Updates on Saturday’s Protests in Egypt
By ROBERT MACKEYThe Lede followed the continuing protests in Egypt on Saturday, as demonstrators demanding an end to the autocratic rule of President Hosni Mubarak return to the streets following the dramatic events of Friday. For a summary of the latest events, see the main news article on this site with reports from my colleagues inside Egypt. Readers who are in Egypt and want to share information with us can write in the comment thread below or send photographs or video to pix@nyt.com.
6:55 P.M. What Will Sunday Bring?
It is nearly 2 a.m. in Egypt now, so The Lede will wrap up live blogging for the day, as we wait along with 80 million Egyptians and observers all over the world to see what Sunday will bring.
Please visit the home page of NYTimes.com for any new developments overnight. In addition to video, photographs and an interactive graphic there, you can also read articles on the situation by my colleagues David Kirkpatrick, Anthony Shadid, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Scott Shane.
We will return tomorrow to keep following the unfolding drama in Egypt. Thanks for your comments and tips.
6:35 P.M. ‘People Completely Governing Themselves’
As Egyptians endure a night of uncertainty, defending their own homes in the absence of a functioning police force, bloggers and journalists continue to speculate that sowing chaos might be part of the regime’s strategy for hanging on to power.
An Egyptian blogger who writes as Sandmonkey has found his way back on to Twitter. On Saturday night, he wrote:
Dear Mubarak, collect your thugs, it’s not working. You’re sacrificing them. We’re protecting the streets….Nasr City now safe and calm, Heliopolis on the way thanks to people taking control of street protection….Women carry sticks and join volunteer protection committees on the streets of Heliopolis. People saluting army. It’s great….People in neighborhoods wearing white bands to identify each other.Great moment for Egypt, people completely governing themselves.
He signed off with this observation: “5 years ago my beliefs made me a minority opposition, today I am the people.”
CNN’s Cairo correspondent Ben Wedeman echoed the reports of Cairo residents banding together to provide their own security, writing on Twitter:
Neighborhood protection groups wearing white arm bands in Cairo. People getting organized to end chaos and looting.My wonderful wife has handed out baseball bats, clubs, kitchen knives and tea to neighborhood patrol.Almost every Egyptian I’ve spoken with, plus myself, is hoarse. Too much teargas, smoke from burning buildings, shouting and talking.Crowd drags two looters to Army soldiers at State TV, after beating the … out of them, looters I mean.It’s blessedly quiet in central Cairo at 12:45 a.m.Army in control of Egyptian Museum. No repeat of Baghdad, please
6:21 P.M. Egyptian Police Reportedly Kill 17 People
While Egyptian police officers are not patrolling the streets of the country’s cities, they are apparently still protecting police stations. Reuters reports:
Egyptian police shot dead 17 people trying to attack two police stations on Saturday in Beni Suef governorate, south of Cairo, witnesses and medical sources said.Twelve of those shot were attempting to attack a police station in Biba while five others were trying to attack another in Nasser city. Dozens of others were injured in the exchanges.
6:15 P.M. The View From London
As Al Jazeera reports that members of Hosni Mubarak’s family may be going to London, The Guardian points to a YouTube clip of a demonstration outside the Egyptian embassy there in which a man chokes up as he explains what the possibility of an end to the regime in Cairo means to him:
5:01 P.M. More From Alexandria
Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch writes, “Two looters were just caught in the Muharram Beyh neighborhood of Alexandria who had police ID cards and were members of an undercover plainclothes force.”
Mr. Bouckaert added:
The most touching moment today was when one of the youth leaders in Alexandria asked us to help him send an observer team to elections in Tunis: “We will pay for ourselves, but we want to see how a real election happens.”
4:58 P.M. CNN Drops ‘Chaos’ for ‘Uprising’ in Egypt Headline
Less than an hour after Mona Eltahway, an Egyptian blogger and journalist,appealed to CNN to stop focusing on looting and security problems in Egypt following the government’s decision to withdraw the police from the streets, the broadcaster has changed its onscreen headline from “CHAOS IN EGYPT” to “UPRISING IN EGYPT.”
Less happily for Egyptians who want to oust the Mubarak regime, and are tired of the argument that his government is a necessary bulwark against Islamist extremism, the network just aired a report that asked the question “What Happens if Mubrak falls?” that featured video of Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian militant who is now Al Qaeda’s second in command.
4:46 P.M. ElBaradei Says State Has Collapsed, Mubarak Must Go
In a telephone interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the opposition leader who was placed under house arrest on Friday, called on President Hosni Mubarak to step down so that democratic elections can be organized by a transitional government.
