History > 2011 > USA > International (IV)

A relative of Ahmed Sarawi, 36,

who was killed in the recent clashes,

cries inside a vehicle in Benghazi.

Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Boston Globe > Big Picture

Libya: Unrest and uncertainty        February 25, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/libya_unrest_and_uncertainty.html

Libya’s Butcher

February 22, 2011
The New York Times

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya vowed on Tuesday that he would “fight on to the last drop of my blood” and die a “martyr.” We have no doubt that what he really meant is that he will butcher and martyr his own people in his desperation to hold on to power. He must be condemned and punished by the international community.

Colonel Qaddafi, who took power in a 1969 coup, has a long, ruthless and erratic history. Among his many crimes: He was responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 2003, after years of international sanctions, he announced that he had given up terrorism and his pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

We applauded those changes, and we are not eager to see Libya once again isolated. But Colonel Qaddafi’s brutal suppression of antigovernment demonstrations has left no doubt that he is still an international criminal.

As of Tuesday, opposition forces claimed to control half of Libya’s 1,000-mile Mediterranean coast. Witnesses described the capital, Tripoli, as a war zone and said pro-government forces, relying heavily on mercenaries, were massacring demonstrators.

Authoritative information was difficult to come by — the government has blocked nearly all foreign reporters and shut down Internet and other communications. But there were reports of warplanes and helicopters being used to attack civilians, and human rights groups estimated that at least 220 protesters have been killed.

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday condemned the violence and said those responsible must be held to account. It must quickly come up with more concrete ways to press Libya’s government to stop the attacks on its people and move to a democratic transition — preferably with Colonel Qaddafi gone.

The Security Council should impose sanctions on Colonel Qaddafi, his family and other officials responsible for the repression, including a freeze on their overseas assets and a travel ban. If the government does not immediately halt the killing, the United Nations should re-impose a ban on all arms sales to Libya.

The Security Council rarely acts quickly, so the United States and the European Union should impose their own sanctions while pressing the United Nations to act. Britain made a good first step when it revoked eight weapons-related export licenses for Libya. On Tuesday, the Arab League suspended Libya’s participation in its meetings.

We were reassured to see some Libyan diplomats rejecting their government’s brutality. Two military pilots refused to fire on their fellow citizens and flew their planes to Malta. All should be granted safe haven.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights says Colonel Qaddafi’s use of lethal force may constitute crimes against humanity. We agree. There needs to be a thorough investigation.

    Libya’s Butcher, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/opinion/23wed2.html

Factbox: U.S. oil companies' interests in Libya

Tue, Feb 22 2011
Reuters

(Reuters) - A burgeoning revolt in Libya led to a call from U.S. Senator John Kerry, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for all oil companies to cease operations in the country immediately.

Many U.S. oil companies have interests in Libya. The following are details of their exposure, based on their latest annual reports:

CONOCOPHILLIPS

ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, holds a 16.3 percent interest in Libya's Waha concessions, which encompass nearly 13 million gross acres. Net oil production from Libya averaged 45,000 barrels per day in 2009 -- or 2 percent of worldwide output -- down from 47,000 bpd in 2008.

MARATHON OIL CORP

Marathon has a 16 percent interest in the outside-operated Waha concessions in the Sirte Basin. Its 2009 exploration program included the drilling of four wells, along with five development wells. Net liquid hydrocarbon sales from Libya were 46,000 bpd in 2009, or 19 percent of its total. Marathon said on Tuesday its Waha production was normal.

HESS CORP

In 2009, Hess produced 22,000 bpd of crude from Libya, or 8 percent of its crude output. At the end of 2009, 23 percent of its proved reserves were in Africa, with Libya making up 11 percent of that. Along with its Oasis Group partners, Hess has operations in Waha, with an interest of 8 percent. Hess also owns all of Area 54 offshore, where it drilled an exploration well in 2008, followed in 2009 by a down-dip appraisal well.

OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM CORP

Occidental, the fourth-largest U.S. oil company, earned $243 million in net sales from Libya in 2009, or less than 2 percent of its total. Production increased in 2010, and Oxy has plans to double its output from Libya by 2014.

(Compiled by Braden Reddall in San Francisco,

with reporting by Anna Driver in Houston; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

    Factbox: U.S. oil companies' interests in Libya, R, 22.2.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-libya-usa-oilcompanies-idUSTRE71L5VI20110222

If Not Now, When?

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

What’s unfolding in the Arab world today is the mother of all wake-up calls. And what the voice on the other end of the line is telling us is clear as a bell:

“America, you have built your house at the foot of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava from different cracks and is rumbling like it’s going to blow. Move your house!” In this case, “move your house” means “end your addiction to oil.”

No one is rooting harder for the democracy movements in the Arab world to succeed than I am. But even if things go well, this will be a long and rocky road. The smart thing for us to do right now is to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the deficit. Legislating a higher energy price today that takes effect in the future, notes the Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a shift in buying and investment well before the tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes, it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are going up anyway, folks. Let’s capture some it for ourselves.

It is about time. For the last 50 years, America (and Europe and Asia) have treated the Middle East as if it were just a collection of big gas stations: Saudi station, Iran station, Kuwait station, Bahrain station, Egypt station, Libya station, Iraq station, United Arab Emirates station, etc. Our message to the region has been very consistent: “Guys (it was only guys we spoke with), here’s the deal. Keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t bother the Israelis too much and, as far as we’re concerned, you can do whatever you want out back. You can deprive your people of whatever civil rights you like. You can engage in however much corruption you like. You can preach whatever intolerance from your mosques that you like. You can print whatever conspiracy theories about us in your newspapers that you like. You can keep your women as illiterate as you like. You can create whatever vast welfare-state economies, without any innovative capacity, that you like. You can undereducate your youth as much as you like. Just keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t hassle the Jews too much — and you can do whatever you want out back.”

It was that attitude that enabled the Arab world to be insulated from history for the last 50 years — to be ruled for decades by the same kings and dictators. Well, history is back. The combination of rising food prices, huge bulges of unemployed youth and social networks that are enabling those youths to organize against their leaders is breaking down all the barriers of fear that kept these kleptocracies in power.

But fasten your seat belts. This is not going to be a joy ride because the lid is being blown off an entire region with frail institutions, scant civil society and virtually no democratic traditions or culture of innovation. The United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report 2002 warned us about all of this, but the Arab League made sure that that report was ignored in the Arab world and the West turned a blind eye. But that report — compiled by a group of Arab intellectuals led by Nader Fergany, an Egyptian statistician — was prophetic. It merits re-reading today to appreciate just how hard this democratic transition will be.

The report stated that the Arab world is suffering from three huge deficits — a deficit of education, a deficit of freedom and a deficit of women’s empowerment. A summary of the report in Middle East Quarterly in the Fall of 2002 detailed the key evidence: the gross domestic product of the entire Arab world combined was less than that of Spain. Per capita expenditure on education in Arab countries dropped from 20 percent of that in industrialized countries in 1980 to 10 percent in the mid-1990s. In terms of the number of scientific papers per unit of population, the average output of the Arab world per million inhabitants was roughly 2 percent of that of an industrialized country.

When the report was compiled, the Arab world translated about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece did. Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the late 1990s in the rankings of Freedom House. At the dawn of the 21st century, the Arab world had more than 60 million illiterate adults, the majority of whom were women. Yemen could be the first country in the world to run out of water within 10 years.

This is the vaunted “stability” all these dictators provided — the stability of societies frozen in time.

Seeing the Arab democracy movements in Egypt and elsewhere succeed in modernizing their countries would be hugely beneficial to them and to the world. We must do whatever we can to help. But no one should have any illusions about how difficult and convulsive the Arabs’ return to history is going to be. Let’s root for it, without being in the middle of it.

    If Not Now, When?, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/opinion/23friedman.html

Pakistan Case Tests Laws on Diplomatic Immunity

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — An American C.I.A. contractor is accused of killing two men at a crowded intersection in Pakistan. Can Pakistani officials lawfully prosecute him for murder?

In debating the fate of Raymond A. Davis, who is charged with gunning down two people in Lahore last month under circumstances that remain murky, the United States and Pakistan are writing a new chapter in the long history of operatives who work under diplomatic cover.

For Pakistanis, many of whom are angry at the apparent impunity with which the C.I.A.’s drone missiles regularly kill terrorism suspects — and, at times, innocent bystanders — Mr. Davis’s case has proved galvanizing. Protesters have called for Mr. Davis to be hanged.

But for Obama administration officials, the legal case is clear-cut. They insist Mr. Davis has diplomatic immunity that protects him against prosecution in Pakistan. Pakistan can expel Mr. Davis, the administration says, but it has no right to imprison him and move forward with a murder case.

“If our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution” under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, President Obama said last week, adding that Pakistan should abide by that rule.

American officials say Mr. Davis was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team collecting intelligence and conducting surveillance on militant groups in Pakistan.

At the core of the debate is the principle that those proclaimed to be diplomats working abroad should be immune to prosecution because they should be beholden only to the legal systems of the countries that sent them, rather than local courts. The usual remedy is expulsion. This has generated international disputes when diplomats have been accused of murder or other crimes.

But this case also rests on legal technicalities, with confusion arising from contradictory statements by the State Department in the first days after Mr. Davis’s arrest. Those statements have called into question whether Mr. Davis was working — officially, at least — as a diplomatic official or a consular one. Consular officials are afforded somewhat weaker legal protections because they are thought of as administrators, rather than diplomats.

Initially, State Department officials described Mr. Davis as a staff member for the United States Consulate in Lahore.

Days later, however, the United States government said that Mr. Davis was actually listed with the administrative and technical staff of the United States Embassy in Islamabad — and that it had formally notified the Pakistani Foreign Ministry of his status there on Jan. 20, 2010.

The distinction is crucial. If Mr. Davis was listed as a technical staff member for the embassy’s diplomatic mission, then he would be covered by a 1961 treaty that gives diplomats total immunity to criminal prosecution. In that case, Pakistan should be allowed only to expel him. Victims’ families, however, might still be able to sue him for civil damages.

But if Mr. Davis were instead listed as a staff member for the consulate in Lahore, then he would be covered by a 1963 treaty that governs the rights of consular officials and that allows host countries to prosecute them if they commit a “grave crime.”

The contradictory statements over Mr. Davis’s assignment are just part of the evidence that Pakistani news accounts have cited in criticizing the United States’ position. On the day of the shootings, for instance, a State Department spokesman said at a news briefing that Raymond Davis was not the actual name of the person who was in Pakistani custody. The United States now says that he is indeed Mr. Davis.

The State Department says that for legal purposes all that really matters is that the embassy had listed him as a member of the diplomatic mission’s technical and administrative staff.

“This is all just a sideshow,” said John Bellinger, a State Department lawyer in the administration of President George W. Bush.

However it is resolved, Mr. Davis’s case appears destined to join a rogue’s gallery of notable disputes arising from invocations of diplomatic immunity.

In 1984, for example, someone inside the Libyan Embassy in London fired a gun out of its window and killed a British policewoman. The shooting caused an uproar that tested the limits of diplomatic immunity, but the British government allowed the embassy staff to return to Libya.

In 1997, a Georgian diplomat driving drunk in Washington killed an American teenager. Although the man was initially released, the Georgian government waived his immunity. He was prosecuted and pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

The United States, however, has made clear that it will not waive immunity for Mr. Davis. That stance raises the question of what happens if Pakistan continues to hold him and moves forward with prosecution, arguing that he was not a real diplomat.

Diplomatic history is full of incidents in which host countries have accused people working as embassy officials of being spies. But in most cases, the officials have simply been expelled.

Perhaps the most notable exception was in 1979, when Iranian militants overran the United States Embassy in Tehran. They claimed their hostages were “mercenaries and spies” who did not deserve “diplomatic respect.”

The United States sued Iran in the International Court of Justice. In 1980, the court ruled against Iran — saying its only remedy if it thought the embassy officials were spies was to expel them or break off diplomatic relations.


Jane Perlez and Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Pakistan Case Tests Laws on Diplomatic Immunity, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/asia/23immunity.html

Qaddafi’s Grip on the Capital Tightens as Revolt Grows

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TOBRUK, Libya — Vowing to track down and kill protesters “house by house,” Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya tightened his grip on the capital, Tripoli, on Tuesday, but the eastern half of the country was slipping beyond his control.

A bloody crackdown drove protesters from the streets of Tripoli, where residents described a state of terror. After a televised speech by Colonel Qaddafi, thousands of his supporters converged in the city’s central Green Square, wearing green bandannas and brandishing large machetes.

Many loaded into trucks headed for the outlying areas of the city, where they occupied traffic intersections and appeared to be massing for neighborhood-to-neighborhood searches.

“It looks like they have been given a green light to kill these people,” one witness said.

Human Rights Watch said it had confirmed 62 deaths in two hospitals after a rampage on Monday night, when witnesses said groups of heavily armed militiamen and mercenaries from other African countries cruised the streets in pickup trucks, spraying crowds with machine-gun fire.

The death toll was probably higher; one witness said militia forces appeared to be using vans to cart away bodies.

But as they clamped down on the capital, Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces did not appear to make any attempt to take back the growing number of towns in the east that had in effect declared their independence and set up informal opposition governments. For now, there is little indication of what will replace the vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s authority in broad parts of the country other than simmering anarchy.

Only around the town of Ajdabiya, south of the revolt’s center in Benghazi, were Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces and militia still clashing with protesters along the road to the colonel’s hometown, Surt.

The widening gap between the capital and the eastern countryside underscored the radically different trajectory of the Libyan revolt from the others that recently toppled Arab autocrats on Libya’s western and eastern borders, in Tunisia and Egypt.

Though the Libyan revolt began with a relatively organized core of longtime government critics in Benghazi, its spread to the capital was swift and spontaneous, outracing any efforts to coordinate the protests.

Colonel Qaddafi has lashed out with a level of violence unseen in either of the other uprisings, partly by importing foreigners without ties to the Libyan people. His four decades of idiosyncratic one-man rule have left the country without any national institutions — not even a unified or disciplined military — that could tame his retribution or provide the framework for a transitional government.

Condemnations of his brutal crackdown mounted, from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the United Nations Security Council to the Arab League, which suspended Libya as a member. High-profile aides and diplomats continued to defect, among them Libya’s interior minister and the country’s ambassadors to the United States, India and Bangladesh.

In his second television appearance in two days, Colonel Qaddafi vowed on Tuesday to die as a martyr for his country. “I will fight on to the last drop of my blood,” he said.

Wearing a beige robe and turban and reading at times from his manifesto, the Green Book, Colonel Qaddafi called the protesters “cockroaches” and attributed the unrest shaking Libya to foreigners, a small group of people distributing pills, brainwashing and young people’s naïve desire to imitate the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

He urged citizens to take to the streets and beat back the protesters, and he described himself in sweeping, megalomaniacal terms. “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution,” he declared.

In Tobruk, an eastern city that joined the uprising almost as soon as it began, a resident watching the speech in the main square reacted by throwing a rock at Colonel Qaddafi’s face as it was broadcast on a large television. And in a cafe not far from Tobruk, Fawzi Labada, a bus driver, looked incredulously at the screen. “He is weak now,” he said. “He’s a liar, a big liar. He will hang.”

In Tripoli, however, the reaction was more chastened. One resident reported the sound of gunfire during the speech — presumably in celebration, he said, but also in warning. “He is saying, ‘If you go to protest, all the shots will be in your chest,’ ” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“We are unarmed and his warning is very clear,” he added. “The people are terrified now.”

The gap between Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in Tripoli and the insurrection in the east recalled Libya’s pre-1931 past as three different countries — Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica — and underscored the challenge facing its insurrection.

Many analysts have suggested that Colonel Qaddafi seemed to fear the development of any national institutions or networks that might check his power, and he has kept even his military divided into battalions, each loyal mainly to its own officers.

That has set the stage for heavy defections during the revolt — rebels in the east said some government forces had simply abandoned their uniforms to join the cause. But it also means that Libya’s military is unlikely to play the stabilizing role its Tunisian or Egyptian counterparts did.

Foreign companies and Libyan factions focused intensely on the fate of the country’s substantial oil reserves. The Italian oil company Eni confirmed that it had suspended use of a pipeline from Libya to Sicily that provides 10 percent of Italy’s natural gas.

Opponents of Colonel Qaddafi tightened their control of their area around Ajdabiya, an important site in the oil fields of central Libya, said Tawfiq al-Shahbi, a protest organizer in Tobruk.

Tripoli remained under an information blackout, with no Internet access and limited and intermittent phone service. Colonel Qaddafi’s government has sought to block all foreign journalists from entering the country or reporting on the revolt.

But the uprising in the east cracked open the country on Tuesday as the Libyan military retreated from the eastern border with Egypt and foreign journalists poured through. The road from the border to Tobruk appeared to be completely under the control of Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents, and small, ragtag bands of men in worn fatigues ran easygoing checkpoints and flashed victory signs at visitors.

Except for those guards, there was little to suggest an uprising was under way. Shops were open along the road, which was full of traffic, mostly heading out of Libya.

Tobruk residents said neighboring cities — including Dernah, Al Qubaa, Bayda and El Marij — were also quiet, and effectively ruled by the opposition.

The government lost control of Tobruk almost immediately, according to Gamal Shallouf, a marine biologist who has become an informal press officer in the city.

Soldiers took off their uniforms on Friday and Saturday, taking the side of protesters, who burned the police station and another government building, smashing a large stone monument of Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book. Four people were killed during clashes here, residents said.

Salah Algheriani, who works for the state-owned Gulf Oil company, talked about the sea change in Tobruk, where everyone was suddenly full of loud opinions and hope, including the hope that young people might stop leaving the country for Europe.

“The taste of freedom is very delicious,” he said.

The protests began with a relatively organized network of families in Benghazi who had all lost relatives in a 1996 prison riot. Many were represented by the same lawyer, a prominent Qaddafi critic in the region, and his arrest last week set off their uprising.

But the revolt in Tripoli appears far more genuinely spontaneous and unorganized than the Benghazi uprising or, for that matter, the revolutions that toppled the leaders of Tunisia or Egypt. The lack of organization now raises questions about the ability of the mostly young rebels in the capital to regroup after the Qaddafi government’s retaliation.

Protesters in other parts of the country have vowed in recent days to send reinforcements to their fellow citizens in Tripoli, but Qaddafi supporters have set up roadblocks to prevent entry into the city.

Still, even in Tripoli, some protesters who had retreated into their homes vowed that they would return to the street.

“It is too late,” one said. “I don’t think anyone is prepared to listen to Qaddafi anymore, and it is not one town or one area. It is the whole country in an uprising.”


Kareem Fahim reported from Tobruk, Libya, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tunis. Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman, Mona El-Naggar, Neil MacFarquhar and Liam Stack from Cairo.

    Qaddafi’s Grip on the Capital Tightens as Revolt Grows, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23libya.html

U.S. Condemns Libyan Tumult but Makes No Threats

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday reiterated its condemnation of bloody clashes between protesters and those loyal to the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but it stopped short of threatening concrete measures, like sanctions or a no-flight zone above Tripoli.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Libyan government was responsible for the bloodshed, which she called “completely unacceptable.” But with the United States not yet able to get its diplomats out of the country, she said, “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.”

“We are in touch with many Libyan officials, directly and indirectly, and with other governments in the region to try to influence what is going on inside Libya,” Mrs. Clinton said to reporters at the State Department.

On Monday, the State Department ordered 35 diplomats and their dependents to leave Libya. On Tuesday, it was not able to move them because of a shortage of seats on commercial flights. It has asked commercial carriers to fly larger planes to Tripoli and has charter flights on standby, said the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley.

On Wednesday afternoon, a ferry chartered by the United States government is scheduled to leave Tripoli for Malta, the State Department announced Tuesday evening. It advised American citizens wishing to leave Libya to arrive at the dock by 10 a.m. Wednesday morning.

Even before the violence, the United States had worried about the safety of its diplomats in Tripoli. The State Department called home its ambassador, Gene A. Cretz, after his name appeared on cables made public by WikiLeaks, which disclosed embarrassing details about the personal habits of Colonel Qaddafi.

“It is a totally legitimate concern, given Qaddafi’s past behavior,” said Tom Malinowski, head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. “But the more they signal that their chief concern is for the safety of their people, the more the incentive for the Qaddafi government to hold hostages.”

Mr. Crowley said the Libyan government had pledged to cooperate with the United States in evacuating Americans. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman has spoken several times by telephone with Libya’s foreign minister, Moussa Koussa.

In addition to the embassy personnel, about 600 American citizens are registered with the embassy in Tripoli, as well as several thousand people with dual American-Libyan citizenship. Many of those work for energy companies and were also trying to get out of the country, he said.

Mrs. Clinton said the United Nations Security Council was the proper place for further action against Libya. After a day of debate on Tuesday, the Security Council condemned the use of force against peaceful demonstrators in Libya and called for those responsible for such attacks to be held to account.

Mrs. Clinton said the situation was still too murky to make a judgment about what to do next. “As we gain a greater understanding of what is actually happening,” she said, “we will take appropriate steps in line with our values, our principles and our laws.” She noted that communications were largely shut down.

Among the steps the United States could take, analysts said, would be to reintroduce the sanctions it imposed, starting in the 1970s, for state-sponsored terrorism, most notably the bombing of a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. It lifted the sanctions after Libya renounced terrorism.

An even more drastic step would be instituting a no-flight zone over Tripoli to prevent warplanes or helicopters from shooting at protesters. But NATO planes would most likely have to enforce such a ban, and analysts said the alliance was unlikely to take such a step without a much greater escalation of the violence.

Administration officials said drafting a United Nations sanctions resolution would take time, since the Security Council would have to prove a case against Libya — which could be difficult, given the chaos on the ground.

Despite the lack of military ties between the United States and Libya, unlike those with Egypt or Bahrain, analysts said it was wrong to argue that the administration had little leverage over the Libyan government.

“Not having ties also gives you more room to impose targeted sanctions or prosecute Libyan officials,” Mr. Malinowski said. “They weren’t whining about their lack of leverage when they went after Qaddafi for his nuclear program.”

    U.S. Condemns Libyan Tumult but Makes No Threats, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23diplomacy.html

WikiLeaks Cables Detail Qaddafi Family’s Exploits

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — After New Year’s Day 2009, Western media reported that Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, had paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing just four songs at a bash on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.

In the newspaper he controlled, Seif indignantly denied the report — the big spender, he said, was his brother, Muatassim, Libya’s national security adviser, according to an American diplomatic cable from the capital, Tripoli.

It was Muatassim, too, the cable said, who had demanded $1.2 billion in 2008 from the chairman of Libya’s national oil corporation, reportedly to establish his own militia. That would let him keep up with yet another brother, Khamis, commander of a special-forces group that “effectively serves as a regime protection unit.”

As the Qaddafi clan conducts a bloody struggle to hold onto power in Libya, cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism and bitter rivalries that have defined what a 2006 cable called “Qadhafi Incorporated,” using the State Department’s preference from the multiple spellings for Libya’s troubled first family.

The glimpses of the clan’s antics in recent years that have reached Libyans despite Col. Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.

Though the Qaddafi children are described as jockeying for position as their father ages — three sons fought to profit from a new Coca-Cola franchise — they have been well taken care of, cables say. “All of the Qaddafi children and favorites are supposed to have income streams from the National Oil Company and oil service subsidiaries,” one cable from 2006 says.

A year ago, a cable reported that proliferating scandals had sent the clan into a “tailspin” and “provided local observers with enough dirt for a Libyan soap opera.” Muatassim had repeated his St. Barts New Year’s fest, this time hiring the pop singers Beyoncé and Usher. An unnamed “local political observer” in Tripoli told American diplomats that Muatassim’s “carousing and extravagance angered some locals, who viewed his activities as impious and embarrassing to the nation.”

Another brother, Hannibal, meanwhile, had fled London after being accused of physically abusing his wife, Aline, and after the intervention of a Qaddafi daughter, Ayesha, who traveled to London despite being “many months pregnant,” the cable reported. Ayesha, along with Col. Qaddafi’s second wife, Safiya, the mother of six of his eight children, “advised Aline to report to the police that she had been hurt in an ‘accident,’ and not to mention anything about abuse,” the cable said.

Amid his siblings’ shenanigans, Seif, the president’s second-eldest son, had been “opportunely disengaged from local affairs,” spending the holidays hunting in New Zealand. His philanthropy, the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, had sent hundreds of tons of aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, and he was seen as a reasonable prospect to succeed his father.

The same 2010 cable said young Libyan contacts had reported that Seif al-Islam is the ‘hope’ of ‘Libya al-Ghad’ (Libya of tomorrow), with men in their twenties saying that they aspire to be like Seif and think he is the right person to run the country. They describe him as educated, cultured, and someone who wants a better future for Libya,” by contrast with his brothers, the cable said.

That was then. Today the young protesters on the streets are demanding the ouster of the entire family, and it was Seif el-Qaddafi who declared on television at 1 a.m. Monday that Libya faced civil war and “rivers of blood” if the people did not rally around his father.

As for the 68-year-old Colonel Qaddafi, the cables provide an arresting portrait, describing him as a hypochondriac who fears flying over water and often fasts on Mondays and Thursdays. The cables said he was an avid fan of horse racing and flamenco dancing who once added “King of Culture” to the long list of titles he had awarded himself. The memos also said he was accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde,” the senior member of his posse of Ukrainian nurses.

After Colonel Qaddafi abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, many American officials praised his cooperation. Visiting with a congressional delegation in 2009, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut told the leader and his party-loving national security adviser, Muatassim, that Libya was “an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

Before Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in 2008 — the first secretary of state to do so since 1953 — the embassy in Tripoli sought to accentuate the positive. True, Colonel Qaddafi was “notoriously mercurial” and “avoids making eye contact,” the cable warned Ms. Rice, and “there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence.” But he was “a voracious consumer of news,” the cable added, who had such distinctive ideas as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a single new state called “Isratine.”

“A self-styled intellectual and philosopher,” the cable told Ms. Rice, “he has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.”


Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    WikiLeaks Cables Detail Qaddafi Family’s Exploits, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23cables.html

Bahraini Protesters’ Calls for Unity Belie Divisions

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and NADIM AUDI

MANAMA, Bahrain — More than 100,000 demonstrators packed the central Pearl Square here on Tuesday in what organizers called the largest pro-democracy demonstration this tiny Gulf nation has ever seen, as the monarchy struggled to hold onto its monopoly on power.

In a nation of only 500,000 citizens, the sheer size of the gathering was astonishing. Tens of thousands of men, women and children, mostly members of the Shiite majority, formed a ribbon of protest for several miles along the Sheik Khalifa Bin Salman Highway as they headed for the square, calling for the downfall of the government in a march that was intended to show national unity.

“This is the first time in the history of Bahrain that the majority of people, of Bahraini people, get together with one message: This regime must fall,” said Muhammad Abdullah, 43, who was almost shaking with emotion as he watched the swelling crowd.

But for all the talk of political harmony, the past week’s events have left Bahrain as badly divided as it has ever been. Its economy is threatened and its reputation damaged. Standard and Poor’s lowered its credit rating this week, authorities cancelled next month’s Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix — a source of pride for the royal family — many businesses remain closed and tourism is down.

On one side of the divide is a Sunni minority that largely supports King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa as the protector of its interests. On the other is a Shiite majority that knows the changes it seeks will inevitably bring power to its side. The king began releasing some political prisoners on Tuesday night and the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, has called for a national dialogue to try to bridge differences, preserve the monarchy and unite the nation.

But so far there is no substantive dialogue between the sides. There is a test of wills, as the Sunnis fight to hold onto what they have and the Shiites grapple for their fair share after years of being marginalized by an absolute monarchy that has ruled the nation for two centuries.

“I’m really excited, but I don’t know what is going to happen,” said Fatima Amroum, a 25-year-old woman in a black abaya who was quietly texting as she watched the procession on Tuesday. “I’m a little scared of uncertainty; we might get what we demand, but freedom will be chaotic at the beginning.”

The days of protest and repression have mostly been about the Shiites speaking up and the Sunnis cracking down. But on Monday night, in the wealthy neighborhood of Juffeir, tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators poured into Al Fateh Grand Mosque to express their support for the embattled king.

The pro-government crowd borrowed some of the opposition’s slogans, including “no Sunni, no Shia, only Bahraini.” But that was where the call for unity started and ended.

This was an affluent crowd, far different than the mostly low-income Shiites who have taken to the streets to demand a constitutional monarchy, an elected government and a representative parliament. The air was scented with perfume and people drove expensive cars. In a visceral demonstration of the distance between Sunni and Shiite, the crowd cheered a police helicopter that swooped low, a symbol of the heavy-handed tactics that have been used to intimidate the Shiites.

“We love King Hamad and we hate chaos,” said Hannan Al Abdallah, 22, as she joined the pro-government rally. “This is our country and we’re looking after it.”

Ali Al Yaffi, 29, drove to the pro-government demonstration with friends in his shiny white S.U.V. He was angry and distrustful. “The democracy they have been asking for is already here,” he said. “But the Shias, they have their ayatollahs, and whatever they say they will run and do it. If they tell them to burn a house, they will. I think they have a clear intention to disrupt this country.”

On that point there is agreement: the Shiite opposition does want to disrupt, but with peaceful protests aimed at achieving its demands. The public here has learned the lessons of Egypt’s popular uprising and the power of peaceful opposition.

“I feel freedom like I never felt it in my life, but I’m also a little worried,” said Hussein Al Haddad, 32, as he marched with the Shiite protesters on Tuesday. “What is going to happen next?”

Last Monday, Shiites tried to hold a “day of rage,” modeled on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that forced out autocratic presidents. The police gave no ground, firing on crowds with tear gas and rubber bullets and leaving one man dead, shot in the back. The next day, at the funeral, another man was killed the same way.

The protesters marched into Pearl Square, the symbolic center of the city, and set up camp. In the early morning hours, the police raided the camp, killing three men. Then on Friday, a group of unarmed protesters tried to march into the square. The Army opened fire, and one young man, Abdul Redha Mohammed Hassan, was left with a bullet in his head. He died on Monday and was buried on Tuesday.

The Army’s attack on unarmed civilians shocked even the government’s supporters and the military was withdrawn. The demonstrators poured back in, setting up a camp and a speaker’s podium and making clear they would not leave until their demands were met. The first demand, now, is the dissolution of the government and an agreement to create a constitutional monarchy.

“They are the ones who made the demands grow bigger,” said Mohammed Al Shakhouri, 51, as he watched a procession of thousands follow the coffin of Mr. Hassan to the cemetery for burial.

The government seems to have accepted that violence will not silence the opposition and has shifted its strategy. It has set up a press center to get its message out and is working with a public relations firm.

The opposition has stuck with its tactic of peaceful protest. On Tuesday, the Shiite political parties, chief among them Al Wefaq, called for the demonstration to start at the Bahrain mall and march into Pearl Square. Even the organizers were surprised as turnout swelled, packing the eastbound side of the highway from the mall to the square.

“It is a revolution,” said Hussein Mohammed, 37, a bookstore owner and volunteer for Al Wefaq. “It is a big revolution. It is unbelievable.”

Michael Slackman reported from Manama and J. David Goodman from New York.

    Bahraini Protesters’ Calls for Unity Belie Divisions, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/middleeast/23bahrain.html

Oil Soars as Libyan Furor Shakes Markets

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and CHRISTINE HAUSER

HOUSTON — The political turmoil sweeping the Arab world drove oil prices sharply higher and stocks much lower on Tuesday despite efforts by Saudi Arabia to calm turbulent markets.

The unrest that has spread from Tunisia to Libya pushed oil prices to a two-year high and has spurred an increase in gasoline prices. The specter of rising energy costs and accelerating inflation in turn unsettled investors.

Oil is now at a price not seen since the recession began, and it is more than $20 above goals set in recent months by Saudi officials as strong enough to satisfy the top producers but not so strong they might suffocate the global economic recovery.

Although there are still plentiful supplies of oil and gasoline in the United States and in much of the world, American consumers are now paying an average of $3.17 a gallon for regular gasoline, a steep rise of 6 cents a gallon over the last week, according to the AAA daily fuel gauge report. With consumers paying roughly 50 cents more a gallon than a year ago, analysts are warning that prices could easily top $3.50 by the summer driving season.

“Higher energy prices act like a tax on consumers, reducing the amount of discretionary purchasing power that they have,” said Lawrence R. Creatura, a portfolio manager at Federated Investors. “It represents an additional, potential headwind for retailers.”

Those concerns helped send the Dow Jones industrial average down 178.46 points, or 1.44 percent, to 12,212.79. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined 27.57 points, or 2.05 percent, to 1,315.44, while the Nasdaq composite index lost 77.53 points, or 2.74 percent, to 2,756.42. Markets in Asia and Europe were also lower. Treasury prices rose in the United States.

Saudi Arabia’s oil minister sought to reassure the markets on Tuesday, saying that OPEC was ready to pump more oil to compensate for any decline. At least 50,000 barrels a day of output has already been halted in Libya. That is only a fraction of the country’s production, but with foreign oil companies beginning to shut down operations and evacuate workers and with local ports closing, more output could be lost.

“OPEC is ready to meet any shortage in supply when it happens,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said at a news conference after a meeting of ministers of oil producing and consuming nations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “There is concern and fear, but there is no shortage.”

Europe appears most immediately vulnerable to the strife in Libya, which produces almost 2 percent of the world’s oil. More than 85 percent of its exports go to Europe; more than a third goes to Italy alone. Libya sends only a small fraction of its oil to the United States, but because oil is a world commodity, Americans are not immune to the price shock waves.

In New York, crude oil for March delivery gained $7.37, or 8.6 percent, to $93.57 a barrel, while oil for April delivery rose 6.4 percent, to $95.42 a barrel. Brent crude, a European benchmark traded in London, rose 4 cents, to $105.78. Refineries on the East and West Coasts also depend on Brent crude, meaning that the higher prices paid by Europeans are also pushing up gasoline and heating oil prices paid by many New Yorkers, New Englanders and other Americans.

Tom Kloza, the chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, estimated that the Saudis could pump an additional 1 million to 1.5 million barrels in a matter of days. As the largest producer, Saudi Arabia is by far the most influential member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, with a reserve capacity to deliver an additional four million to five million barrels to the world markets after several weeks of preparation. That is more than twice the oil that world markets would lose if production were halted completely by unrest in Libya.

“Unless this unrest spreads to the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh,” Mr. Kloza said, “I think it’s a very manageable situation and prices are closer to cresting than they are to exploding higher.”

While Libya has been the immediate cause for the spike in oil prices recently, oil experts said traders were driving up prices because of concerns that a long period of instability in the Middle East was just beginning. They identified the protests in Bahrain in particular as a disturbing sign that neighboring Saudi Arabia might not be immune to the spreading political contagion.

Bahrain produces little oil, but it is connected to the oil-rich eastern region of Saudi Arabia by a 15-mile causeway. The island nation has a majority Shiite population with cultural and religious ties to the Saudi Shiite minority that lives close to some of the richest Saudi oil fields.

Saudi rulers have long feared that its regional rival, Iran, could try to destabilize Bahrain as a way to cause trouble for the Saudi royal family. Iran’s intentions became all the more worrisome to the Saudis when it decided this month to send two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time in more than 30 years.

“No one knows where this ends,” said Helima L. Croft, a director and senior geopolitical strategist at Barclays Capital. “A couple of weeks ago it was Tunisia and Egypt, and it was thought this can be contained to North Africa and the resource-poor Middle East countries. But now with protests in Bahrain, that’s the heart of the gulf, and it’s adding to anxieties.”

Middle Eastern oil fields are generally well defended and far from population centers, but energy analysts say the continuing turbulence potentially threatens supply lines and foreign investment that producers like Libya and Algeria depend on to increase production.

World oil prices started rising sharply when demonstrators overwhelmed downtown Cairo earlier in the month because of concerns that unrest could block the Suez Canal and Sumed pipeline through which three million barrels of crude pass daily. Labor unrest continues to roil the canal, though shipments have continued without incident.

Unrest in Yemen potentially threatens the 18-mile-wide Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, a shipping lane between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East that serves as a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean through which nearly four million barrels of oil pass daily. Security for tanker traffic in the area became a concern after terrorists attacked a French tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002.


Clifford Krauss reported from Houston and Christine Hauser from New York.

    Oil Soars as Libyan Furor Shakes Markets, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/business/global/23oil.html

Saudis, Trying to Calm Markets, Say OPEC Is Ready to Pump More Oil

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

HOUSTON — Trying to calm turbulent oil markets, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said on Tuesday that the OPEC cartel was ready to pump more oil to compensate for any dropoff caused by unrest in the Middle East.

“OPEC is ready to meet any shortage in supply when it happens,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said at a news conference after a meeting of ministers of oil producing and consuming nations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “There is concern and fear, but there is no shortage.”

American consumers are now paying an average of $3.17 a gallon for regular gasoline, a steep rise of 6 cents a gallon in the last week. With consumers paying roughly 50 cents more a gallon than a year ago, oil analysts are warning that prices could easily top $3.50 by the summer driving season.

The intensifying turmoil in Libya drove oil prices sharply higher again on Tuesday, in part because at least 50,000 barrels a day of output had already been suspended. That is only a fraction of what Libya produces, but with foreign oil companies beginning to shut down operations and evacuate workers, the price of Brent crude, a benchmark traded in London, rose to more than $106 a barrel on Tuesday.

The price for light sweet crude that Americans usually use as a reference for oil prices remains more than $10 lower than Brent, rising $4.91 a barrel on Tuesday to $94.62 in New York trading.

Europe appears most immediately vulnerable to the strife in Libya, which pumps about 1.6 million barrels a day, or roughly 1.7 percent of world production. Over 85 percent of its exports go to Europe, more than a third to Italy alone. Libya sends only a small fraction of its oil to the United States, but since oil is a world commodity, Americans are not immune to the price shock waves.

Refineries on the East and West Coasts, for example, depend on Brent crude, meaning that the higher prices paid by Europeans are also pushing up gasoline and heating oil prices paid by many New Yorkers, New Englanders and other Americans.

Energy specialists said, however, that some relief might be on the way. Tom Kloza, the chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, estimated that the Saudis could pump an additional million to million and half barrels of oil in a matter of days. As the largest producer, Saudi Arabia is by far the most influential member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, with a reserve capacity to deliver an additional five million barrels to the world markets after several weeks of preparation. That is roughly three times more oil than world markets would lose if production were halted completely by unrest in Libya.

“Unless this unrest spreads to the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh,” Mr. Kloza said, “I think it’s a very manageable situation and prices are closer to cresting than they are to exploding higher.”

The Saudis have been satisfied with moderately high but stable oil prices over the last two years that have been supported by tighter OPEC production quotas set when prices collapsed three years ago. But prices began rising at the end of last year because of rebounding demand, particularly in China and other emerging markets, and they have spiked sharply this month because of the instability in the Middle East.

While Libya has been the immediate cause for the spike in oil prices in recent days, oil experts said traders were driving up prices because of concerns that a long period of instability in the Middle East was just beginning. They identified the protests in Bahrain in particular as a disturbing sign that neighboring Saudi Arabia might not be immune to the spreading political contagion.

Bahrain produces little oil but it is connected to the oil-rich eastern region of Saudi Arabia by a 15-mile-long causeway. The island nation has a majority Shiite population with cultural and religious ties to the Saudi Shiite minority that lives close to some of the richest Saudi oil fields.

Saudi rulers have long feared that its main regional rival, Iran, could try to destabilize Bahrain as a way to cause trouble for the Saudi royal family. Iran’s intentions became all the more worrisome to the Saudis when it decided this month to send two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time in more than 30 years.

“No one knows where this ends,” said Helima L. Croft, a director and senior geopolitical strategist at Barclays Capital. “A couple of weeks ago it was Tunisia and Egypt and it was thought this can be contained to North Africa and the resource-poor Middle East countries. But now with protests in Bahrain, that’s the heart of the Gulf, and its adding to anxieties.”

Middle Eastern oil fields are generally well defended and far from population centers, but energy analysts say the continuing turbulence potentially threatens supply lines and foreign investment that producers like Libya and Algeria depend on to increase production.

Egypt is not an oil exporter but world oil prices started rising when demonstrations overwhelmed downtown Cairo earlier in the month because of concerns that unrest could block the Suez Canal and Sumed pipeline through which three million barrels of crude pass daily. Labor unrest continues to roil the canal, though shipments have continued without incident.

Unrest in Yemen potentially threatens the 18-mile-wide Strait of Bab el-Mandab, a shipping lane between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East that serves as a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean through which nearly four million barrels of oil passes daily. Security for tanker traffic in the area became a concern after terrorists attacked a French tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002.

    Saudis, Trying to Calm Markets, Say OPEC Is Ready to Pump More Oil, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/business/global/23oil.html

Oil rises as Libyan unrest disrupts supplies

NEW YORK | Tue Feb 22, 2011
12:29pm EST
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Brent crude rose and U.S. oil hit a 2-1/2 year high on Tuesday as the revolt in Libya disrupted the OPEC nation's supplies and raised concern unrest could spread to other oil producing countries in the region.

More than 8 percent of Libya's 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil production has been shut down by the political violence, with Italian ENI (ENI.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Spain's Repsol shutting in output.

Trade sources said the country's marine oil terminals were disrupted by a lack of communications as rebel soldiers said the eastern region of the country had broken free from Muammar Gaddafi. Libya also declared force majeure on all oil product exports, traders said.

Oil gave up some early gains after Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would be ready to meet any shortage from a supply disruption.

Brent crude traded up 76 cents to $106.50 a barrel at 11:44 a.m. EST, off earlier highs of $108.57 a barrel. Brent hit a 2-1/2 year high of $108.70 a barrel on Monday.

U.S. crude for March delivery, which expires at the end of the session, rose $5.65 to $91.85 a barrel, after touching $94.49 a barrel, which was the highest level since October 2008. The more actively traded April contract gained $5.15 to trade at $94.86 a barrel.

The stronger gains in U.S. crude was partly explained by the fact that while the contract was active in electronic trading on Monday, there was no settlement as the exchange in New York was closed for the Presidents Day holiday.

"Geopolitical events have sparked a move higher as oil prices have rocketed on the headlines out of Libya," said Chris Jarvis, president of Caprock Risk Management in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

Saudi Arabia's Naimi, speaking on the sidelines of the International Energy Forum in Riyadh, said worldwide oil spare oil capacity was between 5-6 million bpd.

(Reporting by Matthew Robinson, Gene Ramos, David Sheppard in New York; Claire Milhench in London and Francis Kan in Singapore; Editing by David Gregorio)

    Oil rises as Libyan unrest disrupts supplies, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-markets-oil-idUSTRE71192R20110222

Chaos Grows in Libya; Defiant Qaddafi Vows to Fight On

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TOBRUK, Libya — Libya appeared to slip further into chaos on Tuesday, as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi vowed to “fight until the last drop of my blood” and clashes intensified between rebels and his loyalists in the capital, Tripoli.

Opposition forces claimed to have consolidated their hold over a string of cities across nearly half of Libya’s 1,000 mile Mediterranean coast, leaving Colonel Qaddafi in control of just parts of the capital and some of southern and central Libya, including his hometown.

Witnesses described the streets of Tripoli as a war zone. Several residents said they believed that massacres had taken place overnight as forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi drove through the streets opening fire at will from the backs of pickup trucks.

“They would drive around, and they would start shooting, shooting, shooting,” said one resident reached by telephone. “Then they would drive like bandits, and they would repeat that every hour or so. It was absolute terror until dawn.”

Human Rights Watch said it had confirmed at least 62 deaths in the violence in Tripoli so far, in addition to more than 200 people killed in clashes elsewhere, mostly in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the uprising began last week. Opposition groups estimated that at least 500 people had been killed.

For a second time, Colonel Qaddafi appeared on state television. Dressed in brown robes with a matching turban, he sometimes shouted and seemed to tremble with anger as he delivered a harangue that lasted some 73 minutes. His lectern was planted in the middle of the old wreckage of his two-story house in the Aziziyah barracks in Tripoli, a house American warplanes had destroyed in a 1986 air raid and which he has left as a monument to American perfidy.

In the rambling, sometimes incoherent address, he said those challenging his government “deserved to die.” He blamed the unrest on “foreign hands,” a small group of people distributing pills, brainwashing, and the naïve desire of young people to imitate the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

Without acknowledging the gravity of the crisis in the streets of the capital, he described himself in sweeping, megalomaniacal terms. “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution,” he declared.

Earlier, the state television broadcast images of a cleaned up Green Square in central Tripoli, the scene of a violent crackdown Monday night. It showed a few hundred Qaddafi supporters waving flags and kissing photographs of him for the cameras.

With the Internet largely blocked, telephone service intermittent and access to international journalists constrained, information from inside the country remained limited, and it was impossible to determine whether the demonstrations were staged.

The rebellion is the latest and bloodiest so far of the uprisings that have swept across the Arab world with surprising speed in recent weeks, toppling autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia and challenging others in Bahrain and Yemen.

Opponents of Colonel Qaddafi had tightened their control of cities from the Egyptian border in the east to Ajdabiya, an important site in the oil fields of central Libya, said Tawfiq al-Shahbi, a protest organizer in the eastern city of Tobruk.

He said that had visited the crossing station into Egypt and that border guards had fled. In Tobruk and Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city, protesters were raising the pre-Qaddafi flag of Libya’s monarchy on public buildings, he and other protesters said.

Despite the crackdown by pro-Qaddafi forces, clashes continued in several neighborhoods in Tripoli, including one called Fashloum, as protesters tried to seal off the streets with makeshift barricades of scrap metal and other debris. Forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi so far failed to surmount the barricades and young protesters appeared to be gathering rocks to defend against another attack.

Outside the barricades, militiamen and Bedouin tribesmen defending Colonel Qaddafi and his 40-year rule were stationed at intersections around the city. Many carried Kalashnikov assault rifles and an anti-aircraft gun was deployed in front of the state television headquarters. “It is extremely tense,” one witness said, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals.

A growing number of Libyan embassies around the world, including in neighboring Tunisia, have also raised the country’s pre-Qaddafi flag — now considered the banner of the revolt. Libyan diplomats around the world — including Libya’s ambassadors to the United States, India and Bangladesh — said they had resigned to protest the bloody crackdown.

International condemnation of the violence continued to build. “Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a statement. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said Monday that he had spoken to Colonel Qaddafi and urged him to halt attacks on protesters immediately.

The Security Council was scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss the bloodshed. In what had become the seeming exception, the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Abdurrahman Shalgham, said he was sticking with Colonel Qaddafi.

The chaos, meanwhile, rippled through Libya and the region. The Italian oil company ENI confirmed that it had suspended use of a pipeline that goes from Libya to Sicily and provides 10 percent of Italy’s natural gas, and Turkey and European nations stepped up the evacuation of their citizens.

An exodus from Tripoli had begun, a witness said, and the freeways were crowded with cars and pedestrians trying to flee. Inside the capital, people waited for hours to buy fuel and bread.

Reports from small towns in the mountains outside of Tripoli indicated that uprisings have driven out forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. But security forces blocked roads leading into Tripoli, preventing people from outside the city from joining the insurrection there.

In Benghazi, pro-government security forces appeared to have either fled or defected to the opposition. Citizens armed with guns organized into informal security committees, a resident reached by telephone said.

Supermarkets and warehouses were open, as were local hospitals, caring for hundreds of people wounded in the government crackdown during the weekend, before defections from the military brought a lull in the violence.

“There is collaboration between people like never before,” said Mohammed Abdul Rahman el Mahrek, 42, who has been living in the city for 15 years and said he supported the rebellion. The warehouses of security forces loyal to the government had been looted by the people with the help of the army, he said. “It is quiet,” he said, “but it is like the quiet before the storm.”

Abdel Aziz al Agha, a 24-year-old medical student, said he had seen nine charred bodies at the morgue on Tuesday believed to be soldiers who had refused to fire on protesters. Other victims had been shot through with high-caliber machine guns normally designed for anti-aircraft use, he said.

Reports coming out of Benghazi also indicated continuing tension. Several Ukrainian doctors, who had been working at the city’s hospitals, were quoted in a Ukrainian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, on Tuesday as saying that the opposition forces would not allow them to leave.

“We have been earning money in this country, and now we have to work hard for the good of the revolution,” Dr. Mikhail Firtel said the new authorities in charge told him. “And they don’t care that the doctors had no rest for 24 hours.”

Kareem Fahim reported from Tobruk, Libya, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tunis. Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman, Mona El-Naggar, Neil MacFarquhar and Liam Stack in Cairo; Nada Bakri in Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan in New York.

    Chaos Grows in Libya; Defiant Qaddafi Vows to Fight On, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23libya.html

Defiant Gaddafi vows to die as martyr

TRIPOLI | Tue Feb 22, 2011
12:07pm EST
Reuters

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Muammar Gaddafi vowed to die in Libya as a martyr in an angry television address on Tuesday, as rebel troops said eastern regions had broken free from his rule in a burgeoning revolt.

"I am not going to leave this land, I will die here as a martyr," Gaddafi said on state television, refusing to bow to calls from his own diplomats, soldiers and protesters clamoring in the streets for an end to his four decades at the helm.

"I shall remain here defiant," said Gaddafi, speaking outside one of his residences, which was heavily damaged in a 1986 U.S. bombing raid that attempted to kill him.

Outside the building stood a monument of a giant fist crushing a U.S. warplane.

In a trademark rambling address, Gaddafi urged his supporters to take to the streets, saying protesters warranted the death sentence. He also promised a vague overhaul of government structures

Earlier, witnesses streaming across the Libyan border into Egypt said Gaddafi was using tanks, warplanes and mercenaries in an effort to stamp out the growing rebellion.

In the eastern city of Tobruk, a Reuters correspondent there said sporadic blasts could be heard, the latest sign that Gaddafi's grip on the oil and gas exporting nation was weakening.

"All the eastern regions are out of Gaddafi's control now ... The people and the army are hand-in-hand here," said the now former army major Hany Saad Marjaa.

The White House offered its condolences for the "appalling violence" in Libya and said the international community had to speak with one voice on the crisis.

The U.N. refugee agency meanwhile urged Libya's neighbors to grant refuge to those fleeing the unrest, which was triggered by decades of repression and popular revolts that toppled leaders in Tunisia and Egypt.

On the Libyan side of the border with Egypt, anti-Gaddafi rebels armed with clubs and Kalashnikov rifles welcomed visitors. One man held an upside-down picture of Gaddafi defaced with the words "the butcher tyrant, murderer of Libyans," a Reuters correspondent who crossed into Libya reported.

Hundreds of Egyptians flowed in the opposite direction on tractors and trucks, taking with them harrowing tales of state violence and banditry.

In the eastern town of Al Bayda, resident Marai Al Mahry told Reuters by telephone that 26 people including his brother Ahmed had been shot dead overnight by Gaddafi loyalists.

"They shoot you just for walking on the street," he said, sobbing uncontrollably as he appealed for help.

Protesters were attacked with tanks and warplanes, he said.

"The only thing we can do now is not give up, no surrender, no going back. We will die anyways, whether we like it or not. It is clear that they don't care whether we live or not. This is genocide," said Mahry, 42.

Human Rights Watch said 62 people had died in clashes in Tripoli in the past two days, on top of its previous toll of 233 dead. Opposition groups put the figure far much higher. U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay said the killing could amount to crimes against humanity and demanded an international probe.

The revolt in Libya, the third largest oil producer in Africa, has driven oil prices to a 2 1/2 year high above $108 a barrel, and OPEC said it would produce more crude if supplies from member Libya were disrupted.

With no end in sight to the crisis, refugees fled to Egypt.

"Five people died on the street where I live," Mohamed Jalaly, 40, told Reuters at Salum on his way to Cairo from Benghazi. "You leave Benghazi and then you have ... nothing but gangs and youths with weapons," he added. "The way from Benghazi is extremely dangerous," he said.

Libyan guards have withdrawn from their side of the border and Egypt's new military rulers -- who took power following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak on February11 -- said the main crossing would be kept open round-the-clock to allow the sick and wounded to enter.

Groups of rebels with assault rifles and shotguns, waved cheerily at the passing cars on a stretch of desert road, flicking the V-for-victory sign and posing with their guns, a Reuters correspondent reported.

Libyan security forces have cracked down fiercely on demonstrators across the country, with fighting spreading to Tripoli after erupting in Libya's oil-producing east last week, in a reaction to decades of

As the fighting has intensified some supporters have abandoned Gaddafi. Tripoli's envoy to India, Ali al-Essawi, resigned and told Reuters that African mercenaries had been recruited to help put down protests.

"The fall of Gaddafi is the imperative of the people in streets," he said. The justice minister also quit and a group of army officers urged soldiers to "join the people." Two pilots flew their warplanes to nearby Malta.

DEFIANCE AND CONDEMNATION

Gaddafi's son Saif on Sunday vowed his father would keep fighting "until the last man standing" and the Libyan leader appeared on television after days of seclusion to dismiss reports he had fled to the Venezuela of his ally Hugo Chavez.

"I want to show that I'm in Tripoli and not in Venezuela. Do not believe the channels belonging to stray dogs," said Gaddafi, who has ruled Libya with a mixture of populism and tight control since taking power in a military coup in 1969.

World powers have condemned the use of force against protesters, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon accusing Libya of firing on civilians from warplanes and helicopters. The Security Council met in closed session to discuss Libya.

Washington and Europe have demanded an end to the violence and Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said: "A ruling family, threatening its people with civil war, has reached the end of the line."

Demonstrations spread to Tripoli from the second city Benghazi, cradle of the revolt that has engulfed a number of towns and which residents say is now in the hands of protestors.

Residents said anxious shoppers were queuing outside stores to try to stock up on food and drink. Some shops were closed.

Spain's Repsol suspended all operations in Libya and sources said operations at cargo ports at Benghazi, Tripoli and Misurata had shut due to the violence.

Trade sources said Libyan oil port operations had also been disrupted and others said gas supplies from Libya to Italy had slowed since Late Monday, though Italy said they had not yet been interrupted.

Shell said it was pulling out its expatriate staff from Libya temporarily and a number of states were seeking to evacuate their nationals.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara, Christian Lowe, Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Souhail Karam; Brian Love, Daren Butler; Dina Zayed, Sarah Mikhail and Tom Perry in Cairo and a Reuters correspondent in Libya; Henry Foy in New Delhi; Writing by Jon Boyle; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Giles Elgood)

    Defiant Gaddafi vows to die as martyr, R, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-libya-protests-idUSTRE71G0A620110222

Analysis: Libya's tribal politics key to Gaddafi's fate

LONDON | Tue Feb 22, 2011
12:07pm EST
Reuters
By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - Powerful military elites ultimately decided the outcome of Egypt and Tunisia's revolutions, but in Libya it is the much more opaque and complex tribal power structures that could decide how events play out.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has long relied on his immediate -- but small -- Qathathfa tribe to staff elite military units and guarantee his personal security and that of his government, experts say. But that is seen unlikely to be enough to secure the country.

More important are the larger tribes long co-opted into his rule such as the Wafalla, who make up an estimated 1 million of Libyan's more than 6 million population. Some rumors suggest the ferocity of Gaddafi's crackdown on his own people may already be prompting tribal leaders to switch allegiance.

"In Libya, it will be the tribal system that will hold the balance of power rather than the military," said Alia Brahimi, head of the North Africa program at the London School of Economics.

"I think you will see defections of some of the main tribes if that is not happening already. It looks like he has already lost control of the east of the country where he was never popular and never fully managed to consolidate his power."

Eastern Libya is the site of much of its oil reserves. On Tuesday, a Reuters correspondent reported that Gaddafi's forces appeared to have abandoned their positions on the border with Egypt which were now in the hands of men armed with clubs and Kalashnikovs who said they were opposed to his rule.

Who, if anyone, those men were answering to was not immediately clear. While herder and tribal lifestyles have declined in Libya in the face of rising oil-fueled urbanization, traditional power structures are said to remain strong beneath the surface.

In Egypt and Tunisia, the armies proved to be the supreme political force, easing unpopular leaders Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali from office in part because they were reluctant to fire on protesters. Libya is very different, however.

Long largely closed to outsiders, details of its complex mix of alliances and loyalties are scarce. Experts generally agree part of Gaddafi's strategy for retaining power has been to keep his own tribe in important positions.

"GREEN BOOK"

Some analysts say key members of his family have their own military formations, again usually members of their own Qathathfa tribe. Once largely nomadic herders, the Qathathfa were sidelined by Libya's former monarchy but allowed to join the armed forces and police, then considered secondary organizations.

Noman Benotman, a former dissident familiar with official thinking, says Gaddafi has long kept the army weak in order to prevent it from developing into a rival power base.

"Instead, power is largely vested in a series of paramilitary formations, bolstered by groups of foreign African mercenaries, that have largely remained loyal to the Gaddafi family," he wrote in a paper for Britain's Quilliam thinktank.

Benotman, who once helped lead an uprising against Gaddafi in the mid-1990s, said real armed power lay with special paramilitary units whose loyalty was to the family and revolutionary committees. It was incorrect, however, to suggest that the numerous Gaddafi sons each had control over their own unit, "like so many toys."

The presence of African mercenaries was the result of years of relationship building by Gaddafi in Africa, he said.

Having risen through the military structure himself, Gaddafi is seen to have tried to emasculate it to prevent rival commanders from threatening him. Memorably, he abolished all ranks above his own position of colonel.

Gaddafi's unique "Green Book," containing his political philosophy and system of government, vows to put an end to tribalism but in reality experts say it entrenched it.

"Gaddafi has largely dismissed the older tribal military structures but they will probably not have huge problems finding weapons," said the LSE's Brahimi. "Defections from the military will be key to this."

Parts of the military had long appeared reluctant to use excessive force against their own people, she said. Popular rumor held that Gaddafi was forced to rely on Serbian mercenary pilots to bomb civilian areas during offensives against Islamist militancy in the 1990s.

DIVIDE AND RULE

Some say Gaddafi's tribal strategy has effectively amounted to a system of divide and rule, buying off particularly established tribal leaders from key groups. In recent years, they say, control has been faltering and recent events may accelerate this.

"Gaddafi made sure to keep the people aware of their tribal divisions, winning the alliance of larger ones and hence keeping the population under control," wrote Jerusalem-based journalist Lisa Goldman after a Skype conversation with a Libyan contact she said was well placed to talk on some military matters.

"Although the larger ones like the Werfalees and the Megrahees were privileged with power and money, his recent actions angered these tribes and for the first time in decades tribal barriers have withered away. People are uniting with other formerly rival tribes or even different ethnicities like the Amazeegh or Berbers."

If Gaddafi can persuade other tribes to stay loyal to him, most experts believe he will probably try to arm them directly, raising the risks of ethnic conflict that could tear the country apart, send refugees pouring into its neighbors and jeopardize oil supplies.

Gaddafi's opponents accuse him of bringing in mercenaries from elsewhere in Africa, perhaps veterans of civil wars in the Sahel and West Africa.

"There's a lot of weapons in the country and Gaddafi has armed tribes before that have supported him," said Geoff Porter, North Africa analyst and contributor to political risk consultancy Wikistrat.

"We could see something more along the lines of Lebanon's civil war -- a prolonged period of violence and bloodshed."

(Editing by Andrew Dobbie and Mark Trevelyan)

    Analysis: Libya's tribal politics key to Gaddafi's fate, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-libya-tribes-idUSTRE71L52220110222

Chaos Grows in Libya as Strife in Tripoli Intensifies

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and SHARON OTTERMAN

TUNIS — Libya appeared to slip further into chaos on Tuesday, as clashes intensified between rebels and forces loyal to Col. Muammar el Qaddafi in Tripoli. Opposition forces in eastern Libya moved to consolidate their control.

Witnesses described the streets of Tripoli, the capital, as a war zone. In several neighborhoods of the city, including one called Fashloum, protesters tried to seal off the streets with makeshift barricades of scrap steel and other debris. Forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi so far failed to surmount the barricades and young protesters appeared to be gathering rocks to throw in their defense in anticipation of a renewed attack.

Outside the barricades, militiamen and Bedouin tribesmen defending the strongman and his 40-year rule were stationed at intersections around the city. Many carried Kalashnikov assault rifles and an anti-aircraft gun was deployed in front of the state television headquarters.

“It is extremely tense,” one witness said, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals.

The rebellion is the latest and bloodiest so far of the uprisings that have swept across the Arab world with surprising speed in recent weeks, toppling autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia, and challenging others in Bahrain and Yemen.

With the Internet largely blocked, telephone service intermittent, and access to international journalists constrained, information from inside the country remained limited. The number of casualties in the weeklong revolt against Colonel Qaddafi remained unknown.

Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that it was struggling to confirm the number of dead, saying it had confirmed 233 as of Monday, most in Benghazi, the eastern city where the uprising began. Opposition groups estimated that that at least 500 people had died.

A growing number of Libyan embassies around the world, including in neighboring Tunisia, have raised the country’s pre-Qaddafi flag — now considered the banner of the revolt — and many diplomats, including Libya’s ambassador to the United States, said they had resigned to protest the bloody crackdown.

International condemnation of the violence continued to build. “Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a statement. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said Monday that he had spoken to Colonel Qaddafi and urged him to immediately halt attacks on protesters.

An exodus from Tripoli had begun, a witness said, and the freeways were crowded with cars and pedestrians attempting to flee. Inside the capital, people waited for hours to buy fuel and bread.

Security forces and militiamen backed by helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of Tripoli overnight, according to witnesses and news reports. Fighting was heavy at times, and the streets were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi fighting alongside mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as “small bombs” and helicopters fired on protesters.

Hundreds of Qaddafi supporters took over the central Green Square in the capital after truckloads of militiamen arrived and opened fire on protesters late Monday night, scattering them. Residents said they now feared to leave their houses.

“It was an obscene amount of gunfire,” said one witness. “They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.”

Colonel Qaddafi, whose whereabouts have been unknown, appeared for about 30 seconds on state television at 2 a.m. on Tuesday to signal his defiance and deny rumors he had left the country. “I want to show that I’m in Tripoli and not in Venezuela,” he said, holding a large white umbrella while getting into a car.

“I wanted to say something to the youths at Green Square and stay up late with them but it started raining,” he said, referring to his supporters. “Thank God, it’s a good thing.”

Reports from small towns in the mountains outside of Tripoli indicated that uprisings have driven out forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. But security forces blocked roads leading into Tripoli, preventing people from outside the city from joining the insurrection there.

In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, pro-government security forces appeared to have either fled or defected to the opposition. Citizens armed with guns organized into informal security committees, a resident reached by telephone said. Supermarkets and warehouses were open, as were local hospitals, caring for hundreds of people wounded during the government crackdown of the weekend, before defections from the military brought a lull in the violence.

“There is collaboration between people like never before,” said Mohammed Abdul Rahman el Mahrek, 42, who has been living in the city for 15 years and said he supported the rebellion. The warehouses of security forces loyal to the government had been looted by the people with the help of the army, he said. “It is quiet,” he said, “but it is like the quiet before the storm.”

Abdel Aziz al Agha, a 24-year-old medical student, said he had seen nine charred bodies at the morgue on Tuesday believed to be soldiers who had refused to shoot on protesters. Other victims had been shot through with high-caliber machine guns normally designed for anti-aircraft use, he said.

Reports coming out of Benghazi also indicated ongoing tension. Several Ukrainian doctors, who had been working at the city’s hospitals, were quoted in a Ukrainian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, on Tuesday as saying that the opposition forces would not allow them to leave.

“We have been earning money in this country, and now we have to work hard for the good of the revolution," Dr. Mikhail Firtel said the new authorities in charge told him. "And they don’t care that the doctors had no rest for 24 hours.”

Large areas of eastern Libya along the Mediterranean coast also appeared to be under the opposition’s control, said Ben Wedeman, a CNN correspondent who entered the region late Monday. Citizens with guns were everywhere, he reported, the streets were quiet, and the Libyan security forces at the border of Egypt had largely evaporated.

The border with Tunisia in the western part of the country was reinforced by Libyan security early in the day, but Reuters reported that only men armed with clubs and assault rifles opposed to Colonel Qaddafi were visible by the afternoon.

