February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States this weekend postponed
high-level talks to be held in Washington with Pakistan and Afghanistan, a sign
of the displeasure with Pakistan over the arrest of an American official accused
of murder.
The talks scheduled for Feb. 23 and Feb. 24, held annually to discuss the war in
Afghanistan, involve foreign ministers and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton.
United States officials have said that a variety of visits and assistance to
Pakistan were in jeopardy if the Pakistani government did not quickly resolve
the case of the American, Raymond A. Davis, an official who killed two
motorcyclists in Lahore on Jan. 27 while driving his car.
The State Department did not give a precise public explanation for the
postponement of the talks except to say that “in light of the political changes
in Pakistan” the talks would not go ahead.
But American officials said the talks were postponed because it was unlikely
they would produce anything worthwhile in the charged atmosphere between
Pakistan and the United States. The Americans insist that Mr. Davis is protected
by diplomatic immunity and that Pakistan is holding him illegally.
Further, the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was supposed
to attend the talks and has emerged as a central figure in the standoff over the
Davis case, lost his job in a cabinet shuffle by President Asif Ali Zardari on
Friday.
Mr. Qureshi told the Pakistani press over the weekend that he had refused a
request by Mrs. Clinton to certify that Mr. Davis had diplomatic immunity.
“The kind of blanket immunity Washington is pressing for Davis is not endorsed
by the official record of the Foreign Ministry,” Mr. Qureshi said, according to
the accounts in The News newspaper, and AAJ television. “I could not certify him
as a diplomat.”
The high court in Lahore, where Mr. Davis is under arrest, has requested a
determination from the Foreign Office on Mr. Davis’s status.
Mr. Davis, a former Special Forces soldier, is described by the American embassy
as a “technical and administrative” official. He carried a diplomatic passport
at the time of the shooting.
The presence of American security officials in Pakistan whose duties appear to
deal with Islamic extremists as the United States and Pakistan combat terrorism
has touched a sensitive nerve among all strands of Pakistani society.
The Davis case set off a firestorm of protest in Pakistan, making it exceedingly
difficult for the unpopular American-backed government of Mr. Zardari to release
Mr. Davis under the conventions of diplomatic immunity.
February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Across the political spectrum, American Jewish leaders say
that when they consider the future in Egypt and what it means for Israel, it is
as if they are standing on a shaky tightrope stretched between poles of hope and
dread.
In many ways, the collapse of the 30-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak is
being welcomed by the leaders of American Jewish organizations as a historic
moment worthy of rejoicing. After all, they said in interviews on Sunday, they
can identify with the rebellion in Egypt because thousands of years ago the
Jewish people rebelled against enslavement by an Egyptian pharaoh.
“I can’t help but look at them and see people rising up and saying, We want to
be free,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, president and chief executive of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization that represents 140
national and local Jewish groups.
“Certainly there are things to worry about,” Rabbi Gutow said, “but this has to
be a moment to be supported and celebrated and looked at with a sense of awe.”
But he, like other leaders, said he was watching warily to see who takes power
in Egypt, whether the new government respects human rights, how it relates to
the United States and whether it will preserve the longstanding peace treaty
with Israel.
American Jewish leaders welcomed reassurances by Egypt’s military on Sunday that
the country intends to honor the treaty with Israel. Egypt has maintained what
many policy makers called a “cold peace” with Israel since the treaty was signed
in 1979 — a relationship that was not overly friendly, but at least allowed the
two countries to avoid open aggression.
“We are very much in wait-and-see mode,” said Nathan J. Diament, director of
public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. “It’s
encouraging, but it’s hard to assess what the value of that statement is, not
knowing who’s saying it and what their authority is.”
Several leaders said they were skeptical about the outcome in Egypt because of
precedents in Iran and Gaza. The overthrow of the shah in Iran ushered in an
extremist Islamic regime. In Gaza, open elections in 2006 encouraged by the
American government resulted in victory for Hamas, which Washington classifies
as a terrorist organization.
David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, a centrist
policy group, said, “You could end up not with Jeffersonian democracy, but with
Hezbollah, Hamas and the likes of the Iranian regime.”
He said he would be watching how Egypt’s new government treats the minority
Christian Copts and the tiny remnant of Egypt’s Jews, a once vibrant community
that now numbers no more than 150 people.
“There should be hope,” said Mr. Harris, who has traveled to Egypt many times
and is in touch with some government and nongovernment officials there. “It’s an
extraordinary moment. But hope is not a policy.”
Some Jewish groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac,
a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, favor the Obama administration’s review
of the substantial military aid the United States gives to Egypt, said Josh
Block, a partner in the Davis-Block consulting firm and a former spokesman for
Aipac.
“It’s obviously appropriate for the administration to review America’s aid to
Egypt,” Mr. Block said. “There are key factors to look at,” he said, including
whether Egypt continues to support peace with Israel and sanctions against Iran;
helps in the pursuit of terrorists; and allows international traffic, including
Israeli and American transit, through the Suez canal.
Jeremy Ben-Ami is the president of J Street, a liberal lobbying group founded
three years ago as a counterpoint to Aipac. He said he did not agree with policy
makers who argue that now is not the time to push for a settlement between the
Israelis and the Palestinians because Egypt and Jordan could eventually abandon
their truces with Israel.
Mr. Ben-Ami said that J Street would hold its conference in Washington in two
weeks and expected to draw about 2,000 people. “We will give the president a
friendly push to act now, to get out ahead of events,” he said.
“There are many of us in the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement,” Mr. Ben-Ami said,
“who see this as a critical moment to recognize that just as Mubarak and the
autocrats of the Arab world are unsustainable, so, too, is the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it stands now. The occupation of the West Bank,
the current status quo, are unsustainable. Everybody knows it can’t hold.”
February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — As Israelis began to adjust to the departure of
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, their staunchest and longest-standing regional
ally, the alarm and anxiety that Israel has been projecting seemed to give way
on Sunday to more nuanced tones, as well as some hints of admiration for the
Egyptian people and sympathy for their cause.
“It is difficult not to be awed by the new spirit, the hope and the optimism
that gushed forth out of Egypt,” wrote Ben Caspit, a prominent Israeli
commentator, in the newspaper Maariv on Sunday. “By the courage of the masses.
By the wisdom of the army, by the fight that Mubarak gave (many would have
broken before he did). By the comparatively dignified way in which the Egyptian
people swept out one of its greatest heroes, who became one of the strongest and
most-hated rulers in the modern history of this ancient people.”
The front page of the popular newspaper Yediot Aharonot was taken up entirely by
a picture of Egyptians celebrating, with the headline “A New Egypt.”
Israeli leaders had maintained a diplomatic silence — in public, at least —
throughout most of the Egyptian uprising, not wanting to sound disloyal to Mr.
Mubarak or supportive of dictatorship. With abiding worries about the future and
uncertainty about what kind of Egyptian government will eventually emerge, the
official hush largely continued Sunday.
Throughout the crisis, Israeli leaders were in almost daily contact with the
White House, cautioning the Obama administration against rushing Mr. Mubarak out
the door, which they feared might destabilize the region.
In his first public comments since Mr. Mubarak stepped down, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stated laconically that Mr. Mubarak “resigned over
the weekend and left Cairo.”
Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Mr. Netanyahu went on to
say that the Israeli government welcomed the statement of the Egyptian military
that Egypt would continue to honor the peace treaty with Israel. Israel, he
said, sees the 1979 treaty as “the cornerstone of peace and stability, not only
between the two countries, but in the entire Middle East as well.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not repeat the concerns that he aired last week that a new
Egyptian democracy could be exploited by Islamists, or the possibility that
Egypt “would go the way of Iran.”
Israeli nerves seemed calmed, at least for the short term, by the temporary
takeover of Egypt by its military rulers. Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak,
spoke by telephone on Saturday evening with his Egyptian counterpart, Field
Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the chief of the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces, which is now running Egypt.
Mr. Barak, a former Israeli army chief of staff, and Field Marshal Tantawi first
met about 15 years ago. They discovered in the course of their acquaintance that
they had fought on opposite sides in a notoriously tough battle for an area
called the Chinese Farm in the Sinai desert during the 1973 war.
Mr. Barak told Field Marshal Tantawi on the telephone that they had a
responsibility to prevent any return to that situation, according to Israel’s
Defense Ministry.
Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, said in
a telephone interview that Israel “has no reason to fear.” The likelihood of
Egypt going to war against Israel in the next few years, he said, given Egypt’s
economic situation and the fact that its army, like Israel’s, is dependent on
American equipment, “is very, very small.”
Mr. Halevy, who now directs the Shasha Center for Strategic Studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that the Israeli government was wise to
keep quiet during the recent crisis, but that an unfortunate consequence was
that the field was left open to Israeli pundits and commentators who acted as
“prophets of doom.”
Voices from more conservative quarters in Israel continued to warn of the
possible dangers ahead. Yaakov Amidror, a major general in the reserves, said in
a recent interview that in the long run, democracy was best. But he told Army
Radio on Sunday that the chief challenge was how to hold elections in Egypt that
would not be the country’s last, “because the Muslim Brotherhood will have ended
up determining Egypt’s fate.”
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was expected to arrive
in Israel on Sunday. The original purpose of his visit was to attend the
farewell ceremony on Monday for Israel’s departing army chief of staff, Lt. Gen.
Gabi Ashkenazi, but it has taken on extra significance in light of the events in
Egypt.
The Israeli government on Sunday approved the appointment of General Ashkenazi’s
successor, Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz. General Gantz, a former deputy chief of staff,
was tapped for the job after another candidate’s appointment was canceled
because of accusations surrounding a property deal and after months of bitter
infighting among Israel’s top army officials.
February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
Cairo
Perhaps the most effective antidote to 9/11 will prove to be 2/11, the day Hosni
Mubarak conceded the game was up with his 30-year-old dictatorship and left town
under military escort for the beach.
We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems of
government on them. We’ve tried wars on terror. We’ve tried spending billions of
dollars. What we haven’t tried is tackling what’s been rotten in the Arab world
by helping a homegrown, bottom-up movement for change turn a U.S.-backed police
state into a stable democracy.
This is the critical opportunity Egypt now presents. Islamist radicalism has
thrived on the American double standards evident in strong support for the likes
of Mubarak’s regime. It has prospered from the very brutal repression that was
supposedly essential to stop the jihadists. And it has benefited from the
reduction of tens of millions of Arab citizens to mere objects, shorn of
dignity, and so more inclined to seek meaning in absolutist movements of
violence.
If Westernized Egyptians and the Muslim Brotherhood can coexist in Egypt’s
nascent Second Republic, and if a long-subjugated Arab people can show that it’s
an actor of history rather than its impotent pawn, the likelihood of another
Mohamed Atta walking the streets of Cairo will recede.
In 18 riveting days, Egypt has become a key to the unresolved 9/11 conundrum,
the one President Obama promised to tackle by building bridges to the Muslim
world, before Afghanistan diverted him.
“If we get Egypt right, it could be the best medicine to get rid of radicalism,”
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition figure, told me.
In the Middle East you expect the worst. But having watched Egypt’s
extraordinary civic achievement in building the coalition that ousted Mubarak,
having watched Tahrir Square become cooperation central, and having watched the
professionalism of the Egyptian army, I’m convinced the country has what it
takes to build a decent, representative society — one that gives the lie to all
the stereotypes associated with that dismissive shorthand “The Arab Street.”
In fact, post-Tahrir, let’s retire that phrase.
Speaking of streets, I watched them get cleaned the morning after the
revolution. All the sweeping, dusting and scrubbing tempted me to suggest that
there was no need to get carried away and try to turn the glorious metropolis of
dust, Cairo, into Zurich. But Marwa Kamal put me right.
Kamal, 26, looked proud in her purple hijab. She was next to a sign saying,
“Sorry for disturbance, we build Egypt.” I asked why she swept. “All the dirt’s
in the past,” she said. “We want to clear out the old and start clean.”
A retired chemist, Mahmoud Abdullah, stepped in: “This is a very precious
generation,” he told me, pointing at her. “They did what we failed to do.”
Right now Egypt has no president, no vice president, no constitution, no
parliament and no significant police presence on the streets. But it has the
meeting of generations between these two Egyptians; and it has a new sense of
nationhood forged through countless other barrier-breaking discoveries of 18
shared revolutionary days.
Perhaps it was a good thing that, cocooned with his yes men, Mubarak proved so
stubborn, locked in the prison of his formal Arabic and his hubris while
language and nation unloosed themselves. I think it was over once the army
declined to shoot. But by lingering, Mubarak gave Egyptians time to get to know
each other.
Revolutions, like wars, have their interludes of boredom. They were filled with
chat. And what did Egyptians find? Here’s one scene: Marwa Kassem, 33,
Westernized, living in Geneva, talking to bearded Magdy Ashour of Muslim
Brotherhood sympathies. She’d rushed to Cairo after the uprising began. He’d
joined the protests after a friend was killed. If they’d passed each other in
the street a month ago, each would have pulled back from the other, divided by
fear.
He tells her he was arrested at regular intervals. How often? Sometimes twice a
month. And? Ashour’s 14-year-old son is watching. He asks him to leave, saying
“I want to show him freedom, not my cowardice.”
A frisson of tension stirs. Ashour stands up. They stripped me naked, he says,
blindfolded me. He links his hands behind his back: this is how Mubarak’s
security goons shackled him. They hung me from a hook on the wall, he says. Then
came the electric shocks: to his toes, nipples, genitals.
There are tears in his eyes now. There are tears in Kassem’s, too. He pulls up
his pants to his knee, revealing a terrible black scar on his calf. She cannot
look. Why this treatment? “They wanted to know if I knew Osama bin Laden.”
What they both want now, this secular woman and this religious man, these two
Egyptians, is a state of laws and rights.
Overcome 9/11 through 2/11: the road to reconciliation leads not through Baghdad
or Kabul but through Tahrir.
Dual
Uprisings Show Potent New Threats to Arab States
February
13, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER
CAIRO — As
protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a
lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put
vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.”
The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that
has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement
dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and
Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance,
commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to
rubber bullets and organize barricades.
They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled
from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the
sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab
political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled
from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing
tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.
As their swelling protests shook the Egyptian state, they were locked in a
virtual tug of war with a leader with a very different vision — Gamal Mubarak,
the son of President Hosni Mubarak, a wealthy investment banker and ruling-party
power broker. Considered the heir apparent to his father until the youth revolt
eliminated any thought of dynastic succession, the younger Mubarak pushed his
father to hold on to power even after his top generals and the prime minister
were urging an exit, according to American officials who tracked Hosni Mubarak’s
final days.
The defiant tone of the president’s speech on Thursday, the officials said, was
largely his son’s work.
“He was probably more strident than his father was,” said one American official,
who characterized Gamal’s role as “sugarcoating what was for Mubarak a
disastrous situation.” But the speech backfired, prompting Egypt’s military to
force the president out and assert control of what they promise will be a
transition to civilian government.
Now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt. “Tunis is the force that pushed
Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” said
Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped
organize the Jan. 25 protests that set off the uprising. He spoke at a meeting
on Sunday night where the members discussed sharing their experiences with
similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.
“If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we
did, then that would be the end of all the regimes,” he said, joking that the
next Arab summit might be “a coming-out party” for all the ascendant youth
leaders.
Bloggers Lead the Way
The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil
engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became
engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr.
Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could
not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many
of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties.
“What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since
been arrested four times.
