actually hear reportage about the changing of the world is Democracy
Now's Shariff, live from Cairo. This morning is no exception. Despite
Mubarak's shutting down the train system, the internet and everything
else he could, Al Jazeera english reports 2 million in and around Tahrir
Sqare. Turns out Al Jazeera is on cable in only 3 cities in the US, in
Coumbus Ohio, Burlington Vt., and Washington D.C., where it's hugely
popular. However, it's online at http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/.
Thanks are due Sid Shniad for this info. I just logged on and it's live,
massive and awesome. -Ed
Mohamed ElBaradei: The man who would be President
Exclusive intervew: Robert Fisk meets Egypt's saviour-in-waiting
Independent/uk: Tuesday, 1 February, 2011
Man of the moment? Of course Mohamed ElBaradei is. But man of the people, I
have my doubts. He doesn't claim to be, of course, and sitting in his garden
easy chair near an impossibly blue but rather small swimming pool, he
sometimes appears - even wearing his baseball hat - like a very friendly,
shrewd and bespectacled mouse. He will not like that description, but this
is a mouse, I suspect, with very sharp teeth.
It's almost a delight to dissect the bigger mice who work in the White House
and the State Department. "Do you remember how on the second day, all we
heard was that they were 'monitoring the situation'. On the second day,
Secretary Clinton said: 'We assess the situation as stable'; it was funny
yesterday, too, to hear Clinton say that 'we have been urging the Egyptian
Mubarak for 30 years to move on this - and he moved backward - how on earth
can you still ask him to introduce democratic reform? Then Clinton talks
about 'the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people' and now they are
talking about 'the smooth transition of power'... I think they know that
Mubarak's days are numbered."
Without any prompting, ElBaradei - Nobel peace laureate, ex-UN nuclear chief
inspector, etc, etc - bites our own dear leader. "Yesterday, I heard Mr
Cameron saying that 'democracy is not an election, that it's
'block-building'. Well, everybody knows that. But how do you talk about
building a judiciary, civil society - how do you talk about these 'building
blocks' - under a dictatorship? You either have a civil society or you
don't."
Sometimes, ElBaradei sounds too hopeful. He agrees that the best potential
Egyptian leadership have all been exiled, deliberately of course. On a
recent speaking engagement at Harvard, he found 15 Egyptians on the Harvard
Board.
"I told them: If you come back, you can run Egypt." But it's not that
simple. As ElBaradei admits: "It's an old story that ends: 'Mubarak is a
friend of Israel and we think a change will bring a government hostile to
Israel and it will bring on an Iranian-type velayeh-fakhi [guidance by a
supreme religious leader]. I say this is like 'True Fiction'. You need to
get rid of this 'True Fiction' about the Muslim Brotherhood and the
automatic hostility towards Israel. It is a fact that a durable peace can
only be between democracies and not between dictators and, if you want a
durable peace, whether Egypt is a democracy or a dictatorship, the feeling
of the people in the region is not going to change."
He says he is convinced that Mubarak will go. And so say all of us. He also
says he believes the Egyptian army will not fight the Egyptian people, which
is by no means certain. I suspect that, like me, ElBaradei isn't very keen
on armies. "I think, ultimately, that the Egyptian army will be with the
people. This is common sense when you see a couple of million people in the
street who are representative of 85 million Egyptian people who hate
Mubarak, who want to see his back. The army is part of the people. And at
the end of the day, after anyone takes off his uniform, he is part of the
people with the same problems, the same repression, the same inability to
have a decent life. So eventually, I don't think they are going to shoot
their people. And why should they shoot their people? To protect what?"
When Egypt lost the 1967 war, ElBaradei wrote that "a soldier fights because
he defends something he wants to keep. But in the 1967 war, what was the
Egyptian soldier fighting for? There was nothing to go back to. So they ran
away". Nasser, so the great man believes, was the worst of Egyptian
dictators - "he even nationalised the grocery shops" - but the path of
dictatorship ran right through to today. Even a few months ago he could not
imagine what would happen. "I had gone to a wake, I told my brother, and I
looked at the eyes of the mourners and they were dead - they were dead
souls. And now I look at the people today and they have recovered their
self-confidence. They are free. It was like a pressure cooker."
He talks about hypocrisy, dictatorship, criminal malfeasance, the darkest
deeds of the Egyptian security services, the loyalty of the Egyptian army to
the people in a high, astringent but deadly voice. No he doesn't want to be
the president, but when I ask him if he might consider a transitional
presidency for himself - until fair elections, naturally - I receive a
traditional reply. "If there's a consensus by all people to do whatever they
think I can do for them... I will do that." Hmmm, I think to myself.
"All this will continue to be the same until you address the plight of the
Palestinians, until you review your policy in the region. We have this
strange relationship where you are calling this peace but you cannot even
publish an Israeli book here, or vice-versa, for example. If you really want
peace, yes, the peace can be made durable with democracy, but also you have
your responsibility - which is to review a balanced relationship,
particularly on the Palestinian issue, Iraq, Afghanistan, what have you, and
then you will have an Arab world which will be friendly to the West."
ElBaradei is surprisingly mild when he speaks of Mubarak the man. He last
saw him two years ago. "I would go to see him when I returned from a UN
mission or a holiday. I always received a friendly reception. It was a very
cordial relationship. It was one-to-one, just us, and there was no
formality. I would tell him what I thought of this or that problem, what
might be done. He doesn't really have advisers who have the guts to tell him
the truth."
Much good did ElBaradei's advice do. He is outraged by the arson and
looting. When I ask if state security policemen were behind the arson -
which is used by Mubarak, Obama and Clinton to "tag" those who demand
Mubarak's departure with violence - the mouse shows its teeth. "They [the
police] were, we are now hearing about documents which show that some of
these uniformed officers have taken off their uniforms and gone about
looting. And everybody says that they have been ordered to do this by the
regime or the ministry of interior or whatever. And if this is true, then
this is the most sinister of criminal acts. We have to verify this. But for
sure, many of these bands of thugs and looters are from part of the secret
police."
And then suddenly, in that high voice, eyes glittering behind pebbling
spectacles, the mouse becomes a tiger. "When a regime withdraws the police
entirely from the streets of Cairo, when thugs are part of the secret
police, trying to give the impression that without Mubarak the country will
go into chaos, this is a criminal act. Somebody has to be accountable. And
now, as you can hear in the streets, people are not saying Mubarak should
go, they are now saying he should be put on trial. If he wants to save his
skin, he better leave."
My God, those teeth are sharp.
Mohamed ElBaradei - challenger to Mubarak
* Mohamed ElBaradei was born in Cairo and launched a legal career, joining
the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1980s and became head of the
United Nations body in 1997.
* He was outspoken about the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq before the US-led invasion in 2003, which angered the administration
of George W Bush. The award of the Nobel Prize for Peace jointly with the
IAEA in 2005 further rankled.
* A secret nuclear programme was uncovered in Iran while he was the head of
the IAEA. Tehran has always claimed that the programme is peaceful.
* ElBaradei, 68, began overt opposition to President Hosni Mubarak on his
return to Egypt in February 2010 and won widespread support among young
people and the middle classes.
* Last June he called on supporters to campaign for a change in the
constitution to allow a democratic succession.
* ElBaradei put pressure on the United States to support calls for Mubarak
to step down at the weekend, saying "life support to the dictator" must end.
He dismissed US calls for Mubarak to enact sweeping reform in response to
the mass protests.
* The official media has tried to ridicule ElBaradei, saying that he knows
nothing about Egypt and has no political experience.
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