The violence Colonel Qaddafi unleashed in Tripoli and other cities demonstrated that he was willing to shed far more blood than the deposed rulers of either neighboring Egypt or Tunisia in his effort to hold on to power. On state television, a statement from the defense ministry blamed the violence on gangs of delinquent youths manipulated by foreign forces including al Qaeda, calling them “terrorist gangs who obtained weapons by robbing army storehouses," Reuters reported. “This is not Ben Ali or Mubarak,” said one resident, referring to the deposed leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. “This man has no sense of humanity.”

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials broke with Colonel Qaddafi on Monday. The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Col. Qaddafi’s son, reported that the justice minister, Mustafa Abud al-Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to the demonstrations.

And in New York, the Libyan delegation to the United Nations defected as well. The deputy ambassador and more than a dozen members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country in a letter drafted Monday.

“He has to leave as soon as possible,” said the deputy ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, paraphrasing the letter. “He has to stop killing the Libyan people.”

He urged other nations to join in that request, saying he feared there could be a large-scale massacre in Tripoli and calling on “African nations” to stop sending what he called “mercenaries” to fight on behalf of Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

Two Libyan fighter pilots ordered to bomb protesters changed their course and instead defected to Malta on Monday, according to Maltese government officials quoted by Reuters.

The United States ordered all nonessential personnel and family members at its embassy to leave the country, and the French, Russian, Serbian and Egyptian governments received permission to land evacuation planes for their citizens in Tripoli. The Dutch government said it was sending a frigate for its citizens, having been denied permission to land, Reuters reported, and several foreign oil and gas companies were moving to evacuate some workers as well.

Though the outcome of the battle is impossible to determine, some protesters said the bloodshed in Tripoli only redoubled their determination.

“He will never let go of his power,” said one, Abdel Rahman. “This is a dictator, an emperor. He will die before he gives an inch. But we are no longer afraid. We are ready to die after what we have seen.”


David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tunis, and Sharon Otterman from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Mona El-Naggar, Neil MacFarquhar and Kareem Fahim from Cairo; Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan from New York.

    Chaos Grows in Libya as Strife in Tripoli Intensifies, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23libya.html

Four Americans Held on Hijacked Yacht Are Killed, U.S. Military Says

February 22, 2011
Reuters
By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Four Americans taken hostage after their yacht was hijacked by Somali pirates were killed early Tuesday after gunfire erupted during an attempt by the United States Navy to negotiate with their captors, according to the United States military.

Two pirates were also killed in the confrontation and 13 were taken into American military custody.

The Americans, Jean and Scott Adam, from Southern California, and Phyllis Mackay and Robert A. Riggle, from Seattle, were sailing for Djibouti to refuel when they were hijacked several hundred miles off the coast of Oman on Friday afternoon.

A Navy warship had been shadowing the yacht since Saturday.

“We express our deepest condolences for the innocent lives callously lost aboard the Quest,” said Gen. James N. Mattis, United States Central Command Commander, said in a statement.

    Four Americans Held on Hijacked Yacht Are Killed, U.S. Military Says, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23pirates.html

Exclusive: Libyans say Gaddafi "butcher," flick V-for-victory

ROAD TO TOBRUK, Libya | Tue Feb 22, 2011
8:28am EST
Reuters

By a Reuters Correspondent

ROAD TO TOBRUK, Libya (Reuters) - The Libyan side of the Egyptian border was controlled on Tuesday by anti-Gaddafi rebels armed with clubs and Kalashnikov rifles who welcomed visitors from Egypt, a Reuters correspondent who crossed into Libya reported.

One held up a picture of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, upside down, and defaced with the words "the butcher tyrant, murderer of Libyans," the correspondent said when passing through the town of Musaid, just inside the Libyan side of the border. The men were welcoming and waved cars through.

Egypt's army said Libyan border guards had been withdrawn, with Libya's side of the border controlled by "people's committees," without giving details of their allegiance.

Gaddafi used tanks, helicopters and warplanes to fight a growing revolt, witnesses said on Tuesday, as the veteran leader scoffed at reports he was fleeing after four decades in power.

Demonstrations have spread to Tripoli from the second city Benghazi, cradle of the revolt that has engulfed a number of towns and which residents say is now in the hands of protesters.

One Libyan, who could not be identified, told the Reuters correspondent inside Libya that Benghazi had been "liberated" from a battalion belonging to one of Gaddafi's sons since Saturday.

Driving along a stretch of desert road with the occasional low-brick house and goat herds, groups of rebels with assault rifles and shotguns, waved cheerily at the passing cars.

"Photo! Photo!" they said, flicking the V-for-victory sign and posing with their guns. One of the Libyans, mocking the personality cult cultivated by Gaddafi, pointed at graffiti which read: "No God, but Allah."

Security forces have cracked down fiercely on demonstrators across the country, with fighting in Tripoli after erupting in Libya's oil-producing east last week, in a reaction to decades of repression and following uprisings that have toppled leaders in Tunisia and Egypt.

"THIS IS GENOCIDE"

Speaking to Reuters by telephone from the Libyan town of Al Bayda, one Libyan described on Tuesday how forces using aircraft and tanks killed 26 local people overnight, including his own brother.

Libyans were now "scared of their own shadows," said Marai Al Mahry, from the Ashraf tribe, who named his dead brother as Ahmed al Mahry.

"This is worse than anyone can imagine, this is something no human can fathom. They are bombing us with planes, they are killing us with tanks," he said, sobbing uncontrollably as he appealed for help.

Mahry accused forces loyal to Gaddafi of indiscriminate killing on the streets of the coastal town, which lies east of Benghazi. "They shoot you just for walking on the street."

His account could not be independently corroborated.

"The only thing we can do now is not give up, no surrender, no going back. We will die anyways, whether we like it or not. It is clear that they don't care whether we live or not. This is genocide," said 42-year-old Mahry.

Describing the climate of fear created by the crackdown, he said: "Libyans are scared of their own shadows, children can't sleep. It is like we are on another planet."

Keen to send his message to neighboring Egypt and beyond, he said: "I call on the people of the world -- I call on the Egyptians -- to pray for us, to demonstrate for us."

Egypt's new military rulers -- who took power following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak on February11 -- said the main crossing would be kept open round-the-clock to allow the sick and wounded to enter.

KILLING AND BANDITRY

Piled onto tractors and trucks, hundreds of Egyptians streamed over the border from Libya on Tuesday, describing a wave of killing and banditry unleashed by the revolt.

A witness who had fled the city of Benghazi said at least 2,000 people had been killed there -- a figure that could not be corroborated but which indicated the scale of destruction people believed was wrought by a week of violence.

Egyptians described a treacherous journey out of Libya in which they were shot at by bandits taking advantage of the chaos.

Hassan Kamel Mohamed, a 24-year-old steel worker who had fled from Tobruk, said: "There were thugs everywhere and they would pull weapons on you at any time."

"We were trying to sleep at night but we couldn't. Thugs would fire in the air every fifteen minutes. They took our money, they took everything."

Mohamed Bayoumy, 37, said he had been traveling for three days in the western part of the country and that there were armed groups along the road, demanding bribes.

Another man, who declined to be named, said: "The situation is bad for Egyptians right now."

"They took money from us and shot at us," he said, declining to give his name.

"Five people died on the street where I live," Mohamed Jalaly, 40, told Reuters at Salum on his way to Cairo from Benghazi. "You leave Benghazi and then you have ... nothing but gangs and youths with weapons," he added. "The way from Benghazi is extremely dangerous," he said.

(Reporting by a Reuters correspondent, Writing by Edmund Blair and Peter Millership in Cairo; Editing by Giles Elgood)

    Exclusive: Libyans say Gaddafi "butcher," flick V-for-victory, R, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-libya-protests-east-idUSTRE71L39220110222

Libya's US ambassador resigns from 'dictatorship'

WASHINGTON | Tue Feb 22, 2011
7:31am EST
Reuters

WASHINGTON, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Libya's ambassador to the United States on Tuesday said he no longer represents his country's "dictatorship regime" and called on Muammar Gaddafi to depart.

"I resign from serving the current dictatorship regime. But I will never resign from serving our people until their voices reach the whole world, until their goals are achieved," Ambassador Ali Aujali said in an interview on ABC television's "Good Morning America." "I am calling for him to go and leave our people alone."

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Jackie Frank)

    Libya's US ambassador resigns from 'dictatorship', R, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/libya-usa-ambassador-idUSN2226676620110222

Gaddafi defiant in face of mounting revolt

Tue Feb 22, 2011
3:50am EST
Reuters

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi vowed defiance in the face of a mounting revolt against his 41-year rule on Tuesday, making a fleeting television appearance to disdain protesters and deny he had fled the country.

Gaddafi's forces have cracked down fiercely on demonstrators, with fighting now spreading to the capital Tripoli after erupting in Libya's oil-producing east last week. Human Rights Watch says at least 233 people have been killed.

But in increasing numbers, Libyan officials and diplomats have disowned Gaddafi, denouncing the hardline response to the revolt and calling for his removal. Some in his military also turned against him -- two pilots flew their warplanes to nearby Malta to defect rather than bomb protesters.

In his first appearance on television since the revolt broke out, Gaddafi dismissed reports he had fled to Venezuela, ruled by his friend President Hugo Chavez.

"I want to show that I'm in Tripoli and not in Venezuela. Do not believe the channels belonging to stray dogs," Gaddafi said, holding an umbrella and leaning out of a van apparently outside his residence in what amounted to a 22-second appearance.

"I wanted to say something to the youths at Green Square (in Tripoli) and stay up late with them but it started raining. Thank God, it's a good thing," added Gaddafi, who took power in a military coup in 1969.

World powers have condemned the use of force against protesters, with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon accusing Libya of firing on civilians "from warplanes and helicopters."

"This must stop immediately," said Ban, adding he had spoken to Gaddafi and urged him to halt attacks on protesters. The Security Council was to hold a meeting on Libya later in the day, diplomats said.

As the fighting has intensified across the thinly populated nation stretching from the Mediterranean deep into the Sahara desert, cracks appeared among Gaddafi's supporters, with some ambassadors resigning and siding with the protesters.

A group of army officers called on soldiers separately to "join the people."

Demonstrations spread to Tripoli after several cities in the east -- including Benghazi where the protests had first erupted -- appeared to fall to the opposition, according to residents.

Tripoli, a Mediterranean coastal city, appeared calm in the early hours of Tuesday.

"There is heavy rain at the moment, so people are at home," one resident said. "I am in the east of the city and have not heard clashes."

Residents had earlier reported gunfire in parts of Tripoli and one political activist said warplanes had bombed the city.

"What we are witnessing today is unimaginable. Warplanes and helicopters are indiscriminately bombing one area after another. There are many, many dead," Adel Mohamed Saleh said in a live broadcast on al Jazeera television.

Residents said anxious shoppers were queuing outside stores to try to stock up on food and drink. Some shops were closed.

Oil prices have soared on worries over instability in the OPEC member. Ninety percent of Libya's oil exports come from the eastern region of Cyrenaica, epicenter of the revolt.

International Energy Agency (IEA) chief economist Fatih Birol said on Tuesday that oil prices were in the danger zone and could rise higher if turmoil persisted in the Middle East.

WORLD CONDEMNATION

Upheavals which deposed the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt have shaken the Arab world and inspired protests across the Middle East and North Africa, threatening the grip of long-entrenched autocratic leaders.

While Human Rights Watch said at least 233 people had been killed in five days of violence in Libya, opposition groups put the figure much higher. No independent verification was available and communications from outside were difficult.

The United Nations' Ban told reporters in Los Angeles he held an extensive telephone discussion with Gaddafi on Monday.

"I forcefully urged him to stop violence against demonstrators," Ban said. "I have seen very disturbing and shocking scenes, where Libyan authorities have been firing at demonstrators from warplanes and helicopters. This is unacceptable. This must stop immediately."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was "time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed." EU foreign ministers also condemned the killing of protesters.

U.N. diplomats said the Security Council's closed-door meeting had been requested by Libyan deputy ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi and would start at 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT).

Dabbashi and other diplomats at Libya's mission to the United Nations announced on Monday they had sided with protesters and were calling for Gaddafi's overthrow.

In Malaysia, protesters occupied the embassy briefly and smashed a portrait of Gaddafi.

"The fall of Gaddafi is the imperative of the people in streets," Ali al-Essawi, Libya's ambassador to India who has resigned his post, told Reuters. He said African mercenaries had been recruited to help put down protests.

Earlier, a group of army officers issued a statement urging fellow soldiers to "join the people" and help remove Gaddafi, Al Arabiya television said. The justice minister has also resigned in protest at the use of force.

Two Libyan fighter jets landed in Malta, their pilots defecting after they said they had been ordered to bomb protesters, Maltese government officials said.

Libyan guards have withdrawn from their side of the border with Egypt and people's committees were now in control of the crossing, the Egyptian army said, without making it clear if the groups now in control of the border were loyal to Gaddafi.

A flamboyant figure with his flowing robes and a penchant for female bodyguards, Gaddafi has long been accused by the West of links to terrorism and revolutionary movements.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan once called him a "mad dog" and sent planes to bomb Libya in 1986. Gaddafi was particularly reviled after the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, by Libyan agents in which 270 people were killed.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara, Christian Lowe, Tarek Amara, Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Souhail Karam; Brian Love, Daren Butler; Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Ron Popeski)

    Gaddafi defiant in face of mounting revolt, R, 22.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-libya-protests-idUSTRE71G0A620110222

Qaddafi’s Grip Falters as His Forces Take On Protesters

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR

CAIRO — The faltering government of the Libyan strongman, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, struck back at mounting protests against his 40-year rule as security forces and militiamen backed by helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the capital on Monday, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli.

By Monday night, witnesses said, the streets of Tripoli were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi as well as mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as “small bombs” and helicopters fired on protesters.

Hundreds of Qaddafi supporters took over the central Green Square in the capital after truckloads of militiamen arrived and opened fire on protesters, scattering them. Residents said they now feared even emerging from their houses.

“It was an obscene amount of gunfire,” said one witness. “They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.”

The police stood by and watched, the witness said, as the militiamen, still shooting, chased after the protesters. The death toll could not be determined.

Colonel Qaddafi, whose whereabouts have been unknown, appeared briefly on state television at 2 a.m. on Tuesday to signal his defiance and deny rumors he had left the country. “I want to show that I’m in Tripoli and not in Venezuela,” he said, calling the owners of the news channels reporting that he was leaving the country “stray dogs.”

“I wanted to say something to the youths at Green Square and stay up late with them but it started raining,” he said. “Thank God, it’s a good thing.”

A CNN correspondent, Ben Wedeman, reported on Tuesday from eastern Libya that opposition groups appeared in firm control of much of the region and that local security forces appeared to have joined with the revolt. Earlier, he said that a steady flow of Egyptian expatriate workers — there are some 2 million in Libya — headed to the border with Egypt and 15,000 had already crossed.

The escalation of the conflict came after six days of revolt that began in Libya’s second-largest city, Benghazi, where hundreds of people were killed in clashes with security forces, according to witnesses. Human rights activists outside the country said they had confirmed more than 220 deaths. The rebellion is the latest and bloodiest so far of the uprisings that have swept across the Arab world with surprising speed in recent weeks, toppling autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia, and challenging others in Bahrain and Yemen.

The day had begun with growing signs that Colonel Qaddafi’s grip on power might be slipping, with protesters in control of Libya’s second-largest city, his security forces pulled back to key locations in the capital as government buildings smoldered, and a growing number of officials and military personnel defecting to join the revolt.

But the violence Colonel Qaddafi unleashed Monday afternoon on Tripoli demonstrated that he was willing to shed far more blood than the deposed rulers of either neighboring Egypt or Tunisia in his effort to hold on to power.

Two residents said planes had been landing for 10 days ferrying mercenaries from African countries to an air base in Tripoli. The mercenaries had done much of the shooting, which began Sunday night, they said. Some forces were using particularly lethal, hollow-point bullets, they said.

“The shooting is not designed to disperse the protesters,” said one resident, who wanted to be identified only as Waleed, fearing for his security. “It is meant to kill them.”

“This is not Ben Ali or Mubarak,” he added, referring to the deposed leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. “This man has no sense of humanity.” As rioters overwhelmed the streets around 1 a.m. on Monday, Colonel Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, delivered a rambling but bellicose speech threatening Libyans with the prospect of civil war and “rivers of blood” if they turned away from his father.

Apparently enraged by the speech, protesters converged on Green Square soon after and clashed with heavily armed riot police officers for several hours, witnesses in Tripoli said by telephone.

By dawn in Tripoli, police stations and government buildings — including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets — were in flames. Debris fires from the rioting the night before burned at many intersections.

Most stores and schools were closed, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas. Protesters had torn down or burned the posters of Colonel Qaddafi that were once ubiquitous in the capital, witnesses said.

To the east, protesters in control of Benghazi flew an independence flag over the rooftop of the courthouse and displayed the scene online in a video. A crowd celebrated what they called “the fall of the regime in their city.”

“We have liberated the east areas,” said Fathi Terbil, a prominent opposition lawyer in Benghazi, over a live, online stream that he calls the Free Libya Radio. “We are liberating, we are not overtaking. Now we need to go to Tripoli and liberate Tripoli.” Protesters issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials broke with Colonel Qaddafi. The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, reported that the justice minister, Mustafa Abud al-Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to the demonstrations.

And in New York, the Libyan delegation to the United Nations defected as well. The deputy ambassador and more than a dozen members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country in a letter drafted Monday.

“He has to leave as soon as possible,” said the deputy ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, paraphrasing the letter. “He has to stop killing the Libyan people.”

He urged other nations to join in that request, saying he feared there could be a large-scale massacre in Tripoli and calling on “African nations” to stop sending what he called “mercenaries” to fight on behalf of Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

Mr. Dabbashi said he had not seen the Libyan ambassador since Friday and did not know his whereabouts or whether he shared the opinion of many in his mission. But, Mr. Dabbashi said, the United Nations mission represents the people, not Colonel Qaddafi.

Abdel Monem al-Howni, Libya’s representative to the Arab League, also resigned. “I no longer have any links to this regime, which lost all legitimacy,” he said in a statement reported by news agencies. He also called what is happening in Libya “genocide.”

Al Manara, an opposition Web site, reported that a senior military official, Col. Abdel Fattah Younes in Benghazi, resigned, and the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported that Colonel Qaddafi had ordered that one of his top generals, Abu Bakr Younes, be put under house arrest after disobeying an order to use force against protesters in several cities.

Two Libyan fighter pilots ordered to bomb protesters changed their course and instead defected to Malta, according to Maltese government officials quoted by Reuters.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on information from the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections. Much news about what is going on came from telephone interviews with people inside the country. Several residents reported that cellphone service was down, and even landline phone service sporadic.

The United States ordered all nonessential personnel and family members at its embassy to leave the country.

Several foreign oil and gas companies were moving on Monday to evacuate some workers as well. The Quryna newspaper said that protests have occurred in Ras Lanuf, an oil town where some workers were being assembled to defend a refinery complex from attacks.

Meanwhile, Libyans from other cities — Benghazi and Misrata — were reported to be heading to Tripoli to join the battle against the government forces, said Mansour O. El-Kikhia, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Texas, Austin, who had talked to people inside the country.

“There are dead on the streets, you cannot even pick them up,” he said by e-mail. “The army is just shooting at everybody. That has not deterred the people from continuing.”

Though the outcome of the battle is impossible to determine, some protesters said the bloodshed in Tripoli only redoubled their determination.

“He will never let go of his power,” said one, Abdel Rahman. “This is a dictator, an emperor. He will die before he gives an inch. But we are no longer afraid. We are ready to die after what we have seen.”

Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman, Neil MacFarquhar and Kareem Fahim from Cairo; Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan from New York.

    Qaddafi’s Grip Falters as His Forces Take On Protesters, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23libya.html

Israel Silent as Iranian Ships Transit Suez Canal

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Reports that two Iranian Navy ships were passing through the Suez Canal early on Tuesday, heading for the Mediterranean, were initially greeted with a tense silence in Israel where officials have described the move as a provocation.

The passage of the ships was expected to pass without incident. Although there was no immediate official response to the reports, an aide to Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said by telephone on Tuesday that Israel was obviously not happy at the development. But he reiterated Mr. Barak’s view, expressed in an interview with Fox News last week, that while the move was unwelcome, it should not be blown out of proportion.

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was the first to draw attention to Iranian plans to send warships through the canal for the first time in decades, telling an audience in Jerusalem last Wednesday that the ships were due to cross that night and warning that “the international community must understand that Israel cannot ignore these provocations forever.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel viewed the Iranian move “with utmost gravity.”

Referring to the turmoil that is sweeping the region, and that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Israel’s crucial ally over the past 30 years, Mr. Netanyahu said that Iran was trying “to exploit the situation that has been created in order to expand its influence by passing warships through the Suez Canal.”

This, like other developments, he added, underscored his argument that “Israel’s security needs will grow and the defense budget must grow accordingly.”

Israeli analysts said that the Iranians wanted to show a presence beyond their normal reach, making a point both to Israel and to the United States whose forces are stationed in the Gulf.

Israel has been careful not to point a finger publicly at the Egyptian authorities now in charge in Cairo, although the Egyptians had to give permission for the Iranian ships — a frigate and a supply vessel — to pass through the canal.

Citing a possible purpose for the ships’ movement, Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency reported on Jan. 26 that Iranian Navy cadets had been sent on a yearlong training mission to defend cargo ships and oil tankers against Somali pirates, Reuters reported. The Fars report said they would travel via the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea and on through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.

Israel has long accused Iran and Syria of providing weapons to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization with which Israel fought a war in 2006. Israeli military officials said recently that Hezbollah has around 45,000 rockets and missiles buried underground that could be fired at Israel.

    Israel Silent as Iranian Ships Transit Suez Canal, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/middleeast/23suez.html

Clashes Over Yemen’s Government Leave 2 Protesters Dead

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF

SANA, Yemen — Two young men were shot dead by government supporters on Tuesday night during a protest in front of Sana University, medical workers said. They are the first deaths in clashes between pro- and antigovernment demonstrators in the nearly two weeks since students began calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Eight other people were wounded, the medical workers said, when government supporters in plain clothes opened fire on the protesters, who have been staging a sit-in in front of Sana University since Sunday morning.

A makeshift medical clinic treated the wounded while they waited for ambulances to arrive. Protesters surrounding the clinic chanted, “There is no God but God.”

About 2,000 protesters remained on Tuesday night after the shooting. They have vowed to stay until Mr. Saleh steps down.

According to witnesses, the clashes between the pro- and antigovernment demonstrators started when the two sides began hurling rocks back and forth over the heads of about 10 members of the security forces.

The security forces began to shoot live ammunition in the air in an attempt to stop the rock-throwing, but then the pro-government demonstrators started to run toward the students, shooting automatic weapons and pistols. When the gunmen started shooting, the police ran away, according to multiple witnesses.

According to one government official, who was not authorized to speak to the news media, the antigovernment protesters also fired live ammunition at the pro-government demonstrators, killing one and wounding more than a dozen.

Some foreign journalists at the scene said they did not see any attack by antigovernment protesters, who have largely been peaceful. But the government official said: “Witnesses noted a surge of armed individuals in the vicinity of the opposition camp. Later on, clashes erupted between the pro- and antigovernment camps. The riot police attempted to separate the crowds. Soon thereafter, a barrage of bullets hit the pro-government demonstrators.”

Both sides have clashed before, but some Yemenis said that the escalation of violence would now draw more people into the streets.

“The number of people coming to the protest will increase after they see innocent people dying,” said Mohamed al-Ghasary, 23 and unemployed, who was sitting on a wall beside a group of about 50 men. A large crowd of pro-government demonstrators waited about five blocks away.

The antigovernment protesters occasionally taunted the government supporters, calling them “baltegeya,” or thugs. Piles of rocks lay behind them from a battle only about an hour before.

“The one who is killed is a martyr and will enter heaven; this is why we aren’t scared of the bullets,” said Yasser Abdullah, who came to Sana from Amran to join the protests two days ago.

His left cheek was stuffed full of qat, the stimulant wildly popular in Yemen, and he wore a jambiya, or Yemeni-style dagger, on his belt. Mr. Abdullah is one of the increasing number of Yemenis from rural areas coming to Sana to call for Mr. Saleh’s removal.

The protesters say they believe that the pro-government demonstrators have been sent by the government to terrorize them, further cementing their disgust for the president. But the Yemeni government has denied that it has any connection with the men attacking the students.

    Clashes Over Yemen’s Government Leave 2 Protesters Dead, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/middleeast/23yemen.html

Yemen President Rejects Demand to Step Down

February 21, 2011
Filed at 3:52 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Yemen's president rejected demands that he step down and said Monday that the widespread demonstrations against his regime were unacceptable acts of provocation, though he renewed calls for talks with the protesters.

After a week and a half of marches that have left nine dead, President Ali Abdullah Saleh told a news conference that he ordered the army to fire at demonstrators "only in case of self-defense."

Saleh has ruled the poorest of the world's Arab countries for three decades but the widespread demonstrations are putting heavy pressure on the U.S. ally.

Protesters are occupying a major square in Sanaa but Saleh said those who oppose his regime are not more than 200,000 people, compared to Yemen's population of roughly 25 million.

    Yemen President Rejects Demand to Step Down, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/21/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Yemen.html

Dim View of U.S. Posture Toward Bahraini Shiites Is Described

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

MANAMA, Bahrain — The United States military undermined efforts to improve relations with Bahrain’s Shiite majority and understated abuses by the Sunni royal family, according to one present and one former American government adviser and a Bahraini human rights advocate.

As Bahrain’s leaders struggle to hold back a rising popular revolt against their absolute rule, Washington’s posture toward the Shiite majority, which is spearheading the opposition, could prove crucial to future relations with this strategically valuable Persian Gulf nation. The United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based here, helping ensure the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and the gulf, and safeguarding American interests in this volatile region.

Over the years, the military, according to the advisers and the human rights advocate, believed that King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and his court were reform-minded leaders who could advance democracy and preserve stability. That narrative contrasts sharply with the experience of the Shiites, as documented by human rights groups and some of the military’s own advisers.

“The problem has been that we have been doing everything we can to cuddle up to the Khalifas and have been consciously ignoring at best the situation of Bahraini Shiites,” said Gwenyth Todd, a former political adviser to the Navy in Bahrain from 2004 to 2007 who was also an adviser on Middle Eastern and North African affairs at the Pentagon and the White House. “We could find ourselves in a very bad situation if the regime has to make major concessions to the Shia, unless we change our tone.”

Ms. Todd, who was assigned as an informal liaison between the Navy and the Shiites, was dismissed from her duties in December 2007 in a formal letter that cited “unauthorized contact with foreign nationals,” “financial irresponsibility” and “disclosure of classified information.” But an American official who is familiar with the details of her case and is still working in Bahrain confirmed the details of Ms. Todd’s experience with the Navy and the details she provided, including a glowing letter of recommendation written by a high-ranking Navy official in 2009.

The government advisers and Nabil Rajab of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights said that over the years, the United States military was reluctant to believe the degree of the royal family’s discrimination against Shiites in politics, employment, housing and human rights. Mr. Rajab said that he was invited to speak in Washington and was told by two senators that the military encouraged them not to meet with him, or even to host him. He did not want to identify the senators because he thought it might embarrass them.

“The military here always took a position against the human rights community,” Mr. Rajab said. “The U.S. did not build up any good relations with the opposition. They always categorize them as fundamentalist or extremist in their reports, in order to justify their political position in support of the government.”

In Bahrain, as in Egypt and Tunisia, the United States finds itself again torn by its desire to preserve relations with autocratic leaders who back American foreign policy interests and by the danger of further alienating Arab public opinion by failing to promote democracy. At the moment, feelings toward the United States are neutral, and in some circles even positive, but they could slip toward hostile, opposition advocates said.

“If the United States does not modify its policy now to take into account the Shia, there is a danger that worries me, if we are seen as backing the government to the end,” said a United States government official in Bahrain who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

A spokeswoman for the Fifth Fleet disputed criticism that the Navy discouraged attempts to engage with Bahrain’s Shiite community. “The U.S. Navy has a longstanding relationship of more than 60 years with Bahrain,” the spokeswoman, Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, said in an e-mail. “We enjoy an active community relations program with the entire Bahraini community regardless of religion or ethnicity.”

Some former American diplomats in Bahrain said that it was possible the American military at times over the years sought to limit contacts between military personnel and Shiite community members to prevent service members from accidentally blundering into delicate political situations.

“The embassy had quite extensive contacts with the Shia community and human rights groups,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as United States ambassador to Bahrain from 2001 to 2004. “What we knew and reported was fully visible to the military, and there was no particular reason it should have tried to do our job in parallel.”

The United States Embassy in Bahrain is working hard behind the scenes to ease the crisis, and American officials say their pressure persuaded the Bahraini government to consider political reforms and halt the use of lethal force that killed seven demonstrators and wounded many more.

Khalil Ebrahim al-Marzooq, a leader in the opposition party Al Wefaq and one of 18 members of Parliament to resign in protest of the killings, said he appreciated those efforts. But some demonstrators have asked why the White House encourages Iranians to rise up for democracy but acts less forcefully in Bahrain’s case. Mr. Marzooq agreed the United States could do more.

“The United States should assertively emphasize the Bahrain Shiites should get their rights,” he said.

The royal family has long worried that Bahrain’s Shiites could be agents of Iran, a perspective reflected in some quarters of the American military as well, the advisers said.

Demonstrators have emphasized their loyalty to Bahrain and their commitment to religious pluralism, chanting that Sunni and Shiite are one. As an example of the policies that concerned Ms. Todd, she described one case in which the Navy asked her to organize a gift drive for the children of the poorest Shiite families. She called it a “Giving Tree.”

“I went out with the chaplain and we committed to provide whatever each child asked for,” she said in an e-mail. “I received a list of about 400 requests, some for gadgets, many for bicycles and toys, and some for bookcases, tables and desks. I committed to meet the requests on behalf of the Navy.”

But she said that she was ordered to cancel the promise by a commanding officer who thought it would upset the leadership. “I could not bring myself to do it,” she said. “I worried about the implications for Shia attitudes towards the Navy and feared it could lead to hatred and endanger our people. So I spent over $30,000 of my own money to fund the whole thing myself, in the name of the Navy. Big Brother was not happy, but the Shia never knew the story.”

Her account was confirmed by the present government adviser.

In another case, also confirmed by the one present and one former government adviser, the Navy balked at a chance to give a secure phone to a Bahraini human rights activist so that he could inform the military when an antigovernment protest was scheduled and it could observe the government’s response. The activist, with Al Wefaq, argued that the military was unaware of the true nature of the government because it did not witness the treatment of the Shiites by the police, a force made up primarily of foreigners recruited by the king because he does not trust Shiites to serve in the police or military.

“They ordered me to stop all contact with Shiites,” said the person involved in the case, who did not want to be identified for fear of being punished for discussing an internal military decision.

“They didn’t want any part of this, and they were not interested in knowing what was going on in the island.”

Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Manama, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

    Dim View of U.S. Posture Toward Bahraini Shiites Is Described, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/middleeast/22bahrain.html

Analysis: Libya may face civil war as Gaddafi's grip loosens

Mon, Feb 21 2011
Reuters
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

DUBAI (Reuters) - Libya faces chaos and possible civil war as Muammar Gaddafi fights to maintain his 42-year grip on power in the face of a popular uprising.

Even if he flees -- assuming he could find a refuge -- Gaddafi would leave a nation with few normal structures for a peaceful transition, after four decades of his idiosyncratic rule.

"Any post-Gaddafi period is fraught with uncertainty," said Middle East analyst Philip McCrum. "There is no organized opposition, there are no civil institutions around which people could ordinarily gather.

"The opposition in exile is small and disparate. It will therefore take a long time for a new political order to establish itself and in the meantime, political tensions will run high as various competing groups, such as the tribes, the army, Islamists and liberals vie for power."

Dozens of people were reported killed in Libya overnight as anti-government protests reached the capital, Tripoli, for the first time. Several eastern cities appeared to be in opposition hands. The revolt has already cost more than 200 lives.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of the mercurial leader's sons, appeared on state TV overnight, mixing threats with appeals for calm, saying the army would enforce security at any price.

"We will keep fighting until the last man standing, even the last woman standing," he said, waving a finger at the camera.

McCrum said Saif al-Islam's speech had probably scotched any hopes among young Libyans that he could be a force for reform.

The uprising in Libya already looks set to be the bloodiest in a series of popular protests racing across the Middle East from Algeria to Yemen. Possibilities for compromise look slim.

CIVIL WAR

"Libya is the most likely candidate for civil war because the government has lost control over part of its own territory," said Shadi Hamid, of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.

"Benghazi was lost to the opposition and there are reports of other smaller cities going the same way. It is not something the Gaddafi regime is willing to tolerate."

Benghazi, a city in eastern Libya -- the region that is home to most of the country's oilfields -- is a traditional hotbed of anti-Gaddafi sentiment among tribes hostile to his rule.

As the protests have snowballed, Islamic leaders and once-loyal tribes have declared for the opposition.

Saad Djebbar, a London-based Algerian lawyer who for years defended Libya in the Lockerbie airline bombing case, said Gaddafi must go.

"I'm sure he has armed to the teeth his own tribesmen and those tribes linked to him. I'm sure he will be also giving them as much cash as possible," Djebbar told Reuters.

He said Gaddafi had narrowed the circle of his power to his close family and tribe in recent years, alienating allies and tribes who had backed him after he seized power in 1969.

"Gaddafi will go down fighting and Libyans will butcher each other. It's a fight to the bitter end. If he activates the tribal card, it will only turn Libya into another Somalia."

Djebbar said Western powers should consider protecting any rebel-held areas such as eastern Libya by using air power to bar Gaddafi from bombing his foes into submission -- similar to the no-fly zone they set up in Iraqi Kurdistan after the 1991 Gulf War to deter Saddam Hussein from reasserting control there.

CORNERED ANIMAL

"Gaddafi is like a cornered animal -- when threatened he attacks ferociously," said McCrum. "Throughout his rule, he has shown no qualms in brutally suppressing any opposition.

"He is highly unlikely to make any concessions and if he goes down, he will take as many people with him as possible," he added, predicting that events in Libya "will only get bloodier."

McCrum said he doubted the army would turn on Gaddafi or emulate the role played by the military in facilitating the departure of long-serving autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia.

"The army will not actually effect regime change as in Egypt. They will simply perpetuate the status quo to protect their own interests," he said, noting that main arms of the security services were controlled by sons of Gaddafi.

Libya, once a pariah accused of sponsoring international terrorism, rehabilitated itself by paying compensation to victims of the Lockerbie bombing and other attacks, and by renouncing its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

"If ever there was a regime which exposes the West's hypocrisy, Gaddafi's is it," McCrum said.

"The West has fallen over itself to rehabilitate Gaddafi so they can get at his oil and now it will pay the price in political capital -- if it has any left.

In terms of investment risk, it's obviously very serious," said Julien Barnes-Dace, Middle East analyst at Control Risks.

"People are just pulling out. Even if Gaddafi survives, there will be huge worries and reputational issues about doing business in Libya. Libya would be much more isolated after this."

Analyst Geoff Porter said Gaddafi had "nowhere to go," unlike ousted Arab leaders such as Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who found refuge in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, in internal exile in Sharm el-Sheikh.

"Possibly the only place he can go is Zimbabwe," he said. "So there is no alternative. (If he is toppled), he will be like Saddam Hussein and end up hiding in a hole."

(Editing by Richard Mably and Mark Trevelyan)

    Analysis: Libya may face civil war as Gaddafi's grip loosens, R, 21.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-libya-chaos-idUSTRE71K48T20110221

Libya must stop bloodshed now, Clinton says

Mon, Feb 21 2011
Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States told Libya on Monday to stop shedding the blood of protesters seeking to end Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year rule and announced plans to evacuate some U.S. diplomats from the oil-exporting nation.

Gaddafi fought an increasingly bloody battle to hang on to power when protests spread to the capital, Tripoli, after days of violence in the east of the country. Libya is the latest Arab nation to see mass demonstrations against an authoritarian ruler.

Forces loyal to Gaddafi had killed dozens of people across the country, human rights groups and witnesses said, prompting widespread condemnation from foreign governments.

Al Jazeera news channel reported on Monday that a group of Libyan army officers had issued a statement urging fellow soldiers to "join the people" and help remove Gaddafi.

"Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a written statement in which she stressed Libya had a responsibility to protect its citizens' rights, including freedom of speech and assembly.

No independent verification of the reports of violence was available and communications with Libya were difficult.

But a picture emerged of a leader who has loomed large on the world stage for decades and controls vast reserves of oil fighting for survival. Brent crude prices hit $108 a barrel on fears the violence could disrupt supplies from Libya.

The United States said earlier on Monday it was ordering nonessential U.S. diplomats as well as all embassy family members to leave Libya, a country with which it only recently restored diplomatic relations after years of estrangement.

The improvement in ties began in late 2003, when -- after the U.S.-led war that toppled former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein -- Gaddafi gave up Libya's weapons of mass destruction programs and settled claims stemming from the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and other alleged terrorist acts.

In a brief written statement, Clinton minced no words.

"The world is watching the situation in Libya with alarm," she said. "We join the international community in strongly condemning the violence in Libya."

"The government of Libya has a responsibility to respect the universal rights of the people, including the right to free expression and assembly, she added. "We are working urgently with friends and partners around the world to convey this message to the Libyan government."

In a travel warning issued to U.S. citizens earlier, the State Department advised Americans to defer all travel to Libya and told those in the country to limit their movements, especially after dark, and to prepare "to shelter in place."

"Spontaneous demonstrations, violence, and looting are possible throughout the next several days," it added.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

    Libya must stop bloodshed now, Clinton says, R, 21.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-libya-usa-idUSTRE71K6D520110221

Stocks Fall and Oil Spikes as Libya Grabs Attention

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By BEN PROTESS

The rising political turmoil in Libya sent jitters through global financial markets, with European shares falling on Monday and Asian markets starting out sharply lower on Tuesday.

While investors in the United States have so far ridden out the tumult in the Middle East, analysts said that they would have a harder time shrugging off the upheaval as it spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. A spike in oil prices on Monday was particularly worrisome, they said, because it could snuff out the nascent worldwide economic recovery.

That was the main reason European stocks dropped more than a percentage point on Monday. At midday on Tuesday, the Nikkei 225 was down 2 percent and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong also fell 2 percent. Markets in the United States were closed Monday for Presidents’ Day.

“Over the past few weeks, we had a domino effect, and the concern is that anything can happen,” said Justin Urquhart Stewart, co-founder of Seven Investment Management in London. “At the moment the ripple is very small, but it has the potential to turn into something bigger quickly.”

Other analysts said the unrest had not yet unnerved American investors. Crucial United States stock indexes have steadily risen in 2011 to levels not seen since the financial crisis started, and those gains could continue this week, analysts said.

Still, the problems abroad are becoming harder to overlook. After the toppling of leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, antigovernment protesters in Yemen and Libya are seeking to oust their leaders. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government in Libya on Monday struck back at dissenters, using warplanes and militiamen to fire on protesters.

Market stability in the United States and abroad depends on the price of oil leveling off, which seems unlikely given all the turmoil.

Western countries fear being cut off from the oil supply in Libya, which exports about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, making it one of Africa’s largest holders of crude oil reserves. There was ample reason for concern, as oil companies — including Eni of Italy, the largest energy producer in Libya — began to evacuate employees.

In turn, oil prices soared. Brent crude, a global benchmark for oil that trades in London, jumped more than 2 percent to above $105 a barrel. The price was almost a three-year high. As the crisis in Egypt dragged on in late January, the benchmark rose above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2008.

If the world is, in fact, cut off from Libyan oil, prices are likely to rise even higher. The problem could ultimately hit American consumers at the gas pump.

“The U.S. is not immune from this,” Mr. Urquhart Stewart said. “If you see a significant rise in the oil price for a long period, that could easily choke off any U.S. recovery that is still weak.”

Yet even if Libyan oil exports were shut down, larger oil producers like Saudi Arabia have enough spare capacity to keep prices from skyrocketing.

In hopes of finding a solution to price fluctuations, Saudi Arabia is holding a meeting on Tuesday for energy officials from more than 90 nations, including the United States.

“History shows that political turmoil in a country does not necessarily mean that the flow of oil will be impacted,” said a research note published by JPMorgan Chase on Monday.

Analysts also said that American investors did not panic when Egypt was on the brink of collapse for several days.

In the United States, light sweet crude oil futures rose more than 5 percent, to $91.42 a barrel. Another important American benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, closed at $86.20 a barrel on Friday. Gold prices rose above $1,400 an ounce, also as a result of the unrest.

“There’s reason to get spooked on oil, and U.S. investors aren’t doing it yet,” said Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst at Standard & Poor’s. Instead, he said, American investors have been focusing on strong earnings reports and encouraging sales figures from retailers and other major companies in the United States. “We’ve done well and it looks like that’s going to continue,” he said.

European investors, on the other hand, showed signs of impatience on Monday. Shares of European companies dropped, amid the turmoil in the Middle East and some disappointing earnings reports from European companies.

The DAX, a German stock market index, closed down 1.44 percent, at 7,321.81. The FTSE Eurofirst 300, an index that includes some of Europe’s largest companies, slid 1.32 percent to 1,171.41. On Tuesday, markets in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore and mainland China also retreated.

Thomas Lee, chief United States equity strategist at JPMorgan, remained optimistic that American investors would not panic. “U.S equity markets have taken this in stride,” he said. “It’s not going to be that bad.”

Julia Werdigier contributed reporting from London.

    Stocks Fall and Oil Spikes as Libya Grabs Attention, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/business/global/22markets.html

Libya’s U.N. Diplomats Break With Qaddafi

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Members of Libya’s mission to the United Nations renounced Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Monday, calling him a genocidal war criminal responsible for mass shootings of demonstrators protesting against his four decades in power. They called upon him to resign.

The repudiation, led by Libya’s deputy permanent representative at a news conference at the mission’s headquarters in New York, amounted to the most high-profile defection of Libyan diplomats in the anti-Qaddafi uprising that has convulsed Libya over the past week.

“We are sure that what is going on now in Libya is crimes against humanity and crimes of war,” the deputy permanent representative, Ibrahim O. Dabbashi, told reporters in the ground-floor lobby of the Libyan mission on Manhattan’s East Side, adorned by a large portrait of Colonel Qaddafi in tribal dress atop a white horse.

About a dozen of Mr. Dabbashi’s colleagues stood behind him as he spoke, looking tense and nervous.

The news conference was held against the backdrop of many reports coming from Libya about the spreading insurrection against Colonel Qaddafi’s regime and what protesters described as his brutal tactics to suppress them, including reports of warplanes that fired on demonstrators in the capital Tripoli.

“We find it is impossible to stay silent and we have to transfer the voice of the Libyan people to the world,” Mr. Dabbashi said.

“We state clearly that the Libyan mission is a mission for the Libyan people,” he said. “It is not for the regime. The regime of Qaddafi has already started the genocide against the Libyan people.”

Mr. Dabbashi also asserted that Colonel Qaddafi was flying in mercenaries recruited from other, unidentified African countries to crush the uprising. He offered no proof to support his assertion.

“We warn all African countries who are sending their soldiers to fight, to fight with Qaddafi, that they will not see their soldiers coming back,” he said.

Mr. Dabbashi called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country “as soon as possible.”

He asked that the United Nations create a “no fly zone” to prevent foreigners from entering Libya, but called upon the governments of neighboring Egypt and Tunisia allow medical supplies through the borders.

Mr. Dabbashi also said that he wanted the International Criminal Court at the Hague to investigate Colonel Qaddafi for what he termed “crimes against humanity and crimes of war” and asked that other nations decline to offer him a safe haven.

Mr. Dabbashi said he had not seen the Libyan ambassador since Friday and did not know his whereabouts or whether he shared the opinion of many in his mission.

Asked whether he feared reprisals from Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Dabbashi said: “Whatever the risk, t will not be the risk that the Libyan people are facing.”

    Libya’s U.N. Diplomats Break With Qaddafi, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22nations.html

Moroccan king holds firm after call for less power

Mon, Feb 21 2011
5:48pm EST
Reuters
By Souhail Karam

RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco's King Mohammed said on Monday he would not cede to "demagoguery" a day after thousands of Moroccans took to the street to demand he give up some of his powers to a newly elected government.

The monarch, addressing a ceremony for long-awaited appointments of members of the advisory Social and Economic Council, said he wanted "irreversible" reforms, but they must be formulated in accordance with the "Moroccan model."

Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, but the king is empowered to dissolve the legislature, impose a state of emergency and have a key say in government appointments including the prime minister.

"By setting up the Economic and Social Council we give a strong push to the reformist dynamic that we have initiated since the mission of leading our faithful people has been bestowed on us," he told some 100 members of the council.

"We have constantly sought to ensure that the founding of an effective democracy goes hand in hand ... with sustainable human development.

"If we launch this council today, it is because we have constantly refused to cede to demagoguery and improvisation in our action aimed to consolidate our singular model of democracy and development," he added.

The remarks were carried by the official MAP news agency.

Political commentators have said demands for constitutional reform have been around for decades, but this is the first time they have been embraced by a broad spectrum of Moroccans, from apolitical youths to leftists to Islamists and the indigenous Amazigh.

The interior ministry said that 37,000 people in 53 towns and cities took part in the protests which also demanded the dismissal of the government, the dissolution of parliament and a clampdown on alleged corruption and nepotism in the public administration.

Organizers of the protests say some 300,000 turned out nationwide.

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

    Moroccan king holds firm after call for less power, R, 21.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-morocco-protests-king-idUSTRE71K5Z620110221

Egypt asks for freeze on Mubarak assets

Mon, Feb 21 2011
11:28pm EST
Reuters
By Yasmine Saleh and Mohammed Abbas

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's public prosecutor moved on to freeze the foreign assets of Hosni Mubarak, the first sign that the deposed president would be held to account by the rulers to whom he handed power 10 days ago.

The prosecutor said in a statement he had asked the Foreign Ministry to use diplomatic channels to request a freeze on foreign assets and accounts held by Mubarak, his wife Suzanne and his two sons, Gamal and Alaa, together with their wives.

Media reports suggested the former president's wealth may total billions of dollars and some anti-Mubarak protesters accused him of squandering the wealth of the Arab world's most populous nation, but aides insist he has done nothing wrong.

British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday became the first foreign leader to visit post-Mubarak Egypt and pushed for an end to emergency law, while refusing to talk to the influential Muslim Brotherhood, a growing political force.

The Brotherhood said on Monday any cabinet reshuffle, designed to placate pro-democracy reformists, must purge the old guard associated with Mubarak.

Egyptian online democracy activists called for a demonstration that they dubbed "Tuesday of Challenge" to demand the removal of the interim government, saying it contained too many old faces.

The downfall of Mubarak in Egypt and uprisings across the region have prompted Western governments to rethink their policies of supporting autocrats, but have also raised concerns about the rise of Islamist groups in their place.

British officials said that Cameron would not speak with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is regarded with suspicion in Washington, is Egypt's biggest and best organised political grouping and says it wants a democracy with Islamic principles.

It would be a positive sign to meet other, less organised opposition groups than the Brotherhood, to highlight the fact that Islamists are not the only alternative to Mubarak, the British officials said.

Cameron is at the spearhead of a diplomatic initiative to understand the new political landscape after the uprising in this key U.S. ally which has a peace treaty with Israel.

CAMERON, BURNS URGE LIFT EMERGENCY

British officials said Cameron would specifically appeal to the military to lift emergency law, the cornerstone of Mubarak's iron rule and implemented after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamist officers from his army.

The complete disbandment of the current cabinet, mostly appointed by Mubarak, the lifting of emergency law and the freeing of political prisoners are key demands from reformists and activists who toppled Mubarak.

Egypt's new military rulers, who took over after an 18-day uprising ended 30 years of Mubarak's rule, have said change in the constitution for elections should be ready soon and hated emergency laws would be lifted before the polls.

"What is so refreshing about what's been happening, is that this is not an Islamist revolt, this is not extremists on the street, it's people who want to have the sort of basic freedoms that we take for granted in the UK," Cameron told reporters.

But highlighting Western fears, he said he wanted to expand security ties with Egypt "in combating extremist terror".

Cameron's arrival came hot on the heels of a visit by William J. Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, who landed earlier on Monday. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is due to arrive in Egypt on Tuesday.

Calling ties between Washington and Cairo strong, Burns said the United States would encourage "the momentum of transition ... Through careful preparations of the elections to the further release of detainees to the lifting of emergency law".

Egypt has said it would like European Union states to cancel its debts to them but has not made a formal request, the EU's local delegation said, citing the Egyptian finance minister. There was no official confirmation.

ALARM IN THE WEST

Cameron met Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who now heads the military council that governs Egypt, and offered British help with Egypt's transition to civilian rule.

The meeting with Tantawi was attended by Lieutenant General Sami Enan, the armed forces chief-of-staff, and other members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has promised democracy and free elections within six months.

"I think this is a great opportunity to talk to those currently running Egypt to make sure this really is a genuine transition from military rule to civilian rule," Cameron said.

Uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have sent shockwaves through the Middle East, threatening entrenched dynasties from Libya to Bahrain. The West has watched with alarm as long-time allies and foes came under threat, urging reform and restraint.

The cabinet spokesman said Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq was still consulting on new ministers to join the government and details published about the changes until now were premature.

"No one offered us any post and had they done so, we would have refused because we request what the public demands that this government quit as it is part of the former regime," said Essam El-Erian, a senior member of the Brotherhood.

"We want a new technocratic government that has no connection with the old era," he told Reuters on Monday.

The Brotherhood is represented on a constitutional change committee, a council to protect the revolution and on Monday named its party Freedom and Justice, with echoes of Turkey's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development (AK) Party.

Uncertainty remains over how much influence Egypt's military will seek to exert in reshaping a ruling system which it has propped up for six decades, with diplomats saying it is vital to "create an open political space".

Wary of a clampdown, the Brotherhood took a cautious line early in the protests but has slowly assumed a bigger role. It still treads carefully, saying it will not field a presidential candidate or seek a majority in parliament.

Any sign the army is reneging on its promises of democracy and civilian rule could reignite mass protests on the street.

In moves to appease democracy advocates, authorities said on Sunday they released 108 political prisoners and Shafiq on Monday ordered that streets be renamed to honor some of the 365 "martyrs" who died in the revolt.

(Additional reporting by Edmund Blair, Shaimaa Fayed, Marwa Awad, Tom Perry, Dina Zayed, Alexander Dziadosz, Sarah Mikhail and Tom Pfeiffer; Writing by Peter Millership)

    Egypt asks for freeze on Mubarak assets, 21.2.2011, R, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/22/us-egypt-idUSTRE70O3UW20110222

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI, ASHLEY PARKER, JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT

This article was written by Mark Mazzetti, Ashley Parker, Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt.

WASHINGTON — The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to American government officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other reconnaissance missions for a Central Intelligence Agency task force of case officers and technical surveillance experts, the officials said.

Mr. Davis’s arrest and detention, which came after what American officials have described as a botched robbery attempt, has inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. It has exacerbated already frayed relations between the American intelligence agency and its Pakistani counterpart, created a political dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal.

Without describing Mr. Davis’s mission or intelligence affiliation, President Obama last week made a public plea for his release. Meanwhile, there have been a flurry of private phone calls to Pakistan from Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all intended to persuade the Pakistanis to release the secret operative. Mr. Davis has worked for years as a C.I.A. contractor, including time at Blackwater Worldwide, the controversial private security firm (now called Xe) that Pakistanis have long viewed as symbolizing a culture of American gun slinging overseas.

George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment.

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A., and on Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication.

Since the United States is not at war in Pakistan, the American military is largely restricted from operating in the country. So the Central Intelligence Agency has taken on an expanded role, operating armed drones that kill militants inside the country and running covert operations, sometimes without the knowledge of the Pakistanis.

Several American and Pakistani officials said that the C.I.A. team in Lahore with which Mr. Davis worked was tasked with tracking the movements of various Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, a particularly violent group that Pakistan uses as a proxy force against India but that the United States considers a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis, such spying inside their country is an extremely delicate issue, particularly since Lashkar has longstanding ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Still, American and Pakistani officials use Lahore as a base of operations to investigate the militant groups and their madrasas in the surrounding area.

The officials gave various accounts of the makeup of the covert task force and of Mr. Davis, who at the time of his arrest was carrying a Glock pistol, a long-range wireless set, a small telescope and a headlamp. An American and a Pakistani official said in interviews that operatives from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command had been assigned to the group to help with the surveillance missions. Other American officials, however, said that no military personnel were involved with the task force.

Special operations troops routinely work with the C.I.A. in Pakistan. Among other things, they helped the agency pinpoint the location of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy Taliban commander who was arrested in January 2010 in Karachi.

Even before his arrest, Mr. Davis’s C.I.A. affiliation was known to Pakistani authorities, who keep close tabs on the movements of Americans. His visa, presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late 2009, describes his job as a “regional affairs officer,” a common job description for officials working with the agency.

According to that application, Mr. Davis carried an American diplomatic passport and was listed as “administrative and technical staff,” a category that typically grants diplomatic immunity to its holder.

American officials said that with Pakistan’s government trying to clamp down on the increasing flow of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors trying to gain entry to Pakistan, more of these operatives have been granted “cover” as embassy employees and given diplomatic passports.

As Mr. Davis languishes in a jail cell in Lahore — the subject of an international dispute at the highest levels — new details are emerging of what happened in a dramatic daytime scene on the streets of central Lahore, a sprawling city, on Jan. 27.

By the American account, Mr. Davis was driving alone in an impoverished area rarely visited by foreigners, and stopped his car at a crowded intersection. Two Pakistani men brandishing weapons hopped off motorcycles and approached. Mr. Davis killed them with the Glock, an act American officials insisted was in self-defense against armed robbers.

But on Sunday, the text of the Lahore Police Department’s crime report was published in English by a prominent daily newspaper, The Daily Times, and it offered a somewhat different account.

It is based in part on the version of events Mr. Davis told Pakistani authorities, and it seems to raise doubts about his claim that the shootings were in self-defense.

According to that report, Mr. Davis told the police that after shooting the two men, he stepped out of the car to take photographs of one of them, then called the United States Consulate in Lahore for help.

But the report also said that the victims were shot several times in the back, a detail that some Pakistani officials say proves the killings were murder. By this account, after firing at the men through his windshield, Mr. Davis stepped out of the car and continued firing. The report said that Mr. Davis then got back in his car and “managed to escape,” but that the police gave chase and “overpowered” him at a traffic circle a short distance away.

In a bizarre twist that has further infuriated the Pakistanis, a third man was killed when an unmarked Toyota Land Cruiser racing to Mr. Davis’s rescue, drove the wrong way down a one-way street and ran over a motorcyclist, killing him. As the Land Cruiser drove “recklessly” back to the consulate, the report said, items fell out of the vehicle, including 100 bullets, a black mask and a piece of cloth with the American flag.

Pakistani officials have demanded that the Americans in the S.U.V. be turned over to local authorities, but American officials say they have already left the country.

Mr. Davis and the other Americans were heavily armed and carried sophisticated equipment, the report said.

The Pakistani Foreign Office, generally considered to work under the guidance of the ISI, has declined to grant Mr. Davis what it calls the “blanket immunity” from prosecution that diplomats enjoy. In a setback for Washington, the Lahore High Court last week gave the Pakistani government until March 14 to decide on the issue of Mr. Davis’s immunity.

The pro-American government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, fearful for its survival in the face of a surge of anti-American sentiment, has resisted strenuous pressure from the Obama administration to release Mr. Davis to the United States. Some militant and religious groups have demanded that Mr. Davis be tried in the Pakistani courts and hanged.

Relations between the two spy agencies were tense even before the episode on the streets of Lahore. In December, the C.I.A.’s top clandestine officer in Pakistan hurriedly left the country after his identity was revealed. Some inside the agency believe that ISI operatives were behind the disclosure — retribution for the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, being named in a New York City lawsuit filed in connection with the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, in which members of his agency are believed to have played a role. General Pasha denied that was the case.

One senior Pakistani official close to the ISI said Pakistani spies are particularly infuriated over the Davis episode because it was such a public spectacle. Besides the three Pakistanis who died at the scene, the widow of one of the victims committed suicide by swallowing rat poison.

Moreover, the official said, the case was embarrassing for the ISI for its flagrancy, revealing how much freedom American spies have to roam around the country.

“We all know the spy-versus-spy games, we all know it works in the shadows,” the official said, “but you don’t get caught, and you don’t get caught committing murders.”

Mr. Davis, bearded and burly at 36, appears to have arrived in Pakistan in late 2009 or early 2010. American officials said he operated as part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Global Response Service in various parts of the country, including Lahore and Peshawar.

Documents released by Pakistan’s foreign office show that Mr. Davis was paid $200,000 a year, including travel expenses and insurance.

He is a native of rural, southwest Virginia, described by those who know him as an unlikely figure to be at the center of international intrigue.

He grew up in Big Stone Gap, a small town named after the gap in the mountains where the Powell River emerges.

The youngest of three children, Mr. Davis enlisted in the military after graduating from Powell Valley High School in 1993.

“I guess about any man’s dream is to serve his country,” said his sister Michelle Wade.

Shrugging off the portrait of him as an international spy comfortable with a Glock, Ms. Wade said: “He would always walk away from a fight. That’s just who he is.”

His high school friends remember him as good-natured, athletic, respectful. He was also a protector, they said, the type who stood up for the underdog.

“Friends with everyone, just a salt of the earth person,” said Jennifer Boring, who graduated from high school with Mr. Davis.

Mr. Davis served in the infantry in Europe — including a short tour as a peacekeeper in Macedonia — before joining the Third Special Forces Group in 1998, where he remained until he left the Army in 2003. The Army Special Forces —known as the Green Berets — are an elite group trained in foreign languages and cultures and weapons.

It is unclear when Mr. Davis began working for the C.I.A., but American officials said that in recent years he worked for the spy agency as a Blackwater contractor and later founded his own small company, Hyperion Protective Services.

Mr. Davis and his wife have moved frequently, living in Las Vegas, Arizona and Colorado.

One neighbor in Colorado, Gary Sollee, said that Mr. Davis described himself as “former military,” adding that “he’d have to leave the country for work pretty often, and when he’s gone, he’s gone for an extended period of time.”

Mr. Davis’s sister, Ms. Wade, said she has been praying for her brother’s safe return.

“The only thing I’m going to say is I love my brother,” she said. “I love my brother, God knows, I love him. I’m just praying for him.”


Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Jane Perlez from Pakistan and Ashley Parker from Big Stone Gap, Va. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.

    American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A., NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html

Warplanes and Militia Fire on Protesters in Libyan Capital

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR

CAIRO — The faltering government of the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi struck back at mounting protests against his 40-year rule, as helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the capital Monday, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli.

By Monday afternoon, a witness saw armed militiamen firing on protesters who were clashing with riot police. As a group of protesters and the police faced off in a neighborhood near Green Square, in the center of the capital, ten or so Toyota pickup trucks carrying more than 20 men — many of them apparently from other African countries in mismatched fatigues — arrived at the scene.

Holding small automatic weapons, they started firing in the air, and then started firing at protesters, who scattered, the witness said. “It was an obscene amount of gunfire,” said the witness. “They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.” The police stood by and watched, the witness said, as the militiamen, still shooting, chased after the protesters.

The escalation of the conflict came after Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces had earlier in the day retreated to a few buildings in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, fires burned unchecked, and senior government officials and diplomats announced defections. The country’s second-largest city remained under the control of rebels.

Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi defended a handful of strategic locations, including the state television headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses reported from Tripoli. Fires from the previous night’s rioting burned at many intersections, most stores were shuttered, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas.

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials — including the justice minister and members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations — broke with Mr. Qaddafi. And protesters in Benghazi, the second-largest city, where the revolt began and more than 200 were killed, issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.

Mr. Qaddafi’s security forces waved green flags as they rallied in Tripoli’s central Green Square on Monday under the protection of a handful of police, witnesses said. They constituted one of the few visible signs of government authority around the capital. The once ubiquitous posters of Colonel Qaddafi around the capital had been torn down or burned, witnesses said.

Colonel Qaddafi’s whereabouts were not known.

Tripoli descended into chaos in less than 24 hours as a six-day-old revolt suddenly spread from Benghazi across the country on Sunday. The revolt shaking Libya is the latest and most violent turn in a rebellion across the Arab world that seemed unthinkable just two months ago and that has already toppled autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or to be phoning information to news services outside the country.

In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 220 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt, ” neighbors to the east and west.

The United States condemned the Qaddafi government’s lethal use of force.

Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Monday said protesters had converged on the capital’s central Green Square and clashed with heavily armed riot police for several hours after Mr. Qaddafi’s speech, apparently enraged by it. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, as well as police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. Security forces moved in, shooting randomly.

By the morning, businesses and schools remained closed in the capital, the witnesses said. There were several government buildings on fire — including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets — and reports of looting.

News agencies reported that several foreign oil and gas companies were moving on Monday to evacuate some workers from the country. The Portuguese government sent a plane to Libya to pick up its citizens and other residents of the European Union, while Turkey sent two ferries for its construction workers, The Associated Press reported.

The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, said that protests have occurred in Ras Lanuf, an oil town where some workers were being assembled to defend a refinery complex from attacks.

Quryna also reported that the justice minister, Mustafa Abud al-Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to the demonstrations.

Al Manara, an opposition Web site, reported that a senior military official, Col. Abdel Fattah Younes in Benghazi, resigned, and the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Colonel Qaddafi ordered that one of his top generals, Abu Bakr Younes, be put under house arrest after disobeying an order to use force against protesters in several cities.

Abdel Monem Al-Howni, Libya’s representative to the Arab League, also resigned. “I no longer have any links to this regime which lost all legitimacy,” he said in a statement reported by news agencies . He also called what is happening in Libya “genocide.”

Protesters remained in control of Benghazi on Monday. Online videos showed protesters flying an independence flag over the roof top of a building in Benghazi, and a crowd celebrating what they called “the fall of the regime in their city.”

The younger Mr. Qaddafi blamed Islamic radicals and Libyans in exile for the uprising. He offered a vague package of reforms in his televised speech, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure. But his main theme was to threaten Libyans with the prospect of civil war over its oil resources that would break up the country, deprive residents of food and education, and even invite a Western takeover.

“Libya is made up of tribes and clans and loyalties,” he said. “There will be civil war.”

With little shared national experience aside from brutal Italian colonialism, Libyans tend to identify themselves as members of tribes or clans rather than citizens of a country, and Colonel Qaddafi has governed in part through the mediation of a “social leadership committee” composed of about 15 representatives of various tribes, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied the country.

In addition, Mr. Vandewalle noted, most of the tribal representatives on the committee are also military officers, who each represent a tribal group within the military. So, unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian militaries, the Libyan military lacks the cohesion or professionalism that might enable it to step in to resolve the conflict with the protesters or to stabilize the country.

Over the last three days Libyan security forces have killed at least 223 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch. Several people in Benghazi hospitals, reached by telephone, said they believed that as many as 200 had been killed and more than 800 wounded there on Saturday alone, with many of the deaths from machine gun fire.

After protesters marched in a funeral procession on Sunday morning, the security forces again opened fire, killing at least 60 more, Human Rights Watch said.

The deputy ambassador and more than a dozen members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country in a letter drafted on Monday.

“He has to leave as soon as possible,” the deputy ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, said, paraphrasing the letter. “He has to stop killing the Libyan people.”

He urged other nations to join in that request, saying he feared there could be a large-scale massacre in Tripoli and calling on “African nations” to stop sending what he called “mercenaries” to fight on behalf of Qaddafi’s government.

Mr. Dabbashi said he had not seen the Libyan ambassador since Friday and did not know his whereabouts or whether he shared the opinion of many in his mission.

But, Mr. Dabbashi said, the United Nations mission represents the people, not Colonel Qaddafi.

The man who was the government’s chief spokesman until a month ago, Mohamed Bayou, called on Libya’s leadership to begin a dialogue with the opposition and discuss drawing up a Constitution. On Monday, Reuters reported that Mr. Bayou issued a statement referring to Seif Qaddafi: “I hope he will change his speech to acknowledge the existence of an internal popular opposition.”


Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo; Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan from New York.