By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards
and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated
labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.
After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his
friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they
set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were
determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad
weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Malhalla a
demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the
first major labor confrontation in years.
Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy,
a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what
became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began
exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive
police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press
freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. “We shared
our experience with strikes and blogging,” Mr. Maher recalled.
For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent
struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor,
which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas
of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work
is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a
singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent
resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.
The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and
white clenched fist—after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to
meet with Otpor activists.
Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their
30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which
promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers,
Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.
“The Academy of Change is sort of like Karl Marx, and we are like Lenin,” said
Basem Fathy, another organizer who sometimes works with the April 6 Youth
Movement and is also the project director at the Egyptian Democratic Academy,
which receives grants from the United States and focuses on human rights and
election-monitoring. During the protesters’ occupation of Tahrir Square, he
said, he used his connections to raise about $5,100 from Egyptian businessmen to
buy blankets and tents.
‘This Is Your Country’
Then, about a year ago, the growing Egyptian youth movement acquired a strategic
ally, Wael Ghonim, a 31-year-old Google marketing executive. Like many others,
he was introduced into the informal network of young organizers by the movement
that came together around Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat
who returned to Egypt a year ago to try to jump-start its moribund political
opposition.
Mr. Ghonim had little experience in politics but an intense dislike for the
abusive Egyptian police, the mainstay of the government’s power. He offered his
business savvy to the cause. “I worked in marketing, and I knew that if you
build a brand you can get people to trust the brand,” he said.
The result was a Facebook group Mr. Ghonim set up: We Are All Khalid Said, after
a young Egyptian who was beaten to death by police. Mr. Ghonim — unknown to the
public, but working closely with Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement and a
contact from Mr. ElBaradei’s group — said that he used Mr. Said’s killing to
educate Egyptians about democracy movements.
He filled the site with video clips and newspaper articles about police
violence. He repeatedly hammered home a simple message: “This is your country; a
government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money,
and you have your rights.” He took special aim at the distortions of the
official media, because when the people “distrust the media then you know you
are not going to lose them,” he said.
He eventually attracted hundreds of thousands of users, building their
allegiance through exercises in online democratic participation. When organizers
planned a “day of silence” in the Cairo streets, for example, he polled users on
what color shirts they should all wear — black or white.
After the Tunisian revolution on Jan. 14, the April 6 Youth Movement saw an
opportunity to turn its little-noticed annual protest on Police Day — the Jan.
25 holiday that celebrates a police revolt that was suppressed by the British —
into a much bigger event. Mr. Ghonim used the Facebook site to mobilize support.
If at least 50,000 people committed to turn out that day, the site suggested,
the protest could be held. More than 100,000 signed up.
“I have never seen a revolution that was preannounced before,” Mr. Ghonim said.
By then, the April 6 movement had teamed up with Mr. ElBaradei’s supporters,
some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood
to plaster Cairo with eye-catching modernist posters advertising their
Tunisia-inspired Police Day protest. But their elders — even members of the
Brotherhood who had long been portrayed as extremists by Mr. Mubarak and the
West — shied away from taking to the streets.
Explaining that Police Day was supposed to honor the fight against British
colonialism, Essem Erian, a Brotherhood leader, said, “On that day we should all
be celebrating together.
“All these people are on Facebook, but do we know who they are?” he asked. “We
cannot tie our parties and entities to a virtual world.”
‘This Was It’
When the 25th came, the coalition of young activists, almost all of them
affluent, wanted to tap into the widespread frustration with the country’s
autocracy, and also with the grinding poverty of Egyptian life. They started
their day trying to rally poor people with complaints about pocketbook issues:
“They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day.”
By the end of the day, when tens of thousands had marched to Tahrir Square,
their chants had become more sweeping. “The people want to bring down the
regime,” they shouted, a slogan that the organizers said they had read in signs
and on Facebook pages from Tunisia. Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement said
the organizers even debated storming Parliament and the state television
building — classic revolutionary moves.
“When I looked around me and I saw all these unfamiliar faces in the protests,
and they were more brave than us — I knew that this was it for the regime,” Mr.
Maher said.
It was then that they began to rely on advice from Tunisia, Serbia and the
Academy of Change, which had sent staff members to Cairo a week before to train
the protest organizers. After the police used tear gas to break up the protest
that Tuesday, the organizers came back better prepared for their next march on
Friday, the 28th, the “Day of Rage.”
This time, they brought lemons, onions and vinegar to sniff for relief from the
tear gas, and soda or milk to pour into their eyes. Some had fashioned cardboard
or plastic bottles into makeshift armor worn under their clothes to protect
against riot police bullets. They brought spray paint to cover the windshields
of police cars, and they were ready to stuff the exhaust pipes and jam the
wheels to render them useless. By the early afternoon, a few thousand protesters
faced off against well over a thousand heavily armed riot police officers on the
four-lane Kasr al-Nile Bridge in perhaps the most pivotal battle of the
revolution.
“We pulled out all the tricks of the game — the Pepsi, the onion, the vinegar,”
said Mr. Maher, who wore cardboard and plastic bottles under his sweater, a bike
helmet on his head and a barrel-top shield on his arm. “The strategy was the
people who were injured would go to the back and other people would replace
them,” he said. “We just kept rotating.” After more than five hours of battle,
they had finally won — and burned down the empty headquarters of the ruling
party on their way to occupy Tahrir Square.
Pressuring
Mubarak
In Washington that day, President Obama turned up, unexpectedly, at a 3:30 p.m.
Situation Room meeting of his “principals,” the key members of the national
security team, where he displaced Thomas E. Donilon, the national security
adviser, from his seat at the head of the table.
The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since
youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia,
even though the American intelligence community and Israel’s intelligence
services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20
percent, some officials said.
According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy debates,
the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior
official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian
governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising,
by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt.
Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda
narrative” of Western interference.
American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or anti-Western
sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to Tahrir Square, wanting
to see history being made, we knew this was something different,” one official
said.
On Jan. 28, the debate quickly turned to how to pressure Mr. Mubarak in private
and in public — and whether Mr. Obama should appear on television urging change.
Mr. Obama decided to call Mr. Mubarak, and several aides listened in on the
line. Mr. Obama did not suggest that the 82-year-old leader step aside or
transfer power. At this point, “the argument was that he really needed to do the
reforms, and do them fast,” a senior official said. Mr. Mubarak resisted, saying
the protests were about outside interference.
According to the official, Mr. Obama told him, “You have a large portion of your
people who are not satisfied, and they won’t be until you make concrete
political, social and economic reforms.”
The next day, the decision was made to send former Ambassador Frank G. Wisner to
Cairo as an envoy. Mr. Obama began placing calls to Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and other
regional leaders.
The most difficult calls, officials said, were with King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia and Mr. Netanyahu, who feared regional instability and urged the United
States to stick with Mr. Mubarak. According to American officials, senior
members of the government in Saudi Arabia argued that the United States should
back Mr. Mubarak even if he used force against the demonstrators. By Feb. 1,
when Mr. Mubarak broadcast a speech pledging that he would not run again and
that elections would be held in September, Mr. Obama concluded that the Egyptian
president still had not gotten the message.
Within an hour, Mr. Obama called Mr. Mubarak again in the toughest, and last, of
their conversations. “He said if this transition process drags out for months,
the protests will, too,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said.
Mr. Mubarak told Mr. Obama that the protests would be over in a few days.
Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: “I respect my
elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But
there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the
past doesn’t mean they will be that way in the future.”
The next day, heedless of Mr. Obama’s admonitions, Mr. Mubarak launched another
attack against the protesters, many of whom had by then spent five nights camped
out in Tahrir Square. By about 2:30 p.m., thousands of burly men loyal to Mr.
Mubarak and armed with rocks, clubs and, eventually, improvised explosives had
come crashing into the square.
The protesters — trying to stay true to the lessons they had learned from
Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gene Sharp — tried for a time to
avoid retaliating. A row of men stood silent as rocks rained down on them. An
older man told a younger one to put down his stick.
But by 3:30 p.m., the battle was joined. A rhythmic din of stones on metal rang
out as the protesters beat street lamps and fences to rally their troops.
The Muslim Brotherhood, after sitting out the first day, had reversed itself,
issuing an order for all able-bodied men to join the occupation of Tahrir
Square. They now took the lead. As a secret, illegal organization, the
Brotherhood was accustomed to operating in a disciplined hierarchy. The group’s
members helped the protesters divide into teams to organize their defense,
several organizers said. One team broke the pavement into rocks, while another
ferried the rocks to makeshift barricades along their perimeter and the third
defended the front.
“The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role,” Mr. Maher said.
“But actually so did the soccer fans” of Egypt’s two leading teams. “These are
always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums,” he said.
Soldiers of the Egyptian military, evidently under orders to stay neutral, stood
watching from behind the iron gates of the Egyptian Museum as the war of stone
missiles and improvised bombs continued for 14 hours until about four in the
morning.
Then, unable to break the protesters’ discipline or determination, the Mubarak
forces resorted to guns, shooting 45 and killing 2, according to witnesses and
doctors interviewed early that morning. The soldiers — perhaps following orders
to prevent excessive bloodshed, perhaps acting on their own — finally
intervened. They fired their machine guns into the ground and into the air,
several witnesses said, scattering the Mubarak forces and leaving the protesters
in unmolested control of the square, and by extension, the streets.
Once the military demonstrated it was unwilling to fire on its own citizens, the
balance of power shifted. American officials urged the army to preserve its bond
with the Egyptian people by sending top officers into the square to reassure the
protesters, a step that further isolated Mr. Mubarak. But the Obama
administration faltered in delivering its own message: Two days after the worst
of the violence, Mr. Wisner publicly suggested that Mr. Mubarak had to be at the
center of any change, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that
any transition would take time. Other American officials suggested Mr. Mubarak
might formally stay in office until his term ended next September. Then a
four-day-long stalemate ensued, in which Mr. Mubarak refused to budge, and the
protesters regained momentum.
On Thursday, Mr. Mubarak’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, was on the phone with
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 2 p.m. in Washington, the third time they
had spoken in a week. The airwaves were filled with rumors that Mr. Mubarak was
stepping down, and Mr. Suleiman told Mr. Biden that he was preparing to assume
Mr. Mubarak’s powers. But as he spoke to Mr. Biden and other officials, Mr.
Suleiman said that “certain powers” would remain with Mr. Mubarak, including the
power to dissolve the Parliament and fire the cabinet. “The message from
Suleiman was that he would be the de facto president,” one person involved in
the call said.
But while Mr. Mubarak huddled with his son Gamal, the Obama administration was
in the dark about how events would unfold, reduced to watching cable television
to see what Mr. Mubarak would decide. What they heard on Thursday night was a
drastically rewritten speech, delivered in the unbowed tone of the father of the
country, with scarcely any mention of a presumably temporary “delegation” of his
power.
It was that rambling, convoluted address that proved the final straw for the
Egyptian military, now fairly certain that it would have Washington’s backing if
it moved against Mr. Mubarak, American officials said. Mr. Mubarak’s generals
ramped up the pressure that led him at last, without further comment, to
relinquish his power.
“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt, and less than 1,000 people died in
this revolution — most of them killed by the police,” said Mr. Ghonim, the
Google executive. “It shows how civilized the Egyptian people are.” He added,
“Now our nightmare is over. Now it is time to dream.”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and David E. Sanger from
Washington. Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo,
and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
February
13, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO — The
Egyptian military consolidated its control on Sunday over what it has called a
democratic transition from nearly three decades of President Hosni Mubarak’s
authoritarian rule, dissolving the feeble Parliament, suspending the
Constitution and calling for elections in six months in sweeping steps that
echoed protesters’ demands.
The statement by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, read on television,
effectively put Egypt under direct military authority, thrusting the country
into territory uncharted since republican Egypt was founded in 1952. Though
enjoying popular support, the military must now cope with the formidable task of
negotiating a post-revolutionary landscape still basking in the glow of Mr.
Mubarak’s fall, but beset by demands to ease Egyptians’ many hardships.
Since seizing power from Mr. Mubarak on Friday, the military has struck a
reassuring note, responding in words and actions to the platform articulated by
hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square. But beyond more protests, there is
almost no check on the sweep of military rule. Its statement said it would form
a committee to draft constitutional amendments — pointedly keeping it in its
hands, not the opposition’s — though it promised to put them before a
referendum.
Even as calm seemed to be settling over Egypt, antigovernment demonstrations
erupted in Yemen, with protesters clashing violently with security forces on
Sunday. A small group tried to rush the palace of President Ali Abdullah Saleh,
but was beaten back by riot police officers.
In Algeria, opposition groups meeting on Sunday vowed to hold weekly protests
against the government in the capital, Algiers, said the head of the Algerian
League for the Defense of Human Rights, Mustapha Bouchachi. Around 300 people
were arrested Saturday at a demonstration in the heart of the city that was
stifled by a heavy police presence, the League and other opposition groups said.
While opposition leaders in Egypt welcomed the Egyptian military’s moves, some
have quietly raised worries about the future role of an institution that has
been a pillar of the status quo, playing a crucial behind-the-scenes role in
preserving its vast business interests and political capital.
“Over the next six months, I am afraid the army will brainwash the people to
think that the military is the best option,” said Dina Aboul Seoud, a
35-year-old protester, still in the square on Sunday. “Now, I am afraid of what
is going to happen next.”
The day in Egypt brought scenes that juxtaposed a more familiar capital with a
country forever changed by Mr. Mubarak’s fall. Hundreds of policemen, belonging
to one of the most loathed institutions in Egypt, rallied in Cairo to demand
better pay and treatment. Traffic returned to Tahrir Square, a symbol of the
revolution, navigating through lingering protesters and festive sightseers, many
of whom lingered by the pictures of dead protesters that hung from clotheslines
at one end of the square.
Youthful volunteers swept streets, painted fences and curbs, washed away
graffiti that read, “Down with Mubarak,” and planted bushes in a square many
want to turn into a memorial for one of the most stunning uprisings in Arab
history. Soldiers drove a truck mounted with speakers that blared, “Egypt is my
beloved.”
“Egypt is my blood,” said Oummia Ali, a flight attendant who skipped work to
paint the square’s railing green. “I want to build our country again.”
As she spoke, a boisterous crowd marched down the street away from Tahrir
Square, “Liberation” in Arabic and named for the fall of the Egyptian monarchy
in 1952. “Let’s go home,” they chanted, “we got our rights.” Though hundreds,
perhaps more, vowed to stay until more reforms were enacted, tents were
dismantled, banners taken down and trucks piled with blankets that kept
protesters warm over the 18 days of demonstrations that began Jan. 25, the date
organizers have given to their revolution.
The military’s statement was the clearest elaboration yet of its plans for
Egypt, as the country’s opposition forces, from the Muslim Brotherhood to labor
unions, seek to build on the momentum of the protests and create a democratic
system with few parallels in the Arab world.
The moves to suspend the Constitution and to dissolve Parliament, chosen in an
election deemed a sham even by Mr. Mubarak’s standards, were expected. The
statement declared that the supreme command would issue laws in the transitional
period before elections and that Egypt’s defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed
Hussein Tantawi, would represent the country, in a sign that the 75-year-old
loyalist of Mr. Mubarak’s had emerged to the forefront. Protesters — and some
classified American diplomatic cables — have dismissed him as a “poodle” of Mr.
Mubarak’s. But some senior American officers say he is a shrewd operator who
played a significant role in managing Mr. Mubarak’s nonviolent ouster.