Mr. ElBaradei also said: “people are required to defend themselves: the state of Egypt is in a state of collapse at the moment, and the key reason is that the president of the state, President Hosni Mubarak, is not heeding the call of the people, he is not willing to listen to the people.”
Here is video of Mr. ElBaradei speaking about the need for a new government on Thursday, when he returned to Cairo from Vienna to take part in the protests:
4:31 P.M. ‘The Lion Says: Game Over Mubarak’
Ahmed Ramadan, a Syrian journalist working in Cairo for Egypt’s independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, has also been posting snapshots of the city on Saturday to his TwitPic feed.
His caption for this photograph, uploaded on Saturday afternoon, read: “on Qasr Nil bridge the lion says: Game Over Mubarak.”
Readers might not have noticed, but one of the men in the photograph in our 3:45 p.m. update of people helping to guard Cairo’s Egyptian Museum was a Manchester United fan. In the interest of balance, here is an Arsenal fan in Cairo from Mr. Ramadan’s feed:
4:08 P.M. Egyptian Blogger Decries Use of Word ‘Chaos’ by Media
Speaking on CNN minutes ago, Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian blogger and journalist appealed to the media to not fall for what she described as a Mubarak regime plot to make the protests in Egypt seem like dangerous anarchy. “I urge you to use the words ‘revolt’ and ‘uprising’ and ‘revolution’ and not ‘chaos’ and not ‘unrest, we are talking about a historic moment,” she said.
Moments later, as Ms. Eltahawy suggested that looting and damage to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo shown on Egyptian television was the work of “the police and the thugs of Hosni Mubarak,” the lower third of the screen displayed the banner headline: “EGYPT IN CHAOS.”
She added, “Egyptians want to fix Egypt, they don’t want to destroy Egypt.”
The network then displayed video from Egyptian state television of damage to the museum, which has been shown around the world on Saturday.
Ms. Eltahawy told CNN: “The Mubarak regime has never cared about the museum. If the Mubarak regime cared about the museum it would take care of the pricelss items there. They don’t care about it. They care about the pyramids because they took the money from toursm and put it into their own pockets.”
3:45 P.M. Defending the Egyptian Museum
Cairo residents helped soldiers guard the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo on Saturday, following reports on Egyptian television that looters had broken in the night before and damaged two mummies there.
According to a report from Reuters:
The museum in central Cairo, which has the world’s biggest collection of Pharaonic antiquities, is adjacent to the headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party that protesters had earlier set ablaze. Flames were seen still pouring out of the party headquarters early Saturday.“I felt deeply sorry today when I came this morning to the Egyptian Museum and found that some had tried to raid the museum by force last night,” Zahi Hawass, chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Saturday.“Egyptian citizens tried to prevent them and were joined by the tourism police, but some (looters) managed to enter from above and they destroyed two of the mummies,” he said. He added looters had also ransacked the ticket office.The two-story museum, built in 1902, houses tens of thousands of objects in its galleries and storerooms, including most of the King Tutankhamen collection.
The museum is located close to the epicenter of the protests in central Cairo, between two bridges that were the site of clashes between protesters and riot police on Friday.
Writing on Twitter from New York, Eltahawy, an Egyptian blogger and journalist, commented:
Once more: Mubarak regime thugs are looting and causing mayhem. Egyptian revolutionaries want to fix their country, not destroy it.Egyptians love our antiquities and we want them back from Europe – Nefertiti bust. We treasure them, not destroy them.Mubarak regime neglected the #Egyptian Museum. He’s been responsible. His regime left it under dust and mess.While we do indeed love our antiquities, the priority goes to the living. Focus on Egyptian lives.
3:10 P.M. Parsing the New Vice President’s Past and Future
Ben Wedeman, CNN’s Cairo correspondent, reported a few minutes ago that a source familiar with the thinking of Egypt’s ruling party told him that the decision to appoint Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief, vice president on Saturday “may well be as a preparatory step for a transition of power, for the resignation of President Mubarak, and to ensure that there is somebody in control, that there is a system of transition of power from Mubarak to his vice president in the event, and this is very possible, that the president does in one form or another step down from power.”
On Twitter, Mr. Wedeman also pointed to another blogger’s note that Mr. Suleiman negotiated directly with the C.I.A. on the rendition of terrorism suspects, according to “The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer’s book on the Bush administration’s war on terror.