    Warplanes and Militia Fire on Protesters in Libyan Capital, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html

Oil Companies Plan Evacuations From Libya

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA WERDIGIER and RACHEL DONADIO

LONDON — Global oil companies said Monday that they were making plans to evacuate employees in Libya after some operations there were disrupted by political unrest. Libya holds the largest crude oil reserves in Africa, and the moves drove some stock prices down and a crucial oil benchmark to a three-year high.

The largest and most established foreign energy producer in Libya, Eni of Italy, said in a statement that it had begun repatriating “nonessential personnel” and the families of its employees.

The Norwegian energy company Statoil, which operates in Libya in partnership with Repsol of Spain and Total of France, said it would close its office in Tripoli and that a handful of foreign workers were leaving. “The safety of our personnel is our main priority,” said a spokesman, Bard Glad Pedersen.

OMV of Austria, which produces about 34,000 barrels of oil a day in Libya, said it planned to evacuate 11 workers and their families, leaving only essential staff.

Shares in Eni and OMV dropped on Monday, while the price of Brent crude, an important benchmark for oil traded in London, rose to $104.60 a barrel, the highest level since 2008.

“We’re concerned, and of course we’d like to see a solution sooner rather than later,” said Jason Kenney, an analyst with ING Financial Markets. “It’s very difficult to see how this is going to go. The oil price will be volatile.”

The British oil company BP, which has only exploration operations in Libya, said that it was making plans to evacuate some of its 40 foreign workers, mostly from Tripoli, where the unrest spread to Sunday. It also said it had suspended preparations for a drilling project because employees of a contractor had been evacuated.

“We, like everyone, are watching this very, very carefully,” BP’s chief executive, Robert Dudley, said. “We have operations there that are very limited. We remain committed to doing business there.”

For many years, Libya was shunned by most foreign oil companies because of its anti-American government and ties to terrorist organizations. Eni was an exception, with operations there since 1959, and current major stakes in four fields.

Ever since Italy’s brief colonial adventure in Libya in the early 20th century, the country has been a cornerstone of Italian foreign policy. In recent years, Italian blue-chip companies including Unicredit and Eni have come to rely on infusions of Libyan capital.

In 2003, when Libya struck a deal with the United States and Britain in which it promised not to develop weapons of mass destruction, international sanctions against Libya were lifted, and Eni was joined there by other foreign oil companies.

In Egypt, where protests led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, oil companies said operations had returned to normal. Statoil and BP said most employees who had left Egypt were back on the job.


Julia Werdigier reported from London and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

    Oil Companies Plan Evacuations From Libya, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22oil.html

Qaddafi’s Grip on Power Seems to Ebb as Forces Retreat

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR

CAIRO — The 40-year-rule of Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi appeared to teeter Monday as his security forces retreated to a few buildings in the Libyan capital of Tripoli where fires burned unchecked, senior government officials and diplomats announced defections, and the country’s second-largest city remained under the control of rebels.

Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi defended a handful of strategic locations, including the state television headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses reported from Tripoli. Fires from the previous night’s rioting burned at many intersections, most stores were shuttered, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas.

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials — including members of the the Libyan mission to the United Nations — announced their resignations. And protesters in Benghazi, the city where the revolt began, issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.

Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi waved green flags as they rallied in Tripoli’s central Green Square Monday under the protection of a handful of police, these witnesses said. But they constituted one of the few visible signs of government authority around the capital.

Tripoli descended into chaos in less than 24 hours as a six day old revolt suddenly spread from Benghazi across the country and into the capital on Sunday. The revolt shaking Libya is the latest and most violent turn in the rebellion across the Arab world that seemed unthinkable just two months ago.

In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 220 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt” — the neighbors to the east and west that both overthrew their veteran autocrats in the space of the last six weeks.

The United States condemned the Qaddafi government’s lethal use of force.

Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Monday said protesters had converged on the capital’s central Green Square and clashed with heavily armed riot police for several hours after Mr. Qaddafi’s speech, apparently enraged by it. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, as well as police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. Security forces moved in, shooting randomly.

By the morning, businesses and schools remained closed in the capital as clashes . There were several government buildings on fire — including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets —and reports of looting. Protesters were seen taking down pictures of Colonel Qaddafi and burning them. Police were noticeably absent from the streets, but a heavy security presence remained in front of the state television building, and the palace that serves as Colonel Qaddafi’s residence.

News agencies reported that several foreign oil and gas companies were moving on Monday to evacuate their workers from the country. The Portuguese government sent a plane to Libya to pick up its citizens and other residents of the European Union, while Turkey sent two ferries for its construction workers in the strife-torn country, The Associated Press reported.

The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif, said that protests have occurred in Ras Lanuf, an oil town where some workers were being assembled to defend a refinery complex from attacks.

As Colonel Qaddafi appeared to dig in for a long fight, Quryna reported that his justice minister, Mustafa Abud Al Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to antigovernment demonstrations.

Al-Manara, an opposition website, reported that a senior military official, Col. Abdel Fattah Younes in Benghazi, resigned, and the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Colonel Qaddafi ordered that one of his top generals, Abu Bakr Younes, be put under house arrest after disobeying an order to use force against protesters in several cities.

Abdel Monem Al-Howni, Libya’s representative to the Arab League, also resigned. “I no longer have any links to this regime which lost all legitimacy,” he said in a statement reported by news agencies . He also called what is happening in Libya ”genocide.”

In Benghazi, the starting point of the revolt and a center of opposition to the Qaddafi government, three witnesses said that special military forces called in as reinforcements had instead helped the protesters take over the local army barracks. “The gunshots you hear are the gunshots of celebration,” said Abdel Latif al-Hadi, a 54-year-old Benghazi resident whose five sons were out protesting.

Protesters remained in control of Benghazi on Monday, and online videos showed protesters flying an independence flag over the roof top of a building in Benghazi, and a crowd celebrating what they called “the fall of the regime in their city.”

The younger Mr. Qaddafi blamed Islamic radicals and Libyans in exile for the uprising. He offered a vague package of reforms in his televised speech, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure. But his main theme was to threaten Libyans with the prospect of civil war over its oil resources that would break up the country, deprive residents of food and education, and even invite a Western takeover.

“Libya is made up of tribes and clans and loyalties,” he said. “There will be civil war.”

Recalling Libya’s colonial past, he warned, “The West and Europe and the United States will not accept the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Libya.”

There was no sign that Colonel Qaddafi, 68, intended to allow the revolts that have taken down the longtime leaders in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt to fell him as well. Colonel Qaddafi for decades has skillfully cultivated tribal rivalries to avoid any threat to his authority.

“We will fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet,” his son said in his televised speech. The younger Mr. Qaddafi has been the government’s principal spokesman, especially on the subject of reform.

Over the last three days his security forces have killed at least 223 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch. Several people in Benghazi hospitals, reached by telephone, said they believed that as many as 200 had been killed and more than 800 wounded there on Saturday alone, with many of the deaths from machine gun fire. And after protesters marched in a funeral procession on Sunday morning, the security forces opened fire again, killing at least 60 more, Human Rights Watch said.

The man who was the government’s chief spokesman until a month ago, Mohamed Bayou, called on Libya’s leadership to begin a dialogue with the opposition and discuss drawing up a Constitution. “I hope he will change his speech to acknowledge the existence of an internal popular opposition,” he said in a statement, referring to the younger Qaddafi, according to Reuters.

The escalating violence in Libya — a cycle of funerals, confrontations, and more coffins — has made the revolt there the bloodiest in the wave of uprisings sweeping the region.

Under Colonel Qaddafi’s idiosyncratic rule, tribal bonds remain primary even within the ranks of the military, and both protesters and the security forces have reason to believe that backing down will likely mean their ultimate death or imprisonment.

But in a break with the Qaddafi government, the powerful al-Warfalla and al-Zuwayya tribes came out against Colonel Qaddafi on Sunday. “We tell him to leave the country,” a spokesman for the al-Warfalla told the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, with only occasional access, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or phoning information to services outside the country. Al Jazeera, viewed by many as a cheerleader for the democracy movements stirring the region, has been taken off the air. Several people and intermediaries said Libyans were reluctant to talk to the foreign press via phone, fearing reprisals from the security forces.

The Libyan protesters, however, may face a more daunting prospect than rebels in Egypt to the east or Tunisia to the west.

Colonel Qaddafi has styled his authoritarian government “rule by the masses” and, despite his pervasive security forces, cultivated a noisy disdain for centralized government. With little shared national experience aside from brutal Italian colonialism, Libyans tend to identify themselves as members of tribes or clans rather than citizens of a country, and Colonel Qaddafi has governed in part through the mediation of a “social leadership committee” composed of about 15 representatives of various tribes, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied the country.

What’s more, Mr. Vandewalle noted, most of the tribal representatives on the committee are also military officers, who each represent a tribal group within the military. So, unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian militaries, the Libyan military lacks the cohesion or professionalism that might enable it to step in to resolve the conflict with the protesters or to stabilize the country.


Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from Cairo, and Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon.

    Qaddafi’s Grip on Power Seems to Ebb as Forces Retreat, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html

Egypt's Brotherhood calls for purge of old guard

Mon Feb 21, 2011
5:46am EST
Reuters
By Yasmine Saleh and Peter Millership

CAIRO (Reuters) - The Muslim Brotherhood, once banned and playing a growing role in the new Egypt, rejected a government reshuffle on Monday, calling for a purge of the old guard cabinet appointed by deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.

In a bid to placate pro-democracy activists, the reshuffle late on Sunday named several Mubarak opponents but disappointed those eager for a new line-up as key defense, foreign, justice, interior and finance portfolios were left unchanged.

Egypt's new military rulers, who took over after an 18-day uprising ended 30 years of Mubarak's iron rule, has said changes in the constitution for elections in six months should be ready soon and hated emergency laws would be lifted before the polls.

But for many democracy advocates, who want a completely new cabinet with no links to Mubarak's corrupt and autocratic elite to govern the Arab world's most populous nation, the military needs to put fresh faces in office.

"No one offered us any post and had they done so, we would have refused because we request what the public demands that this government quit as it is part of the former regime," said Essam El-Erian, a senior member of the Brotherhood, which is Egypt's most organized political group.

"We want a new technocratic government that has no connection with the old era," he told Reuters.

The Brotherhood, viewed with suspicion by Washington and which wants a democracy with Islamic principles, is represented on a constitutional change committee, a council to protect the revolution and will register as soon as new rules allow.

Uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have spread like wildfire in the Arab world, threatening entrenched dynasties from Libya to Bahrain. The West has watched with alarm as long-time allies and foes came under threat, urging reform and restraint.

"OPEN POLITICAL SPACE"

Uncertainty remains over how much influence Egypt's military will seek to exert in reshaping a corrupt and oppressive ruling system which it has propped up for six decades, with diplomats saying it is vital to "create an open political space."

Wary of a clampdown, the Brotherhood took a cautious line early in the protests but has slowly assumed a more prominent role. It still treads warily, saying it will not field a presidential candidate or seek a majority in parliament.

Any sign the army is reneging on its promises of democracy and civilian rule in this key U.S. ally which has a peace treaty with Israel could reignite mass protests on the street.

Friday's celebrations which marked a week since Mubarak's overthrow served as a reminder to the military of people power.

The military on Monday announced an amnesty for weapons stolen during the revolution and there were pockets of protests in and around Cairo over pay and conditions despite an order aimed at ending strikes and protests damaging the economy.

In moves to appease democracy advocates, authorities said on Sunday they released 108 political prisoners and Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq on Monday ordered that streets be renamed to honor some of the 356 "martyrs" who died in the revolt.

But it is increasingly clear that demands for a complete cabinet overhaul top many political activists' agendas along with lifting emergency rule and freeing political prisoners.

Mubarak, 82, shuffled his cabinet shortly after protests over corruption, poverty and repression erupted on January 25 in an attempt to assuage rage over his autocratic rule and to try and distance himself from his own regime.

Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who leads the ruling military council that is running Egypt, has been defense minister for 20 years and, according to diplomats, had the job thrust upon him and wants to get back to running the military.

THE NEW FACES

The latest reshuffle brought into the cabinet some new faces including three from registered political parties, a staggering change in Egypt where just four weeks ago opposition groups were harried, fragmented and weakened by decades of oppression.

Yehia el-Gamal, a professor of law and a leader in activist Mohamed ElBaradei's coalition called the National Association for Change, was appointed deputy prime minister.

Mounir Abdel Nour, secretary-general of the Wafd party, a decades old liberal, nationalist party, became minister in charge of tourism, which has been badly damaged by the unrest with visitors reluctant to visit the pyramids and the Nile.

In other changes, the post of information minister was scrapped after the former minister, Anas el-Fekky, angered protesters with state media playing down or ignoring protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere for much of the revolution.

Amr Hamzawy, a member of the so-called council of "Wise Men" which sought to mediate a resolution between Mubarak and the protesters during the uprising, became minister for youth.

On the foreign policy front, the new military rulers, in their first diplomatic test, have approved the passage of two Iranian naval vessels through the Suez Canal, causing concern in Israel. Canal officials said on Sunday their passage had been delayed until Wednesday.

(Additional reporting by Edmund Blair, Shaimaa Fayed, Marwa Awad, Tom Perry; Writing by Peter Millership)

    Egypt's Brotherhood calls for purge of old guard, R, 21.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-egypt-idUSTRE70O3UW20110221

Reform Lawyer Says Tunisia Risks Anarchy

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER

TUNIS — The head of a Tunisian government commission on political reform warned on Monday that the country risked falling into “anarchy” as it passed through what he described as a very dangerous post-revolutionary transition toward multi-party democracy.

“We might lose our freedom because we become too drunk on freedom,” said Yadh Ben Achour, a prominent lawyer who is the head of Tunisia’s Higher Political Reform Commission. “The risk is that everyone says what they want and does not think of the common good.”

Mr. Ben Achour’s commission is tasked with dismantling the repressive laws of the authoritarian government of former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country in January, leaving a vacuum of power.

Tunisia faces enormous challenges rebuilding its political system. The country’s caretaker government has been confronted with nearly daily protests by a variety of groups and the police force has been badly weakened by mass desertions and the firing of top officials. Provincial government offices remain dysfunctional and the judicial system is hobbled by its links to the ousted regime.

Abdelrazek Kilani, president of the Tunisian Bar Association, estimated that “about 100 judges are totally corrupt” and need to be removed. “They took bribes and followed orders from the Ministry of Justice,” Mr. Kilani said in an interview. “They convicted people because the ministry told them to.”

“Our worry is that the Ben Ali system is still in place,” he said.

Mr. Ben Achour of the commission on political reform said Tunisia would miss the two-month deadline stipulated in its Constitution for a presidential election to replace Mr. Ben Ali. “Every judicial system knows the concept of force majeure,” he said. It would be impossible to organize elections before March 15 deadline, he said.

Tunisians cannot on agree whether to change the current Constitution or discard it and elect a constitutional assembly that would write a new one, he said.

“We need to decide as soon as we can,” he said. “The public is tired of waiting.”

The commission may also help draft a new constitution, a process, he said, that risked being bogged down by politicians focusing on narrow interests and not the future of the country.

“This is what risks moving us toward anarchy,” Mr. Ben Achour said. “And we know that anarchy always leads to dictatorship — theocratic or military dictatorship.”

    Reform Lawyer Says Tunisia Risks Anarchy, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22tunisia.html

Tunis march against Islamists, for harmony after Polish priest murdered

Feb 20, 2011
13:03 EST
Reuters

About 15,000 demonstrators have protested in Tunis against the country’s Islamist movement, calling for religious tolerance a day after the Interior Ministry announced a Polish Catholic priest had been murdered by an extremist group.

“We need to live together and be tolerant of each other’s views,” said Ridha Ghozzi, 34, who was among the protesters carrying signs and chanting slogans on Saturday including “Terrorism is not Tunisian” and “Religion is Personal”.

Tunisia’s Islamist movement has shown signs of organising since the overthrow of former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had surpressed them during his more than two decades of rule, and have pressured authorities to shut at least three brothels in recent weeks.
tunis funeral

(Tunis Catholic Archbishop Maroun Lahham blesses a photograph of Fr. Marek Rybinski during Mass at the cathedral of Tunis February 20, 2011/Anis Mili)

The Polish priest was murdered in the Tunisian capital on Friday, state media cited the Interior Ministry as saying, the latest sign of rising religious tension since last month’s revolution.

Fr. Marek Rybinski was found dead at the School of Our Lady in Manouba where he worked, Tunisia Africa Press reported. His throat had been cut. The school is run by the Salesian order of priests. The Polish section of the Salesians said on their website he was 34 years old and had worked in Tunisia since 2007. They also said the priests at the school had received a death threat in an anonymous letter on January 31.

“The Ministry of the Interior condemns this act and regrets the death. Based on results of the preliminary investigation, including the method of assassination, it believes a group of terrorist fascists with extremist tendencies was behind this crime,” the ministry said.

“These extremists are taking advantage of an exceptional situation to disturb national security and plunge our country into violence,” the ministry statement said. It did not say what form of extremism it suspected.

The Islamist campaign against brothels prompted security forces to fire into the air to disperse hundreds of Islamists protesting against one in Tunis on Friday, witnesses said. At least three people were injured.

At least three people were injured on Friday when Tunisian security forces fired in the air to disperse hundreds of Islamists protesting against a brothel in the capital Tunis, witnesses said. Tunisia, a strictly secularist state under Ben Ali, is the only Arab country with legal prostitution.
tunis muslim girl

(A Tunisian Muslim girl places flowers before a photograph of murdered Fr. Marek Rybinski at the Catholic cathedral of Tunis February 20, 2011S/Anis Mili)

“Almost 500 Islamists, many wearing beards, were demonstrating in Old Medina to demand the closure of a brothel,” said Mourad Barhoumi, a Tunis resident who witnessed the demonstration. “There were several dozen riot police who shut off entry to the neighbourhood. They fired in the air to break up the crowd, which didn’t want to go until the brothel was shut,” he said, adding that three people were injured.

A second witness at the demonstration confirmed the details to Reuters by phone, but asked not to be named. The demonstrators later dispersed after a military official announced that the brothel had been shut, he said.

    Tunis march against Islamists, for harmony after Polish priest murdered, R, 20.2.2011, http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2011/02/20/tunis-march-against-islamists-for-harmony-after-polish-priest-murdered/

Qaddafi’s Son Warns of Civil War as Libyan Protests Widen

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR

CAIRO — A five-day-old uprising in Libya took control of its second-largest city of Benghazi and spread for the first time to the capital of Tripoli late on Sunday as the heir-apparent son of its strongman, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, warned Libyans in a televised speech that their oil-rich country would fall into civil war and even renewed Western “colonization” if they threw off his father’s 40-year-long rule.

In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 200 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt” — the neighbors to the east and west that both overthrew their veteran autocrats in the space of the last six weeks.

The revolt shaking Libya is the latest and most violent turn in the rebellion across the Arab world that seemed unthinkable just two months ago and now poses the greatest threat in four decades to Colonel Qaddafi’s autocratic power. The United States condemned the Qaddafi government’s lethal use of force.

Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Sunday night said protesters were converging on the capital’s central Green Square and clashing with the heavily armed riot police. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes. The police had retreated from some neighborhoods, and protesters were seen armed with police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads.

The protesters set trash hauling bins on fire, blocking roads in some neighborhoods. In the early evening the sound and smells of gunfire hung over the central city, and by midnight looting had begun.

“The state has disappeared from the streets,” said Mansour Abu Shenaf, a writer living in Tripoli, “and the people, the youth, have practically taken over.”

In Benghazi, the starting point of the revolt, three witnesses said that special military forces called in as reinforcements had instead helped the protesters take over the local army barracks. “The gunshots you hear are the gunshots of celebration,” said Abdel Latif al-Hadi, a 54-year-old Benghazi resident whose five sons were out protesting.

The younger Mr. Qaddafi blamed Islamic radicals and Libyans in exile for the uprising. He offered a vague package of reforms in his televised speech, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure. But his main theme was to threaten Libyans with the prospect of civil war over its oil resources that would break up the country, deprive residents of food and education, and even invite a Western takeover.

“Libya is made up of tribes and clans and loyalties,” he said. “There will be civil war.”

Recalling Libya’s colonial past, he warned, “The West and Europe and the United States will not accept the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Libya.”

There was no sign that Colonel Qaddafi, 68, intended to allow the revolts that have taken down the longtime leaders in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt to fell him as well. Colonel Qaddafi for decades has skillfully cultivated tribal rivalries to avoid any threat to his authority.

“We will fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet,” his son said in his televised speech. The younger Mr. Qaddafi has been the government’s principal spokesman, especially on the subject of reform.

The whereabouts of Colonel Qaddafi himself remained unclear on Sunday. Over the last three days his security forces have killed at least 173 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch. Several people in Benghazi hospitals, reached by telephone, said they believed that as many as 200 had been killed and more than 800 wounded there on Saturday alone, with many of the deaths from machine gun fire. And after protesters marched in a funeral procession on Sunday morning, the security forces opened fire again, killing at least 50 more, Human Rights Watch said.

The escalating violence in Libya — a cycle of funerals, confrontations, and more coffins — has made the revolt there the bloodiest in the wave of uprisings sweeping the region.

Under Colonel Qaddafi’s idiosyncratic rule, tribal bonds remain primary even within the ranks of the military, and both protesters and the security forces have reason to believe that backing down will likely mean their ultimate death or imprisonment.

But in a break with the Qaddafi government, the powerful al-Warfalla and al-Zuwayya tribes came out against Colonel Qaddafi on Sunday. “We tell him to leave the country,” a spokesman for the al-Warfalla told the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, with only occasional access, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or phoning information to services outside the country. Al Jazeera, viewed by many as a cheerleader for the democracy movements stirring the region, has been taken off the air. Several people and intermediaries said Libyans were reluctant to talk to the foreign press via phone, fearing reprisals from the security forces.

Benghazi, the traditional hub of the country’s eastern province, has long been a center of opposition to the Qaddafi government, centered in the Western city of Tripoli. In 1996, Benghazi was the site of a massacre at the Abu Slim prison, when security forces killed about 1,200 prisoners. Those killings have since become a cause for Qaddafi critics there.

Opponents of the government had set Thursday, Feb. 17, as the day of a demonstration dubbed the “day of rage” and inspired by the protests in Tunisia and Egypt. But on Tuesday, the security forces detained a prominent opposition lawyer, Fathi Terbil, who represented many of the families of prisoners killed in the massacre, and members of the families led the protesters into the streets the next day.

By Sunday, Fathi Terbil had been released and set up a live online video broadcast that appeared to emanate from the roof of the Benghazi courthouse overlooking what residents call their Tahrir Square. “Free Libya Radio,” he called it.

“We are expecting people to die today, more people than before,” Mr. Terbil said early on Sunday, before the latest round of funerals and shootings began.

“If anything happens to us today, we are not going to leave this place,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die, I’m afraid to lose the battle, that’s why I want the media to see what’s going on.”

“At least if we die, so many people can witness, I can protest from everywhere,” he added, “Long live a free Libya. We are determined to fight till the end for our country.”

On Sunday morning, residents of Benghazi described an ongoing battle for control of the city, with a population of about 700,000. Thousands of protesters had occupied a central square in front of the courthouse. As they had for days, they were chanting the slogans that echoed through the streets of Tunis and Cairo before — “The people want to bring down the regime.”

A brigade of more than a thousand other members of the security forces were concentrated a few miles from the courthouse in a barracks in the neighborhood of Berqa. Witnesses said young protesters were attempting suicidal attacks on the barracks with thrown rocks or stun grenades usually used for fishing. But the security forces responded by shooting from the cover of their fortified building, while others shot from vehicles as they cruised the side streets.

By afternoon, however, witnesses reported streams of new protesters flowing to Benghazi from other cities around the east to support the revolt. Then another brigade of reinforcements — described by witnesses as special forces — began collaborating with the protesters as well, some even lending their tanks to the cause of assaulting the government security forces.

Soon the protesters had stormed the local headquarters of the state security services. “These young men are taking bullets in their chests to confront the tyrant,” Mr. Hadi said, speaking by phone from the siege of the security building.

Within hours, several protesters said, they had taken control of the army barracks as well. “Despite the pain and victims, we are happy because the blood of our sons was not spilled in vain,” Amal Mohaity, a lawyer and human rights activist, said as the siege unfolded. “Mark my words: Qaddafi is coming down.”

There were reports of uprisings in several cities along the coast, including in the major cities of Baida and Misratah. Roughly 70 miles east of Benghazi, in the port of Darnah, one witness said that five had died in clashes with the police on Thursday but that by Sunday the protesters had set fire to the security headquarters and the police had fled. “Right now, people are terrified,” said Ashraf Tarbah, a public employee, “and they are praying for the people of Benghazi.”

Fifty prominent Libyan Muslim religious leaders issued an appeal to Muslims in the security forces to stop participating in the violence against protesters.

Over Twitter, Facebook and online social networks, Libyans were calling Sunday for help from across the eastern border in Egypt, pleading for sympathetic Egyptians to bring medical supplies to help with revolt. And Egyptians, with the help of Libyans living abroad, were organizing aid convoys to the border.

The Libyan protesters, however, may face a more daunting prospect than rebels in Egypt to the east or Tunisia to the west.

Colonel Qaddafi has styled his authoritarian government “rule by the masses” and, despite his pervasive security forces, cultivated a noisy disdain for centralized government. With little shared national experience aside from brutal Italian colonialism, Libyans tend to identify themselves as members of tribes or clans rather than citizens of a country, and Colonel Qaddafi has governed in part through the mediation of a “social leadership committee” composed of about 15 representatives of various tribes, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied the country.

What’s more, Mr. Vandewalle noted, most of the tribal representatives on the committee are also military officers, who each represent a tribal group within the military. So, unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian militaries, the Libyan military lacks the cohesion or professionalism that might enable it to step in to resolve the conflict with the protesters or to stabilize the country.

    Qaddafi’s Son Warns of Civil War as Libyan Protests Widen, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/africa/21libya.html

U.S. ‘Gravely Concerned’ Over Violence in Libya

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Sunday condemned Libya’s use of lethal force against peaceful demonstrators, pointing to what it said were “multiple credible” reports that “hundreds of people” had been killed and injured in several days of unrest.

In the administration’s strongest statement on the escalating violence in Libya, the State Department said that it was “gravely concerned” about the reports and that the number of deaths was unknown because of a lack of access to many parts of the country by news organizations and human rights groups.

Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, said that the United States has raised “strong objections about the use of lethal force” with several senior Libyan officials, including Musa Kusa, the foreign minister.

“Libyan officials have stated their commitment to protecting and safeguarding the right of peaceful protest,” Mr. Crowley said in a statement. “We call upon the Libyan government to uphold that commitment and hold accountable any security officer who does not act in accordance with that commitment.”

The impact of the administration’s sharp criticism of Libya’s firing on demonstrators was unclear, and stood in contrast to how President Obama’s strong criticism of the use of force by security forces in Bahrain appeared to have pressured its government to withdraw police officers and troops from the main square of that country’s capital, Manama.

On Friday night, Mr. Obama spoke to King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain, leaning on the government to show restraint, especially against peaceful protesters, and pressing for meaningful reform. The next day, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, telephoned the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, to underscore Mr. Obama’s message. Mr. Donilon praised the prince’s orders earlier in the day to withdraw security forces.

Administration officials said Sunday that the tough line with Bahrain, home of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet and the center of American efforts to contain Iran, had been effective. “We’ve been very clear with our partners in Bahrain that they ought to exercise restraint, that there is no place for violence against peaceful protesters there or anywhere else, and we’ve condemned that violence,” Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

As it did with Iran and Egypt, the administration has responded in different ways to the embattled governments in Libya and Bahrain. “Each of these countries is different,” Ms. Rice said. “Each of these circumstances will be decided by the people of those countries. We are not pushing people out or dictating that they stay.

“What we’re doing is saying, consistently across the board they are universal human rights that need to be respected.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican from South Carolina, offered support on Sunday for the administration’s dual approaches. “We should have a policy of urging old friends to do better and replacing old enemies,” Mr. Graham said on “Meet the Press.”

“I’d like to see regime change in Libya,” he said. “I’d like to see regime change in Iran. I think we need to be tougher on companies that do business with Iran. But, generally speaking, the administration, I think, has handled Egypt well and is trying to stay ahead of this when it comes to Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.”

Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Saudi Arabia on Sunday for a previously scheduled weeklong trip to the Persian Gulf region. His scheduled stops also include Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and, possibly, Bahrain.

Capt. John Kirby, his spokesman, said in a statement that Admiral Mullen would meet with his counterparts in each country and would “make clear his desire to see that peaceful protest be allowed to continue without threats or violence from any quarter and that restraint is shown by all sides in these disputes.”

Middle East security experts say the United States has greater influence over allies like Bahrain than countries with which relations are more strained, including Libya, even though full diplomatic ties were restored in 2009.

In Bahrain’s case, the administration is also balancing the interests of Saudi Arabia, another monarchy, which is connected to Bahrain by a causeway. Senior Saudi officials have expressed displeasure that Mr. Obama has allowed the protests to continue, and even grow, by espousing political and economic reforms in the region.

Throughout the region, Ms. Rice said, “there are conditions that are inherently unstable — a youth bulge, high unemployment, a lack of political openness — and we have pressed publicly and privately for the kind of change that is necessary.”

Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said that in most of those countries, an aging autocratic leadership was confronting the realities of a youthful population eager for social and economic changes and connected by social networks that were not broadly in use even a few years ago.

“They know they are not getting their fair share, that life is not going to be good for them,” Mr. Lugar said Sunday on “State of the Union” on CNN. “As a result, given hunger problems, other economic difficulties, they have come to the fore.”

Mr. Lugar continued, “The question is, will, as in the case of the Libyans, the protesters simply be shot?”

    U.S. ‘Gravely Concerned’ Over Violence in Libya, NYT, 20.2.1011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/middleeast/21diplomacy.html

Watching Protesters Risk It All

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Manama, Bahrain

As democracy protests spread across the Middle East, we as journalists struggle to convey the sights and sounds, the religion and politics. But there’s one central element that we can’t even begin to capture: the raw courage of men and women — some of them just teenagers — who risk torture, beatings and even death because they want freedoms that we take for granted.

Here in Bahrain on Saturday, I felt almost physically ill as I watched a column of pro-democracy marchers approach the Pearl Roundabout, the spiritual center of their movement. One day earlier, troops had opened fire on marchers there, with live ammunition and without any warning. So I flinched and braced myself to watch them die.

Yet, astonishingly, they didn’t. The royal family called off the use of lethal force, perhaps because of American pressure. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, but the protesters marched on anyway, and the police fled.

The protesters fell on the ground of the roundabout and kissed the soil. They embraced each other. They screamed. They danced. Some wept.

“We are calling it ‘Martyrs’ Roundabout’ now,” Layla, a 19-year-old university student, told me in that moment of stunned excitement. “One way or another, freedom has to come,” she said. “It’s not something given by anybody. It’s a right of the people.”

Zaki, a computer expert, added: “If Egypt can do it, then we can do it even better.”

(I’m withholding family names. Many people were willing for their full names to be published, but at a hospital I was shaken after I interviewed one young man who had spoken publicly about seeing the police kill protesters — and then, he said, the police kidnapped him off the street and beat him badly.)

To me, this feels like the Arab version of 1776. And don’t buy into the pernicious whisper campaign from dictators that a more democratic Middle East will be fundamentalist, anti-American or anti-women. For starters, there have been plenty of women on the streets demanding change (incredibly strong women, too!).

For decades, the United States embraced corrupt and repressive autocracies across the Middle East, turning a blind eye to torture and repression in part because of fear that the “democratic rabble” might be hostile to us. Far too often, we were both myopic and just plain on the wrong side.

Here in Bahrain, we have been in bed with a minority Sunni elite that has presided over a tolerant, open and economically dynamic country — but it’s an elite that is also steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population. If you parachute into a neighborhood in Bahrain, you can tell at once whether it is Sunni or Shia: if it has good roads and sewers and is well maintained, it is Sunni; otherwise, it is Shia.

A 20-year-old medical student, Ghadeer, told me that her Sunni classmates all get government scholarships and public-sector jobs; the Shiites pay their own way and can’t find work in the public sector. Likewise, Shiites are overwhelmingly excluded from the police and armed forces, which instead rely on mercenaries from Sunni countries. We give aid to these oligarchs to outfit their police forces to keep the Shiites down; we should follow Britain’s example and immediately suspend such transfers until it is clear that the government will not again attack peaceful, unarmed protesters.

We were late to side with “people power” in Tunisia and Egypt, but Bahrainis are thrilled that President Obama called the king after he began shooting his people — and they note that the shooting subsequently stopped (at least for now). The upshot is real gratitude toward the United States.

The determination of protesters — in Bahrain, in Iran, in Libya, in Yemen — is such that change is a certainty. At one hospital, I met a paraplegic who is confined to a wheelchair. He had been hit by two rubber bullets and was planning to return to the democracy protests for more.

And on the roundabout on Sunday, I met Ali, a 24-year-old on crutches, his legs swathed in bandages, limping painfully along. A policeman had fired on him from 15 feet away, he said, and he was still carrying 30 shotgun pellets that would eventually be removed when surgeons weren’t so busy with other injuries. Ali flinched each time he moved — but he said he would camp at the roundabout until democracy arrived, or die trying.

In the 1700s, a similar kind of grit won independence for the United States from Britain. A democratic Arab world will be a flawed and messy place, just as a democratic America has been — but it’s still time to align ourselves with the democrats of the Arab world and not the George III’s.

    Watching Protesters Risk It All, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21kristof.html

Pakistan’s Nuclear Folly

February 20, 2011
The New York Times

With the Middle East roiling, the alarming news about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons buildup has gotten far too little attention. The Times recently reported that American intelligence agencies believe Pakistan has between 95 and more than 110 deployed nuclear weapons, up from the mid-to-high 70s just two years ago.

Pakistan can’t feed its people, educate its children, or defeat insurgents without billions of dollars in foreign aid. Yet, with China’s help, it is now building a fourth nuclear reactor to produce more weapons fuel.

Even without that reactor, experts say, it has already manufactured enough fuel for 40 to 100 additional weapons. That means Pakistan — which claims to want a minimal credible deterrent — could soon possess the world’s fifth-largest arsenal, behind the United States, Russia, France and China but ahead of Britain and India. Washington and Moscow, with thousands of nuclear weapons each, still have the most weapons by far, but at least they are making serious reductions.

Washington could threaten to suspend billions of dollars of American aid if Islamabad does not restrain its nuclear appetites. But that would hugely complicate efforts in Afghanistan and could destabilize Pakistan.

The truth is there is no easy way to stop the buildup, or that of India and China. Slowing and reversing that arms race is essential for regional and global security. Washington must look for points of leverage and make this one of its strategic priorities.

The ultimate nightmare, of course, is that the extremists will topple Pakistan’s government and get their hands on the nuclear weapons. We also don’t rest easy contemplating the weakness of Pakistan’s civilian leadership, the power of its army and the bitterness of the country’s rivalry with nuclear-armed India.

The army claims to need more nuclear weapons to deter India’s superior conventional arsenal. It seems incapable of understanding that the real threat comes from the Taliban and other extremists.

The biggest game-changer would be for Pakistan and India to normalize diplomatic and economic relations. The two sides recently agreed to resume bilateral talks suspended after the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. There is a long way to go.

India insists that it won’t accept an outside broker. There is a lot the Obama administration can do quietly to press the countries to work to settle differences over Afghanistan and the disputed region of Kashmir. Pakistan must do a lot more to stop insurgents who target India.

Washington also needs to urge the two militaries to start talking, and urge the two governments to begin exploring ways to lessen the danger of an accidental nuclear war — with more effective hotlines and data exchanges — with a long-term goal of arms-control negotiations.

Washington and its allies must also continue to look for ways to get Pakistan to stop blocking negotiations on a global ban on fissile material production.

The world, especially this part of the world, is a dangerous enough place these days. It certainly doesn’t need any more nuclear weapons.

    Pakistan’s Nuclear Folly, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21mon1.html

Fears of Chaos Temper Calls for Change in Morocco

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER

CASABLANCA, Morocco — For Morocco, a kingdom on the western edge of North Africa, the calls for change sweeping the region are muted by a fear of chaos, a prevalent security apparatus and genuine respect for the king, Mohammed VI. Since he took the throne in 1999, the king, who is only 47, has done much to soften the harsh and often brutal rule of his father, Hassan II.

As in Jordan, demands for the resignation of the government have not touched the king, who is considered by many to be a reformer on the side of the poor. But the demands in Morocco include a desire for a more legitimate democracy, with limits on the power of Mohammed VI, who together with his close advisers controls most of the real power in the country.

On Sunday, in response to a “February 20 Movement for Change” that began on Facebook, more than 10,000 people turned out in cities across the country to call for democratic change, lower food prices, freedom for Islamist prisoners, rights for Berbers and a variety of causes, including pan-Arab nationalism.

In Rabat, the capital, and in Casablanca, the largest city, there were between 3,000 and 5,000 protesters, and there were smaller demonstrations in Marrakesh, Tangier and other cities. All were peaceful, though state radio announced that the rallies had been canceled, perhaps as a tactic to keep the turnout down.

There were reports of scattered violence on Sunday evening in Marrakesh, where protesters, some of them throwing stones, clashed with the police and attacked a McDonald’s, and in the northern town of Larache, where a gas station was set ablaze.

In Casablanca and Rabat, numerous undercover police officers were obvious in the crowd, sometimes photographing protesters. In Rabat, people chanted slogans like, “Down with autocracy,” and, “The king must reign, not govern.” In Casablanca, protesters called for the government to resign. One sign said: “Democratic Constitution = Parliamentary Monarchy.”

“This is a start,” said Imane Safi, 18, who was at the demonstration in Casablanca. “The Arab world is changing and the Moroccan people need a change in the Constitution for more democracy. We want a country like Britain, with a constitutional monarchy and a strong Parliament that is not corrupt.”

A doctor, 62, said that she was very happy to see the youth movement for change. “We hope that civil society will join, and we know it will take time, but we have to work at it,” said the doctor, who requested anonymity because she did not want to jeopardize her position. “The government is not real, and all key decisions are in the hands of the king and his friends, and people are tired of accepting a lie.”

But an adviser to the king said that he saw an opportunity in the protests to accelerate a movement for needed reform in Morocco, where about 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line; where the median age is 26.5; and where there is high unemployment, high illiteracy and a level of corruption judged to be more severe than in Tunisia, if below that of Egypt.

These are some of the same factors — a large, youthful demographic combined with high unemployment, anger over corruption and the disparities between rich and poor — that set off the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt.

But the adviser, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the king was listening, having recently promised to invest $1.9 billion in subsidies to ease high prices for food and basic commodities. Nor will anyone rule out a replacement of the conservative prime minister, Abbas el-Fassi, appointed by the king in 2007.

“The king is trying to catch the wind of reform and use it,” the adviser said. “We have to listen to what people are saying, it’s reality. And you have to listen and accelerate change, because these kids want better things, not bad things.”

Saad el-Bazi, 25, another of the demonstrators in Casablanca, noted the softer approach of this king, compared with his father, saying it provided a contrast to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. “If Hassan were still in power, things would be very different here,” he said.

But in fact the pace of the overhaul has slackened in Morocco, because of nervousness about the rise of radical Islam, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and a parallel conservative reaction to change, including a landmark family law promoted by the king that in 2004 raised the age for women to marry and allowed women to seek divorce. The slowdown was an effort to provide stability, but the current protests may provide a new momentum for change.

Baudoin Dupret, director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, said he viewed the protests as an opportunity for the king to “unlock” difficult issues like corruption, regionalization and overhauling the judiciary.

“The Arab spring represents an opportunity for Moroccan leaders,” Mr. Dupret told the newspaper Le Monde, adding that the king retained legitimacy. “He is widely perceived as the ‘king of the poor,’ active in the social field, to the point that the most critical French-language newspaper had a headline this autumn, ‘Must he do everything?’ In other words, the challenge may be for the government, but it is more difficult to imagine that it affects the king. To that extent, the system will remain intact.”

The king’s adviser warned, however, that the Internet allowed young people “to become a citizen of the world, but it’s a virtual world,” he said. “You begin to think that the life and experience of others is yours. Yes, we would like to live like the United States and Norway, but we have to get there.”

It is important for the king and his government to get across the message of joint goals, he said, adding, “Let’s work together to get this. We want this for everybody.”

    Fears of Chaos Temper Calls for Change in Morocco, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/middleeast/21morocco.html

E.U. to Pledge Support for Arab World Transition

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By STEPHEN CASTLE

BRUSSELS — Slow to react to uprisings in the Arab world and compromised by ties to aged, autocratic rulers, the European Union is now promising full support for democratic reform in Egypt and Tunisia and says it will draw on its own experience of transition from authoritarian governments in Europe.

Seeking to catch up with events, E.U. foreign ministers will promise a “new partnership” with Egypt and Tunisia, to support democracy and the rule of law, according to draft of a declaration due to be issued Monday. It also calls on the Egyptian leadership to start reforms that would pave the way for parliamentary and presidential elections.

Two days of talks aim to set a new direction after the hesitant reaction to the uprisings from European governments, torn between instinctive support for democratic values and worries that change might destabilize the region.

Europe’s contribution will draw “where appropriate on European experience of transition, including support to civil society, youth and enhanced economic cooperation,” the draft declaration says.

Spain and Portugal shed right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s, while 10 former communist countries are now members of the bloc.

A separate discussion document on Egypt suggests the Union could offer loans, make visas more readily available, help prepare for elections and aid an investigation into police abuses during the uprisings.

“The push for change has come from within the society,” says the paper, circulated to E.U. foreign ministers who arrived here Sunday evening. “The EU can only welcome this and present itself as a reliable partner, willing to accompany this process of democratic change based on a participatory approach, pluralism, open economic governance and respect for human rights.”

That was not always the impression Europe gave as protests swept the Arab world.

Although this month the Union froze the assets of former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family, the French government has been embarrassed by a succession of revelations about its links to the old regime. It emerged that the French foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, spoke to Mr. Ben Ali while she was on vacation in Tunisia during anti-government protests in December, and flew twice on a jet owned by one of his close friends.

Prime Minister François Fillon has been criticized for enjoying hospitality in Egypt provided by then-President Hosni Mubarak, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy earlier this month described Mr. Mubarak as “a wise man and a point of reference.”

Last week, Britain said it would review its export licenses to Bahrain when it emerged that it had allowed the sale of 250 tear gas cartridges to the Bahrain Defense Force and National Security Agency.

The uprisings in the Arab world have been the first real test for new E.U. foreign policy arrangements, which were created by the bloc’s Lisbon Treaty and intended to bolster Europe’s role on the global stage, but which remain shaky.

Catherine Ashton, the E.U. foreign policy chief, is due to visit Tunisia and Egypt this week, around two weeks after Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain toured the region, though he was not able to visit Egypt.

At the start of the crisis the bloc’s big governments, rather than Ms. Ashton on behalf of the E.U., took the lead in issuing statements. She now has the task of ending years of failure in European policy toward the Mediterranean region.

The document on Egypt, written by the E.U.’s new diplomatic service and its executive, the European Commission, stresses the need for an independent judiciary and says that legislation that needs to be reviewed includes “the NGO law, the media law, the law on associations, the law on political parties, the penal code, the criminal procedure code, the law on military tribunals and the state of emergency.”

“All human rights fields will be concerned — freedom of expression/access to information, freedom of association and assembly, fight against torture, the abolition of the death penalty, social-, economic- and cultural rights,” it says.

Ms. Ashton has already said she will ask governments for an additional €1 billion, or nearly $1.4 billion, of European Investment Bank lending to North African countries, including Egypt.

    E.U. to Pledge Support for Arab World Transition, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/europe/21iht-union21.html

Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.

That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn’t unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it.

“It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today’s world,” Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted.

His description for Jan. 28: “Egypt is now officially offline.”

In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less.

The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.

“Frankly, I didn’t participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites’ blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets,” wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.

“It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled,” he wrote. “Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, ‘this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,’ I went down and joined the protests.”

For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. “During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day,” he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. “Tell you what, I didn’t miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter. Almost everyone sharing in a political discussion, trying to announce something or circulate news, even if they are rumors, simply retweets.”

Laughing at how what is old is new again, Mr. Mohamed ended this e-mail passage with a smilely face icon.The idea that the Egyptian government could simply shut down the Internet (something Libya now does periodically) was a shock to outsiders — even a bit of a technical achievement. And the decision to do it ran against the grain of what had been the government’s relatively open policy toward the Internet, said Andrew Bossone, who spent the past five years in Cairo writing about technology.

“When I went to Tunisia about a year ago, I couldn’t get onto YouTube or Al Jazeera,” Mr. Bossone said in an interview from Beirut, where he now lives. “Egypt didn’t really block any Web sites.”

He said the policy had raised expectations: “It’s not just about Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It’s about access to this technology that everybody else has. A sense of entitlement. The idea that everybody else has it, why can’t I have it?”

Perhaps that sense of entitlement is behind the discussions that Mr. Gabr reported hearing. “Some friends are now even demanding, jokingly or seriously,” he wrote, “that a new or amended constitution should emphasize on a non-negotiable ‘right to Internet access’ for everybody.”

This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia’s annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.

Filled with much of Egypt’s technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn’t accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government.

Moushira Elamrawy, an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria, remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians’ connection to the world.

The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. “It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned — completely isolated from the world.”

Ms. Elamrawy, who is 27 and trained as an architect but consults on development for free culture projects like Wikipedia, spoke by telephone from San Francisco, where she headed after spending the protests in Alexandria.

The protesters, she recalled, realized that in the time of darkness, it was particularly important to document what happened. They knew, she said, that at some point the Internet would be back, and people would want to know about the interim.

Ahmad Balal, a radiologist at Cairo University Hospitals who was a medical student during the Wikipedia conference in 2008, was one such chronicler. Mr. Balal wrote in an e-mail that his Facebook wall was the best way to relive what he experienced during the protests.

He had joined the protests at the start, on Jan. 25, but there is an eerie gap on his Facebook wall when the Internet was down, and friends from outside Egypt asked how he was but received no reply.

On Feb. 2, 5:18 a.m., when the Internet was back, he wrote in English, one of the few times he has: “The Internet is back to Egypt. Mr. Hosni Mubarak has offered it back to us after blocking it for only 5 days. Such a generous man!!!”

Forty-two minutes later, there appeared a photograph of a crowded Tahrir Square. The caption read, “I was there.”

    Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/business/media/21link.html

Iranian Ships to Enter Suez Canal

February 20, 2011
Filed at 3:49 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By REUTERS

CAIRO (Reuters) - Two Iranian naval ships are due to sail through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean on Monday, Suez Canal officials said, denying a report from Iran that said the ships had already gone through the waterway.

The vessels, the first Iranian naval ships to sail through the canal since 1979, are due to arrive at the southern entrance to the canal in the Gulf of Suez later on Sunday, the officials said.

Earlier on Sunday, Iran's Arabic language state television channel Al Alam TV reported that the ships had passed through the Suez Canal.

The military, which has been running Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was toppled on February 11, approved Iran's request to send the ships through the canal, an Egyptian army source said on Friday.

The request was a difficult one for Egypt's interim government. Cairo is an ally of the United States and has a peace treaty with Israel, and its relations with Iran have been strained since Iran's 1979 revolution.

The prospect of Iranian warships sailing through the canal into the Mediterranean for the first time since 1979 alarmed Israel whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, described it as a provocation.

(Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Peter Millership)

    Iranian Ships to Enter Suez Canal, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/international-us-egypt-iran-canal.html

Libyan Forces Again Fire on Residents at Funerals

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID and MONA EL-NAGGAR

CAIRO — Libyan security forces opened fire again Sunday on residents of Benghazi as they attended a funeral procession for the dozens of protesters killed there the day before, and quickly crushed three smaller uprisings in working-class suburbs of the capital, Tripoli.

It was the fifth day of protests and violence in what has become the most serious challenge to four decades of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule.

The escalating violence in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and the center of the protests, appeared to mark a decisive turn in the protests that have shaken Libya, a North African nation rich in oil.

The shooting at the funeral, where the number of casualties could not immediately be confirmed, reinforced what seems to have become a deadly cycle in a city where thousands have gathered in antigovernment demonstrations: security forces fire on funeral marches, killing more protesters, creating more funerals.

By Sunday morning, the number of confirmed deaths around the country had risen to at least 173 people, most of them in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, Human Rights Watch reported.

The scope of the crackdown was almost impossible to verify in an isolated country that remains largely off limits to foreign journalists and, as part of the government’s efforts to squelch the protests, has been periodically cut off from the Internet. But doctors reached by Al Jazeera, an Arabic satellite channel, said dozens and perhaps hundreds were killed and wounded in the fighting in Benghazi on Saturday, which persisted into the night.

A Benghazi resident who visited the hospital said by e-mail that 200 were dead and nearly 850 wounded; if confirmed, that would substantially raise the death toll by Human Rights Watch, which reported at least 20 people killed Saturday.

“It is too late for dialogue now,” said a Benghazi resident who has taken part in the demonstrations but refused to be identified. “Too much blood has been shed. The more brutal the crackdown will be, the more determined the protesters will become.”

“We don’t trust the regime anymore,” he said in a phone interview.

In Tripoli, residents reported in telephone interviews on Sunday that there had been smaller uprisings in three working class suburbs of the capital, all quickly crushed by security forces.

With Internet and telephone outages, and reports of security forces visiting the homes of those who spoke with foreign journalists, Libyans scrambled Sunday morning to broadcast news of the clashes taking place. By Sunday, Fathi Terbil, a lawyer and critic of the Qaddafi government whose brief arrest last week helped set off the violence, had set up a live video broadcast. It appeared to emanate from the roof of the courthouse in Benghazi, overlooking the public square that Libyans said they have begun to refer to as their Tahrir Square, after the site in Cairo where Egyptians gathered to challenge their dictator.

“We are expecting people to die today, more people than before,” Mr. Terbil said.

“If anything happens to us today, we are not going to leave this place,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die, I’m afraid to lose the battle, that’s why I want the media to see what’s going on.”

“At least if we die, so many people can witness, I can protest from everywhere,” he added, “Long live a free Libya. We are determined to fight till the end for our country.”

A group of fifty prominent Libyan Muslim religious leaders issued an appeal to Muslims in the security forces to stop participating in the violence against protesters.

“We appeal to every Muslim, within the regime or assisting it in any way, to recognize that the killing of innocent human beings is forbidden by our Creator and by His beloved Prophet of Compassion (peace be upon him), ” the statement declared, according to Reuters. “Do NOT kill your brothers and sisters. STOP the massacre NOW! ”

The government response in Libya underlined an unintended consequence of the success of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where protests pouring into the streets day after day forced the departure of long-serving authoritarian leaders. In Libya, Yemen and Algeria, the governments have quickly resorted to violence to crush unrest before it gathers momentum that might threaten their grip on power.

A day of antigovernment marches in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, took a violent turn Saturday as government supporters opened fire on a group opposing the 31-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, wounding at least four people. And hundreds of police officers in the Algerian capital, Algiers, used clubs to overwhelm antigovernment demonstrators.

The crackdown in Libya has proven the bloodiest of the recent government actions, drawing criticism from the United States and European allies.

In London, Foreign Minister William Hague said Saturday that he had reports that heavy weapons fire and sniper units were being used against protests, organized in a half-dozen cities or more.

“This is clearly unacceptable and horrifying,” he said in a statement.

Earlier in the day, thousands had returned to the courthouse in Benghazi. Idris Ahmed al-Agha, a Libyan writer reached by telephone, said the crowd had grown to more than 20,000 by midday — an account confirmed by others — with many of the people there planning to take part in funeral marches to bury dozens of people killed a day before.

Opposition Web sites reported that security forces later fired on some of the mourners. One site, Al Manara, said snipers fired from an army base that sits on the route to the cemetery, and a video posted on a Facebook page that has compiled images from the protests showed a march coming under fire, with at least one man shot in the head. Doctors have said that most of the dead have suffered gunshots.

“It seems that security forces in Libya do not feel there are limits on how far they can go in suppressing protests,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Cairo who has been in contact with residents and doctors in Benghazi.

The government has viewed the situation in Benghazi as so precarious that Colonel Qaddafi sent his son, Saadi, to the eastern Libyan city last week in an attempt to mollify resentment, residents said. In a speech Wednesday, the son promised reform, but his overtures were seen as condescending, several said. His whereabouts were unclear on Saturday, with some saying he was holed up in a hotel in the city, where Colonel Qaddafi’s hold on power is not as strong as in the capital, Tripoli, in the west.

In Benghazi, protesters have echoed a chant heard in Tunisia, then picked up by protesters in Egypt: “The people want to topple the regime.”

One of the region’s wealthier countries, Libya has been spared the economic grievances that offered a cadence to protests against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Nor does Colonel Qaddafi seem to generate the loathing that President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali did in Tunisia. Though his rule has proven idiosyncratic and eccentric, he has a luxury not afforded neighboring Egypt: vast oil revenues and a small population.

But political grievances in places like Benghazi have deepened with the crackdown. Some accuse the state of deploying special forces and foreign mercenaries unable to speak Arabic to crush the protests, and the bloodshed — much of it inflicted on funeral marches — seems to have struck a chord of anger.

“They’re not going to go back to their homes,” said Issa Abed al-Majid Mansour, an exiled opposition leader in Oslo. “If they do, he’ll finish them off. They know the regime very well. There’s no to way to go back now. Never, never.”

The Libyan crackdown comes amid one of the most tumultuous moments in the Arab world in recent memory, with two longtime leaders falling in as many months and a series of Arab states facing defiant calls for change.

In the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, saved from much of the devastation visited on the rest of the country during the American-led war, a demonstration ended with gunfire on Saturday for the second time in less than a week. Gunmen wearing civilian clothes fired on a group of students from the University of Sulaimaniya, wounding 12 people. Hundreds of students chanting antigovernment slogans had gathered on Saturday to demand the government apologize for the bloodshed at the earlier demonstration. The original protests were against local leaders in the semiautonomous area and echoed complaints across the region over the excessive power of long-ruling parties and corruption.

About 1,000 protesters demanding Mr. Saleh’s ouster in Yemen gathered for another day in Sana on Saturday, squaring off against government supporters. Some protesters shouted, “Be peaceful!” but the calls were drowned out as the two sides hurled bottles, rocks and shoes at each other. Government supporters fired at protesters; one man, his chest bloodied, was carried away.

In Algiers, hundreds of baton-wielding police officers pushed back demonstrators, breaking up an antigovernment protest in the downtown. Thousands paraded peacefully through Tunis to demand the country adhere to secular traditions, in one of the largest protests since Mr. Ben Ali’s fall in January; since his ouster, many exiled Islamists have returned to the country, apparently raising concerns that that they would push for religion to play a greater role in politics. The government there also signed an amnesty decree that would free prisoners convicted on grounds of politics, security or activism.

The military government in Egypt took more steps toward a handover of power. State television reported that that within six months, the government would end the so-called emergency law which, for 30 years, has allowed detentions without charges or trial. The judge heading the effort to draft constitutional amendments said his panel might produce recommendations as early as Sunday, for a referendum in the coming weeks. And the government recognized the first new political party formed since the revolution, a moderate Islamist group that has sought recognition for 15 years.


Reporting was contributed by Mona El-Naggar and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Nada Bakri from Beirut, Adam Nossiter from Algiers, Laura Kasinof from Sana, Yemen, Jack Healy from Baghdad, Thomas Fuller from Tunis and John Markoff from San Francisco.

    Libyan Forces Again Fire on Residents at Funerals, NYT, 20.2.1011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/africa/21libya.html

In a Town Built Upon Patronage, a Test of Egypt’s New Order

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BAGOUR, Egypt — In a town he represented in Parliament for 46 years, Kamal al-Shazli left his mark. There is the Kamal al-Shazli School on Kamal al-Shazli Street, around the corner from the Kamal al-Shazli Mosque, which is a little ways from the cafe where Mr. Shazli held court when he was the only man in town who got things done.

“Giving without limits” read his posters on a bridge that Mr. Shazli found money for.

Mr. Shazli died a few months ago of cancer at the age of 76, before the revolution that was meant to sweep away the decaying system represented by this Willie Stark-like figure, known here simply as “the minister.” To Egypt’s residents, the town was derisively referred to as the Republic of Shazli, the Republic of Bagour or, most accurately, a State of Personalities.

One of the greatest challenges of Egypt’s revolution is to replace that order, which has ruled Egypt for 60 years, knit together by patronage, greased by bribes, enforced by a ubiquitous security force answering only to itself and guided by the principle that the ruling party knows best.

Far from the tumult of Tahrir Square, in the lush but crowded countryside of the Nile Delta, the challenge of Bagour may determine how far Egypt’s revolution goes. Suffused with optimism, residents celebrate the fall of Mr. Shazli’s state, even as many acknowledge reaping its rewards.

Former President Hosni Mubarak’s party remains here, as does its machinery, along with the dreaded apparatus of State Security that only last week beat protesters trying to visit relatives in a nearby prison. To a remarkable extent, everyone talks about change — even party officials — but no one quite agrees on what it represents.

“The very way of thinking about the system has to change,” said Moussa Eid, the owner of the cafe Mr. Shazli frequented, sipping coffee and scolding customers for daring to interrupt him. “Here! Here!” he shouted, pointing to his head. “That has to change.”

Along dirt paths plodded by donkey carts whose drivers solicit “rubabikiya,” or junk for sale, the countryside is roiled with expectations of that change. To farmers outside Mr. Mubarak’s hometown, Kafr al-Musalha, his government felt like the canals that water their fields — slow-moving, opaque and suffused with trash.

“His fall was the judgment of God himself,” said one farmer, Mustafa Abu Youssef, who seized the opportunity to start a tirade about all that was wrong in rural Egypt: the high rents he had to pay as a tenant farmer, the few hundred dollars in bribes he faced for adding floors to his house and the $70 billion that some claim Mr. Mubarak accumulated at the expense of Egypt. “How could he even count that high?” he asked.

“Ibn al-balad” is a phrase of endearment here — literally, a son of the country. Nasser al-Zayad, another farmer, said that Mr. Mubarak was not, and that that was his problem.

“He always talked about getting rid of the poverty, but he never understood what our poverty meant,” Mr. Zayad said. “He didn’t really consider himself from here.”

Mr. Shazli did, and his relationship to his hometown speaks to the success and eventual failure of the government of Mr. Mubarak, who was forced to resign on Feb. 11.

Near Mr. Shazli’s tomb, a meeting hall adorned with hundreds of pictures of him speaks to Mr. Shazli’s ascent, a script for the very old guard who ruled until Mr. Mubarak’s last years in office.

The first ones show a wiry and earnest young man, whose father was a teacher from a modest but reputable family in Bangour, a 90-minute drive north of Cairo. More pictures show him with the barrel chest of a party enforcer, invigorated with the heady promises of Arab nationalism.

An older Mr. Shazli, by now a senior official under President Anwar el-Sadat, rubs shoulders with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. In his later years, he was the potentate of a party that had long stopped believing in its own slogans.

With the fleshy face of satisfied power, he is portrayed almost always with a microphone, delivering orders that came with his authority as the longest-serving Parliament member (from 1964 until his death in 2010), a minister of parliamentary affairs and the chief whip of the governing National Democratic Party. A picture outside the hall shows him as many saw Mr. Shazli in the end: His portrait is superimposed over Parliament, bigger than the institution itself.

To many, he was a loathed figure, inspiring the character of the fat and corrupt party hack in the famous Egyptian novel “The Yacoubian Building.” But to a generation in Bangour, he was appreciated, even loved. He had a politico’s knack for names and faces, along with encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt’s families and figures. For residents here, he was the sole mediator between them and a distant state.

He built a Cairo-style overpass in a town that did not need it. He got natural gas delivered to residents’ homes and electricity wires buried that had electrocuted people when they were strung aloft. He had a catalog of projects for which he secured financing: schools, a hospital and a youth center. Roads were paved and government jobs — by the estimate of a doctor with firsthand knowledge — were provided to thousands of youths.

“Bagour belonged to Kamal al-Shazli,” said Ahmed Ibrahim, a business student.

But Mr. Ibrahim did not mean it as a compliment, and for his generation, the refrain of failure and corruption that echoed across Tahrir Square punctuated his conversation with friends, who remember Mr. Shazli most from their parents’ nostalgia.

“We can sacrifice one good person, Kamal al-Shazli or anyone else, if it’s for the good of our country and toppling an unjust regime,” said Ahmed Habib, a law student.

They complained of taxes “on the air we breathe,” bribes that beget more bribes, even to get a driver’s license, and the dim future for aspiring college graduates in the countryside like themselves. One told of a friend who disappeared, only to show up in a neighboring village a few days later after he was beaten by the police.

All lamented the utter corruption of Mr. Shazli’s party. Not lost on any of them was the oddity that with Mr. Shazli dead, they no longer had the connections — known as “wasta” here — to get ahead.

“We want parties that express our opinion,” Mr. Ibrahim said. “If we don’t change the local government and the ruling party, then nothing else is going to change here.”

Down the street in Bagour, though, the dead hand of the past still has life in it. At the headquarters of Mr. Mubarak’s party, the pictures of the former president remain: “Yes to Mubarak, man of peace.” So do the tired slogans. “Serious youth build, they don’t destroy,” one read.

Affable and polite, Tariq Abdel-Zahar has worked with the party here for 15 years, and on this morning, he lamented the collapse of the party’s leadership in Cairo before it mobilized more of its three million members to take on the protesters in Tahrir Square. “We were waiting for orders,” he said, “but they never came.”

He was dismissive of the complaints of Mr. Ibrahim and his friends, pulling out paper after paper from a dusty binder that advertised jobs with a salary of $120 a month that no youth wanted.

“Lazy,” Mr. Abdel-Zahar called them. “Every youth in Egypt wants an office in some government agency and a chair to sit on, and nothing more than that.”

For much of republican Egypt, the governing party embodied the state, almost a mirror of its functions, and even in a small town like Bagour, its reach remains vast, underpinned by security forces that remain far more intact in the countryside than in Cairo.

Mr. Abdel-Zahar leads a local council of 24 members in Mit Afif, a few miles away, one of 13 such councils that help administer Bagour and its environs. Without exception, all members belong to Mr. Mubarak’s party, regardless of their beliefs. In fact, the head of Bagour’s council, Abdel-Azim Farid, looked perplexed when asked what the party’s ideological bent was beyond representing Mr. Mubarak and his government.

“Socialist?” he finally answered.

But he and colleagues sitting in the office, strewn with cigarette butts, were adamant about the role a revived party would play in any election. They had the infrastructure, with a party office in every village. And, they contended, they had the experience: In a state that relentlessly crushed opposition, they were the only ones with it.

“Without us, there would be anarchy,” said Alaa Salim, one of the members of Bagour’s local council. “After 30 years, what are you going to change in a few months?”

There is a proverb that several people offered in Bagour: “Equality in injustice is justice.” It held during the three decades that Egypt was at war with Israel, when the country shared a sense of sacrifice. But in the three decades since, Dr. Hamdi al-Sirsawi said, he watched as peasants lost out to landlords, his own children graduated without jobs and party members in Bagour profited from their connections to the state.

Sitting outside his pharmacy, he spoke with conviction that sounded more like hope, echoing an enthusiasm that rural Egypt shares with its cities. Mr. Mubarak’s party is “a cardboard outfit,” he said, and “God willing, it will all disappear in a week.”

He shrugged his shoulders, smiling. “Why wouldn’t it?” he asked.

    In a Town Built Upon Patronage, a Test of Egypt’s New Order, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20nile.html

When Armies Decide

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — There comes a moment in the life of almost every repressive regime when leaders — and the military forces that have long kept them in power — must make a choice from which there is usually no turning back: Change or start shooting.

Egypt’s military, calculating that it was no longer worth defending an 82-year-old, out-of-touch pharaoh with no palatable successor and no convincing plan for Egypt’s future, ultimately sided with the protesters on the street, at least for Act 1.

In so doing, they ignored the advice of the Saudis, who, in calls to Washington, said that President Hosni Mubarak should open fire if that’s what it took, and that Americans should just stop talking about “universal rights” and back him.