The military’s communiqué was welcomed by opposition leaders as offering a
specific timetable for transition to civil rule. Ayman Nour, a longtime opponent
of Mr. Mubarak’s, called it a victory for the revolution, while youthful
leaders, some of whom met in downtown Cairo on Sunday night to chart a path
forward in negotiations with the military, described it as a concrete step.
“The statement is fine,” said Ahmed Maher, a leading organizers. “We still need
more details, but it was more comforting than what we heard before.” Another
organizer, Ahmed Zidan, said it met “90 percent of the demands” of the
demonstrators.
But still unanswered are other demands of the protesters, among them the release
of thousands of political prisoners. The military’s position on the emergency
law, which gave Mr. Mubarak’s government wide powers to arrest and detain
people, has remained ambiguous. The military said earlier that it would abolish
it once conditions improved, but has yet to address it since. Essam al-Arian, a
prominent Brotherhood leader, echoed those demands, saying their fulfillment
“would bring calm to the society.”
“To be able to trust the army completely and do what it says completely is
impossible because the country has had corrupted institutions for 30 years
working in every sector,” said Tamer el-Sady, one of the young organizers at
Sunday’s meeting. “I cannot just assume that the army is clean and can do
something.”
The military has said the government of Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, appointed
Jan. 29, will remain in place as a caretaker cabinet in the transition, though
it reserved the right to dismiss some of the ministers. The cabinet met Sunday
for the first time since Mr. Mubarak’s fall, notably with his once-ubiquitous
portrait nowhere to be seen.
“Our concern now in the cabinet is security, to bring security back to the
Egyptian citizen,” he told a news conference after the meeting.
Other than Mr. Tantawi and Sami Anan, the army chief of staff, the military’s
council remains opaque, with many in Egypt unable to identity anyone else on it.
Omar Suleiman, the former vice president, has not appeared since Friday, and Mr.
Shafiq said that the military would determine his role.
With the police yet to return to the streets in force, the military has been
deployed across the city, seeking to manage protests that sprung up across Cairo
on Sunday. At banks, insurance companies and even the Academy of Scientific
Research, scores gathered to demand better pay, in a sign of the difficulties
that the military will face in meeting the expectations that have exponentially
risen with the success of the uprising.
“We can’t miss this opportunity,” said Mukhtar Guindi, an employee at the
academy, gathered with others at the entrance. “This is the time to demand our
rights.”
“One, two, where did our money go?” chanted others.
The most remarkable protest was by the police themselves, who gathered in black
uniforms, leather jackets and plain clothes, blaming the hated former interior
minister, Habib el-Adly, for their reputation and seeking forgiveness for orders
they said they were forced to obey.
The protest was reminiscent of a similar demonstration in Tunis, the day after
the fall of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, poignantly illustrating the
degree to which people’s fear of authority had collapsed. (It said something,
too, about the authorities’ fear of the people that the new interior minister
eventually came down to the street to meet them.)
“They forced us to steal from the people,” Ayman Ali, a policeman for 11 years,
shouted over the chants. “The hidden message was what? Don’t worry about your
salaries or getting a raise. You can get the rest of what you need by taking
from the people.”
There were no police officers to be seen Sunday in Tahrir Square, where soldiers
in red berets feebly directed traffic. Scuffles broke out as the military
removed barricades and moved protesters away from the square’s main arteries.
Some insisted they would stay until emergency law was lifted or even until
civilian rule was restored. But many were simply the curious, and they echoed
the sentiments across a city snarled once again in traffic: that a new phase of
negotiations, fraught with danger, would follow Friday’s revolution.
“Even God needed seven days to create the world,” said Mustafa Ibrahim, a
60-year-old driver working near Tahrir Square. “Not everything is going to
happen in a day.”
Kareem Fahim, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack contributed reporting.
February
13, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER
TUNIS —
Bakers have threatened to stop making baguettes unless their salaries are
increased. Lawyers demanding judicial independence protested outside the Justice
Ministry. Unemployed miners slept in the halls of the headquarters of a
phosphate mining company, demanding more jobs.
A month after Tunisians toppled their authoritarian president, sending shock
waves across the Arab world, many are discovering that may have been the easy
part.
With restrictions on the media lifted and freedom of speech flourishing, the
cork has popped on years of bottled-up demands over salaries, working conditions
and other grievances.
Tunisians seem torn between a desire to fully eradicate the remnants of the
previous government and a pining for stability.
Even as a fragile caretaker government begins the daunting task of rewriting the
Constitution and preparing for elections still months away, it faces a crush of
immediate demands for jobs, economic improvement and security. The challenges of
balancing revolutionary ideals with bread-and-butter issues may provide a
glimpse of what lies ahead for Egyptians as their political transition unfolds.
“We are only starting now to think about the future,” said Mahmoud Ben Romdhane,
a former university professor who heads the Mouvement Ettajdid, or Renewal
Movement, a left-leaning political party. The danger, he said, is that “the
revolutionary dynamic can go on forever.”
On Sunday, as sanitation workers cleaned up fetid piles of garbage that had
accumulated during several days of strikes, Foreign Minister Ahmed Ounaiss
resigned after his staff refused to work with him. Mr. Ounaiss “was not worthy
of the revolution,” one Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying.
Among other perceived transgressions, Mr. Ounaiss had reportedly refused to
refer to last month’s events as a “revolution.”
As those events recede into history, the political battles here have turned to
defining the past as much as creating a future.
At least 219 people were killed during the protests that led to the ouster of
President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a United Nations investigation found. Before
he fled into exile in Saudi Arabia on Jan. 14, he had ruled for 23 years.
“We don’t want power ever to be that centralized again,” Mr. Ben Romdhane said.
But a consensus on where to go from here is still far off. Politicians banned
under the old government, many of them Islamists, have been steadily arriving
from European capitals where they lived in exile. The role of Islamism in the
new order remains an open question in what has been a relatively secular
society.
The government has appointed a commission to draft a constitution and says it
expects to hold elections in five or six months.
Dreams of a more inclusive political system are intertwined with the desire for
more and better jobs, a difficult wish to fulfill at the best of times, let
alone during a tumultuous political transition.
The same groups of young people who last month swarmed the streets shouting,
“Get Out!” gathered Saturday evening with a new chant: “Unemployed!”
“The unemployed gained nothing from the revolution,” said Hamdi Tarek, 29, who
works sporadically hawking vegetables and clothing on the streets of Tunis, the
capital. “We’re still waiting. We are waiting for work.”
The Tunisian economy has been one of the most competitive in the Arab world and
Tunisia’s finances are relatively sound. The official unemployment rate is 14
percent but it is estimated to be as high as 30 percent in the impoverished and
restive hinterland, where the upheaval began with the self-immolation of a fruit
vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, after a fight with a local official.
His suicide, the symbol of daily humiliations and petty corruption by low-level
officials, was the catalyst for protests that spread from the countryside to the
capital and then on to Egypt and across the Arab world.
Today, the caretaker government is facing a power vacuum in the less-developed
areas inland. Governors from the old government were fired, but new ones have
yet to be appointed.
In Tunis, too, fears of the lack of government have taken hold. The police force
is understaffed because officers are refusing to show up, in some cases out of
fear of popular resentment of their role as guardians of the previous
government.
“This is not democracy; this is disorder,” said Hamdouni, a saleswoman at a
cellphone shop who gave only one name. “We are all waiting for the return of
order.”
The shop, like many businesses in Tunis, closes early these days out of fears of
insecurity.
About 11,000 inmates were reported to have escaped or been released from prisons
during the turmoil, a statistic often cited here by those who say they are more
fearful of crime. Many inmates have since returned to prison and a nighttime
curfew officially starts at midnight, but streets are empty well before then.
In the weeks since Mr. Ben Ali fled, protesters have clashed with the police in
several provincial cities, leaving at least two people dead.
The Tunisian news media have reported that some of the violence was provoked by
elements of the ancien régime seeking to undermine the new government and
justify a return to dictatorship. Last week the government called up military
reservists to help maintain order.
February
13, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF and J. DAVID GOODMAN
SANA, Yemen
— Young protesters in Yemen squared off against security forces on Sunday, and
some marched on the presidential palace here, witnesses said, as a third day of
demonstrations sought to emulate the revolution in Egypt.
The protests, organized largely via text message, were the largest yet by young
Yemenis, with more than 1,000 marching. And it appeared to mark a rift with
opposition groups who had organized previous demonstrations that wrested
significant concessions from President Ali Abdullah Saleh, including the promise
that he would relinquish power in 2013.
Those established opposition groups did not join the crowd on Sunday, which was
calling for the immediate ouster of the president. After the initial
demonstration, a smaller group of young protesters peeled off and marched toward
the presidential palace, only to be violently repulsed by armed security forces
both uniformed and in plain clothes, some armed with stun guns, witnesses said.
There were reports of several injuries, but no deaths.
“The J.M.P. in our opinion — the opinion of the students — is that they move in
stages,” said a 30-year-old protester, Mohamed Mohsin, referring to the Joint
Meeting Parties, a coalition of opposition parties. “But we go to the
demonstrations to send the message to the leadership now.”
Unlike the earlier protests in Yemen, which were highly organized and marked by
color-coordinated clothing and signs, the spontaneity of the younger
demonstrators appeared to have more in common with popular uprisings in Tunisia
and Egypt, where opposition groups watched from the sidelines as leaderless
revolts grew into revolutions.
The opposition coalition said at a news conference in Sana, the capital, on
Sunday that it welcomed the new street protests, but cautioned that the
situation could quickly escalate if mass uprisings took hold in Yemen, a country
with a well-armed populace. “If the people on the streets take the lead, we will
say thank you for that,” said Yassin Saeed Noman, a socialist party leader,
adding that the opposition “should deal wisely with this big movement.”
The opposition group said that 120 people had been arrested in protests on
Saturday and Sunday in Taiz, a poverty-stricken town about a four-hour drive
south of the capital, as waves of youthful unrest spread to new places.
Sheik Hamid al-Ahmar, an opposition leader, said in an interview on Sunday that
political leaders had tried to prevent the younger demonstrators from taking to
the streets to demand immediate changes to the autocratic rule of Mr. Saleh.
But, he said, “It’s not that they aren’t cooperating with the new protests,”
only that opposition leaders would like to move more slowly.
Mr. Saleh, an important ally of the United States in the fight against
terrorism, has in recent weeks sought to counter a rising tide of opposition and
preserve his three-decade rule by raising army salaries, halving income taxes
and ordering price controls, among other concessions.
Since Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt on Friday, police officers,
some of them armed, have filled Sana’s central square — which, like its Cairo
counterpart, is called Tahrir Square — blocking access with concertina wire to
prevent protesters from gathering. Witnesses reported seeing men in plain
clothes with AK-47s on the street.
“This is a revolution across the whole Arab world,” said Jalal Bakry, an
unemployed protester standing in front of the main entrance to Sana University.
“If those in Tahrir Square want to kill me, that’s O.K. We will still be
peaceful.”
A text message sent around on Sunday called on Yemenis to “participate in the
student and youth revolution in a demonstration to demand the removal of the
leader and to celebrate the Egyptian revolution, tomorrow at 9 a.m. in the front
of the main gate of Sana University.” Protesters also posted messages on
Facebook to rally supporters on Sunday, but social networking sites remain less
of an organizing tool in Yemen than in Tunisia and Egypt because of low Internet
penetration.
Even before large-scale protests first began in January, a rebellion in the
north and a struggle for secession in the south have threatened the fragile
stability of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. The
government’s precarious hold on control has been a source of concern for the
United States, which has received support from Mr. Saleh to fight the Yemeni
branch of Al Qaeda.
In a visit to Sana this month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged
dialogue between Mr. Saleh and the opposition in the interest of preserving
stability.
At its news conference on Sunday, the opposition coalition said it would be
willing to restart talks with the ruling party if specific conditions were met,
like including members of the southern separatist movement in the dialogue.
While the aims of Yemen’s southern secessionist movement are different from the
political opposition’s in Sana, they too have claimed inspiration from the
Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Demonstrations throughout the southern port
city Aden have increased in number over the past two weeks despite high security
citywide, and last Friday, thousands protested throughout Yemen’s south.
“In Egypt they chanted ‘The people want to expel the system,’ but we chant ‘The
people want to cut the ties,’ ” said Wagdy al-Shaaby, a secessionist protester
who marched on Friday in the southern city of Zinjibar.
It remained unclear to what degree a widening popular uprising could set off
renewed armed clashes in the south. Protests across the south have been notably
more violent than those in the country’s north.
Southern separatists have called for the creation of an independent state and
are therefore less committed to reforming or even toppling Mr. Saleh’s
government. Its leaders are divided over how much they should work with the
opposition coalition in Sana.
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, and J. David Goodman from New York.
February
13, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YONG
TEHRAN —
The Iranian leaders who cheered the popular overthrow of an Egyptian strongman
last week have promised to crush an opposition march planned for Monday in
solidarity with the Egyptian people.
“These elements are fully aware of the illegal nature of the request,” Mehdi
Alikhani Sadr, an Interior Ministry official, said of the permit request for the
march in comments published Sunday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. “They
know they will not be granted permission for riots.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was blunt.
“The conspirators are nothing but corpses,” Hossein Hamadani, a top commander of
the corps, said Wednesday in comments published by the official IRNA news
agency. “Any incitement will be dealt with severely.”
But opposition supporters, hoping the democratic uprisings sweeping the region
will rejuvenate their own movement, insisted the march would go forward. “There
are no plans to cancel it,” Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, senior political adviser to
the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, said in a statement published Sunday
on opposition Web sites.
The opposition also hopes to capitalize on the contradiction between Iran’s
embrace of democracy movements abroad — Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi
referred Friday to “the brave and justice-seeking movement in Egypt” — and its
crackdown on a kindred movement at home.
“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 is fake,” another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, said in an interview
last week.
The United States has also seized on the apparent hypocrisy, issuing a statement
on Sunday that seemed intended to encourage a revival of the protests in Iran.
“By announcing that they will not allow opposition protests, the Iranian
government has declared illegal for Iranians what it claimed was noble for
Egyptians,” the statement, from the White House, said. “We call on the
government of Iran to allow the Iranian people the universal right to peacefully
assemble, demonstrate and communicate that’s being exercised in Cairo.”
Even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran was welcoming the emergence of
what he called a “new Middle East” on Friday, his government had already taken
steps to quash the protest planned here.
In the week since opposition leaders filed the request for the march, the
government has imposed restrictions on the communications and movements of Mr.
Karroubi and detained at least 30 journalists, student activists and family
members of figures close to the opposition leadership, according to opposition
Web sites. There was also a vigilante attack on a senior reformist figure.
While the pro-democracy movement here professes similar political goals to those
elsewhere, the differences are critical. The so-called Green movement here is,
as the government points out, inherently counterrevolutionary; while democracy
movements toppled secular dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, Iran’s Islamic
Revolution did that here in 1979. The Iranian leaders praising the revolts of
recent weeks claim them as their political progeny.
The democracy movement here has also been shaped, and battered, by recent
experience. After the disputed election of June 2009, hundreds of thousands of
Iranians took to the streets in protest, deploying their own social networks in
what was then called “the Twitter revolution.” By the end of the year, a
government crackdown characterized by killings and mass arrests had largely
curtailed the movement’s public actions.
With those memories still fresh, opposition supporters are caught between fear
and hopelessness on one hand, and the urge to seize what feels like a historic
opportunity on the other.
