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BBC MUNDO RADIO
As pro-Mubarak gangs attacked demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo, White House press spokesperson Robert Gibbs addressed the unfolding situation in Egypt and faced a barrage of questions about how far the Obama administration will push Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt street violence: Few options for Obama administration
President Obama says an 'orderly transition' to a post-Mubarak government 'must begin now.' But the president of Egypt is digging in his heels, refusing to relinquish power any time soon.
Protesters listen to an announcement by Egyptian President Mubarak from a makeshift television projector in Tehrir Square on Tuesday, February 1. On Wednesday, there were violent clashes between pro-democracy protesters and those supportive of President Hosni Mubarak.
Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor
As Egypt’s political crisis degenerated into violent clashes between pro-democracy protesters and those supportive of President Hosni Mubarak, the United States Wednesday did little more than reiterate its calls for a speedy transition to democracy.
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The Obama administration has already taken sides, expressing support for the “legitimate needs and grievances expressed by the Egyptian people,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton puts it. It’s promised – read “threatened” – a review of the $1.5 billion the US provides Egypt every year in foreign aid, most of that for military and other security programs. And President Obama has called for an “orderly transition” to a post-Mubarak government that “must begin now."
But the Egyptian president – whose one-man rule has lasted nearly 30 years – is digging in his heels, refusing to relinquish power until next September’s elections there.
In a tough statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said foreign calls for a democratic transition to begin now were "rejected and aimed to incite the internal situation in Egypt."
"This appears to be a clear rebuff to the Obama administration and to the international community's efforts to try to help manage a peaceful transition from Mubarak to a new, democratic Egypt," Robert Danin, a former senior US official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Reuters news agency.
While the administration is “planning for a full range of scenarios,” as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it Wednesday, it has yet to reveal what those plans might be other than to reiterate what Obama said after speaking with Mubarak Tuesday night.
“Events have moved enormously quickly in a very volatile region of the world,” Gibbs said. “That simply demands that we continue to watch and continue to ensure that we are taking the steps to communicate directly with all of the entities of their government about what we expect in terms of nonviolence, what the world expects in terms of nonviolence, and the steps that need to take place in order to see that transition.”
While Gibbs refused to be pinned down on any degree to which the administration may be ratcheting up the pressure on Mubarak to leave sooner rather than later, again and again he emphasized the importance of change “now” – pointing out that since Obama used that word Tuesday night, “now means yesterday.”
In Cairo, it’s clear that officials are feeling the heat from Washington – and complaining about it.
An Egyptian official told the New York Times that his government has “a serious issue with how the White House is spinning this.”
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“There is a contradiction between calling on the transition to begin now, and the calls which President Mubarak himself has made for an orderly transition,” the official said Wednesday. “Mubarak’s primary responsibility is to ensure an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. We can’t do that if we have a vacuum of power.”
While Republicans as well as Democrats started out generally supportive of the Obama administration’s stance on Egypt, senior lawmakers of both parties now are pushing their rhetoric even farther.
On Tuesday, before Mubarak had said he would not run for reelection, Senator John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “Egyptians have moved beyond his regime, and the best way to avoid unrest turning into upheaval is for President Mubarak to take himself and his family out of the equation.’’
And in a statement Wednesday, Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona said, “The rapidly deteriorating situation in Egypt leads me to the conclusion that President Mubarak needs to step down and relinquish power.”
“It is clear that the only institution in Egypt that can restore order is the army, but I fear that for it to do so on behalf of a government led by or involving President Mubarak would only escalate the violence and compromise the army’s legitimacy,” McCain said. “I urge President Mubarak to transfer power to a caretaker administration that includes members of Egypt’s military, government, civil society, and pro-democracy opposition, which can lead the country to free, fair, and internationally credible elections this year as part of a real transition to democracy.”
Regarding Wednesday’s street violence in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, administration officials could only say the White House “deplores and condemns the violence” while repeating its “strong call for restraint,"
"The administration's rhetoric has come a long way in the last week. They are seeing the realities of the situation," Michele Dunn, an Egypt expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an informal White House adviser, told the Wall Street Journal. "But as typical with this administration, they are trying to be subtle, nuanced, soft spoken. That has its virtues, but it's not getting across to hundreds of thousands of demonstrators."
Egypt crackdown echoes years of Mubarak's iron rule
Egyptians have long lived in fear and desperation under President Hosni Mubarak. Now they are standing up.
