Egypt Erupts in Jubilation as Mubarak Steps Down
An 18-day-old revolt
led by the young people of Egyptousted
President Hosni
Mubarak on Friday, shattering three decades of political stasis
here and overturning the established order of the Arab world.
Shouts of
“God is great” erupted from Tahrir Square at twilight as Mr. Mubarak’s vice
president and longtime intelligence chief, Omar
Suleiman, announced that Mr. Mubarak had passed all authority to a
council of military leaders.
Tens of
thousands who had bowed down for evening prayers leapt to their feet, bouncing
and dancing in joy. “Lift your head high, you’re an Egyptian,” they cried.
Revising the tense of the revolution’s rallying cry, they chanted, “The people,
at last, have brought down the regime.”
“We can
breathe fresh air, we can feel our freedom,” said Gamal Heshamt, a former
independent member of Parliament. “After 30 years of absence from the world,
Egypt is back.”
Mr.
Mubarak, an 82-year-old former air force commander, left without comment for
his home by the Red Sea in Sharm el Sheik. His departure overturns, after six
decades, the Arab world’s original secular dictatorship. He was toppled by a
radically new force in regional politics — a largely secular, nonviolent,
youth-led democracy movement that brought Egypt’s liberal and Islamist
opposition groups together for the first time under its banner.
One by
one the protesters withstood each weapon in the arsenal of the Egyptian
autocracy — first the heavily armed riot police, then a ruling party militia
and finally the state’s powerful propaganda machine.
Mr.
Mubarak’s fall removed a bulwark of American foreign policy in the region. The
United States, its Arab allies and Israel are now pondering whether the
Egyptian military, which has vowed to hold free elections, will give way to a
new era of democratic dynamism or to a perilous lurch into instability or
Islamist rule.
The
upheaval comes less than a month after a sudden youth revolt in nearby Tunisia
toppled another enduring Arab strongman, President Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali. And on Friday night some of the revelers
celebrating in the streets of Cairo marched under a Tunisian flag and pointed
to the surviving autocracies in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Yemen. “We are
setting a role model for the dictatorships around us,” said Khalid Shaheen, 39.
“Democracy is coming.”
President
Obama, in a televised address, praised the Egyptian revolution.
“Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will
carry the day,” he said. “It was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism
and mindless killing — that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist
movement that until 18 days ago was considered Egypt’s only viable opposition,
said it was merely a supporting player in the revolt.
“We
participated with everyone else and did not lead this or raise Islamic slogans
so that it can be the revolution of everyone,” said Mohamed Saad el-Katatni, a
spokesman for the Brotherhood. “This is a revolution for all Egyptians; there
is no room for a single group’s slogans, not the Brotherhood’s or anybody
else.”
The
Brotherhood, which was slow to follow the lead of its own youth wing into the
streets, has said it will not field a candidate for president or seek a
parliamentary majority in the expected elections.
The
Mubarak era ended without any of the stability and predictability that were the
hallmarks of his tenure. Western and Egyptian officials had expected Mr.
Mubarak to leave office on Thursday and irrevocably delegate his authority to
Vice President Suleiman, finishing the last six months of his term with at
least his presidential title intact.
But
whether because of pride or stubbornness, Mr. Mubarak instead spoke once again
as the unbowed father of the nation, barely alluding to a vague “delegation” of
authority.
The
resulting disappointment enraged the Egyptian public, sent a million people
into the streets of Cairo on Friday morning and put in motion an unceremonious
retreat at the behest of the military he had commanded for so long.
“Taking into consideration
the difficult circumstances the country is going through, President Mohammed
Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the post of president of the republic and
has tasked the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to manage the state’s
affairs,” Mr. Suleiman, grave and ashen, said in a brief televised statement.
It is now not clear what
role Mr. Suleiman, whose credibility plummeted over the past week as he stood
by Mr. Mubarak and even questioned Egypt’s readiness for democracy, will have
in the new government.
The transfer of power
leaves the Egyptian military in charge of this nation of 85 million, facing
insistent calls for fundamental democratic change and open elections. Hours
before Mr. Suleiman announced Mr. Mubarak’s exit, the military had signaled its
takeover with a communiqué that appeared to declare its solidarity with the
protesters.