“Things are far more complicated in Iran than Egypt,” said an online activist
using the pseudonym Zahra Meysami. “People need to believe that things are
possible. We desperately need hope. People need to see, not just believe, that
the movement is alive.”
In the background has been a steady drumbeat of executions. International rights
groups say 66 prisoners have been hanged this year, at least three of them
arrested during the 2009 protests.
Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi have condemned the executions for creating an
atmosphere of “terror in society.” Some activists have called them a deliberate
ploy to neutralize dissent.
Still, opposition Web sites have announced protest routes for more than 30
cities.
“The victory of the freedom-seeking movement in Egypt and Tunisia can open the
way for Iran,” read a statement from an association of Tehran University student
political groups. “Without a doubt, the starting point of these protests was the
peaceful freedom-seeking movement of Iran in 2009.”
But some of the movement’s foot soldiers learned other lessons from 2009.
“Many people suffered in the 2009 unrest,” Leyla, 27, said. “They don’t want one
martyr to become two.
“This is my souvenir from the protests,” she said, pushing aside her hair to
reveal a scar in the center of her forehead, etched by a police baton two
summers ago.
“My parents will be locking me in the house tomorrow.”
February
12, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
ALGIERS —
Riot police officers stifled a protest in Algeria’s capital on Saturday by
hundreds of people voicing the same demands for change that have helped topple
two of the region’s autocratic governments over the last month.
Gathering in the central May 1 Square, demonstrators in Algiers chanted
“Bouteflika out!” referring to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has ruled
Algeria with a tough hand since 1999, maintaining power through elections that
opposition figures say were rigged. The rally’s organizers said thousands had
taken part, but news agencies and the government here gave vastly differing
figures, from a few dozen to thousands.
Witnesses said thousands of riot police officers with clubs had blocked the
demonstrators from carrying out a planned march in the center of the whitewashed
seaside capital, which was otherwise tense and deserted on Saturday. By late
afternoon, with the last of the demonstrators gone, the square was still sealed
off by police officers, and dozens of armored police vehicles remained in the
neighborhood.
It was unclear on Saturday what, if any, long-term implications the protest
would have for Mr. Bouteflika’s government; outbursts of civil unrest have been
frequent here for decades. But the large-scale deployment of the police and
recent concessions — Mr. Bouteflika has promised to lift a longstanding state of
emergency here — show the government is wary of the contagion of unrest in
neighboring countries.
Many demonstrators were arrested Saturday, although there were also conflicting
numbers for those detained.
The government news agency minimized the “unauthorized” demonstration’s
significance, quoting the police as saying that only 250 had taken part. But one
of the organizers, Said Sadi of the opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy,
said that Saturday’s event was a “great success” and that it would not be the
last such demonstration.
“When you mobilize 30,000 police in the capital, that’s a sign of weakness, not
strength,” he said. The figure could not be independently verified. But
witnesses suggested the police had far outnumbered the protesters.
“There was a march of police, not demonstrators,” said a civil servant, standing
near the square late Saturday afternoon. He refused to give his name, citing
security concerns. “The marchers had asked to conduct a peaceful march and it
was refused. This is how power here acts.”
With the police still out in force, knots of men watched them silently from
doorways in the chill dusk. Among them were suggestions that persistent
grievances — large-scale unemployment, reports of government corruption,
heavy-handed police tactics — had not been mitigated by the demonstration’s
suppression.
“They can’t kill us because we are already dead,” said Bilal Boudamous, 29, who
said he was out of work. “At 30 we are unemployed, we live with our parents, and
we have no future.”
Glancing over at the helmeted police officers, he said, “They are there to
stifle us, to prevent us from doing anything.” He had tried to take part in the
march, he said, but had been beaten back by officers wielding truncheons.
Others said with resignation that harsh police interventions were nothing new,
even though with all the regional ferment circumstances had changed. “It’s
always been like this,” said another civil servant, who gave his name as Mourad.
“We are used to this. It’s not easy to change a whole system. Algeria is not
Egypt or Tunisia.”
On Friday, several people were wounded outside the office of the main opposition
group by security forces as they were celebrating the resignation of President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt after antigovernment protests there.
Three weeks earlier, demonstrations in neighboring Tunisia led to the ouster of
that country’s autocratic ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and set off a wave of
antigovernment protests across the region.
In Algeria, several antigovernment protests broke out in early January,
including some in which demonstrators clashed with members of the security
forces. Those protests began after prices rose sharply for flour, sugar and
other food staples. In 2009, there were riots in Algiers over high unemployment
and housing shortages.
Algeria’s government has operated under a state of emergency for nearly two
decades. Its battle with Islamic militants reached a peak in a brutal civil war
in the 1990s, in which as many as 200,000 people were killed. That conflict
began after the military-backed government canceled elections that an Islamist
party appeared poised to win.
In Yemen on Saturday, a small antigovernment protest in the capital, Sana,
quickly drew several thousand supporters before they were attacked by
pro-government forces, witnesses said.
The protests began when a group of Sana University students gathered in front of
the campus, writing banners in support of the Egyptian uprising, said Faysal
al-Namsha, an opposition supporter who was there.
When the crowd grew to 3,000 people, Mr. Namsha said, men in plain clothes
believed to be security forces attacked the demonstrators with clubs and sabers.
The students later marched toward Tahrir Square, where supporters of President
Ali Abdullah Saleh, some carrying his picture, attacked them again.
At least two people were slightly injured and 17 were detained by the police,
human rights activists said.
The opposition there, an eclectic group of parties dominated by Islamists, has
been organizing street demonstrations every Thursday for at least four weeks.
Opposition members vowed Saturday to continue the protests, which they are
calling “the coffee revolution,” in honor of Yemen’s famous export.
Several Arab leaders also made their first public comments on the revolt in
Egypt, a day after mass demonstrations forced Mr. Mubarak to resign.
Saudi Arabia, which has been outspoken in its defense of Mr. Mubarak, said it
welcomed a “peaceful transition of power” in Egypt, and expressed “hope in the
efforts of the Egyptian armed forces to restore peace, stability and
tranquillity,” the Saudi news agency reported. The Saudi monarchy had previously
criticized the protesters, denouncing what it described as foreign meddling in
Egypt’s affairs.
In Bahrain, the newspaper Al-Watan quoted a government statement as saying that
the kingdom was interested in developing its relationship with Egypt and was
confident in the ability of the Egyptians to establish security and stability.
King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain, who is facing street protests planned
for Monday, decided Friday to give the equivalent of $2,560 to each Bahraini
family. He is expected to announce reforms soon.
In Tunis, the cradle of the revolution, hundreds turned out Friday and again
Saturday to celebrate Mr. Mubarak’s ouster. Many said they hoped Algeria would
be the next to fall.
On Friday evening, young people in Tunis sang an Algerian soccer chant:
“One-two-three, Algerie!”
Adam Nossiter reported from Algiers, and Timothy Williams from New York.
Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Beirut, and Thomas Fuller from Tunis.
February
12, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM —
The Palestinian leadership announced Saturday that it planned to hold
presidential and parliamentary elections by September, apparently a response to
the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt calling for greater democracy and government
accountability.
The decision was announced in the West Bank city of Ramallah after a meeting of
the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which oversees
the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian
Authority, is also the chairman of the P.L.O.
At the same meeting, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator with
Israel, submitted his resignation and Mr. Abbas accepted it. A subcommittee was
formed to look for a successor as well as to consider restructuring the
negotiations unit.
The Islamist Hamas faction rejected the plan for national elections, saying Mr.
Abbas had no legitimacy to call for them since he was serving beyond his term.
The Palestinians have not held elections since 2006, when Hamas won a majority
in the parliament, leading to a year and a half of uneasy power sharing and a
brief civil war in June 2007. Since then, Hamas has governed Gaza and the
Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority has controlled the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority announced that postponed local elections would be held
in July, a move that Hamas also rejected.
Hamas has said it believes that elections should follow a reconciliation process
between itself and Fatah, including a restructuring of the P.L.O. to include
Hamas, which is currently excluded.
The authority’s announcement on national elections said: “We call upon all
parties to set aside their reservations and disagreements. Let us work together
to hold elections and uphold the will of the Palestinian people. As for
differences and disagreements, whether in political or security matters, we
believe that these issues could be resolved by the coming elected Legislative
Council.”
In explaining his resignation as chief peace negotiator, Mr. Erekat said that
the leak to Al Jazeera television last month of some 1,600 documents — minutes
and e-mails — from the negotiations had come from his department and that he
bore responsibility for the embarrassment they caused. The leaks showed Mr.
Erekat and fellow negotiators making more far-reaching offers than were publicly
known regarding the yielding of land to Israel in East Jerusalem and on other
divisive issues, like the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes
in what is today Israel.
A member of the P.L.O. executive committee who spoke on the condition of
anonymity said that there was unhappiness with Mr. Erekat, especially after the
leaks were exposed, and that he was leaving because of it. Mr. Erekat has been a
part of the negotiating team for nearly two decades.
Other Palestinian officials said there were no negotiations to lead and blamed
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
“I think this resignation makes a point that we don’t believe Netanyahu has any
intention of accepting the minimum of what had been agreed to before,” Nabil
Shaath, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team, said in a telephone
interview. “We want a total end of building settlements, including in East
Jerusalem.”
In reaction to Mr. Erekat’s announcement, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Fawzi
Barhoum, said the resignation was proof that negotiations and peaceful efforts
with Israel were a failure, and added that the Palestinian Authority should
“cease all types of coordination with the Zionist enemy.”
Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, and Fares Akram from
Gaza.
February
12, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR, DAVID ROHDE and ARAM ROSTON
After Hosni
Mubarak’s younger son, Gamal, left his job as an executive with Bank of America
in London in the mid-1990s, he joined forces with Egypt’s largest investment
bank. Today he has a significant stake in a private equity company with
interests throughout the Egyptian economy, from oil to agriculture to tourism,
corporate records and interviews show.
During President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, he and his family were not
flamboyant with their wealth, particularly by the standards of other leaders in
the Middle East. While there is no indication that Gamal Mubarak or the bank
were involved in illegal activity, his investments show how deeply the family is
woven into Egypt’s economy.
Now with Hosni Mubarak out of power, there are growing calls for an accounting
to begin.
Within hours of Mr. Mubarak’s resignation on Friday, Swiss officials ordered all
banks in Switzerland to search for — and freeze — any assets of the former
president, his family or close associates. In Egypt, opposition leaders vowed to
press for a full investigation of Mr. Mubarak’s finances.
Tracing the money is likely to be difficult because business in Egypt was
largely conducted in secret among a small group connected to Mr. Mubarak.
“Now we open all the files,” said George Ishak, head of the National Association
for Change, an opposition umbrella group. “We will research everything, all of
them: the families of the ministers, the family of the president, everyone.”
Estimates of the Mubaraks’ fortune vary wildly, including a widespread rumor
that they are worth as much as $70 billion. United States officials say that
figure is vastly exaggerated and put the family’s wealth at $2 billion to $3
billion.
Gamal Mubarak, who was being groomed to be the next president, and his older
brother Ala’a, were considered major figures in the business elite.
Gamal Mubarak’s private equity business came through his ties to EFG-Hermes, the
largest investment bank in Egypt. EFG-Hermes, which listed assets of $8 billion
on its 2010 financial statement, was pivotal in Egypt’s privatization program,
in which state companies were sold to politically connected businessmen.
The connection to EFG-Hermes reaches back to the mid-1990s. After Gamal Mubarak
left Bank of America, he set up an investment firm called Medinvest Associates
in London in 1996 with two partners. Medinvest, in turn, is owned by an
international securities fund in Cyprus called Bullion Company Ltd. According to
EFG-Hermes, Gamal Mubarak owns half of Bullion, and records in Cyprus show that
his brother Ala’a is on the board.
Bullion owns 35 percent of the private equity operation, which has $919 million
under management, according to the chief executive of EFG-Hermes, Hassan Heikal.
The equity fund invests in oil and gas, steel, cement, food and cattle.
Mr. Heikal said that other than the private equity investment, Gamal Mubarak had
no other ties “directly, indirectly, offshore or through family” to the bank. He
said the fund constituted only 7 percent of the bank’s business. Questioned
about the size of Gamal’s initial investment in the 1990s, Mr. Heikal declined
to elaborate.
A spokeswoman for EFG-Hermes said in a statement that the bank “has received no
special privileges or consideration from the Egyptian government and has always
operated under legal and transparent best-practices.” Calls to Medinvest’s
office in London and Bullion’s office in Cyprus last week were not returned. In
the past, Gamal Mubarak has denied any wrongdoing and said he was involved in
legitimate business activities.
For years, opposition groups have contended that since Egypt privatized its
economy in the 1990s, the Mubaraks and a few dozen elite families have held
stakes in the sale of state assets and in new business ventures. Later, some of
these businessmen were appointed to government positions overseeing the very
businesses they ran. Connections to the presidential palace brought benefits
like the opportunity to develop government real estate and access to easy bank
loans.
“The corruption of the Mubarak family was not stealing from the budget, it was
transforming political capital into private capital,” said Samer Soliman, a
professor of political economy at American University in Cairo.
Occasionally, members of the ruling elite who fell out of favor were suddenly
convicted of financial corruption charges, but generally, the inner workings of
the system have remained hidden.
One businessman who won government approval for various major development
projects is Magdi Rasekh, Ala’a Mubarak’s father-in-law. Mr. Rasekh is chairman
of the board of Sixth of October Development & Investment Company, which built
one of a series of sprawling new developments in the desert outside Cairo. The
government-backed development, Sixth of October City, is home to 500,000 people,
an entirely new satellite city with an industrial park, a hospital, villas and
middle-class apartments. Efforts to reach Mr. Rasekh were not successful.
As attention turns to tracking the Mubaraks’ purported wealth, rumors of vast
real estate holdings by the family have swirled. But the only property outside
of Egypt that has emerged is the London townhouse at 28 Wilton Place in
Knightsbridge where Gamal Mubarak lived when he was an investment banker there.
But determining the precise ownership of the house shows why investigating the
family’s wealth is complicated. A woman answering the front door of the house
said the Mubaraks had sold it, but property agents said there was no record of a
sale, and neighbors said they had seen Gamal Mubarak and his family entering it
several times recently.
According to British records, the home is owned by a company called Ocral
Enterprises of Panama. The registered agent for the company in Panama is a local
law firm. A lawyer at the firm said that he could not reveal Ocral’s owner. The
lawyer said his firm received its instructions regarding Ocral from a company in
Muscat, Oman, which he declined to identify.
Though Swiss banks have begun the search for Mubarak family assets, experts said
any money would be returned to Egypt only if its new government formally
demanded them.
“Egypt has to run a criminal investigation,” said Daniel Thelesklaf, director of
the International Center for Asset Recovery in Switzerland. “A lot will depend
on the new Egyptian government.”
As the protest intensified last week, government prosecutors froze the assets of
five government ministers and imposed a travel ban on them. The move appeared to
be an effort by Mr. Mubarak to distance himself from the wealthy businessmen who
had become the focus of public ire over corruption. It is unclear whether the
military, which now runs the government and has vast business holdings itself,
will allow a full inquiry into the Mubarak family’s wealth.
Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the level of corruption
involving Hosni Mubarak himself. Former American diplomats said he appeared to
live relatively simply, particularly by the standards of rulers in the region.
