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31/01/2011 | The Arab Revolution: Nile Insurgency Creates Uncertain Future for Egypt

Spiegel Staff

In the wake of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the Egyptians are now revolting against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The country feels as if it were waking up from a bad dream, but the West stands to lose a reliable partner -- and Israel one of its few Arab friends.

 

The Pharaoh was silent. He was sitting, as he often does now in his old age, in his vacation home in Sharm al-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, gazing out at Tiran Island in the eternally glistening Red Sea. This is where the Egyptian president receives world leaders, where he has sat stiffly next to Israeli prime ministers, and where he has introduced alternating US presidents to alternating Arab rulers. Hosni Mubarak, 82, feels at home in the majestic calm of Sharm el-Sheikh, but not in noisy, dirty, crowded Cairo. Sharm el-Sheikh is where the Egyptian ruler holds court and where, for now at least, he was remaining silent.

He was allowing others to speak instead: His prime minister, who promised that the government would tolerate freedom of expression, as long as it was exercised "with legitimate means," and the head of the governing party, who denied that the party elites were leaving the country. Mubarak was not even denying the rumors about his son Gamal, who he had been preparing to succeed him for years, and who is now said to have left the country, or about his wife Suzanne, the daughter of an Egyptian and a British woman, who had reportedly flown to London.

Mubarak was not commenting on any of this. In fact, from his perspective, nothing could be more dangerous than to dignify the rumors with so much as a word, or to descend into the depths of his police state. That was what former Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had done two weeks earlier, and he was forced to flee the country. This explains why not a word had emerged from Sharm el-Sheikh all week.

A Rival Event to the 1977 Bread Riots

And then it was Friday. As if all the frustration that had accumulated during the 30 years of the Mubarak regime were suddenly erupting from the Egyptians, Friday would become a day of reckoning, a day of violence and retaliatory violence so excessive as to rival the 1977 bread riots. At the time, Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar al-Sadat, had ordered his soldiers to shoot at angry protestors, killing 80 Egyptians.

Thirty-four years ago, dockworkers and students in Alexandria were the first to take their anger to the streets. This time, the news of the first casualty came from Suez, where the police had reportedly shot and killed a protester. But this did not deter the rest of the protesters, nor did the curfew that the government had imposed. Until early evening, that is, when Mubarak brought in the military to regain control of the city on the Suez Canal, a key petroleum processing center.

Clouds of smoke billowed across Alexandria, the port city on the Mediterranean. A protest movement had already emerged in Alexandria in the summer after a plainclothes policeman had beaten to death the 28-year-old blogger Khalid Said.

But no other place in the entire country was as hotly contested as Tahrir (Freedom) Square in the capital Cairo. A symbol of national power, the square is home to the headquarters of the Arab League, the Egyptian Museum, the American University and the headquarters of the Mubarak regime's National Democratic Party.

The first protestors began arriving before noon prayers, but soon the crowds in the capital had ballooned to tens of thousands.

Despite a heavy police presence, the protestors on Tahrir Square courageously broke through the crowd control barriers, allowing others to surge through in their wake. Doggedly defying the teargas employed by the police, they dragged metal panels and plastic barricades along the streets as protection. By early evening, they had pushed the security forces back far enough that they could no longer control the situation. The protestors, beating drums, chanted: "The people want to topple the regime." For the first time, the protesters had managed to drown out the shots coming from the security forces.

Police Universally Despised in Egypt

The police had abandoned Tahrir Square, at least temporarily. Nevertheless, they continued to fire teargas canisters and, apparently, rubber bullets into the crowd, even though the protestors included women and children. The police are so universally despised in Egypt that many protesters called for the military to step in, chanting: "Come and see what the police are doing to us! We want the army!" A bizarre scene unfolded in front of the state broadcasting building, where cheering protesters greeted military tanks.

