This article explain what my Egyptian-born husband has also been telling me:
that Omar Suleiman was a choice amenable to Israel.
Hajja Romi
PHARAOH FINAL
HOURS.
JOINING
THE CLUB OF IDI AMIN - SUKARNO - MARCOS - SHA OF
IRAN - BEN ALI.
[email protected]
Egypt: Death Throes
of a Dictatorship.
Our writer joins protesters atop a Cairo tank as the army
shows signs of backing the people against Mubarak's
regime.
By Robert Fisk
January 30, 2011 "The Independent" -- The Egyptian tanks,
the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the
40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in
Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim
Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers.
Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest?
Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I
could only remember those wonderful films of the
liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni
Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still
firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was
a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own
tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.
In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who
still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most
preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to
soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's
chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence
officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How
this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with
the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is
beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the
tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they
burst into laughter.
Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases
clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the
graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks.
"Mubarak Out – Get Out", and "Your regime is over,
Mubarak" have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian
tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling
Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside
a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds
scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews,
applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed
Mubarak's choice of vice-president and his gradual
appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the
streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU
leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over.
Mubarak's feeble attempts to claim that he must end
violence on behalf of the Egyptian people – when his own
security police have been responsible for most of the
cruelty of the past five days – has elicited even further
fury from those who have spent 30 years under his
sometimes vicious dictatorship. For there are growing
suspicions that much of the looting and arson was carried
out by plainclothes cops – including the murder of 11 men
in a rural village in the past 24 hours – in an attempt to
destroy the integrity of the protesters campaigning to
throw Mubarak out of power. The destruction of a number of
communications centres by masked men – which must have
been co-ordinated by some form of institution – has also
raised suspicions that the plainclothes thugs who beat
many of the demonstrators were to blame.
But the torching of police stations across Cairo and in
Alexandria and Suez and other cities was obviously not
carried out by plainclothes cops. Late on Friday, driving
to Cairo 40 miles down the Alexandria highway, crowds of
young men had lit fires across the highway and, when cars
slowed down, demanded hundreds of dollars in cash.
Yesterday morning, armed men were stealing cars from their
owners in the centre of Cairo.
Infinitely more terrible was the vandalism at the Egyptian
National Museum. After police abandoned this greatest of
ancient treasuries, looters broke into the red-painted
building and smashed 4,000-year-old pharaonic statues,
Egyptian mummies and magnificent wooden boats, originally
carved – complete with their miniature crews – to
accompany kings to their graves. Glass cases containing
priceless figurines were bashed in, the black-painted
soldiers inside pushed over. Again, it must be added that
there were rumours before the discovery that police caused
this vandalism before they fled the museum on Friday
night. Ghastly shades of the Baghdad museum in 2003. It
wasn't as bad as that looting, but it was a most awful
archeological disaster.
In my night journey from 6th October City to the capital,
I had to slow down when darkened vehicles loomed out of
the darkness. They were smashed, glass scattered across
the road, slovenly policemen pointing rifles at my
headlights. One jeep was half burned out. They were the
wreckage of the anti-riot police force which the
protesters forced out of Cairo on Friday. Those same
demonstrators last night formed a massive circle around
Freedom Square to pray, "Allah Alakbar" thundering into
the night air over the city.
And there are also calls for revenge. An al-Jazeera
television crew found 23 bodies in the Alexandria
mortuary, apparently shot by the police. Several had
horrifically mutilated faces. Eleven more bodies were
discovered in a Cairo mortuary, relatives gathering around
their bloody remains and screaming for retaliation against
the police.
Cairo now changes from joy to sullen anger within minutes.
Yesterday morning, I walked across the Nile river bridge
to watch the ruins of Mubarak's 15-storey party
headquarters burn. In front stood a vast poster
advertising the benefits of the party – pictures of
successful graduates, doctors and full employment, the
promises which Mubarak's party had failed to deliver in 30
years – outlined by the golden fires curling from the
blackened windows of the party headquarters. Thousands of
Egyptians stood on the river bridge and on the motorway
flyovers to take pictures of the fiercely burning building
– and of the middle-aged looters still stealing chairs and
desks from inside.
Yet the moment a Danish television team arrived to film
exactly the same scenes, they were berated by scores of
people who said that they had no right to film the fires,
insisting that Egyptians were proud people who would never
steal or commit arson. This was to become a theme during
the day: that reporters had no right to report anything
about this "liberation" that might reflect badly upon it.
Yet they were still remarkably friendly and – despite
Obama's pusillanimous statements on Friday night – there
was not the slightest manifestation of hostility against
the United States. "All we want – all – is Mubarak's
departure and new elections and our freedom and honour," a
30-year-old psychiatrist told me. Behind her, crowds of
young men were clearing up broken crash barriers and road
intersection fences from the street – an ironic reflection
on the well-known Cairo adage that Egyptians will never,
ever clean their roads.
Mubarak's allegation that these demonstrations and arson –
this combination was a theme of his speech refusing to
leave Egypt – were part of a "sinister plan" is clearly at
the centre of his claim to continued world recognition.
Indeed, Obama's own response – about the need for reforms
and an end to such violence – was an exact copy of all the
lies Mubarak has been using to defend his regime for three
decades. It was deeply amusing to Egyptians that Obama –
in Cairo itself, after his election – had urged Arabs to
grasp freedom and democracy. These aspirations disappeared
entirely when he gave his tacit if uncomfortable support
to the Egyptian president on Friday. The problem is the
usual one: the lines of power and the lines of morality in
Washington fail to intersect when US presidents have to
deal with the Middle East. Moral leadership in America
ceases to exist when the Arab and Israeli worlds have to
be confronted.
And the Egyptian army is, needless to say, part of this
equation. It receives much of the $1.3bn of annual aid
from Washington. The commander of that army, General
Tantawi – who just happened to be in Washington when the
police tried to crush the demonstrators – has always been
a very close personal friend of Mubarak. Not a good omen,
perhaps, for the immediate future.
So the "liberation" of Cairo – where, grimly, there came
news last night of the looting of the Qasr al-Aini
hospital – has yet to run its full course. The end may be
clear. The tragedy is not over.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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