As the contagion of democracy protests spread in the Arab world last week, Bahrain’s far less disciplined forces decided, in effect, that the Saudis, who are their next-door neighbors, were right. They drew two lessons from Egypt: If President Obama calls, hang up. And open fire early.

It is far too early to know how either of these reactions will work out. But in both countries, as in nearly all police states, the key to change lies with the military. And as with any self-interested institution, the military’s leaders can be counted on to ask: What’s in it for us, long and short term?

Egypt’s military leadership came to the same conclusion that South Korea’s did in the 1980s and Indonesia’s did in the 1990s: The country’s top leader had suddenly changed from an asset to a liability.

The military, with its business enterprises, to say nothing of its American aid and high-tech arms, required a transition that would let it retain power while allowing Washington to herald gradual, substantive reform.

In Bahrain, on the other hand, the military seems to have concluded that adapting to change would do them no good — that the protesters were far too great a threat to their very command of society. So the country that acts as host to America’s Fifth Fleet decided to ignore President Obama’s advice, which it regarded as assisted suicide.

None of this came as much of a surprise to the White House, which last summer, at President Obama’s request, began examining the vulnerability of these regimes and more recently began examining what makes a transition to democracy successful.

“There are many different factors involved in the cases we have looked at: economic crises, aging authoritarians, negotiated transitions between elites,” said Michael McFaul, a top national security aide at the White House who runs what he jokingly calls the White House “Nerd Directorate.”

He spent the past few weeks churning out case studies for President Obama and the National Security Council, as it sought lessons about how to influence the confrontations that have engulfed close American allies and bitter adversaries. “There is not one story line or a single model,” said Mr. McFaul, who drew on work he did as a professor at Stanford. “There are many paths to democratic transition, and most of them are messy.”

Egypt certainly started out that way, with street battles between police and protesters, and a rampage by thugs to rout the protesters from Tahrir Square. But American officials, recalling their strained conversations with Egyptian counterparts, say they knew that Mr. Mubarak’s days were numbered eight days into the crisis, when the military made clear that — except in some extreme cases — it simply would not fire on its own people.

“You could almost hear them making the calculations in their heads,” said one senior American official who was involved in the delicate negotiations. “Did they want to stick with an aging, sick leader whose likely successor was his own son, who the military didn’t trust? And we just kept repeating the mantra, ‘Don’t break the bond you have with your own people.’ ”

Their words were persuasive, in no small part, many American officials believe, because of the revered role the military has long had in Egypt and its deep ties to the American military. A 30-year investment paid off as American generals, corporals and intelligence officers quietly called and e-mailed friends they had trained with.

But now comes the trickiest part, which is making the military hold to its promises to allow a civilian government to flourish. That will mean the military must give up its monopoly on power, and that isn’t easy for any leader of a regime, especially one deeply invested in its country’s economy — a trait Egypt’s army shares with the People’s Liberation Army in China. Already, Egypt’s generals have balked at Mr. Obama’s demand for an immediate end to emergency rule.

The question is whether Egypt’s military can manage a transition to democracy, as the militaries of South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Chile have.

South Korea is perhaps the clearest example of a good outcome, for both its citizens and the United States. The country is now among the most prosperous in the world, and the government, after some very rocky years, is now Washington’s favorite ally in Asia. In the face of large street protests in the mid-1980s, the generals gradually allowed free elections. In those days, rumors of coups were rampant, and the first freely elected president was a general. But the last four have been civilians, including one Nobel-prize winning dissident.

Then there is Indonesia. General Suharto ruled for 31 years — then ran out of gas, just as Mr. Mubarak did. Washington ignored Suharto’s many human rights abuses because he was a steadfast anti-Communist. But he lasted only two and a half weeks after street riots broke out in 1998, triggered by the Asian economic crisis.

Suharto’s cold war utility had expired. Karen Brooks, a former White House expert on Indonesia, wrote last week for the Council on Foreign Relations about the similarities between Suharto and Mr. Mubarak: “Both demonized Islamist political forces and drove them underground; both kept a tight lid on the media, the opposition and all forms of dissent; both accumulated massive amounts of wealth while in power” and, of course, “both enjoyed the support of the United States.”

After Suharto was finally forced out, it took the Indonesian military little more than a year to hold elections. Ms. Brooks said that a clear deadline was important, but so was allowing the Islamists to enter politics. They did so on an anti-Israel, anti-American platform. But even in the world’s most populous Islamic nation, she notes, the Islamic parties have remained a small minority, because once they were inside the system “the party found itself participating in the same unseemly activities” as everyone else, from corruption to deal-making.

That example leaves the Israelis, among others, unimpressed. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, they point out, is far better organized, and more disciplined. “History is rife with cases in which well-intentioned revolutions are hijacked,” said one senior Israeli official, echoing a point that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the weekend before Mr. Mubarak’s fall.

One can make a good case that Washington’s comfort with years of slow, incremental change contributed to the crisis sweeping the region. When American officials visited Bahrain, the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, usually said the right things: The country’s dispossessed Shiite majority was gradually getting a larger share of the national wealth, and slightly greater political freedoms. In private, though, the Bahraini military would tell the Pentagon that it would never allow Shiites into serious positions. “We were told the Shia would all be spies for Iran,” one former senior official in the Defense Department said last week.

So when the protests started, the military decided that if it held its fire, Egypt-style, it would have no future: The Shiite majority would take over the country. Military leaders doubled their bet on King Hamad and his son, Crown Prince Salman, who on Friday was placed in charge of starting a “national dialogue.” The same day troops opened fire again.

Abderrahim Foukara, the bureau chief of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service in Washington, said the crackdown’s consequences are predictable. “Once you shoot women and children at 3 in the morning, you may be able to hold on to power for a while, but any sense of legitimacy is gone,” he said.

He may prove right. But other people said the same thing about the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing when it opened fire in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The army’s bet on firepower that June day has paid off many times over: Today it has far-flung business interests that make it so rich and powerful that most of China’s leaders will not mess with it.

    When Armies Decide, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/weekinreview/20military.html

Oil Flows, but High Prices Jangle Nerves

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — The turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East has helped drive oil prices up to more than $102 a barrel for an important benchmark crude, Brent, although so far there have been no significant disruptions in production or supply, according to experts at the International Energy Agency here.

While Egypt and Tunisia have little oil, Libya is one of Africa’s largest holders of crude oil reserves, Algeria and Iran are major suppliers and Bahrain and Yemen both border Saudi Arabia on the peninsula that produces much of the world’s oil. Together, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain and Iran represent about 10 percent of global oil production.

Oil markets are famously skittish, especially when there is even the possibility of disruptions in the Middle East and North Africa, which account for some 35 percent of the world’s oil production and a greater percentage of the world’s known reserves.

That nervousness is likely to spread elsewhere, with so many economies still fragile in the wake of the worldwide economic downturn and with the possibility that higher crude prices could lead to further increases in food prices. The high cost of food has already led to unrest in several countries, even before political revolts began in the Middle East.

The increased price of energy is a “burden that can be a detriment to the global economic recovery,” said Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency.

Brent is a global benchmark crude oil that is produced in the North Sea and traded in London. It is typically the benchmark that is used to set the price for most of the oil from the Middle East. Another benchmark crude, West Texas Intermediate, closed at $86.20 a barrel on Friday. Each benchmark has an impact on gasoline prices in the United States, with the East Coast more affected by the Brent prices than other regions.

The reserves in the Middle East and North Africa (known as the MENA countries), while long important, have grown even more critical as demand for oil increases. Prices have risen about 30 percent since September, reaching their highest level since September 2008.

Those who track oil prices are especially worried about the renewed turmoil in Iran and the possibility of unrest spreading from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, which could have a major impact on oil’s price and its availability.

Richard H. Jones, the energy agency’s deputy executive director and a former American diplomat in the Middle East, said that about 17 million barrels of oil passed through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz every day. “So if that shuts down, we’re in big trouble,” he said.

But so far, Mr. Jones said, the effects of the regional turmoil have been small. Egyptian production and transportation of natural gas have continued despite an explosion at a pipeline in the Sinai as the demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak were under way. (An Egyptian investigator said four gunmen bombed the pipeline.) Although there have been labor protests among workers at the Suez Canal, so far analysts have said there is no danger of the vital waterway being affected by the country’s political upheaval.

The unrest in Libya, while serious, has not disrupted its production of oil. Mr. Jones and Didier Houssin, who runs the directorate for energy markets and security at the International Energy Agency, said that Libya was not a major producer, selling “only a little over one million barrels a day” and representing about 2 percent of world production. If there were to be a disruption of supplies from Libya, “We can cope,” Mr. Jones said.

Still, a Deutsche Bank commodities analyst, Soozhana Choi, said, “As antigovernment protests have spread from Tunisia and Egypt to the streets of Bahrain, Yemen and OPEC member countries Algeria, Libya and Iran, concerns about geopolitical risk and the potential for supply disruptions have returned aggressively” to the oil market.

The International Energy Agency monitors strategic oil reserves that total about 1.6 billion barrels, Mr. Tanaka said. The agency has sometimes released reserves to smooth out global oil prices, including in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The agency’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, said that with Brent crude over $100 a barrel, “we are entering a danger zone,” he said, with oil prices “creating inflationary pressures and risk for economic recovery.”

For now, although oil stocks are declining with increased consumption, “there is still plenty of spare production capacity, especially in OPEC countries,” Mr. Tanaka said.

Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, speaking on Saturday at a Group of 20 meeting, said that the Saudis in particular had indicated that they had significant spare capacity, which may help to keep markets calm.

But over the past two years, Mr. Zoellick said, “There is a much closer connection between food and energy prices.” Part of the reason is biofuels, he said, but oil is also vital for fertilizers, transportation and agricultural equipment, especially in the developing world, where demand is increasing.

While the world is moving toward more renewable energy sources and re-examining nuclear power, it will be dependent on fossil fuels for years to come, Mr. Birol said. For the future, “90 percent of growth in oil production will have to be met by MENA countries,” he said. “If not, we’re in trouble.”


Jad Mouawad contributed reporting from New York and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

    Oil Flows, but High Prices Jangle Nerves, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/20oil.html

Unrest Encircles Saudis, Stoking Sense of Unease

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — As pro-democracy uprisings spread across the Middle East, the rulers of Saudi Arabia — the region’s great bulwark of religious and political conservatism — are feeling increasingly isolated and concerned that the United States may no longer be a reliable backer, officials and diplomats say.

Saudi Arabia is far less vulnerable to democracy movements than other countries in the region, thanks to its vast oil wealth, its powerful religious establishment and the popularity of its king.

But the country’s rulers were shaken by the forced departure of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, a close and valued ally. They are anxiously monitoring the continuing protests in neighboring Bahrain and in Yemen, with which Saudi Arabia shares a porous 1,100-mile border. Those concerns come on top of long-festering worries about the situation in Iraq, where the toppling of Saddam Hussein has empowered Iran, Saudi Arabia’s great rival and nemesis.

The recent illness of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, 87, who is expected to return to the kingdom this week after an absence of more than three months for treatment in the United States and Morocco, has reinforced the sense of insecurity.

“The Saudis are completely encircled by the problem, from Jordan to Iraq to Bahrain to Yemen,” said one Arab diplomat, voicing a view that is common in the halls of power in Riyadh, the capital. “Saudi Arabia is the last heavyweight U.S. ally in the region facing Iran.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with diplomatic protocol.

The Saudis tend to see any threat to the established order in the region as a gain for their nemesis Iran, and its allies Syria and Hezbollah. They have grown increasingly worried that the Obama administration is drifting away from this perspective and supporting movements for change whose outcome cannot be guaranteed. Those worries were heightened by the crisis in Egypt, where the Saudis felt that Mr. Mubarak should have been allowed to stay on and make a more “dignified” exit, Saudi officials say.

King Abdullah had at least two phone conversations with President Obama to convey his concerns in the weeks before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, and the last conversation ended in sharp disagreement, according to officials familiar with the calls.

Saudi officials have tried to appear unruffled. On Wednesday evening, Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, the interior minister, invited a group of prominent intellectuals and journalists in Riyadh to discuss the recent turmoil. He struck a confident tone, saying that Saudi Arabia is “immune” to the protests because it is guided by religious law that its citizens will not question.

“Don’t compare us to Egypt or Tunisia,” the prince said, according to one of the attendees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was meant to be off the record. But the attendee said he and others were skeptical, and suspected the prince was merely hiding his anxieties.

The Saudi and pan-Arab news media have been cautiously supportive of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with a number of opinion articles welcoming the call for nonviolent change. That may change now that protests and violence have seized Bahrain, which lies just across a 15-mile causeway from the Saudi border. Bahrain is a far more threatening prospect, in part because of the sectarian dimensions of the protests. Bahrain’s restive population is mostly Shiite, and is adjacent to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, an important oil-producing area where the Shiite population has long complained of unfair treatment by the puritanical Saudi religious establishment. They feel a strong kinship with their co-religionists across the water.

“The Bahrain uprising may give more courage to the Shia in the Eastern Province to protest,” said one Saudi diplomat. “It might then escalate to the rest of the country.”

Most analysts say that is unlikely. Although Saudi Arabia shares many of the conditions that bred the democracy uprisings — including autocracy, corruption and a large population of educated young people without access to suitable jobs — its people are cushioned by oil wealth and culturally resistant to change.

Moreover, analysts tend to agree that Saudi Arabia would never allow the Bahraini monarchy to be overthrown. Ever since Bahrain began a harsh crackdown on protesters on Thursday, rumors have flown that Saudi Arabia provided military support or guidance; however, there is no evidence to support that. In recent days, the deputy governor of the Eastern Province, Saud bin Jalawi, spoke to Shiite religious leaders and urged them to suppress any rebellious sentiment, according to Saudi news media reports.

“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Rutgers University. “It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.”

The sectarian divisions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia could also work against unrest, allowing the authorities there to blame a sectarian agenda by Iran or its Shiite proxies for any protests. That accusation is a powerful weapon in a region where suspicion of Iran runs deep. Saudi protesters have issued a call for demonstrations in all of the country’s major cities on March 11, though many seem skeptical about the results.

“I do not expect much,” said Ali al-Ahmed, the director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, himself a Shiite who has been critical of the Saudi monarchy. “I think people still expect that the Saudi king will make things better.”

Still, the Saudis are closely watching American diplomatic gestures toward Bahrain. Any wavering of American support for Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, analysts say, would provoke a deep sense of betrayal, and could create an unprecedented rift in a partnership with the United States that has been a pillar of Saudi policy since 1945.

“Saudi Arabia has always had a fear of encirclement, whether with Communism or with Iranian influence,” said Rachel Bronson, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Bahrain to me is the tipping point for when this becomes really unsettling.”

    Unrest Encircles Saudis, Stoking Sense of Unease, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20saudi.html

Cycle of Suppression Rises in Libya and Elsewhere

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Libyan security forces moved against protesters Saturday in Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city and the epicenter of the most serious challenge to four decades of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule, opposition leaders and residents said. The death toll rose to at least 104 people, most of them in Benghazi, Human Rights Watch reported.

The events appeared to mark a decisive turn in four days of protests that have shaken Libya, a North African nation rich in oil. By nightfall, a deadly cycle had clearly emerged in a city where thousands have gathered in antigovernment demonstrations: Security forces fired on funeral marches, killing more protesters, creating more funerals.

The scope of the crackdown was almost impossible to verify in an isolated country that remains largely off limits to foreign journalists and, as part of the government’s efforts to squelch the protests, has been periodically cut off from the Internet. But doctors reached by Al Jazeera, an Arabic satellite channel, said dozens and perhaps hundreds were killed and wounded in the fighting, which persisted into the night. And a Benghazi resident who visited the hospital said by e-mail that 200 were dead and nearly 850 wounded; if confirmed, that would substantially raise the death toll by Human Rights Watch, which reported at least 20 people killed Saturday.

“It is too late for dialogue now,” said a Benghazi resident who has taken part in the demonstrations but refused to be named. “Too much blood has been shed. The more brutal the crackdown will be, the more determined the protesters will become.”

“We don’t trust the regime anymore,” he said in a phone interview.

The government response in Libya underlined an unintended consequence of the success of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where protests pouring into the streets day after day forced the departure of long-serving authoritarian leaders. In Libya, Yemen and Algeria, the governments have quickly resorted to violence to crush unrest before it gathers momentum that might threaten their grip on power.

A day of antigovernment marches in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, took a violent turn as government supporters opened fire on a group opposing the 31-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, wounding at least four people. And hundreds of police officers in the Algerian capital, Algiers, used clubs to overwhelm antigovernment demonstrators.

The crackdown in Libya has proven the bloodiest of the recent government actions, drawing criticism from the United States and European allies.

In London, Foreign Minister William Hague said he had reports that heavy weapons fire and sniper units were being used against protests, organized in a half-dozen cities or more. “This is clearly unacceptable and horrifying,” he said in a statement.

Earlier in the day, thousands had returned to the courthouse in Benghazi. Idris Ahmed al-Agha, a Libyan writer reached by telephone, said the crowd had grown to more than 20,000 by midday — an account confirmed by others — with many of the people there planning to take part in funeral marches to bury dozens of people killed a day before.

Opposition Web sites reported that security forces later fired on some of the mourners. One site, Al Manara, said snipers fired from an army base that sits on the route to the cemetery, and a video posted on a Facebook page that has compiled images from the protests showed a march coming under fire, with at least one man shot in the head. Doctors have said that most of the dead have suffered gunshots.

“It seems that security forces in Libya do not feel there are limits on how far they can go in suppressing protests,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Cairo who has been in contact with residents and doctors in Benghazi.

The government has viewed the situation in Benghazi as so precarious that Colonel Qaddafi sent his son, Saadi, to the eastern Libyan city last week in an attempt to mollify resentment, residents said. In a speech Wednesday, the son promised reform, but his overtures were seen as condescending, several said. His whereabouts were unclear on Saturday, with some saying he was holed up in a hotel in the city, where Colonel Qaddafi’s hold on power is not as strong as in the capital, Tripoli, in the west.

In Benghazi, protesters have echoed a chant heard in Tunisia, then picked up by protesters in Egypt: “The people want to topple the regime.”

One of the region’s wealthier countries, Libya has been spared the economic grievances that offered a cadence to protests against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Nor does Colonel Qaddafi seem to generate the loathing that President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali did in Tunisia. Though his rule has proven idiosyncratic and eccentric, he has a luxury not afforded neighboring Egypt: vast oil revenues and a small population.

But political grievances in places like Benghazi have deepened with the crackdown. Some accuse the state of deploying special forces and foreign mercenaries unable to speak Arabic to crush the protests, and the bloodshed — much of it inflicted on funeral marches — seems to have struck a chord of anger.

“They’re not going to go back to their homes,” said Issa Abed al-Majid Mansour, an exiled opposition leader in Oslo. “If they do, he’ll finish them off. They know the regime very well. There’s no to way to go back now. Never, never.”

The Libyan crackdown comes amid one of the most tumultuous moments in the Arab world in recent memory, with two longtime leaders falling in as many months and a series of Arab states facing defiant calls for change.

In the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, saved from much of the devastation visited on the rest of the country during the American-led war, a demonstration ended with gunfire for the second time in less than a week. Gunmen wearing civilian clothes fired on a group of students from the University of Sulaimaniya, wounding 12 people. Hundreds of students chanting antigovernment slogans had gathered on Saturday to demand the government apologize for the bloodshed at the earlier demonstration. The original protests were against local leaders in the semiautonomous area and echoed complaints across the region over the excessive power of long-ruling parties and corruption.

About 1,000 protesters demanding Mr. Saleh’s ouster in Yemen gathered for another day in Sana, squaring off against government supporters. Some protesters shouted, “Be peaceful!” but the calls were drowned out as the two sides hurled bottles, rocks and shoes at each other. Government supporters fired at protesters; one man, his chest bloodied, was carried away.

In Algiers, hundreds of baton-wielding police officers pushed back demonstrators, breaking up an antigovernment protest in the downtown. Thousands paraded peacefully through Tunis to demand the country adhere to secular traditions, in one of the largest protests since Mr. Ben Ali’s fall in January; since his ouster, many exiled Islamists have returned to the country, apparently raising concerns that that they would push for religion to play a greater role in politics. The government there also signed an amnesty decree that would free prisoners convicted on grounds of politics, security or activism.

The military government in Egypt took more steps toward a handover of power. State television reported that that within six months, the government would end the so-called emergency law which, for 30 years, has allowed detentions without charges or trial. The judge heading the effort to draft constitutional amendments said his panel might produce recommendations as early as Sunday, for a referendum in the coming weeks. And the government recognized the first new political party formed since the revolution, a moderate Islamist group that has sought recognition for 15 years.


Reporting was contributed by Mona El-Naggar and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Nada Bakri from Beirut, Adam Nossiter from Algiers, Laura Kasinof from Sana, Yemen, Jack Healy from Baghdad, Thomas Fuller from Tunis and John Markoff from San Francisco.

    Cycle of Suppression Rises in Libya and Elsewhere, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20mideast-protests.html

Delirious Joy in Bahrain

February 19, 2011
11:21 am
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

BAHRAIN — There’s delirious joy in the center of Bahrain right now. People power has prevailed, at least temporarily, over a regime that repeatedly used deadly force to try to crush a democracy movement. Pro-democracy protesters have retaken the Pearl Roundabout – the local version of Tahrir Square – from the government. On a spot where blood was shed several days ago there are now vast throngs kissing the earth, chanting slogans, cheering, honking and celebrating. People handed me flowers and the most common quotation I heard was: “It’s unbelievable!”

When protesters announced that they were going to try to march on the Pearl Roundabout this afternoon, I had a terrible feeling. King Hamad of Bahrain has repeatedly shown he is willing to use brutal force to crush protesters, including live fire just yesterday on unarmed, peaceful protesters who were given no warning. I worried the same thing would happen today. I felt sick as I saw the first group cross into the circle.

But, perhaps on orders of the crown prince, the army troops had been withdrawn, and the police were more restrained today. Police fired many rounds of tear gas on the south side of the roundabout to keep protesters away, but that didn’t work and the police eventually fled. People began pouring into the roundabout from every direction, some even bringing their children and celebrating with an almost indescribable joy. It’s amazing to see a site of such tragedy a few days ago become a center of jubilation right now. It’s like a huge party. I asked one businessman, Yasser, how he was feeling, and he stretched out his arms and screamed: “GREAT!!!!”

Many here tell me that this is a turning point, and that democracy will now come to Bahrain – in the form of a constitutional monarchy in which the king reigns but does not rule – and eventually to the rest of the Gulf and Arab world as well. But some people are still very, very wary and fear that the government will again send in troops to reclaim the roundabout. I just don’t know what will happen, and it’s certainly not over yet. But it does feel as if this just might be a milestone on the road to Arab democracy.

For King Hamad, who has presided over torture, gerrymandering and lately the violent repression of his own people, I don’t know what will happen. Like Hosni Mubarak, he could have worked out a deal for democracy if he had initiated it, but he then lost his credibility when he decided to kill his own citizens. Some people on the roundabout were chanting “Down with the Regime,” and they have different views about what precisely that means. Some would allow the king to remain in a largely figurehead role, while others want King Hamad out.

A democratic Bahrain will also put pressure on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab countries. Saudi Arabia has been notoriously repressive toward the Shiite population in its eastern region, and the racist contempt among some Sunnis in the Gulf toward Shiites is breathtaking. If Shiites come to rule the banking capital of the region (as well, now, as Iraq), that will help change the dynamic.

We don’t know what exactly President Obama said to the king in his call last night, but we do know that the White House was talking about suspending military licensing to Bahrain. This may have been a case where American pressure helped avert a tragedy and aligned us with people power in a way that in the long run will be good for Bahrain and America alike.

Americans will worry about what comes next, if people power does prevail, partly because Gulf rulers have been whispering warnings about Iranian-influence and Islamists taking over. Look, democracy is messy. But there’s no hint of anti-Americanism out there, and people treated American journalists as heroes because we reflect values of a free press that they aspire to achieve for their country. And at the end of the day, we need to stand with democracy rather than autocracy if we want to be on the right side of history.

Finally, I just have to say: These Bahraini democracy activists are unbelievably courageous. I’ve been taken aback by their determination and bravery. They faced down tanks and soldiers, withstood beatings and bullets, and if they achieve democracy – boy, they deserve it.

    Delirious Joy in Bahrain, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/delirious-joy-in-bahrain/

As Army Pulls Back, Bahrain Protesters Retake Square

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and JACK HEALY

MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of jubilant protesters surged back into the symbolic heart of Bahrain on Saturday after government security forces withdrew and the monarchy called for peace after two days of violent crackdowns.

It was a remarkable turn after a week of protests that had shifted by the hour between joy and fear, euphoric surges of popular uprising followed by bloody military crackdowns, as the monarchy struggled to calibrate a response to an uprising whose counterparts have toppled other governments in the region.

“All Bahrain is happy today,’’ said Jasim Al Haiki, 24, as he cheered the crowds in the central Pearl Square, aflutter with Bahraini flags. “These are Bahrainis. They do what they say they will do!”

The withdrawal of security forces in Bahrain was a victory for the country’s main Shiite opposition bloc, which had rejected a call to negotiate from Bahrain’s Sunni monarch until the authorities pulled the military off the streets. It also added new pressures for shaken governments in Libya, Algeria and Yemen as they made new moves to stifle protests.

Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who is also deputy commander of the military, announced in a statement that he had ordered the withdrawal of all military from the streets of Bahrain “with immediate effect,” adding that the Bahrain police force would continue to oversee law and order.

Bahrain, a small island in the Gulf, is a strategically important ally of the United States and home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

In Libya, demonstrations on Saturday continued to challenge the 41-year rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The country moved to shut off Internet access, mirroring a tactic used by Egyptian authorities to try to thwart an upheaval that eventually led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch said that the death toll in Libya after three days of government crackdowns against protesters had risen to 84. .

Thousands of demonstrators gathered again Saturday at a courthouse in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and a fulcrum for protests there. One activist, Idris Ahmed al-Agha, a Libyan writer reached by telephone, said the crowd had grown to more than 20,000 by mid-day Saturday. He said protesters planned a funeral march to bury some of those killed in pitched clashes on Friday.

Occasional uprisings have shaken Benghazi and eastern Libya, where Colonel Gadhafi’s writ still runs broad but not as deep as in the capital, Tripoli, in the west. Mr. Agha said security forces had not returned to parts of the city after withdrawing Friday. Even traffic police have disappeared from some streets, leaving residents to direct cars, he said.

The unrest in Benghazi appeared to grow out of the long-simmering repercussions of the killings of hundreds of prisoners in 1996 in the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Some of the families have refused government compensation for the deaths of their relatives and have organized occasional demonstrations to press for more information.

Others joined their protest Friday at the courthouse in Benghazi and, by the end of the day, the crowd had grown into the thousands, said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

In Algiers, hundreds of baton-wielding police pushed back demonstrators protesting the government of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the country’s 73-year-old autocratic leader.

Riot police in unyielding lines repeatedly forced the hundreds of demonstrators into smaller groups, shoving some down side streets and pushing others up a main artery until they dispersed, in a working-class district near the city center.

Protesters held up signs reading “Bouteflika, get out,” and chanted, in Arabic and French, “We’re sick of this government.” But they were overwhelmed by the massed police, who beat their plastic shields with thick truncheons as they surged forward against the crowd, which broke up barely two hours after the start of the planned march.

Long lines of armored police trucks surrounded the headquarters of the opposition RCD party nearby, and police were posted at intersections throughout the seaside capital.

Many of the demonstrators said they were angered by the massive police presence at what they insisted was a peaceful march in a country where elections are widely seen as rigged, the military holds real power and antigovernment demonstrations like the one Saturday are prohibited.

“We are simply asking for what the other countries are asking for,” said Mohamed Ditabshish, a retired civil servant. “Independence is not enough. We need liberty as well. We are independent, but not free.”

Last Saturday, thousands of security forces massed in the capital to stifle a planned protest. Unlike some of its regional neighbors, the country had been relatively quiet this past week. In Yemen, about 1,000 protesters demanding the ouster of President Saleh gathered for another day in Sana, the capital, squaring off against pro-government demonstrators, who held posters of Mr. Saleh The pro-government group moved closer, and the two sides began hurling bottles, shoes and rocks at each other, even as some antigovernment protesters called out, “Be peaceful!”

The pro-government demonstrators fell back, but then a larger group returned, firing automatic weapons, at first into the air, and then at the antigovernment marchers. One man fell into the street and was carried away by other demonstrators, his chest covered in blood.

The antigovernment marchers scattered as the pro-Saleh group took control of the street, celebrating their victory by chanting, dancing and waving their jambiyas, Yemen’s traditional curved daggers.


Michael Slackman reported from Manama, Bahrain, and Jack Healy from Baghdad. Adam Nossiter contributed reporting from Algiers; Laura Kasinof from Sana, Yemen; Anthony Shadid from Beiru, and Timothy Williams from New York.

    As Army Pulls Back, Bahrain Protesters Retake Square, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20protests.html

After the carrot, Egypt military shows the stick

Sat Feb 19, 2011
8:44am EST
Reuters
By Sarah Mikhail and Tom Perry

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's military, after promising to deliver civilian rule in six months, warned workers using their new freedom to protest over pay that strikes must stop, in a move businessmen said on Saturday could have come sooner.

The military council, under pressure from activists to speed up the pace of reform, has adopted a softly-softly approach since taking power after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, but said late on Friday that labor unrest threatened national security.

It issued the order, effectively banning strikes, after millions celebrated across Egypt with fireworks, dancing and music to mark a week since Mubarak, 82, was swept aside after 30 years, triggering a cascade of Middle East protests.

"I think it is a very late decision. The army should have given a firm statement for all kinds of sit-ins to stop, immediately after Mubarak stepped down," Sami Mahmoud, a board member of the Nile Company food distributor, said on Saturday.

"Though this statement should have come way earlier, I think the army was just allowing people to take their chance to voice their demands and enjoy the spirit of freedom," said Walid Abdel-Sattar, a businessman in the power industry.

"It's Not The Time For It," said Saturday's banner headline in the state-owned Akhbar Elyom newspaper, urging the nation to end work stoppages which were causing "a state of paralysis to our national economy" and losing Egypt crucial revenue.

Banks, which have been closed this week because of strikes that have disrupted business, are due to open on Sunday, the first day of the working week in Egypt. The military believes this is an important step toward restoring normality.

FREEDOM TO SPEAK OUT

Workers cite a series of grievances. What unites them is a new sense of being able to speak out in the post-Mubarak era.

The message to return to work was reinforced by influential preacher Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi at Friday prayers.

Most Egyptians, however, are keen to get back to normal, begin earning again and restart the damaged economy.

Life is far from normal in Egypt after the 18-day uprising erupted on January 25, with schools closed, tanks on the streets in major cities and nationwide public sector strikes.

In a sign of economic nervousness, Egypt's stock exchange, closed since January 27 because of the turmoil, said it would remain shut until it was sure banks were functioning properly.

Nine airlines canceled flights to and from Egypt's capital on Saturday, Cairo airport officials said. The unrest prompted foreign embassy travel warnings, hitting tourism.

The military statement also said that "some elements" were preventing state employees from working. Others were appropriating state land and building on farm land.

"The Supreme Council for the Armed Forces will not allow the continuation of those illegitimate practices," it said in the strongly-worded statement, without specifying precisely what steps would be taken against the perpetrators.

Protests, sit-ins and strikes have occurred at state-owned institutions across Egypt, including at the stock exchange, textile and steel firms, media organizations, the postal service, railways, the Culture Ministry and the Health Ministry.

The council understood workers' demands and had instructed the relevant state bodies to study and act on them, the military statement said. But citizens had a duty toward the state.

"It was also noted that the continuation of the state of instability and the consequences resulting from it will lead to damage in national security," the statement said.

Pro-democracy campaigners welcomed the army's suspension of the constitution, dissolution of parliament and a referendum on constitutional amendments but still want the immediate release of political prisoners and lifting of emergency laws.

A Cairo court on Saturday approved the establishment of an Egyptian political party that has been trying to secure an official license for 15 years.

The Wasat Party (Center Party) has applied four times for a license since the 1990s. Saturday's ruling made it the first party to gain legal status since Mubarak was toppled.

The ruling paves the way for the Wasat Party, founded by a former Muslim Brotherhood member, to take part in coming elections.

(Additional reporting by Sarah Mikhail, Edmund Blair, Sherine El Madany, Yasmine Saleh, Shaimaa Fayed, Marwa Awad, Dina Zayed, Tom Pfeiffer, Tom Perry, Patrick Werr, Alexander Dziadosz; Writing by Peter Millership; editing by David Stamp)

    After the carrot, Egypt military shows the stick, R, 19.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/19/us-egypt-idUSTRE70O3UW20110219

Egyptian revolution brings show of religious unity

Fri, Feb 18 2011
Reuters
By Yasmine Saleh

CAIRO (Reuters) - The surge of popular unity that toppled Hosni Mubarak last week has eased tension between Egypt's Muslims and the Coptic Christian minority and raised hopes for lasting harmony.

Muslims and Christians joined hands and formed human shields to protect each other from riot police as members of the different faiths prayed during the protests in Cairo.

Alongside banners demanding Mubarak's resignation and an end to emergency rule, protesters held aloft posters of the Christian cross and Islamic crescent together against the red white and black of Egypt's flag.

"Egypt has been victorious over what they called sectarian strife," respected Muslim preacher Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi told millions gathered in Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square on Friday.

"Here in Tahrir, the Christian and Muslim stood side by side," said Qaradawi. "This cursed strife is no more."

Some of Egypt's Copts, who make up a tenth of Egypt's 79 million population, say it will take more than effusive displays of interfaith unity to heal the wounds of the past.

"I am still afraid of what will happen in the future," said Marie, a tourism worker in her late 20s. "More guarantees are needed that Copts will live freely and be treated fairly."

Others say they have already noticed a positive change.

Lawyer Peter el-Naggar, who spent years defending the right of Christians to have their religion recognized, said officials were often reluctant to recognize a Christian's religion, but this changed when Mubarak's government fell.

"The Ministry of Interior has issued a decision saying everyone who has a church document stating that his faith is Christianity will be recognized as such by the state," he said.

DRIVE-BY SHOOTING

Leaders of both religions tend to emphasize sectarian harmony but communal tensions sometimes boil up into violence, often sparked by land disputes, cross-faith relationships or church construction permits.

Last year saw more than the usual share of strife.

A drive-by shooting outside a church killed six Christians and a Muslim policeman in January. Protests followed and homes and shops were set ablaze. Fighting in northern Egypt sparked by a land dispute led to 27 arrests in March.

In November, hundreds of Christians protesting after construction of a church was halted clashed with riot police in the Cairo suburb of Giza. Dozens of Muslims joined in.

This January, Christians took to the streets in protest after a bomb hit a church in Alexandria, killing up to 23 people. Police fired tear gas to disperse them.

The authorities stepped up security at Egypt's churches after the Alexandria attack, but Christians say many of the extra guards withdrew as the protests against Mubarak grew.

Two churches in Sinai were attacked but Naggar sees that as part of sporadic looting that was not motivated by religion.

Social researcher Negad al-Borai blamed government repression and poverty for growing religious extremism in Egyptian society. Democracy was the only solution, he said.

"I can certainly see the people's souls returning to them now, but obviously the harm they felt for thirty years will not go away in ten days," he said. "If a proper democratic system is implemented, it can easily replace any religious fanaticism."

Unemployed Christian Medhat Malak, 32, who took part in the Giza protests in November, said he was already seeing more kindness from many of his Muslim compatriots.

"I don't feel about Muslims the way I used to," he said. "I feel that all the Egyptian people around me are treating me nicely and with respect and decency."

Some government officials were an exception, he said.

"I went yesterday to finish some procedural paper work and the official threw my papers in my face and treated me badly."

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

    Egyptian revolution brings show of religious unity, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/18/us-egypt-christians-idUSTRE71H6KA20110218

Obama speaks to Bahrain's king, urges restraint

Fri, Feb 18 2011
Reuters
By Ross Colvin

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama spoke with Bahrain's king on Friday night, urging restraint after the kingdom's security forces ignored Washington's earlier call for calm and opened fire on protesters demanding reforms.

Amid unrest across much of the Middle East, U.S. officials have voiced concern about violence in the island nation in talks with the government of Bahrain, which hosts a big U.S. military base and borders Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter.

The White House said in a statement that Obama, in speaking with King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, condemned violence and said Bahrain's stability depended on respect for the rights of its people.

Earlier on Friday, Obama said he was deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen. "The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur," Obama said in a statement.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said he had asked the State Department to probe whether Bahrain had broken a U.S. law he wrote that prohibits aid to foreign security forces that violate human rights. The United States provided around $20 million in military aid to Bahrain in 2010.

Bahraini security forces shot at protesters in the capital, Manama, on Friday, wounding at least 60 people, a day after police swept away a protest camp in the city, killing four people and wounding more than 230.

In Libya, soldiers sought to crush unrest. In Yemen, at least four protesters were killed in clashes between security forces and government loyalists and crowds demanding an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh's 32-year rule.

Bahrain's crackdown on protesters posed a new dilemma for the Obama administration after a popular uprising in Egypt ousted U.S. ally President Hosni Mubarak a week ago.

A U.S. national security official said Bahrain security forces appeared to be using rubber bullets and live ammunition fired from, but not limited to, shotguns.

'WANT TO AVOID'

"This (violence) is exactly what the administration and the U.S. want to avoid," said Robert Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

"In the case of Egypt, the goal was to see managed change, (an) orderly transition. But the number-one thing was to ensure that this be done without violence. The minute that there's violence it is very hard to reconcile support for your ally and the aspirations of the demonstrators."

U.S. national security and intelligence agencies expect Bahrain's government to ride out the unrest and that security forces will eventually succeed in containing the protests, a senior U.S. official familiar with government reporting and analysis on Bahrain told Reuters.

The United States views Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, as a strategic ally that straddles oil supply lines in the Gulf. As in the case of Egypt and elsewhere in the region, it must balance strategic interests with its support for protesters' demands for economic and political reforms.

Obama's response may be colored by the U.S. view of Bahrain as one of the more progressive Arab states. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Bahrain civil society activists during a visit in December their government was moving more quickly than many others in the region to implement democratic change.

Several 2009 cables from the U.S. Embassy in Manama, made available to Reuters, characterized King Hamad as an enlightened and deeply pro-American ruler who, since assuming the throne in 1999, had fostered reconciliation with the Shi'ite Muslim majority and had undertaken serious political and economic reforms.

"The U.S. is in a rather embarrassing position, because officials have tended to give King Hamad far more credit than they should have for political reforms," said Michele Dunne, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The State Department issued a travel warning on Friday for Bahrain, noting clashes between protesters and demonstrators. "Spontaneous demonstrations and violence are expected throughout the next several days," the department said, urging U.S. citizens to defer nonessential travel to the country.

Middle East experts said the Obama administration had little leverage over Bahrain's Sunni Muslim monarchy.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, may be reprising the role he played in the Egypt uprising by keeping channels open to the Bahraini military, they said.

"The options to bring pressure seem extremely limited. Despite the close alliance, Bahrain has been defiant of the United States over the years," said Simon Henderson, a Gulf expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn, Susan Cornwell, Mark Hosenball, Tom Ferraro and Steve Holland in Washington and Matt Spetalnick aboard Air Force One; Editing by John O'Callaghan, Eric Walsh and Peter Cooney)

    Obama speaks to Bahrain's king, urges restraint, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/19/us-bahrain-usa-idUSTRE71H5L420110219

U.S. vetoes U.N. draft condemning Israeli settlements

Fri, Feb 18 2011
Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States on Friday vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements on Palestinian land after the Palestinians refused a compromise offer from Washington.

The U.S. move was welcomed by American pro-Israel groups, some of which have previously criticized President Barack Obama's administration for what they see as its record of lukewarm support for Israel.

U.N. diplomats say the Palestinian Authority, which has been trying to defend itself against critics who accuse it of caving in to the Americans and Israelis during peace talks, was eager to show that it can stand up to Washington.

The other 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the draft resolution. But the United States, as one of the five permanent council members with the power to block any action by the Security Council, voted against it and struck it down.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice told council members that the veto "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity." The U.S. position is that continued Israeli settlements lack legitimacy, she said.

But Rice said the draft "risks hardening the position of both sides" and reiterated the U.S. view that settlements and other contentious issues should be resolved in direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

The resolution described the settlements as "illegal" and urged the Jewish state to "immediately and completely" halt all settlement activities. Diplomats said the views contained in the resolution, which would have been legally binding had it passed, are generally supported by the Obama administration.

However, they said, the United States refuses to allow the Security Council to intervene with binding resolutions on issues it feels belongs to direct peace talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Israel "deeply appreciates" the U.S. decision to veto the resolution.

Israeli Ambassador Meron Reuben, opposing the resolution, urged the Palestinians to "return to negotiations without preconditions." U.S.-brokered peace talks collapsed last year after Israel refused to extend a moratorium on settlements.

The Palestinians say continued building flouts the internationally backed peace plan that will permit them to create a viable, contiguous state on the land after a treaty with Israel to end its occupation and 62 years of conflict.

Israel says this is an excuse for avoiding peace talks and a precondition never demanded before during 17 years of negotiation, which has so far produced no agreement.

HYPOCRITICAL?

World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder thanked Obama, saying his veto showed "America's support for the rights of the Jewish state and for the Middle East peace process." Other pro-Israel groups also praised Obama.

Obama's offer to support a non-binding Security Council statement chiding Israel over the settlements instead of a binding resolution had been criticized by pro-Israel lobby groups and some members of the U.S. Congress.

British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, speaking on behalf of Britain, France and Germany, condemned Israeli settlements as "illegal under international law."

He added that the European Union's three biggest nations hope that an independent state of Palestine will join the United Nations as a new member state by September 2011.

Several EU nations, including Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden, were among the resolution's more than 100 co-sponsors.

The Palestinian Authority earlier on Friday decided to insist that the resolution be put to the council, and rejected the U.S. compromise offer despite a telephone call from Obama to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday.

The permanent Palestinian observer to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said the U.S. veto could send the wrong signal to Israel. "We fear ... that the message sent today may be one that further encourages Israeli intransigence and impunity," he said.

Mansour declined to comment on media reports that Obama warned Abbas of repercussions if the Palestinians did not withdraw the draft resolution.

The decision to put it to a vote was made unanimously by the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive and the central committee of Abbas's Fatah movement at a meeting in Ramallah on Friday to discuss Obama's appeal to Abbas.

"The Palestinian leadership has decided to proceed to the U.N. Security Council, to pressure Israel to halt settlement activities. The decision was taken despite American pressure," said Wasel Abu Yousef, a PLO executive member.

New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a statement saying the U.S. veto undermined international law and suggested the Obama administration was being hypocritical.

"President Obama wants to tell the Arab world in his speeches that he opposes settlements, but he won't let the Security Council tell Israel to stop them in a legally binding way," said HRW's Middle East director, Sarah Leah Whitson.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations and Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah; editing by Eric Beech)

    U.S. vetoes U.N. draft condemning Israeli settlements, R, 18.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/19/us-palestinians-israel-idUSN1813183320110219

The Middle East and the Groupon effect

Feb 18, 2011
09:58 EST
Reuters
Chrystia Freeland

They are being called the Facebook revolutions, but a better term for the uprisings sweeping through the Middle East might be the Groupon effect. That is because one of the most powerful consequences satellite television and the Internet have had for the protest movements is to help them overcome the problem of collective action, in the same way that Groupon has harnessed the Web for retailers.

“It is a question of co-ordinating people’s beliefs,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, with Matthew Jackson of Stanford University in California, is working on a paper about the effect of social networks on collective action problems.

Protesting against an authoritarian regime is a prime example of this issue, Mr. Acemoglu said, because opponents of a dictator need to know that their views are widely shared and that a sufficient number of their fellow citizens are willing to join them to make opposition worthwhile.

“I need to know if other people agree with me and are willing to act,” he said. “What really stops people who are oppressed by a regime from protesting is the fear that they will be part of an unsuccessful protest. When you are living in these regimes, you have to be extremely afraid of what happens if you participate and the regime doesn’t change.”

That makes publicly protesting an oppressive regime a classic collective action problem: If everyone who wants regime change takes to the streets, the group will achieve its shared goal. But if too few protest, they will fail and be punished. Even if an overwhelming majority wants change, it is smart for individuals to speak out only if enough compatriots do, too.

As protests have spread from Tunisia to Egypt and now to Bahrain, Libya and other parts of the Middle East, the power of television, particularly Al Jazeera, and the Internet to spread information and to help with the practicalities of organizing demonstrations has become readily apparent. Taken together, television, Facebook and Twitter may have been even more powerful in helping to solve the problem of collective action, by giving people unhappy with their governments the confidence that their views are widely shared.

This potential for technology to overcome collective action problems has been taken to the next level in the consumer space by Groupon. The swiftly growing electronic coupon company is built around the retailer’s version of the collective action problem: Offering deep discounts is worthwhile if it attracts enough extra customers so that the retailer can make up in the scale of his sales what he loses because of the lower price.

Groupon has solved that problem by creating sales that only occur if a sufficient number of people sign on. The Groupon technique is particularly powerful because once the tipping point is reached, all the interested shoppers are locked in to participating – your investment in the Groupon coupon is irrevocable from that moment on.

Political activists have not yet figured out an equivalent way of ensuring participation once a sufficient mass of supporters is identified: Even if we all watch television coverage of demonstrations together and express our enthusiasm for the movement online, we have no guarantee our neighbors will take the physical risk of going out in the streets until they actually do so.

Even so, the combination of satellite television and social networking has made it dramatically easier for the disaffected to overcome one of the central obstacles to organizing regime change – letting each individual know what views are shared by enough people to make protesting worthwhile, and relatively safe.

This new power is transformative. As Mr. Acemoglu said: “There have always been many regimes that are unpopular, but it has taken a well-organized civil society to allow that pent-up frustration to find a voice.” Technology is making it much easier for frustrated societies to express their collective anger.

Once that collective action problem is overcome, the act of physically coming together to express a deeply felt emotion can be – as we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia – very powerful. We are social animals who take pleasure in intense, mass experiences: Hence the continued popularity, in this digital age, of sports events and music concerts.

But even though the Groupon effect makes it easier to bring people together to oppose unpopular regimes, it may be harder for new technologies to overcome the “day after” problem.

Regime change is a classic matter of collective action and of a tipping point – if enough of us do not like the government, and if we can find a way to co-ordinate our protests (and, crucially, if the regime lacks the means or the will to fight back), we can topple our oppressive rulers.

Installing a new and better regime is a much tougher project, and one that may not be as easily facilitated by new technologies. Social networks are good ways to discover whether our beliefs are shared and even to lock us in to specific, self-contained acts.

We haven’t yet figured out how to use them to facilitate more complicated, longer-term collective actions that require significant commitment and negotiation.

That is the next challenge for activists: Using the Internet to facilitate social transformation that is more complicated than getting a sufficient mass of people to come out to the streets.

    The Middle East and the Groupon effect, R, 18.2.2011, http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2011/02/18/the-middle-east-and-the-groupon-effect/

Family rule is under siege, at last

Feb 18, 2012
12:15 EST
Reuters
Gregg Easterbrook

Dictatorship is under siege throughout the Arab world: fingers are crossed that democracy will prevail. Something else is under siege, too — the notion of family rule. This is among the oldest, and most harmful, concepts in human society. Is it about to vanish at last?

For centuries, in some cases for millennia, regions and nations have been ruled by families — either formally as royalty, or de facto via warlords, khans and shoguns who in most cases inherited their positions. As recently as a century ago, families still ran most of Europe, all of Russia and Japan, while an assortment of warlord-like figures with inherited standing ran much of what’s now South America and the Middle East, and kings and emperors controlled the subcontinent and most of Africa.

Today family rule has been vanquished, or reduced to constitutional status, in most of the world. The big exceptions are Cuba, North Korea, the Middle East, and parts of Africa and Pakistan. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, following a 30-year warlord-style rule — and the unlikelihood that his sons will inherit control of the country, as Mubarak planned — represents a major subtraction from the remaining portion of the globe under family control.

Let’s hope the trend continues. Today China, India, the United States, Indonesia and Brazil, the world’s five largest nations, representing more than half of the global population, have abolished all forms of inherited rule. Much of the rest of the world has done or is doing the same. This is no guarantee of happiness, of course. Open systems can be chaotic (the United States), still lack personal freedom (China) or be poorly administered (Italy). But in the main, ending family rule has been good for societies that achieve this.

Mubarak kept Egypt out of war, but that’s the only positive that can be attached to his three decades of warlord rule. Egypt’s economy stagnated, while theft of public funds by Mubarak and his family members was rampant.

Backwardness, corruption and repression are the hallmarks of all nations still suffering under family rule. Most of the Persian Gulf has kings or emirs whose sole accomplishments in life are the accidents of their births; North Korea has the maniacal and incompetent Jung-Il family; Cuba has the Castros, both are one thousand times more concerned with personal power than with the welfare of Cubans.

Perhaps it was inevitable that in a simpler past, family rule would have been a part of human culture. In the modern era, family rule differs little, in structure and function, from organized crime. Now the crime boss of Egypt is out, following the removal of the crime boss of Tunisia.

We can hope the example will spread to other parts of the region, and that more family rulers will fail or flee. And we can hope that the United States will not backslide. The current generation has seen America’s first presidential succession, from George Hebert Walker Bush to his son George W. Bush. The younger Bush’s brother Jeb may be a future presidential candidate, while there remains a chance Hillary Clinton, wife of a former president, could be elected to the White House. George W. Bush was freely chosen for his post, rather than strong-arming his way to rule. But family rule is family rule — not good for any nation.

Bahrain, where the current strongest protests are occurring, is ruled by an absolute monarch whose primary achievement in life was being handed a crown by his father. The sooner his family’s rule ends, the better. The sooner the whole concept of family rule fades into history, the better off the human family will be.

    Family rule is under siege, at last, R, 18.2.2011, http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/02/18/family-rule-is-under-siege-at-last/

In Bahrain, the Bullets Fly

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MANAMA, Bahrain

A column of peaceful, unarmed pro-democracy protesters marched through the streets here in modern, cosmopolitan Bahrain on Friday. They threatened no one, but their 21st-century aspirations collided with a medieval ruler — and the authorities opened fire without warning.

Michael Slackman and Sean Patrick Farrell of The New York Times were recording video, and a helicopter began firing in their direction. It was another example of Bahrain targeting journalists, as King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa attempts to intimidate or keep out witnesses to his repression.

The main hospital here was already in chaos because a police attack nearby was sending protesters rushing inside for refuge, along with tear gas fumes. On top of that, casualties from the shootings suddenly began pouring in. A few patients were screaming or sobbing, but most were unconscious or shocked into silence that their government should shoot them.

A man was rushed in on a stretcher with a shattered skull and a bullet lodged in his brain, bleeding profusely. A teenage girl lay writhing on a stretcher; doctors later said she had suffered a heavy blow or kick to her chest. A middle-age man was motionless on a stretcher. A young man had bullet wounds to both legs. A young man trying to escape had been run over by a car said to have government license plates.

Different doctors had different views (and perhaps not much expertise) about whether the bullets were metal or rubber, but there seemed to be some of each. Two X-rays that I saw both seemed to show metal bullets, according to doctors familiar with reading X-rays, and a surgeon told me that the wound he had treated had probably been caused by a metal bullet rather than a rubber one.

Several large emergency wards quickly filled up completely. Patients with lesser injuries or who had merely been overcome with tear gas lay outside.

It turns out that members of Bahrain’s medical community have been reading my Twitter postings, and doctors and nurses rushed me from patient to patient so I could see and photograph the injuries and write messages to the world and get the news out right away. They knew that King Hamad’s government would wrap its brutality in lies.

The doctors spoke in enormous frustration about what they termed butchery or massacres, but they encountered evidence of the danger of speaking publicly. In the midst of the crisis, a democracy activist staggered in for treatment from a fresh beating by security forces. He had made public statements about police brutality he had witnessed, and so, he said, the police had just kidnapped him and brutalized him all over again.

The hospital’s ambulance drivers had been beaten on Thursday morning by Bahrain’s army and police for attempting to rescue the dead and injured, and some had been warned that they would be executed if they tried again to help protesters. But they showed enormous courage in rushing to the scene of the carnage once again.

One ambulance paramedic, Yasser, was still recovering in the hospital from the beating he suffered the last time. But when he heard the call for all hands in the emergency room, he staggered over to the ambulance bay and went out to pick up the wounded.

“Those people needed help, and I had to go,” he told me. “But when we got there, the police blocked us and wouldn’t let us through.”

Indeed, the army temporarily seized four ambulances and their crews, hospital staff said, although this time it apparently spared them beatings. The first ambulances on the scene had reported many, many casualties, and doctors were aghast at the idea that there were many injured who were not being treated. So a group of them decided to drive out to army lines and beg to be allowed to collect the dead or wounded. This was considered an extremely perilous mission, so they decided that only male doctors would participate. But several female doctors immediately clamored to go as well.

When our close ally behaves in such a way, America finds itself in a tough position, and that probably explains President Obama’s very cautious statement saying that he is “deeply concerned.” We value Bahrain as the host of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, we worry (probably too much) about Iranian influence, and it’s not clear how much leverage we have. King Hamad has strong Saudi support and has so outraged his subjects that he may feel that his best hope for staying in power is to shoot his subjects.

But we should signal more clearly that we align ourselves with the 21st-century aspirations for freedom of Bahrainis rather than the brutality of their medieval monarch. I’m not just deeply “concerned” by what I’ve seen here. I’m outraged.

    In Bahrain, the Bullets Fly, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/opinion/19kristof.html

U.S. Offered Rosy View Before Bahrain Crackdown

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — At a town-hall-style meeting in Bahrain two months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got a pointed question from a member of Bahrain’s Parliament: was the United States letting Bahrain, a Persian Gulf ally, off the hook for a string of arrests of lawyers and human rights activists?

The moderator rebuked the questioner for “hijacking the mike,” but Mrs. Clinton replied anyway. “I see the glass as half full,” she said, pointing to Bahrain’s recent elections. “I think the changes that are happening in Bahrain are much greater than what I see in many other countries in the region and beyond.”

When it came to Bahrain, Mrs. Clinton was not the only American diplomat who tended to see the glass as half full. Her rosy assessment, which seems incongruous in light of the army’s bloody crackdown on protesters, illustrates how the United States government has overlooked recent complaints about human rights abuses in a kingdom that is an economic and military hub in the Persian Gulf.

And it leaves the White House once again scrambling to deal with an Arab ally facing a tide of popular discontent. In this case, its calculations are complicated by signs that Bahrain is being pressed by its neighbor Saudi Arabia, the most strategically important country in the region.

In cables made public by WikiLeaks, the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly characterized Bahrain as more open and reform-minded than its neighbors, and pushed back when human rights groups criticized the government.

In a January 2010 cable, the American Embassy in Bahrain criticized the human rights group Freedom House for downgrading Bahrain’s rating from “partly free” to “not free” in its global survey of political rights and civil liberties. The cable asserted that Freedom House had been successfully lobbied by a radical Shiite movement, known as Haq, which rejects the government’s reform efforts.

Another cable passed along doubts about a Human Rights Watch report that said the police were using torture in interrogations — saying it relied heavily on allegations made by members of the same group — though the embassy did urge the Bahraini authorities to undertake a “timely and credible” investigation.

“The embassy was feeding this happy talk for years,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. “Bahrain was moving on a genuine reform path for several years, but it did a significant U-turn in the last year, and I think the U.S. government was well behind the curve.”

A senior administration official said Mrs. Clinton was not offering a definitive judgment of Bahrain’s record, but praising it for legislative elections a few weeks earlier, which the government, by all accounts, had handled in a free and fair manner. Elections, Mrs. Clinton noted, are only one element of a democratic system. And she addressed, albeit perfunctorily, the arrests of human rights advocates.

“People are arrested and people should have due process, and there should be the rule of law, and people should have good defense counsel,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We believe in all of that, and we say all of that.”

Still, the chummy tone of her visit, and those of other American officials, has magnified the shock and dismay of American officials over the violence. They are struggling to understand how King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, a monarch described in the cables as “personable and engaging,” could have resorted to the kinds of brutal measures that Egypt’s government shunned.

On Friday, President Obama condemned the violence in Bahrain, as well as in Yemen and Libya, where security forces also clashed with protesters. Saying that he was “deeply concerned,” he urged “the governments of Bahrain, Libya and Yemen to show restraint in responding to peaceful protests, and to respect the rights of their people.”

Administration officials said it was not entirely clear, amid the chaos in Bahrain, who was giving orders. The royal family has various factions, suggesting, they said, that hard-liners, rather than the king, could have told the soldiers to open fire. The king said Friday that he had put his son, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, in charge of a dialogue with protesters.

The prince, a 1992 graduate of American University in Washington, is described in a 2009 cable as “very Western in his approach.” He “is closely identified with the reformist camp within the ruling family — particularly with respect to economic and labor reforms designed to combat corruption.”

Briefing cables prepared for visiting American dignitaries typically laud King Hamad’s reform program, which he began soon after succeeding his father in 1999. He restored Parliament, banned since 1975; allowed exiles to return; and abolished the much-feared state security courts. When Freedom House dropped Bahrain from “partly free” to “not free” in its 2010 survey, a cable, signed by Ambassador J. Adam Ereli, offered a spirited defense of the government.

“Gerrymandered districts notwithstanding, Bahrain’s citizens enjoy the right to vote for their national and municipal legislators every four years,” it said. “Political societies and N.G.O.’s are active to an extent almost unheard of in the gulf, even in Kuwait, which Freedom House designated as ‘partly free.’ ”

One area where the embassy has not tried to defend Bahrain is Internet freedom. In a 2009 cable, diplomats said the government had blocked various Web sites — primarily those offering pornography and online gambling — but also political sites run by extremist Sunni and Shiite parties.

“For the moment,” said the cable, Bahrain “seems serious about cutting off access to the affected Web sites. However, it appeared to lose interest in a similar campaign in June 2008, and may do so again.”

In January 2010, a State Department technology expert, Alec J. Ross, met Bahrain’s minister of cabinet affairs to push Mrs. Clinton’s message of Internet freedom. Local human rights groups, meeting with embassy officials, urged them to lean on American companies to stop selling Bahrain’s government technology that blocks Internet access.

The drive to cut off Shiite Web sites attests to King Hamad’s fear that outside forces, like Iran or the militant group Hezbollah, would ally with Shiites inside the kingdom to destabilize it.

In a 2008 cable that gives a glimpse of Bahrain’s sensitivities, the embassy reported that despite the government’s “periodic claims that there are Hezbollah- or Iranian-connected sleeper cells with Bahrain, they have never offered hard evidence of such a presence, and our reporting has been unable to substantiate it.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    U.S. Offered Rosy View Before Bahrain Crackdown, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19diplomacy.html

Cellphones Become the World’s Eyes and Ears on Protests

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON and BRIAN STELTER

For some of the protesters facing Bahrain’s heavily armed security forces in and around Pearl Square in Manama, the most powerful weapon against shotguns and tear gas has been the tiny camera inside their cellphones.

By uploading images of this week’s violence in Manama, the capital, to Web sites like YouTube and yFrog, and then sharing them on Facebook and Twitter, the protesters upstaged government accounts and drew worldwide attention to their demands.

A novelty less than a decade ago, the cellphone camera has become a vital tool to document the government response to the unrest that has spread through the Middle East and North Africa.

Recognizing the power of such documentation, human rights groups have published guides and provided training on how to use cellphone cameras effectively.

“You finally have a video technology that can fit into the palm of one person’s hand, and what the person can capture can end up around the world,” said James E. Katz, director of the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communication Studies. “This is the dagger at the throat of the creaky old regimes that, through the manipulation of these old centralized technologies, have been able to smother the public’s voice.”

In Tunisia, cellphones were used to capture video images of the first protests in Sidi Bouzid in December, which helped spread unrest to other parts of the country. The uploaded images also prompted producers at Al Jazeera, the satellite television network, to begin focusing on the revolt, which toppled the Tunisian government in mid-January and set the stage for the demonstrations in Egypt.

While built-in cameras have been commercially available in cellphones since the late 1990s, it was not until the tsunami that struck southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, and the London subway bombings the following July that news organizations began to take serious note of the outpouring of images and videos created and posted by nonprofessionals. Memorably, in June 2009, cellphone videos of the shooting death of a young woman in Tehran known as Nedawere uploaded on YouTube, galvanizing the Iranian opposition and rocketing around the world.

Now, news organizations regularly seek out, sift and publish such images. Authenticating them remains a challenge, since photos can be easily altered by computers and old videos can resurface again, purporting to be new. YouTube is using Storyful, a news aggregation site, to help manage the tens of thousands of videos that have been uploaded from the Middle East in recent weeks and to highlight notable ones on the CitizenTube channel.

But journalists are not the only conduits. Cellphone images are increasingly being shared between users on mobile networks and social networking sites, and they are being broadly consumed on Web sites that aggregate video and images.

The hosting Web sites have reported increases both in submissions from the Middle East and in visitors viewing the content.

Among the sites, Bambuser has stood out as a way to stream video. Mans Adler, the site’s co-founder, said it had 15,000 registered users in Egypt, most of whom signed up just before last November’s election. He said there were more than 10,000 videos on the site that were produced around the time of the election, focusing on activity at the polls, in what appeared to be an organized effort.

Afterward, the level of activity settled down to 800 to 2,000 videos a day, but then soared back to 10,000 a day again when the mass protests erupted in Egypt last month, he said.

In Bahrain, the government has blocked access to Bambuser.

At training sessions to help activists use their cameras, Bassem Samir, the executive director of the Egyptian Democratic Academy, said that improving the quality of the images and video was a high priority.

“Videos are stories,” said Mr. Samir. “What happened on the 25th and 28th of January, it’s a story. It’s like a story of people who were asking for freedom and democracy, and we had, like, five or three minutes to tell it.”

Robert Mackey contributed reporting.

    Cellphones Become the World’s Eyes and Ears on Protests, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19video.html

Clashes in Libya Worsen as Army Crushes Dissent

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — Thousands gathered Friday for a third day of violent demonstrations in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, in an unprecedented challenge to the mercurial 41-year reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Human rights groups said 24 people had been killed across the North African country, though activists say the count may be far higher.

The escalating unrest bears the hallmarks of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, as protesters copy slogans heard there. But as in Bahrain and Iran, the police and the army have moved quickly to crush unrest. Residents say the government has mobilized young civilian supporters in the capital and other towns and deployed foreign mercenaries in eastern Libya, long the most restive region.

Libya demonstrates both the power and the limits of the Arab uprisings. The country, though the most isolated in the region, is not disconnected enough to black out the news of autocrats falling in two of its immediate neighbors. But information about what is happening inside Libya — and the ability of protesters to mobilize world opinion on their behalf — is far more limited.

A refrain of opposition leaders was that the world was failing to act, even as they sought to post videos, statements and testimony on social networking sites with mixed success.

“The international community is watching,” said Issa Abdel Majeed Mansour, an opposition figure based in Oslo. “Why isn’t anyone helping us?”

As the Libyan clashes worsened, a violent crackdown continued in Bahrain on Friday, where government forces opened fire on hundreds of mourners marching toward Pearl Square and at least one helicopter sprayed fire on peaceful protesters. There were also violent confrontations on Friday in Yemen and Jordan.

Since seizing power in a coup in 1969, Colonel Qaddafi has imposed his idiosyncratic rule on Libya, one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil. With a population of just 6.4 million, the country is one of the region’s wealthiest, though eastern Libya and Benghazi have witnessed periodic uprisings. Tripoli, the capital, has also had sporadic protests but remains firmly in the government’s grip, residents say.

“I don’t see them being easily overpowered, especially at this point, because of the powers of the Libyan security forces and their tendency to crack down very brutally on protests,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in contact with residents in Libya. “I’m not saying it will never happen, but it won’t happen today.”

Residents reached by telephone said the most intense unrest was in Benghazi and Bayda, a city about 125 miles to the northeast. As many as 15,000 people gathered in front of the courthouse in Benghazi on Friday, and security forces withdrew from at least part of the city by the afternoon, residents said. The residents saw the withdrawal as a sign of withering authority.