His main residence outside Cairo was a villa in a private compound in the Red
Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheik, where he went after resigning the presidency
on Friday. Diplomats said the villa was not particularly grand for the
neighborhood, smaller than the nearby home of Bakr bin Laden, a member of the
wealthy Saudi construction clan and a half-brother of Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Mubarak’s villa is in a compound developed by Hussein Salem, an Egyptian
businessman and close friend of the former president. Mr. Salem pleaded guilty
in 1983 to overcharging the Pentagon $8 million for shipping military equipment
to Egypt. Despite the conviction, he prospered in Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt and heads
a lucrative business that ships natural gas to Israel.
Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.
February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER, MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER
This article is by Helene Cooper, Mark Landler and David E.
Sanger.
WASHINGTON — Last Saturday afternoon, President Obama got a jarring update from
his national security team: With restive crowds of young Egyptians demanding
President Hosni Mubarak’s immediate resignation, Frank G. Wisner, the envoy who
Mr. Obama had sent to Cairo only days before, had just told a Munich conference
that Mr. Mubarak was indispensable to Egypt’s democratic transition.
Mr. Obama was furious, and it did not help that his secretary of state, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, Mr. Wisner’s key backer, was publicly warning that any credible
transition would take time — even as Mr. Obama was demanding that change in
Egypt begin right away.
Seething about coverage that made it look as if the administration were
protecting a dictator and ignoring the pleas of the youths of Cairo, the
president “made it clear that this was not the message we should be delivering,”
said one official who was present. He told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to
take a hard line with his Egyptian counterpart, and he pushed Senator John Kerry
to counter the message from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wisner when he appeared on a
Sunday talk show the next day.
The trouble in sending a clear message was another example of how divided Mr.
Obama’s foreign policy team remains. A president who himself is often torn
between idealism and pragmatism was navigating the counsel of a traditional
foreign policy establishment led by Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden and Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates, with that of a younger White House staff who worried
that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on
the wrong side of history.
In fact, Mr. Obama never did take the extraordinary step of publicly calling on
Mr. Mubarak to resign.
In interviews over the past week, participants and the people they consulted
described the tension inside the administration, tension that fed the perception
that there was confusion on the Potomac. Time and again, the administration
appeared to tack back and forth, alternately describing Mr. Mubarak as a
stalwart ally and then a foe of meaningful political change. Twelve days ago,
Mr. Obama was announcing that Mr. Mubarak had to begin the transition “now”;
last weekend his chief diplomat was telling reporters that removing Mr. Mubarak
too hastily could undermine Egypt’s transition to democracy.
Inside the White House, the same youthful aides who during his campaign pushed
Mr. Obama to challenge the assumptions of the foreign policy establishment were
now arguing that his failure to side with the protesters could be remembered
with bitterness by a rising generation.
Those onetime campaign aides included Denis McDonough, the sharp-tongued deputy
national security adviser; Benjamin J. Rhodes, who wrote the president’s seminal
address to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009; and Samantha Power, the
outspoken Pulitzer Prize winner and human rights advocate who was once drummed
out of the campaign for describing Mrs. Clinton as a monster.
All agreed that Egypt, facing a historic popular revolt, needed to begin a
genuine transition to democracy. The debate was how to deploy American influence
on a volatile and fast-changing situation — to at least temporarily shore up a
faltering ally proposing a gradual transition in the interests of stability, or
to signal more support for a new generation of Egyptians demanding faster and
more decisive change.
Despite the fervor on the streets of Cairo, and Mr. Obama’s occasional tough
language, the president always took a pragmatic view of how to use America’s
limited influence over change in Egypt. He was not in disagreement with the
positions of Mr. Wisner and Mrs. Clinton about how long transition would take.
But he apparently feared that saying so openly would reveal that the United
States was not in total sync with the protesters, and was indeed putting its
strategic interests first. Making that too clear would not only anger the
crowds, it could give Mr. Mubarak a reason to cling to power and a pretext to
crush the revolution.
It was not only Mr. Wisner’s and Mrs. Clinton’s comments that threw the
administration off message. Mr. Biden told an interviewer that he did not
believe Mr. Mubarak was a dictator — words he quickly regretted, officials say.
As the administration struggled to craft a message, it was playing to multiple
audiences — the crowds in Tahrir Square who wanted Mr. Obama to be their
champion; neighboring allies who feared instability and that revolutionary
fervor would spill across their borders; and home audiences on the left and the
right who saw this as a test of whether he would restore democracy promotion to
the top of the foreign policy agenda.
Mrs. Clinton and some of her State Department subordinates wanted to move
cautiously, and reassure allies they were not being abandoned, in part
influenced by daily calls from Israel, Saudi Arabia and others who feared an
Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would destabilize the entire region. Some of these
allies were nervous in part because they believed that the United States had
cheerleaded the protesters in Tunisia.
In fact, some of the differences in approach stemmed from the institutional
biases of the State Department versus those of the White House. The diplomats at
the State Department view the Egyptian crisis through the lens of American
strategic interests in the region, its threat to the 1979 peace accord between
Egypt and Israel and its effects on the Middle East peace process.
The White House shared those concerns, officials said, but workers in the West
Wing also worried that if Mr. Obama did not encourage the young people in the
streets with forceful, even inspiring language, he would be accused of
abandoning the ideals he expressed in his 2009 speech in Cairo.
For her part, Mrs. Clinton, too, has called for radical change in the Arab
world. In January, on a trip to Qatar, she issued a scathing critique of Arab
leaders, saying their countries risked “sinking into the sand” if they did not
undertake swift political reforms. She said that stagnant economies and the
bulge in the youth population was a recipe for the kind of unrest that later
convulsed Tunisia and Egypt. And during a meeting at the White House on Jan. 29,
officials said, Mrs. Clinton pushed for the administration to adopt language
that would clearly lay the groundwork for Mr. Mubarak’s departure.
But she also expressed concern later that a hasty exit of Mr. Mubarak could
complicate Egypt’s transition to democracy given the lack of a political culture
there. Added to that, many foreign policy experts worried — and still worry —
that Egyptians are even now faced with a choice between the military on one side
and the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, on the other.
For Mr. Obama, the turning point came on Feb. 1, when he watched Mr. Mubarak
give a defiant speech on television and then called him to make the point that
if the Egyptian leader thought he could avoid reform, he was mistaken. He
stopped short of calling for Mr. Mubarak to resign, but the next morning, he
instructed his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, to not to shy away from his demand
that day that meaningful reform must begin “now.”
“I want you to be clear that I meant what I said when I said ‘now,’ ” Mr. Obama
told his aides, according to a senior administration official. The result was
Mr. Gibbs’ line that “now started yesterday,” which appeared to harden the
administration’s position even more.
But it also angered the administration’s allies, who made their displeasure
clear in a flood of calls. It was in that tense atmosphere that Mrs. Clinton
left on Feb. 4 for a security conference in Munich without Thomas E. Donilon,
the national security adviser, who was initially supposed to attend, too.
The surprise speaker was Mr. Wisner, who addressed the group by video link just
days after returning from Cairo, where he went to deliver Mr. Obama’s message in
person to Mr. Mubarak, whom he had known well when he was the American
ambassador to Egypt.
Mr. Wisner comes from the old school of nurturing American relationships around
the world. And he warned the audience in Munich that “you need to get a national
consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward,” and that, in the
remarks that so angered Mr. Obama, Mr. Mubarak “must stay in office in order to
steer those changes through.”
In Munich, Mrs. Clinton and other Western officials put their emphasis on the
“orderly” part of an “orderly transition” in Egypt. Mrs. Clinton ticked off the
list of hurdles that had to be surmounted: Political parties had to be created,
leaders had to emerge from an opposition that had been suppressed for 30 years,
the Constitution needed to be amended and voter rolls assembled.
She said the process should move “as expeditiously as possible under the
circumstances,” but added, “That takes time.”
Mrs. Clinton’s message, officials said, was conflated later with Mr. Wisner’s.
Administration officials insist that Mr. Obama was angered by Mr. Wisner’s
remarks, not by Mrs. Clinton’s. But speaking to reporters on the flight home
from Munich, Mrs. Clinton echoed at least part of Mr. Wisner’s argument, warning
that Mr. Mubarak’s abrupt resignation could prompt a chain of events, stipulated
by the Egyptian Constitution, which would lead to elections in two months — far
too short a time.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, said, “The secretary sees the
need for profound transformation in the Middle East – and sees it as consistent
with both our values and long-term interests.” But he added, “She is also very
mindful of the challenges and seeks to insure it proceeds in a way where
people’s aspirations are realized and not thwarted; where lives are valued and
not lost.”
Back in Washington, though, Mr. Obama was moving quickly to counteract the
rhetoric coming from Munich. The White House recruited Senator Kerry, the
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who appeared on the NBC News
program “Meet the Press” and declared that Mr. Wisner’s comments "just don’t
reflect where the administration has been from day one.”
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Kerry played down the administration’s mixed
messages. “A little confusion came out of Munich,” he said. “Apart from that,
they calibrated it appropriately, to try to give the process room without making
it an American process.”
February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — The cheers of Tahrir Square were heard around the
world. But if you listened carefully, you might have heard cheering from another
quarter 7,000 miles from Cairo as well, in Dallas.
The revolution in Egypt has reopened a long-simmering debate about the “freedom
agenda” that animated George W. Bush’s presidency. Was he right after all, as
his supporters have argued? Are they claiming credit he does not deserve? And
has President Obama picked up the mantle of democracy and made it his own?
The debate in Washington, and Dallas, tends to overlook the reality that
revolutions in far-off countries are for the most part built from the ground up,
not triggered by policy made in the halls of the West Wing. But the lessons of
the Egyptian uprising will ripple through American politics, policymaking and
history-shaping for some time to come.
President Bush, after all, made “ending tyranny in our world” the centerpiece of
his second inaugural address, and, although he pursued it selectively, he
considers it one of his signature legacies. The very notion of democracy
promotion became so associated with him, and with the war in Iraq, that
Democrats believed that it was now discredited. Never mind that Republican and
Democratic presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, had championed
liberty overseas; by the time Mr. Bush left office it had become a polarizing
concept.
Mr. Obama was seen by some supporters as the realist counterbalance who would
put aside the zealous rhetoric in favor of a more nuanced approach. He preached
the virtues of democracy in speeches, but did not portray it as the mission of
his presidency. When the Green Movement protesters of Iran took to the streets
of Tehran, Mr. Obama’s relatively muted response generated strong criticism.
By contrast, foreign policy specialists said, Mr. Obama’s embrace of the
Egyptian protesters in the last couple of weeks, if cautious at times and
confused by conflicting signals from others in his administration, seemed to
suggest a turning point.
“He got on the right side of this thing when a lot of the foreign policy
establishment was cautioning otherwise,” said Robert Kagan, a Brookings
Institution scholar who long before the revolution helped assemble a nonpartisan
group of policy experts to press for democratic change in Egypt. “And he got it
right. This may strengthen his confidence the next time this kind of thing
happens.”
For Mr. Obama, the challenge may be to define the spread of liberty and
democracy as a nonpartisan American goal, removing it from the political debate
that has surrounded it in recent years. Democrats who have long worked on the
issue have expressed hope that he can shed the goal’s association with Mr. Bush,
while framing it in a way that accounts for the mistakes of the last
administration.
“The stirring events in Egypt and Tunisia should reinforce what has always been
a bipartisan ambition because they are vivid reminders of universal democratic
aspirations and America’s role in supporting those aspirations,” said Kenneth
Wollock, president of the National Democratic Institute, a government-financed
group affiliated with the Democratic Party that promotes civil society abroad.
Finding the right balance has never been easy. Mr. Bush focused on democracy as
a goal after the invasion of Iraq found none of the weapons of mass destruction
reported by American intelligence agencies. He elevated it to a central theme in
his second inaugural address, according to advisers, to infuse the war on
terrorism with a positive mission beyond simply hunting down terrorists. His
argument was that more freedom would undercut radicalism.
But there was always an internal tension in his administration. Former Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld makes clear in his new memoir that he thought the
emphasis on democracy was misplaced, given the difficulties of transplanting
Western-style institutions in regions accustomed to autocracy. Then, in 2006,
the election of a Palestinian government led by Hamas quieted some of the
administration’s ardor for democracy.
Matt Latimer, a former Bush speechwriter, recalled in a recent column in The
Daily Beast that he prepared a ringing speech on democracy for the president to
deliver while in Egypt in his final year in office, only to have it watered down
at the last minute. “Demands for reform in Egypt became a mere ‘hope’ that Egypt
might ‘one day’ lead the way for political reform,” Mr. Latimer wrote.
Still, in recent days, former Bush advisers like Elliott Abrams and Peter Wehner
have written columns recalling the former president’s calls for change, and
crediting them with setting the stage for what would come later in the Middle
East, a region that skeptics often said would never move toward democracy.
Whatever the final language of the 2008 appearance in Sharm el- Sheikh, they
said Mr. Bush spoke to democratic ideals.
“He was right in saying, for the first time, that people in the Middle East
wanted freedom as much as people in any other region, and in beginning through
diplomacy and programs to help,” said Lorne W. Craner, a Bush assistant
secretary of state for democracy and currently president of the International
Republican Institute.
Mr. Craner said, “His message became conflated with the method of displacing
Saddam Hussein in Iraq,” and to too many, “the freedom agenda meant invading a
country and staying there while I.E.D.’s were going off.” But, he added, “Bush
placed us on the right side of history, and that served the interests of
democrats in the region, and the United States as well.”
Not everyone sees it that way, especially in the Obama White House, where the
assertion rankles deeply. “Was Bush right?” scoffed one Obama adviser who spoke
on the condition of anonymity. “Give me a break. How many democratic
transformations like this took place when he was in office?”
Several, actually, in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan, where popular
risings also toppled entrenched ruling systems. But later events in those
countries also showed that such first steps did not necessarily point in a
straight line to lasting Jeffersonian democracy. Similarly, the change in Egypt
has only begun, as Mr. Obama pointed out on Friday. Its final destination is
still very much up in the air.
So, too, is Mr. Obama’s destination. Aides said he has been focused on the issue
of democracy abroad since the beginning of his tenure. Last fall, they compiled
a 17-page, single-spaced compendium of speech excerpts to show it. But he seems
to have found more of a voice in the last six months.
On Aug. 12, officials said, he issued a formal but unpublicized presidential
study directive seeking a review of political reform in the Middle East and
North Africa. The following month, he gave a speech at the United Nations in
which he declared that “part of the price of our own freedom is standing up for
the freedom of others.” And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton likewise
gave speeches pressing governments in the Middle East and elsewhere to reform.
Aides to Mr. Obama said he can make progress where Mr. Bush faltered because the
current president has made reaching out to the Muslim world a priority and has
de-emphasized the idea that the fight against terrorism means a war on Islam.
While Mr. Bush also sent such messages, Obama aides said the baggage of Iraq and
Guantánamo Bay undercut the impact.
“We do not make this about us,” said one senior administration official, who was
not authorized to be identified. “We very carefully say this is about the
people. We’re on the sidelines, we never talk about our values, we talk about
universal values. Does that create space for these things to happen?” Hopefully
so, the official said.
The question then becomes whether democracy promotion will again become a
bipartisan aspiration.
Damon Wilson, a former Bush aide and now executive vice president of the
Atlantic Council, said he was surprised that Mr. Obama did not take ownership of
democracy as an issue from the start. But with Egypt, he now has a chance to do
that, Mr. Wilson said, expressing hope that Republicans will not turn away from
the notion simply because Mr. Obama is embracing it.