 A pro-Mubarak supporter kisses an image of the Egyptian president in Cairo on Wednesday. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times) |
Photos: Protests in Egypt" height="44" width="80">
President Hosni Mubarak does not tolerate dissension. He is inclined to crush it rather than compromise. Those born since his rule began in 1981 have lived entirely under emergency law, among the spookily omnipresent security forces that can pluck a soul from the street and vanish in an instant.
The bloodshed between Mubarak's supporters and anti-government demonstrators Wednesday in Tahrir Square was not a spontaneous act of political passion but an orchestrated mission, opposition leaders say, by thugs hired by the ruling party to put fear into those clamoring for change.
What the day before was a protest, with the mood of a carnival, turned into a street brawl of fists and machetes. Three people were killed and more than 600 were wounded. The injured were carried away, their ripped shirts brushing the ground. Soldiers sat on tanks and did little to stop the violence around them.
The brutality was stunning, and sad. Stones and Molotov cocktails flew past the National Museum, where ancient artifacts stood endangered by modern rage. Men rode bareback on horses and camels, swinging sticks. Mobs surged and retreated, then regrouped and surged again. Smoke rolled and plumed over the Nile as the wounded stumbled into a makeshift hospital.
This was Egypt from early afternoon into night.
Mubarak, who hours earlier had promised unity, was championed by gangs that sought to further tear the nation in order to protect his rule.
The specter was a disturbing culmination of 30 years of a country growing brittle from within. Mubarak's government has been marked more by the consolidation of power — and providing riches for those at its core — than for lifting a people into a new era. Once the nexus of the Arab world, Egypt today has sagged in stature like so many of the balustrades on its once-fine boulevards.
Poverty reaches across Nile Delta villages and into the deepest city alleys. The poor must hustle, chasing rusted minivans, bickering in markets, standing in bread lines, praying for work. They laugh and weep in shared misery, like weary soldiers summoned to take an impossible hill. More than 40% live on less than $2 a day. Desperation is their twin.
One man recently summed up the frustration in his country: "We are eating one another."
Travel Egypt and you see why: the fisherman with torn nets, the woman who lives on the rooftop because she can't afford a room in the house, the boy who sells baskets in the street and sleeps in the dirt, and the laborer with empty pockets and a family in need who, one day after dinner, hanged himself above a donkey stall.
Many of those who challenged the government ended up jailed and tortured. Political opponents were threatened. Elections, like the parliamentary poll in November, defied mathematical odds by sweeping the ruling party to power while other candidates and their supporters were intimidated by hoodlums. More than 1,200 Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters were arrested.
Mubarak's power resides in the darker magic of fear. It has worked for decades. The poor are too poor to protest, intellectuals are bottled up, activists hounded; everyone is kept off balance. There are glimmers of democracy, including rambunctious, independent news media, but they are viewed more as annoyances than threats to the ruling party. It's a creepy, unpredictable climate: One never knows if one will be ignored or arrested.
Egyptians used to joke that they were too complacent, too in love with enjoying life, even amid its grind, to rise up. Then the Tunisians overthrew their authoritarian leader. The Egyptians saw what they hoped was a kinship in the Tunisian spirit. They filled the streets, they poured into squares. The police retreated.
Mubarak hasn't. The economy is in turmoil. Buildings burn. Protesters chant. In all this, Mubarak sees sedition, a people manipulated by sinister forces to challenge his rule. He told his countrymen Tuesday night that he and they were "were quickly exploited by those who sought to spread chaos and violence, confrontation and to violate the constitutional legitimacy and to attack it."
He refused to step down. The government enforcers arrived the next day.
"I'm scared," Ahmed Hesham, an anti-government protester, said by phone as he stood in the square at night facing the pro-Mubarak crowd. "I went out to march Tuesday and Friday for my rights. But now Mubarak is making the Egyptian people face off against one another. It's all for his benefit. He's saying, 'Without the police and my government, look at the chaos you will create.'"
Hesham attempted to work his way through the crowd to get home. Bearded men hunkered near him in the square, urging anti-government demonstrators: "Stand up for your life and fight. This is the day to see Allah."
Hesham then mentioned something that is as strong as a president's grip.
"My mother told me to come today," he said. "She's putting cotton on the wounds of the injured. I came to stand beside her.
"She told me, 'Come to the square to help it look crowded so others won't be frightened and they will come too.' "
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