Police vehicles were burning on the bridges across the Nile, where the driver of one police van attempted to push protestors in the river. Smoke from a massive and threatening fire hung in the air over the city after protesters had set fire to the headquarters of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. The capital was descending into chaos.

And still the Pharaoh said nothing.

Early on Saturday morning, at 12:15 a.m., Mubarak finally broke his silence. It was an eerie speech. A few hours earlier, a handful of the country's top business leaders had left the country in their private jets. But Mubarak remained grimly determined, saying that although he respected the legitimate concerns of the people, he would not tolerate chaos in the streets. He, who had devoted his life "to the point of exhaustion" to his country, would "defend freedom and stability." He promised more democracy, more stability and more jobs, saying that he was willing to engage in a "national dialogue."

Then he fired his cabinet.

But even if the Egyptian president refused to believe it, after that Friday, Jan. 28, 2011, the world was no longer the same.

A Difficult Conundrum for Europe and the United States

For the people of the Arab world, the radical change that began in Tunisia more than a month ago and now continues in Egypt is already an epochal event. Many of the 360 million Arabs are so young that they have only experienced rulers who have become ossified into icons during the course of their rule. Egyptians today must be well over 30 and Libyans well over 40 to even remember being ruled by someone other than Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Gadhafi. But the Tunisians have proven that aura is ultimately irrelevant, and that even icons are replaceable. It is a realization akin to the shock the people of Eastern Europe experienced after the fall of their communist regimes, or even that of the subjects of Europe's monarchs after the French Revolution.

Suddenly freed of the fears that have crippled them for decades, the people of the Arab world are now taking to the streets. In the Yemeni capital Sana'a, they demanded the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power for 33 years: "Ben Ali left after 20 years, 30 years in Yemen, that's enough for you!" In Amman, Jordan, some 3,500 protestors called for the prime minister to step down, shouting: "Rifai, get out. The prices are burning, and so are we!"

A Strengthened Resolve to Resist Tyranny

The Tunisians strengthened their resolve to resist tyranny, even going beyond the act of overthrowing despotic rulers. Last Wednesday, the new government in Tunis issued an international arrest warrant for Ben Ali and his wife.

Governments in Europe and the United States, which have become accustomed to Arab autocrats, are no less shocked, just as they are dismayed for not having anticipated these developments and distanced themselves in advance. On Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched an international wave of self-critique by saying that he regretted that "France has underestimated the extent of the desperation of the Tunisians." He added: "When you are so close, when individual and collective destinies are so interwoven, you don't always have the necessary distance to understand the other party's feelings, assess their frustrations and anxieties."

As significant as these words seemed, they would have sounded more credible if the European Commission had not rolled out the red carpet the same day for Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, a man who is responsible for serious human rights violations, but whose country provides bases through which Western armies in Afghanistan funnel a substantial share of their supplies. "Who actually invited Karimov?" a reporter asked after the meeting in Brussels. "I don't know who invited him," Commission President José Manuel Barroso groaned. "We spent an hour talking about human rights."

The Middle East uprisings present the biggest conundrum for the United States -- the only Western country with the power to attempt to bring order to the Middle East -- which has worked closely with security fanatics like Mubarak and Yemeni President Saleh for decades. At the same time, America cannot remain silent when nations rise up in the name of freedom.

Impressed by the events in Tunis, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reproached Arab autocrats attending the Forum for the Future in Doha, Qatar, for their rigid political system and called on them to enact reforms. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama even uttered a sentence that could have come from his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. "Let us be clear," he said, in a message aimed at democracy proponents in the Arab world, "The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people."

But now that the crisis in Egypt has rocked the region, a note of caution has crept back into the rhetoric. Mubarak is an "important ally," Obama said this week. And although he certainly urged the government in Cairo not to use force, the president added, "At the same time, those protesting in the streets have a responsibility to express themselves peacefully." On Friday afternoon, after a telephone conversation with Mubarak, Obama did call on the Egyptian president to take "concrete steps" to expand civil rights.