Read on
state television by an army spokesman, the communiqué declared that the
military — not Mr. Mubarak, Mr. Suleiman or any other civilian authority —
would ensure the amendment of the Constitution to “conduct free and fair
presidential elections.”
“The
armed forces are committed to sponsor the legitimate demands of the people,”
the statement declared, and the military promised to ensure the fulfillment of
its promises “within defined time frames” until authority could be passed to a
“free democratic community that the people aspire to.”
It
pledged to remove the reviled “emergency law,” which allows the government to
detain anyone without charges or trial, “as soon as the current circumstances
are over” and further promised immunity from prosecution for the protesters,
whom it called “the honest people who refused the corruption and demanded
reforms.”
Egyptians
ignored the communiqué, as they have most official pronouncements of the
Mubarak government, until the president’s resignation was announced. Then they
hugged, kissed and cheered the soldiers, lifting children on tanks to get their
pictures taken. “The people and the army are one hand,” they chanted.
Standing
guard near the presidential palace, soldiers passed photographs of “martyrs”
killed during the revolution through barbed wire to attach them to their tanks.
At Tahrir Square, some slipped out of position to join the roaring crowds
flooding the streets.
Whether the
military will subordinate itself to a civilian democracy or install a new
military dictator will be impossible to know for months. Military leaders will
inevitably face pressure to deliver the genuine transition that protesters did
not trust Mr. Mubarak to give them.
Yet it
may also seek to protect the enormous political and economic privileges it
accumulated during Mr. Mubarak’s reign. And the army has itself been infused
for years with the notion that Egypt’s survival depends on fighting threats,
real and imagined, from foreign enemies, Islamists, Iran and the frustrations
of its own people.
Throughout
the revolt, the army stood passively on the sidelines — its soldiers literally
standing behind the iron fence of the Egyptian Museum — as the police or armed
Mubarak loyalists fought the protesters centered in Tahrir Square.
But
Western diplomats, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were
violating confidences, said that top army officials had told them that their
troops would never use force against civilians, depriving Mr. Mubarak of a
decisive tool to suppress the dissent.
It has
been “increasingly clear,” a Western diplomat said Friday, that “the army will
not go down with Mubarak.”
Now the
military, which owns vast commercial interests here but has not fought in
decades, must defuse demonstrations, quell widespread labor unrest and rebuild
a shattered economy and security forces. Its top official, Field Marshal Hussein
Tantawi, 75, served for decades as a top official of Mr. Mubarak’s
government. And its top uniformed official, Gen. Sami Hafez
Enan, has not spoken publicly.
Egypt’s
opposition has said for weeks that it welcomed a military role in securing the
country, ideally under a two- to five-member presidential council with only one
military member. And the initial reaction to the military takeover was
ecstatic.
“Welcome
back,” said Wael
Ghonim, the Google executive who administered the Facebook group
that helped start the revolt.
Mr.
Ghonim, who was detained for 12 days in blindfolded isolation by the Mubarak
government as it tried to stamp out the revolt, helped protesters turn the tide
in a propaganda war against the state media earlier this week, when he
described his captivity in an emotional interview on a satellite television
station.
“Egypt is going to be a
democratic state,” he declared Friday, in another interview. “You will be impressed.”
Dr. Shady el-Ghazaly Harb,
32, a transplant surgeon who was among the small group of organizers who guided
the revolution, said the leaders had decided to let the protests unwind on
their own. “We are not going to ask the people to stay in the square or leave —
it is their choice,” he said. “Even if they leave, any government will know
that we can get them to the streets again in a minute.”
“Our country never had a victory in our
lifetime, and this is the sort of victory we were looking for, a victory over a
vicious regime that we needed to bring down,” Dr. Harb said.
Amr Ezz,
27, another of revolt’s young leaders, said that calling the revolution a
military coup understated its achievement. “It is the people who took down the
president and the regime and can take down anyone else,” he said. “Now the role
of the regular people has ended and the role of the politicians begins. Now we
can begin negotiations with the military in order to plan the coming phase.”
The
opposition groups participating in the protest movement had previously settled
on a committee led byMohamed
ElBaradei, the former diplomat and Nobel laureate, to negotiate with
the army if Mr. Mubarak resigned.
Mr.
ElBaradei could not be reached for comment on Friday, but in a television
interview he indicated that he expected the talks with the military to begin
within days.