Ian Black, The Guardian’s Middle East editor, has added a short profile of Mr. Suleiman to the newspaper’s live blog on Saturday’s events.
2:51 P.M. Looters and Residents Face Off on Cairo Streets
CNN just reported from a Cairo neighborhood where looters on motorcycles, armed with swords, have been faced down by neighborhood patrols formed by residents in the sudden absence of police on the streets.
The Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, now back online, reported the rumor that some of the looters in Cairo are members of the hated mukhabarat or secret police.
Mr. Abbas also reports, “cell phones are all working fine now but SMS is still blocked.”
2:39 P.M. In Alexandria, Residents Secure Their Own Neighborhoods
Here is the latest report from Peter Bouckaert of Human Rigths Watch who is in Alexandria:
Every street has men armed with sticks and knives to protect their shops and homes. They told us to stay out of poorer neighborhoods because security is very bad, lots of looting. Egyptians keep telling us they want to determine their own future, not one imposed by other countries, very much like Tunisia.Reports that large numbers of criminals escaped or were released in Alex during unrest, adding to looting and criminalityJust got a call from a Popular Committee member in Sidi Basr neighborhood of Alexandria to say looting is going down because of Popular Committee members defending neighborhoods
2:34 P.M. Military Urges Protesters to Heed Curfew
A video report broadcast on Al Jazeera a short time ago showed protesters in Tahrir (Liberation) Square in central Cairo, apparently unmolested by troops on the streets. The Arab network’s report also included footage of an Egyptian soldier standing on a tank in the city with a megaphone, calling the protesters “honest men” and telling them to “demonstrate and express yourselves as much as you want, but at night clear the streets and let us handle the thugs.”
2:23 P.M. Some Web Access Reported by Cairo Blogger
Wael Abbas, a well-known Egyptian blogger and journalist, wrote on his Twitter feed about 30 minutes ago: “I’m online again!” He estimated that “the Internet is working partly for only 8 percent of the Egyptians.”
Mr. Abbas, who discussed the prospects for Tunisia’s uprising spreading to Egypt on Al Jazeera just over a week ago, also endorsed the theory that the Egyptian government is fomenting chaos on the streets to justify a crackdown. He wrote:
Egyptian TV and radio are behind wave of panic of looting! Lots of exaggeration to convince protesters to go home. Yes, there is looting but not on that large scale as official media is trying to make it look like.
2:05 P.M. Egyptian Blogger Appeals to American People
Gigi Ibrahim, an Egyptian blogger and activist — who spoke to The Lede via Skype on Thursday night from an Internet cafe in Cairo — manged to find a way to post a flurry of messages on her Twitter feed about seven hours ago.
Ms. Ibrahim, who went to high school and college in California and recently graduated from the American University in Cairo, used her brief moment online to appeal to her American readers to press their government to stop supporting Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Among other things, she pointed out that tear gas fired at protesters on Friday by Egyptian police officers wasreportedly American-made. She wrote:
I have internet access from an ‘unknown’ location, the people are in MILLIONS in the streets and will NOT stop until MUBARAK is OUT!I don’t have net access for long, but all I want to say …I AM SOO PROUD OF BEING EGYPTIAN.CHANGE IS HERE …PEOPLE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL MUBARAK IS OUT!!!The government have blocked everything because they are soo afraid, but the people are not and will not give up!!So many people have died, hospitals are in need of blood, please tell everyone u know to donate blood at hospitalsThe riot police was shooting at us with shrapnel bullets, live bullets, water canon, rocks, and of course TEARGAS.IT WAS RAINING U.S.-MADE TEARGAS ON PEACEFUL EGYPTIAN PROTESTERS CUZ THEY’RE DEMANDING DIGINITY, JUSTICE & FREEDOM. MR.OBAMA, R U LISTENING?Egyptian State-owned media is showing nothing from what’s really happening and trying to minimize it, BUT IT IS SOOOO HUGE!Demands are: 1) MUBARAK OUT! 2) Dismissal of gov & parliament 3) Provisional government until free and fair elections >>4m the Egyptian People!I WANT TO THANK EVERY TUNISIAN FOR LIBERATING EGYPT AS WELL.NO I DON’T HAVE INTERNET, this is just a happy moment at a ‘location’ where they have internet, I can’t say where.Internet is still down in all Egypt… curfew moved to 4 p.m. from 6 p.m., only mobile connection is back.American people need to press on their hypocritical government to dismiss Mubarak because he is ruthless and he has to leave.American people, ur tax-paying money is going to dictators like Mubarak to throw Egyptians with tear gas & bullets for asking for our rights.Will the army be with the people? I think they will never shoot at the people, they are there only to protect …the police is out.I will go now, and I might be back, going back to Tahrir …when Internet is back I have amazing pics and videos for u all.Viva Egypt! Change is happening now!