Stability is the word that Arab world's autocrats have associated with their elites and their partners in the West for decades. Their people, they insist, have a choice between autocracy and chaos.

The Right Man at the Right Time?

If there is an opponent to President Mubarak, it is Mohammed ElBaradei, 68. Ironically, he too is a product of the Egyptian elite, born as the son of an influential and affluent family of lawyers, raised in Cairo and educated to work in the diplomatic service. As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, and he was subsequently awarded the Greatest Nile Collar, the highest Egyptian civilian decoration.

ElBaradei, a shy intellectual, golf player and opera lover, is everything but a revolutionary or tribune of the people, and he wields no official position of power in Egypt. And yet he could be the right man at the right time. He is relatively uninhibited, holding open discussions with the Muslim Brotherhood and, despite all differences, calling the Islamists "a legitimate movement." Moreover, he is not tainted by the suspicion of being an agent of the West or a corrupt recipient of US funds. In fact, as head of the IAEA ElBaradei quarreled openly with the Bush administration, and his phone was even tapped by the CIA.

ElBaradei had intended to withdraw into private life after the end of his third term at the IAEA in 2009. But when he returned to Cairo to an enthusiastic reception in February of last year and subsequently traveled around Egypt, he became infected by the enthusiasm of dissatisfied Egyptians. He believed that a challenger to the president did not stand a fair chance. Andy yet, as he told SPIEGEL, he wanted to serve as a "catalyst for change" in Egypt. The regime reacted to his remarks with a smear campaign culminating with the publication of photos of his bikini-clad daughter.

ElBaradei collected thousands of supporters on the Internet, but then he disappointed the movement when he left the country -- as he had planned to do -- to write his memoirs in the south of France and give lectures in the United States. In light of the protests, he decided to return home last Thursday and brought himself into play as a possible transitional president. "If (people) want me to lead the transition, I won't let them down," he said.

He joined the protestors on Friday. "People broke the culture of fear and, once you break the culture of fear, there is no going back," he said. "(The authorities) have been charging people, detaining people, but that will backfire ... use of violence will backfire badly." He had previously already sharpened his criticism of the West, and had expressed strong words for US Secretary of State Clinton, who, while calling for civil rights for the Egyptians, had also characterized the Mubarak regime as "stable." "I was stunned to hear Secretary Clinton saying the Egyptian government is stable," ElBaradei said. "And I ask myself at what price is stability. Is it on the basis of 29 years of martial law? Is it on the basis of rigged elections?"

ElBaradei was then placed under house arrest on Friday. His remark that he rejected violence as a means of revolution disappointed some of the hotheaded protesters in the streets. Even ElBaradei probably did not expect that the protests would continue into the night on Friday evening, despite the curfew, and that at least some members of the military called in by Mubarak would join forces with the rioters.

There was little evidence that the Nobel Peace laureate and his loose alliance, the National Movement for Change, were in control of the situation, nor was the uprising being spearheaded by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, as the government had reflexively claimed -- presumably to trigger known fears in the West. The protesters' pronouncements were not in favor of anything, including Western democracy, but rather against something. It was a broad, spontaneous alliance of the disappointed united by their demands for Mubarak's resignation.

Forty Percent of Population Live on Less than Two Dollars a Day

Mubarak survived an attack by the Islamist terrorist group Jihad Islami, which killed his predecessor Anwar al-Sadat during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981. Since then, stopping Islamist terror has been a central tenet of his policies. Many Egyptians shared Mubarak's sentiments and even supported the regime when, in the 1990s, it searched for the terrorists responsible for attacks on tourists.

Even today, Mubarak is not nearly as hated as former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein or his Tunisian counterpart Ben Ali were when they were in power. A former air force general who distinguished himself in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Mubarak has earned high marks for his personal integrity. Nevertheless, there has been persistent speculation over the affluent lifestyle of his wife and sons. Gamal, whose greatest political patron is said to be his mother Suzanne Mubarak, owns an investment firm and an apartment in London's upscale Knightsbridge neighborhood. Nevertheless, the assets of the Mubaraks are likely modest in comparison with those of the Tunisian Ben Ali clan.