“I’d like
to see that started tomorrow so we can have a sharing of power, the civilian
and the military, and tell them what our demands are, what they need to do,” he
said.
By
evening, Egyptian politicians were beginning to position themselves to run for
office. Amr Moussa,
one of the country’s most popular public figures, resigned his position as
secretary general of the Arab League,
and an aide, Hesham Youssef, confirmed that Mr. Moussa was considering seeking
office.
In
Switzerland, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had frozen
possible assets of “the former Egyptian president” and his associates.
In the
military’s final communiqué of the day, its spokesman thanked Mr. Mubarak for
his service and saluted the “martyrs” of the revolution.
In Tahrir
Square, protesters said they were not quite ready to disband the little
republic they had built up during their two-week occupation, setting up
makeshift clinics, soundstages, a detention center and security teams to
protect the barricades.
Many have boasted that
their encampment was a rare example of community spirit here, and after Mr.
Mubarak’s resignation the organizers called on the thousands who protested here
to return once again on Saturday morning to help clean it up.
Egypt’s Path After Uprising Does Not Have to
Follow Iran’s
Two Egyptian leaders
have been struck down in 30 years: one by an Islamist assassin’s bullets, the
other by the demands of hundreds of thousands of protesters in a peaceful
uprising. The first event, the death of President Anwar
el-Sadat, marked a spectacle of the most militant brand of political
Islam. The revolution the world witnessed Friday, the toppling of President Hosni
Mubarak, may herald the dawn of something else.
There is
a fear in the West, one rarely echoed here, that Egypt’s
revolution could go the way of Iran’s,
when radical Islamists ultimately commandeered a movement that began with a far
broader base. But the two are very different countries. In Egypt, the uprising
offers the possibility of an accommodation with political Islam rare in the
Arab world — that without the repression that accompanied Mr. Mubarak’s rule,
Islam could present itself in a more moderate guise.
Egypt’s
was a revolution of diversity, a proliferation of voices — of youth, women and
workers, as well as the religious — all of which will struggle for influence.
Here, political Islam will most likely face a new kind of challenge: proving
its relevance and popularity in a country undergoing seismic change.
“Choosing
a regime will become the right of the people,” Ali Abdel-Fattah, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, said Saturday.
“The nature of the regime will be decided by elections. And I think Egyptians
agree on the demands and how to realize them.”
Of
countries in the region, only Turkey has managed to incorporate currents of
political Islam into a system that has so far proven viable, but its bold
experiment remains unfinished. The rest of the region is strewn with disasters,
from the ascent of the most militant strands in Iraq after the American
invasion to the rise of populist and combative movements in the Palestinian territories
and Lebanon that emerged under Israeli occupation.
In Egypt,
repression of its Islamic activists helped give rise to the most extremist
forces in the Muslim world — leadership of Al Qaeda in
Afghanistan and an insurgency against its own government in the 1990s.
But at
its core the revolt that finally toppled Mr. Mubarak had a very different set
of demands. Its organizers rallied to broad calls for freedom, social justice
and a vague sense of nationalism that came together over a belief that distant
and often incompetent rulers had to treat the opposition with respect. The
demands were voiced by youth, women, workers and adherents of revived currents
of liberalism, the left and Arab nationalism, spread by social networks made
possible by new technology.
The
Muslim Brotherhood, a mainstream group that stands as the most venerable of the
Arab world’s Islamic movements, is of course also a contender to lead a new
Egypt. It has long been the most organized and credible opposition to Mr.
Mubarak. But is also must prepare to enter the fray of an emerging democratic
system, testing its staying power in a system ruled by elections and the law.
“This is
not yesterday’s Egypt,” declared Amal Borham, a protester in Tahrir Square.
“It is
their right to participate as much as it is mine, as much as it is anyone
else’s in this country,” added Ms. Borham, who considers herself secular. “They
are part of this society, and they have been made to stay in the shadows for a
very long time.”
The
protests illustrated the challenges before the Brotherhood and other Islamic
groups. While the Brotherhood eventually brought its organizational prowess to
the demonstrations — organizing security and deploying its followers overnight
when the protests lulled — it was reluctant to join at first. Indeed, many
protesters saw it as a representative of an old guard that they believed had
for so long failed to answer society’s problems.