1:48 P.M. Facebook Updates From Cairo
While the Internet remained blocked inside Egypt on Saturday, some Egyptian bloggers and activists have managed to find ways to get online, at least briefly, to post text accounts, photographs and video on Saturday’s protests.
Mohamed Ibrahim Elmasry, a computer science professor at a Canadian university who is in Cairo, has posted updates to his Facebook wall on Saturday. At 7:30 a.m. local time (12:30 a.m. ET), he wrote:
Mubarak’s speech late last night was too little too late. Regime blames – falsely – foreign intervention and Muslim Brotherhood for enticing protesters. If you are an American please please send your president: Please stop supporting Mubarak regime now. Egyptians deserve better.
At about 5 p.m. local time, Mr. Elmasry posted video of protesters streaming across the Kasr al-Nil Bridge to Tahrir (Liberation) Square in central Cairo, with this description:
All day long (Saturday, Jan. 29) groups of protesters crossing Kasr Al-Neel bridge leading to Lib square to join others (more than 50,000). On foot, by motor bikes, horse and buggy. Calling on Mubarak, his family and regime to leave. “We hate him,” they say. “People want to get ride of president,” they add.
As my colleague Kareem Fahim reported, thousands of protesters waged a battle with police for control of that bridge, which leads to Tahrir (Liberation) Square. Mr. Elmasry’s video of that battle was featured in our Friday live blog.
1:20 P.M. Guardian Reports Shooting at Protesters in Cairo
Peter Beaumont, the foreign affairs editor of London’s Observer filed an audio report for The Guardian’s live blog on the protests in which he said that tens of thousands of protesters filled Cairo’s Tahrir (Libration) Square on Saturday and Egyptian police had fired live rounds at demonstrators outside the interior ministry. He added that witnesses, including his colleague, Jack Shenker, saw bodies carried away from the scene.
1:10 P.M. Video of Dead Protester Carried Through Cairo Streets
Here is remarkable video from Al Jazeera, apparently showing the body of a dead protester, covered in an Egyptian flag, being carried through the streets of Cairo on Saturday:
Earlier in the day, the Arab network’s English-language channel also broadcast this report, showing extremely graphic images of what it said were the dead bodies of protesters wrapped in bloody sheets in morgues in Cairo and Alexandria:
12:54 P.M. Reports of Looting in Alexandria
Here is another update from Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch in Alexandria:
Looting is reported in Alexandria, in the low-income neighborhoods of Bokkla, Sidi Bishr and Assafre. We hear men armed with knives are looting empty homes in Bokkla. Locals are forming neighborhood committees to protect their homes. We were talking to the army when one group asked for help but the soldiers said they were overstretched and couldn’t do anything today. Later we heard the army has asked people to coordinate the Popular Committee for Protection of Property and said reinforcements are coming tomorrow.Many people stuck in Alexandria far from their homes without transport home.
12:41 P.M. A Times Video Report From Cairo
Here is a new video report from my colleagues Stephen Farrell, Kareem Fahim and Liam Stack in Cairo.
12:28 P.M. Video of Egyptian Troops Between Protesters and Police
Video shot on Saturday morning in Cairo by Egypt’s Daily News, an English-language newspaper, gives a sense of the confusion there about which side the military is on. The newspaper’s description of the video, embedded above, said:
Around 9 a.m. Saturday January 29, 2011, Egyptian police attempted to clear a street leading to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Police fired shotguns into the air to announce their presence, following a night of massive civil unrest in Cairo. A group of protesters moved towards them from Tahrir Square. Three Egyptian military armored vehicles moved in to obstruct police fire, seemingly to protect protesters. The follow raw footage shows what happened next.
CNN’s Cairo correspondent, Ben Wedeman, reports that some Egyptians have suggested President Hosni Mubarak’s regime has withdrawn the police from the streets and ordered the military not to enforce law and order as an intentional ploy to sow chaos and create a situation in which the people will turn to the strongman to restore security.
The network’s reporter in Alexandria, Nic Robertson, added that “the criminal element” in that city is apparently now free to loot and set fire to police stations. In an attempt to fill that void, he reported, some citizens have banded together to defend their homes from looters.