“Security has retreated to allow the protesters to march because the masses are in a state of extreme anger,” said one of the protesters, Idris Ahmed al-Agha, a writer and activist. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think it’s going to escalate.”

In the background, demonstrators’ chants could be heard. “The people want to topple the government!” they cried, an expression first heard in protests in Tunisia, then picked up by the demonstrators in Cairo’s uprising.

Judging by funerals and residents’ accounts, Mr. Agha put the toll at 50 in Benghazi. Other opposition activists said 60 had died there and dozens more in Bayda, though Libya’s isolation made the numbers difficult to verify. Citing doctors’ reports in Benghazi, Samira Boussalma, a member of Amnesty International’s North Africa team, said a majority of those killed were shot in the head and the chest. An opposition figure, citing a source at the Jalaa Hospital there, said that most of the dead were 13 to 36 years old and that as many as 50 people had been wounded.

Opposition groups said protesters had wrested control of several towns, including Bayda and Darnah, a northeastern port, though the degree of their authority seemed ambiguous. They said several police stations had been burned across Libya, and Mr. Agha said a military building was attacked in Benghazi.

In Kufrah, an oasis town in Libya’s southeast, protests were planned after Friday Prayer, but security forces deployed outside mosques, forbade demonstrations, then allowed worshipers to leave one by one, said Badawi Altobawi, an activist there.

He said the military had deployed in force to counter a second day of demonstrations, where protesters chanted Thursday, “Long live a free Libya.”

“We will keep protesting until the regime falls,” he said. “There is no going back. This is a protest led by the youth. They went out, as did their counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia. It was a spontaneous move, but now we are getting organized.”

Another protester reached by phone, who declined to be identified, citing safety concerns, said demonstrators had burned a building in Kufrah belonging to the so-called revolutionary committees, one of the instruments of Colonel Qaddafi’s peculiar brand of authoritarian leadership. Pictures circulated on the Internet showed protesters tearing down a statue for his Green Book, a three-volume tract that outlines his vision of that rule.

Known officially as the Brotherly Leader and the Guide of the Revolution, Colonel Qaddafi has gone from a self-styled prophet of third world liberation to an erratic partner of Europe and the United States, which re-established ties with Libya in 2006. In September 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in a tour of North Africa.

His relations with his Arab neighbors are unstable. While he lashed out at Tunisians for overthrowing President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January, his rambling rants at Arab League meetings have long ruffled counterparts, Saudi Arabia among them.

The Libyan news agency said he toured parts of Tripoli early on Friday to rally support for his government, which seemed fully ready to use force to crush dissent. After nightfall, opposition figures said hundreds had gathered to protest in the capital — reports that, if true, could mark a noteworthy turn in opposition.

“Any risk from these minuscule groups — the people and the noble revolutionary power will violently and thunderously respond,” said a pro-government newspaper, Al Zahf Al Akhdar. It called Colonel Qaddafi one of several red lines in the country. “Those who try to cross or come near these lines are suicidal and playing with fire,” it added.

Meanwhile, protesters turned up the pressure on other Arab governments on Friday. A demonstration in Amman, Jordan, turned violent as government supporters clashed with protesters calling for political change, injuring several, witnesses said.

Antigovernment protests, though rare for Jordan, have become routine on Fridays since uprisings swept Egypt and Tunisia. But this was the first time that one ended in confrontation.

The protest began peacefully outside the King Hussein Mosque in Amman, according to participants, with the demonstrators calling for an end to corruption and constitutional monarchy and for the lowering of prices. Then, participants said, more than a hundred government supporters surrounded and attacked them.

Similar clashes between demonstrators for and against the government broke out in Yemen, where turmoil continued for an eighth day. The violence began when thugs with sticks ran down rivals calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Rival groups also engaged in street fights in the city of Taiz, 130 miles south of the Yemeni capital, Sana. Reuters reported that a grenade exploded in a large crowd of protesters who had gathered in the city’s Hurriya, or Freedom, Square. At least eight people were wounded in the blast, the agency reported.

The protests in Taiz, where thousands of students have set up encampments, have appeared more intractable than the daily skirmishes in Sana. The police there have arrested more than 100 demonstrators in recent days as the nation fights over the future of Mr. Saleh’s 32-year-old American-backed government.

Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri from Beirut, Mona El-Naggar from Cairo, Ranya Kadri from Amman and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

    Clashes in Libya Worsen as Army Crushes Dissent, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/africa/19libya.html

After Long Exile, Sunni Cleric Takes Role in Egypt

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Sunni cleric who is banned from the United States and Britain for supporting violence against Israel and American forces in Iraq, delivered his first public sermon here in 50 years on Friday, emerging as a powerful voice in the struggle to shape what kind of Egyptian state emerges from the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

On the same day, other signs of a changing Egypt emerged. The military warned restive workers that it would stop what it declared were illegal strikes crippling Egypt’s economy, declaring “it will confront them and take the legal measures needed to protect the nation’s security.”

It also allowed two Iranian Navy ships to pass through the Suez Canal — a first since the 1979 Iranian revolution and a move that some Israeli officials called a provocation. Egyptian officials reportedly said the ships did not contain weapons.

Sheik Qaradawi, a popular television cleric whose program reaches an audience of tens of millions worldwide, addressed a rapt audience of more than a million Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to celebrate the uprising and honor those who died.

“Don’t fight history,” he urged his listeners in Egypt and across the Arab world, where his remarks were televised. “You can’t delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed.”

He spoke as the authorities in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were waging violent crackdowns on uprisings inspired in part by the Egyptian revolution. The sermon was the first public address here by Sheik Qaradawi, 84, since he fled Egypt for Qatar in 1961. An intellectual inspiration to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Qaradawi was jailed in Egypt three times for his ties to the group and spent most of his life abroad. His prominence exemplifies the peril and potential for the West as Egypt opens up. While he condemned the 9/11 attacks, he has supported suicide bombers against Israel and attacks on American forces in Iraq.

On Friday, he struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching. He began his sermon by saying that he was discarding the customary opening “Oh Muslims,” in favor of “Oh Muslims and Copts,” referring to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. He praised Muslims and Christians for standing together in Egypt’s revolution and even lauded the Coptic Christian “martyrs” who once fought the Romans and Byzantines. “I invite you to bow down in prayer together,” he said.

He urged the military officers governing Egypt to deliver on their promises of turning over power to “a civil government” founded on principles of pluralism, democracy and freedom. And he called on the army to immediately release all political prisoners and rid the cabinet of its dominance by officials of the old Mubarak government.

“We demand from the Egyptian Army to free us from the government that was appointed by Mubarak,” Sheik Qaradawi declared. “We want a new government without any of these faces whom people can no longer stand.” And he urged the young people who led the uprising to continue their revolution. “Protect it,” he said. “Don’t you dare let anyone steal it from you.”

As the uprising here intensified in recent weeks, Sheik Qaradawi had used his platform to urge Egyptians to rise up against Mr. Mubarak. His son, Abdul-Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is an Egyptian poet who supported the revolution, and, though Sheik Qaradawi is considered a religious traditionalist, three of his daughters hold doctoral degrees, including one in nuclear physics.

Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.

But he has made exceptions for violence against Israel or the American forces in Iraq. “You call it violence; I call it resistance,” said Prof. Emad Shahin of the University of Notre Dame, an Egyptian scholar who has studied Sheik Qaradawi’s work and was in Tahrir Square for his speech Friday.

“He is enormously influential,” Mr. Shahin added. “His presence in the square today cemented the resolve of the demonstrators to insist on their demands from the government.”

Egyptians streamed back into Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution, for a rally that was part prayer service, part celebration and part political protest. State television put attendance at two million.

A raucous spirit of flag-waving celebration prevailed. Women in full face veils painted their daughters’ faces in the colors of the Egyptian flag. Young men danced to thrumming drum beats on balconies, lampposts and trucks. There were many signs bearing the dual images of a crescent and cross, the symbol of Muslim-Christian unity.

Many said they had come to remember “the martyrs — the people who gave their lives to change Egypt to a new society of justice and freedom,” as Wael Lotfi el-Said, 39, put it. Vendors sold plastic cups emblazoned with the pictures of the “martyrs” — many now easily recognizable here from posters that have hung in the square and portraits that have appeared in newspapers. The Egyptian Health Ministry has said at least 365 people died in the uprising.

But many, including Mr. Said, said they were prepared to return every Friday “if necessary” to ensure that the Egyptian military kept its commitment to hand over the government to a civilian democracy as quickly as possible. Many said they worried that the military had not yet clearly ended the so-called emergency law allowing detention without charges or trial. Nor has the military yet incorporated any civilian input into the interim government.

And many complained that the military had kept most of the cabinet ministers put in place during the last days of Mr. Mubarak’s rule. Mohamed el-Beltagui, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who played a leading role in the square during the protests, pointed at Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, a retired general and businessman appointed by Mr. Mubarak. “Can we stop the protests when the government of Ahmed Shafiq is still there?” Mr. Beltagui asked. “No, no, no,” the crowd answered.

There were signs that the demonstrators had not forgotten their disappointment with what seemed to be American support for Mr. Mubarak until the end of the revolt. Though the demonstrators had returned to remove most of the graffiti around the square, one billboard remained inscribed with a message in English: “USA Admin — we will get democracy with our will. Play your games with the tyrant.”

By nightfall, however, most politics were forgotten. Fireworks exploded over the square to mark the first week since Mr. Mubarak’s fall, and after midnight the square was still packed with revelers.

Anthony Shadid and Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.

    After Long Exile, Sunni Cleric Takes Role in Egypt, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19egypt.html

Egyptians in America Ponder a Return

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — This week, Khaled Abou El Fadl has greeted each fellow Egyptian he sees with one word: “mabrook,” or congratulations.

But quickly, their joy over the toppling of the presidency of Hosni Mubarak gives way to a rapid string of questions. Can they raise money here in the United States to help clean up Tahrir Square? Can they help revive the economy by urging friends to invest in Egyptian companies? Can they successfully lobby for the right to vote even though they have lived abroad for years?

And, after weeks of watching events thousands of miles away unfold on television, another thought keeps nagging at them: Is it time to go home?

That is a profound conundrum for Egyptian immigrants, many of whom left the country to escape an autocratic government and have built a prosperous life for themselves in the United States. They are eager to help rebuild their home country and wonder if they might put their talents to use there, bringing their own experience with democracy to help reshape society. And yet, many are loath to give up the very freedoms they hope to see blossom in Egypt.

Mr. Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a critic of Mr. Mubarak, has spent hours on the phone in the last several days discussing ways to rewrite the Egyptian Constitution, including speaking with some of the jurists selected to serve on the panel created by the military there.

“My heart, my soul and my intellect is just completely tied up into that, the democratic constitution we need in the Arab world,” he said. “One of the first calls I got was from a colleague there asking me to help. Would I quit my job? I don’t know that yet. I don’t know how to best contribute.”

The conversation about whether to stay or go is repeating itself at countless dinner tables, in urgent telephone calls and in posts on Facebook, particularly among highly educated and younger Egyptians who may have the most to lose by leaving the United States, but also the most to gain.

“I don’t think any of us are not seriously considering moving there,” said Nadine Wahab, 34, a public relations executive in Washington and a leader of the Egyptian Association for Change, which helped organize protests throughout the United States during the last several weeks. “Everyone is asking what can I do? What would I be going back to? Where am I going to make the most impact?”

There are roughly 300,000 Egyptians living in the United States, according to the most recent census data, with the largest concentrations in Southern California and New York, and a smaller but close-knit cluster around the District of Columbia.

Hana Elhattab left Egypt five years ago to start college at the University of Maryland. Her parents had moved there three years earlier and Ms. Elhattab figured she was saying goodbye to Egypt for good. “I wasn’t going to move back ever,” she recalled telling people. “But the moment Mubarak was going to be gone, I knew I was going back.”

Since graduating last year, Ms. Elhattab has worked as a policy analyst for a Middle East research organization in Washington. When the protests began last month in Cairo, Ms. Elhattab immediately began translating Twitter posts from Arabic to share with a wider English-speaking audience.

“Everything I have done since I got here has been about creating a career here,” she said. “Now I have to start that over and figure out what is going to be relevant and helpful there. I need to do something that is a real job. I don’t want to go and just be another liability there.”

First, Ms. Elhattab plans to look for a job in the United States in international development and to go to graduate school, which means it could be two or three years before she returns to Egypt. “If I could go tomorrow, I would,” she said.

The same kind of anxious impatience is tugging at Rania Behiri, 31, who left Egypt with her family when she a toddler. She traveled back often though, and last year married Rami Serry, an Egyptian racecar driver she met over the Internet.

Ms. Behiri was reluctant to move her two sons, 9 and 12, from a previous relationship, to Egypt from West Covina, Calif., and Mr. Serry refused to leave Cairo, so the two resigned themselves to a long-distance marriage.

But last week Ms. Behiri quickly changed her mind and is preparing to move with her sons next month. When she arrives in Egypt, she plans to work for a professional development company her father-in-law runs. A group of Egyptian-born businessmen are planning a fund-raiser in the next several weeks to help underwrite her efforts.

“People don’t have trust, they don’t have faith and they have been just so oppressed and messed up by the laws that they need to learn how to think for themselves,” Ms. Behiri said. “It’s going to be invaluable. This whole thing showed that people truly can make a difference — so now I feel like, of course, I want to be a part of it.”

Ms. Behiri is one of countless Egyptian immigrants speaking in such grand terms these days, driven by what they saw happen to their birthplace. Many in the Egyptian diaspora here say they hope to educate people back home before elections and will press for the right to vote as well.

After years of oppression, Ms. Berhiri said, many Egyptians might be easily deceived by unscrupulous or power-hungry politicians. Friends her age, for example, could be so focused on improving Egypt’s economy that they are too willing to overlook religious demands by public officials.

It is not unheard of for exiles to return to their birth country to help rebuild after a revolution. Less than a decade ago, millions of Afghan refugees were repatriated, and many found a place in government, including President Hamid Karzai.

Hundreds of Egyptians come to the United States on student visas, planning to earn graduate degrees and look for a job in academia. For years, many of them scrambled to find jobs anywhere in the world outside Egypt. They worried that working as a professor there would not provide enough money to support a family. And more worrisome, they said, was the prospect of limited academic freedom.

Nora Muharram and her husband, Said Fares, assumed that they, too, would try to find a way to remain in the United States once he finished his doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the spring.

“We never looked forward to going back,” Ms. Muharram said “The environment would not allow him to publish the kinds of papers he wanted to do or give my children the kind of education I wanted for them. Now, all of that has changed and we are very, very optimistic.”

Ms. Muharram said she was confident that with her background as an electrical engineer, she would be able to find a job.

“People are going to want a better life, to change things, to do something,” she said, her voice rising in excitement. “The picture is still not clear, but at least now I am hearing the hope from everyone.”


Ian Lovett contributed reporting.

    Egyptians in America Ponder a Return, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/19return.html

Security Forces in Bahrain Fire on Mourners and Journalists

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and MARK LANDLER

MANAMA, Bahrain — Government forces opened fire on hundreds of mourners marching toward Pearl Square Friday, sending people running away in panic amid the boom of concussion grenades. But even as the people fled, at least one helicopter sprayed fire on them and a witness reported seeing mourners crumpling to the ground.

It was not immediately clear what type of ammunition the forces were firing, but some witnesses reported live fire from automatic weapons and the crowd was screaming “live fire, live fire.” At a nearby hospital, witnesses reported seeing people with very serious injuries and gaping wounds, at least some of them caused by rubber bullets that appeared to have been fired at close range.

Even as ambulances rushed to rescue people, forces fired on medics loading the wounded into their vehicles.

A Western official said at least one person had died in the mayhem surrounding the square, and reports said at least 50 were wounded. The official quoted a witness as saying that the shooters were from the military, not the police, indicating a hardening of the government’s stance against those trying to stage a popular revolt.

The mourners who were trying to march on symbolic Pearl Square were mostly young men who had been part of a funeral procession for a protester killed in an earlier crackdown by police.

Minutes after the first shots were fired, forces in a helicopter that had been shooting at the crowds, opened fire at a Western reporter and videographer who were filming a sequence on the latest violence.

At least seven people had died in clampdowns before Friday’s violence.

The chaos has left the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of dealing with a strategic Arab ally locked in a showdown with its people.

The protests in Bahrain started Monday, inspired by the overthrow of autocratic governments in Egypt and Tunisia. The Bahraini government initially cracked down hard, then backed off after at least two deaths and complaints from the United States. But since Thursday morning, security forces have shown little patience with the protesters, first firing on demonstrators sleeping in Pearl Square early Thursday morning, killing at least five, and then shooting today at those who gathered to mark an earlier death.

The violence appeared to be transforming the demands of the protesters who early on were calling for a switch from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one. On Thursday, the opposition withdrew from the Parliament and demanded that the government step down. And on Friday, the mourners were chanting slogans like “death to Khalifa,” referring to King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

The protests here, while trying to mimic those in Egypt and Tunisia, add a dangerous new element: religious division. The king and the ruling elite of Bahrain are Sunni, while the majority of the population are Shiites, who have been leading the demonstrations and demanding not only more freedom but equality.

The king is distrustful enough of his Shiite subjects that many of his soldiers and police are foreigners hired by the government.

On Friday, in the village of Sitra, south of Manama, a crowd of thousands accompanied the coffins of Ali Mansour Ahmed Khudair, 53, and Mahmoud Makki Abutaki, 22, both killed by shotgun fire on Thursday.

The coffins were carried on the roofs of two cars as a man with a loudspeaker led the crowd in its chants from the bed of a pickup truck, alternating between calls to the faithful — “There is no God but God” — with political messages such as “We need constitutional reform for freedom.”

In the sun-scorched, sandy cemetery with its crumbling white headstones, the bodies were laid to rest on their sides so that they faced the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. “Have you seen what they have done to us,” said Aayat Mandeel, 29, a computer technician. “Killing people for what? To keep their positions?”

After the burials, the crowds moved off to a major mosque for noon prayers on the Muslim holy day, an occasion that has provided a focus for protests elsewhere in the region. But it was not clear whether religious leaders would urge them to continue their demonstrations.

For the Obama administration, the violence in this tiny Persian Gulf State was the Egypt scenario in miniature, a struggle to avert broader instability and protect its interests — Bahrain is the base of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet — while voicing support for the democratic aspiration of the protesters.

Before Friday’s violence, the United States said it strongly opposed the use of violence. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Bahrain’s foreign minister on Thursday morning to convey “our deep concern about the actions of the security forces,” she said. President Obama did not publicly address the Thursday crackdown, but his press secretary, Jay Carney, said that the White House was urging Bahrain to use restraint in responding to “peaceful protests.”

In some ways, the administration’s calculations are even more complicated here, given Bahrain’s proximity to Saudi Arabia, another Sunni kingdom of vital importance to Washington, and because of the sectarian nature of the flare-up here.

This has broader regional implications, experts and officials said, since Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its eastern, oil-producing districts and the Shiite government in Iran would like to extend its influence over this nearby island kingdom. Shiite political figures in Bahrain deny that their goal is to institute an Islamic theocracy like that in Tehran.

For those who were in the traffic circle known as Pearl Square Thursday when the police opened fire without warning on thousands who were sleeping there, it was a day of shock and disbelief. Many of the hundreds taken to the hospital were wounded by shotgun blasts, doctors said, their bodies speckled with pellets or bruised by rubber bullets or police clubs.

In the morning, there were three bodies already stretched out on metal tables in the morgue at Salmaniya Medical Complex: Mr. Khudair, dead, with 91 pellets pulled from his chest and side; Isa Abd Hassan, 55, dead, his head split in half; Mr. Abutaki, dead, with 200 pellets of birdshot pulled from his chest and arms.

Doctors said that at least two others had died and that several patients were in critical condition with serious wounds. Muhammad al-Maskati, of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, said he had received at least 20 calls from frantic parents searching for young children.

A surgeon, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said that for hours on Thursday the Health Ministry prevented ambulances even from going to the scene to aid victims. The doctor said that in the early morning, when the assault was still under way, police officers beat a paramedic and a doctor and refused to allow medical staff to attend to the wounded. News agencies in Bahrain reported that the health minister, Faisal al-Hamar, resigned after doctors staged a demonstration to protest his order barring ambulances from going to the square.

In the bloodstained morgue, Ahmed Abutaki, 29, held his younger brother’s cold hand, tearfully recalling the last time they spoke Wednesday night. “He said, ‘This is my chance, to have a say, so that maybe our country will do something for us,’” he recalled of his brother’s decision to camp out in the circle. “My country did do something; it killed him.”

There was collective anxiety as Friday approached and people waited to see whether the opposition would challenge the government’s edict to stay off the streets. The government had made it clear that it would not tolerate more dissent, saying it would use “every strict measure and deterrent necessary to preserve security and general order.” Both sides said they would not back down.

“You will find members of Al Wefaq willing to be killed, as our people have been killed,” said Khalil Ebrahim al-Marzooq, one of 18 opposition party members to announce Thursday that they had resigned their seats. “We will stand behind the people until the complete fulfillment of our demands.”

Arab leaders have been badly shaken in recent days, with entrenched leaders in Egypt and Tunisia ousted by popular uprisings and with demonstrations flaring around the region. And now as the public’s sense of empowerment has spread, the call to change has reached into this kingdom. That has raised anxiety in Saudi Arabia, which is connected to Bahrain by a bridge, and Kuwait, as well, and officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council met here to discuss how to handle the crisis.

After the meeting — and before Friday’s clampdown — the council issued a statement supporting Bahrain’s handling of the protests. It also suggested that outsiders might have fomented them, in a clear effort to suggest Iranian interference.

“The council stressed that it will not allow any external interference in the kingdom’s affairs,” said the statement, carried on Bahrain’s state news agency, “emphasizing that breaching security is a violation of the stability of all the council’s member countries.”

“The Saudis are worried about any Shia surge,” said Christopher R. Hill, who retired last year as United States ambassador to Iraq, where he navigated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. “To see the Shia challenging the royal family will be of great concern to them.”

Still, Mr. Hill said there was little evidence that Arab Shiites in Bahrain would trade their king for Iranian rulers.

Bahrain’s king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and his family have long been American allies in efforts to fight terrorism and push back the regional influence of Iran. In diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks, he urged American officials to take military action to disable Iran’s nuclear program.

While Bahrain has arrested lawyers and human rights activists over the last two years, it had taken modest steps to open up the society in the eight years before that, according to Human Rights Watch. King Hamad allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall, for which he was praised by Mrs. Clinton during a visit to Bahrain in December.

In the streets, however, people were not focused on geopolitics or American perceptions of progress. They were voicing demands for democracy, rule of law and social justice.


Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Manama, Robert F. Worth from Washington, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Security Forces in Bahrain Fire on Mourners and Journalists, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19bahrain.html

Rival Yemeni Protesters Take to Streets

February 18, 2011
Filed at 6:48 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By REUTERS

SANAA (Reuters) - Crowds of rival demonstrators thronged the Yemeni capital and two other cities on Friday in a show of strength between President Ali Abdullah Saleh's supporters and those demanding an end to his 32 years in power.

In the biggest display of anti-government feeling, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Hurriya (Freedom) Square in Taiz, about 200 km (120 miles) south of the capital Sanaa, witnesses said.

"Down with the dictator, down with oppression," chanted the demonstrators, who have camped out for days in imitation of Egyptian demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

At least 10,000 Saleh loyalists also took to the streets of the busy commercial city.

Saleh, a U.S. ally against a Yemen-based al Qaeda wing that has launched attacks at home and abroad, is struggling to end month-old protests flaring across the impoverished country.

In Sanaa, thousands of anti-Saleh protesters marched down University Street, shouting "You're next after Mubarak, Ali" and holding signs saying "Leave, leave for the sake of our future."

Hundreds of Saleh loyalists gathered near Sanaa University, shouting "No to chaos, no to sabotage," as a small group broke away and attacked anti-Saleh protesters with sticks and rocks.

State television said a million people had gathered in Taiz, a city of four million, to voice support for the 68-year-old leader, who has been in power for more than three decades.

"Yes to unity and stability, no to chaos and sabotage," the loyalists shouted, echoing a statement made by Saleh a few days earlier warning that people implementing a "foreign agenda" were sparking protests to create chaos in the Arab world.

In Hurriya Square, set up first-aid and food tents, and organized groups to try and prevent Saleh supporters from entering the square.

BAROMETER FOR PROTEST MOVEMENT

Some analysts see Taiz, which has a sizeable middle class and groups people from both north and south, as a barometer for the protest movement in Yemen, which has gathered strength since Tunisians and Egyptians toppled their presidents this year.

"Sanaa is important, but if Taiz really gets going this thing could take off," Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton University scholar, said in his blog on Yemen, Waq al-Waq.

Saleh, whose country is mired in poverty, is also struggling to quash al Qaeda militants, defuse a southern separatist revolt and maintain a shaky truce with northern Shi'ite rebels.

In a sop to protesters, he has promised to step down when his term ends in 2013 and not hand power to his son.

A coalition of opposition parties, which had laid on rallies that drew tens of thousands, has now agreed to talk to him, but smaller, more spontaneous protests have continued, organized by students and others using mobile text messages and Facebook.

One protester in Sanaa, Abdullah Mahyub, said: "After 30 years of oppression, we have no demand other than that this corrupt regime leaves."

A lawyer named Abdelmaeen al-Qadi, said: "All we want is the fall of this regime and an end to corruption."

Thousands of protesters turned out in the southern port city of Mukalla. Police fired in the air and used tear gas to try and disperse them. Three people were wounded, protesters said.

Four people were killed in Aden on Thursday and two on Wednesday by what local officials called "random gunfire" as police in the port city tried to disperse the crowds.

(Writing by Erika Solomon, editing by Alistair Lyon and Philippa Fletcher)

    Rival Yemeni Protesters Take to Streets, ,NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/international-us-yemen-protests.html

Popular Rage Is Met With Violence in Mideast

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY and ALAN COWELL

The severity of a Libyan crackdown on a so-called “Day of Rage” began to emerge Friday when a human rights advocacy group said 24 people had been killed by gunfire and news reports said further clashes with security were feared at the funerals for the dead.

That apprehension also seized Bahrain where five people died in a brutal assault on a democracy camp in the capital, Manama on Thursday. The violence has pitted a Sunni minority government against a Shiite majority in the strategic island state that is home to the American Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Thousands of Shiites gathered at a mosque in the windswept village of Sitra, south of Manama, on Friday for the funerals of two of the dead, chanting “The people want the fall of the government” before noon prayers.

Defying threats of reprisals in several cities, thousands of Libyan protesters mounted one of the sharpest challenges to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s 40-year rule in a “Day of Rage” on Thursday modeled on the uprisings coursing through the region that have had toppled the authoritarian regimes of Tunisia and Egypt.

Despite Libya’s heavy hand in controlling security and stifling dissent, Human Rights Watch said protests were reported in the capital, Tripoli; Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city; and at three other places. News reports said the protests continued into early Friday in Benghazi.

The report of 24 dead from Human Rights Watch, based on what it said were accounts by “multiple witnesses” was one of the highest so far. The accounts were muted by Libya’s strict media controls, which made independent verification difficult. Unlike in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, the authorities, like those in Iran during protests last Monday, have largely prevented conventional television coverage and the only images to emerge have been on social networking sites. On the ground, a fog of smoke, tear gas and fresh unease descended over cities throughout the region, with demonstrations and rolling street battles lurching in violent new directions as governments fought to blunt their momentum and reassert control of the streets. States imposed curfews and ordered people to stay home, and those who defied the orders risked gunfire or beatings at the hands of security forces, private guards or pro-government crowds.

But across the Middle East, where brutal social contracts have left millions uneducated, impoverished and alienated, existing battle lines between people and their governments appeared to harden, foreshadowing more confrontations in the days ahead.

In Bahrain, five people were killed and hundreds wounded in a harsh crackdown.

Yemen was shaken by a seventh day of demonstrations demanding the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Protesters chanted “There is no state!” and lobbed rocks back and forth with pro-government marchers.

In Iran, a leading opposition figure, Mir Hussein Moussavi, was reported missing, raising fears that he had been detained in connection with this week’s anti-government rallies. The marches, the largest since the 2009 disputed elections, were put down by Iranian security and paramilitary forces. The government called for its supporters to rally Friday; the opposition called for another march on Sunday.

In Algeria, where a major protest has been called for Saturday, state television denounced “foreign interference,” while a prominent political leader, Abdelhamid Mehri, accused the government of not “responding to the hunger for integrity, liberty, democracy and social justice.”

Even in Tunisia, where protests successfully ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali last month, small groups of protesters continued to gather outside various government ministries in the capital, Tunis, demanding the resignation of the country’s caretaker government and the release of family members from prisons.

In Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak stepped down last week, Suez Canal workers in three major cities joined strikes, deepening the economic strains of the widespread labor unrest.

And in Iraq, protest leaders said they would go ahead with plans for a Saturday march in Baghdad, despite a second day of violence marring demonstrations elsewhere in the country.

“Are we expecting violence?” said Kamal Jabar, an Iraqi organizers. “Yes, we’re expecting violence. Are we going out? Yes, we’re going out.”

The Libya protests, which started earlier in the week, grew larger and bloodier as the government unleashed thousands of its supporters in countermarches.

Mohammad Ali Abdellah, the deputy leader of an exiled opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said in a telephone interview from London that roads leading to Green Square in central Tripoli had been closed off and that people living nearby had been warned in text messages from the authorities not to join any protests.

In Al Beyda, he said, hospital authorities had appealed for international help to cope with an influx of around 30 or 40 people with gunshot wounds after security forces opened fire on protests that erupted on Wednesday night and continued into early Thursday.

The Associated Press quoted opposition Web sites as saying that security forces had fired on demonstrators, killing several, and that the government was refusing to provide medical supplies needed to treat protesters.

The unrest rippling through Iraq spread on Thursday to the more stable Kurdistan region, where security guards in Sulaimaniya fired on a group of rock-throwing protesters who had been trying to take over the offices of a local political leader. At least one person was killed.

A day ago, security forces in the eastern city of Kut killed three rock-throwing protesters, who had been among hundreds rallying to call for the provincial governor to step down. The shootings prompted the crowd to set fire to the governor’s home and offices.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the provincial government said Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had ordered the governor to resign.

In a news conference, Mr. Maliki took a slightly softer stance toward the demonstrations than his counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East, saying that he was happy Iraqis were exercising their rights to demonstrate.

“But the protesters should not set fire to a building,” he said. “We should express our demands in a civilized manner.”

    Popular Rage Is Met With Violence in Mideast, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/europe/19protests.html

Dozens Reported Killed in Libyan Crackdown

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL

PARIS — At least 24 people have died in protests in Libya against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to Human Rights Watch, and demonstrations were reported continuing into the early hours of Friday in what seemed the most serious challenge to his 41-year rule.

Exiled opponents of the Libyan leader said on Thursday that protests mirroring the turmoil in the Arab world had broken out in several parts of the country on a so-called “Day of Rage.”‘.

But the ferocity of the government’s response emerged only on Friday when the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said security forces “killed at least 24 protesters and wounded many others in a crackdown on peaceful demonstrations across the country.”

The organization quoted an unidentified protesters as saying demonstrations also began late Thursday in Tripoli, the capital. The worst of the violence reported so far has been in restive east of the country, where Colonel Qaddafi has long faced greater discontent than in the capital.

Reuters said thousands of protesters remained on the streets of Beghazi, Libya’s second city, into early Friday.

“According to multiple witnesses, Libyan security forces shot and killed the demonstrators in efforts to disperse the protests, Human Rights Watch said, calling the crackdown vicious. Protests broke out in five places, it said — Benghazi, Al Beyda, Zentan, Derna and Ajdabiya.The protests seem to feed on earlier grievances, both economic and political, particularly in the east of the country whose people have long felt disadvanted compared to those in the capital. The South Korean news Yonhap on Friday quoted the South Korean Foreign Ministry as saying 200 people forced their way into a South Korean-run construction side at Derna, in eastern Libya, on Thursday and occupied it.

The action in a month and seemed to be related to “discontent o over the government’s housing policy,” the ministry said.

Throughout the protests, the state media in Libya have ignored the demonstrations, offering a counter-narrative that depicted Libyans waving green flags and shouting in support of Colonel Qaddafi.

The official JANA news agency said the government supporters wanted to affirm their “eternal unity with the brother leader of the revolution.”

Two days ago, “subscribers to Libyana, one of two Libyan mobile phone networks, received a text message calling upon ‘nationalist youth’ to go out and ‘defend national symbols,’” Human Rights Watch said.

The protests began late on Tuesday in Benghazi, Libya’s restive second-largest city, and spread to other areas. In a land where any display of dissent or opposition is rapidly quashed, the violence seemed to present a highly unusual challenge to Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.

“Today the Libyans broke the barrier of fear, it is a new dawn,” Faiz Jibril, an opposition leader in exile told The Associated Press. But that assessment had yet to be tested against Colonel Qaddafi’s repressive internal security apparatus. Several opposition Web sites and exiled leaders said the authorities had deployed military snipers and commandos to suppress the unrest.

As the confrontation spread to the city of Al Beyda east of Benghazi, a Web site opposing Colonel Qaddafi said four protesters had been killed by government forces. Other accounts put the death toll higher.

Quryna, a privately owned newspaper in Benghazi, reported the firing of a local security chief over the violent crackdown in Al Beyda.

On Thursday, according to news reports from Tripoli, traffic moved freely on Omar al-Mokhtar street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, banks and shops were open and there was no increased security presence.

But Mohammad Ali Abdellah, the deputy leader of an exiled opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said in a telephone interview from London that roads leading to Tripoli’s central Green Square had been closed off and that people living nearby had been warned in text messages from the authorities not to join any protests.

In Al Beyda, he said, hospital authorities had appealed for international help to cope with an influx of around 30 or 40 people with gunshot wounds after security forces opened fire on protests that erupted on Wednesday night and continued into early Thursday.

His account could not be immediately verified.

Mr. Abdellah also said separate protests broke out again on Thursday in Benghazi, Misratah, east of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, and Al-Kufrah in the southeast. Other reports from opposition Web sites spoke of protests in several other places including Zentan, Rijban, southwest of Tripoli, and Shahat, southwest of Benghazi.

Video provided by an opposition leader showed marchers in Zentan chanting: “Down with Qaddafi. Down with the regime,” The A.P. said.

Colonel Qaddafi has sought to defuse the protests, doubling the salaries of state employees and releasing 110 accused Islamic militants. But some of the protests appear to draw on much older grievances. They were first set off on Tuesday night when the police arrested a human rights lawyer representing families of 1,000 detainees massacred in 1996 at the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Colonel Qaddafi took power in a bloodless coup in 1969 and has built his rule on a cult of personality and a network of family and tribal alliances supported by largess from Libya’s oil revenues.


Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul.

    Dozens Reported Killed in Libyan Crackdown, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/africa/19libya.html

Internet Use in Bahrain Restricted, Data Shows

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

As protests have erupted in Bahrain over the last several days, the government has severely restricted the access of its citizens to the Internet, new data from an organization that monitors Internet traffic strongly suggests.

The data, collected by Arbor Networks, is the first quantitative confirmation that Internet traffic into and out of Bahrain has suffered an anomalous drop over the past days.

Jose Nazario, the senior manager of security research at Arbor, which is based in Massachusetts, said that the traffic was 10 percent to 20 percent below expected levels. The measurements gauge the amount of information flowing through Internet backbone lines into and out of Bahrain.

A fluctuation of that size is generally caused only by natural calamities or major global sporting events, Mr. Nazario said, leading the company to conclude that the most likely explanation is that Bahrain is blocking many sites on the Internet.

He said that the company could not absolutely rule out technical problems with Internet carriers inside the country as a cause.

But Jillian York of Harvard, project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative, said that the findings were consistent with reports that Bahrainis had been blocked from various sites, including YouTube and Bambuser.

    Internet Use in Bahrain Restricted, Data Shows, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18manama.html

Bahrain Turmoil Poses Fresh Test for White House

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and MARK LANDLER

MANAMA, Bahrain — A brutal government crackdown on pro-democracy protesters here on Thursday not only killed at least five people but, once again, placed the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of dealing with a strategic Arab ally locked in a showdown with its people.

As the army patrolled with tanks and heavily armed soldiers, the once-peaceful protesters were transformed into a mob of angry mourners chanting slogans like “death to Khalifa,” the king, while the opposition withdrew from the Parliament and demanded that the government step down. At the main hospital following the violence, thousands gathered screaming, crying and collapsing in grief.

On Friday, the funerals for the dead created a potential new flashpoint as mourners chanted anti-government slogans. In the village of Sitra, south of Manama, a large crowd of thousands of mourners accompanied the coffins of Ali Mansour Ahmed Khudair, 53, and Mahmoud Makki Abutaki, 22, both killed by shotgun fire on Thursday.

The coffins were carried on the roofs of two cars as a man with a loudspeaker led the crowd in its chants from the bed of a pickup truck, alternating between calls to the faithful — “There is no God but God” — with political messages such as “We need constitutional reform for freedom.”

“Death to Khalifa,” the crowds chanted, referring to King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and “We want the fall of the government.”

In the sun-scorched, sandy cemetery with its crumbling white headstones, the bodies were laid to rest on their sides so that they faced the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. “Have you seen what they have done to us,” said Aayat Mandeel, 29, a computer technician. “Killing people for what? To keep their positions?”

After the burials, the crowds moved off to a major mosque for noon prayers on the Muslim holy day, an occasions that has provided a launching pad for protest elsewhere. But it was not clear whether religious leaders would urge them to maintain their protest.

While there was no sign of security forces at the funerals, a police helicopter clattered overhead.

For the Obama administration, it was the Egypt scenario in miniature in this tiny Persian Gulf state, a struggle to avert broader instability and protect its interests — Bahrain is the base of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet — while voicing support for the democratic aspiration of the protesters.

The United States said it strongly opposed the use of violence. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Bahrain’s foreign minister on Thursday morning to convey “our deep concern about the actions of the security forces,” she said. President Obama did not publicly address the crackdown, but his press secretary, Jay Carney, said that the White House was urging Bahrain to use restraint in responding to “peaceful protests.”

In some ways, the administration’s calculations are even more complicated here, given Bahrain’s proximity to Saudi Arabia, another Sunni kingdom of vital importance to Washington. Unlike in Egypt, where the struggle was between democracy and dictatorship, Bahrain is suffering a flare-up in old divisions between its ruling Sunni Muslim minority and restive Shiites, who constitute 70 percent of the local population of 500,000.

This has broader regional implications, experts and officials said, since Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its eastern, oil-producing districts and the Shiite government in Iran would like to extend its influence over this nearby island kingdom. Shiite political figures in Bahrain deny that their goal is to institute an Islamic theocracy like that in Tehran.

For those who were in the traffic circle known as Pearl Square when the police opened fire without warning on thousands who were sleeping there, it was a day of shock and disbelief. Many of the hundreds taken to the hospital were wounded by shotgun blasts, doctors said, their bodies speckled with pellets or bruised by rubber bullets or police clubs.

In the morning, there were three bodies already stretched out on metal tables in the morgue at Salmaniya Medical Complex: Mr. Khudair, dead, with 91 pellets pulled from his chest and side; Isa Abd Hassan, 55, dead, his head split in half; Mr. Abutaki, dead, with 200 pellets of birdshot pulled from his chest and arms.

Doctors said that at least two others had died and that several patients were in critical condition with serious wounds. Muhammad al-Maskati, of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, said he had received at least 20 calls from frantic parents searching for young children.

A surgeon, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said that for hours on Thursday the Health Ministry prevented ambulances even from going to the scene to aid victims. The doctor said that in the early morning, when the assault was still under way, police officers beat a paramedic and a doctor and refused to allow medical staff to attend to the wounded. News agencies in Bahrain reported that the health minister, Faisal al-Hamar, resigned after doctors staged a demonstration to protest his order barring ambulances from going to the square.

In the bloodstained morgue, Ahmed Abutaki, 29, held his younger brother’s cold hand, tearfully recalling the last time they spoke Wednesday night. “He said, ‘This is my chance, to have a say, so that maybe our country will do something for us,’” he recalled of his brother’s decision to camp out in the circle. “My country did do something; it killed him.”

There was collective anxiety as Friday approached and people waited to see whether the opposition would challenge the government’s edict to stay off the streets — and if it did, whether the government would follow through on its threat to use “every strict measure and deterrent necessary to preserve security and general order.” Both sides said they would not back down.

“You will find members of Al Wefaq willing to be killed, as our people have been killed,” said Khalil Ebrahim al-Marzooq, one of 18 opposition party members to announce Thursday that they had resigned their seats. “We will stand behind the people until the complete fulfillment of our demands.”

Arab leaders have been badly shaken in recent days, with entrenched leaders in Egypt and Tunisia ousted by popular uprisings and with demonstrations flaring around the region. And now as the public’s sense of empowerment has spread, the call to change has reached into this kingdom. That has raised anxiety in Saudi Arabia, which is connected to Bahrain by a bridge, and Kuwait, as well, and officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council met here to discuss how to handle the crisis.

After the meeting, the council issued a statement supporting Bahrain’s handling of the protests. It also suggested that outsiders might have fomented them, in a clear effort to suggest Iranian interference.

“The council stressed that it will not allow any external interference in the kingdom’s affairs,” said the statement, carried on Bahrain’s state news agency, “emphasizing that breaching security is a violation of the stability of all the council’s member countries.”

“The Saudis are worried about any Shia surge,” said Christopher R. Hill, who retired last year as United States ambassador to Iraq, where he navigated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. “To see the Shia challenging the royal family will be of great concern to them.”

Still, Mr. Hill said there was little evidence that Arab Shiites in Bahrain would trade their king for Iranian rulers.

Bahrain’s king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and his family have long been American allies in efforts to fight terrorism and push back the regional influence of Iran. In diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks, he urged American officials to take military action to disable Iran’s nuclear program.

While Bahrain has arrested lawyers and human rights activists over the last two years, it had taken modest steps to open up the society in the eight years before that, according to Human Rights Watch. King Hamad allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall, for which he was praised by Mrs. Clinton during a visit to Bahrain in December. In the streets, however, people were not focused on geopolitics or American perceptions of progress. They were voicing demands for democracy, rule of law and social justice. When the protests started Monday, the demands were for a constitutional monarchy, but in the anger of the day the chants evolved into calls for tearing down the whole system.

“Death to Khalifa! Death to Khalifa!” chanted a frantic crowd massed in the driveway of the hospital. “Bring down the government!” cried out the thousands of men and women. The fearful and hostile mood was set the night before, when the police opened fire. Doctors, victims and witnesses gave a detailed account of how the police assault unfolded, revealing details of a calculated, coordinated attack that closed in from all sides, offering no way out.

“They had encircled us and they kept shooting tear gas and live rounds,” said Ali Muhammad Abdel Nabi, 25, as he rested in a hospital bed after having been hit by shotgun pellets on both his legs and his shoulder. “The circle got closer and closer.”

Doctors at the hospital said that 226 demonstrators had been recorded as being treated in the hospital and that many more were given aid on the run. At the scene, the doctors said protesters were handcuffed with thick plastic binders, laid on the ground and stomped on by the police.

Outside the hospital, the police stayed away, as the fuming crowd of mourners remained on the medical campus. But not far away, in the symbolic center of the city, beneath the towering statue of a pearl on a setting, soldiers patrolled, armored vehicles blocked all arteries, and a circle of barbed wire was laid around the square. Within 24 hours, the site of the first tolerated expression of public dissent had been transformed into a memorial to fear and death.

“We are a people of mourners now, we have nothing,” said Taghreed Hussein, 35, as she and her friends crowded the hospital.


Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Manama, Robert F. Worth from Washington, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Bahrain Turmoil Poses Fresh Test for White House, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19bahrain.html

Among Egypt’s Missing, Tales of Torture and Prison

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By LIAM STACK

CAIRO — Ramadan Aboul Hassan left his house one night about three weeks ago to join a neighborhood watch group with two friends and did not return. The next time their relatives saw the three men they were emerging Wednesday night from a maximum security prison, 400 miles from home, run by Egypt’s military. Some family members said they bore signs of torture, though others denied it.

While many here have cheered the military for taking over after last week’s ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and for pledging to oversee a transition to democracy, human rights groups say that in the past three weeks the military has also played a documented role in dozens of disappearances and at least 12 cases of torture — trademark practices of the Mubarak government’s notorious security police that most here hoped would end with his exit.

Some, like Mr. Aboul Hassan and his two friends, were not released until several days after the revolution removed Mr. Mubarak.

Now human rights groups say the military’s continuing role in such abuses raises new questions about its ability to midwife Egyptian democracy.

“The military is detaining people incommunicado, which is illegal, and so it is effectively disappearing people,” said Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch, which has documented four cases that it describes as involving torture. Amnesty International has documented three such cases, and the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters has documented five.

Human Rights Watch has also documented one case in which the military transferred a prisoner to the country’s feared State Security forces, where it says he was tortured.

Ms. Morayef said the cases of detention and torture did not appear to be “systematic,” but added, “It is enough to set off alarm bells and call for an investigation into abuses by the military police.”

Most victims were arrested by the military, she says, though two were detained by neighborhood watch groups and then handed over to soldiers. The interrogations accompanying abuse all revolved around victims’ suspected participation in the antigovernment protests that toppled the Mubarak government.

Hundreds of unidentified bodies have shown up at hospitals around the country, says the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters, deepening the uncertainty. On Wednesday, Egypt’s Health Ministry reported that 365 had died during the uprising and that 5,500 were injured.

Military officials said at a meeting of youth activists on Monday that they would search for those who had disappeared during the uprising, and confirmed that at least 77 people had been detained in fighting in Tahrir Square, according to notes of the meeting published on Facebook.

Local media reported that the army chief of staff, Sami Enan, had agreed to release all of those detained during the revolution, but rights groups complain that he did not commit to a timetable. They have seen little movement toward fulfilling the pledge.

Ramadan Aboul Hassan, 33, vanished well after the battle with the police around Tahrir Square had ended. On Jan. 29, after the police fled the city and the military stepped in, Ramadan left home with his nephew Ahmed Aboul Hassan, 22, and their friend Mostafa Mahrous Mostafa to join neighbors in fending off looters. Then they disappeared.

For 18 days Mohamed Aboul Hassan, 51, Ramadan’s eldest brother, worked the phones, each call introducing him to a new lieutenant or government bureaucrat offering a different story about the men’s whereabouts and counseling a different course of action.

The family combed hospitals and police stations and begged military officials they managed to get on the phone. They asked the national prison authority if the men’s names were in the country’s database of inmates, and were told they were nowhere to be found.

Five days after the disappearance, their families learned that the men had been arrested by the military under a bridge on nearby Revolution Street close to the local headquarters of military intelligence. Mohamed was called in to the intelligence office, given their national ID cards and asked to sign for them before he could take the cards home. He was not told why they had been arrested or when they would be released.

“I don’t understand why the government is doing this,” Mohamed said Tuesday, the height of the search. “If they would just give me some piece of information about them, it would mean so much for me.”

The military has little experience directly governing and policing the civilian population, leaving it ill equipped for tasks like notifying families of arrests or detentions, said Ahmed Ragheb, the executive director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a human rights organization. “The army is not prepared to operate an incarceration system or facilities.”

Early Tuesday afternoon, a contact in the military told the Aboul Hassan family that the three men had been released from Wadi Gedid maximum security prison in a distant southern province and put on a military train bound for Cairo. A short while later a cousin with friends working in the train station told them no such train existed, and an official at Wadi Gedid said the prison had no record of them.

Later, another prison official told Mohamed that the men were in the custody of the civil police in Upper Egypt, while a military official told another brother, Rabie, 36, that the men were awaiting military trials on unknown charges.

On Wednesday, Rabie hired a taxi and made the 400-mile journey to Wadi Gedid prison to ask about the men himself. He found them awaiting release with several hundred others, and said they bore the physical and psychological scars of torture.

The men had been detained at Hikestep Military Base, in the desert outside Cairo, before being sent to Wadi Gedid. They were beaten, whipped, exposed to electric shocks and suspended from the door frames of their cells, Rabie said. They were offered bread doused in gasoline and had guns held to their heads, he asserted. “They treated them like a herd of sheep,” he said.

After their release, Mohamed said, “They are psychologically traumatized and physically ill,” although he denied that they had been tortured. Because of concerns for their well-being, the Aboul Hassan family did not allow reporters access to the three men after their return to Cairo and none were interviewed for this article.

The Aboul Hassans are a poor family in an upper-class neighborhood. Ramadan, Ahmed and Mostafa are the children of men who tend the gardens and guard the doors at upscale apartments in the Heliopolis district of Cairo. Their homes are a grim warren of windowless concrete rooms in the building’s basement, sparsely furnished and bursting at the seams with children.

For weeks, the men’s recovered national ID cards were the only clues family members had about their fates.

“We joined the protests to liberate the country and end the problems of the regime,” said Rabie, who had accompanied his brother to Tahrir Square in the days before his arrest. His family’s ordeal at the hands of the military, an institution he said he respected, has shaken his faith in the revolution.

“After 18 days the regime is gone but the same injustices remain.”

Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, Enas Muthaffar and Dawlat Magdy contributed reporting.

    Among Egypt’s Missing, Tales of Torture and Prison, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18missing.html

Egyptians Say Military Discourages an Open Economy

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The Egyptian military defends the country, but it also runs day care centers and beach resorts. Its divisions make television sets, jeeps, washing machines, wooden furniture and olive oil, as well as bottled water under a brand reportedly named after a general’s daughter, Safi.

From this vast web of businesses, the military pays no taxes, employs conscripted labor, buys public land on favorable terms and discloses nothing to Parliament or the public.

Since the ouster last week of President Hosni Mubarak, of course, the military also runs the government. And some scholars, economists and business groups say it has already begun taking steps to protect the privileges of its gated economy, discouraging changes that some argue are crucial if Egypt is to emerge as a more stable, prosperous country.

“Protecting its businesses from scrutiny and accountability is a red line the military will draw,” said Robert Springborg, an expert on Egypt’s military at the Naval Postgraduate School. “And that means there can be no meaningful civilian oversight.”

Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the minister of defense and military production who now leads the council of officers ruling Egypt, has been a strong advocate of government control of prices and production. He has consistently opposed steps to open up the economy, according to diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks.

And already there are signs that the military is purging from the cabinet and ruling party advocates of market-oriented economic changes, like selling off state-owned companies and reducing barriers to trade.

As the military began to take over, the government pushed out figures reviled for reaping excessive personal profits from the sell-off of public properties, most notably Mr. Mubarak’s younger son, Gamal, and his friend the steel magnate Ahmed Ezz. On Thursday, an Egyptian prosecutor ordered that Mr. Ezz be detained pending trial for corruption, along with two businessmen in the old cabinet — former Tourism Minister Zuhair Garana and former Housing Minister Ahmed el-Maghrabi — as well as former Interior Minister Habib el-Adli.

But the military-led government also struck at advocates of economic openness, including the former finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali, who was forced from his job, and the former trade minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid, whose assets were frozen under allegations of corruption. Both are highly regarded internationally and had not been previously accused of corruption.

“That mystified everybody,” said Hisham A. Fahmy, chief executive of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt.

In an interview, Mr. Rachid said he felt like a scapegoat. “People who have been supporting liberal reforms or an open economy are being caught up in the anticorruption campaign,” he said. “My case is one of them.”

“Now there are a lot of voices from the past talking about nationalization — ‘Why do we need a private sector?’ ” he added. He declined to talk specifically about the military but said that in general within the government, “some people have tried to say that the cause of the revolution was simply economic reform.”

Though some Western analysts have guessed that the military’s empire makes up as much as a third of Egypt’s economy, Mr. Rachid said it was in fact less than 10 percent. But economists say that because of its vested interests they still worry that the military will impede the continuation of the transition from the state-dominated economy established under President Gamal Abdel Nasser to a more open and efficient free market that advanced under Mr. Mubarak.

Moreover, the military’s power to guide policy is, at the moment, unchecked. The military has invited no civilian input into the transitional government, and it has enjoyed such a surge in prestige since it helped usher out Mr. Mubarak that almost no one in the opposition is criticizing it.

“We trust them,” said Walid Rachid, a member of the April 6 Youth Movement that helped set off the revolt. “Because of the army our revolution has become safe.”

Some of the young revolutionaries at the vanguard of the revolt identify themselves as leftists or socialists. And the idea of liberalizing the economy was thrown into disrepute because of the corrupt way that the Mubarak government carried out privatization, bestowing fortunes on a small circle around the ruling party while leaving most Egyptians struggling against grinding poverty and rampant inflation.

“People think that liberalization creates corruption,” said Abdel Fattah el-Gibaly, director of economic research at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “I think we will go back, not exactly to socialism, but maybe halfway.”

And the Egyptian military, said Mr. Springborg of the Naval Postgraduate School, is happy to go along. “The military is like the matador with the red cape attracting the bull of resentment against the corruption of the old regime,” he said, “and they are playing it very successfully.”

Gen. Fathy el-Sady, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense Production, declined to comment, saying the minister in charge was tied up dealing with strikes at military-run companies.

The military has used its leverage in times of crises to thwart free market reforms before, most notably during the 1977 bread riots set off after President Anwar el-Sadat cut subsidies for food prices to move toward a free market. The military agreed to quell the unrest only after extracting a promise from Mr. Sadat that he would reinstate the subsidies, said Michael Wahid Hanna, who studies Egypt’s military at the Century Foundation in Washington.

Field Marshal Tantawi, the defense minister, and other senior officers were all commissioned before Mr. Sadat switched Egypt’s allegiance to the West in 1979. They trained in the former Soviet Union, where sprawling business empires under military control were not uncommon.

“In the cabinet, where he still wields significant influence, Tantawi has opposed both economic and political reforms that he perceives as eroding central government power,” the American ambassador at the time, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., wrote in one 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks.

“On economic reform, Tantawi believes that Egypt’s economic reform plan fosters social instability by lessening G.O.E. controls over prices and production,” the ambassador added, referring to the government of Egypt and calling Field Marshal Tantawi “aging and change-resistant.”

In a cable later that year describing the tensions pitting the military against the businessmen around Gamal Mubarak, the new ambassador, Margaret Scobey, wrote: “The military views the G.O.E.’s privatization efforts as a threat to its economic position, and therefore generally opposes economic reforms. We see the military’s role in the economy as a force that generally stifles free market reform by increasing direct government involvement in the markets.”

Mr. Mubarak, scholars and Western diplomats say, allowed the military to expand its empire, ensuring the allegiance of its officers and quieting discontent by dismantling other state-owned businesses. And with so many businesses under their control, the military’s top officials have doled out chief executive jobs and weekends at military-owned resorts to cultivate loyalty. Though deprivation and inequality were major complaints leading to the uprising, economists credit the Mubarak government with expanding the economy and increasing its growth rate by loosening state controls and attracting foreign investment.

But the Mubarak government carried out reforms from the top, without changing burdensome regulations that made it hard for small businesses to compete, and the benefits flowed mainly to a few. Most Egyptians felt, if anything, more impoverished, watching new Mercedeses and BMWs zip by donkey carts hauling garbage through the streets.

“The Mubarak government privatized basically by offering state properties to their cronies,” said Ragui Assaad, an economist who studies Egypt at the University of Minnesota.

Paul Sullivan, an expert on Egypt and its military at Georgetown University, said the military leaders were farsighted enough to see that stability would now require continued economic as well as political liberalization. But he also acknowledged the possibility of a return to the past. “There is a witch hunt for corruption, and there is a risk that the economy might go back to the days of Nasser,” the apex of centralized state control, he said.

    Egyptians Say Military Discourages an Open Economy, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18military.html

Egypt’s Missing Stir Doubts

on Military’s Vows for Change

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By LIAM STACK

CAIRO — Ramadan Aboul Hassan left his house one night about three weeks ago to join a neighborhood watch group with two friends and did not return. The next time their relatives saw the three men they were emerging Wednesday night from a maximum security prison, 400 miles from home, run by Egypt’s military. Some family members said they bore signs of torture, though others denied it.

While many here have cheered the military for taking over after last week’s ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and for pledging to oversee a transition to democracy, human rights groups say that in the past three weeks the military has also played a documented role in dozens of disappearances and at least 12 cases of torture — trademark practices of the Mubarak government’s notorious security police that most here hoped would end with his exit.

Some, like Mr. Aboul Hassan and his two friends, were not released until several days after the revolution removed Mr. Mubarak.

Now human rights groups say the military’s continuing role in such abuses raises new questions about its ability to midwife Egyptian democracy.

“The military is detaining people incommunicado, which is illegal, and so it is effectively disappearing people,” said Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch, which has documented four cases that it describes as involving torture. Amnesty International has documented three such cases, and the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters has documented five.

Human Rights Watch has also documented one case in which the military transferred a prisoner to the country’s feared State Security forces, where it says he was tortured.

Ms. Morayef said the cases of detention and torture did not appear to be “systematic,” but added, “It is enough to set off alarm bells and call for an investigation into abuses by the military police.”

Most victims were arrested by the military, she says, though two were detained by neighborhood watch groups and then handed over to soldiers. The interrogations accompanying abuse all revolved around victims’ suspected participation in the antigovernment protests that toppled the Mubarak government.

Hundreds of unidentified bodies have shown up at hospitals around the country, says the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters, deepening the uncertainty. On Wednesday, Egypt’s Health Ministry reported that 365 had died during the uprising and that 5,500 were injured.

Military officials said at a meeting of youth activists on Monday that they would search for those who had disappeared during the uprising, and confirmed that at least 77 people had been detained in fighting in Tahrir Square, according to notes of the meeting published on Facebook.

Local media reported that the army chief of staff, Sami Enan, had agreed to release all of those detained during the revolution, but rights groups complain that he did not commit to a timetable. They have seen little movement toward fulfilling the pledge.

Ramadan Aboul Hassan, 33, vanished well after the battle with the police around Tahrir Square had ended. On Jan. 29, after the police fled the city and the military stepped in, Ramadan left home with his nephew Ahmed Aboul Hassan, 22, and their friend Mostafa Mahrous Mostafa to join neighbors in fending off looters. Then they disappeared.

For 18 days Mohamed Aboul Hassan, 51, Ramadan’s eldest brother, worked the phones, each call introducing him to a new lieutenant or government bureaucrat offering a different story about the men’s whereabouts and counseling a different course of action.

The family combed hospitals and police stations and begged military officials they managed to get on the phone. They asked the national prison authority if the men’s names were in the country’s database of inmates, and were told they were nowhere to be found.

Five days after the disappearance, their families learned that the men had been arrested by the military under a bridge on nearby Revolution Street close to the local headquarters of military intelligence. Mohamed was called in to the intelligence office, given their national ID cards and asked to sign for them before he could take the cards home. He was not told why they had been arrested or when they would be released.

“I don’t understand why the government is doing this,” Mohamed said Tuesday, the height of the search. “If they would just give me some piece of information about them, it would mean so much for me.”

The military has little experience directly governing and policing the civilian population, leaving it ill equipped for tasks like notifying families of arrests or detentions, said Ahmed Ragheb, the executive director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a human rights organization. “The army is not prepared to operate an incarceration system or facilities.”

Early Tuesday afternoon, a contact in the military told the Aboul Hassan family that the three men had been released from Wadi Gedid maximum security prison in a distant southern province and put on a military train bound for Cairo. A short while later a cousin with friends working in the train station told them no such train existed, and an official at Wadi Gedid said the prison had no record of them.

Later, another prison official told Mohamed that the men were in the custody of the civil police in Upper Egypt, while a military official told another brother, Rabie, 36, that the men were awaiting military trials on unknown charges.

On Wednesday, Rabie hired a taxi and made the 400-mile journey to Wadi Gedid prison to ask about the men himself. He found them awaiting release with several hundred others, and said they bore the physical and psychological scars of torture.

The men had been detained at Hikestep Military Base, in the desert outside Cairo, before being sent to Wadi Gedid. They were beaten, whipped, exposed to electric shocks and suspended from the door frames of their cells, Rabie said. They were offered bread doused in gasoline and had guns held to their heads, he asserted. “They treated them like a herd of sheep,” he said.

After their release, Mohamed said, “They are psychologically traumatized and physically ill,” although he denied that they had been tortured. Because of concerns for their well-being, the Aboul Hassan family did not allow reporters access to the three men after their return to Cairo and none were interviewed for this article.

The Aboul Hassans are a poor family in an upper-class neighborhood. Ramadan, Ahmed and Mostafa are the children of men who tend the gardens and guard the doors at upscale apartments in the Heliopolis district of Cairo. Their homes are a grim warren of windowless concrete rooms in the building’s basement, sparsely furnished and bursting at the seams with children.

For weeks, the men’s recovered national ID cards were the only clues family members had about their fates.

“We joined the protests to liberate the country and end the problems of the regime,” said Rabie, who had accompanied his brother to Tahrir Square in the days before his arrest. His family’s ordeal at the hands of the military, an institution he said he respected, has shaken his faith in the revolution.

“After 18 days the regime is gone but the same injustices remain.”


Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, Enas Muthaffar and Dawlat Magdy contributed reporting.

    Egypt’s Missing Stir Doubts on Military’s Vows for Change, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18missing.html

Guru of the Revolution

February 17, 2011
By ROGER COHE
The New York Times

LONDON — When the history of the Egyptian Revolution gets written, a large place must be reserved in it for Pierre Sioufi, the bearded, twinkly-eyed, chain-smoking, larger-than-life guru of liberation who threw open his sprawling apartment overlooking Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the “kids” who demanded the right to connect.

I say a “large place.” Sioufi weighs in at some 300 pounds. If Tahrir Square during those 18 days had its elements of Woodstock — the plastic tents, the bleary-eyed folk at dawn, the all-we-can-really-do-is-love-one-another spirit — then he was its Jerry Garcia (with a touch of Allen Ginsberg).

Picture Sioufi at his cluttered desk, like a captain at the helm of a storm-tossed ship, reaching for his box of Swedish matches, lighting another Marlboro, waving in some group of Facebook “kids” (he always called them that) with their laptops, dressed in a T-shirt that says “Fel Meshmesh” (roughly “It will never happen”), searching for a charger in the pile tangled around a bottle of Maille vinegar, gazing out at glass-faced wooden bookcases with leather-bound volumes including “La Grande Encyclopédie,” eating his way through another bowl of lentils, writing messages to the world on his desktop, exhorting, welcoming and laughing.

There were never less than 40 people in Sioufi’s apartment, sometimes many more, out on the terrace with its panoramic view (and twisted cactuses); in the computer room where the “kids” did the Facebook work of coordination (often to the sound of Led Zeppelin); in the kitchen where somehow food never dwindled; threading their way down labyrinthine corridors beneath gilt-framed portraits hung at all angles; watching TV through palls of smoke; trying not to tread on Olive the cat or on the two terriers Coquette and Babo or on a woman curled up with her video camera on one of many mattresses scattered across parquet floors; plotting and praying and sometimes, at the sight of the immense crowd, just murmuring “Oh my God.”

At its most basic level, what’s gone on in Tunisia and Egypt, and what’s going on in Bahrain and Libya and Yemen and Iran, is about what happened in Sioufi’s apartment: the right to meet, to exchange views, to organize political campaigns, to connect. A big part of the Arab-Persian world’s problem — and the West’s problem in turn — has been that for decades about the only place people could gather in the security states of the region has been the mosque.

For the United States to support Mubarak and his ilk, and at the same time imagine violent Islamist extremism might erode, was delusional. Tahrir brought debate into the public sphere. It lifted the lid of the radicalizing Arab pressure cooker.

“I was just here by chance,” Sioufi, 50, told me. “I’m no more than a salon revolutionary, perhaps because I can afford it. If I couldn’t, maybe I’d be a real revolutionary!”

It was not easy, in the hubbub of what became known as “The House of the Revolution,” to get to the bottom of the Sioufi story — I’ll leave that to the historians. But there was money — a grandfather did well representing a German chemical company — and the building we were in had been constructed by his family.

Sioufi himself, in gray sweatpants, pepper-and-salt hair flying at all angles, had worked as an actor, an artist, a journalist; he had also devoted serious time to keeping work at bay.

“What’s an artist?” he mused. “I try to be as free as I can individually, use what I have to be as free as I can.”