Even some
of the Brotherhood’s own youthful supporters expressed frustration with their
leaders’ cautiousness.
“On
Tuesday they were not convinced,” recalled Islam Lotfi, a 32-year-old organizer
and leader of the Brotherhood’s youth. “On Wednesday, it was ‘maybe.’ And on
Thursday, ‘It seems you did a great job. Go ahead and this time we will
follow.’ ”
It will
undoubtedly moderate its message in a campaign, trying to appeal to the
broadest constituency. The next elections promise to be far more competitive
than the shams of past years, when many Egyptians simply stayed home. That
emerging diversity may prove more uncomfortable than the head-to-head
confrontation with Mr. Mubarak’s enforcers that helped define the Brotherhood’s
appeal.
“The
system made them work in the dark and that made them look bigger than they
are,” said Ahmed Gowhary, a secular organizer of the protests. “Now it will be
a real chance for them to show that they are more Egyptian than they have
appeared.”
“Their real power,” he
added, “will show.”
The Arab world has a
spectrum of Islamic movements, as broad as the states that have repressed them,
from the most violent in Al Qaeda to the most mainstream in Turkey. Though cast
for years as an insurgent threat by Mr. Mubarak, the Brotherhood in Egypt has
long disavowed its violent past, and now has a chance to present itself as
something more than a force for opposition to Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarianism.
Founded
by a schoolteacher named Hassan el-Banna in the Suez Canal town of Ismailiyya
in 1928, it quickly became the most important political contestant in the
country, boasting a vibrant press, delivering weekly lectures from mosques and
reaching out to students, civil servants, urban laborers and peasants. It was
banned in 1954 under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the founder of Mr. Mubarak’s state,
weathering a brutal crackdown that instilled in it the iron discipline of a
clandestine movement.
The
repression, which persisted until last month, produced some of the Muslim
world’s most militant thinkers, among them Sayyid
Qutb, who had a profound impact on militancy across the Muslim
world. But remarkably, the movement also evolved over those same years,
pursuing coalitions with other political parties since 1984, joining street
protests with leftist groups and entering a feeble Parliament as independents,
whose demands were not enforcement of Islamic strictures but opposition to
martial law.
Its
former leader turned heads in 2005 when he offered a play on the group’s
traditional slogan, “Islam is the solution.” “Freedom is the solution,” he
declared.
The
Brotherhood’s relationship with the government came full circle last Sunday,
when Vice President Omar
Suleiman invited it to talks. The discussions were meaningless, but
the symbolism was vast: only one seat separated the Brotherhood’s spokesman
from a man whose intelligence apparatus deemed the group the greatest threat to
its rule.
“It
exposed the lie of the regime that the Brotherhood is a violent organization,
anti-systemic and a threat to the country,” said Samer Shehata, a professor at Georgetown
University.
Although
Iran’s and Egypt’s revolutions share a date, Feb. 11, the comparisons end
there. Millions welcomed Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini on his return from Paris. In Egypt, there was no
charismatic figure of stature.
Unlike
the Shiite Muslim clergy in Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood is neither led by
clerics nor based on a clerical organization. In many ways, it represents a lay
middle class. The very dynamics are different, too: cassette tapes of Ayatollah
Khomeini’s speeches helped drive Iran’s revolution, whose zealots sought to
export it. The Internet helped propel the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the
medium’s own diffusion helping carry it from the backwater town of Sidi Bouzid
in Tunisia to Tahrir Square in Cairo.
Perhaps
most importantly, the revolutions occurred a generation apart, a note echoed in
the Brotherhood stronghold of Munira, along streets of graceful balustrades of
the colonial era and the utilitarian architecture of Mr. Nasser and his
successors.
“The
people are aware this time,” said Essam Salem, a 50-year-old resident there.
“They’re not going to let them seize power. People aren’t going to be deceived
again. This is a popular revolution, a revolution of the youth, not an Islamic
revolution.”
In the
struggle, morality was rarely mentioned, even by the Muslim Brotherhood, which
echoed the demands that swung broad segments of Egypt’s population to the
revolution’s side.
“We’re a
part of the people and there is a consensus over the people’s demands,” said
Hamdi Hassan, another Brotherhood official.