“Of all the issues to fight on,” he said, “democracy is not one where we should
be declaring partisan differences.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: February 12, 2011
Because of incorrect information provided by the White House, an earlier version
of this article gave an incorrect date for the issue of President Obama's study
directive seeking a review of political reform in the Middle East and North
Africa. It was Aug. 12, not Aug. 16.
February 11, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering
about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on
the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and
declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but
completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really
matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians
dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene
tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the
bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the
social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is
reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are
walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a
serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the
program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from
nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In
terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly
want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid.
Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants
and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said
that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than
greater democracy and more economic opportunities.” Americans are being asked to
swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few
decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones
who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign
contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and
anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both
parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and
lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they
left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big
time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All
Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have
rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that
have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough,
the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United
decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate
money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of
power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are
listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic
downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of
cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The
endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35
billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are
longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate
taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of
industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their
air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so
much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What
the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem.
Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we
get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard
road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a
real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in
January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at
all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will
have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the
streets of Cairo.
February 11, 2011
3:50 pm
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
I’ve been critical of the Obama administration’s wishy-washy,
weather vane approach to people power in Tunisia and Egypt. But President
Obama’s statements yesterday were a big step forward, and his speech just now
was pitch perfect. It’s our job as journalists to criticize, but I thought he
got it exactly right. He put the United States unambiguously on the side of
Egypt’s youth and future and freedom, all while making it clear that Egypt’s
future is up to Egyptians to decide.
In the past, the problem was three-fold. First, we seemed to be engaged in
behind-the-scenes machinations and plotting with Mubarak/Suleiman, confirming
every suspicion that it is actually the United States that calls the shots.
Second, we seemed to be favoring cosmetic changes that would allow an oppressive
but pro-Western system to survive rather than backing the uncertainty of a
popular democracy (especially if it might challenge Israel). Third, although our
aim was to out-maneuver the Muslim Brotherhood, our ineptitude ended up
undermining pro-Western forces, increasing anti-American sentiment and
strengthening the Muslim Brotherhood as an authentic voice of Arab democracy. So
it was very important that President Obama kept emphasizing in his speech that
Egypt’s future is up to Egyptians to decide — that we’re watching, but not
trying to pull strings. And the flattery (“Egyptians have inspired us”) was not
only deserved but will also help soothe the irritation that it took so long for
Americans to side with a democratic movement.
Although Obama mostly hailed the Egyptians’ achievement, he was right to note
that it is unfinished business and that many challenges lie ahead. Forthrightly
acknowledging that they include Muslim-Christian relations was the right thing
to do: the Coptic Christian community leadership in the past was way too cozy
with Mubarak, and it will have to find its own framework for harmony in the
coming years. Talking about the issue openly will help.
It was also useful to emphasize jobs and the economy. While interviewing
Egyptians in Tahrir Square, I was struck by how many cited as their principal
grievance not the lack of freedom at the polls but the lack of jobs. Mubarak did
a fair job over 30 years of raising education levels in Egypt, but jobs never
materialized for those educated young people — and those frustrations helped
lead to Tahrir. Economic development is going to be a huge challenge for any
emerging Egyptian democracy, and the best way the U.S. can help is with trade,
not aid.
Finally, I was glad to see Obama talk about Egypt’s leadership role.
Historically, Egypt was the leader of the Arab world as well as its most
populous country, but since President Nasser that leadership has declined. Now,
if Egypt can emerge as a democracy, it just might regain that traditional role
as a leader of Arab public opinion in a way that will benefit the entire Muslim
world — or, heck, let’s just say the entire world.
Egypt is enjoying a new beginning today. I hope that President Obama’s speech
signals a new beginning as well in American relations toward Egypt.
February
11, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM —
As the streets of Gaza exploded with celebration on Friday night with masked
Hamas militants marching defiantly to cheer the resignation of President Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt, Israelis reacted with quiet and deep concern because the
regional leader on whom they had relied most was suddenly gone.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained the same studied
silence it has sustained for more than two weeks on the assumption that nothing
it said could serve its interests: if it praised the pro-democracy movement, it
would be seen as disloyal to its ally, Mr. Mubarak. If it favored Mr. Mubarak,
it would be dismissed as a supporter of dictatorships.
But behind the scenes, officials willing to share their thoughts anonymously
expressed worry because they believed that whoever followed Mr. Mubarak would be
less friendly to Israel.
“We don’t know who will be running things in the coming months in Egypt, but we
have to keep two things in mind,” one top official said. “The first is that the
only example we have of this kind of thing in the region is Iran in 1979. You
can’t take that out of your mind. The second is that if Egypt pulls back in any
way from its peace with Israel, it will discourage anyone else in the region,
including the Palestinians, from stepping forward. So the regional implications
for us are significant.”
The official said it was more likely than not that Egypt would maintain its
peace treaty with Israel and added that, in any case, relations with Israel
would probably not be among the first concerns of incoming Egyptian authorities.
Omar Suleiman, the former head of Egyptian intelligence who was recently named
vice president by Mr. Mubarak, has longstanding relations with Israel and is
respected here. But his role seems subordinate, at best, to the military council
that appears to be running Egypt. Still, relations between the Israeli and
Egyptian defense establishments have long been cordial. But officials worry that
cooperative efforts could slow or halt.
Earlier this week, Mr. Netanyahu did speak publicly in Jerusalem about Egypt
before the European Friends of Israel. He laid out three possible situations if
Mr. Mubarak quit. “There are many possible outcomes beyond the liberal,
democratic models that we take for granted in our own countries,” he said.
“First, Egyptians may choose to embrace the model of a secular reformist state
with a prominent role for the military. There is a second possibility that the
Islamists exploit the influence to gradually take the country into a reverse
direction — not towards modernity and reform but backward.
“And there’s still a third possibility — that Egypt would go the way of Iran,
where calls for progress would be silenced by a dark and violent despotism that
subjugates its own people and threatens everyone else.”
Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister who is a longtime friend of Mr.
Mubarak, said by telephone — and on Israeli television — that he had spoken with
Mr. Mubarak hours before his Thursday night speech to the nation. Mr. Mubarak,
he said, seemed to know he had no choice but to leave — and Mr. Ben-Eliezer
agreed. But Mr. Mubarak saw great peril ahead.
“He spoke about a snowball that was starting to roll, which would not leave a
single Arab state untouched in either the Middle East or North Africa,” Mr.
Ben-Eliezer said. “He spoke of his disappointment with the Americans. He said,
‘You will have to grow accustomed to one fact — that you’re going to live in a
radical Islamic world, and no one can promise what will happen tomorrow.’ For
me, he was one of the pillars of the peace process.”
Israel’s entire strategic outlook relies in some fashion on its three-decade
peace with Egypt. Thanks to the treaty, its military has minimal presence on its
southern border, freeing it up for actions to the east and north; about 40
percent of Israel’s natural gas is imported from Egypt; Egypt has been
supportive and helpful in negotiating with the Palestinians; and Egypt has
played a big role in stopping the smuggling of weapons and militants into Gaza,
and in helping Israel in its blockade policy aimed at squeezing Hamas.
The other regional countries that have diplomatic relations with Israel — Jordan
and Turkey — have cooled significantly in recent years, especially after
Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and its 2008-9 war in Gaza.
The marches in Gaza on Friday, a rare open display by armed uniformed militants
on the streets, showed that the Egyptian policy toward Hamas would probably
change and that it had, in fact, already loosened. The border has been breached
repeatedly in the past two weeks by Hamas, which has brought back its militants
from Egyptian prisons. Hamas officials are calling on Egypt to open its border
with Gaza completely. And last weekend, a gas pipeline in the Sinai exploded,
apparently as a result of sabotage, disrupting the supply to Israel and Jordan.
The marchers in Gaza chanted against Mr. Mubarak and President Mahmoud Abbas of
the Palestinian Authority, whom they consider a traitor. Israel fears that Mr.
Mubarak’s decline will strengthen Hamas and weaken the more moderate Palestinian
Authority.
Eli Shaked, a former ambassador to Cairo for Israel, gave a bleak analysis of
Egypt’s prospects, saying by telephone that it had too few institutions,
educated people and political parties to move to a democratic system. He feared
that the only force organized enough to take over was the Muslim Brotherhood,
which he described as anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-peace.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Fares Akram from
Gaza.
February
11, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON
— The two military officers who have risen to power in Egypt are members of the
very elite that benefited from the reign of President Hosni Mubarak. Now the
question being raised here and in Cairo is whether they can figure out a way to
share power with a restive population that for decades has had none.
Both are members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has rarely
met but will run the country at least until elections are held later in the
year. Each gained credibility with protesters during the turmoil of the past
three weeks by venturing out into the streets and mingling with the crowds,
sending strong signals that they would not stand behind the president or order
soldiers to fire on the demonstrators.
Despite this nod to populism, American military officers who know them say that
neither officer is fiercely pro-democracy; in fact one of them, Field Marshal
Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, is seen as a strident opponent of political change.
Both are likely to have calculated that protecting the military’s status and
credibility was more important than standing behind an increasingly isolated and
weakened president.
Field Marshal Tantawi, 75, the Egyptian defense minister, has the higher profile
of the two officers, a member of the ruling clique for decades and widely known
to American officials.
Although he has been derided on the street, and in classified diplomatic cables,
as a “poodle” to Mr. Mubarak, Field Marshal Tantawi is portrayed by some senior
American officers who know him personally as a shrewd operator who played a
significant role in the relatively nonviolent ouster of his patron.
These officers say Field Marshal Tantawi is likely to be the most powerful
military figure during the transition, because he is canny, knows the system and
is more experienced.
By contrast, the second officer, Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, chief of staff of the
armed forces, is a bit of a cipher to American officials, who say he has never
sought to project a separate identity from the army he leads.
He is younger than the defense minister, and thus would most likely be promoted
to the more senior ministry position if the military can calmly guide the nation
toward democracy.
Americans who have worked with General Enan describe him as bright and
innovative.
The army’s role in Egyptian society says much about the general who leads it.
General Enan commands a conscription army — drawn by law from all sectors of
Egyptian society and therefore tightly knitted with the populace. Every adult
male is required to serve.
American officials said General Enan had made it clear to them in several
telephone calls to Washington that his troops would not fire on the protesters,
even as the military sought to protect the institutions of government.
Classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks illuminate the symbiotic
relationship between top Egyptian commanders and their American counterparts,
especially their mutual concern about regional threats.
General Enan comes across as particularly worried about Iranian power in the
Middle East.
According to one cable, General Enan in April 2009 “stressed the importance of
resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to deter Iranian interference in
the region.” Three months later, Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of
the United States Central Command, told General Enan that Egypt’s success in
constraining Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, had blunted Iran’s
influence.
That same trove of cables offers a critical assessment of Field Marshal Tantawi.
In the view of American diplomats and senior military officers, he was seen as a
Mubarak confidant who had consistently resisted not only changes to the Egyptian
military’s mission, but also social reforms in the country.
A classified cable prepared before a visit to Egypt in December 2008 by General
Petraeus said the United States had pressed Egypt’s military to expand its
mission to counter emerging threats like piracy, border security and terrorism.
“Egypt’s aging leadership, however, has resisted our efforts and remains
satisfied with continuing to do what they have done for years: train for
force-on-force warfare with a premium on ground forces and armor,” the cable
said, adding that Field Marshal Tantawi, in particular, “has been the chief
impediment to transforming the military’s mission to meet emerging security
threats.”
A September 2008 cable cited a political analyst at a research center run by the
Egyptian government as saying that Field Marshal Tantawi had made clear the
Defense Ministry “will not tolerate independent thought within its own ranks.”
A March 2008 cable also characterized Field Marshal Tantawi as resistant to the
kind of social changes that were among the top priorities of the hundreds of
thousands of Egyptians who have been protesting for three weeks. “In the
cabinet, where he still wields significant influence,” it said, “Tantawi has
opposed both economic and political reforms that he perceives as eroding central
government power.”
The cable concluded: “He and Mubarak are focused on regime stability and
maintaining the status quo through the end of their time. They simply do not
have the energy, inclination or world view to do anything differently.”
American experts on the Egyptian military shared the cables’ assessments.
“Tantawi has a reputation for basically being Mubarak’s shadow,” said Anthony H.
Cordesman, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. “He’s loyal without making waves or shaking structures.”
Mr. Cordesman said that General Enan “has a reputation for being more
progressive and has a better understanding of the outside world. But neither of
these people have ever governed anything.”
February
11, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO — One
revolution ended Friday. Another may soon begin.
In a moment that may prove as decisive to the Middle East as the 1967
Arab-Israeli war, 18 days of protest hurtled Egypt once again to the forefront
of politics in the Middle East. In the uprising’s ambition, young protesters,
savvy with technology and more organized than their rulers, began to rewrite the
formula that has underpinned an American-backed order: the nation in the service
of a strongman.
The ecstatic moments of triumph in Tahrir Square seemed to wash away a lifetime
of defeats and humiliations, invasions and occupations that, in the weeks before
the revolution, had seemed to mark the bitterest time for both Egypt and the
Arab world.
“The sun will rise on a more beautiful Egypt,” one protester said. Or, as a joke
traded by cellphone on Friday put it: “From Tahrir Square to our brothers in
fellow countries ... is there anyone who has a president bothering them?”
But in the gray light of dawn, Egypt will face the meaning of its revolution, as
will an Arab world that shares its demographic of a younger generation taking
the stage, posing challenges as myriad as Mr. Mubarak’s departure was singular.
The months and years ahead will determine whether the fervor and community of
Tahrir Square can translate into a new notion of citizenship, a truce between
the state and Islamists and the curbing of the entrenched power of militaries,
the police and suffocating bureaucracies that have failed to deliver young
people a better life in an Arab world that is becoming ever younger. “It’s not
the end,” said Nadia Magdy, a protester in the square. “It’s the beginning.”
The beginning was as stunning a moment as the Arab world has witnessed, written
in the smallest acts of citizenship and the grandest gestures of defiance. From
the first day, Tahrir Square represented a model of people seizing the
initiative from a hapless government, be it cleaning the streets or running
their own security. The very acts seemed an antidote to decades of autocracy,
stagnation and festering resentment over their own powerlessness. “We’ve
discovered ourselves,” said one of the organizers, Wael Khalil.
As revelatory was a new form of politics, the protests of the long-derided Arab
street, where dutiful crowds were trotted out at the whim of dictators in Syria
and Iraq or deployed by the sheer organizational skills of Islamist movements
like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Egypt’s revolt was by no means spontaneous — propelled
by new media like Facebook and the potency of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts — but the
spark of Tunisia’s uprising became the flame of Egypt’s revolt.
Even the slogan — “The people want the fall of the regime” — was borrowed from
the Tunisian protests. So was the idea. “Islam is the solution,” goes the
hackneyed slogan of Islamic activists. Protesters in Cairo offered an
alternative: “Tunisia is the solution,” and it articulated an indigenous
vocabulary, free of the baggage of an American invasion, that put forth resonant
calls for an end to corruption, a better standard of living, the respect of
rulers and a notion of dignity.
“This is a historic moment in the Arab world: An Arab leader stepping down under
the pressure of his people,” said Khaled Dakheel, a writer and columnist in
Saudi Arabia. “What is happening is telling the people that there is something
they can do.”