11:57 A.M. Protesters in Alexandria Vow to Stay on the Streets
My colleagues Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet report from the streets of Alexandria, in northern Egypt:
For lack of an organized plan, demonstrators in Alexandria marched back and forth along the Corniche on Saturday afternoon, slowly gathering followers, their numbers climbing from the hundreds into the thousands.The crowd included men and women of all ages, in sharp contrast to the largely young and mostly male protesters who clashed with police on Friday.Protesters were clear in their demand for President Hosni Mubarak to step down, with chants that had once called generally for an end to the regime or the government were now more explicitly directed at Mr. Mubarak by name.“We will be in the streets until he steps down,” said Rawia al-Ali, 52, a nurse. “Thirty years is enough,” she said.“I’ve been in the streets from the 25th on and I’m going to remain in the streets until Hosni Mubarak and his friends leave the country,” said Marwat Saleh, 43, who owns a small tourism company.Protesters voiced significant anger at the United States for supporting Mr. Mubarak, rushing up to American reporters on the streets of Alexandria unprompted to ask why the United States continued to back the Egyptian government.“We are very disillusioned by President Obama’s speech,” said Muhammad Shafai, 35, a lawyer, who called for Mr. Obama to distance himself from Mr. Mubarak.Mr. Shafai and others were also sharply critical of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech on the situation in Egypt.“We are calling for protesters in Cairo to take over the U.S. embassy, like Iran has done,” said Mr. Shafai. “We want the U.S. to apologize for all the support for Mubarak and all that they have done to the Egyptian people over 30 years.”
11:48 A.M. A Dark Joke on Wikipedia
My colleague Reem Makhoul writes from our Jerusalem bureau to point out that after Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief, was appointed vice president on Saturday, someone edited his Wikpedia biography so that it briefly said that he had died on this date.
The entry, which has already been edited 57 times in the past hour, no longer displays that dark joke, but Reem sent along a screenshot:
11:14 A.M. Intelligence Chief Appointed Vice President
Half a day after President Obama called on Egypt to embrace political reform, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief, was sworn in as the country’s new vice president on Saturday, state television reported.
The country has not had a vice president since Hosni Mubarak was elevated to the presidency from that position following the assassination of Anwar Sadat on Oct. 6, 1981.
As Reuters reports, the 74-year-old Mr. Suleiman “has been the director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services since 1993, a role in which he has played a prominent public role in diplomacy, including in Egypt’s relations with Israel and with key aid donor the United States.”
Here is a photograph of him meeting with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, last November in Tel Aviv.
Mr. Suleiman has been mentioned in the past as a possible successor to Mr. Mubarak. In 2009 London’s Telegraph reported:
All of the Middle East’s most delicate issues land on his desk in Cairo. At present, he is trying to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, requiring him to win the trust of both Israel and Hamas. These implacable enemies refuse to talk to each other, but they both deal with Gen Suleiman.During a single week this month, Gen Suleiman juggled the “Gaza file” with diplomatic missions to Sudan, Libya and Saudi Arabia.He is also a crucial figure in what no one any longer calls the global “war on terrorism”. The tall, slightly stooping man, who favours navy blue suits and has an iron grey moustache in the style of a 1940s British colonel, is an expert on defeating violent Islamist extremism; he is probably the only serving intelligence chief who can claim to have come close to achieving this in his own country.Soon, Gen Suleiman may emerge from the shadows and become Egypt’s new leader. President Hosni Mubarak, who has dominated the Arab world’s largest country for almost 28 years, will turn 81 in May. He trusts hardly anyone and relies on a tiny circle of loyalists. Gen Suleiman is by far the most significant member of this privileged handful.
In 2003, Mary Anne Weaver wrote in an Atlantic article about the possible successors to Mr. Mubarak:
The President began to spend more and more time with his intelligence chief. “He tells Mubarak everything that’s happening,” one of the retired generals I spoke to said. “After twenty-two years in power, the gerontocracy that surrounds the President tells him what they think he wants to hear. Suleiman tells Mubarak the way it is.”I asked an Egyptian ambassador how Suleiman is perceived on the diplomatic stage. “He’s held in high esteem by the Israelis and by the Palestinians,” the ambassador said. “And the Americans trust him more than anyone else.”
10:11 A.M. Rights Worker Visits Morgue in Alexandria
Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, who is in the city of Alexandria, has been filing reports for the organization’s Web site.