Across
the Arab world, the most militant Islamic movements are those embedded in
conflict — Hezbollah and Hamas —
or stateless, like Al Qaeda, celebrating in mystical terms this generation’s
equivalent of armed struggle. Iraq’s bloodiest spectacles, claimed by a
homegrown Islamic militant movement, occurred in a civil war that followed the
American invasion.
In many
ways, the Brotherhood is the counterexample, echoed in the success of Turkey’s
Justice and Development Party. It has de-emphasized the mainstays of Islamic
activism — charity and proselytizing, for instance — for the prize of political
success in Parliament.
While it
remains deeply conservative, it engages less in sometimes frivolous debates
over the veil or education and more in demands articulated by the broader
society: corruption, joblessness, political freedom and human rights abuses.
The shift
illustrates both its strengths and its weaknesses.
“The ability to present a
mainstream national reform agenda and mobilize and galvanize Egyptians around
this agenda, this is something the Muslim Brotherhood has failed to do,” said
Emad Shaheen, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. “The youth have
achieved in 18 days what the Brotherhood failed to achieve in 80 years.”
Military Offers Assurances to Egypt and
Neighbors
As a new era dawned
in Egypt on
Saturday, the army leadership sought to reassure Egyptians and the world that
it would shepherd a transition to civilian rule and honor international
commitments like the peace treaty with Israel.
Exultant
and exhausted opposition leaders claimed their role in the country’s future,
pressing the army to lift the country’s emergency law and release political
prisoners and saying they would present their vision for the government. And
they vowed to return to Tahrir Square next week to celebrate a victory and
honor those who had died in the 18-day uprising that toppled Hosni
Mubarak after nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule.
In an
announcement broadcast on state television, an army spokesman said Egypt would
continue to abide by all its international and regional treaties and the
current civilian leadership would manage the country’s affairs until the
formation of a new government. But he did not discuss a timetable for any
transfer of power, and it was unclear how and when talks with opposition
figures would take place.
The army
spokesman said the military was “aspiring to guarantee the peaceful transition
of power within the framework of a free democratic system that allows an
elected civilian power to rule the country, in order to build a free democratic
state.”
The
impact of Egypt’s uprising rippled across the Arab world as protesters turned
out in Algeria, where the police arrested leading organizers, and in Yemen,
where pro-government forces beat demonstrators with clubs.
The Palestinian leadership
responded by announcing that it planned to hold presidential and parliamentary
elections by September. And in Tunisia, which inspired Egypt’s uprising,
hundreds demonstrated to cheer Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
Adm. Mike
Mullen, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, will travel to Jordan and Israel for talks as both
countries deal with the reverberations from Egypt’s revolution.
In
Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, some members of the broad movement that toppled
Mr. Mubarak vowed to continue their protests, saying that all their demands had
not yet been met.
A long
list included an end to the emergency law that allows detention without
charges, the dissolution of the Parliament, seen as illegitimate, and for some
of the protesters, the prosecution of Mr. Mubarak. About 50 stood in the square
on Saturday morning, as the military removed barricades and concertina wire on
the periphery.
But the
uprising’s leading organizers, speaking at a news conference in central Cairo,
asked protesters to leave the square.
The
group, the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, which includes members of
the April 6 Youth Movement, the Muslim Brotherhood Youth and young
supporters of Mohamed
ElBaradei, a prominent opposition figure, said that it had not yet
talked with the military and that on Sunday it would lay out its road map for a
transitional government.
The
coalition said that Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and other
respected figures would work as intermediaries between the youth group and the
country’s new military chiefs.
“The
power of the people changed the regime,” said Gehan Shaaban, a group
spokeswoman. “But we shouldn’t trust the army. We should trust ourselves, the
people of Egypt.”
Again,
there were signs that not all the protesters were willing to give up. During
the news conference, a woman yelled: “We should all head to Tahrir and stay
there, until we ourselves are sure that everything is going as planned! The
government of Ahmed Shafiq has to go!” Mr. Shafiq is the prime minister. The
woman’s shouts brought the news conference to a close.
As the
protesters and opposition groups prepared an agenda, they sought clues about
exactly whom they were negotiating with. On Friday, Vice President Omar
Suleiman said that Mr. Mubarak had authorized the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces to manage the state’s affairs, marking the
transition from civilian to military rule.
Mr.
