The main headlines on Al Jazeera English, featuring the latest news and reports from around the world.
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enlarge What is it with sex and Republicans? While they’re on the House floor trying to rob women of their gynecologists, reproductive privacy, and control of their own bodies, they’re out trolling on Craigslist? Gawker’s exclusive on Rep. Christopher Lee (R-NY) and his Craigslist adventures will either make you laugh or gag, depending. The emails are especially disgusting, at least to this woman who thinks trolling the internet for sex is lame and juvenile, whether male or female. At any rate, it seems that he cozied up to the wrong woman online, and she turned over her email and photos to Gawker. Gotta love it. Rep. Christopher Lee is a married Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” forum, he’s Christopher Lee, “divorced” “lobbyist” and “fit fun classy guy.” One object of his flirtation told us her story. On the morning of Friday, January 14, a single 34-year-old woman put an ad in the “Women for Men” section of Craigslist personals. “Will someone prove to me not all CL men look like toads?” she asked, inviting “financially & emotionally secure” men to reply. That afternoon, a man named Christopher Lee replied. He used a Gmail account that Rep. Christopher Lee has since confirmed to be his own. (It’s the same Gmail account that was associated with Lee’s personal Facebook account, which the Congressman deleted when we started asking questions.) By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He’s also 46.) Go read the rest. The emails aren’t especially interesting, but they point to Rep. Lee’s hypocrisy, given his anti-woman, anti-gay voting record. Will it matter? I doubt it. After Vitter, Ensign, Sanford and Craig, Christopher Lee just looks like a stupid choir boy doing stupid Internet things. Update: Rep. Lee has resigned , effective immediately. Just saw this from Jake Tapper on Twitter: enlarge “It has been a tremendous honor to serve the people of Western New York. I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents. I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness. “The challenges we face in Western New York and across the country are too serious for me to allow this distraction to continue, and so I am announcing that I have resigned my seat in Congress effective immediately.” Fastest. scandal. ever.
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Egyptians now feel the Mubarak regime has lost the initiative as momentum shifts back to the streets Omar Suleiman may be starting to deserve the adjective “embattled” that has often been attached to his boss, Hosni Mubarak, since Egypt’s uprising began. Appointed vice-president as a safe and loyal pair of hands, Mubarak’s former intelligence chief has been mandated to run “an inclusive and serious national dialogue with participants from the whole political spectrum to deliver an orderly transition to democracy by September”. But doubts about the regime’s real intentions, present from the start of the crisis, are growing fast. The first talks on Sunday were inconclusive. The impression is strengthening, say analysts in Egypt and abroad, that Suleiman is not serious about a constitutional review, a timetable for change, protecting freedom of expression, allowing peaceful protest, and ending the state of emergency. His remarks on Tuesday, rejecting an immediate departure by Mubarak or any “end to the regime”, did not sit well with his wish to resolve the crisis through dialogue. His warning of a possible “coup” sounded like a threat of more overt military intervention than has been seen so far. The view from Cairo is that the regime, though confused, is taking a hard line, and that the negotiations have essentially come to an end. The regime’s strategy has been to play for time, believing that the protests would fade in the face of a faltering economy and government initiatives such as raising wages for state employees. In a fast-moving situation, the mood changes from day to day. Only last Friday the government seemed to have acted wisely by not sending back its thugs to Tahrir square. That eased pressure from abroad, with the US, Britain and others tacitly accepting that Mubarak was unlikely to leave office before September. Worries about the Muslim Brotherhood taking advantage of the chaos may also have played into western calculations. Now, with protesters showing determination and resilience after Tuesday’s big rally, and another massive turnout planned for Friday, there is a tougher line from Washington. Joe Biden, the US vice-president, urged Suleiman to rescind the emergency laws immediately. Egyptians now feel that the regime has lost the initiative as momentum has shifted away from negotiations and back towards the street. Even if unco-ordinated, strikes involving thousands of workers fuel an atmosphere of confrontation, while sporadic violence and evidence of brutality by the security forces ensure that Egypt’s tense standoff continues. Omar Suleiman does not appear to be able to resolve it. Egypt Protest Middle East Ian Black guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media [YouTube] Video via The Guardian Thousands of demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square gave a hero’s welcome to a Google executive and activist who has become a symbol of the country’s anti-government movement. ================================================ REPORTER: Do you think you’re going to succeed? GHONIM: We don’t care. We’re going to do whatever we’ve got to do. ================================================= Too cool. A tweet from @Ghonim :