The Egyptian economy has grown in recent years, and prices on Egypt's stock exchange, which fell by 17 percent last week, have almost tripled since 2005. Many business owners have benefited from this development, which attracted foreign capital to the country. Nevertheless, even as the rich were raking in profits, ordinary people became increasingly frustrated when economic growth failed to improve conditions in the labor market. Some 40 percent of the population live on less than $2 a day, and even members of the educated middle class, whose sons and daughters took to the streets last week, see no improvements in their situation, with real unemployment likely hovering around 20 percent.

Mubarak has built up his army, thanks in part to the $1.3 billion (€955 million) in annual military aid he receives from Washington. Meanwhile, he has forgotten his people. "I have no problem with Mubarak running our country," says a protester in Cairo. "But I need a job!"

Despite his failings, the West has stood by Mubarak, giving the Egyptian president little more than mild warnings, as the US embassy cables leaked to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks demonstrate. According to those cables, when US Secretary of State Clinton visited Cairo she was asked not to mention the name of Ayman Nour, an opposition politician who had been arrested in 2005 and was later released.

The 'Facebook Party'

Partly because of a lack of Western support, the opposition remained unsuccessful for years in its attempts to seriously challenge the regime. But now the spark has ignited a conflagration. The "Facebook Party," as novelist Alaa al-Aswani calls the 20-to-30-something generation, has achieved something the traditional opposition parties -- the Islamists, leftists, liberals and Nasserites -- were unable to do.

The founders of a Facebook page titled the April 6 Youth Movement collected 70,000 virtual signatures. Of those, bloggers estimate that at least 15,000 heeded the call of the Internet activists to turn what began as a "day of police" into a "Day of Rage" last Tuesday. In the end, when union members, leftists and ordinary Egyptians joined the protests, it was clear that the "Facebook Party" had achieved its goal. "There were people as far as I could see! A sea of people!" Aswani raved. "It was a special moment. My knees were shaking."

For Aswani, the fact that the revolts remained leaderless was not a weakness but a strength. "None of the classic parties could exploit the protests ideologically. It wasn't about Islamism, socialism or Nasserism. What the people want is simple: freedom and prosperity."

The opposition weekly newspaper al-Fagr (The Dawn) characterized the first day of the protest as a "Last Judgment." The protesters were settling scores with the regime, and with "30 miserable years of poverty, electoral fraud, torture and corruption." The paper was especially critical of the prime minister when it wrote: "The prime minister has three palaces and a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, and he lives in a perpetual honeymoon."

Muslim Brotherhood's Role Unclear

The role of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood remains unclear. The largest opposition movement in the Arab world, it is demonized by both the Mubarak regime and the United States. The Islamists' critics charge that while the group makes use of democratic principles, it is only doing so to secure power once and for all.

Hala Mustafa, Egypt's leading political scientist, disagrees. "The Muslim Brotherhood is useful to the Mubarak regime," she says. "It constitutes a clear image of the enemy, a justification for the regime to constantly beef up its security apparatus." Social scientist Hassan Nafaa of Cairo University also sees an underlying symbiotic relationship between the secular regime and its Islamist adversaries: "The Muslim Brotherhood knows that its movement benefits from the status quo and social dissatisfaction in Egypt. In fact, that's what is providing the Brotherhood with more and more members."

This could explain why the Islamists took so long to react to the protests and why, in the end, they were relatively subdued in announcing their intention to participate. "A protest that you don't control yourself can easily swing in a completely different direction -- a truly democratic one," says Mustafa.