Suleiman, a former general who became Egypt’s foreign intelligence chief,
straddled the two worlds. But Hosam Sowilam, a retired general, said Mr.
Suleiman no longer played a leadership role. “Omar Suleiman finished his time,”
he said. “He’s 74 years old.” Others were not so quick to dismiss Mr. Suleiman,
a close ally of Mr. Mubarak who was mentioned as his successor.
In interviews, protest
leaders said they assumed that the defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed
Hussein Tantawi, 75, who was considered a loyalist of Mr. Mubarak,
was now the country’s de facto leader. On Saturday morning, his convoy tried to
drive to Tahrir Square, according to a paratrooper stationed there. But he did
not leave his car.
The military chiefs worked
quickly to exert their influence, calling on citizens to cooperate with the
police, after weeks of civil strife, and urging a force stained by accusations
of abuse and torture to be mindful of the department’s slogan: “The police in
the service of the people.”
Security
officials said that the recently appointed interior minister, Mahmoud Wagdy,
visited units of the department’s feared security services on Saturday, in the
hope of returning police officers to work. The officers vanished from Egypt’s
streets on Jan. 29 after violent clashes with protesters, and only small
numbers have returned.
Reuters
reported that Field Marshal Tantawi met with Mr. Wagdy to discuss the officers’
return.
That
security force, including plainclothes officers widely accused of abuse, are
loathed by the protesters, who have demanded police reform to end brutality
and, in particular, torture in police stations. Prosecutors are weighing
charges against the previous interior minister, Habib al-Adly, who seemed to ignore
or encourage police abuses. But some analysts have suggested that he is a
scapegoat, and that the real problem was a government that relied on harsh
tactics.
At the
same time, neighborhoods in Cairo and other cities have for weeks been forced
to function without the police. The lack of public safety was underscored on
Friday, when security officials said hundreds of inmates, freed by armed gangs,
escaped from a prison in Cairo.
While the
Egyptian military’s commitment to international treaties reassured the United
States and Israel, there was no indication whether such a pledge would survive
a new government. The protesters in the square made it clear that they would
reconsider all of Mr. Mubarak’s foreign alliances, and many frequently referred
to the deposed president as an Israeli or American agent.
Hamdy
Hassan, a former member of Parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood, said the
military had “acknowledged the revolution’s legitimacy,” but added that there
were still doubts about its intentions. “We want a guarantee that we do not
have another tyrant.”
In Cairo,
citizens embraced their new reality with humor, mild arguments and
celebrations. The official state press gave a measure of the changes.
“The
People Toppled the Government” said the headline in Al Ahram, the flagship
state-owned national newspaper and government mouthpiece, borrowing a line from
the protest movement. Another article noted that Switzerland had frozen the
assets of Mr. Mubarak and his aides.
On state
television, which for weeks depicted the protesters as a violent mob of
foreigners, an anchor spoke of the “youth revolution.”
Security
officials said Saturday that the information minister, Anas el-Fekky, who many
of the protesters say should be fired, was placed under house arrest.
In Tahrir
Square on Saturday, thousands of volunteers who brought their own brooms or
cleaning supplies swept streets and scrubbed graffiti from buildings. On the
streets around the square, the celebrations from the night before continued,
spurred on by honking drivers.
At night,
the party started early, as tens of thousands of Cairo residents and visitors
from all over Egypt filled the square, dancing and snapping pictures of their
children standing on vigilant tanks.
The
president’s departure to his home by the Red Sea in Sharm el Sheik seemed for
some to have stripped the country’s political woes of some urgency.
Mr.
ElBaradei’s brother, Ali ElBaradei, said Mr. ElBaradei was taking the day off
and had not been contacted by the military. “They will call when they call,” he
said.
Amr
Hamzawy, who has acted as a mediator between the protesters and the government,
said that “everyone is taking a break,” though he expressed concern with the
vague nature of the army’s most recent statements.
“What is
the timeline we are looking at?” he said. “Is it September?” He also said it
was unclear whether the army council ruling the country favored amending the
Constitution or starting from scratch, which is the preferred solution for many
of the protesters.
There was also no clear
sign from the military about whether it intended to dissolve Parliament, Mr.
Hamzawy said, adding that so far the military’s tone had been “very, very
positive.”
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