Perhaps that sounds too highfalutin’ for the task of overthrowing a ruthless regime. But Sioufi was laser-like in his analysis — “Either Mubarak has to kill or he has to leave,” he told me early on — and he performed an immense practical feat in providing space, electricity and nurture to the diverse crowd that gathered beneath his roof.

I saw Muslim Brotherhood folk mingling with the likes of Sanaa Seif, aged 17, high school student, Facebook fiend (“I’ve no idea where my parents are, they’re activists like me.”) I heard all the dark humor between young computer-science majors plotting revolution (First geek: “I think we’ll be friends for life.” Second geek: “Yeah, either in prison or a free Egypt!”) Above all there was Sioufi, a personification of the uprising’s eclectic spirit, a Christian with images of the crucifixion hanging in this apartment and, he told me, a sign saying “Allah” at the entrance to his other Cairo place, and books like Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” lying around.

It all began with wanting to offer a “safe haven” for “the kids.” He was afraid for them, for Egypt’s youth. They were heroes, confronting Mubarak’s thugs. They needed a place to recover and tweet and, yes, eat. And so, in the serendipitous way of much of the uprising, the “Facebook flat,” as it was also known, took form.

On his own Facebook page, Sioufi’s “basic information” entry runs as follows: “Life’s a bitch — then it delivers six puppies, always more responsibilities.” Except that every once in a long while the puppy is freedom.

    Guru of the Revolution, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen18.html

Qat Got Their Tongues

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ALI AL-MUQRI

Sana, Yemen

IT occurs to me as I listen to the shouts of the young protesters in the streets here that they could use most of the chants of the Egyptian protesters verbatim — save for the ones about Suzanne Mubarak, the former first lady of Egypt. This is because the mere mention of any of the four wives of our president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, would be a shameful violation of a tribal taboo.

The state-controlled news media continue to assert that Yemen is neither Tunisia nor Egypt. But the president and his minions have been watching their backs since the success of the Egyptian revolution, as most of the revolutionary movements in Yemen have been influenced by earlier Egyptian events. The 1952 revolution in Egypt belatedly inspired the 1962 revolution in Yemen, which split our nation in half for nearly three decades. There is even a celebrated Tahrir, or Liberation, Square here in Sana, just as in Cairo.

It is not only the authorities who are nervous: most Yemenis are hoping to wake up one day and discover that the revolution has arisen earlier than they have; just like that, painlessly, with no losses. As much as they long to follow the path of Tunisia and Egypt, they are worried about the repercussions such a revolt might have, including a civil war should certain tribes align themselves with President Saleh.

In recent days, the president has met with tribal leaders in the Sana area and paid a visit to an army barracks. It’s a clear indication of his fears that the Islamist Congregation for Reform, or Islah Party, might infiltrate the two pillars of his regime, the tribes and the military. Islah, once a vital ally of the president’s, has thrown in its lot with the opposition.

For the last two weeks, members of Mr. Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress, have set up large tents in Tahrir Square, attempting to pre-empt any protests. Hundreds of tribesmen take shifts at the tents, raising banners in support of President Saleh. Cars with government markings deliver their meals, along with handouts of cash that they spend on the stimulant qat. They sit in their tents for hours each day, chewing qat and listening to preachers on loudspeakers urging Yemenis to love their country and protect it against “troublemakers” and “foreign agents.”

Until recently, the protest movement had been quite tame. On Feb. 3, for example, an online call went up for a demonstration at Sana’s central mosque; one young blogger urged his fellows to “stop using qat for one week only, for Yemen’s sake, for the sake of change and dignity.” Yet when I joined the protest around noon, there were only about 20 people, chanting slogans. “Tens of thousands of people joined the protest in the morning,” one of them told me, “but they’ve left now and will come back in the evening.”

As angry as they were with the government, they were equally frustrated with Islah. “We’re here to free the Yemeni people from the bonds of darkness,” another protester told me, “and there they are with loudspeakers beseeching God to break the siege of Gaza and bring down the Egyptian Pharaoh.” I stood for a while, listening to their chants: “If the people decide one day to choose life/then fate must heed their call”; “Ali, enough, enough/Leave, let yourself out”; and, when a police car passed by, “The army, the police and we/are all connected by our need for daily bread.”

The most striking was, “We will not sleep until the regime falls,” which Yemenis understand means that the protesters had foregone qat that afternoon (users tend to become lethargic after its stimulant effect wears off). Still, the large crowd of the morning never returned, apparently having succumbed to qat’s temptations.

More recently, however, the perseverance of young people like those 20 at the mosque seems to have paid off. For the last seven days there have been a series of localized but violent clashes between protesters and supporters of the regime backed by the police. Fortunately, Western news reports tell us that the police have so far fired their guns only into the sky as a warning. And the protests have spread across Yemen, to Aden, Taiz and other cities.

I, like many others, don’t think that President Saleh’s hastily made pledges — including his promises not to run for president again, to create a fund to employ university graduates and to increase wages and reduce income taxes — will assure his regime’s survival. The virus of revolution that overtook Tunisia and Egypt has taken hold.

To many here, that is a troubling thought. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen is tribal and could easily fall into civil war. Still, while I understand the risks, I believe that the future cannot be worse than the present. Yemen may be a fractured society, but I have faith that we can unite against a nepotistic regime that has plundered our resources and given us little but misery.


Ali al-Muqri is a novelist. This essay was translated by Ghenwa Hayek from the Arabic.

    Qat Got Their Tongues, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18muqri.html

Now Bahrain

February 17, 2011
The New York Times

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain is the latest autocrat to choose brutality, rather than reform, to try to silence his people’s demands for a more just government. His actions are unconscionable and miss the lessons of Egypt and Tunisia where violence only fed popular anger. Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali are now gone.

Protests in Bahrain were peaceful and festive on Wednesday when thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators — including children — bedded down in Pearl Square for the night. Hours later, hundreds of riot police stormed the area without warning, firing tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets and shotguns.

Nicholas D. Kristof of The Times interviewed paramedics who said they were beaten for treating the injured. At least five people were killed. Two other protesters were killed earlier in the week.

Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement was inspired by Egypt and Tunisia, but the grievances of its Shiite majority are longstanding. They compose 70 percent of the citizenry but hold only four of 23 cabinet slots. They are excluded from serving in the police and army. In last October’s election, the Shiites won less than half of the seats in the National Assembly, raising charges of vote-rigging.

King Hamad has repeatedly vowed both political and economic reforms but has never really delivered. Now the government is looking for a scapegoat — blaming Iran for the unrest. Tehran certainly never misses a chance to foment trouble. But the Shiites’ demands are legitimate, and the appeal of Iran and other extremists will only grow if the government continues on this path.

For too long, the United States has muted its criticism of what goes in Bahrain, to ensure the kingdom’s cooperation on security issues. Bahrain is home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet and an ally in efforts to counter Iran, terrorism and piracy.

After all of its backing and forthing on Egypt, we hoped the White House would have figured this one out. On Wednesday, President Obama criticized Iran’s crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, and pointedly did not mention Bahrain. On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did better, expressing strong opposition to the violence and support for reform.

Bahrain’s brutality is not only at odds with American values, it is a threat to the country’s long-term stability. Washington will need to push harder.

    Now Bahrain, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18fri2.html

Blood Runs Through the Streets of Bahrain

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MANAMA, Bahrain

As a reporter, you sometimes become numbed to sadness. But it is heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate Bahrain right now and watch as a critical American ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to crush a peaceful democracy movement and then lie about it.

This kind of brutal repression is normally confined to remote and backward nations, but this is Bahrain. An international banking center. The home of an important American naval base, the Fifth Fleet. A wealthy and well-educated nation with a large middle class and cosmopolitan values.

To be here and see corpses of protesters with gunshot wounds, to hear an eyewitness account of an execution of a handcuffed protester, to interview paramedics who say they were beaten for trying to treat the injured — yes, all that just breaks my heart.

So here’s what happened.

The pro-democracy movement has bubbled for decades in Bahrain, but it found new strength after the overthrow of the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. Then the Bahrain government attacked the protesters early this week with stunning brutality, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and shotgun pellets at small groups of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Two demonstrators were killed (one while walking in a funeral procession), and widespread public outrage gave a huge boost to the democracy movement.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa initially pulled the police back, but early on Thursday morning he sent in the riot police, who went in with guns blazing. Bahrain television has claimed that the protesters were armed with swords and threatening security. That’s preposterous. I was on the roundabout earlier that night and saw many thousands of people, including large numbers of women and children, even babies. Many were asleep.

I was not there at the time of the attack, but afterward, at the main hospital (one of at least three to receive casualties), I saw the effects. More than 600 people were treated with injuries, overwhelmingly men but including small numbers of women and children.

One nurse told me that she was on the roundabout, known as Pearl Square, and saw a young man of about 24, handcuffed and then beaten by a group of police. She said she then watched as they executed him at point-blank range with a gun. The nurse told me her name, but I will not use full names of some people in this column to avoid putting them at greater risk.

I met one doctor, Sadiq al-Ekri, who was lying in a hospital bed with a broken nose and injuries to his eyes and almost his entire body. He couldn’t speak to me because he was still unconscious and on oxygen after what colleagues and his family described as a savage beating by riot police who were outraged that he was treating people at the roundabout.

Dr. Ekri, a distinguished plastic surgeon, had just returned from a trip to Houston. He identified himself as a physician to the riot police, according to other doctors and family members, based partly on what Dr. Ekri, 44, told them before he lost consciousness. But then, they said, the riot police handcuffed him and began beating him with sticks and kicking him while shouting insults against Shiites. Finally, they said, the police pulled down his pants and threatened to rape him, although that idea was abandoned and an ambulance eventually was allowed to rescue him.

“He went to help people,” said his father, who was at the bedside. “It’s his duty to help people. And then this happened.”

Three ambulance drivers or paramedics told me that they had been pulled out of their ambulances and beaten by the police. One, Jameel, whose head was bandaged and his arm was in a cast, told me that police had clubbed him and that a senior officer had then told him: “If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”

A fourth ambulance driver, Osama, was unhurt but said that a military officer — who he said he believed to be a Saudi, based on his accent in Arabic — held a gun to his head and warned him to drive away or be shot. (By many accounts, Saudi tanks and other military forces participated in the attack, but I can’t verify that).

The hospital staff told me that ambulance service has now been frozen, with no ambulances going out on calls except with approval of the Interior Ministry.

Some of the victims, though not all, said that the riot police shouted anti-Shiite curses when they attacked the protesters, who were overwhelmingly Shiite. Sectarianism is particularly delicate in Bahrain because the Sunni royal family, the Khalifas, presides over a country that is predominately Shiite, and Shiites often complain of discrimination by the government.

Hospital corridors were also full of frantic mothers searching desperately for children who had gone missing in the attack.

In the hospital mortuary, I found three corpses with gunshot wounds. One man had much of his head blown off with what mortuary staff said was a gunshot wound. Ahmed Abutaki, a 29-year-old laborer, stood by the body of his 22-year-old brother, Mahmood, who died of a shotgun blast.

Ahmed said he blamed King Hamad, and many other protesters at the hospital were also demanding the ouster of the king. I think he has a point. When a king opens fire on his people, he no longer deserves to be ruler. That might be the only way to purge this land of ineffable heartbreak.

    Blood Runs Through the Streets of Bahrain,  NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18kristof.html

Arab revolts can boost anti-terrorism fight: UK

Thu Feb 17, 2011
12:57pm EST
Reuters
By Michael Holden and William Maclean

LONDON (Reuters) - Revolts by young Arabs seeking freedom are a "huge opportunity" for Western counter-terrorism because they weaken al Qaeda's argument that democracy and Islam are incompatible, Britain's Security Minister said on Thursday.

The minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, said the example set by ordinary Muslims seeking peaceful political change would counter the attraction violent extremism still exerted on a small number of young people in Britain's Muslim minority communities.

"We have, if we can get this right, a great vehicle for the promotion of Western values," Neville-Jones told Reuters in an interview, referring to a surge of anti-government protests in countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

"These young people ... are asking for greater freedoms, they are asking for the kind of Western values to be implanted in their society that they can see through the Internet.

"It should be regarded in my view as a huge opportunity."

Britain's counter-terrorism efforts are widely watched in Europe and beyond after a string of attacks on the West dating back to the 1990s by young Islamist militants educated in Britain, which critics say has long been complacent about Islamist radicalism in its Muslim communities.

The leader of the last successful militant attack in Britain, British-Pakistani Mohammad Sidique Khan, made an implicit criticism of democracy in a posthumous statement explaining his decision to coordinate suicide bombings that killed 52 people in London in 2005.

"WE NEED TO INTEGRATE"

Referring to the Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he drew a distinction between Western democracy and what he called his obedience to God, saying "your democratically elected governments perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you responsible."

The West should help political transition in Arab countries, said Neville-Jones, who is working on a new strategy to try to draw alienated Muslim youths away from extremism.

"We need to integrate," she said. "We need to be a single society and Muslims are as much a part of that as anybody else, and (for) extremists of any variety this is not welcome territory and not fertile ground for them."

Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's transnational militant network has traditionally drawn many recruits from Arab states, with Egyptians often figuring in senior positions. A principal ambition of al Qaeda is the violent overthrow of authoritarian Arab governments and their replacement by strict Islamic rule.

Bin Laden has said democracy is akin to idolatry as, according to him, it places men's desires and authority above God's. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has dismissed democracy as impious and as reflecting a state of "unbelief."

Neville-Jones suggested these notions were at odds with the push for democracy now seen in Arab countries.

IDEOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

"It does pose precisely the kind of ideological challenge back to the terrorist, (to) the sort of philosophy that has been promoted by the terrorists with their very deeply authoritarian, ideological and deeply conservative ideology, of the kind which really doesn't give people personal freedoms."

Neville-Jones said the Arab rebellions would be "of very great assistance to us" in promoting democracy among members of the country's estimated 1.8 million Muslim minority.

"We would certainly wish to ... demonstrate that being a Muslim and being part of a modern Western liberal democratic society are entirely compatible things," she said.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

    Arab revolts can boost anti-terrorism fight: UK, R, 17.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/us-protests-security-britain-interview-idUSTRE71G5KA20110217

Tunis renames square after man who sparked protests

Thu Feb 17, 2011
12:17pm EST
Reuters

TUNIS (Reuters) - Tunisian authorities renamed the main square in the capital Tunis after a vegetable seller whose suicide sparked the protests that toppled the regime.

The newly named Mohammad Bouazizi Square had previously been November 7 Square, marking the date in 1987 when former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali took power.

Bouazizi set himself on fire in December when police confiscated his goods and scales -- a desperate act that launched a wave of protests that led Ben Ali to flee to Saudi Arabia in January and inspired the uprising in Egypt that led President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

The renaming was announced Thursday by Tunis municipality.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; editing by Richard Valdmanis)

    Tunis renames square after man who sparked protests, R, 17.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/us-tunisia-square-idUSTRE71G57G20110217

Workers Strike Along Suez Canal

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — Hundreds of workers went on strike Thursday along the Suez Canal, one of the world’s strategic waterways, joining others across Egypt pressing demands for better wages and conditions in protests that have sent the economy reeling and defied the military’s attempt to restore a veneer of the ordinary after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall last week.

The labor unrest at textile mills, pharmaceutical plants, chemical industries, the Cairo airport, transportation sector and banks has emerged as one of the most powerful dynamics in a country navigating the military-led transition that followed an 18-day popular uprising and the end of Mr. Mubarak’s three decades of rule.

Banks reopened last week, but amid a wave of protests over salaries and management abuses promptly shut again this week. The opening of schools was delayed another week, and a date has yet to be set for opening the stock market, which some fear may plummet over the economic reverberations and anxiety about the political transition.

The military has repeatedly urged workers to end their strikes, to no avail.

“For 30 years, there were no protests at all — well, not really — and now that’s all there is,” Ibrahim Aziz, a merchant in downtown Cairo, said. “The situation’s a mess.”

The military leadership has sought for days to navigate a country in the throes of a political transition that could remake Egypt more dramatically than at any time since the monarchy was overthrown in 1952. In a series of statements it has outlined steps to amend the constitution and return Egypt to civilian rule within six months, though the exact date for elections for the presidency and Parliament was left ambiguous.

So far the military seems to enjoy broad popular support, not least for facilitating the departure of Mr. Mubarak to his residence in the Sinai town of Sharm el-Sheikh, though some have complained of decision-making that remains utterly opaque to the public. Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and critic of Mr. Mubarak, complained this week about that lack of transparency and the speed of the military-led transition.

Other critics have questioned why the military has refused to free thousands of political prisoners and lift emergency rule, which gave the Mubarak government wide powers in arresting and imprisoning people it deemed its opponents. Thursday marked the second day without the military’s issuing any communiqués on its intentions in the weeks ahead, and questions about forming political parties and civil rights are left unanswered.

“There has not been very much coming out about what I call the infrastructure — even the temporary infrastructure — for democracy,” a Western diplomat in Cairo said Thursday. “That seems to me an area where further clarification would be important.”

The diplomat said Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi has emerged as the clear leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to which Mr. Mubarak delegated power when he resigned Friday. “Tantawi seems to be the acting president of Egypt,” the diplomat said. Though the council has maintained contacts with the United States, through the Defense Department and the National Security Council, it has so proven disciplined in keeping its deliberations from diplomats and opposition leaders.

“What one would have liked to see is more transparency in this whole Supreme Council deliberation process,” the diplomat said under customary rules of anonymity.

Egypt’s revolution was, in some ways, remarkable for the consensus over its demands, primarily the end to Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian rule, with disparate ideologies subsumed in the narrative of a popular uprising. But already this week some of the fundamental rules that have underlined republican Egypt were being renegotiated.

The head of Al-Azhar, once one of the world’s foremost institutions of religious scholarship, has called for its leadership to be elected, not appointed by the government, a change that could reverse decades of the institution’s abject subordination to the state. The strikes may prove no less decisive in turning back years of privatization that left workers’ with fewer protections and more grievances.

In a statement Thursday striking workers in Mahalla el-Kobra, the center of the country’s textile industry and a stronghold of labor resistance in the Nile Delta, said they would no longer take part in a government-controlled labor union but rather join the new Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Union, which it said was set up on Jan. 30.

The striking workers at the Suez Canal Authority said their protests in the three major canal cities — Suez, Port Said and Ismailiya — would not interfere with the operations of the canal, which links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. One of the world’s busiest waterways, the canal is one of Egypt’s primary sources of revenue and a major transit route for global shipping and oil.

Other strikes were reported at textile plants in the coastal city of Damietta and a pharmaceutical factory in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. Taken together they are thought to number in the tens of thousands of workers in one of Egypt’s most pronounced episodes of labor unrest. The problems point to a growing challenge for both the military and caretaker government: How to satisfy demands as the economy staggers.

“Everyone’s looking for money and there’s none to be had,” Hani Shukrallah, a political analyst and editor, said.

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting.

    Workers Strike Along Suez Canal, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18egypt.html

Abbas Casts Doubt on Palestinian Elections

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, cast doubt on Thursday about the chances of holding presidential and parliamentary elections this year, despite an announcement over the weekend that they would be held by September.

The plans for elections, long overdue in the Palestinian territories, came after the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and appeared to be a preemptive move to stave off calls for more democracy and government accountability.

But the idea was immediately rejected by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, and Mr. Abbas told a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Thursday that it would be “unacceptable to hold elections in the West Bank without Gaza.”

“Without this, we cannot hold them,” he said at a joint news conference with the president of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, who was visiting Ramallah, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa.

The Palestinians have not held elections since 2006, when Hamas won a majority in Parliament, leading to a year and a half of uneasy power sharing and a brief civil war in Gaza. That ended in June 2007, when Hamas seized control there, routing forces loyal to Mr. Abbas. His authority is now confined to the West Bank.

Hamas says that Mr. Abbas, whose term has technically run out, does not have the legitimacy to call elections. It also has also said that it will not cooperate with any elections in the absence of a reconciliation agreement with Fatah, the secularist party led by Mr. Abbas. All attempts at reconciliation have failed so far.

The two Palestinian territories are physically split by Israeli territory. Palestinian analysts have warned in the past that holding general elections in the West Bank alone would not produce a legitimate leadership for the Palestinian people and would only deepen the divide.

The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank has also called for local council elections to be held in July.

The Palestinian population has shown few signs of restiveness through this period of regional turmoil. While some small demonstrations have taken place, either in support of Mr. Abbas or in solidarity with the Egyptian and Tunisian people, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have prevented other unauthorized gatherings.

Earlier Thursday, Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians in northern Gaza, near the border with Israel. Residents reported heavy machine gun fire from Israeli watchtowers in the northwest corner of the coastal enclave. They said that a helicopter gunship also participated in the operation.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces opened fire at Palestinian militants who were approaching the border fence in order to plant explosives, hitting three. The military does not allow Palestinians in the border zone.

The Gaza-based Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights said that the three men had gone near the border to collect seashells, which they intended to sell. But the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small group, identified one of the men as one of its members and said he was killed while carrying out a mission for its military wing, The Associated Press reported.


Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.

    Abbas Casts Doubt on Palestinian Elections, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18palestinians.html

Protesters Face Off for 7th Day in Yemen

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF

SANA, Yemen — Yemeni police fired shots into the air on Thursday as thousands of demonstrators, some supporting President Ali Abdullah Saleh and some seeking his downfall, clashed for hours in central Sana, bombarding one another with a hailstorm of rocks on the seventh straight day of violent unrest here.

“There is no state, there is no state,” the president’s adversaries chanted as they set fire to two tires in the center of downtown Rabat Street, sending plumes of black smoke into the air in what seemed an escalation of the confrontation that drew in a broader cross-section of Yemeni society among the president’s foes.

For several hours, the two sides clashed before government supporters, wielding sticks and makeshift weapons, broke through and dispersed the antigovernment protesters who ended up taking refuge in the university.

The delicate position of the United States seemed as evident here as it was in places like Bahrain, where pro-American leaders are facing calls from adversaries on the street to make way for democratic change. The clamor has already toppled the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, both close allies of Washington.

“We want Obama to take Saleh to America and lock him in a hotel in America,” said one antigovernment protester in Sana on Thursday. Like others, the demonstrator identified himself by only his first name, Sultan, because of fear of retribution. He described himself as a 26-year-old, unemployed law graduate.

Others said they had modeled their protest on the examples of Tunisia and Egypt, where campaigners used social networking sites to propel their uprisings. “We are turning into being like Tunisia, like Egypt,” said Amjad, another antigovernment protester who said he was a 21-year-old media student.

Much of the region’s protest has been inspired by economic unrest and a deep sense that long-entrenched regimes are not able to meet the aspirations of a new, educated generation. Some have also complained that pervasive corruption blocks their way to advancement.

“I graduated from university and I don’t have job,” said Hassan Al-Jawfy, 27. “I offered my resumé to many sectors of the government, and they said I had to pay money to get a job. This is the rule here.”

Mr. Saleh promised to step down in 2013 after earlier demonstrations, and opposition leaders had held off from street protests before this week as they awaited Mr. Saleh’s reaction to new demands, including a promise that Mr. Saleh would not to pass power to one of his sons.

In the meantime, younger demonstrators impatient for change have taken to the streets, and for a week, Yemen’s protest has evolved into daily clashes between opponents and supporters of the president.

About 2,000 antigovernment protesters hurled rocks as the president’s supporters, gathered on bridges, bombarded them from above with stones.

Large numbers of police officers took up positions around the capital here on Wednesday in an attempt to end six days of running street battles between small groups of pro- and antigovernment protesters. On Thursday, police officers fired assault rifles into the air in a vain attempt to halt the clashes.

Mr. Saleh has attributed the effort to drive him and other regional leaders from office to “foreign agendas,” according to the state-run Saba news agency, quoting a telephone conversation between Mr. Saleh and the king of Bahrain, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who is also facing widespread street protests.

“There are schemes aimed at plunging the region into chaos and violence targeting the nation’s security and the stability of its countries,” Mr. Saleh told the king, the state agency reported.

In the southwestern city of Taiz on Wednesday, thousands of students who have occupied the streets in overnight protests that began a week ago vowed to remain there until Mr. Saleh stepped down. The police have arrested more than 100 demonstrators and around 30 have been injured in skirmishes with pro-government groups who have periodically set upon the antigovernment encampment wielding sticks and hurling stones.

There were also fresh protests by southern secessionists in Aden, the port city east of Taiz, where demonstrations have been notably more violent. One protester, about 20 years old, was said to have been shot to death in battles with the police on Wednesday, according to reports from the city, as hundreds took to the streets in several neighborhoods.

Though Yemen’s southern secessionists have also sought inspiration from a regional wave of protests, their demand for independence is longstanding and their goals differ from those of the students protesting against Mr. Saleh in Sana and other areas, including Taiz, which is not part of the area that secessionists have claimed.

Since Sunday, when police officers in Sana attacked more than 1,000 young protesters with batons and stun guns, the police have mostly refrained from attacking them, instead stepping in to break up skirmishes between rival groups.

Despite the increased police presence on Wednesday, the two groups clashed at the university and there were reports of several injuries as government supporters attacked students with batons. Reuters reported that the police had fired shots in the air to separate the groups, and that some of those protesting in favor of the government were picked up by luxury cars and sped away.

Several foreign journalists were singled out and set upon by pro-government groups, Reuters reported. Since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, security forces have made scattered efforts to prevent foreign journalists from covering the spread of demonstrations, which have taken on a younger and more spontaneous cast in recent days.

Mr. Saleh, an important ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism, has in recent weeks sought to counter the rising tide of opposition and preserve his three-decade rule by raising army salaries, halving income taxes and ordering price controls, among other concessions. But as protests by young Yemenis continued, it was clear that those efforts were not stemming the unrest.

Government supporters and armed police officers continued to occupy Sana’s central square — which, like its Cairo counterpart, is called Tahrir Square. The pro-government men, mostly from the outskirts of the capital and some carrying weapons, have pitched tents in the square and vowed to remain until the unrest ends. Police officers moved to restrict access with concertina wire to prevent antigovernment protesters from gathering there.


J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Protesters Face Off for 7th Day in Yemen, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18yemen.html

Libyan Unrest Spreads to More Cities, Reports Say

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL

PARIS — Exiled opponents of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said on Thursday that protests mirroring the turmoil in the Arab world had broken out in several parts of the country on a so-called Day of Rage to challenge his 41-year-old iron rule — the region’s longest.

But the state media in Libya offered a counter-narrative, showing Libyans waving green flags and shouting in support of Colonel Qaddafi, ignoring the exiles’ claims of a crackdown by security forces deploying snipers and helicopters against protesters.

The official JANA news agency said the government supporters wanted to affirm their “eternal unity with the brother leader of the revolution.”

There was little verifiable information about the protests, which began late on Tuesday in Benghazi, Libya’s restive second city, and spread to other areas. The scale of the protests was unclear, but in a land where any display of dissent or opposition is rapidly quashed the violence seemed to present a highly unusual open challenge to Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.

“Today the Libyans broke the barrier of fear, it is a new dawn,” Faiz Jibril, an opposition leader in exile told The Associated Press. But that assessment had yet to be tested against Colonel Qaddafi’s repressive internal security apparatus. Several opposition Web sites and exiled leaders said the authorities had deployed military snipers and commandos to suppress the unrest.

In the initial protests at least 14 people were injured and one killed, the Human Rights Watch advocacy group said on Thursday. But as the confrontation spread to the city of Al Beyda east of Benghazi, a Web site opposing Colonel Qaddafi said four protesters had been killed by government forces. Other accounts put the death toll higher.

Quryna, a privately owned newspaper in Benghazi, reported the firing of a local security chief over the violent crackdown in Al Beyda.

On Thursday, according to news reports from Tripoli, traffic moved freely on Omar al-Mokhtar street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, banks and shops were open and there was no increased security presence.

But Mohammad Ali Abdellah, the deputy leader of an exiled opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said in a telephone interview from London that roads leading to Tripoli’s central Green Square had been closed off and that people living nearby had been warned in text messages from the authorities not to join any protests.

In Al Beyda, he said, hospital authorities had appealed for international help to cope with an influx of around 30 or 40 people with gunshot wounds after security forces opened fire on protests that erupted on Wednesday night and continued into early Thursday.

His account could not be immediately verified.

Mr. Abdellah also said separate protests broke out again on Thursday in Benghazi, Misratah, east of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, and Al-Kurah in the southeast. Other reports from opposition Web sites spoke of protests in several other places including Zentan, Rijban, southwest of Tripoli, and Shahat, southwest of Benghazi.

Video provided by an opposition leader showed marchers in Zentan chanting: “Down with Qaddafi. Down with the regime,” The A.P. said.

Colonel Qaddafi has sought to defuse the protests, doubling the salaries of state employees and releasing 110 accused Islamic militants. But some of the protests appear to draw on much older grievances. They were first set off on Tuesday night when the police arrested a human rights lawyer representing families of 1,000 detainees massacred in 1996 at the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Colonel Qaddafi took power in a bloodless coup in 1969 and has built his rule on a cult of personality and a network of family and tribal alliances supported by largess from Libya’s oil revenues.

    Libyan Unrest Spreads to More Cities, Reports Say, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/africa/18libya.html

Factbox: Key political risks to watch in Bahrain

Thu Feb 17, 2011
1:33pm EST
Reuters

MANAMA (Reuters) - Thousands of mainly Shi'ite demonstrators, emboldened by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, have held protests in Bahrain since a "Day of Rage" on February 14 to demand more say in the Sunni-ruled Gulf Arab kingdom.

Opposition politicians say at least five protesters have been killed in clashes with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. On February 17 police forcibly dispersed demonstrators camped out in Pearl Square, in the capital Manama.

Here are some of the main political risks in Bahrain:

POLITICAL TENSION

Sectarian tension has long simmered in Bahrain, where the Shi'ite majority complains of unequal access to state jobs, housing and healthcare, which the government denies.

The Sunni al-Khalifa family rules 1.3 million people, about half of them foreigners. Shi'ites want Bahrain to stop trying to change the demographic balance by granting citizenship and jobs in the military and security services to Sunnis from elsewhere.

Wefaq, the main Shi'ite party with 17 of parliament's 40 seats, competes with Sunni Islamist groups and the secular group Waad. It walked out of the assembly on February 16, demanding a more democratic constitution for the tiny island kingdom and said on February 17 it would quit the assembly in protest over the deaths.

The introduction of a new constitution and parliamentary elections a decade ago helped calm Shi'ite discontent, but the assembly's lack of influence revived tension in a youthful population, half of whom are aged below 30.

Shi'ite street protests before a parliamentary election in October 2010 led to a crackdown by the Sunni rulers.

Bahrain relies on limited oil and gas revenue, which gives it a per capita gross domestic product just below that of South Korea. It has tried to diversify into trade and finance.

In the long term, the government needs to phase out subsidies, cut public spending and introduce taxes to pare its fiscal deficit and meet the cost of infrastructure investment.

It may find it hard to enact economic reforms without granting more political participation.

WHAT TO WATCH:

- Continued protests and efforts to repress them.

- Any decision by Wefaq to boycott future elections.

IRAN CONFLICT

The United States and Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, see Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, as a bulwark against neighboring Shi'ite power Iran.

Gulf Arab states fear Iran's rising influence and share Western suspicions that it is seeking a nuclear arms capability. Tehran says its nuclear program is for civilian use only.

Bahrain has close political and commercial ties with Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Arab power which is particularly wary of Iran.

Yet Iran's influence in Bahrain is limited because Bahraini Shi'ites look more to clerics in more moderate centers such as Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq than to those in the Islamic Republic.

Bahrain, with its U.S. naval base, could be a target of Iranian reprisals if the United States or Israel attacked Iran.

The Manama naval base lets the U.S. military protect Saudi oil installations and the Gulf waterways used to transport oil, without any sensitive presence of Western troops on Saudi soil.

WHAT TO WATCH:

- Status of nuclear talks between Iran and the West.

- Any sign of military strike against Iran.

ENERGY

Bahrain, like its Gulf Arab neighbors, has seen a rapid increase in natural gas consumption as its economy has grown.

It consumed 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas per day (cfd) in 2007 and expects consumption to rise to 2 billion cfd in less than a decade. It produces about 1.7 billion cfd.

Plans to import gas have been hampered by political tension with regional producers Qatar and Iran, threatening growth.

Aluminum Bahrain (Alba), for example, raised $338 million in an initial public offering in November 2010 but has had to postpone expanding output partly due to lack of energy.

Talks on importing 1 billion cfd of gas from Iran have faltered since 2009 when an Iranian official made comments that appeared to question Bahrain's sovereignty.

Oil markets fear a wave of popular unrest that has already toppled the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt could spread further in the Gulf Arab region, which accounts for 40 percent of global oil production. Such worries helped push Brent crude prices to a 28-month high of $104 a barrel on February 17.

WHAT TO WATCH:

- Status of gas talks with Iran.

- Status of plans to build facility to import liquefied natural gas.

BANKING

Bahrain's status as a regional banking, trading and Islamic finance center is also at risk with $10 billion parked in mutual funds in the kingdom.

Bahrain has made itself a regional banking hub for the Gulf's oil wealth. Its banks hold assets of about $211 billion.

The cost of insuring Bahrain's debt against default could also rise further. Debt insurance costs climbed to 18-month highs in the five-year credit default swap market on Thursday.

Contagion fears could spread to regional sovereign debt while Bahrain's sovereign rating may also come under pressure.

WHAT TO WATCH

- Short term decline in business until the situation improves

- Bahrain's sovereign rating

(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)

    Factbox: Key political risks to watch in Bahrain, R, 17.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/us-bahrain-risks-idUSTRE71G5XX20110217

Brutal Crackdown in Moderate Bahrain

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MANAMA, Bahrain

As a reporter, you sometimes become numbed to sadness. But it is just plain heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate Bahrain today and watch as a critical American ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to crush a peaceful democracy movement and then lie about it.

This kind of brutal repression is normally confined to remote and backward nations, but this is Bahrain! An international banking center. An important American naval base, home of the Fifth Fleet. A wealthy and well-educated nation with a large middle class and cosmopolitan values.

To be here and see corpses of protesters with gunshot wounds, to hear an eyewitness account of an execution of a handcuffed protester, to interview paramedics who say they were beaten for trying to treat the injured – yes, all that just breaks my heart.

So here’s what happened.

The pro-democracy movement has bubbled for decades in Bahrain, but it found new strength after the overthrow of the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. Then the Bahrain government attacked the protesters early this week with stunning brutality, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and shotgun pellets at small groups of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Two demonstrators were killed (one while walking in a funeral procession), and widespread public outrage gave a huge boost to the democracy movement.

King Hamad initially pulled the police back, but early on Thursday morning he sent in the riot police, who went in with guns blazing. Bahrain television has claimed that the protesters were armed with swords and threatening security – that’s preposterous. I was on the roundabout earlier that night and saw many thousands of people, including large numbers of women and children, even babies. Many were asleep.

I was not at the roundabout at the time of the attack, but afterward at the main hospital (one of at least three to receive casualties) I saw the effects. More than 600 people were treated with injuries, overwhelmingly men but including small numbers of women and children.

One nurse told me that she was on the roundabout and saw a young man of about 24, handcuffed and then beaten by a group of police. She said she then watched as they executed him at point-blank range with a gun. The nurse told me her name, but I will not use full names of some people in this column to avoid putting them at greater risk.

Dr. Ahmed Jamal, the president of the Bahrain Medical Society, said that one doctor, Sadiq Ekri, a surgeon, had been badly beaten by riot police while attempting to treat the injured. Dr. Ekri has a suspected fracture at the base of his skull, according to Dr. Jamal.

Dr. Jamal also said that the authorities are suspected of taking other injured people to prison, and he called on the government to allow the wounded to be treated.

Three ambulance drivers or paramedics told me that they had been pulled out of their ambulances and beaten by the police. One, Jameel, whose head was bandaged and his arm was in a cast, told me that police had clubbed him and that a senior officer had then told him: “If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”

A fourth ambulance driver, Osama, was unhurt but said that a military officer – whom he said was a Saudi, based on his accent in Arabic – held a gun to his head and warned him to drive away or be shot. (By many accounts, Saudi tanks and other military forces participated in the attack, but I can’t verify that).

The hospital staff told me that ambulance service has now been frozen, with no ambulances going out on calls except with approval of the Interior Ministry.

Some of the victims, though not all, said that the riot police shouted anti-Shiite curses when they attacked the protesters, who were overwhelmingly Shiite. Sectarianism is particularly delicate in Bahrain because the Sunni royal family, the Khalifas, presides over a country that is predominately Shiite, and Shiites often complain of discrimination by the government.

Hospital corridors were also full of frantic mothers searching desperately for children who had gone missing in the attack.

In the hospital mortuary, I found three corpses with gunshot wounds. One man had much of his head blown off with what mortuary staff said was a gunshot wound. Ahmed Abutaki, a 29-year-old laborer, stood by the body of his 22-year-old brother, Mahmood, who died of a shotgun blast.

Ahmed said he blamed King Hamad, and many other protesters at the hospital were also demanding the ouster of the king. I think he has a point: when a king opens fire on his people, he no longer deserves to be ruler. That might be the only way to purge this land of ineffable heartbreak.

    Brutal Crackdown in Moderate Bahrain, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18kristof.html

Bahrain’s Military Takes Control of Key Areas in Capital

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

MANAMA, Bahrain — The army took control of this city on Thursday, except at the main hospital, where thousands of people gathered screaming, crying, collapsing in grief, just hours after police opened fired with birdshot, rubber bullets and tear gas on pro-democracy demonstrators camped in Pearl Square.

As the army asserted control of the streets with tanks and heavily armed soldiers, the once- peaceful protesters were transformed into a mob of angry mourners chanting slogans like “Death to the King,” while the opposition withdrew from the parliament and demanded that the government step down.

But for those who were in Pearl Square in the early morning hours, when police opened fired without warning on thousands who were sleeping there, it was a day of shock and disbelief. Many of the hundreds taken to the hospital were wounded by shotgun blasts, doctors said, their bodies speckled with pellets or bruised by rubber bullets or police clubs.

In the morning, there were three bodies already stretched out on metal tables in the morgue at Salmaniya Medical Complex: Ali Mansour Ahmed Khudair, 53, dead, with 91 pellets pulled from his chest and side; Isa Abd Hassan, 55, dead, his head split in half; Mahmoud Makki Abutaki, 22, dead, 200 pellets of birdshot pulled from his chest and arms.

Doctors said that at least two others had died and that several patients were in critical condition with serious injuries. Muhammad al-Maskati, of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights said that he received at least 20 calls from frantic parents searching for young children lost in the chaos of the attack.

In the bloodstained morgue, Ahmed Abutaki, 29, held his younger brother’s cold hand, stroking his arm tearfully recalling the last time they spoke Wednesday night. “He said ‘This is my chance, to have a say, so that maybe our country will do something for us,”’ he recalled of his brother’s decision to camp out in Pearl Square. “My country did do something, it killed him.”

Emotions ran high in this small Persian Gulf nation, even as the foreign minister, Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, defended the police action as a last resort meant to pull Bahrain back from the “brink of a sectarian abyss.” Tanks rolled into the city center, many stores remained closed, sidewalks and public spaces stayed eerily empty.

There was a collective anxiety gripping the country as it waited to see whether the opposition would challenge the government’s edict to stay off the streets, and if it did, whether the government would follow through on its threat to use “every strict measure and deterrent necessary to preserve security and general order.”

There seemed little chance for now that the confrontation would fade away, as both sides said they would not back down.

“You will find members of Al Wefaq willing to be killed as our people have been killed,” said Khalil Ebrahim al-Marzooq, one of 18 party members to announce Thursday that they had resigned their seats in Parliament. “We will stand behind the people until the complete fulfillment of our demands.”

Arab leaders have been badly shaken in recent days, with entrenched presidents in Egypt and Tunisia ousted by popular uprisings and with protest demonstrations flaring around the region. And now as the public’s sense of empowerment spread, the call to change has reached into this Persian Gulf kingdom. That has raised anxiety in Saudi Arabia, connected to Bahrain by a bridge, and Kuwait, as well, both Sunni governed states with restive Shiite populations. Officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council met here to discuss how to handle the crisis.

The international community also weighed in, concerned as yet another Arab leader decided to try using lethal force to put down peaceful opposition protests. Bahrain is small, but it is a strategic ally of the United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet here, and the royal family has long been an ally in efforts to fight terrorism and push back the regional influence of Iran.

But here in the streets, people were not focused on geopolitics. The events centered on very domestic demands for democracy, rule of law and social justice. The island nation is 70 percent Shiite and is governed by a king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who is Sunni. When protests started on Monday, the demands were for a constitutional monarchy, but in the anger of the day the chants evolved into calls for tearing down the whole system.

“Death to Khalifa! Death to Khalifa!” chanted a frantic crowd massed in the driveway of the hospital. “Bring down the government,” cried out the thousands of men and women. Several people literally collapsed, their eyes rolling back, in the frenzied moment.

The fearful and hostile mood was set the night before, when the police opened fire. Doctors, victims and witnesses gave a detailed account of how the police assault unfolded, revealing details of a calculated, coordinated, attack that closed in from all sides, offering no way out.

“They had encircled us and they kept shooting tear gas and live rounds,” said Ali Muhammad Abdel Nabi, 25, as he rested in a hospital bed after having been hit by shotgun pellets on both his legs and his shoulder. “The circle got closer and closer.”

Doctors at the hospital said that 226 demonstrators had been recorded as being treated in the hospital and that many more were given aid on the run. A surgeon, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said that for hours on Thursday the Health Ministry prevented ambulances even from going to the scene to aid victims. The doctor said that in the early morning, when the assault was still under way, police officers beat a paramedic and a doctor and refused to allow medical staff to attend to the injured.

“They refused to let ambulances into the roundabout the help the injured,” the doctor said.

At the scene, the doctors said protesters were handcuffed with thick plastic binders, laid on the wet ground and stomped on by the police.

“I said, they will attack, and they did,” said Hussein Mohammed, 39, a member of the opposition party Al Wefaq. “It’s a slaughter.”

The hospital corridors were packed with people angry and crying, the beds filled with many wounded by shotgun blasts. Hassan Mohammed, 19, who also had shotgun pellets in his legs, said that after the assault he saw uniformed men tossing injured into refrigerator trucks, though he had no idea where they were taken. There was no way to confirm his account.

Outside the hospital, the police stayed away, as the fuming crowd of mourners remained on the medical campus. But not far away, in the symbolic center of the city, beneath the towering statue of a pearl on a setting, soldiers patrolled, armored vehicles blocked all arteries and a circle of barbed wire was laid around the square. Within 24 hours, the site of the first tolerated expression of public dissent, had been transformed into a memorial to fear and death.

“We are a people of mourners now, we have nothing,” said Taghreed Hussein, 35, as she and her friends crowded the hospital waiting in grief.


Nadim Audi contributed reporting.

    Bahrain’s Military Takes Control of Key Areas in Capital, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html

Bahrain Unrest Presents Diplomatic Puzzle for Obama

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — For the second time in two weeks violence has broken out in a restive Arab ally of the United States, confronting the Obama administration with the question of how harshly to condemn a friendly leader who is resisting street protests against his government.

This time it is Bahrain, a postage-stamp monarchy in the Persian Gulf, where the United States Navy bases its Fifth Fleet. At least five people were killed early Thursday when heavily armed riot police officers fired shotguns and concussion grenades into a crowd occupying a traffic circle in the capital, Manama.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, on Thursday to “express deep concern about recent events,” a State Department official said. Mrs. Clinton urged “restraint moving forward” and pushed Sheik Khalid, a member of the royal family that rules Bahrain, to speed up a program of political and economic reforms.

But President Obama has yet to issue the blunt public criticism of Bahrain’s rulers that he eventually leveled against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — or that he has repeatedly aimed at Iran’s leaders. Such criticism would be an even sharper break for the United States than it was in the case of Egypt, since just two months ago Washington was holding up Bahrain as a model of reform for the region.

What the administration does with Bahrain is likely to be a telling indicator of how it will deal with the balance between protecting its strategic interests, and promoting democracy — a balance some critics said it never properly struck in its sometimes awkward response to the Egyptian turmoil. What will make this diplomatic maneuvering even more complicated is Bahrain’s proximity to Saudi Arabia, another Sunni monarchy with even greater strategic value to the United States.

Though much smaller than Egypt, Bahrain is another pillar of the American security architecture in the Middle East. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, a Sunni Muslim, is a staunch ally of Washington in its showdown with Iran’s Shiite theocracy. In diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks, he urged administration officials to take military action to disable Iran’s nuclear program.Bahrain’s situation is also more complicated than Egypt’s because the uprising there is not purely a case of economically thwarted young people rebelling against a hidebound regime. It has a majority Shiite population that is expressing long-simmering resentments against the Sunni minority that rules with a tight grip.

The large Shiite population fans suspicions that Iran will seek to exploit instability there to extend its influence to the other side of the Persian Gulf, even though Shiite parties in Bahrain insist that this is not a religious dispute.

Another complication is that King Hamad, while hardly a constitutional monarch, allowed municipal and legislative elections last fall, for which he was praised by Mrs. Clinton during a visit to Bahrain in December.

“The fact that so many citizens voted was a strong demonstration of their resolve to take part in their public life,” she said. “I am impressed by the commitment that the government has to the democratic path that Bahrain is walking on.”

That history, as much as the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet, may explain why the administration has not been quicker to condemn King Hamad.

Bahrain, with its strategic location but its minuscule military, has been sheltered under an umbrella of American military protection for more than half a century, and since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 the military ties have become stronger. But while the Fifth Fleet calls the island its home base, that is mainly a matter of convenience rather than necessity to the United States Navy. The Navy has only 2,300 personnel there working in the comfort of an isolated compound, and making relatively little use of local port facilities for its major warships, which stay mainly at sea and at other anchorages. The island is a favorite place for shore leave in the Gulf, as the culture is relatively open and alcohol is openly available. The two militaries do train together and have even mounted joint combat operations.

    Bahrain Unrest Presents Diplomatic Puzzle for Obama, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18diplomacy.html

Pentagon Watching Unrest in Bahrain

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By J. DAVID GOODMAN

The Pentagon said on Thursday that it was closely monitoring unrest in Bahrain, the base of operations for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

The tiny Persian Gulf nation has occupied a strategic place in the global structure of the American military for decades. The Navy has had a presence there for more than 60 years, well before it took over a British army base east of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, in 1971, when the country achieved full independence.

The 100-acre naval base is in the suburb of Juffair six miles from the capital’s central Pearl Square, where thousands of antigovernment protesters were attacked by security forces early Thursday morning. The base is home to 4,800 service members and their families and 1,300 contractors and civilians working for the Department of Defense, according to a spokeswoman for the Navy.

Tens of thousands of sailors are deployed around the region on the fleet’s ships, which includes Coast Guard cutters, Navy destroyers and two aircraft carriers: the Enterprise and the Carl Vinson.

Jennifer Stride, the spokeswoman, said the unrest that has shaken the nation had not affected the base or the two piers that the Navy uses to dock its largest ships. Those piers, about five miles north of the base, are not owned by the United States military but are used with permission of the Bahraini government.

Despite the fact that the base is physically separated from its piers, Ms. Stride said there was “no concern” about being cut off from those facilities if protests were to widen. “There are no demonstrations at all in the vicinity of the base or those piers,” she said.

The mission of the Fifth Fleet is broad and includes counterterrorism, air support for the war in Afghanistan, antipiracy efforts around the Gulf of Aden and military exercises with regional allies, including Bahrain. The United States and Bahrain signed a 10-year defense pact in 1991 that includes American training of Bahraini forces; it was renewed in 2001, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

“We work with their militaries to build their skill sets and to build partnerships with countries in the region,” said Lt. Frederick M. Martin, a spokesperson for the fleet.

The fleet monitors 2.5 million square miles of water that touch 20 countries along the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean. The area includes the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab el Mandeb at the southern tip of Yemen — all strategic passages for international shipping.

“As a long-time ally and home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, Bahrain is an important partner and the department is closely watching developments there,” Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. “We also call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from violence.”

    Pentagon Watching Unrest in Bahrain, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18fleet.html

Protests Spread to More Iraqi Cities

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and DURAID ADNAN

BAGHDAD — Unrest continued to spread in Iraq on Thursday, with new protests erupting in several cities and reports from law enforcement officials that private security guards in a city in Kurdistan fired on a group of protesters who tried to storm the political offices of the region’s leader.

Early reports from law enforcement officials said that five people had been killed and dozens injured in that city, Sulaimaniya. But the head of the health department there later said that only one person had died.

Protesters have been calling for better government services, including more electricity, and in some cases, for local government officials to resign.

The demonstrations, although over long-festering grievances that neither the American military nor successive Iraqi governments solved, appear to have been inspired by unrest elsewhere in the Middle East.

The protests in Sulaimaniya and in the eastern city of Kut, where three people died Wednesday, were far more violent than others that have popped up around Iraq over the past few weeks.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, at a press conference in Baghdad, suggested that the protests were something of a positive development, although he cautioned against violence.

“I am happy to see the Iraqis are able to protest," Mr. Maliki said, saying that the ability to challenge the government had been only a “dream” under Saddam Hussein. “But the protesters should not set fire to a building. We should express our demands in a civilized manner.”

Mr. Maliki also acknowledged that Iraqis had a right to be upset with such problems as sporadic electricity, but he blamed these problems on Mr. Hussein’s government and said Iraq still needs time to recover from the former dictator’s rule and the war.

Insurgent violence also continues to disrupt the country. In Muqdadiya, a city 50 miles northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded killing seven and injuring 30. Among the dead was one policeman.

In Sulaimaniya, the protesters attacked the headquarters of the political party headed by the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani.

At first, guards fired their guns in the air, according to Adel Abdulah Hamid, a member of parliament from Mr. Barzani’s party. But when the protesters continued throwing rocks at the building, the guards opened fire.

The authorities imposed a curfew from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Many jewelry store owners emptied their stores of products because they were concerned that riots might break out.

Meanwhile, in Kut, about 1,000 protesters took to the streets demanding the release of 45 people arrested Wednesday after clashes with government security forces.

The protesters on Wednesday had set the provincial government headquarters and governor’s home on fire after security forces fired on them as they threw rocks at the building, demanding that the governor resign. Three people died in the melee and at least 27 were injured, including a security officer.

The protesters in Kut have called on the province’s governor, Latif Hamad al-Tarfa, to resign over accusations that he stole money from the government and failed to improve the economy and electrical supply.

A donkey with the word “the governor” scrawled on its side stood with demonstrators in front of the headquarters on Thursday.

“We will stay here in the street until the governor walks out,” said Mahdi al-Yasiry, a 37-year old engineer who is unemployed. “Everything in this province is bad. No gas. No electricity. No jobs. No nothing.”

Kut, a mostly Shiite city of about 850,000, is about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad and is one of the poorest cities in Iraq. The authorities there imposed a curfew at 5 p.m. but a local law enforcement official said he expected that 500 protesters outside of government buildings would be allowed to camp there.

According to Akel Salah, a 27-year old who took part in the protest, said his brother was arrested during the demonstrations.

“I am calling his phone, but it is switched off,” he said. “His wife and son are going crazy,” he said.

Mr. Salah said that he and other protesters had assembled tents on the streets so they could sleep there overnight, a tactic used in Egypt where protesters set up camp in a busy Cairo square. He said they would remain until their demands were met.

In Basra, about 600 people gathered in front of the provincial headquarters, calling for the governor’s ouster.

And in the northern city of Kirkuk about 400 people protested in front of a government building, calling for better services for widow and orphans.

The protesters there shouted: “We want justice. Where are our rights? Protect the orphans from the thieves. We are hungry in a country of oil."


Employees for The New York Times contributed reporting from Sulaimaniya, Erbil, Diyala, Kirkuk, Basra and Kut.

    Protests Spread to More Iraqi Cities, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html

Egypt Military Rulers Face Iran Warship Passage

February 17, 2011
Filed at 1:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's new military rulers faced their first unwelcome diplomatic exposure on Wednesday as Israel reported that two Iranian warships were approaching the Suez Canal to pass through for the first time since 1979.

The two navy vessels planned to sail through the canal, one of the world's busiest waterways and a vital source of foreign currency for Egypt's economy, en route to Syria, Israel said, calling it a "provocation" by the Islamic Republic.

Such navy ships have the right to pass under international law, analysts said, but noted the scenario was not the kind of diplomatic challenge the new military rulers would relish.

Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel in its 1979 treaty and is a pivotal ally of the United States in the Middle East region. The United States and Israel are arch-adversaries of Iran, an ally of Syria.

"For warships to pass through the canal, approval from the ministry of defense and the ministry of foreign affairs is needed and this applies to all warships owned by any country," a Canal official told Reuters. No notice had been given so far.

Neil Partrick, an independent UK-based Middle East expert, said he presumed Iran decided on the ships' mission before Egypt was engulfed in the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last week and that the operation was driven by long-time military and security cooperation between Tehran and Damascus.

"Egypt is in a sense the guarantor of free passage of goods and people through the Canal. So you could say this might be a provocative move at a time when Egypt is moving into a period of uncertainty. Nevertheless the Iranians would say they have a right to the canal and they have simply chosen to exercise it."

On the domestic front, Egypt's ruling military command was trying to get their country back to normal after the 18-day revolution that rewrote modern Egyptian history.

Some Egyptian workers ignored a call by the military to return to work on Wednesday, and a committee hammered out constitutional changes to pave the way for democracy after 30 years of Mubarak's iron rule.

The Higher Military Council had urged Egyptians to put aside the revolutionary ardor, expressed in protests and strikes about poor pay and working conditions, in the interest of national unity and restarting the damaged economy.

Banks are closed across Egypt due to protests and unrest, having a spillover effect across many sectors of the economy, while over 12,000 textile workers went on strike in the city of Mahalla el-Kubra and industrial action also hit Cairo airport.

Motivated by uprisings in Egypt and in Tunisia, hundreds of people, angry at the arrest of a rights campaigner, clashed with police and government supporters in the Libyan city of Benghazi. There have also been clashes in Iran, Bahrain and Yemen.

"The ripple effect of the Egyptian revolution is shaking Middle Eastern dictators to their foundation," said Fawaz Gerges, a London School of Economics Middle East expert.

FRENZY OF Rumor

There was a frenzy of rumor about the health of Mubarak, 82, who is holed up at his residence in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh after flying from his Cairo palace. In one of his final addresses, Mubarak said he wanted to die in Egypt.

One Saudi official in Riyadh said: "He is not dead but is not doing well at all and refuses to leave. Basically, he has given up and wants to die in Sharm." The official added that Saudi Arabia had offered to be his host.

Life was far from normal five days after Mubarak was forced from power by a whirlwind uprising, with troops and tanks on the streets of Cairo, schools and banks closed and Egyptians still finding their new found freedom hard to believe.

A committee, set up to amend the constitution within 10 days as a prelude to parliamentary and presidential elections in six months, also met as the military dismantles the mechanisms used to maintain Mubarak's rule. The Higher Military Council has already dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution.

Members of the newly formed 19-person pro-democracy Council of Trustees of the Revolution appeared at a news conference in downtown Cairo to say its main goal was to unite ranks, protect the revolution and open a dialogue with the military.

WASHINGTON SUSPICIONS

The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which did not play a leading role in the revolution but has been Egypt's best organized opposition group for many years, has a member on the committee drawing up the constitutional amendments.

That member said the ruling military council had pledged to lift emergency laws before parliamentary and presidential elections are held. It was not immediately possible to confirm whether the council had given such a guarantee.

Some secular leaders fear that racing into presidential and parliamentary elections in a nation where Mubarak suppressed most opposition activity for 30 years may hand an edge to the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak.

Washington regards the Brotherhood with suspicion.

"I would assess that they are not in favor of the treaty (with Israel)," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. But the Brotherhood was "only one voice in the emerging political milieu," Clapper said.

Opposition leaders welcomed the military's commitment to a swift handover to civilian rule, but called for the release of political prisoners and the lifting of emergency laws.

Pro-democracy leaders plan a "Victory March" on Friday to celebrate the revolution, and perhaps remind the military of the power of the street.

With no clear leadership, the youth movement that was pivotal to the revolution due to its use of social networking sites to organize protests is seeking to overcome divisions and expects to announce a new political party on Thursday.

Uncertainty remains over how much influence the military, which receives $1.3 billion a year in U.S. aid, will try to exert in reshaping a corrupt and oppressive ruling system which it has propped up for six decades.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said military aid was of "incalculable value," helping Egypt's armed forces to become a capable, professional body.

"Changes to those relationships ... ought to be considered only with an abundance of caution and a thorough appreciation for the long view, rather than in the flush of public passion and the urgency to save a buck," he said.

(Reporting by Marwa Awad, Edmund Blair, Alexander Dziadosz, Shaimaa Fayed, Andrew Hammond, Alistair Lyon, Sherine El Madany, Tom Perry, Yasmine Saleh, Tom Pfeiffer, William Maclean, Patrick Werr, Jonathan Wright, Dina Zayed and Amena Bakr in Saudi Arabia; writing by Peter Millership; editing by Mark Heinrich and Philippa Fletcher)

    Egypt Military Rulers Face Iran Warship Passage, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/02/17/world/international-us-egypt.html

Digital media and the Arab spring

Feb 16, 2011
16:46 EST
Reuters
By Philip N. Howard,
author of “ The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam,”
and director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington.
The opinions expressed are his own.

President Obama identified technology as one of the key variables that enabled and encouraged average Egyptians to protest. Digital media didn’t oust Mubarak, but it did provide the medium by which soulful calls for freedom have cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East. It is difficult to know when the Arab Spring will end, but we can already say something about the political casualties, long-term regional consequences and the modern recipe for democratization.

It all started with a desperate Tunisian shopkeeper who set himself on fire, which activated a transnational network of citizens exhausted by authoritarian rule. Within weeks, digitally-enabled protesters in Tunisia tossed out their dictator. It was social media that spread both the discontent and inspiring stories of success from Tunisia across North Africa and into the Middle East.

The protests in Egypt drew the largest crowds in 50 years, and a second dictator fell from power. The discontent spread through networks of family and friends to Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen. Autocrats have had to dismiss their cabinets, sometimes several times, to placate frustrated citizens. Algerians had to lift a 19-year “state of emergency” and are gearing for demonstrations over the weekend. Even Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has had to make concessions to activists brave enough to raise street protests against government housing policy.

But perhaps the most important casualty in terms of global politics is the U.S. preference for stability over democracy in North Africa and the Middle East. This preference, expressed in different foreign policies, seems untenable when groundswells of public opinion mobilize for democracy.

What are the lessons for the West? First, Islamic fundamentalists may terrorize parts of the region, but a larger network of citizens now has political clout, largely because of social media. The Muslim Brotherhood is no longer the only way to organize political opposition. In a digital world, older ideologically recalcitrant political parties may not even be the most effective way to organize effective political opposition.

Second, democratization has become more about social networks than political change driven by elites. The U.S. needs to spot when a dictator’s social networks fragment to the point that he is incapable of managing his regime. More urgently, the U.S. needs to take serious note when networks of family and friends align — increasingly through digital media — on a set of grievances that political elites simply cannot or will not address.

So what are the lessons for Tunisia and Egypt’s neighbors in the region? In this global, digital media environment, it is going to be increasingly difficult for the strong men of North Africa and the Middle East to rig elections. It will also be increasingly difficult to suspend democratic constitutions and pass power to family members. In the West, we may not think of these things as significant steps. But historically, closing options for authoritarian rule has been an important part of democratization. Giving a dictator less room to maneuver is as much a part of democratization as is running the first successful election.

Finally, what does it all mean for democratization? The Arab Spring has already brought down two dictators. Regardless of whether others will fall in the next few days or weeks, terms and conditions for authoritarian rule in North Africa and the Middle East have changed. With even a modicum of outside support, democracy in these countries can be home grown.

The West has a significant opportunity to help people across these regions enshrine the democratic norms we value and they seek. America should issue the right kinds of rhetorical and practical support, such as working hard to keep the Internet infrastructure open and publicly accessible. Taking advantage of this opportunity means understanding the ingredients for democratization — especially digital media.

    Digital media and the Arab spring, R, 16.2.2011, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/02/16/digital-media-and-the-arab-spring/

Tunisia. Egypt. Bahrain?

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MANAMA, Bahrain

The gleaming banking center of Bahrain, one of those family-run autocratic Arab states that count as American allies, has become the latest reminder that authoritarian regimes are slow learners.

Bahrain is another Middle East domino wobbled by an angry youth — and it has struck back with volleys of tear gas, rubber bullets and even buckshot at completely peaceful protesters. In the early-morning hours on Thursday here in the Bahrain capital, it used deadly force to clear the throngs of pro-democracy protesters who had turned Pearl Square in the center of the city into a local version of Tahrir Square in Cairo. This was the last spasm of brutality from a regime that has handled protests with an exceptionally heavy hand — and like the previous crackdowns, this will further undermine the legitimacy of the government.

“Egypt has infected Bahrain,” a young businessman, Husain, explained to me as he trudged with a protest march snaking through Manama. Husain (I’m omitting some last names to protect those involved) said that Tunisia and Egypt awakened a sense of possibility inside him — and that his resolve only grew when Bahrain’s riot police first attacked completely peaceful protesters.

When protesters held a funeral march for the first man killed by police, the authorities here then opened fire on the mourners, killing another person.

“I was scared to participate,” Husain admitted. But he was so enraged that he decided that he couldn’t stay home any longer. So he became one of the countless thousands of pro-democracy protesters demanding far-reaching change.

At first the protesters just wanted the release of political prisoners, an end to torture and less concentration of power in the al-Khalifa family that controls the country. But, now, after the violence against peaceful protesters, the crowds increasingly are calling for the overthrow of the Khalifa family. Many would accept a British-style constitutional monarchy in which King Hamad, one of the Khalifas, would reign without power. But an increasing number are calling for the ouster of the king himself.

King Hamad gave a speech regretting the deaths of demonstrators, and he temporarily called off the police. By dispatching the riot police early Thursday morning, King Hamad underscored his vulnerability and his moral bankruptcy.

All of this puts the United States in a bind. Bahrain is a critical United States ally because it is home to the American Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and Washington has close relations with the Khalifa family. What’s more, in some ways Bahrain was a model for the region. It gives women and minorities a far greater role than Saudi Arabia next door, it has achieved near universal literacy for women as well as men, and it has introduced some genuine democratic reforms. Of the 40 members of the (not powerful) Lower House of Parliament, 18 belong to an opposition party.

Somewhat cruelly, on Wednesday I asked the foreign minister, Sheik Khalid Ahmed al-Khalifa, if he doesn’t owe his position to his family. He acknowledged the point but noted that Bahrain is changing and added that some day the country will have a foreign minister who is not a Khalifa. “It’s an evolving process,” he insisted, and he emphasized that Bahrain should be seen through the prism of its regional peer group. “Bahrain is in the Arabian gulf,” he noted. “It’s not in Lake Erie.”

The problem is that Bahrain has educated its people and created a middle class that isn’t content to settle for crumbs beneath a paternalistic Arab potentate — and this country is inherently unstable as a predominately Shiite country ruled by a Sunni royal family. That’s one reason Bahrain’s upheavals are sending a tremor through other gulf autocracies that oppress Shiites, not least Saudi Arabia.

Bahrain’s leaders may whisper to American officials that the democracy protesters are fundamentalists inspired by Iran. That’s ridiculous. There’s no anti-Americanism in the protests — and if we favor “people power” in Iran, we should favor it in Bahrain as well.

Walk with protesters here, and their grievances seem eminently reasonable. One woman, Howra, beseeched me to write about her brother, Yasser Khalil, who she said was arrested in September at the age of 15 for vague political offenses. She showed me photos of Yasser injured by what she described as beatings by police.

Another woman, Hayat, said that she had been shot with rubber bullets twice this week. After hospitalization (which others confirmed), she painfully returned to the streets to continue to demand more democracy. “I will sacrifice my life if necessary so my children can have a better life,” she said.

America has important interests at stake in Bahrain — and important values. I hope that our cozy relations with those in power won’t dull our appreciation that history is more likely to side with protesters being shot with rubber bullets than with the regimes doing the shooting.

    Tunisia. Egypt. Bahrain?, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/opinion/17kristof.html

Freed by Egypt’s Revolt, Workers Press Demands

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

CAIRO — Egyptian workers and the country’s military chiefs squared off again on Wednesday as strikes and labor protests spread to the Cairo airport and the nation’s largest textile factory, despite pleas by the military for people to get back to work.