On Saturday he wrote:
I went to the morgue at the Alexandria General Hospital, where I saw 13 bodies of dead people – all men, young and old, but mostly young. Also visited the hospital’s emergency room and saw many people who had been shot and were still waiting to get treatment. Live bullets seem to have been used by police yesterday evening when protesters went to attach police stations, but also by security services against people even in their homes. One man who told me that thugs (whom he referred to as “mukhabarat,” the Egyptian security services) showed up at his apartment, accused him of throwing things on police from his windows, and shot him.The Egyptian government has got to rein in its security forces on the streets of Egypt’s cities today.Things are very tense in Alexandria. Large protests are ongoing. The police stations appear to have all been burned. Yesterday, demonstrators tried to burn down the building of intelligence services, but seem not to have succeeded. The army is not intervening — so far.
10:00 A.M. Protesters and Troops on the Streets of Suez
Video of protesters speaking out against Egypt’s president on the streets of Suez, despite the presence of troops, was just posted online by The Associated Press.
There have been violent clashes in Suez this week, where several protesters were killed by the security forces.
9:46 A.M. Video of Protesters on the Streets of Cairo
This Associated Press video shows protesters flooding the streets of Cairo on Saturday, as the country’s police withdrew and the military allowed demonstrations to take place:
As my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim report from Cairo, President Hosni Mubarak’s decision to put troops on the streets appeared to backfire on Saturday, “as troops and demonstrators fraternized and called for the president himself to resign. While some protesters clashed with police, army tanks expected to disperse the crowds in central Cairo and in the northern city of Alexandria instead became rest points and even, on occasion, part of the protests.”
They add:
In Ramses Square in central Cairo Saturday midday, protesters commandeered a flatbed army truck. One protester was driving the truck around the square while a dozen others on the back were chanting for President Mubarak to leave office. Nearby, soldiers relaxed around their tanks and armored vehicles and chatted with protesters. There were no policemen in sight.
Earlier on Saturday, The A.P. posted this video of Cairo’s streets on Saturday morning:
CNN also just aired footage of protesters posing for photographs with soldiers on there streets of Alexandria late Friday night.
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55 Readers' Comments
http://english.aljazeera.net...
... The riots raging on in Egypt have spread into several prisons in the country Saturday, as at last eight detainees were reportedly killed in a jail holding political prisoners. ... -- http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4020717,00.html
They would be vital in forming a new -- and better -- government.
... Obama doesn't seem to understand that the US doesn't need to "take the fight" to al-Qaeda, or even fire a single shot, to score its greatest victory in the "war on terror". Supporting real democratisation will do more to downgrade al-Qaeda's capabilities than any number of military attacks. He had better gain this understanding quickly because in the next hours or days the Egypt's revolution will likely face its moment of truth. And right behind Egypt are Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, and who knows what other countries, all looking to free themselves of governments that the US and its European allies have uncritically supported for decades. ...
Amen.
May the people of Egypt persevere nevertheless! Forward The Revolution! Forward Democracy around the World! Human Rights are Universal and Inalienable!!!
Erdogan's foreign policy of steering Turkey into a more independent course and away from its old allies the United States and Israel has added to his popularity.
Seems like Mubarak is surffering from Marie Antoinette syndrome....
Appointing his chief of security as PM is another slap on the face of the Egyptian public....
THE Army will decide the outcome of this test of wills....
President Obama has now a moral obligation to force Mubarak to capitulate and avoid a massive bloodshed....
THERE is no going back to business as usual.
For my perspective on events, please read my blog @http://wispajones.blogspot.com/
Tourism is probably Eqypt's biggest industry. But the tourists are shepherded around on busses with armed escorts, snapping photos of Egyptians with their donkeys and donkey carts, Egyptians with their camels, Egyptians in religious dress carrying baskets on their heads, Egyptians begging, Egyptians farming using the same animals and tools as their 3,000 year old forebearers.
And the young Egyptians? They take great fun in snapping photos of the tourists snapping photos of them. And when it happens the tourists wonder whether it's humor, resentment, or hostility?
And these are the Egyptians who have taken to the streets.
http://english.aljazeera.net...
May the good Arab people of Egypt and elsewhere succeed in their fight against massive poverty, unemployment, corruption and dictatorial regimes!
May democracy, authentic freedom, justice and prosperity prevail for all subjugated, suffocated and exploited people of the world.
They should just "walk like an Egyptian!"
let the poor and violent loose on the city at night
maybe even open up the jail like in tunisia
give a sense of chaos and get the reasonable people off the street
then the army comes in to rescue the population crushing looters/vandals not protesters
interesting
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY!
from
an American