Protesters in Cairo were blunter. One leader had fallen, but some worried about
a military that sought to claim the mantle of the revolution even as it remained
a bulwark of the old order. Asked what they would do if it imposed its own brand
of rule, Ahmed Sleem, an organizer with an opposition group led by Mohamed
ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate, said simply, “We know the way to Tahrir Square.”
Egypt’s revolution earned many names in 18 days: Revolution of the Youth, of the
People, of Anger, of Freedom, of the Hungry, and most poetically, the Revolution
of Light. In the end, it was called the January 25 Revolution, the date of the
first protest. In that, it was a departure from another revolution, that of July
26, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and fellow officers seized power from a decadent
king and mobilized Egypt for wars with Israel. It evolved into something far
less ambitious: a mantra of security and stability, in which Egyptians and many
Arabs were forced to give up their rights.
Even in his very last days, Mr. Mubarak understood the conflict in those terms;
in his last speech to the nation, he spoke of security and stability 10 times.
The protesters in Cairo wrecked the regional formula, though their ambitions
have yet to offer a paradigm to replace it. “Leaders in the Arab world are
weaker now,” said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian thinker and writer.
Whatever order emerges will almost certainly be less favorable to Israel and the
United States, both symbols to many protesters of Egyptian subservience. It was
no coincidence that the most outspoken proponents of Mr. Mubarak’s rule were
Israel and Saudi Arabia who, with Egypt, formed the spine of American dominance
in the region. Nor will economic reforms of the kind mandated by the
International Monetary Fund make headway in a country that blames them for
creating a class of crony capitalists.
But a defining trait of Egypt’s revolution was the way it looked inward at a
country whose stagnation rankled even more than the petty humiliations of the
police and the prisons that held thousands without charge. Democracy was the cry
on Friday in Tahrir Square, a way to rejuvenation, even as some acknowledged
that the unity that created one of the most remarkable tableaus in Egyptian
history could splinter as it faces a transition that remained opaque.
“I’m dead scared,” said Yasmine Gharabli, a protester in the square, punctuated
by cries for civilian, not military government. “I can’t believe the power of
the people but we have to work so hard now and make sure it goes the way we want
it to go.”
Egypt’s military struck the right note in its communiqués. A spokesman even
raised his hand in salute as he praised the youths killed in the revolution. But
like the bureaucracy, utterly incapable of meeting the demands of a city of 18
million, the military remains an entrenched institution, itself a symbol of the
array of interests — from tribes in Jordan, a ruling minority in Syria and
ruling families in the gulf — that may offer up some reform, as Bahrain and
Yemen’s leaders have, to defuse radical change.
“Those who are wise among the Arab regimes would introduce serious and quick
reforms right away before uprisings and revolutions sweep them away,” said
Najeeb Rajab, a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain.
Few believe that the revolution will represent the kind of moment that Eastern
Europe experienced in 1989. The Arab world, ruled by monarchies, republics and
something in between, has too many different ideologies and disparate histories.
Of all Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt have the strongest sense of national
identity, a cohesiveness that helped their revolutions coalesce so quickly.
Neither had a military that would brutally crush dissent (as in Syria), or the
ability to play off populations against each other (as in Jordan) or even the
money to pay people to stay quiet (as in the gulf).
It does have the Muslim Brotherhood, though, and the way Egypt’s transition
brings the Islamic group formally into politics for the first time in nearly 60
years may chart a way forward for states that have long used the threat of
Islamists to forestall democratic reform. Its role remains a pressing question
so far unanswered in the Middle East: How to reconcile individual rights with
religious identity in devout countries.
There are few examples of success in the Arab world. Nominally democratic places
like Iraq and Lebanon are beholden to sectarian allegiances so visceral they
promote toxic divisions. These past weeks, Egypt defied those narrower
identities, bringing Islamic activists into the arena with the most secular.
Many said their work together helped dispel clichés about each other. But
protests rallying around one demand pale before the task of building a state.
Some have looked to Turkey, a Muslim country that many Islamic activists
consider a success in bringing religiously inspired parties into the political
mainstream.
“I think the most important challenge for Egypt the next few years is how to
build a new civil culture,” said Hanna Grace, an opposition leader. “Not
military, not religious, but a civil culture. How do you build a secular modern
state for religious people?”
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Egypt’s revolution, though, will prove its
most intangible: a sense of pride. After the 1967 war, Nizar Qabbani, a renowned
Arab poet, wrote, “Our shouting is louder than our actions, our swords are
taller than us. This is our tragedy.” On Friday night in Tahrir Square, the song
of a contemporary, the Egyptian icon Abdel-Halim Hafez, blared from the
speakers. Everyone nearby shouted the chorus.
“You rose up, oh Egypt. And after patience and the night came victory,” it went.
“Egypt, you rose up, and your son succeeded and he waved your flag high.”
February
11, 2011
11:34 am
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
So Hosni
Mubarak is out. Vice President Omar Suleiman says that Mubarak has stepped down
and handed over power to the military. This is a huge triumph for people power,
and it will resonate across the Middle East and far beyond (you have to wonder
what President Hu Jintao of China is thinking right now). The narrative about
how Arab countries are inhospitable for democracy, how the Arab world is
incompatible with modernity — that has been shattered by the courage and vision
of so many Tunisians and Egyptians.
It’s also striking that Egyptians triumphed over their police state without
Western help or even moral support. During rigged parliamentary elections, the
West barely raised an eyebrow. And when the protests began at Tahrir Square,
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the Mubarak government was
“stable” and “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests
of the Egyptian people.” Oops. So much for our $80 billion intelligence agency.
On my Facebook fan page, I asked my fans (before the Tahrir protests began) what
the next Tunisia would be. A surprising number said Egypt — if you were among
them, you apparently did better than our intelligence community. Indeed,
Egyptians in Tahrir told me that they were broadly inspired by America’s example
of freedom, but that their greatest inspiration came from Tunisia and Al
Jazeera. On Tahrir Square, there were signs saying “Thank you, Tunisia.” So, all
of you Tunisians and Egyptians, “mabrouk” or “congratulations”! You’ve made
history. The score in Egypt is: People Power, 1; Police State, 0.
But the game isn’t over, and now a word of caution. I worry that senior generals
may want to keep (with some changes) a Mubarak-style government without Mubarak.
In essence the regime may have decided that Mubarak had become a liability and
thrown him overboard — without any intention of instituting the kind of broad,
meaningful democracy that the public wants. Senior generals have enriched
themselves and have a stake in a political and economic structure that is
profoundly unfair and oppressive. And remember that the military running things
directly really isn’t that different from what has been happening: Mubarak’s
government was a largely military regime (in civilian clothes) even before this.
Mubarak, Vice President Suleiman and so many others — including nearly all the
governors — are career military men. So if the military now takes over, how
different is it?
The military ostensibly played a neutral role in recent weeks, and protesters
certainly feel much more sympathetic to the military than to the police. But
some elements of the army have been involved in repression of pro-democracy
protesters, including arrest and torture. The Guardian noted:
One of those detained by the army was a 23-year-old man who would only give his
first name, Ashraf, for fear of again being arrested. He was detained last
Friday on the edge of Tahrir Square carrying a box of medical supplies intended
for one of the makeshift clinics treating protesters attacked by pro-Mubarak
forces….
Ashraf was hauled off to a makeshift army post where his hands were bound behind
his back and he was beaten some more before being moved to an area under
military control at the back of the museum.
“They put me in a room. An officer came and asked me who was paying me to be
against the government. When I said I wanted a better government he hit me
across the head and I fell to the floor. Then soldiers started kicking me. One
of them kept kicking me between my legs,” he said. “They got a bayonet and
threatened to rape me with it. Then they waved it between my legs. They said I
could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know. The
torture was painful but the idea of disappearing in a military prison was really
frightening.”
That kind of thing happened to a lot of people, and those millions of brave
Egyptians who went to the streets were protesting not just against Mubarak but
against the police state as a whole. May Mubarak’s resignation mark a milestone
toward their goal — and I think it is, but it’s not the end of the journey. And
let’s hope that the United States makes absolutely clear that it stands for full
democracy, not just for some kind of false stability that derives from
authoritarianism. The Obama administration missed the boat in the last few
weeks, but I thought yesterday’s speech and statement by President Obama marked
an improvement. Let’s hope it continues. May Mubarak’s resignation mark a new
beginning — in Egypt, and also in wiser American policy toward Egypt and the
Arab world.
February
11, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
CAIRO — The
city is erupting. Honking and cheering fill the great metropolis from Tahrir
Square to Heliopolis, from the banks of the Nile to the Pyramids. A ground-up
leaderless revolution led by young Egyptians has driven Hosni Mubarak, the man
who ruled with an iron fist for 30 years, from power.
After all the words and all the contortions and all the behind-the-curve
contrivances of an Arab dictator confronted by a movement he could not
comprehend, the finale was brief: “Hosni Mubarak has resigned as president of
the republic and assigned the governance of the country to the Supreme Council
of the Armed Forces.”
The statement was read by an ashen-faced Omar Suleiman, the vice president and
longtime henchman of Mubarak to whom power was handed Thursday night before that
power passed to the army.
Faced by the communications generation, a movement of Internet-linked
20-something Egyptians demanding the right to speak freely, Mubarak proved
himself to the last to be the great non-communicator. Anyone wanting to teach a
course in 21st-century politics should begin in Egypt, where the power of
real-time flat Web-savvy organizations over ponderous hierarchies has just been
illustrated.
What course the Egyptian armed forces will take is unclear, but their sympathy
with the cause of the uprising — or at least their determination not to fire on
the people and to defend the nation rather than a despot — has been evident from
the time of the first big demonstration on Jan. 25. A communiqué issued by the
military’s Supreme Council before Mubarak’s resignation said it was “committed
to sponsor the legitimate demands of the people” in pursuit of “a free
democratic community.” It spoke of the “honest people who refused corruption.”
At last, it seemed, an Arab people — long trampled-upon, long subjected to the
humiliation of non-citizenry in a state without laws — stood front and center.
The Arab world has awoken from a long conspiracy-filled slumber induced by aging
despots determined to keep their peoples from modernity.
We in the West have often asked ourselves why a Middle East peace was so
elusive. Perhaps we should have conceded that the building blocks we were trying
to use were rotten to the core and we had been complicit in that rot.
Almost a decade after 9/11, the event that signaled the devastating gulf that
had grown up between the West and Islam, this is a day of hope for millions of
young Arabs and for the world. Egypt’s revolution comes hard on the heels of
Tunisia’s and inevitably poses the question: which wizened specimen from the
Arab Jurassic Park is next?
Democracies take time to build, but once built, as Europe illustrates, they do
make meaningful peace with one another. To state the obvious — although it’s not
obvious to some — there is nothing anti-democratic in the Arab genome.
Mubarak’s Thursday speech, in which he tried to cling to de jure power, was a
surreal exercise in political deafness: you don’t say you’re going by listing
what you plan to do. As a senior Western diplomat said, “He never understood.”
The U.S. defense secretary, Robert Gates, has been in regular contact with the
Egyptian defense minister, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, since the uprising began,
urging restraint and the pursuit of a democratic transition.
I understand that the Egyptian military, which receives about $1.3 billion a
year in U.S. aid, has repeatedly conveyed the importance it attaches to the
American relationship and its determination to do nothing that would jeopardize
the bond. All that American money — tens of billions over Mubarak’s rule — does
appear to buy at least a professional army. The supreme test of the investment
now comes.
The revolution was everywhere Friday, seeping out of a packed Tahrir Square like
a dam breaking. The presidential palace was besieged, the state television
building surrounded. In the Nile Delta and in Upper Egypt, unrest engulfed
provincial towns. Until, in the early evening, the end came.
Before Mubarak’s resignation, two possible routes to a free election had been
put forward. The first was embodied by Suleiman. It involved cleaving to a
terribly flawed constitution conceived for a dictator and revising it along
guidelines set by Mubarak in one of his parting acts.
That course always looked hopelessly flawed to me. One problem was the
credibility of Suleiman, a security chief responsible for his share of torture
and killing. How far could Mubarak be from the scene as long as Suleiman was
guiding the process? What sense would it make to submit a revised constitution
to a parliament picked in a rigged November election?
Now the way is open to the much better course proposed by the Nobel
prize-winning opposition figure, Mohamed ElBaradei: the establishment of a
presidential council including a military representative and two respected
civilian figures to set in motion the drafting of a new democratic Constitution
and free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections within a year.
It’s will be a tough road after almost six decades of dictatorship, but
Egyptians have shown the depth of their culture.
February
11, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — An
18-day-old revolt led by the young people of Egypt ousted President Hosni
Mubarak on Friday, shattering three decades of political stasis here and
overturning the established order of the Arab world.
Shouts of “God is great” erupted from Tahrir Square at twilight as Mr. Mubarak’s
vice president and longtime intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, announced that
Mr. Mubarak had passed all authority to a council of military leaders.
Tens of thousands who had bowed down for evening prayers leapt to their feet,
bouncing and dancing in joy. “Lift your head high, you’re an Egyptian,” they
cried. Revising the tense of the revolution’s rallying cry, they chanted, “The
people, at last, have brought down the regime.”
“We can breathe fresh air, we can feel our freedom,” said Gamal Heshamt, a
former independent member of Parliament. “After 30 years of absence from the
world, Egypt is back.”
Mr. Mubarak, an 82-year-old former air force commander, left without comment for
his home by the Red Sea in Sharm el Sheik. His departure overturns, after six
decades, the Arab world’s original secular dictatorship. He was toppled by a
radically new force in regional politics — a largely secular, nonviolent,
youth-led democracy movement that brought Egypt’s liberal and Islamist
opposition groups together for the first time under its banner.
One by one the protesters withstood each weapon in the arsenal of the Egyptian
autocracy — first the heavily armed riot police, then a ruling party militia and
finally the state’s powerful propaganda machine.
Mr. Mubarak’s fall removed a bulwark of American foreign policy in the region.
The United States, its Arab allies and Israel are now pondering whether the
Egyptian military, which has vowed to hold free elections, will give way to a
new era of democratic dynamism or to a perilous lurch into instability or
Islamist rule.
The upheaval comes less than a month after a sudden youth revolt in nearby
Tunisia toppled another enduring Arab strongman, President Zine el-Abidine Ben
Ali. And on Friday night some of the revelers celebrating in the streets of
Cairo marched under a Tunisian flag and pointed to the surviving autocracies in
Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Yemen. “We are setting a role model for the
dictatorships around us,” said Khalid Shaheen, 39. “Democracy is coming.”
President Obama, in a televised address, praised the Egyptian revolution.
“Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will
carry the day,” he said. “It was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism
and mindless killing — that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist movement that until 18 days ago
was considered Egypt’s only viable opposition, said it was merely a supporting
player in the revolt.
“We participated with everyone else and did not lead this or raise Islamic
slogans so that it can be the revolution of everyone,” said Mohamed Saad
el-Katatni, a spokesman for the Brotherhood. “This is a revolution for all
Egyptians; there is no room for a single group’s slogans, not the Brotherhood’s
or anybody else.”
The Brotherhood, which was slow to follow the lead of its own youth wing into
the streets, has said it will not field a candidate for president or seek a
parliamentary majority in the expected elections.
The Mubarak era ended without any of the stability and predictability that were
the hallmarks of his tenure. Western and Egyptian officials had expected Mr.
Mubarak to leave office on Thursday and irrevocably delegate his authority to
Vice President Suleiman, finishing the last six months of his term with at least
his presidential title intact.