Economists have warned that the labor unrest is deepening an already catastrophic financial crisis and scaring off foreign investors. At the same time, the ruling Supreme Military Council has made increasingly desperate pleas to the workers and their leaders to end the strikes.

On Wednesday, cellphone users in Egypt received text messages from the military exhorting the workers to do the right thing. “Some of the sectors organizing protests, despite the return to normal life, are delaying our progression,” one of the messages said.

A labor movement that was fragmented and hemmed in by former President Hosni Mubarak’s government exploded once the police state collapsed. In part, the strikes are an effort by workers to catch up on wages that have been eaten away by inflation. In some places, the strikes seemed to reflect opportunism, as people all over the country wonder what the revolution can do for them.

But they also seem to underscore the growing confidence of workers whose activism in recent years — despite a ban on strikes and the formation of independent unions — served as a critical root of the revolution. The workers’ role grew in the days before Mr. Mubarak stepped down, as strikes involving thousands of workers spread across the country.

“They were afraid the movement in Tahrir could not continue forever,” said Rahma Refaat of the Center for Trade Union and Worker Services, a pro-labor, nonprofit group. “If the workers came to the movement it would be very important. And it played a very big role.”

Five days after Mr. Mubarak’s resignation, the strikes were not as widespread as they were during the height of the protests, but they have not stopped, hobbling the public sector and private companies as workers demand wage increases, changes in management and solutions to long-running disputes.

The strikes have closed the banks, stalled buses in Cairo and crippled some textile mills. Police officers, airport employees, ambulance drivers and electrical engineers have carried out protests. Journalists have risen up against their managers. The government has struggled with its response.

“All ministers here are displeased with the strikes,” Magdy Radi, the cabinet’s spokesman, said in an interview. “It is hampering our work as a caretaker government. But it is an issue for the Supreme Council to take care of, not us.”

Despite initial reports that the military would ban strikes, the generals have so far settled for warnings. On Tuesday, they military issued a communiqué urging Egyptians to tone down the labor protests, citing the consequences for the economy. On Wednesday, it sent its text messages.

The recent strikes build on what labor organizers contend was their critical role in the uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak: a grass-roots mobilization that seemed to find its own steam without the help of Facebook or Twitter or any kind of a national labor network.

One labor organizer and 20 of his colleagues, using cellphones, spread the word of a strike to a textile mill in Alexandria and a chemical factory in Aswan. The health technicians’ union reached out to steelworkers. Fliers were distributed all over the country last week by organizations like the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt and Ms. Refaat’s group.

One flier said: “Three hundred young people have paid with their lives as a price for our freedom. The path is open for all of us.”

That labor leaders could organize strikes on the spur of the moment should come as no surprise, they say. They developed tight bonds over “many years of meetings and joint struggle for our rights,” said Muhammad Abdelsalam al-Barbari of the Coordinating Committee for Labor Freedoms and Rights. “It was natural during the protests to ask around about what labor action is being taken here and there.”

The movement had been building for years, despite the heavy hand of the security services and an authorized trade union federation that was seen as collaborating with the government.

Joel Beinin, a Stanford professor who has followed Egyptian labor movements, said strikes over the past decade accelerated in the past six years in response to the government’s efforts to privatize the economy. Mahalla el-Kobra, the center of the country’s textile industry, became a stronghold of labor resistance, and remains so.

The workers never developed strong connections to the Internet activists who became the most visible face of the uprising, like the April 6 Youth Movement, which was actually named for a labor action. “By and large, there wasn’t any organic connection between workers and middle-class movements for democracy,” Mr. Beinin said.

The differences were stark: the Facebook activists — patriotic and well intentioned — commanded huge anonymous audiences, but until recently had trouble mobilizing them. The workers knew and trusted one another and could mobilize readily, but their activism was local.

As the protesters filled Tahrir Square last week, the labor strikes went national, and included a sit-in by workers for the Suez Canal Authority, an alarming development for Mr. Mubarak’s government.

Now, amid talk of forming an independent national labor organization, the workers’ strikes and protests seem likely to continue. A protest outside Cairo’s television building this week was typical, as workers from the Public Transportation Authority called for higher wages and the resignation and indictment of the authority’s leader.

“Prices have risen so much that if I buy some lemons to treat a sore throat, I find myself bankrupt for the month,” said a Transportation Ministry employee, Abdelrahman Khalil. “The governor has to resign and be put on trial immediately.”

Emad Mekay and Liam Stack contributed reporting.

    Freed by Egypt’s Revolt, Workers Press Demands, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17labor.html

Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.

Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.

Administration officials did not say how the report related to intelligence analysis of the Middle East, which the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, acknowledged in testimony before Congress, needed to better identify “triggers” for uprisings in countries like Egypt.

Officials said Mr. Obama’s support for the crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo, even if it followed some mixed signals by his administration, reflected his belief that there was a greater risk in not pushing for changes because Arab leaders would have to resort to ever more brutal methods to keep the lid on dissent.

“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”

At the time, officials said, President Hosni Mubarak appeared to be either digging in or grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him. Parliamentary elections scheduled for November were widely expected to be a sham. Egyptian police were jailing bloggers, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had returned home to lead a nascent opposition movement.

In Yemen, too, officials said Mr. Obama worried that the administration’s intense focus on counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda was ignoring a budding political crisis, as angry young people rebelled against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an autocratic leader of the same vintage as Mr. Mubarak.

“Whether it was Yemen or other countries in the region, you saw a set of trends” — a big youth population, threadbare education systems, stagnant economies and new social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter — that was a “real prescription for trouble,” another official said.

The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.

The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo.

Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.

By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.

The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab leaders for resisting change.

“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”

Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.

While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress.

    Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17diplomacy.html

Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes.

It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raquib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”

In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raquib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”

Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)

In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.

“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”

Not everyone is so impressed. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians.

Still, just as Mr. Sharp’s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is contracting.

Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary.

In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raquib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does not like it.

He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said. He has another manuscript in the works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr. Sharp to adopt the scientist’s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the foreword to Mr. Sharp’s first book, about Gandhi.)

In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

    Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17sharp.html

Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

From northern Africa to the Persian Gulf, governments appeared to flounder over just how to outrun mostly peaceful movements, spreading erratically like lava erupting from a volcano, with no predictable end.

The protests convulsed half a dozen countries across the Middle East on Wednesday, with tens of thousands of people turning out in Bahrain to challenge the monarchy, a sixth day of running street battles in Yemen, continued strikes over long-suppressed grievances in Egypt and a demonstrator’s funeral in Iran turning into a brief tug of war between the government and its opponents.

Even in heavily policed Libya, pockets of dissent emerged in the main square of Benghazi, with people calling for an end to the 41-year rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Iraq, accustomed to sectarian conflict, got a dose of something new: a fiery protest in the eastern city of Kut over unemployment, sporadic electricity and government corruption. And the protesters in Bahrain were confronted Thursday morning by riot police officers who rushed into the main square in Manama firing tear gas and concussion grenades.

The unrest has been inspired partly by grievances unique to each country, but many shared a new confidence, bred in Egypt and Tunisia, that a new generation could challenge unresponsive authoritarian rule in ways their parents thought impossible.

Leaders fell back on habitual, ineffective formulas. A ban on strikes announced by the week-old military government in Egypt was ignored. The Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, called his Bahraini counterpart, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, to commiserate about the region’s falling victim to “foreign agendas,” according to the state-run Saba news agency.

“There are schemes aimed at plunging the region into chaos and violence targeting the nation’s security and the stability of its countries,” the news agency quoted Mr. Saleh as telling the king.

On one hand, each protest was inspired by a distinctive set of national circumstances and issues — dire poverty and a lack of jobs, ethnic and religious differences, minority rule, corruption, or questions of economic status.

But there was also a pervasive sense that a shared system of poor governance by one party, one family or one clique of military officers backed by brutal secret police was collapsing. A new generation has served notice that the social contract in play in the decades since independence around World War II was no longer valid.

Much of the generation in their 40s and 50s tried to effect change, but first accepted the empty promises of the rulers that change was coming. When it did not, many grew politically apathetic.

The protests are a fire alarm that the promises are not going to work anymore, said Sawsan al-Shaer, a Bahraini columnist. But governments that have stuck around for 20 to 40 years are slow to realize that, she said.

“Now the sons are coming, the new generation, and they are saying, ‘I don’t care that my father agreed with you — I am asking for more, and I am asking for something else,’ ” Ms. Shaer said.

Most rulers have surrounded themselves with a tight coterie of advisers and security officers for so long that they believe the advice that just a few young people are knocking around outside and will tire in good time, she said, even after the fall of the presidents in Tunisia and Egypt.

“The rulers don’t realize there is a new generation who want a better job, who want to ask what is happening, where did you spend the money?” Ms. Shaer said. “My father did not ask. I want to ask.”

The growing population throughout the 3,175-mile zone from Tehran to Tangier, Morocco, has changed too much, analysts believe, for the old systems to work.

“There is a contradiction between educating a lot of your population and creating a white-collar middle class and then ruling with an iron hand,” said Juan R. Cole, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Michigan.

The continued eruptions present a particular challenge to the United States. It is caught between broadly supporting democracy in the region and tolerating the stability guaranteed by despots, analysts said. In addition, its ability to influence events is particularly limited with foes like Iran.

President Obama’s administration was accused of waffling on Egypt, trying to please the protesters while not really pushing President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of the United States, to leave. It faces a similar dilemma in Bahrain, a crucial base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

“For decades, the U.S. sort of prioritized stability over democracy because of oil and Israel,” said Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan who is the head of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The current policy is not sustainable,” he said, but changing it toward so many countries at once will be neither easy nor quick.

A main problem is the lack of a discernible end to the spreading protests. They could die down if governments engage in serious political changes, analysts said, and if the public is willing to accept gradual change. But old approaches like raising salaries or promising reforms as soon as the marchers disperse will only fuel the protest epidemic.

“Governments can no longer keep claiming they can take their time,” Mr. Muasher said, “can no longer invoke the need for a homegrown process as an excuse to do nothing.”

In Bahrain, tens of thousands of people, virtually all Shiites, poured into Pearl Square on Wednesday. They demanded changes in a system that they say has discriminated against them for decades on issues like housing, jobs and basic civil rights.

The scene had seemed more like a picnic earlier in the day, complete with deliveries of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but the crowd swelled at night, tying up roads as far as the eye could see and creating a peaceful celebration of empowerment unparalleled for the country’s Shiites, who make up about 70 percent of Bahrain’s 600,000 citizens.

But early Thursday morning, hundreds of riot police officers surrounded the square, firing tear gas containers and concussion grenades at the demonstrators. At least two people died as the officers aggressively emptied the square, according to witnesses at a nearby hospital and news agency reports.

In Egypt, the military government issued its initial estimate of the death toll during the 18 days leading up to Mr. Mubarak’s resignation. At least 365 civilians died, not including police officers and prisoners, said the health minister, Ahmed Sameh Farid.

Despite two warnings in three days from the government to halt protests and strikes, hundreds of airport employees protested inside the terminals at Cairo International Airport for higher wages and health benefits, The Associated Press reported. Flights were not disrupted.

Textile workers also walked out, and a group of 60 women and community groups condemned a panel that was appointed to rewrite the constitution for failing to include a single woman.

In Iran, students were thwarted in their attempt to hold a separate memorial service for Saane Zhaleh, an art student who was killed Monday during the protests, the largest in more than a year. The authorities staged an official funeral for Mr. Zhaleh, saying he was a vigilante, which the opposition called a lie.

But students said they were blocked from attending the official funeral, with Basiji vigilantes overwhelming the campus of the Tehran University of Art. The vigilantes also prevented the fewer than 100 students who had shown up early from staging their own memorial.

“He was one of us, a member of the Green movement, and they stole him from us,” a student who tried to attend the funeral said via an Internet link. She spoke anonymously out of fear for her own safety.

In Yemen, police officers were deployed in large numbers around Sana, the capital, and in Aden and the town of Taiz in an attempt to end street battles.

Students again organized protests at the capital’s central university, calling for Mr. Saleh’s ouster. But there were also clashes between antigovernment and pro-government demonstrators.

In Kut, Iraq, security forces opened fire, killing at least three people, according to a local government official. Protesters then stormed the governor’s headquarters and his house, burning both buildings. At least 27 people were injured, the official said. The protest was the most violent in Iraq since unrest began in the region last month. Until now, there had been several small, scattered demonstrations calling for better government services.

Wednesday’s protests were organized by a group called the Youth of Kut, which wants the governor of the province to step down because it says he has failed to create jobs and increase the supply of electricity. The protesters also say the governor, Latif Hamad al-Tarfa, has stolen money from the government.

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from Paris; J. David Goodman from New York; Laura Kasinov from Sana, Yemen; Michael S. Schmidt from Baghdad; and Michael Slackman from Manama, Bahrain.

    Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17protest.html

Police in Bahrain Clear Protest Site in Early Morning Raid

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and NADIM AUDI

MANAMA, Bahrain — Without warning, hundreds of heavily armed riot police officers rushed into Pearl Square here early Thursday, firing tear gas and concussion grenades at the thousands of demonstrators who were sleeping there as part of a widening protest against the nation’s absolute monarchy.

Men, women and young children ran screaming, choking and collapsing.

The square was filled with the crack of tear gas canisters and the wail of ambulances rushing people to the hospital. Teams of plainclothes police officers carrying shotguns swarmed through the area, but it was unclear if they used the weapons to subdue the crowd.

“There was a fog of war,” said Mohammed Ibrahim as he took refuge in a nearby gas station. He was barefoot, had lost his wallet and had marks on his leg where he said he had been beaten. “There were children, forgive them.”

At least two people were killed in the mayhem, according to witnesses at a nearby hospital and news agency reports. Many people were injured in the chaos — trampled, beaten or suffocated by the tear gas.

The unrest posed another diplomatic challenge to the United States as it struggles with how to respond to largely peaceful movements against entrenched rulers. Bahrain has long been a strategically important American ally, hosting the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Only hours before Thursday’s crackdown on the protests, the square had been transformed from a symbol of the nation — anchored by a towering monument to its pearl-diving history — into a symbol of the fight for democracy and social justice that has been rocking autocratic governments all across the Middle East. Tens of thousands of people had poured into the square during the day, setting up tents, giving rousing speeches and pressing their demands for a constitutional democracy.

By 11 p.m. Wednesday, the square had started to quiet down. Young men sat smoking water pipes, while young children slept on blankets or in tents. At 2:45 a.m. Thursday, the camp was quiet, those awake still reflecting on the remarkable events of the day. And then, the blue flashing lights of police vehicles began to appear, encircling the square. At first there were four vehicles, then dozens and then hundreds.

Wearing white crash helmets, the police rushed the square.

“Everybody was sleeping, they came from upside and down,” said Zeinab Ali, 22, as she and a group of women huddled, crying and angry, in small nearby market.

The protest had begun on Monday, when young organizers called for a “Day of Rage,” modeled on the uprisings in Egypt or Tunisia. On that day, the police were unforgiving, refusing to allow demonstrators to gather, overwhelming them with tear gas and other rounds. One young man was killed, shot in the back by the police. A day later, another young man, a mourner, also was killed, shot in the back.

That galvanized the opposition and under pressure from the United States, the king withdrew his police force from the streets.

For a time, it appeared that change might be coming quickly to Bahrain, a tiny nation in the Persian Gulf ruled for more than 200 years by the Khalifa family. The royal family is Sunni while the majority of the nation’s 600,000 citizens are Shiite.

The Shiite community has long complained of being marginalized and discriminated against.

On Wednesday, as the protesters gained momentum, Shiite opposition leaders issued assurances that they were not being influenced by Iran and were not interested in transforming the monarchy into a religious theocracy. Those charges are frequently leveled against them by Sunni leaders here.

Still, the leaders of the largest Shiite political party, Al Wefaq, announced that they would not return to Parliament until King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa agreed to transform the nation into a constitutional democracy with an elected government.

By evening, crowds spilled out of the square, tied up roads for as far as the eye could see and united in a celebration of empowerment unparalleled for the country’s Shiites.

“They say you are few and you cannot make changes,” said Ali Ahmed, 26, drawing cheers from the crowd as he spoke from a platform. “We say, ‘We can, and we will.’”

“The people want the fall of the regime,” the crowds chanted on the darkened square, their words echoing off the towering buildings nearby.

Late at night, thousands of people remained, hoping to establish a symbolically important base of protest in much the same way Egyptians took over Tahrir Square to launch their successful revolution against Hosni Mubarak.

But the leadership’s newfound tolerance for dissent was a mirage.

Bahrain, while a small Persian Gulf state, has considerable strategic value to the United States as the base of its Fifth Fleet, which American officials rely upon to assure the continued flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the West and to protect the interests of the United States in a 20-nation area that includes vital waterways like the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz. The base is home to 2,300 military personnel, most of them in the Navy.

United States military officials said Wednesday they were taking no extra security precautions at the American base in Manama, which is not close to the protests, and that there had been no threat to United States forces in the region. “The U.S. is not being targeted at all in any of these protests,” an American military spokeswoman, Jennifer Stride, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Bahrain has been a politically volatile nation for generations.

The Khalifa family has ruled since the 18th century and has long had tense relations with the Shiite majority. The king recruits foreigners to serve as police rather than trust Shiite citizens to wear uniforms and carry weapons.

In 2001, voters in Bahrain overwhelmingly approved a national charter to lead the way toward democratic changes. But a year later, the king imposed a Constitution by decree that Shiite leaders say has diluted the rights in the charter and blocked them from achieving a majority in the Parliament.

Before the events in Egypt and Tunisia, the traditional opposition made little progress in pushing its demands. But the success of those popular, peaceful uprisings inspired a change of tactics here, and young people led a call for a Bahraini “Day of Rage” on Feb. 14.

By nightfall Wednesday at Pearl Square, a feeling of absolute celebration took hold, a block party in the square. If the afternoons belonged to disaffected young men, the evenings belonged to the whole community.

BBC Arabic was projected on the side of the pearl monument, making Pearl Square seem like a living room where protesters sat together, relaxed and watched TV while sipping tea. At least until the police arrived.

As the sun rose over the square, the night’s events came into sharp focus. The entire field was trampled and crushed. Canvas tents and a speaker’s podium lay crushed. The sound of ambulances continued to wail, and a helicopter circled the square.

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.

    Police in Bahrain Clear Protest Site in Early Morning Raid, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html

Egypt tourism industry sees hope in revolution

Thu, Feb 17 2011
Reuters
By Alexander Dziadosz

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Egypt's uprising emptied the hotels, casinos and bars of a tourist trade that employs one in eight Egyptians, but staff expect the recovery to be quick and the revolution to boost business in the long run.

With its year-round warm beaches and wealth of pharaonic antiquities, Egypt earned nearly $11 billion from tourism in 2009, according to the tourism ministry, accounting for over a tenth of gross domestic product.

An 18-day upheaval prompted many countries to issue warnings against travel in Egypt, hamstringing the industry. Sites such as the Giza Pyramids, usually overrun with sunburned visitors, stood ominously empty.

But workers in Sharm El-Sheikh, a Sinai peninsula resort that usually crams in package tourists by the jetful this time of year, say they hope future holiday-makers will be drawn to a country that threw off the shackles of authoritarian rule.

"We have a good feeling for next time. People come here five, six times and they come back. Maybe next time they'll have a good feeling, a feeling of freedom, you know," said Mahmoud el-Helefy, 30, who manages a open-air seaside restaurant.

Hotel occupancy in Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada, another Red Sea tourist hub, sank to 11 percent from 75 percent after the unrest erupted on January 25, the Egyptian Hotels Association said.

During his brief time as vice president, Omar Suleiman said about 1 million tourists fled Egypt, costing it some $1 billion.

SYMPATHY

It's hardly the first time this decade that Egypt's tourist trade has been forced to recover from a near-fatal disruption.

From the September 11 attacks on the United States, to bombings on Sinai resorts, to Red Sea shark attacks, to last year's Icelandic volcano -- headlines have a history of tearing through the business.

Still, the overall trend has remained ever upward.

"I am very optimistic tourism will pick up very quickly because I think tourists find the revolution positive," Hala el-Khatib, secretary general of the Egyptian Hotels Association, said, adding he did not see large-scale layoffs happening yet.

Mahmoud, a Sharm el-Sheikh tour operator who declined to give his full name because he preferred to go by his nickname "Mahmoud Crystal", said he had not had a customer in over a week but he is used to cycles of boom and bust.

"It's a crazy city. It's like a casino," he said as he sat smoking cigarettes in his empty offices, guidebooks in Russian, Italian and English arrayed before him.

Despite the drop in revenue, sympathy for the revolution runs deep among Sharm el-Sheikh residents. Many came from Cairo and the Nile Delta because there was no work at home.

At a popular restaurant chain, the bar staff chanted revolutionary slogans on Wednesday night, recalling visits to Cairo's Tahrir Square -- the heart of the protest movement -- and talking politics as they served beer to tourists.

Many in the tourism industry share the anger at patronage and official corruption that was one of the principal complaints of the protesters. The former tourism minister now faces graft charges.

RECOVERY

Two of Europe's biggest travel companies said on Monday they would restart holidays from Germany to Egypt in March. The German units of British groups Thomas Cook (TCG.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and TUI Travel (TT.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) had cancelled holidays until the end of February.

Some tourists have already shrugged off the unrest, especially Britons. Unlike many countries that discouraged all travel to Egypt during the unrest, Britain advised its citizens to avoid big cities like Cairo, Alexandria and Suez but did not warn them to keep away from resorts like Sharm El-Sheikh.

"Before and after the revolution, I think it would have been fine. It's kind of like a country in and of itself here," Simon Box, a 27-year-old IT manager, said of the beach resort.

For European tourists drawn to the Red Sea's winter sun, he doubted a change in Egypt's governing structure would have much impact one way or the other.

"It will affect the people, no doubt, but tourism I think will stay the same," he said.

(Additional reporting by Sarah Mikhail and Victoria Bryan; Editing by Peter Graff)

    Egypt tourism industry sees hope in revolution, R, 17.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/uk-egypt-tourism-idUSLNE71G01Q20110217

ABC Correspondent Attacked in Bahrain

February 16, 2011
10:55 pm
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

In the latest instance of an American journalist coming under attack while covering the spreading unrest in the Middle East, Miguel Marquez, an ABC News correspondent, was set upon and beaten while covering protests in Bahrain on Wednesday, the network said.

Mr. Marquez was not seriously injured. He had been filing a report from Pearl Square in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, where thousands had gathered for protests on Wednesday, when he was suddenly hit with billy clubs and had his camera yanked from his hands by what he called “a gang of thugs.”

In an audio clip of the attack, which was posted on the ABC News Web site, Mr. Marquez can be heard pleading with his attackers — “No! No! No! Hey, I’m a journalist here!” — and then retreating from the square, where he said the police were aggressively trying to clear the crowds.

“I’m hit,” he says anxiously. “I just got beat rather badly by a gang of thugs. I’m now in a marketplace near our hotel where people are cowering in buildings.

“I mean, these people are not screwing around,” he adds. “They’re going to clear that square tonight, ahead of any protest on Friday. The government clearly does not want this to get any bigger.”

The demonstrations in Bahrain are part of a wave of antigovernment protests spreading in the Middle East. For the past three days, tens of thousands of protesters have gathered in Pearl Square demanding political changes and greater opportunities for work from King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, whose family has ruled Bahrain for centuries.

Several other American television correspondents have been attacked in the region in recent weeks. CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Christiane Amanpour were targeted by angry crowds while reporting from Cairo earlier this month, and more recently Lara Logan, the CBS News correspondent, was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo while reporting on Hosni Mubarak’s announcement that he was stepping down. Logan received medical treatment and returned to the United States, CBS said.

    ABC Correspondent Attacked in Bahrain, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/abc-correspondent-attacked-in-bahrain/

Analysis: Arab uprisings overturn cliches on democracy

Wed Feb 16, 2011
8:42am EST
Reuters
By Andrew Hammond

CAIRO (Reuters) - Arab uprisings against unpopular Western-backed rulers have undercut the arguments of some Western intellectuals about passive populations who are not prepared to fight for democracy.

During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, neoconservative cheerleaders for war who had direct access to Western policymakers said force was the only way to take down Arab dictators. A minority of Arab intellectuals agreed with them.

Many writers, especially in the United States, suggested there were characteristics peculiar to the region that could explain why Arabs had not been touched by the democratic wave that toppled East European regimes two decades ago.

Often they cited Islam, or implied there was something wrong in the Arab psyche. Those who suggested more of a focus on U.S. policies and backing for unpopular regimes have had less access to mainstream media and policy makers.

Bernard Lewis, one of the intellectual giants of this trend, wrote in 2005 that "creating a democratic political and social order in Iraq or elsewhere in the region will not be easy," as if "creating" democracy required American tutelage.

The uprisings that removed Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14 and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak four weeks later have shown the people are capable of doing it themselves, even when up against huge odds.

Scholars and opposition figures, who all opposed the Iraq war, said the uprisings, which have so far sparked street action in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Iran, also exposed the ulterior motives behind U.S. backing for police states.

"The West must change its mistaken belief that we are not fit for democracy and freedom. Now is the time for Western powers to recognize the desires of the Arab people and to remove their support of their despotic allies," said Ali Al-Ahmed, a Saudi dissident based in Washington.

"Tunisians and Egyptians have proven Western powers and analysts wrong about the Arabs desire for freedom," he said.

Western countries long saw rulers such as Mubarak and Ben Ali as strongmen able to deliver on Western foreign policy needs while cracking down on convenient Islamist threats such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ennahda party in Tunisia.

Israel has reacted with great alarm to the fall of a trusted ally like Mubarak. He spent much time in his final days in office on the phone to U.S. and Israeli officials who fear the rise of popular forces, Islamist or secular, in a democratic Egypt would take a different line on regional issues.

Egypt under Mubarak never veered from the script of a 1979 peace treaty with Israel engineered by his predecessor Anwar Sadat and backed by military top brass despite popular anger.

He imposed a blockade of the Gaza Strip, drawing the opprobrium of many ordinary Arabs, because like Israel and the United States he did not like Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and its links to Egypt's own Islamist trend.

"The explosion of Arab popular anger everywhere flies against U.S. policy interests," said As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese politics professor in the United States. "In other words, the U.S. needed to believe that Arabs are fatalistic and quiescent ... to rationalize the American embrace of most Arab tyrannies."

MAJOR FEAT

Turfing out unpopular rulers was no small feat. It required a mass movement to cross a barrier of fear created by an elaborate network of often ruthless security agencies developed under a system like that of Mubarak, who played up the Islamist threat to ensure U.S. support for his rule.

"People in the West don't realize how brutal the regimes we have in the Arab world are," said Muhammad al-Zekri, a Bahraini anthropologist.

While the uprisings took policy makers by surprise, they were in fact several years in the making.

In Egypt Kefaya, or Enough, movement began mobilizing Egyptians in 2005 against the prospect of a future presidential bid by Mubarak's son Gamal, a leading light in Mubarak's National Democratic Party. In 2008, labor strikes broke out in north Egypt and became more frequent since then.

Activists spoke on state television about how they studied police tactics in controlling street protests in the past in order to outfox them when the revolt erupted on January 25. Within four days the police had lost control and the army was sent in.

When Tunisians brought down Ben Ali, it was the spark that lit a fire waiting to happen in Egypt.

None of this was the work of populations prepared to acquiesce in injustice.

NEW GENERATION

Mounir Khelifa, a Tunisian literature professor who advised the education ministry, says the uprisings were made possible by the emergence of a generation who grew up during the information technology revolution and were not prepared to accept government arguments any more on why full rights should be put in abeyance.

Both the Internet and Arab satellite television undercut the propaganda of state media, encouraged people develop a consensus on their rights as citizens and facilitated mobilization.

Like their Western allies, Egypt and Tunisia underestimated their own people and thought the old means of control -- media, police, ruling party -- would continue to stifle them.

"There was obliviousness to a broad class of young educated people out there who were accessing information from all over the world," Khelifa said. "Even the school curriculums talked about a lot of things that Ben Ali was not providing, such as freedom of opinion and fair elections," he said.

In Egypt, 40 percent of the population of over 80 million are under 30, disconnected from the mindset of an 82-year-old former air pilot who in his final speeches repeatedly referred to himself as their father.

(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)

    Analysis: Arab uprisings overturn cliches on democracy, R, 16.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/us-egypt-uprisings-idUSTRE71F39L20110216

Egypt activists ask: "Where are the women?"

Wed Feb 16, 2011
10:09am EST
Reuters
By Dina Zayed

CAIRO (Reuters) - The lack of women on a committee charged with amending Egypt's constitution for elections post-Mubarak casts doubt over whether the country can develop into a true democracy, a group of activists said Wednesday.

The group of over 60 non-governmental organization and activists said the committee, which is presided over by a respected retired judge known for his independence, had begun work Wednesday by "marginalizing female legal experts."

"This sheds doubt over the future of democratic transition in Egypt and raises questions about the future of participation, and whether this revolution sought to liberate all of society or just some of its sectors," a statement said.

Mass demonstrations that ousted President Hosni Mubarak from his 30-year rule were led by both men and women.

"We affirm that Egyptian woman participated in the revolution, and proof of such is that many remain missing or arrested. They have every right to participate in building the Egyptian nation," the group said in a statement sent by Nahed Shehata of the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights.

Protesters have demanded several changes, including making presidential races fair and putting limits on a president's term in office. Mubarak served almost five six-year terms and had been expected to seek a sixth.

The committee is due to propose its changes within 10 days as a prelude to parliamentary and presidential elections due to take place in six months.

STANDARDS OF SELECTION

The committee includes one senior Muslim Brotherhood legal expert in an unprecedented move to include the Islamist opposition group, but the panel did not give details on how it selected its members.

"Signatures to this statement have received with great concern the list of committee members as there is no participation from female experts, which is unacceptable marginalization of half of society," the statement said.

"We also question the standards used to select the members of the committee," the group said, although adding they supported the military's efforts in moving to a democracy.

The role of women in Egyptian politics has been limited, with few occupying ministerial and parliamentary seats. Their role in the judiciary has been the subject of wide debate in recent years.

Last year, a top court ruled that women should be allowed to serve on the State Council, a court that tries cases involving the government and which had resisted including female judges.

Mubarak appointed Tahany el-Gibali, Egypt's first woman judge, to the Constitutional Court in 2003. Conservative judges campaigned to stop what they regarded as an exception from becoming a trend.

Activists called on the Higher Military Council to revisit "values of citizenship" and asked that female experts be incorporated in the constitutional committee.

(editing by Elizabeth Piper)

    Egypt activists ask: "Where are the women?", R, 16.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/us-egypt-women-idUSTRE71F3Z720110216

Egypt-inspired protests gain pace across region

Wed Feb 16, 2011
12:59pm EST
Reuters
By Paul Taylor

PARIS (Reuters) - Anti-government protests inspired by popular revolts that toppled rulers in Tunisia and Egypt are gaining pace around the Middle East and North Africa despite political and economic concessions by nervous governments.

Clashes were reported in tightly controlled oil producer Libya, sandwiched between Egypt and Tunisia, while new protests erupted in Bahrain, Yemen and Iran on Wednesday.

The latest demonstrations against long-serving rulers came after U.S. President Barack Obama, commenting on the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, declared: "The world is changing...if you are governing these countries, you've got to get out ahead of change, you can't be behind the curve."

With young people able to watch pro-democracy uprisings in other countries on satellite television or the Internet, and to communicate with like-minded activists on social networks hard for the secret police to control, governments across the region have grounds to fear contagion.

Hundreds of opponents of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, in power since 1969, clashed with police and government supporters in the eastern city of Benghazi overnight, a witness and local media said.

Reports from the port city, 1,000 km (600 miles) east of the capital Tripoli, said protesters armed with stones and petrol bombs set fire to vehicles and fought with police in a rare outbreak of unrest in the oil-exporting country.

The riot in Libya's second city was sparked by the arrest of human rights activist Fethi Tarbel, who has worked to free political prisoners, Quryna newspaper said.

Gaddafi's opponents used the Facebook social network to call for protests across Libya on Thursday.

In a possible concession to the protesters, Libya will free 110 members of the banned militant organization the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison on Wednesday, another human rights activist said.

POLITICAL, ECONOMIC CONCESSIONS

In Yemen, a 21-year old protester died from gunshot wounds after fierce clashes broke out between police and demonstrators in the southern port town of Aden, his father said, as unrest spread across the Arabian Peninsula state.

Mohammed Ali Alwani was among two people hit as police fired shots into the air to try to break up around 500 protesters.

In the Yemeni capital Sanaa at least 800 anti-government protesters marched against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a U.S. ally in the fight against al Qaeda.

In power for more than 30 years, Saleh has pledged to step down when his term expires in 2013 and offered dialogue with the opposition, but radical protesters are demanding he go now.

In Bahrain, protesters poured into the capital of the Gulf island kingdom, Manama, for a third successive day to mourn a demonstrator killed in clashes with security forces on Tuesday.

The emirate has a history of protest over economic hardship, the lack of political freedom and sectarian discrimination by the Sunni rulers against the Shi'ite majority.

Some 2,000 protesters demanding a change of government were encamped at a major road junction in Manama, seeking to emulate rallies on Cairo's Tahrir Square that toppled Mubarak.

In Iran, supporters and opponents of the hardline Islamic system clashed in Tehran during a funeral procession for a student shot at an anti-government rally two days ago, state broadcaster IRIB reported.

Both sides claimed Sanee Zhaleh was a martyr to their cause and blamed the other for his death.

Monday's rallies in Tehran and several other Iranian cities were the first staged by the Green pro-democracy movement since security forces crushed huge protests in the months after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 re-election.

Rulers in several countries, drawing lessons from events in Tunisia and Egypt, have announced political changes and moved to cut prices of basic foodstuffs and raise spending on job creation in efforts to pre-empt spreading unrest.

SOCIAL NEEDS

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika promised to lift a 19-year-old state of emergency soon and has acted to reduce the cost of staple foods in the North African oil and gas exporter.

Authorities deployed an estimated 30,000 police in Algiers on Saturday to prevent a banned pro-democracy march. Several hundred protesters defied the ban and dozens were detained.

A coalition of civil society and human rights groups and an opposition party vowed afterwards to demonstrate every Saturday until the military-backed government is removed.

Morocco, where the main banned Islamist opposition movement warned last week that "autocracy" would be swept away unless there were deep democratic reforms, announced on Tuesday it would almost double state subsidies to counter an increase in commodity prices and address social needs.

Syria, controlled by the Baath Party for the last 50 years, released a veteran Islamist activist on Tuesday after he went on hunger strike following his arrest 11 days ago for calling for Egyptian-style mass protests, human rights activists said.

Jordan's King Abdullah has sacked his prime minister and appointed a new government led by a former general who promised to widen public freedom in response to anti-government protests.

Countries with oil and gas wealth such as Saudi Arabia and Algeria appear better placed than poorer countries like Egypt and Tunisia to buy social peace.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)

    Egypt-inspired protests gain pace across region, R, 16.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/us-protests-idUSTRE71F41K20110216

Pro - , Anti - Govt Supporters Clash At Tehran Funeral

February 16, 2011
Filed at 10:40 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Supporters and opponents of the Iranian government clashed on Wednesday at a funeral for a student shot dead during an opposition rally whose allegiance has been claimed by both sides, state media reported.

State television showed thousands of government supporters at Tehran University for the funeral of Sanee Zhaleh, one of two people shot dead on Monday during the first opposition rally for more than a year. Each side blames the other for the killings.

"Students and the people attending the funeral ceremony of the martyred student Sanee Zhaleh have clashed with a limited number of people, apparently linked to the sedition movement, and forced them out by chanting slogans of death to hypocrites," said the website of the state broadcaster IRIB.

The semi-official Fars news agency said Zhaleh had been a member of the Basij, the volunteer militia connected to the elite Revolutionary Guards Corps which played an important role in suppressing protests in 2009.

Opposition websites did not deny that Zhaleh was a member of the Basij, which has millions of members throughout Iran, but said he attended Monday's rally -- the first reformist protest in more than a year -- as an active opposition supporter.

"University occupied by the military -- martyr's body carried on the shoulders of murderers," read a headline on opposition website Kaleme after Zhaleh's coffin, draped in the Iranian flag, was carried through the streets as the crowd chanted "I will kill the person who killed my brother" and other slogans against leaders of the opposition.

Fars said the funeral had been organized by student Basijis.

The Kaleme website said the university's arts faculty, where the 26-year-old was a student, was "occupied" from early morning by pro-government militants. It said several people were attacked and a large number arrested.

"The martyr's fellow students were standing against the walls watching a large crowd of strangers who had entered the university," Kaleme quoted Sajjad Rezaie, head of the faculty's Islamic Association, as saying.

SECOND MARTYR

The fight for the soul of Zhaleh mirrors the struggle to claim allegiance with the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which the government says is an extension of Iran's own 1979 Islamic Revolution against the Western-backed shah, but which the Green movement says was inspired by its own protests.

Monday's rally was the first to be held by the Green movement since huge protests in the weeks and months after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 re-election were stamped out by the government which blamed foreign enemies for stirring "sedition."

Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi hailed the rally as a "glorious" event by a "magnificent movement." Reformist websites said an estimated 1,500 people had been arrested.

Mehdi Karoubi, the other main opposition leader, said Monday's rally had been turned violent by "individuals whose role and affiliation with specific institutions is evident to all."

Tehran's deputy police chief Ahmadreza Radan said only about 150 people turned up. A second person died of gunshot wounds on Tuesday and a further eight people who had been shot were being treated in hospital, he was quoted as saying by Fars.

By Wednesday there were tributes to Zhaleh and the other victim, 22-year-old Mohammad Mokhtari, on the social media website Facebook, hailing both as victims of state brutality.

Authorities have blamed "terrorist" elements for the violence at Monday's unauthorized rally. A large majority in parliament signed a motion for the opposition leaders, who both say they are living under virtual house arrest, to be tried, calling them "corrupts on earth." [ID:nHAF546420]

Being "corrupt on earth" is a charge which has been leveled at political dissidents in the past. It is a capital offence.

Karoubi, 73, told the government to "remove the cotton wool from their ears and hear the voices of the people before it is too late."

"Violent acts and opposition to the demands of the people will only work for so long. Avoid the fate of other governments and learn from the people," he said in a statement.

After the funeral procession, government supporters headed toward the Justice Ministry to hold a demonstration calling for the swift prosecution of opposition leaders, and in the holy city of Qom, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said of them: "This nation has defeated the shah -- you are the petty leftovers, you are nothing."

"Our people like their system that is why they do not do anything illegal, but if their tolerance ends, the seditionists will not be alive even for one day (more)," Khatami said in an address broadcast live on state television.

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

    Pro - , Anti - Govt Supporters Clash At Tehran Funeral, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/02/16/world/international-us-iran-protests-clash-1.html

Police Fire on Protesters in Iraq

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and DURAID ADNAN

BAGHDAD — Security forces in the eastern Iraqi city of Kut on Wednesday fired on a group of protesters calling for the province’s governor to step down, killing at least three people, according to a local government official.

After the police opened fire the protesters stormed the governor’s headquarters and his home, burning both buildings, according to the official. At least 27 people were injured in the melee, including one police officer, h said.

“They burned all the rooms in the buildings and all the generators; they also burned the cars of the employees,” said the official, who was in Kut at the time the violence erupted and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to sensitive information. “We were able to take the deputy and the employees out the back door. Some of the employees were women and they were choked by the fires.”

As unrest has spread throug the Middle East over the last few weeks there have been scattered protests in Iraq calling for better government services.

Wednesday’s protests were organized by a group called the Youth of Kut, which wants the governor of the province to step down because he has failed to create jobs and increase the supply of electricity. The official said that the governor, Latif Hamad Al-Tarfa, was in Baghdad on Wednesday.

“At 10 a.m. in the morning, we all gathered in the central of the city and we were heading to the building of the provincial council and the governor’s building,” said Ali al-Wasity, a protester. “We had a delegation that went up and asked for the governor to step down. They refused to come out and talk to us.”

Mr. Wasity said the security forces then began shooting. “When they opened fire on us I was feeling that we are not a free country,” he said. “We are under a dictatorship system. I tell them one thing: we will not stop going out on protest unless the governor steps down and leaves us.”

The official said the security guards had used tear gas to try to disperse the crowd.

“The situation now is going to be bad here,” the official said. “The forces have imposed a curfew on the city.”

Kut, a mostly Shiite city of about 850,000, is close to Iraq’s border with Iran and has a large military base that was heavily bombed during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran and during the Persian Gulf War.


Khalid D. Ali contributed reporting.

    Police Fire on Protesters in Iraq, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html

Police Try to End Clashes in Yemen

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF and J. DAVID GOODMAN

SANA, Yemen — Large numbers of police officers took up positions around the capital on Wednesday in an attempt to end six days of running street battles between small groups of pro- and antigovernment protesters. Students again organized protests at the capital’s central university calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Reuters reported that several hundred students marched through the streets from Sana University, the gathering point for many young protesters who have sought to emulate the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The police had moved to block students from demonstrating near the university, Reuters reported, but the demonstrators broke free. There was no indication of violence against them.

In the southern city of Taiz thousands of students who have occupied the streets in overnight protests that began on Friday vowed to remain there until Mr. Saleh steps down. The police have arrested more than 100 of the demonstrators and around 30 have been injured in skirmishes with pro-government groups who have periodically set upon the antigovernment encampment wielding sticks and hurling stones.

There were also reports of fresh protests in Aden, where a movement calling for a separate southern state is strong.

Since Sunday, when police officers attacked more than 1,000 young protesters with batons and stun guns, they have mostly refrained from attacking them, instead stepping in to break up skirmishes between rival groups.

Despite the increased police presence on Wednesday the two groups clashed at the university and there were reports of several injuries as government supporters attacked students with batons. Reuters reported that the police had fired shots in the air to separate the groups, and that some of those protesting in favor of the government were picked up by luxury cars and sped away.

Several foreign journalists were singled out and set upon by pro-government groups, Reuters reported. Since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, security forces have made scattered efforts to prevent foreign journalists from covering the spread of demonstrations, which have taken on a younger and more spontaneous cast in recent days.

Indeed, a rift appears to be emerging between the student organizers, who have called for the president to step down immediately, and the established opposition groups, who have wrested significant concessions from Mr. Saleh — including a promise that he would give up power in 2013 — but who would prefer to move more slowly toward political reform.

Mr. Saleh, an important ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism, has in recent weeks sought to counter the rising tide of opposition and preserve his three-decade rule by raising army salaries, halving income taxes and ordering price controls, among other concessions. But as protests by young Yemenis continued it was clear that those efforts were not stemming the unrest.

Government supporters and police officers, some of them armed, continued to occupy Sana’s central square — which, like its Cairo counterpart, is called Tahrir Square. The pro-government men, mostly from the outskirts of the capital, have pitched tents in the square and vowed to remain until the unrest ends. Police officers moved to restrict access with concertina wire to prevent antigovernment protesters from gathering there.

    Police Try to End Clashes in Yemen, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17yemen.html

Egypt Asks Swiss for Help Finding Regime's Assets

February 16, 2011
Filed at 6:46 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


GENEVA (AP) — The Swiss government says Egypt has asked for assistance in locating assets belonging to members of the regime led by ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Swiss Justice Ministry spokesman Folco Galli declined Wednesday to say whether the request concerns assets belonging to Mubarak himself.

Last week the Swiss government froze any assets in Switzerland belonging to Mubarak, his wife, their two sons, their sons' wives, Mubarak's brother-in-law and five senior politicians belonging to the ousted leader's NDP party.

Galli says the Egyptian request is being examined. If it meets legal requirements, the Justice Ministry will then decide which Swiss authorities should deal with it.

    Egypt Asks Swiss for Help Finding Regime's Assets, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/16/world/europe/AP-EU-Switzerland-Egypt.html

Egypt Antiquities Chief: 3 Missing Objects Found

February 16, 2011
Filed at 6:39 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's top archaeologist says three of the 18 pieces reported missing from the famed Egyptian Museum have been found.

Zahi Hawass said Wednesday that one was found under a case in the museum and two were found in the museum courtyard.

On Jan. 28, during massive street protests that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, looters climbed a fire escape, broke windows on the roof and entered the museum by rope.

Hawass said they broke 13 cases, scattering about 70 objects on the ground. About 20 of those will be repaired.

The items found include a statue of a goddess who was carrying the 18th Dynasty King Tutankhamun. The king's statue has not been found.

Hawass said police had arrested a number of suspects.

    Egypt Antiquities Chief: 3 Missing Objects Found, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Egypt-Antiquities.html

Thousands of Yemeni Police Confront Protesters

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
Filed at 4:50 a.m. EST
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Yemen has sent 2,000 policemen into the streets to try to put down days of protests against the U.S.-allied president of 32 years.

The policemen, including plainclothes officers, fired in the air and blocked thousands of students at Sanaa University from joining thousands of other protesters elsewhere in the capital. They are holding a sixth straight day of demonstrations.

Taking inspiration from the toppling of autocratic leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen's protesters are demanding political reforms and the ouster of President Ali Abbdullah Saleh.

Witnesses say at least four protesters were wounded in scuffles with police on Wednesday.

Yemen is a conflict-ridden and impoverished nation. Its president has cooperated with the U.S. in battling al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

    Thousands of Yemeni Police Confront Protesters, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Yemen.html

Iran’s Leader Derides Protests; Lawmakers Urge Death for Opposition Leaders

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

A day after the largest antigovernment protests in Iran in more than a year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday dismissed opposition attempts to revive mass demonstrations as certain to fail, while members of the Iranian Parliament clamored for the two most prominent leaders of the protest movement to be executed.

Critics have called in the past for the two men, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, to be prosecuted for alleged crimes that would merit the death penalty. The calls for punishment on Tuesday, however, appeared to be the most strident yet — with members of Parliament shouting in unison, “Moussavi, Karroubi should be hanged!”

But while the government has tried and convicted many opposition members since large street protests in 2009, it has so far shied away from putting the two men on trial, perhaps fearing that would lead to further unrest.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported, new clashes were reported between government opponents and supporters at the funeral of Saane Zhaleh, one of two students reported killed during protests on Monday.

The authorities said Mr. Zhaleh, a Kurdish student at Tehran Art University, was a Basij, one of the student vigilantes on many campuses, who was shot by a government opponent. Opposition accounts said plainclothes security officers roaming the streets beat him to death.

The government and the opposition scheduled separate memorial services for Mr. Zhaleh on Wednesday, creating a potential for confrontation.

Word of the renewed clashes came from a state broadcaster, Reuters said, but the scale of the confrontation was not clear.

“Students and the people attending the funeral ceremony of the martyred student Saane Zhaleh have clashed with a limited number of people apparently linked to the sedition movement and forced them out by chanting slogans of death to hypocrites,” the broadcaster’s Web site was quoted as saying.

The government on Tuesday continued to try to squelch reports about the demonstrations on Monday, arresting or sequestering critics and revoking the working credentials of about a dozen foreign correspondents who had been ordered not to cover the protests.

Opposition supporters were elated about the demonstrations, saying they felt people’s willingness to come out despite beatings by the police proved that the antigovernment movement born after Mr. Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election was still alive after 20 months of brutal government suppression.

“The friends I talked to in Iran were so happy that people had shown up after months of nothing going on,” said Sadra M. Shahab, who helped spread the word about the demonstrations from overseas.

Mr. Karroubi, who has been under house arrest since the eve of the protests, said Tuesday that “the government should take the cotton out of its ears and hear the voice of the people,” according to a statement posted on Saham News, his Web site.

“Violent and aggressive actions in response to the will of the people can halt continuing protests up to a point,” he said, addressing the government, “but you should learn from the history of the governments that have fled.” He was referring to the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, who were recently driven out by street protests.

Mr. Karroubi did not mention any future plans, and it is unclear if the opposition has a clear idea of what to do next. Organizers of a special Facebook page dedicated to the protests in Iran said the authorities would never allow Iranian demonstrators to set up the type of permanent encampment that came to represent the tenacity of the Egyptians in Tahrir Square in Cairo as they called for Hosni Mubarak to leave.

There were reports at least two people died in the protests in Iran on Monday. Few reporters were able to cover the demonstrations, but witness accounts and some news reports suggested that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 people took to the streets in several cities, including Tehran.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, in a live interview on state television, pursued the government line that such demonstrations were foreign attempts to undermine a great nation, according to reports by the official news agency, IRNA.

“The Iranian nation is like the sun in that it is so brilliant. And of course this brilliance has enemies and they make true efforts,” he said. “but ultimately their efforts are like throwing dirt at the sun. It falls right back on them.”

By chanting against the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Monday, protesters were demanding that the entire government system should go, rather than simply attacking Mr. Ahmadinejad. In doing so, they forged rare unity between him and Parliament, which have been at odds over domestic policy.

Of the 290 Parliament members, 222 signed a statement on Tuesday demanding that the government prosecute Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi, according to IRNA. It was at least the third time that the two men have been threatened publicly with prosecution.

“They would like to provide an atmosphere for the government to take harder action against the opposition leaders,” said Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, an exiled former member of Parliament now at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “But I do not think they could do anything like execute the leaders — even if they arrested them, it would motivate a new round of the uprising.”

On Tuesday, pro-government demonstrators staged a sit-in at Mr. Karroubi’s house, according to opposition Web sites.

President Obama, speaking Tuesday at a Washington news conference, expressed support for the courage of the Iranian demonstrators and criticized the Tehran government’s response.

“I find it ironic that you’ve got the Iranian regime pretending to celebrate what happened in Egypt,” he said, “when in fact they have acted in direct contrast to what happened in Egypt by gunning down and beating people who were trying to express themselves peacefully in Iran.”

The leadership of the Islamic republic has been hailing the demonstrations in the Arab world, saying they show the triumph of popular support for Islam, even though Islamists had a low profile in both the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also denounced Iran in a speech on Internet freedom, criticizing its government for using the Web to hunt down critics.

Reports of the number of people arrested over the latest protests in Iran varied, with the official number put at 150 and the opposition’s estimate at 1,500.

The protesters who died Monday were identified as Mr. Zhaleh and Mohammad Mokhtari, 22, a student at Islamic Azad University in Shahrood.


Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, and Artin Afkhami from Washington.

    Iran’s Leader Derides Protests; Lawmakers Urge Death for Opposition Leaders, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17iran.html

Bahrain Takes the Stage With a Raucous Protest

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of protesters poured into this nation’s symbolic center, Pearl Square, late Tuesday in a raucous rally that again demonstrated the power of popular movements that are transforming the political landscape of the Middle East.

The protest continued Wednesday with marchers calling for further demonstrations at the funeral of a demonstrator shot dead on Tuesday, news reports said. Further unrest was reported from Yemen and, for the first time, in Libya.

In a matter of hours on Tuesday, this small, strategically important monarchy experienced the now familiar sequence of events that has rocked the Arab world. What started as an online call for a “Day of Rage” progressed within 24 hours to an exuberant group of demonstrators, cheering, waving flags, setting up tents and taking over the grassy traffic circle beneath the towering monument of a pearl in the heart of Manama, the capital.

The crowd grew bolder as it grew larger, and as in Tunisia and Egypt, modest concessions from the government only raised expectations among the protesters, who by day’s end were talking about tearing the whole system down, monarchy and all.

Then as momentum built up behind the protests on Tuesday, the 18 members of Parliament from the Islamic National Accord Association, the traditional opposition, announced that they were suspending participation in the legislature.

The mood of exhilaration stood in marked contrast to a day that began in sorrow and violence, when mourners who had gathered to bury a young man killed the night before by the police clashed again with the security forces.

In that melee, a second young man was killed, also by the police.

“We are going to get our demands,” said Hussein Ramadan, 32, a political activist and organizer who helped lead the crowds from the burial site to Pearl Square. “The people are angry, but we will control our anger, we will not burn a single tire or throw a single rock. We will not go home until we succeed. They want us to be violent. We will not.”

Bahrain is best known as a Persian Gulf base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet and as a playground for residents of Saudi Arabia who can drive over a causeway to enjoy the nightclubs and bars of the far more permissive kingdom. Its ruler, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, is an important ally of the United States in fighting terrorism and countering Iranian influence in the region.

It is far too soon to tell where Bahrain’s popular political uprising will go. The demands are economic — people want jobs — as well as political, in that most would like to see the nation transformed from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional one. But the events here, inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, have altered the dynamics in a nation where political expression has long been tamed by harsh police tactics and prison terms.

In a rare speech to the nation, the king expressed his regret on national television over the two young men killed by the police and called for an investigation into the deaths. But in an unparalleled move he also instructed his police force to allow more than 10,000 demonstrators to claim Pearl Square as their own.

As night fell Tuesday and a cold wind blew off the Persian Gulf, thousands of demonstrators occupied the square or watched from a highway overpass, cheering. Where a day earlier the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at any gatherings that tried to protest, no matter how small, or peaceful, people now waved the red and white flag of Bahrain, gave speeches, chanted slogans and shared food.

The police massed on the other side of a bridge leading to the square. A police helicopter never stopped circling, but took no action, to the protesters’ surprise.

By 10 p.m., many of the people headed home from the square, with many saying they had plans to return the next day. A core group planned to spend the night there in tents.

“Now the people are the real players, not the government, not the opposition,” said Matar Ibrahim Matar, 34, an opposition member of Parliament who joined the crowd gathered beneath the mammoth statue. “I don’t think anyone expected this, not the government, not us.”

Bahrain’s domestic politics have long been tangled. The king and the ruling elite are Sunni Muslims. The majority, or about 70 percent, of the local population of about 500,000, are Shiite Muslims. The Shiites claim they are discriminated against in jobs, housing and education, and their political demands are not new.

The demonstrators have asked for the release of political prisoners, the creation of a more representative and empowered Parliament, the establishment of a constitution written by the people and the formation of a new, more representative cabinet. They complain bitterly that the prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, the king’s uncle, has been in office for 40 years.

They also want the government to stop the practice of offering citizenship to foreigners willing to come to Bahrain to serve as police officers or soldiers, a tactic they say is aimed at trying to reduce the influence of Shiites by increasing the number of Sunnis.

While the demands are standard here, what is new is the way the demonstrations have unfolded, following the script from Egypt and Tunisia. Young people organized a protest using online tools like Twitter and Facebook. They tapped into growing frustrations with economic hardship and political repression but were not aided by the traditional opposition movements.

The day began early, around 7 a.m., at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, where Ali Mushaima, 21, died the night before from a shotgun wound to his back. About 2,000 mourners lined up in a parking lot behind a truck that carried his coffin on its roof.

As soon as the procession exited the hospital grounds, a young man bolted from the crowd and charged at the police standing nearby. He threw a rock and the police fired tear gas into the crowd. They fired other weapons, too, and Fadel Matrouq, 31, was killed.

The mourners regrouped a block away and walked slowly for about 90 minutes behind the coffin to the Jidi Haffiz cemetery, a dusty expanse of sun-baked land dotted with simple graves. For more than an hour thousands of people milled peacefully around the area in a blend of politics, mourning and faith.

Mr. Mushaima’s father was escorted by both arms gently through the crowd, after his son was laid out on a white tile table, washed for burial and wrapped in a cloth decorated with golden Arabic script from the Koran. When the body was taken to the gravesite, there were as many as 10,000 people in the street, some mourning, some calling for the government to be dissolved, some chanting slogans and prayers.

Among the crowd were some people who carried protest signs stating their political demands, while others carried black, yellow and red flags that said “Ya Hussein,” referring to the most revered figure in Shiite Islam.

When the body was in the ground, people in the crowd moved toward Pearl Square, not knowing if they would arrive at their destination or be cut off by the police, again. When they made it, they rejoiced.

“The government has brought us past the tipping point,” said Abd al-Amir al-Jawri, 40, an activist who was elated as he recorded events with a video camera. “This is it.”


Nadim Audi contributed reporting.

    Bahrain Takes the Stage With a Raucous Protest, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17bahrain.html

Unrest Reported to Spread to Libyan City of Benghazi

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL

PARIS — The wave of turmoil and protests sweeping the Middle East appeared on Wednesday to have reached Libya, ruled for four decades by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to news reports.

The eruption of violence in Libya’s second city Benghazi was not reported in the state-run media which said rallies would be held Wednesday in support of Colonel Qaddafi — a tactic reflecting those used in Egypt and Yemen where pro-government demonstrators have clashed with their adversaries since the tumult began.

Quryna, a privately owned newspaper in Benghazi, said a crowd armed with gasoline bombs and rocks protested outside a government office to demand the release of a human rights activist, Reuters reported. The demonstrators, numbering at least several hundred and possibly more, went to the central Shajara Square and clashed with police.

The fighting coincided with news reports of demonstrators massing for a third successive day on the easternmost rim of the Arab world in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain.

The eruption in Libya was highly unusual since a pervasive security apparatus keeps dissent in check and protects Col. Qaddafi against perceived foes, some of them Islamists. Reuters quoted a Benghazi resident as saying the protesters were led by relatives of prisoners in the Abu Salim jail in Tripoli where political detainees are held. The prison is notorious for a massacre of more than 1,000 inmates in June 1996.

Libyan state television showed images of a pro-Qaddafi rally in Tripoli, the capital, where demonstrators chanted slogans critical of the Doha-based Al Jazeera satellite broadcaster that provided close coverage of events in Tunisia and Egypt, speeding images of uprising that rattled the autocratic leaders of the Arab world.

As in other parts of the Arab world, protesters had used social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to call for demonstrations, but they had not been scheduled until Thursday.

The BBC quoted witnesses as saying the unrest in Benghazi was inspired by the arrest of a lawyer who has criticized the government. Around 2,000 people took part, the BBC said, quoting witnesses as saying police used water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets.

The turmoil began in Tunisia, where the former president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, was forced into exile in Saudi Arabia in mid-January. It spread to Egypt where an 18-day uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak as president after almost three decades in power.

Protests have spread this week alone to Yemen, Bahrain and Iran.

Colonel Qaddafi took power in a bloodless coup in 1969 and has ruled his oil-exporting country with an iron fist, seeking to spread a revolutionary influence in Africa. He has been accused in the West of sponsoring terrorism.

Apart from his security forces, Colonel Qaddafi has built his rule on a cult of personality and a network of family and tribal alliances supported by largesse from Libya’s oil revenues.

Internationally, he is regarded as an erratic and quixotic figure who travels with an escort of female bodyguards and likes to live in a large tent of the kind used by desert nomads.

The turmoil in the Middle East has shaken his immediate neighbors to the east in Egypt and to the west in Tunisia, prompting him to lower food prices. The high cost of food was one of the factors contributing to the explosion in Tunisia.

Like Mr. Mubarak in Egypt and other rulers, Colonel Qaddafi has sought to build a dynasty to succeed him, with speculation currently centering on his son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi.

The son achieved international prominence when he flew to Scotland in August 2009 to escort home Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, after the Scottish government ordered his release on compassionate grounds. Mr. Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent, had served 8 years of a 27-year minimum sentence on charges of murdering 270 people in Britain’s worst terrorist attack.

Some analysts said the location of the protests on Tuesday night was significant since Benghazi has long been regarded as having a political dynamic that sets it apart from the rest of the country.

Libyan news reports, quoted by Reuters, said Colonel Qaddafi planned to appear at a ceremony in Tripoli to open a soccer stadium on Wednesday, offering a potential opportunity to choreograph a show of popular support.

    Unrest Reported to Spread to Libyan City of Benghazi, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17libya.html

Mubarak's retreat a far cry from the real Egypt

Tue, Feb 15 2011
Reuters
By Alexander Dziadosz

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Anyone wondering how veteran President Hosni Mubarak lost touch with Egyptian reality needs look no further than this Red Sea resort, where he took refuge after his overthrow last week by a popular uprising.

With its tidy rows of palm trees and wide streets, Sharm el-Sheikh looks more like a Florida suburb than the teeming, polluted industrial cities and crumbling rural villages where most ordinary Egyptians live.

Tourists sunbathe and drink beer openly in a sea breeze that residents say lured the 82-year-old Mubarak to spend more and more time here in the twilight of his 30-year rule, hobnobbing with foreign leaders or recovering from ailments.

His fondness for the remote town, symbolized by his retreat to Sharm el-Sheikh after he was ousted, were signs of his estrangement from Egypt's everyday problems.

"Mubarak wanted to try to avoid seeing or hearing what was happening in reality," Nabil Abdel Fattah, an analyst at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said.

"This helped lead to a credibility gap between Mubarak and the new generations, especially in Cairo, Alexandria and cities in the Nile Delta like Mansoura."

The security afforded by the sea and mountains at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula also made Sharm el-Sheikh a natural spot for Mubarak to host high-profile summits.

The city became a stage for years of fruitless Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The 2011 Arab Economic Summit was convened at the luxury resort near Mubarak's family villa less than a week before Egypt's demonstrations began.

Nowadays, local gossip has turned from spotting dignitaries such as Kofi Annan and Mahmoud Abbas -- one restaurant owner said he saw Mubarak himself driving alone about eight years ago -- to rumors about the deposed president's health.

Some residents, citing unsubstantiated media reports and local rumor, say Mubarak fell into a coma after the revolution, or became depressed and refused to take medicine.

Saudi-owned daily Asharq al-Awsat said on Tuesday Mubarak's health was deteriorating.

A military source told Reuters Mubarak was "breathing" but would give no details of his condition. Another source with links to the family said he was not well but did not elaborate.

HISTORY

Property developers, drawn by the Sinai Peninsula's natural beauty, transformed Sharm el-Sheikh from a fishing outpost around a sandy bay into a tourist hub after Israel returned the land to Egypt in the early 1980s.

The peace that followed the 1979 Camp David accords allowed investors to clear landmines left over from three wars with Israel and build a network of hotels, casinos, restaurants, scuba diving centers and bars along the coast.

Many local residents credit Mubarak with their prosperity and tend to talk about the ex-president more like a doddering, isolated father than a heavy-handed dictator.

"The last 15 years were bad, but the first 15 were not so bad," said Mahmoud el-Helefy, a 30-year-old restaurant manager, adding that Mubarak seemed to grow more disconnected as he aged.

"You know sometimes you talk to old people and they lean in and say, 'what, what?' ... If you can't hear well, you can't think well."

Alaa, another restaurant manager who declined to give his full name, said he viewed Mubarak fondly for the most part and blamed bad advisers for the corruption that enraged protesters.

"If you want to know Mubarak and what he did for Egypt, read history," he said.

But many of the almost 50 million Egyptians who have lived their whole lives under Mubarak's reign -- out of a total population of 79 million -- are indifferent to the distant past.

"If you see people hurting me, and you don't stop them, then you are hurting me," said Ibrahim Mohamed, 27, a hotel worker.

Mohamed said many of his friends joined demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the center of the protest movement, and he was proud of what they accomplished in less than three weeks.

Widespread Internet access allowed many young Egyptians to watch as the outside world moved forward, adding to frustrations over the lack of serious political reform at home, he added.

"We were watching the world outside," he said. "I'm a human too. We were created in the same way. So I have to look for the reason. Freedom and democracy -- if you won't give it to me, I will take it. It's my right."

(editing by Paul Taylor)

    Mubarak's retreat a far cry from the real Egypt, R, 15.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/15/us-egypt-mubarak-idUSTRE71E4QT20110215

CBS reporter Lara Logan assaulted in Egypt: CBS News

Tue, Feb 15 2011
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CBS correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob while covering the jubilation in Cairo's Tahrir Square on the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the U.S. broadcasting network said Tuesday.

Logan, a 39-year-old South Africa native and longtime war correspondent, has since flown back to the United States and is recovering in hospital. She was one of dozens of journalists attacked during the three weeks of protests throughout Egypt.

CBS News said in a statement Logan was covering the celebrations for CBS's "60 Minutes" program on February 11 when she and her team were surrounded by "a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy."

"In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers," CBS said.

Logan made her name as a war correspondent for Britain's GMTV during the start of the U.S.-led Afghanistan war in 2001 and subsequently reported on the war in Iraq and its violent aftermath. She joined CBS News in 2002.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a media watchdog group, said at least 52 journalists were attacked and 76 were imprisoned during the unrest in Egypt that led Mubarak to step down after 30 years in power. All have been released, it said.

