period, we’ve stood for a set of core
principles.
First, we oppose violence. And I want to commend the Egyptian military for the
professionalism and patriotism that it has shown thus far in allowing peaceful
protests while protecting the Egyptian people. We’ve seen tanks covered with
banners, and soldiers and protesters embracing in the streets. And going
forward, I urge the military to continue its efforts to help ensure that this
time of change is peaceful.
Second, we stand for universal values, including the rights of the Egyptian
people to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and the freedom to access
information. Once more, we’ve seen the incredible potential for technology to
empower citizens and the dignity of those who stand up for a better future. And
going forward, the United States will continue to stand up for democracy and the
universal rights that all human beings deserve, in Egypt and around the world.
Third, we have spoken out on behalf of the need for change. After his speech
tonight, I spoke directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status
quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place. Indeed, all of us who
are privileged to serve in positions of political power do so at the will of our
people. Through thousands of years, Egypt has known many moments of
transformation. The voices of the Egyptian people tell us that this is one of
those moments; this is one of those times.
Now, it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders. Only
the Egyptian people can do that. What is clear -- and what I indicated tonight
to President Mubarak -- is my belief that an orderly transition must be
meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.
Furthermore, the process must include a broad spectrum of Egyptian voices and
opposition parties. It should lead to elections that are free and fair. And it
should result in a government that’s not only grounded in democratic principles,
but is also responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people.
Throughout this process, the United States will continue to extend the hand of
partnership and friendship to Egypt. And we stand ready to provide any
assistance that is necessary to help the Egyptian people as they manage the
aftermath of these protests.
Over the last few days, the passion and the dignity that has been demonstrated
by the people of Egypt has been an inspiration to people around the world,
including here in the United States, and to all those who believe in the
inevitability of human freedom.
To the people of Egypt, particularly the young people of Egypt, I want to be
clear: We hear your voices. I have an unyielding belief that you will determine
your own destiny and seize the promise of a better future for your children and
your grandchildren. And I say that as someone who is committed to a partnership
between the United States and Egypt.
There will be difficult days ahead. Many questions about Egypt’s future remain
unanswered. But I am confident that the people of Egypt will find those answers.
That truth can be seen in the sense of community in the streets. It can be seen
in the mothers and fathers embracing soldiers. And it can be seen in the
Egyptians who linked arms to protect the national museum -- a new generation
protecting the treasures of antiquity; a human chain connecting a great and
ancient civilization to the promise of a new day.