But whether because of pride or stubbornness, Mr. Mubarak instead spoke once
again as the unbowed father of the nation, barely alluding to a vague
“delegation” of authority.
The resulting disappointment enraged the Egyptian public, sent a million people
into the streets of Cairo on Friday morning and put in motion an unceremonious
retreat at the behest of the military he had commanded for so long.
“Taking into consideration the difficult circumstances the country is going
through, President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the post of
president of the republic and has tasked the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces
to manage the state’s affairs,” Mr. Suleiman, grave and ashen, said in a brief
televised statement.
It is now not clear what role Mr. Suleiman, whose credibility plummeted over the
past week as he stood by Mr. Mubarak and even questioned Egypt’s readiness for
democracy, will have in the new government.
The transfer of power leaves the Egyptian military in charge of this nation of
85 million, facing insistent calls for fundamental democratic change and open
elections. Hours before Mr. Suleiman announced Mr. Mubarak’s exit, the military
had signaled its takeover with a communiqué that appeared to declare its
solidarity with the protesters.
Read on state television by an army spokesman, the communiqué declared that the
military — not Mr. Mubarak, Mr. Suleiman or any other civilian authority — would
ensure the amendment of the Constitution to “conduct free and fair presidential
elections.”
“The armed forces are committed to sponsor the legitimate demands of the
people,” the statement declared, and the military promised to ensure the
fulfillment of its promises “within defined time frames” until authority could
be passed to a “free democratic community that the people aspire to.”
It pledged to remove the reviled “emergency law,” which allows the government to
detain anyone without charges or trial, “as soon as the current circumstances
are over” and further promised immunity from prosecution for the protesters,
whom it called “the honest people who refused the corruption and demanded
reforms.”
Egyptians ignored the communiqué, as they have most official pronouncements of
the Mubarak government, until the president’s resignation was announced. Then
they hugged, kissed and cheered the soldiers, lifting children on tanks to get
their pictures taken. “The people and the army are one hand,” they chanted.
Standing guard near the presidential palace, soldiers passed photographs of
“martyrs” killed during the revolution through barbed wire to attach them to
their tanks. At Tahrir Square, some slipped out of position to join the roaring
crowds flooding the streets.
Whether the military will subordinate itself to a civilian democracy or install
a new military dictator will be impossible to know for months. Military leaders
will inevitably face pressure to deliver the genuine transition that protesters
did not trust Mr. Mubarak to give them.
Yet it may also seek to protect the enormous political and economic privileges
it accumulated during Mr. Mubarak’s reign. And the army has itself been infused
for years with the notion that Egypt’s survival depends on fighting threats,
real and imagined, from foreign enemies, Islamists, Iran and the frustrations of
its own people.
Throughout the revolt, the army stood passively on the sidelines — its soldiers
literally standing behind the iron fence of the Egyptian Museum — as the police
or armed Mubarak loyalists fought the protesters centered in Tahrir Square.
But Western diplomats, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were
violating confidences, said that top army officials had told them that their
troops would never use force against civilians, depriving Mr. Mubarak of a
decisive tool to suppress the dissent.
It has been “increasingly clear,” a Western diplomat said Friday, that “the army
will not go down with Mubarak.”
Now the military, which owns vast commercial interests here but has not fought
in decades, must defuse demonstrations, quell widespread labor unrest and
rebuild a shattered economy and security forces. Its top official, Field Marshal
Hussein Tantawi, 75, served for decades as a top official of Mr. Mubarak’s
government. And its top uniformed official, Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, has not spoken
publicly.
Egypt’s opposition has said for weeks that it welcomed a military role in
securing the country, ideally under a two- to five-member presidential council
with only one military member. And the initial reaction to the military takeover
was ecstatic.
“Welcome back,” said Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who administered the
Facebook group that helped start the revolt.
Mr. Ghonim, who was detained for 12 days in blindfolded isolation by the Mubarak
government as it tried to stamp out the revolt, helped protesters turn the tide
in a propaganda war against the state media earlier this week, when he described
his captivity in an emotional interview on a satellite television station.
“Egypt is going to be a democratic state,” he declared Friday, in another
interview. “You will be impressed.”
Dr. Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, 32, a transplant surgeon who was among the small
group of organizers who guided the revolution, said the leaders had decided to
let the protests unwind on their own. “We are not going to ask the people to
stay in the square or leave — it is their choice,” he said. “Even if they leave,
any government will know that we can get them to the streets again in a minute.”
“Our country never had a victory in our lifetime, and this is the sort of
victory we were looking for, a victory over a vicious regime that we needed to
bring down,” Dr. Harb said.
Amr Ezz, 27, another of revolt’s young leaders, said that calling the revolution
a military coup understated its achievement. “It is the people who took down the
president and the regime and can take down anyone else,” he said. “Now the role
of the regular people has ended and the role of the politicians begins. Now we
can begin negotiations with the military in order to plan the coming phase.”
The opposition groups participating in the protest movement had previously
settled on a committee led by Mohamed ElBaradei, the former diplomat and Nobel
laureate, to negotiate with the army if Mr. Mubarak resigned.
Mr. ElBaradei could not be reached for comment on Friday, but in a television
interview he indicated that he expected the talks with the military to begin
within days.
“I’d like to see that started tomorrow so we can have a sharing of power, the
civilian and the military, and tell them what our demands are, what they need to
do,” he said.
By evening, Egyptian politicians were beginning to position themselves to run
for office. Amr Moussa, one of the country’s most popular public figures,
resigned his position as secretary general of the Arab League, and an aide,
Hesham Youssef, confirmed that Mr. Moussa was considering seeking office.
In Switzerland, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had frozen
possible assets of “the former Egyptian president” and his associates.
In the military’s final communiqué of the day, its spokesman thanked Mr. Mubarak
for his service and saluted the “martyrs” of the revolution.
In Tahrir Square, protesters said they were not quite ready to disband the
little republic they had built up during their two-week occupation, setting up
makeshift clinics, soundstages, a detention center and security teams to protect
the barricades.
Many have boasted that their encampment was a rare example of community spirit
here, and after Mr. Mubarak’s resignation the organizers called on the thousands
who protested here to return once again on Saturday morning to help clean it up.
Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack contributed reporting.
February 11, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI
BEIRUT — Across the Arab world on Friday, thousands of people
poured into the streets to celebrate the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak
of Egypt after nearly three weeks of demonstrations against his almost 30-year
rule.
In Beirut, gunfire broke out and crowds of people waved Egyptian flags. In
Yemen, they gathered in front of the Egyptian Embassy chanting, “Wake up rulers,
Mubarak fell today.” In Gaza, they fired shots in the air and set off fireworks.
But in a telling sign of the divide between the rulers and the ruled, the
region’s leaders, presidents and monarchs remained largely silent.
The popular uprising that started four weeks ago in Tunisia had claimed its
second autocratic government, this time in the largest country in the Arab
world. With more protests planned in coming days, some governments were clearly
worried they could be next.
“All the regimes are shaking now,” said Fawaz Traboulsi, a prominent Lebanese
writer and columnist. “They are becoming more and more fragile. This is just the
beginning.”
Several leaders met with their advisers late into the night on Friday, devising
strategies for coping with the demands for change in their own countries. While
those meetings were private, their public responses so far have relied on a
combination of tactics including denunciations of the protesters as foreign-led,
offers of monetary and other concessions to undercut complaints of injustice,
and the generous deployment of tear gas, truncheons and other blunt instruments
of repression.
Saudi Arabia has been the most outspoken in its opposition to the protesters,
assailing those in Egypt for what it described as foreign meddling in Egypt’s
affairs.
King Abdullah accused the Egyptian protesters last week of “meddling in the
security and stability of Arab and Muslim Egypt.” And the foreign minister,
Prince Saud al-Faisal, said Thursday in Morocco that he was astonished “at what
we see as interference in the internal affairs of Egypt by some countries.”
In Bahrain, King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa on Friday ordered the equivalent of
$2,650 be given to every Bahraini family. He is facing a “Day of Rage” protest
on Monday. Analysts there say he may announce reforms in a speech on Saturday.
“Arab people discovered their ability to make change,” said Nabeel Rajab, a
human rights activist in Bahrain. “And with Egypt in the leadership once again,
the change will reach all the Arab world.”
In Yemen, after protests that drew thousands into the streets of the capital,
Sana, on Friday, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was expected to announce more
concessions soon, opposition leaders said. Last week, he declared that he would
suspend constitutional amendments allowing him to remain in power for life, a
longstanding demand of the Islamist-led opposition, and promised that his son
would not inherit his rule.
He has also raised salaries for the military and civil servants, cut income
taxes in half and ordered price controls.
In Iraq, officials have reduced their salaries, and in Algeria, the government
has promised to lift the state of emergency that has been the law since 1992.
Syrian officials lifted a ban on Facebook and Youtube this week, tools Egyptian
protesters used to great effect. Human rights advocates warned that the move
could make it easier for the government to monitor its opponents. Still,
residents of a Damascus suburb celebrated Mr. Mubarak’s ouster with fireworks on
Friday, Reuters reported, a bold stance in a country ruled by emergency law for
nearly five decades.
The only governments in the region that seemed to have embraced the protests
without reservation were those led by Islamists. In Lebanon, a Hezbollah
statement said, “Hezbollah congratulates the great people of Egypt on this
historic and honorable victory which is a direct result of their pioneering
revolution.”
In Gaza, the Palestinian militant group Hamas went further, calling on the new
Egyptian leadership to open the borders with Gaza and reconsider its ties with
Israel.
On the streets of Arab cities, the joy was sometimes tempered with tristesse for
those still under authoritarian governments.
“As much as I was happy, I felt sad for Arabs,” said Shawqi al-Qadi, a Yemeni
opposition leader. “Why are we ruled by people who are so hated and disgusted by
their people? How did that happen to us?”
And wistfulness.
“I wish I was an Egyptian today,” said Jammal Amar, 23, a Beirut university
student. “What happened makes us confident that we can revolt against injustice
and oppression and prevail.”
Contagious as the enthusiasm was, the obstacles to another Tunisia or another
Egypt remain daunting.
On Friday, those obstacles were perhaps most visible in Algeria, where thousands
of police officers in riot gear mobilized in the center of the capital, Algiers.
They were preparing to put down an opposition march planned there on Saturday.
February 11, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — President Obama heaped praise on the peaceful
protesters who deposed Hosni Mubarak on Friday, declaring, “Egypt will never be
the same,” even as his national security team acknowledged that the swift
uprising would almost certainly upend American strategy in the Middle East.
Standing in the foyer of the White House, where just a week before he had
started to press Mr. Mubarak for immediate reforms without calling for his
resignation, Mr. Obama described the Egyptian uprising as a model of nonviolence
and moral force “that bent the arc of history.” While comparing the 18-day
protests to Gandhi’s peaceful resistance to British rule, the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the student protests that brought down a dictator in Indonesia, he also
set out a series of benchmarks that he said he expected the Egyptian military to
follow, warning that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”
“That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency
law, revising the Constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible,
and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free,” he said.
“Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”
Mr. Obama’s tone was optimistic, and he promised the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir
Square — which was listening to his brief broadcast live via Egyptian state
television — continued American support for Egypt. That support, however, is
likely to take new forms: Administration officials agreed that the $250 million
in economic aid was a pittance compared with the $1.3 billion in annual military
aid, and the White House and the State Department were already discussing
setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties. Under
Egypt’s current Constitution, alternatives to Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic
Party are all but banned.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama promised “whatever assistance is necessary” to pursue
a “credible transition to a democracy.”
But as he spoke, White House officials were assessing the longer-term impact of
street revolutions that have deposed two dictators in less than a month,
starting with the ouster of Tunisia’s leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Middle
East leaders from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Yemen have moved to pre-empt similar
uprisings.
In Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which depended heavily on Mr. Mubarak,
officials were blistering in their criticism of Washington, arguing that the
United States abandoned a long-time ally without first building in guarantees
that Egypt’s revolution could not be hijacked by religious extremists.
In his final press briefing at the White House on Friday, Robert Gibbs, Mr.
Obama’s press secretary, told reporters, “I think it’s important that the next
government of Egypt, as we’ve said in here many times, recognize the accords
that have been signed with the government of Israel.” But other officials have
acknowledged privately that if Egypt turns into a noisy democracy that includes
the Muslim Brotherhood, there will undoubtedly be political debate in Egypt
about whether the 1979 peace accord with Israel should remain in force.
“We don’t think that there is any real chance the Egyptian military would have
any interest in seeing the peace accord walked back,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior
aides said this week. “But it’s a warning we must issue.”
The Saudis, like Mr. Mubarak himself, portrayed the uprising as the creation of
“foreign powers,” which was widely interpreted as code words for Washington and
other Western powers.
“We are astonished however at what we see as interference in the internal
affairs of Egypt by some countries,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince
Saud al-Faisal, said Thursday, as Mr. Mubarak was still clinging to power. In an
unusually direct shot at the White House, he said, “We are shocked to see that
there are countries pre-empting even the will of the Egyptian people,” never
addressing the fact that the protests in Egypt seemed both widespread and
homegrown.
While there are few signs yet of protests gathering steam in Saudi Arabia, the
government there has taken steps to raise wages and try to keep the contagion
from spreading across its own desert.
Yemen and Syria, according to an analysis circulating in the White House, could
be more vulnerable. But even as administration officials worried about how the
protests could spread, they seemed to be all but inviting it in Iran.
White House officials were clearly relishing the discomfort the uprising has
created for Iran’s leaders.
On Friday, White House officials noted that the Iranians, who initially greeted
the protests in Egypt because they were aimed at a secular leader who had helped
isolate Tehran, had changed their minds. They were blocking broadcasts by the
BBC, and putting some opposition leaders under house arrest.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but urged Iranians to go out onto
Tehran’s streets, in a repeat of the June 2009 demonstrations: “I say to our
Iranian friends, Let your people march. Let your people speak. Release your
people from jail. Let them have a voice.”
Just a week ago, trying to coax Mr. Mubarak to transfer his powers or leave
office, Mr. Obama called the Egyptian leader a “patriot” who cared deeply about
his country. On Friday, after Mr. Mubarak slipped out of Cairo, Mr. Obama
mentioned him only once.
Instead, he focused his comments on the young people in the streets, and a
military that “would not fire bullets” into the crowds that gathered in Tahrir
Square, also known as Liberation Square. He struck a decidedly optimistic tone
about Egypt’s future, repeating lines from his own presidential campaign in
2008, saying that Egyptians could now create a government that “represented
their hopes and not their fears.”
Even some outsiders who have been critical of the administration’s mixed
messages during the Egyptian crisis — from its early declarations to Egypt as
“stable” to its wavering on whether reform could happen with Mr. Mubarak still
in office — said Mr. Obama struck the right tone on Friday. “He has done better
than his government has done,” said Robert Kagan, a conservative scholar and
essayist at the Brookings Institution.
But there are widespread concerns in Washington about the weeks ahead, starting
with the worry that once Tahrir Square clears, the military might try to
recreate a state it would dominate. “It is going to be critical to make sure the
military remains true to the transition,” Senator John Kerry, chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations committee, said in an interview. “If that is secured
quickly, then I believe the process can flow quite smoothly.”
Mr. Kagan said he thought the risks were relatively small.
“Once the military decided they were not going to kill people in the streets, I
don’t know what leverage they have. If they tried to re-establish the military
dictatorship that Egypt has had for years, it would be pretty difficult.”
