Egyptian masses continue to pour into the streets demanding the overthrow of the U.S.-backed regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The rulilng National Democratic Party has been attacked and prisoners have been liberated.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
By Heba Saleh in Cairo
Last updated: February 2 2011 23:12
Financial Times
As Tahrir Square in central Cairo turned into a battlefield between supporters of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, and protesters who want him to step down, the crisis in Egypt appeared to be deepening with no side willing to make further compromises.
“The protests will go on, and the losses will be greater,” said Ossama al-Ghazali Harb, leader of the Democratic Front party which has been calling for the president to go.
Protesters are already calling for fresh demonstrations this week on what they dubbed the “Friday of departure”, a reference to their desire for Mr Mubarak to leave power.
Amal Sharaf, a co-founder of April 6, an opposition group of young activists, said Wednesday’s violence would not stop the campaign to oust the president. “We are going to continue. Nobody is leaving. We have a big event on Friday.”
“I don’t think the suppression of the protests will work,” said Amr al-Shobaki, a political analyst. “We need a completely different style of political management to emerge from this crisis.”
But the apparent decision to use violence against the protesters suggests the regime has reached the end of the political concessions it is prepared to make.
Mr Mubarak had appeared on television on Tuesday night after a day of demonstrations, in which at least 1m people took part, to announce he would not seek another term in elections scheduled for the autumn.
He promised to oversee a peaceful transition of power and to introduce constitutional amendments that would set presidential term limits, and review the eligibility criteria for presidential candidates.
These are steps the Egyptian president has long resisted, despite repeated calls from the opposition.
But groups supporting the protest fear that when it is time to translate these promises into legislation, the improvements would be cosmetic or flimsy.
They point to Mr Mubarak’s decision six years ago to allow pluralistic presidential elections. It was viewed as a huge step along the path of democratic reforms when it was first announced.
This quickly turned into disappointment after parliament, dominated by Mr Mubarak’s National Democratic party, approved a constitutional amendment that placed restrictions on independent candidates.
It essentially ensured that NDP candidates, who are usually backed by the state, would compete against weak candidates from the legal opposition parties.
Mr Mubarak has also offered a dialogue with the opposition on reforms. State television announced on Wednesday that 12 parties had accepted. These, however, are weak and lack popular support.
Any dialogue looks certain to exclude the youth activists behind the protests. So far, these remain leaderless, though Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, has emerged as a figurehead for many protesters.
Mr ElBaradei has demanded Mr Mubarak go, so a transition government can oversee a new constitution, followed by elections.
Egyptian state television spent most of Wednesday broadcasting footage of the pro-Mubarak rally away from the violence in Tahrir Square. When it finally reported the clashes, it said they were between those who favoured stability [Mubarak’s supporters] and those who did not.
This is not a revolution made in America
By Philip Zelikow
Last updated: February 2 2011 20:44
Financial Times
On the 20th of June 2005, I stood in a packed auditorium in the heart of Cairo as my boss, the then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, gave a deeply considered speech. She and I had worked together during the revolutions in Europe in 1989-1990. That experience informed her pronouncement that: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now,” she added, “we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
Her remarks satisfied no one. Some regional editorial writers congratulated her for trying to “sweep away all of the dust and cobwebs that have limited democratic progress in the Arab world”. But she angered Hosni Mubarak and his elite by going too far. She angered Egypt’s opposition by not going far enough. Others, noticing war-torn Iraq, saw there the nemesis of a hubristic “freedom agenda”.
Yet the confusion then, and now, is the belief that somehow America would offer an answer for Egypt’s future. Ms Rice and aides like me were instead asking a question: “My friend, can you explain your positive vision for Egypt’s future? What we see does not look promising.”
Sadly, the question was never really answered. Ms Rice’s successor, Hillary Clinton, spoke out last month to pose it again. Now, coincidentally, many Egyptians are demanding the answer.
That answer will be uttered first in Arabic. Washington did not choose Egypt’s president and it will not choose the next one. The last popular revolution in Egypt was in 1952, replacing King Farouk with a revolutionary council of “free” military officers. They enacted land reform, wrote a democratic constitution, crushed the Muslim Brotherhood – which then, too, had been a focus of organised dissent. Then they sorted out their own internal power struggle. Muhammad Neguib, the well-liked front man for the revolutionaries, was taken down. In his place arose Nasser . . . Sadat. . . and Mubarak.
But what does this history say to well-wishing outsiders like my government? Quite a lot.
Educated Egyptians all have a version of this history. They know its outstanding feature was the submission of democratic forms to the “top-down” rule of a charismatic leader. They know that its other great feature was the choice for secularism, a choice then cloaked in a bemedalled uniform of exciting pan-Arab ambition. Outsiders should listen intently as Egyptians interpret that history to instruct each other on its “lessons”.
Outsiders should ponder the significant insignificance of Egypt’s international situation. In the past 230 years of Egyptian history, the past 30 are unique in the relative unimportance of external affairs. The external peace was no accident, and with much time for Egyptians to reflect on their own condition, this revolution is a result. Its agenda is profoundly internal, more so than in 1952. Outsiders can continue to help determine whether Egyptians see the external situation as threatening or benign.
Also, the US should not let its own natural preoccupation with foreign policy suffuse the conversation about Egypt’s future. Yes, any government more in tune with Egyptian public opinion is not likely to be friendlier to Israel. But Egypt’s relations with Israel have been narrow. There were Gaza quarantines to limit Islamist infections. Those may weaken. There was limited help with the Palestinian peace process, quite limited: among the external influences on Palestinian politics, Egypt no longer ranks high. And yes, Egyptian intelligence and police agencies help counter violent Islamists. But many of those zealots first nurtured their grievances in Egypt. Give Egyptians space to grow healthier political seedlings.
Outsiders can frame choices without trying to steer them. Egyptians face momentous decisions. To offer the promise of more justice and dignity, leaders will search for a message of opportunity. Egypt started a limited economic reform programme in 2004. It has made progress at the macro-level but prospects are constrained by the distortions of crony capitalism – a narrow tax base, budget-busting subsidies, epidemic corruption and political networks for access to banking and credit. The crisis will make the fiscal situation precarious but the bigger Egyptian choices will be about the scope of the private sector and rule of law, such as finance for small and medium-sized companies and retraction of centralised control over who gets business. It will not be hard for trading nations or Arab and international financial institutions to come up with ways to improve the odds if Egypt gambles on a different future.
But outsiders should not put themselves at the centre of these choices. There is a natural tendency to want to be at the centre. Some Egyptians, too, will look to outsiders as saviours or scapegoats. After 1952 Nasser got on well enough with the Americans. The break came when both sides put the Americans at the centre of Egypt’s development and security hopes, with such projects as the financing of the Aswan Dam on which Nasser invested large dreams. It became a pawn in great power politics. In the long run, neither Egyptians nor Americans profited from this pathology.
As Egyptians answer the big questions, it is worth recalling another line from Ms Rice’s speech in 2005. “The United States has no cause for false pride and we have every reason for humility.”
The writer is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. From 2005 to 2007 he was the counsellor of the US Department of State. He was also executive director of the 9/11 Commission
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