One journalist, Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ta'awun, was killed while filming clashes near Tahrir Square, the CPJ said.

"Egypt's old regime orchestrated a ferocious campaign to stop the news of this movement for change," Paul Steiger, a member of the CPJ's board and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal said.

He was speaking at a news conference to discuss the group's annual report, which examined working conditions for journalists in more than 100 countries. It said 44 journalists were killed and 145 were imprisoned in 2010.

The number of deaths marked a sharp drop from the 71 recorded in 2009. The high toll that year stemmed from a massacre in the Philippines in which at least 34 journalists died -- the single deadliest event for journalists ever.

Pakistan was the deadliest country for journalists in 2010, with eight killed, followed by Iraq with five. Indonesia, Mexico and Honduras followed, each with three reporters slain.

This year's report highlights the increasing importance of web-based journalism. In 2010, 69 journalists whose work appeared primarily online were jailed, according to the CPJ.

Steiger said attacks on Internet journalists, which often include cyberattacks and attacks on websites, must be closely monitored.

"The often invisible, sophisticated attacks constitute a new front in the fight for press freedom," he said. "We need to pay close attention to Internet censorship."

(Reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr. and Mark Egan; Editing by David Storey)

    CBS reporter Lara Logan assaulted in Egypt: CBS News, R, 15.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/15/us-egypt-journalists-idUSTRE71E76I20110215

Hope and Protests

February 15, 2011
The New York Times

Iran’s autocrats have shown once again that they know absolutely no shame. Last week, they crowed about the ouster of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and rushed to claim solidarity with the protestors in Tahrir Square.

On Monday, when thousands of Iranian protestors courageously took to the streets of Tehran, the government sent out its riot police to threaten and beat anyone who dared to demand an end to the mullah’s rule. The judiciary announced that 1,500 people were jailed, and a member of Parliament said two people were killed. Journalists were barred from covering the protests, so no one really knows how many more may have died.

The government has placed two of the main opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest. On Tuesday, 222 of 290 Iranian lawmakers called for their execution. Unfortunately, no one can dismiss that as empty rhetoric. A group of Iranian intellectuals living abroad recently charged that Tehran executed more than 500 dissidents in 2010 and another 83 just since the start of this year.

We don’t know what will happen next. We are cheered by the news that the Iranian people are still willing to stand up and truly frightened by the government’s capacity for brutality.

Iran’s wasn’t the only government choosing force over reason. Two people were killed this week during protests in Bahrain. The tiny country is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, and majority Shiites have long demanded a bigger role in Parliament and other democratic changes. The king is going to have to start delivering promised reforms. A further crackdown will only feed the fury.

The Obama administration took too long to find its voice on Egypt. Part of that was understandable given this country’s strategic investment in Egypt. The cost to America’s reputation may be high.

Denouncing repression in Iran is, of course, easier. On Tuesday, President Obama saluted Iranian demonstrators and criticized the government crackdown. The challenge for Washington is still considerable.

Mr. Obama was smart not to make the United States the issue during Iran’s 2009 antigovernment protests. He and his aides must now find a way to help the Iranian people without feeding the mullahs’ narrative about foreign manipulation. The State Department’s initiative to expand and defend access to the Internet around the world (it just opened a Twitter site in Farsi) seems like a creative start.

Bahrain is the home of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and the administration is once again struggling to find its voice. On Tuesday, the State Department expressed concern about the deaths in Bahrain and urged all sides to refrain from violence. We hope the administration is also pressing the government to begin making reforms and warning it against an even bloodier crackdown. If the repression continues, Washington will have to forcefully denounce it.

Egypt’s revolution has inspired people across the region and deeply frightened autocrats. But the truth is no one knows even how Egypt will turn out. The army says it “hopes” to hand power to an elected civilian leadership by August. To make good on that pledge, it needs to lift the state of emergency now and begin working with opposition groups to plan for a credible vote.

The United States has deep ties with Egypt’s military and more than $1 billion in annual aid as leverage. It needs to keep pushing Egypt forward.

    Hope and Protests, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/opinion/16wed1.html

U.S. Follows Two Paths on Unrest in Iran and Bahrain

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has responded quite differently to two embattled governments that have beaten protesters and blocked the Internet in recent days to fend off the kind of popular revolt that brought down Egypt’s government.

With Iran — a country under sanctions pursuing a nuclear program that has put it at odds with the West — the administration has all but encouraged protesters to take to the streets. With Bahrain, a strategically important ally across the Persian Gulf from Iran, it has urged its king to address the grievances of his people.

Those two approaches were on vivid display at a news conference on Tuesday.

President Obama accused Iran’s leaders of hypocrisy for first encouraging the protests in Egypt, which they described as a continuation of Iran’s own revolution, and then cracking down on Iranians who used the pretext to come out on the streets. He then urged protesters to muster “the courage to be able to express their yearning for greater freedoms and a more representative government.”

But speaking to other restive countries, including Bahrain, Mr. Obama directed his advice to governments, not protesters, illustrating just how tricky diplomacy in the region has become. He said his administration, in talking to Arab allies, was sending the message that “you have a young, vibrant generation within the Middle East that is looking for greater opportunity; and that if you are governing these countries, you’ve got to get out ahead of change. You can’t be behind the curve.”

Mr. Obama’s words on Iran, on the other hand, were among the strongest he has ever voiced in encouraging a street revolt, something his administration initially shied away from doing in June 2009, after a disputed presidential election provoked an uprising that was crushed by the government. Later, the administration embraced the protests, but by then the “Green Movement” in Iran had been crushed.

But now, administration officials see an opportunity to expand the fissures in Iranian society and make life more difficult for the mullahs.

“This isn’t a regime-change strategy,” a senior administration official insisted in recent days. “But it’s fair to say that it’s exploiting fractures that are already there.”

Dealing with other countries in the region is more complicated, however, particularly if they are strategic allies — which was true of Egypt and which prompted criticism that the White House was initially reluctant to put more pressure on such a crucial partner. The same complexities apply to Bahrain, an island state that is home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Two protesters have been killed in Bahrain. The authorities also blocked a video channel that was carrying images uploaded by demonstrators in Pearl Square, a traffic circle the protesters have dubbed Bahrain’s Tahrir Square.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Obama did not mention the violence in Bahrain and chose to draw his distinction between Egypt’s successful uprising and the 2009 crackdown in Iran.

“What’s been different is the Iranian government’s response, which is to shoot people and beat people and arrest people,” he said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton drew a similar distinction in a speech on Tuesday on Internet freedom. Both Egypt and Iran temporarily shut down the Web and cellphone networks, she said.

In Iran, she said, “after the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended. In Egypt, however, the story ended differently.”

In addition to those two countries, Mrs. Clinton listed China, Cuba and Syria as other nations that have censored Facebook and other social networking services.

A senior administration official said the White House had been consistent in calling for all these countries to respond to the demands of their frustrated young people, to allow them to assemble freely and to avoid violence.

But the official said there were deep differences between Iran and Bahrain.

In Iran, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that Egypt had followed in the footsteps of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, an “Islamic awakening” he said would result in the “irreparable defeat” of the United States and Israel.

“Frankly, Iran presented this opportunity itself when Khamenei was the only leader in the region who attempted to take credit for Egypt,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “Our messaging on this is simply to underscore the hypocrisy.”

The official said the administration deplored violence anywhere it occurred, and late on Tuesday the State Department issued a statement saying it was “very concerned” about the two deaths in Bahrain. But the official noted that Bahrain’s monarch, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, had responded to the deaths by calling on Tuesday for an investigation and promising to continue a process of political reforms.

King Hamad has been a stalwart American ally in isolating Iran; in fact, in documents released by WikiLeaks, he was quoted by American diplomats as urging the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Likewise, in Jordan, another close ally of Washington, the administration official said that King Abdullah II had attempted to stay ahead of popular unrest by dismissing his government and replacing it with officials who have pledged to pass a more fair election law and rights of assembly.

Last weekend, the State Department sent William J. Burns, a senior diplomat and former ambassador, to meet with King Abdullah in Jordan. Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, has played that role with Yemen, speaking regularly by telephone with its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom he has also urged to avoid violence in responding to protests, the official said.

The administration’s response to Yemen, where demonstrators have marched on the presidential palace, is complicated by the fact that the United States conducts counterterrorism operations with Mr. Saleh’s government.

Mr. Obama used his news conference to argue that while the revolution in Egypt started quickly, the next act could take far longer. Drawing on studies he had asked for inside the government, he said “the history of successful transitions to democracy have generally been ones in which peaceful protests led to dialogue, led to discussion, led to reform and ultimately led to democracy.”

He cited Eastern Europe and the country where he spent much of his youth: Indonesia, “a majority Muslim country that went through some of these similar transitions,” which he said did not end up dividing the nation.

    U.S. Follows Two Paths on Unrest in Iran and Bahrain, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16diplomacy.html

Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments — many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails — may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

But now, as Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence and their own knowledge of the Egyptian Internet’s construction, they are beginning to understand what, in effect, hit them. Interviews with many of those engineers, as well as an examination of data collected around the world during the blackout, indicate that the government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.

For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.

Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.

Over the past several days, activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have seen strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests there. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are particularly high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic.

A Double Knockout

The attack in Egypt relied on a double knockout, the engineers say. As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals that are tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. But the cutoff also revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on moment-to-moment information from systems that exist only outside the country — including e-mail servers at companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

The government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry somehow remained accessible.

“They drilled unexpectedly all the way down to the bottom layer of the Internet and stopped all traffic flowing,” said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a network management company based in New Hampshire that has closely monitored Internet traffic from Egypt. “With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event.”

The engineers say that a focal point of the attack was an imposing building at 26 Ramses Street in Cairo, just two and a half miles from the epicenter of the protests, Tahrir Square. At one time purely a telephone network switching center, the building now houses the crucial Internet exchange that serves as the connection point for fiber-optic links provided by five major network companies that provide the bulk of the Internet connectivity going into and out of the country.

“In Egypt the actual physical and logical connections to the rest of the world are few, and they are licensed by the government and they are tightly controlled,” said Wael Amin, president of ITWorx, a large software development company based in Cairo.

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Mr. Cowie noted that the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them — and that it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country. But he added that, inevitably, some autocrats would conclude that Mr. Mubarak had simply waited too long to bring down the curtain.

“Probably there are people who will look at this and say, it really worked pretty well, he just blew the timing,” Mr. Cowie said.

Speaking of the Egyptian shutdown and the earlier experience in Tunisia, whose censorship methods were less comprehensive, a senior State Department official said that “governments will draw different conclusions.”

“Some may take measures to tighten communications networks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Others may conclude that these things are woven so deeply into the culture and commerce of their country that they interfere at their peril. Regardless, it is certainly being widely discussed in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Vulnerable Choke Points

In Egypt, where the government still has not explained how the Internet was taken down, engineers across the country are putting together clues from their own observations to understand what happened this time, and to find out whether a future cutoff could be circumvented on a much wider scale than it was when Mr. Mubarak set his attack in motion.

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.

China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.

But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world.

But either way, the international portals were shut, and the domestic system reeled from the blow.

The Lines Go Dead

The first hints of the blackout had actually emerged the day before, Jan. 27, as opposition leaders prepared for a “Friday of anger,” with huge demonstrations expected. Ahmed ElShabrawy, who runs a company called EgyptNetwork, noticed that the government had begun blocking individual sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just after midnight on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Amin’s iPhone beeped with an alert that international connections to his consulting company’s Internet system had vanished — and then the iPhone itself stopped receiving e-mail. A few minutes later, Mr. ElShabrawy received an urgent call telling him that all Internet lines running to his company were dead.

It was not long before Ayman Bahaa, director of Egyptian Universities Network, which developed the country’s Internet nearly two decades ago, was scrambling to figure out how the system had all but collapsed between the strokes of 12 and 1.

The system had been crushed so completely that when a network engineer who does repairs in Cairo woke in the morning, he said to his family, “I feel we are in the 1800s.”

Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off.

The most telling bit of evidence was that some Internet services inside the country were still working, at least sporadically. American University in Cairo, frantically trying to relocate students and faculty members away from troubled areas, was unable to use e-mail, cellphones — which were also shut down — or even a radio frequency reserved for security teams. But the university was able to update its Web site, hosted on a server inside Egypt, and at least some people were able to pull up the site and follow the emergency instructions.

“The servers were up,” said Nagwa Nicola, the chief technology officer at American University in Cairo. “You could reach up to the Internet provider itself, but you wouldn’t get out of the country.” Ms. Nicola said that no notice had been given, and she depicted an operation that appeared to have been carried out with great secrecy.

“When we called the providers, they said, ‘Um, hang on, we just have a few problems and we’ll be on again,’ ” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us it was out.”

She added, “It wasn’t expected at all that something like that would happen.”

Told to Shut Down or Else

Individual Internet service providers were also called on the carpet and ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing agreements if the government so decrees.

According to an Egyptian engineer and an international telecom expert who both spoke on the condition of anonymity, at least one provider, Vodafone, expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told that if it did not comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt infrastructure — a method that would be much more time-consuming to reverse. Other exchanges, like an important one in Alexandria, may also have been involved.

Still, even major providers received little notice that the moves were afoot, said an Egyptian with close knowledge of the telecom industry who would speak only anonymously.

“You don’t get a couple of days with something like this,” he said. “It was less than an hour.”

After the Internet collapsed, Mr. ElShabrawy, 35, whose company provides Internet service to 2,000 subscribers and develops software for foreign and domestic customers, made urgent inquiries with the Ministry of Communications, to no avail. So he scrambled to re-establish his own communications.

When he, too, noticed that domestic fiber-optic cables were open, he had a moment of exhilaration, remembering that he could link up servers directly and establish messaging using an older system called Internet Relay Chat. But then it dawned on him that he had always assumed he could download the necessary software via the Internet and had saved no copy.

“You don’t have your tools — you don’t have anything,” Mr. ElShabrawy said he realized as he stared at the dead lines at his main office in Mansoura, about 60 miles outside Cairo.

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.

Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”

    Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html

Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Be Political Party

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and J. DAVID GOODMAN

CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamic group that has long constituted Egypt’s main political opposition, said Tuesday that it would apply to become an official political party as soon as the necessary changes were made to the Egyptian Constitution.

Those changes, which are expected to establish a democratic process in advance of elections in six months, had been widely anticipated in the aftermath of the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

The ousted leader saw the Brotherhood as a chief political rival and initiated the renewal of a crackdown since 2005, when the group ran independent candidates in parliamentary elections and won many races.

The current Constitution bars any political party based on a religious identity, a provision that precluded the Brotherhood from forming a legally recognized party.

In a sign of the Brotherhood’s increasing official legitimacy, the military government said Tuesday that a panel of experts drawing up changes to the Constitution over the next 10 days would include one member from the banned group.

The Brotherhood strongly reaffirmed its commitment to rejoining the political process, saying in a statement released Tuesday on its Web site that it “envisions the establishment of a democratic, civil state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, with central Islamic values serving all Egyptians regardless of color, creed, political trend or religion.”

Banned since 1954, the Brotherhood has for more than a decade operated as a de facto political party, running independent candidates who all used the same slogans and the same platform and all caucused together. In the 2005 elections, the Brotherhood won 88 seats in Parliament, or about 20 percent of the total, but the Mubarak government pushed the group out of the country’s most recent vote last fall, in elections that were widely seen as fraudulent.

The constitutional amendments to be drawn up in the coming days are widely expected to include broadening the terms of eligibility for political participation, including allowing the Brotherhood to compete under its own name as a party.

The Brotherhood reported on its Web site on Tuesday that “once an official legitimate committee has been formed, it will apply to become an official party.”

But leaders of the group have said they would not field a presidential candidate in this year’s election to replace Mr. Mubarak. “It’s time for solidarityl it’s time for unity; in my opinion we need a national consensus,” Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Brotherhood, told Reuters, explaining why it would not seek the presidency this year.


David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and J. David Goodman from New York.

    Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Be Political Party, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16brotherhood.html

Iran MPs want death penalty for opposition leaders

Reuters
Tue Feb 15, 2011
9:04am EST
By Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian lawmakers urged judiciary on Tuesday to hand out death penalties to opposition leaders for fomenting unrest in the Islamic state after a rally in which one person was killed and dozens were wounded, state media said.

Clashes broke out between security forces and protesters when thousands of opposition supporters rallied in sympathy for popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia on Monday, reviving mass protests that shook Iran after a presidential vote in 2009.

"(Opposition leaders) Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried," the official IRNA news agency quoted lawmakers as saying in a statement.

The loose term "Corrupt on Earth," a charge which has been leveled at political dissidents in the past, carries the death penalty in the Islamic Iran.

Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said: "Those who created public disorder on Monday will be confronted firmly and immediately."

Iranian authorities have repeatedly accused opposition leaders of being part of a Western plot to overthrow the Islamic system. The claim has been denied by Mousavi and Karroubi.

Parliament speaker Ali Larijani also accused the United States and its allies of providing support to the opposition.

"The main aim of Americans was to simulate the recent events in the Middle East in Iran to divert attentions from those countries," Larijani said, state radio reported.

Protests against Iran's clerical establishment appeared to have ended and life was back to normal in Tehran streets and other cities on Tuesday.

INCREASING PRESSURE

But wary of a repeat of the protests in 2009, which saw the biggest unrest since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, hardline rulers are expected to step up pressure on the opposition to prevent a new flare-up.

The last anti-government protest in Iran was in December 2009 when eight people were killed.

At least 20 pro-reform activists were arrested before the protests, opposition websites reported.

State television described protesters as "Hypocrites, monarchists, thugs and seditionists." A senior police official said dozens of protesters had been arrested and at least nine policemen were wounded by "hypocrites."

"We have information...that America, Britain ad Israel guided the opposition leaders who called for the rally," said deputy police chief Ahmadreza Radan, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Iran's top authority Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia against secular, Western-allied rulers an "Islamic awakening," akin to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah in Iran.

But the opposition say events in Tunisia and Egypt mirror their own protests after the June 2009 vote which they say was rigged to secure President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election. Authorities deny this.

The opposition leaders, who called the protest, were prevented by security forces from participating the rally, Mousavi's website Kaleme reported.

Amnesty International, Britain and the United States condemned the authorities' reaction to the protests.

(Additional reporting by Ramin Mostafavi and Reza Derakhshi; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

    Iran MPs want death penalty for opposition leaders,  R, 15.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/15/us-iran-opposition-idUSTRE71D1RT20110215

Egypt Initiates 10-Day Rewrite of Its Constitution

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

CAIRO — The military officers governing Egypt convened a panel of jurists on Tuesday to revise the country’s constitution, giving the panel, which includes a former lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood, just 10 days to complete its work in an early sign of the military’s apparent seriousness in quickly moving the country to civilian rule.

Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the military council, told the panel that he hoped to yield control to civilian rulers in six months or less, according to Sobhi Saleh, the former Muslim Brotherhood lawmaker. The Muslim Brotherhood, banned by former President Hosni Mubarak, also issued a statement on Tuesday declaring its intention to again become an official political party “when the time is right.”

The constitutional panel will be trying to fix a document that concentrated power in the hands of Mr. Mubarak and his allies, by removing or amending clauses including one that severely restricted who could run for president. The panel of eight people is headed by a former judge, Tareq el-Bishri, and includes a Coptic Christian judge and three experts in constitutional law.

“The committee is technical and very balanced,” Mr. Saleh said. “It has no political color, except me, since I was a member of Parliament. Tantawi told us try and finish as fast as we can.”

Some analysts voiced concern that the military’s schedule was too brisk. “Constitutional amendments in 10 days?” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.

“We’re talking about the architecture of the nation. That’s just crazy,” he said.

Some in the opposition welcomed the brisk schedule as evidence that the officers were eager to turn over power to a civilian authority. But others, noting that the military had so far excluded civilians from the transitional government, questioned whether the schedule might signal just the opposite. They worried that the military might be trying to manipulate events to preserve its power by rushing the process and denying political parties and candidates enough time to organize for a meaningful, fair election that could elect a strong civilian government.

Two generals on the governing Supreme Military Council presented the plan — which calls for writing the amendments in 10 days and holding the referendum within two months — in a meeting on Sunday night with the revolution’s young leaders.

The meeting appeared to be the military’s first significant effort to reach out to the civilian opponents of Mr. Mubarak, and two of the young protest organizers, true to their movement’s Internet roots, promptly summarized the meeting in a post on Facebook.

“The first time an Egyptian official sat down to listen more than speak,” they wrote of their meeting with the generals, Mahmoud Hijazi and Abdel Fattah. The two young leaders, Wael Ghonim and Amr Salama, also praised the generals’ attentive demeanor and the absence of the usual “parental tone (you do not know what is good for you, son).”

Still, the two reserved judgment about the military’s plan, and others in the group said their coalition had yet to make a final assessment of it.

“This meeting was just for the military to tell us about their plans,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, another of the revolution’s young leaders. “We have asked for another meeting this week to tell them about our plans. Then we will see.”

Egypt has effectively been under direct military control since Sunday, when the council suspended the Constitution and dissolved Parliament. And some in the opposition, including the Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, have repeatedly warned that hasty elections could so weaken the fledgling democracy that another military strongman could seize power.

A communiqué issued on Monday by the Supreme Military Council appeared to walk a fine line in grappling with a variety of problems in governing a restive Egypt. In responding to a series of strikes by state workers, journalists and the police on Monday, the council issued a forceful exhortation that some read as a veiled threat, although it did not threaten specific penalties.

A Western diplomat who knows Field Marshal Tantawi said it was clear that he did not relish his high-profile role and did not want to keep it.

“My strong sense is there is no real desire to prolong this period,” the diplomat said. “The field marshal does not seem really interested in being the government of Egypt. He would prefer to take the armed forces back, to have their very large and very comfortable arrangement in Egyptian society and let the civilians take charge of government.”

But the diplomat said it remained to be seen whether a swift transition to democracy was possible. “The issue is whether this is the best thing or not the best thing,” he said.

Rumors swirled about the whereabouts of the former president, who has not been seen in public since he flouted plans for a graceful exit and delivered a defiant reassertion of his power in a speech on Thursday night. Mr. Mubarak had reportedly left Cairo for his vacation home in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik.

On Monday, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, Sameh Shoukry, said on NBC’s “Today” show that Mr. Mubarak, 82, was “possibly in somewhat of bad health.”

    Egypt Initiates 10-Day Rewrite of Its Constitution, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16egypt.html

Egypt to Revise Its Constitution

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

CAIRO — The military officers governing Egypt convened a panel of jurists on Tuesday to revise the country’s constitution, giving the panel, which includes a former lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood, just 10 days to complete its work in an early sign of the military’s apparent seriousness in quickly moving the country to civilian rule.

The military council, headed by the defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, told the panel that he hoped to yield control to civilian rulers in six months or less, according to Sobhi Saleh, the former Muslim Brotherhood lawmaker.

The experts will be trying to fix a constitution that concentrated power in the hands of former President Hosni Mubarak and his allies, by removing or amending clauses including one that severely restricted who could run for president. The panel of eight people is headed by a former judge, Tareq el-Bishri, and includes a Coptic Christian judge and three experts in constitutional law.

“The committee is technical and very balanced,” Mr. Saleh said. “It has no political color, except me, since I was a member of Parliament. Tantawi told us try and finish as fast as we can.”

Some analysts voiced concern that the military’s schedule was too brisk. “Constitutional amendments in 10 days?” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.

“We’re talking about the architecture of the nation. That’s just crazy,” he said.

    Egypt to Revise Its Constitution, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16egypt.html

Bahrain Roiled After Second Protester Is Killed by Police

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and ALAN COWELL

MANAMA, Bahrain — More than 10,000 people streamed into the capital’s central Pearl Square on Tuesday in the largest political protest to hit this Persian Gulf kingdom in recent memory.

Galvanized by the death of a demonstrator in clashes with the police on Monday, protesters waved flags and chanted “peaceful” under the square’s towering monument as a police helicopter hovered overhead. Hundreds of protesters also massed on a nearby bridge overpass.

While festive, the atmosphere among protesters, who passed out sandwiches and talked about creating their own version of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, was cut through with a sense of foreboding as dozens of police cars could be seen gathering nearby. The police blocked protesters from the square on Monday.

Protesters on Tuesday chanted: “We’re not Sunni. We’re not Shiite. We just want to be free.”

Hours before, protesters clashed with the police and a second demonstrator was killed by gunfire, spurring the largest Shiite bloc to suspend its participation in the country’s Parliament.

The events came after thousands of mourners gathered for the funeral of the Shiite protester shot to death during what was called a Day of Rage protest on Monday, modeled on outbursts of discontent that have toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt since mid-January and spread on Monday to Iran.

With only about a million residents, half of them foreign workers, Bahrain has long been among the most politically volatile countries in the region. The principal tension is between the royal family under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and the ruling elites, who are mostly Sunnis, on one side, and the approximately 70 percent of the population that is Shiite, on the other.

But protesters young and old called for a new Constitution and democratic changes to allow for a more effective representative Parliament and government. King Hamad has been promising to open up the political system for a decade, but progress has been slow.

On Tuesday, the king made a rare television appearance in which he offered condolences on the protesters’ deaths and said the process of change in the kingdom “will not stop,” according to the official Bahrain News Agency.

On Tuesday the police first sought to block the funeral, firing tear gas at the crowd. In the skirmishing that followed, the second protester was shot dead.

The bloodshed prompted the Wefaq National Islamic Society, the largest Shiite opposition bloc in Parliament, to announce to mourners that it was suspending its membership. But it did not rule out a return.

“This is the first step; we want to see dialogue,” Ibrahim Mattar, a Shiite member of Parliament, told Reuters. “In the coming days, we are either going to resign from the council or continue.”

The demonstrations on Tuesday, a public holiday marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, drew thousands of people who followed the body of the protester slain on Monday, Ali Mushaima, from a hospital morgue to his home outside Manama to be prepared for burial.

Mourners chanted slogans demanding the ouster of the ruling elite, echoing calls in Tunisia and Egypt.

News reports said the second protester to die was Fadhel Salman Matrook. According to the police, mourners and the police clashed when a police vehicle broke down and three others carried officers to its rescue. He was wounded and died later in the hospital, Reuters reported.

Many of the clashes Monday and Tuesday were in small Shiite villages on the outskirts of Manama, the capital, places with narrow streets and alleyways. Shiites say they face systemic discrimination in employment, housing, education and government. Young people said they mostly wanted jobs and a chance at a better life.


Michael Slackman reported from Manama, Bahrain, and Alan Cowell from Paris. J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

    Bahrain Roiled After Second Protester Is Killed by Police, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html

Clashes at Protest for Second Day in Bahrain

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and ALAN COWELL

MANAMA, Bahrain — After weeks of turmoil rolling through the Arab world, protesters in the Persian Gulf kingdom clashed for a second day with the police on Tuesday and a second demonstrator was killed by gunfire, spurring the largest Shiite bloc to suspend participation in the country’s Parliament.

The events came as mourners gathered for the funeral of a Shiite protester shot to death during what was called a “Day of Rage” protest on Monday, modeled on similar outbursts of discontent that have toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt since mid-January and spread on Monday to Iran.

With only about a million residents, half of them foreign workers, Bahrain has long been among the most politically volatile in the region. The principal tension is between the royal family under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and the ruling elites, who are mostly Sunnis, on one side, and the approximately 70 percent of the local population that is Shiite on the other.

Occupying mostly run-down villages with cinder block buildings and little else, many Shiites say they face systemic discrimination in employment, housing, education and government.

The clashes Monday and Tuesday centered on small Shiite villages on the outskirts of Manama, the capital, places with narrow streets and alleyways.

On Tuesday, police first sought to block the funeral, firing tear gas at the crowd. In the skirmishing that followed, the second protester was shot dead and a human rights workers, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the high tension in the kingdom, said the demonstrator appeared to have been shot in the back.

The bloodshed prompted the Wefaq National Islamic Society, the largest Shiite opposition bloc in the Parliament, to announce to mourners that it was suspending its membership. But it did not rule out a return.

“This is the first step. We want to see dialogue,” Ibrahim Mattar, a Shiite parliamentarian told Reuters. “In the coming days, we are either going to resign from the council or continue.”

The demonstrations on Tuesday, a public holiday marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, drew thousands of people who followed the body of the protester slain on Monday, Ali Mushaima, from a hospital morgue to his home outside Manama to be prepared for burial.

Mourners chanted slogans demanding the ouster of the ruling elite, echoing similar calls in Tunisia and Egypt.

News reports said the second protester to die was Fadhel Salman Matrook. According to the police, mourners and police clashed when a police vehicle broke down and three others carried officers to its rescue. He was wounded and died later in the hospital, Reuters reported.

It appeared that all of the protests on Monday were in Shiite communities, with demands that were both economic and political. Young people said they mostly wanted jobs and a chance at a better life.

But protesters young and old called for a new Constitution and democratic changes to allow for a more effective representative Parliament and government. The king has been promising to open up the political system for a decade, but progress has been slow.

    Clashes at Protest for Second Day in Bahrain, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html

In One Slice of a New Egypt, Few Are Focusing on Religion

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — A generation ago, Ahmed Mitwalli’s parents were Islamists in this neighborhood along the Nile once nicknamed the Islamic Republic of Imbaba. But their son is not, and his convictions, echoed in the cauldron of frustrations of one of the world’s most crowded quarters, suggest why the Muslim Brotherhood is not driving Egypt’s nascent revolution.

“Bread, social justice and freedom,” the 21-year-old college graduate said. “What’s religious about that?”

Egypt’s revolution is far from decided, and the Muslim Brotherhood remains the most popular and best-organized opposition forces in the country, poised to play a crucial role in the transition and its aftermath. But in a neighborhood once ceded to militant Islamists, who declared their own state within a state in the early 1990s, sentiments here are most remarkable for how little religion inflects them. Be it complaints about a police force that long resembled an army of occupation, smoldering class resentment or even youthful demands for frivolity, a growing consciousness has taken hold in a sign of what awaits the rest of the Arab world after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall on Friday.

Three times more crowded than Manhattan, Imbaba offers a window on the shift away from religious fervor. A fiery preacher, derided as a drummer-turned-cleric, imposed his rule on Imbaba’s streets for years until the government drove him and his followers out after a long siege in 1992. With American largess, the government tried to wrangle a city still not recognized on its maps back on the grid. By the accounts of residents, it failed, eventually withdrawing from a sea of resentment that neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor anyone else has managed to channel.

“The last thing youth are thinking about is religion,” said Mr. Mitwalli, who hides his cigarettes from a family where all the women wear the most conservative veil. “It’s the last thing that comes up. They need money, they need to get married, a car, and they don’t have anything to do with anything else. They’ll elect whoever can deliver that.”

Though parts of Imbaba are upscale, much of it feels like the countryside washing across the pretenses of a city, unfinished red-brick buildings overlooking markets disgorged in the streets. Three-wheel buggies known as tuk-tuks, blaring the latest pop song of Amr Diab, an ageless Egyptian pop star, navigate a mélange of overflowing trash dumpsters, mannequins in the median and racks of clothes in the street.

Mr. Mubarak’s government long stigmatized neighborhoods like Imbaba as a netherworld of crime and danger. There is that, though its people extol their own sense of community, where streets band together at the slightest provocation. When the uprising devastated the economy, vendors brought down prices to help people cope. And in almost every conversation, residents, especially the young, frame their plight as us against them.

“There was no dialogue,” said Walid Sabr, a 29-year-old who works at a shoe store. “There was force and there was bullying. Dialogue with that? It’s impossible.”

Samih Ahmed, a vendor down the street, added, “This isn’t the January 25th revolution,” calling the uprising by its most popular name. “This is a revolution of dignity.”

Everyone in the neighborhood had a story about officials — a $2 bribe to enter a hospital to see a relative, a $20 fine imposed for stealing electricity, a $10 payoff to a municipal official to get an identity card. Mr. Sabr talked about getting arrested for trying to report a traffic accident. Ibrahim Mohamed complained that he had been thrown in jail after the police planted hashish on him. Umayma Mohamed, a 23-year-old woman carrying her 3-month-old baby, begged for help in getting her brother released after a fight.

“You raise your voice,” Mohamed Ali said, “and they answer by beating you.”

Egypt is deeply devout, and imposing labels often does more to confuse than illuminate. Amal Salih, who joined the protests against her parents’ wishes, dons an orange scarf over her head but calls herself secular. “Egypt is religious, regrettably,” she said. Mr. Mitwalli wears a beard but calls himself liberal, “within the confines of religion.” A driver, Osama Ramadan, despises the Muslim Brotherhood but has jury-rigged his car to blare a prayer when he turns on the ignition.

Defining sentiments is no more precise. Youths defiant in their praise of Mr. Mubarak only last week joined the celebrations on Friday, some bringing flags and fireworks to Tahrir Square. Residents say some of the most ardent Islamists here had the best connections with the police, who sought to cultivate them as informants. But in streets suffused with trash, occasionally drawing flocks of sheep, a common refrain is that political Islam, as practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood, does not offer the kind of solutions that may decide an election.

“We don’t need prayers, sheiks and beards,” said Mr. Mohammed, standing with the angry crowd on a street filled with trash. “We’ve had enough of the clerics.”

The Islamic Group, known in Arabic as Al Gamaa al-Islamiyya, waged an intermittent insurgency against the government in the 1990s, and Mr. Mitwalli’s uncle was one of its leaders. He was jailed for 13 years. A man known as Sheik Gaber belonged to the same group, and he and his followers imposed their notion of order here, drawing thousands to sermons where they occasionally — and triumphantly — broadcast a tape of President Anwar el-Sadat’s assassination in 1981. They arbitrated disputes and provided for the poor, while sauntering through the slum to drive away prostitutes and drug dealers, to impose the veil, to burn shops that rented Western videos, and to force Christians to pay a religious tax.

An embarrassed government eventually sent in 12,000 soldiers and armored cars in a crackdown that began a six-week occupation. With the help of American aid, it flooded the neighborhood with investment for a time, paving roads and bringing sewerage, telephones and electricity. Just last year, the governor of Giza, which oversees Imbaba’s side of the Nile, pledged it would soon look like one of Cairo’s wealthier neighborhoods.

It does not. In fact, Imbaba feels overwhelmed, as the rich flee to suburbs with names like Dreamland, Beverly Hills and the European Countryside, and a new government faces its predecessor’s failure to provide housing for a population where nearly 7 in 10 are under the age of 34, numbers that mirror much of the Arab world.

“The youth today think this way: let me live my life today, and I don’t care if you kill me tomorrow,” said Mohammed Fathi, a 23-year-old friend of Mr. Sabr’s at the shoe store. “Next year isn’t important. All I’m thinking about is getting by today.”

In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and grim stretches of urban Iraq, populist clerics often manage to channel youthful anger. But the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps most distinguished for representing the demands of an aspiring middle class; it counts some of Cairo’s wealthiest among its ranks. No one in Imbaba mentioned a religious figure as an inspiration. Asked about their choice for a new president, many shrugged or offered up Amr Moussa, the aging former secretary general of the Arab League.

The biggest draw here seemed to be one of Imbaba’s favorite sons, the Little Arab, a pop singer who runs a cafe on Luxor Street decorated with his own pictures.

“I don’t want to be pinned down by any political tendency,” Ms. Salih said.

It remains an oddity of the long struggle between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood that both an aging opposition and a corrupt state spoke the same language of moral conservatism. It has left Egypt more ostensibly religious over the years. Measured by sentiments here, it may have also provoked a backlash among youth recoiling at the prospect of yet more rules promised by an even more stringent application of Islamic law.

“In my view?” asked Osama Hassan, a high school student who joined the protests in their climactic days. “We need more freedom not less. The whole system has to change.”

    In One Slice of a New Egypt, Few Are Focusing on Religion, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16islam.html

Pakistan and Afghanistan to Get New U.S. Envoy

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has chosen Marc Grossman, a retired senior diplomat and former ambassador to Turkey, as the Obama administration’s new special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a senior State Department official said Monday.

Mr. Grossman, who left the State Department in 2005 and is the vice chairman of a consulting firm, will succeed Richard C. Holbrooke, who died of a torn aorta in December, leaving a void in the senior policy-making ranks on one of the White House’s most pressing foreign-policy issues.

Mrs. Clinton met with Mr. Grossman on Monday and he was introduced to members of Mr. Holbrooke’s staff, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the appointment was not yet public. Mr. Grossman must still undergo a vetting process, the official said, though Mrs. Clinton may announce his appointment as soon as Friday.

The Washington Post reported the news of Mr. Grossman’s appointment on its Web site on Monday evening.

The search for Mr. Holbrooke’s replacement was difficult, with Mrs. Clinton considering several senior diplomats before settling on Mr. Grossman. Among the other people on her list, officials said, was Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state who leads the Brookings Institution, and Frank G. Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt, who was recently sent on a mission to prod former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to declare he would not to run for re-election.

Mr. Holbrooke’s post has been filled on an interim basis by his deputy, Frank Ruggiero, who served as the head of the provincial reconstruction team in the Afghan city of Kandahar.

Mr. Grossman, who now works for the Cohen Group, was assistant secretary of state for European affairs, in addition to his post in Turkey. He was also under secretary of state for political affairs, the highest ranking job in the State Department for a career diplomat.

If he passes his background checks, Mr. Grossman could face an early challenge in Pakistan, where the government has arrested an American official, Raymond A. Davis, in the killing of two Pakistanis. The United States protested the move, which it says violates the official’s diplomatic immunity.

    Pakistan and Afghanistan to Get New U.S. Envoy, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/asia/15envoy.html

U.S. Policy to Address Internet Freedom

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Days after Facebook and Twitter added fuel to a revolt in Egypt, the Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Internet freedom, designed to help people get around barriers in cyberspace while making it harder for autocratic governments to use the same technology to repress dissent.

The State Department’s policy, a year in the making, has been bogged down by fierce debates over which projects it should support, and even more basically, whether to view the Internet primarily as a weapon to topple repressive regimes or as a tool that autocrats can use to root out and crush dissent.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will lay out the policy in a speech on Tuesday, acknowledged the Internet’s dual role in an address a year ago, and administration officials said she would touch on that theme again, noting how social networks were used by both protesters and governments in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries.

The State Department plans to finance programs like circumvention services, which enable users to evade Internet firewalls, and training for human rights workers on how to secure their e-mail from surveillance or wipe incriminating data from cellphones if they are detained by the police.

Though the policy has been on the drawing board for months, it has new urgency in light of the turmoil in the Arab world, because it will be part of a larger debate over how the United States weighs its alliances with entrenched leaders against the young people inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Administration officials say that the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but is not a “magic bullet” that brings down repressive regimes.

“People are so enamored of the technology,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “People have a view that technology will make us free. No, people will make us free.”

Critics say the administration has dawdled for more than a year, holding back $30 million in Congressional financing that could have gone to circumvention technology, a proven method that allows Internet users to evade government firewalls by routing their traffic through proxy servers in other countries.

Some of these services have received modest financing from the government, but their backers say they need much more to install networks capable of handling millions of users in China, Iran and other countries.

A report by the Republican minority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be released Tuesday, said the State Department’s performance was so inadequate that the job of financing Internet freedom initiatives — at least those related to China — should be moved to another agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

“Certainly, the State Department took an awfully long time to get this out,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent and expert on Internet freedom issues who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “They got so besieged by the politics of what they should be funding.”

Still, Ms. MacKinnon said that she believed the State Department’s deliberations had been thoughtful and the plan “is going to be effective if it’s couched within a broader set of policies.”

There are other contradictions in the State Department’s agenda: it champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.

In the long months the government has wrestled with these issues, critics said, the Iranian government was able to keep censoring the Internet, helping it muffle the protests that followed its disputed presidential election in 2009.

Mr. Posner, a longtime human rights advocate, acknowledges that the process has been long and occasionally messy. But he contends that over the past year, the administration has developed a coherent policy that takes account of the rapidly evolving role the Internet plays in closed societies.

The State Department has received 68 proposals for nearly six times the $30 million in available funds. The department said it would take at least two months to evaluate proposals before handing out money.

Among the kinds of things that excite officials are “circuit riders,” experts who tour Internet cafes in Myanmar teaching people how to set up secure e-mail accounts, and new ways of dealing with denial-of-service attacks.

This does not satisfy critics, who say the lawmakers intended the $30 million to be used quickly — and on circumvention.

“The department’s failure to follow Congressional intent created the false impression among Iranian demonstrators that the regime had the power to disrupt access to Facebook and Twitter,” said Michael J. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who lobbies on behalf of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a circumvention service with ties to Falun Gong.

Mr. Horowitz has organized demonstrations of the service for legislators, journalists and others. On Jan. 27, the day before the Egyptian government cut off access to the Internet, he said there were more than 7.8 million page views by Egyptians on UltraSurf, one of two consumer services under the umbrella of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. That was a huge increase from only 76,000 on Jan. 22.

The trouble, Mr. Horowitz said, is that UltraSurf and its sister service, Freegate, do not have enough capacity to handle sudden spikes in usage during political crises. That causes the speed to slow to a crawl, which discourages users. The companies need tens of millions of dollars to install an adequate network, he said. Under a previous government grant, the group received $1.5 million.

But the experience in Egypt points up the limits of circumvention. By shutting down the entire Internet, the authorities were able to make such systems moot. Administration officials point out that circumvention is also of little value in countries like Russia, which does not block the Internet but dispatches the police to pursue bloggers, or in Myanmar, which has sophisticated ways to monitor e-mail accounts.

Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said that governments had been shifting from blocking the Internet to hacking and disabling it. Even in the United States, he noted, the Senate is considering a bill that would allow the president to switch off the Internet in the event of a catastrophic cyberattack.

    U.S. Policy to Address Internet Freedom, NYT, 14.2.201, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/15clinton.html

Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

With Facebook playing a starring role in the revolts that toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt, you might think the company’s top executives would use this historic moment to highlight its role as the platform for democratic change. Instead, they really do not want to talk about it.

The social media giant finds itself under countervailing pressures after the uprisings in the Middle East. While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users, according to some company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal business.

And Facebook does not want to alter its firm policy requiring users to sign up with their real identities. The company says this requirement protects its users from fraud. However, human rights advocates like Susannah Vila, the director of content and outreach for Movements.org, which provides resources for digital activists, say it could put some people at risk from governments looking to ferret out dissent.

“People are going to be using this platform for political mobilization, which only underscores the importance of ensuring their safety,” she said.

Under those rules, Facebook shut down one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest pages in November because Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who emerged as a symbol of the revolt, had used a pseudonym to create a profile as one of the administrators of the page, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

With Egypt’s emergency law in place limiting freedom of speech, Mr. Ghonim might have put himself and the other organizers at risk if they were discovered at that time. Activists scrambled to find another administrator to get the page back up and running. And when Egyptian government authorities did figure out Mr. Ghonim’s role with the Facebook page that helped promote the Jan. 25 protest in Tahrir Square, he was imprisoned for 12 days.

Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged Facebook to take “immediate and tangible steps” to help protect democracy and human rights activists who use its services, including addressing concerns about not being able to use pseudonyms.

In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Mr. Durbin said the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia had highlighted the costs and benefits of social tools to democracy and human rights advocates. “I am concerned that the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments,” he wrote.

Elliot Schrage, the vice president for global communications, public policy and marketing at Facebook, declined to discuss Facebook’s role in the recent tumult and what it might mean for the company’s services.

In a short statement, he said: “We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country. Certainly, technology was a vital tool in their efforts but we believe their bravery and determination mattered most.”

Other social media tools, like YouTube and Twitter, also played major roles in Tunisia and Egypt, especially when the protests broke out. But Facebook was the primary tool used in Egypt, first to share reports about police abuse and then to build an online community that was mobilized to join the Jan. 25 protests.

In recent weeks, Facebook pages and groups trying to mobilize protesters have sprung up in Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco and Syria. Hashtags on Twitter have also helped spread the protests, which extended to Algeria over the weekend and to Bahrain, Iran and Yemen on Monday.

“This is an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where he works on projects about the use of technology and media in the developing world. “It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists.”

Unlike Vodafone and other telecommunications carriers, which often need contracts and licenses to operate within countries, Facebook and other social networks are widely available around the world (except in countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have restricted access) and encourage the free flow of information for anyone with access to the Internet.

In a speech that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to deliver Tuesday, she will once again emphasize that Internet freedom is an inalienable right. In recent weeks, the State Department has been sending out Twitter updates in Arabic and began sending updates in Persian over the weekend.

Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have been more willing to embrace their roles in activism and unrest, Mr. Zuckerman said.

After the Internet was shut down in Egypt, Twitter and Google actively helped protesters by producing a new service, speak2tweet, that allowed people to leave voice mail messages that would be filed as updates on Twitter. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, used it as an opportunity to emphasize the positive global impact that comes with the open exchange of information.

When the Internet was back up, YouTube, working with Storyful, a social media news curation service, took the thousands of videos pouring in from the protests in Tahrir Square to help people retrieve and share the information as quickly as possible on CitizenTube, its news and politics channel.

Facebook has taken steps to help protesters in Tunisia after government officials used a virus to obtain local Facebook passwords this year. The company rerouted Facebook’s traffic from Tunisia and used the breach to upgrade security last month for all of its more than 550 million users worldwide; at the same time, it was careful to cast the response as a technical solution to a security problem. There are about two million Facebook users in Tunisia and five million in Egypt.

Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said the company was not considering changing its policy requiring users to use their real identities, which she says leads to greater accountability and a safer environment.

“The trust people place in us is the most important part of what makes Facebook work,” she said, adding that the company welcomed a discussion with Mr. Durbin and others who have an interest in this matter. “As demonstrated by our response to threats in Tunisia, we take this trust seriously and work aggressively every single day to protect people.”

Mr. Durbin has urged Facebook to join the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code of conduct for technology companies, created in 2008, that requires participating businesses to take reasonable steps to protect human rights.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, said that the people and companies behind the technology needed to be more transparent about what information they collect, and that they needed to develop consistent policies to allow people to opt in or out of their data collection systems. “We must have a right to protect the privacy of information stored in the cloud as rigorously as if it were in our own home,” he said.

    Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/business/media/15facebook.html

Iran Uses Force Against Protests As Region Erupts

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL

Hundreds of riot police officers in Iran beat protesters and fired tear gas Monday to contain the most significant street protests since the end of the 2009 uprising there, as security forces around the region moved — sometimes brutally — to prevent new unrest in sympathy with the opposition victory in Egypt.

In Tehran, a spokesman for Mir Hussein Moussavi, a leading opponent of the government, said the protests had shown that the so-called Green Movement, formed to challenge the disputed election in 2009, had scored a “great victory“ and was “alive and well“ despite a huge government crackdown.

But, breaking an official silence on the demonstrations, the Fars news agency, a semiofficial service linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the demonstrations had been conducted by “hypocrites, monarchists, hooligans and seditionists“ whose leaders were puppets of Britain and the United States. It ridiculed them for not chanting slogans about Egypt, the nominal reason for the protests, and said an unspecified number of people had been arrested.

Iranian human rights activists and police said on person was killed and several injured in protests that continued until close to midnight. The authorities had refused to issue a permit for the demonstration but Amir Arjomand, the spokesman for Mr. Moussavi said: “If the government had issued a permit and guaranteed the safety of the people there would certainly have been millions of people out in Tehran and other cities.“

The size of the protests in Iran was unclear. Witness accounts and news reports from inside the country suggested that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 demonstrators in several cities defied strong warnings and took to the streets.

The unrest was an acute embarrassment for Iranian leaders, who had sought to portray the toppling of two secular rulers, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, as a triumph of popular support for Islam in the Arab world. They had refused permission to Iranian opposition groups seeking to march in solidarity with the Egyptians, and warned journalists and photographers based in the country, with success, not to report on the protests.

Iranian demonstrators portrayed the Arab insurrections as a different kind of triumph. “Mubarak, Ben Ali, now it’s time for Sayyid Ali!“ Iranian protesters chanted in Persian on videos posted online that appeared to be from Tehran, referring to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian authorities have shown that they will not hesitate to crush demonstrations with deadly force. Other governments across the Middle East and the Persian Gulf also moved aggressively to stamp out protests on Monday.

In Egypt, the army stuck to its promise not to attack demonstrators, but the death toll during the protests leading to Mr. Mubarak’s downfall reached about 300 people, according to the United Nations and human rights organizations. Most fatalities appeared to have occurred when pro-government thugs attacked demonstrators.

On Monday, the police in Bahrain fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of peaceful protesters from the Shiite majority population. So much tear gas was fired that the officers themselves vomited. In Yemen, hundreds of student protesters clashed with pro-government forces in the fourth straight day of protests.

In the central Iranian city of Isfahan, many demonstrators were arrested after security forces clashed with them, reports said, and sporadic messages from inside Iran indicated that there had also been protests in Shiraz, Mashhad and Rasht.

Numbers were hard to assess, given government threats against journalists who tried to cover the protests. Aliakbar Mousavi Khoeini, a former member of Parliament now living in exile in the United States, said that 20,000 to 30,000 people had taken part across the country.

Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian establishment have tried to depict the Arab movements as a long-awaited echo of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, though Islamist parties had a low profile in both the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings. The Iranian opposition has painted the Arab protests as an echo of its own anti-government movement in 2009, when citizens demanded basic rights like freedom of assembly and freedom of speech after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition leader, said in an interview last week that the opposition had decided to organize a day of demonstrations to underscore the double standard of the government in lauding protesters in Arab countries while suppressing those at home. Mr. Karroubi has been put under house arrest, with outside communication links severed, opposition reports said, as has Mir Hussein Moussavi, the other main opposition leader.

Government security forces prevented Mr. Moussavi from joining with the marchers, said Mr. Arjomand, his spokesman.

“We will frame our future tactics in light of what happened today,“ Mr. Arjomand said.

The Fars news agency, a semiofficial service linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, indirectly confirmed the protests by saying an unspecified number of demonstrators had been arrested. It called participants “hypocrites, monarchists, ruffians and seditionists“ and ridiculed them for not chanting slogans about Egypt, the nominal reason for the protests.

The authorities’ tactics on Monday indicated that they were resolved to stifle unrest — starting with the refusal to issue a permit for a nationwide demonstration. Reports that did emerge suggested that security forces had tried to prevent people from gathering by blocking the access routes to main squares in major cities and closing train stations in Tehran.

The crackdown came as the protests flared in Yemen and Bahrain. While those outbreaks were reported in some official Iranian state news media, which had also covered the 18-day Egyptian uprising selectively, there was no immediate mention of the clashes in Tehran and elsewhere on such state broadcasters as the English-language Press TV in Tehran.

On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported, thousands of mourners in Bahrain braved police tear gas to take part in a funeral procession for a man killed in protests on Monday.

Reports from inside Iran on Monday were harvested from a special Facebook page set up for the day called 25 Bahman, Twitter feeds, telephone calls and opposition Web sites.

They indicated that one tactic for sympathizers hoping to avoid a beating at the hands of the police was to drive to the demonstrations, with huge traffic jams reported in Tehran. Security forces on motorcycles tried to run down protesters, witnesses said.

Callers to the BBC Persian service television program called “Your Turn“ said demonstrators had tried to gather in small knots until the police turned up in force, at which point they would run into traffic to seek refuge with strangers who opened their car doors.

“It has not turned into a big demonstration mostly because they never managed to arrive at the main squares,“ said Pooneh Ghoddosi, the program’s host.

Cellular telephone service was shut off around the main squares and the Internet slowed to a crawl, activists said. Echoing tactics in Egypt and Tunisia, sympathizers outside Iran set up the 25 Bahman Facebook page — named for Monday’s date on the Iranian calendar — to collect videos, eyewitness accounts and any information.

Twitter feeds informed demonstrators to gather quickly at a certain intersection, then disperse rapidly. One video showed them burning a government poster as the chant against Ayatollah Khamenei rang out.

The Islamic government of Iran gradually stamped out the 2009 protests through the shooting of demonstrators, mass trials, torture, lengthy jail sentences and even executions of those taking part.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “We wish the opposition and the brave people in the streets across cities in Iran the same opportunity that they saw their Egyptian counterparts seize in the last week.


Artin Afkhami contributed reporting.

    Iran Uses Force Against Protests As Region Erupts, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16iran.html

Egypt’s Ruling Generals Meet With Opposition

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — The military leaders now governing Egypt have told a coalition of young opposition leaders that they plan to convene a panel of distinguished jurists to submit a package of constitutional amendments within 10 days for approval in a national referendum within two months, setting a breakneck schedule for the transition to civilian role.

Confronting more immediate challenges, the governing Supreme Military Council issued a communiqué on Monday urging labor leaders to end the strikes that have broken out in the aftermath of the revolution.

The statement, read on state television, seemed aimed not just at strikes against private industry but also at a fresh wave of smaller demonstrations by state employees, including ambulance drivers, journalists, police officers and transport workers, demanding better pay and working conditions. Several hundred police officers demonstrated in the square — not, as at the beginning of the revolt, to suppress protest, but to seek better working conditions and public sympathy.

How completely the military will deliver on its promises of a transition to a constitutional democracy will not be clear until the election, currently set for six months from now. But the young revolutionaries — most in their early 30s — were clearly impressed by the deference they received from the two military officials, Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Hijazi and Maj. Gen. Abdel Fattah.

The two generals sat down Sunday night to talk about their country’s future with seven of the revolution’s young organizers — including the Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim — and the young activists posted their notes on the meeting directly to the Internet for the Egyptian public to see.

“We all sensed a sincere desire to preserve the gains of the revolution and unprecedented respect for the right of young people to express their views,” two of the young organizers, Mr. Ghonim and Amr Salama, wrote in their Facebook posting, with the disclaimer that they were speaking only for themselves. They noted that the generals spoke without any of the usual “parental tone (you do not know what is good for you, son),” and called the encounter “the first time an Egyptian official sat down to listen more than speak.”

There were indications Monday that Egypt’s ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, could be having medical problems. Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, Sameh Shoukry, said in an interview on the Today Show that Mr. Mubarak was “possibly in somewhat of bad health.”

The former president, 82, has had health problems in recent years, and had his gallbladder removed last year in Germany. Yet he had appeared vigorous in public appearances before the start of the uprising that ended his nearly three decades in power.

There were conflicting reports about his condition in the Egyptian news media on Monday, with some papers reporting that he was depressed, refusing medication and slipping in and out of consciousness at his home in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, The Associated Press reported. Others had him flying to the United Arab Emirates for medical attention, while still others said he was in Germany, something the German government strongly denied.

Mr. Mubarak’s ouster spread shock waves around the region, as many autocratic regimes braced for the possibility of protests modeled on the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

In Bahrain, skirmishes broke out early Monday between heavily armed police and scattered groups of young people in villages outside the capital. Shops stayed closed and shuttered, the streets were clear of cars and there were calls for universities to close in anticipation of what organizers here have called Bahrain’s own “Day of Rage.” Young protesters took to the streets for a fourth successive day in Yemen.

In Iran, the authorities deployed hundreds of riot police to thwart plans by the opposition to hold its first major rally on Monday since the government quashed a wave of protests after the disputed presidential elections in 2009. A reformist Web site said Iranian authorities cut the phone lines of an opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and cordoned off his house on Monday.

Opposition groups in Algeria met Sunday and 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. About 300 people were arrested Saturday at a demonstration in the heart of the city that was stifled by a heavy police presence, the human rights league and other opposition groups said.

Since Sunday, Egypt has been effectively under direct military authority, thrusting the country into territory uncharted since republican Egypt was founded in 1952. Though enjoying popular support, the military must 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 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. While opposition leaders in Egypt welcomed the 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.

Nevertheless, the military’s statement on Sunday 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. “The statement is fine,” said Ahmed Maher, a leading organizer. “We still need more details, but it was more comforting than what we heard before.” 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. 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.

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.


Reporting was contributed by Michael Slackman from Manama, Bahrain, William Yong from Tehran and Kareem Fahim, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack from Cairo.

    Egypt’s Ruling Generals Meet With Opposition, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/middleeast/15egypt.html

Jordan Minister Rallies for Killer of Israelis

February 14, 2011
Filed at 9:13 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan's controversial justice minister has joined protesters demanding the release of a soldier who shot dead seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997.

It is an unprecedented move by a Cabinet minister in Jordan, which maintains cordial ties with Israel under a peace treaty signed in 1994.

The minister, Hussein Mjali, was the lawyer for soldier Ahmed Daqamseh, who received a life sentence for killing the Israeli schoolgirls during an outing near Jordan's northwestern border with Israel.

Monday's protest in front of Mjali's office was organized by Daqamseh's family. Mjali joined the crowd, saying he was participating in his capacity as the soldier's former lawyer.

He said he joined the new Cabinet to see changes made, especially to freedom of expression.

    Jordan Minister Rallies for Killer of Israelis, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Jordan-Israel.html

Palestinian Leader Dissolves Cabinet

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, dissolved his cabinet on Monday and was immediately re-appointed by the president to form a new one. The move was the latest of a series of political steps taken by the authority after the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Ghassan Khatib, the spokesman for the West Bank-based Palestinian government, said that there had been plans for a cabinet reshuffle for months, regardless of the recent turmoil in the region, but that the process had “taken longer than expected.”

Speaking by telephone from Ramallah, the authority’s headquarters in the West Bank, Mr. Khatib said the timing of Monday’s move had more to do with the approach of September, a month that has acquired symbolic significance in the Palestinian Authority’s timetable for eventual statehood.

Mr. Fayyad’s two-year plan for building the institutions of a future state is supposed to be completed by September. The one-year time frame for direct peace talks with Israel, which began last September and which the Palestinians suspended soon after because of continued Israeli settlement building, runs out in September. And in the absence of a negotiated agreement, the Palestinians are hoping that by September they will have enough international support for a United Nations resolution recognizing the Palestinians’ right to a state within the 1967 boundaries.

“The Palestinians are taking September very seriously,” Mr. Khatib said, “and I hope that the outside world will take us seriously. We cannot continue with business as usual after this date.”

But it appears that the regional upheavals have injected an added impetus and sense of urgency.

With the Palestinians split between the West Bank and Gaza, controlled by the authority’s rival, the militant Islamic group Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and his senior officials seemed to be aiming to foster greater unity and government accountability, at least in the West Bank.

Since the popular protests began in Egypt, the West Bank Palestinian leadership has called for local council elections in July, and parliamentary and presidential elections by September. All are long overdue.

Hamas has said that it will not cooperate with any elections in the absence of a reconciliation agreement with Fatah, the secularist party led by Mr. Abbas. All attempts at reconciliation have failed so far.

The outgoing Palestinian cabinet had 24 seats, but at least 6 were vacant, either because the ministers had resigned or were unable to travel from Gaza. By law Mr. Fayyad has up to five weeks to form a new cabinet, though officials said they were hoping the task would be completed sooner.

Forming a government involves finding a balance between appointing technocrats like Mr. Fayyad, an American-educated economist who has the confidence of the West, and giving adequate representation to satisfy Fatah and other political parties and factions.

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, which ended in June 2007 after Hamas seized full control of Gaza. A cabinet led by Mr. Fayyad was subsequently appointed by presidential decree.

Mr. Fayyad submitted his resignation in March 2009, saying he wanted to help pave the way for a Palestinian unity government with Hamas, but was reappointed on May 19 after reconciliation talks with Hamas ended inconclusively.

    Palestinian Leader Dissolves Cabinet, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/middleeast/15palestine.html

Protesters Clash With Government Supporters in Yemen

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF and J. DAVID GOODMAN

SANA, Yemen — More than a hundred pro-government demonstrators clashed with hundreds of student protesters on Monday at a sit-in at Sana University that called for an end to the authoritarian rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

As antigovernment protests continued for a fourth straight day state-run media reported that Mr. Saleh would cancel a planned trip to the United States at the end of February “due to circumstances in the region” after the revolution in Egypt.

In the capital, Sana, the police stepped in to separate the rival groups as pro-government demonstrators — some carrying posters of the president — beat the young protesters with sticks near the university’s main gate. The clashes erupted after the two groups faced off shouting slogans at each other.

“The people want to expel Ali Saleh!” students shouted, adapting a chant commonly heard during demonstrations in Egypt.

The pro-government group chanted in response, borrowing the same rhythm: “The people want to start dialogue!”

Similar demonstrations occurred in the southern cities of Aden and Taiz. Reuters reported that police in Taiz were unable to control thousands of protesters who staged an overnight rally beginning Sunday.

As protests spread to new areas, the fragile status of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, was a source of concern for the United States, which has received support from Mr. Saleh to fight the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda.

Monday’s protests sought to keep up the momentum after the largest demonstrations yet by young Yemenis on Sunday, with more than 1,000 marching. Those protests appeared to mark a rift with opposition groups who organized previous demonstrations that wrested significant concessions from Mr. Saleh, including the promise that he would yield 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 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.”

In contrast to the earlier protests in Yemen, which were highly organized and marked by color-coordinated clothing and signs, the spontaneity of the younger demonstrators on Sunday 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 were 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 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 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.

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.

    Protesters Clash With Government Supporters in Yemen, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/middleeast/15yemen.html

Young Protesters Clash With Police in Bahrain

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

MANAMA, Bahrain — Skirmishes broke out early Monday between heavily armed police and scattered groups of young people in villages outside of the capital, as this strategically important nation in the Persian Gulf braced to see if the wave of unrest which has toppled two presidents would reach its sun-scorched shores.

Shops stayed closed and shuttered, the streets were clear of cars amid a heavy police presence, and there were calls for universities to close in anticipation of what organizers here have called Bahrain’s own “Day of Rage,” a demonstration modeled after the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

“What happened in Egypt and Tunisia inspired us,” said Maryam al Khawaja, 23, with the Bahrain Center for Human Rights Monday. “For years, there has been hopelessness here. Are we ever really going to be able to change anything? With Egypt, there is a sense of empowerment, that the young people can do it.”

Ms. Khawaja was in the village of Nuwaidrat, on the island of Sitra, an industrial area outside the capital that is dotted with poor and crowded villages populated by Shiite Muslims who complain of discrimination in work, education and housing at the hands of the Sunni elite. The police blocked off the main road into the village and a helicopter hovered overhead.

In the early morning, as young men came out of the mosque, the two sides squared off. A large contingent of riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the young men darting in and out of the alleys. Women joined in too, taunting the police, and then running. One young man was injured and was taken away in an ambulance bleeding from his eyes, nose and ears.

Others were bruised and wounded when police aimed their tear gas launchers directly at those gathered and fired at close range.

“I want my rights,” said Adel Mal Alla, 31, as he carried a Bahraini flag in one hand and in the other, a slice of onion, to help ease the effects of tear gas. “My life is very difficult.”

This tiny nation of about 1 million is among the most politically volatile in the Gulf, and also one of the most strategically important for the United States. It is the base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. But there has long been tension between the Sunni Muslim king, Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa, the royal family and ruling elites, and the approximately 70 percent of the local population which is Shiite. About half the residents of Bahrain are foreign workers.

For more than a year, Shiites in villages around the nation have held protests, burning tires in the road, demanding the release of dozens of political prisoners, including 25 being tried on charges plotting to overthrow the state, charges seen by the people here as part of a broad effort to silence the Shiite majority.

But the call to protest on Monday, coming on the heels of the momentous events elsewhere in the region, appeared to have rattled the leadership here into trying both enticement and fear. The king announced that the state was giving every Bahraini family the equivalent of $2,700 in cash and he filled the streets with heavily armed riot police.

Human rights workers were clearly concerned at the potential for violence. The king has built a security force here staffed almost exclusively with foreigners. So the police charged with putting down any protests are from Syria, Sudan, Yemen and other countries, drawn here by the offer of eventual citizenship.

As a result, there is no connection with the people, and therefore a greater likelihood they will not hesitate to open fire, said Mohammed Al-Maskati, head of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights.

By midday, the early skirmishes had ended. The helicopters continued to hover overhead and the streets were unusually quiet as everyone braced for what may lay ahead.

“The people in Egypt joined together, they were one hand,” said Mahmoud Ahmed, 20, after he darted away from the police in the morning. “We have learned a lot from there. Here we will have to be one hand until we realize our objectives, too.”


Nadim Audi contributed reporting.

    Young Protesters Clash With Police in Bahrain, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/middleeast/15bahrain.html

Security Forces Deploy to Block Tehran March