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A blindfolded Robert Tait could only listen as fellow captives were electrocuted and beaten by Mubarak’s security services The sickening, rapid click-click-clicking of the electrocuting device sounded like an angry rattlesnake as it passed within inches of my face. Then came a scream of agony, followed by a pitiful whimpering from the handcuffed, blindfolded victim as the force of the shock propelled him across the floor. A hail of vicious punches and kicks rained down on the prone bodies next to me, creating loud thumps. The torturers screamed abuse all around me. Only later were their chilling words translated to me by an Arabic-speaking colleague: “In this hotel, there are only two items on the menu for those who don’t behave – electrocution and rape.” Cuffed and blindfolded, like my fellow detainees, I lay transfixed. My palms sweated and my heart raced. I felt myself shaking. Would it be my turn next? Or would my outsider status, conferred by holding a British passport, save me? I suspected – hoped – that it would be the latter and, thankfully, it was. But I could never be sure. I had “disappeared”, along with countless Egyptians, inside the bowels of the Mukhabarat, President Hosni Mubarak’s vast security-intelligence apparatus and an organisation headed, until recently, by his vice-president and former intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, the man trusted to negotiate an “orderly transition” to democratic rule. Judging by what I witnessed, that seems a forlorn hope. I had often wondered, reading accounts of political prisoners detained and tortured in places such as junta-run Argentina of the 1970s, what it would be like to be totally at the mercy of, and dependent on, your jailer for everything – food, water, the toilet. I never dreamed I would find out. Yet here I was, cooped up in a tiny room with a group of Egyptian detainees who were being mercilessly brutalised. I had been handed over to the security services after being stopped at a police checkpoint near central Cairo last Friday. I had flown there, along with an Iraqi-born British colleague, Abdelilah Nuaimi, to cover Egypt’s unfolding crisis for RFE/RL, an American radio station based in Prague. We knew beforehand that foreign journalists had been targeted by security services as they scrambled to contain a revolt against Mubarak’s regime, so our incarceration was not unique. Yet it was different. My experience, while highly personal, wasn’t really about me or the foreign media. It was about gaining an insight – if that is possible behind a blindfold – into the inner workings of the Mubarak regime. It told me all I needed to know about why it had become hated, feared and loathed by the mass of ordinary Egyptians. We had been stopped en route to Tahrir Square, scene of the ongoing mass demonstrations, little more than half an hour after leaving Cairo airport. Uniformed and plainclothes police swarmed around our car and demanded our passports and to see inside my bag. A satellite phone was found and one of the men got in our car and ordered our driver to follow a vehicle in front, which led us to a nearby police station. There, an officer subjected our fixer, Ahmed, to intense questioning: did he know any Palestinians? Were they members of Hamas? Then we were ordered to move again, and eventually drove to a vast, unmarked complex next to a telecommunications building. That’s when Ahmed sensed real danger. “I hope I don’t get beaten up,” he said. He had good reason to worry. We were ordered out and blindfolded before being herded into another vehicle and driven a few hundred yards. Then we were pushed into what seemed like an open-air courtyard and handcuffed. I heard the rapid-fire clicking of the electric rattlesnake – I knew instantly what it was – and then Ahmed screaming in pain. A cold sweat washed over me and I thought I might faint or vomit. “I’m going to be tortured,” I thought. But I wasn’t. “Mr Robert, what is wrong,” I was asked, before being told, with incongruous kindness, to sit down. I sensed then that I would avoid the worst. But I didn’t expect to gain such intimate knowledge of what that meant. After being interrogated and held in one room for hours, I was frogmarched after nightfall to another room, upstairs, along with other prisoners. We believe our captors were members of the internal security service. That’s when the violence – and the terror – really began. At first, I attached no meaning to the dull slapping sounds. But comprehension dawned as, amid loud shouting, I heard the electrocuting rods being ratcheted up. My colleague, Abdelilah – kept in a neighbouring room – later told me what the torturers said next. “Get the electric shocks ready. This lot are to be made to really suffer,” a guard said as a new batch of prisoners were brought in. “Why did you do this to your country?” a jailer screamed as he tormented his victim. “You are not to speak in here, do you understand?” one prisoner was told. He did not reply. Thump. “Do you understand?” Still