The Biggest Prize in the Middle East

But for the West -- and the protesters -- Egypt remains the biggest prize in the Middle East. With its 84 million inhabitants, it is the most populous country in the Arab world. Although its influence is waning, Egypt still dominates language and culture, particularly youth culture, in the region. More than seven percent of global shipping traffic and about two percent of petroleum shipments pass through the Suez Canal each year.

Egypt has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979. It mediates between the Israelis and the Palestinians and, also since 1979, it has been a sworn enemy of Iran. There is hardly a US embassy cable about Mubarak in which the Egyptian leader does not use choice language to rail against the mullahs in Tehran.

What happens if this giant falls? What if the Egyptians, in free elections, vote the way the people of the Gaza Strip did, when they brought the radical group Hamas into power in 2006, or the way the Lebanese did when they voted for Hezbollah? Will the rest of the Arab world follow Egypt's lead, just as Egypt has followed in Tunisia's footsteps?

Three Scenarios for Egypt's Future

Three possible scenarios loom for Egypt: a Burmese, a Turkish or an Iranian model. Whatever direction the country takes, Egypt's future will be critical for the region.

Whether the military assumes power in Cairo, as has been the case in Rangoon for decades, is unclear. Sami Annan, the army's chief of staff, and Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi traveled to Washington at the beginning of the week. The military leadership is undoubtedly coordinating its next steps with the Pentagon, despite the fact that Washington threatened to freeze military aid to Cairo on Friday evening. Modern-day Egypt has a tradition of having presidents with military backgrounds. Gamel Abdal Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, Egypt's three leaders since 1954, all had army backgrounds. And Defense Minister Tantawi, 75, is significantly more popular than intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, also frequently mentioned as a possible successor to Mubarak.

Despite the many differences between the two countries, some analysts believe that it is possible, even desirable, for Egypt to follow Turkey's path. The Turkish model espoused by the Justice and Development Party (AKP ) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has inspired many Arab democrats. It is the only successful attempt to date to domesticate political Islam, an attempt that has succeeded both economically and in terms of foreign policy. Of course, to implement this model in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood would have to follow the example of Turkey's Islamists, that is, to significantly modernize its image of humanity and more clearly distance itself from terror than it has done to date.

This is precisely what Leslie Gelb, a former US assistant secretary of state, predicts is unlikely to happen. He writes: "In rotten regimes that fall to street mobs, the historical pattern has been moderates followed by new dictators." Gelb believes that any effort to back away from Mubarak is dangerous and does not even rule out a Bolshevik or Iranian scenario in Egypt. In truth, he writes, officials in Washington "have no idea of exactly who these street protesters are, whether the protesters are simply a mob force incapable of organized political action and rule, or if more sinister groups hover in the shadows."

Little Enthusiasm in Israel

So far, the only clear loser of the events of past weeks is Israel. The Jewish state, which has become accustomed to the status quo, threatens to lose several potential partners for peace. For this reason, top politicians in the "only democracy in the Middle East," as Israel characterizes itself, have followed the events in the region with little enthusiasm. Their reactions have been sparse and in some cases icy.

Despite his policies of brutal suppression, Egypt's autocratic president has become Israel's favorite Arab politician. Mubarak has repeatedly offered his services as a mediator in the Palestinian conflict. Cables from the US embassy in Cairo made available by WikiLeaks indicate that Mubarak even has an excellent working relationship with Israel's hardliner prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he calls "charming." The two leaders are on such good terms that Netanyahu even gave the Egyptian leader advance notice of his plans to attack the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and offered him the option of governing the region himself after the attack -- an offer Mubarak politely rejected.

Israeli politicians sense that Egypt's next strong man will hardly be as cooperative. Indeed, the Israelis will sorely miss Mubarak.

**REPORTED BY DIETER BEDNARZ, ERICH FOLLATH, YASSIN MUSHARBASH, GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ, DANIEL STEINVORTH, VOLKHARD WINDFUHR AND BERNHARD ZAND

Spiegel (Alemania)

 


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