no answer. More thumps. “Do you understand?” Prisoner: “Yes, I understand.” Torturer: “I told you not to speak in here,” followed by a cascade of thumps, kicks, and electric shocks. Exhausted, the prisoners fell asleep and snored loudly, provoking another round of furious assaults. “You’re committing a sin,” a stricken detainee said in a weak, pitiful voice. Craving to see my fellow inmates, I discreetly adjusted my blindfold. I briefly saw three young men – two of them looked like Islamists, with bushy beards – with their hands cuffed behind their backs (mine were cuffed to the front), before my captors spotted what I had done and tightened my blindfold. The brutality continued until, suddenly, I was ordered to stand and pushed towards a room, where I was told I was being taken to the airport. I received my possessions and looked at my watch. It was 5pm. I had been in captivity for 28 hours. The ordeal was almost over – save for another 16 hours waiting at an airport deportation facility. It had been nightmarish but it was nothing to what my Egyptian fellow-captives had endured. Later, I learned that Ahmed, the fixer, had been released at the same time as Abdelilah and me. He told friends we had been “treated very well” but that he had bruises “from sleeping on the floor”. I had flown to Cairo to find out what was ailing so many Egyptians. I did not expect to learn the answer so graphically. Robert Tait is a senior correspondent with RFE/RL. He was formerly the Guardian’s correspondent in Tehran and Istanbul Egypt Torture Middle East Hosni Mubarak Robert Tait guardian.co.uk
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Military accused by human rights campaigners of targeting hundreds of anti-government protesters The Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian. The military has claimed to be neutral, merely keeping anti-Mubarak protesters and loyalists apart. But human rights campaigners say this is clearly no longer the case, accusing the army of involvement in both disappearances and torture – abuses Egyptians have for years associated with the notorious state security intelligence (SSI) but not the army. The Guardian has spoken to detainees who say they have suffered extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organised campaign of intimidation. Human rights groups have documented the use of electric shocks on some of those held by the army. Egyptian human rights groups say families are desperately searching for missing relatives who have disappeared into army custody. Some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on the edge of Tahrir Square. Those released have given graphic accounts of physical abuse by soldiers who accused them of acting for foreign powers, including Hamas and Israel. Among those detained have been human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, but most have been released. However, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, said hundreds, and possibly thousands, of ordinary people had “disappeared” into military custody across the country for no more than carrying a political flyer, attending the demonstrations or even the way they look. Many were still missing. “Their range is very wide, from people who were at the protests or detained for breaking curfew to those who talked back at an army officer or were handed over to the army for looking suspicious or for looking like foreigners even if they were not,” he said. “It’s unusual and to the best of our knowledge it’s also unprecedented for the army to be doing this.” One of those detained by the army was a 23-year-old man who would only give his first name, Ashraf, for fear of again being arrested. He was detained last Friday on the edge of Tahrir Square carrying a box of medical supplies intended for one of the makeshift clinics treating protesters attacked by pro-Mubarak forces. “I was on a sidestreet and a soldier stopped me and asked me where I was going. I told him and he accused me of working for foreign enemies and other soldiers rushed over and they all started hitting me with their guns,” he said. Ashraf was hauled off to a makeshift army post where his hands were bound behind his back and he was beaten some more before being moved to an area under military control at the back of the museum. “They put me in a room. An officer came and asked me who was paying me to be against the government. When I said I wanted a better government he hit me across the head and I fell to the floor. Then soldiers started kicking me. One of them kept kicking me between my legs,” he said. “They got a bayonet and threatened to rape me with it. Then they waved it between my legs. They said I could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know. The torture was painful but the idea of disappearing in a military prison was really frightening.” Ashraf said the beatings continued on and off for several hours until he was put in a room with about a dozen other men, all of whom had been severely tortured. He was let go after about 18 hours with a warning not to return to Tahrir Square. Others have not been so lucky. Heba Morayef, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Cairo, said: “A lot of families are calling us and saying: ‘I can’t find my son, he’s disappeared.’ I think what’s happening is that they’re being arrested by the military.” Among those missing is Kareem Amer, a prominent government critic and blogger only recently released after serving a four-year prison sentence for criticising the regime. He was picked up on Monday evening at a military checkpoint late at night as he was leaving Tahrir Square. Bahgat said the pattern of accounts from those released showed the military had been conducting a campaign to break the protests. “Some people, especially the activists, say they were interrogated about any possible links to political organisations or any outside forces. For the ordinary protesters, they get slapped around and asked: ‘Why are you in Tahrir?’ It seems to serve as an interrogation operation and an intimidation and deterrence.” The military has claimed to be neutral in the political standoff and both Mubarak and his prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, have said there will be no “security pursuit” of anti-government activists. But Morayef says this is clearly not the case. “I think it’s become pretty obvious by now that the military is not a neutral party. The military doesn’t want and doesn’t believe in the protests and this is even at the lower level, based on the interrogations,” she said. Human Rights Watch says it has documented 119 arrests of civilians by the military but believes there are many more. Bahgat said it was impossible to know how many people had been detained because the army is not acknowledging the arrests. But he believes that the pattern of disappearances seen in Cairo is replicated across the country. “Detentions either go completely unreported or they are unable to inform their family members or any lawyer of their detention so they are much more difficult to assist or look for,” he said. “Those held by the military police are not receiving any due process either because they are unaccounted for and they are unable to inform anyone of their detention.” Human Rights Watch has also documented detentions including an unnamed democracy activist who described being stopped by a soldier who insisted on searching his bag, where he found a pro-democracy flyer. “They started beating me up in the street their rubber batons and an electric Taser gun, shocking me,” the activist said. “Then they took me to Abdin police station. By the time I arrived, the soldiers and officers there had been informed that a ‘spy’ was coming, and so when I arrived they gave me a ‘welcome beating’ that lasted some 30 minutes.” While pro-government protesters have also been detained by the army during clashes in Tahrir Square, it is believed that they have been handed on to police and then released, rather than being held and tortured. The detainee was held in a cell until an interrogator arrived, ordered him to undress and attached cables from an “electric shock machine”. “He shocked me all over my body, leaving no place untouched. It wasn’t a real interrogation; he didn’t ask that many questions. He tortured me twice like this on Friday, and one more time on Saturday,” he said. Egypt Torture Human rights Protest Middle East Chris McGreal guardian.co.uk
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Government refuses transition plan as demonstrations are joined by strikes – and vice-president’s coup ultimatum raises tensions Talks between the Egyptian government and opposition have all but collapsed after the regime balked at surrendering power to a transitional administration in the hope that mass protests would die down this week. Instead, the unrest is spreading as some of the largest demonstrations yet against President Hosni Mubarak were joined by labour strikes across the country, including on the Suez canal, in the city of Alexandria and by public transport workers in Cairo. A prominent member of a key opposition group, the Council of Wise Men, said negotiations had “essentially come to an end”. A western diplomat said Washington was alarmed by the lack of political progress and the Egyptian vice-president Omar Suleiman’s warning of a coup if the opposition refused to accept the government’s terms. Diaa Rashwan, of the Council of Wise Men, said he offered Suleiman a compromise in which Mubarak would have remained president but with his powers transferred to a transitional government. Rashwan said this proposal was rejected at the weekend and there had been no further movement. “The regime is taking a hard line and so negotiations have essentially come to an end,” he said. “Suleiman’s comments about there being a danger of a coup were shocking to all of us – it was a betrayal of the spirit of negotiations, and is unacceptable. “The regime’s strategy has been just to play for time and stall with negotiations. They don’t really want to talk to anyone. At the start of this week they were convinced that the protests were going to fade away.” Instead, the largest anti-Mubarak demonstration so far took place in Cairo on Tuesday. This came on the same day as 25 separate big demonstrations elsewhere in Egypt and the start of a series of strikes as trade unions joined the fray. Some stoppages are mainly about wage demands, but in the present crisis there is little doubt that they are timed to support the pro-democracy movement. Tens of thousands of workers stayed away in Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation. Employees of the state-run Suez Canal company, public transport workers in Cairo and iron and steel workers in other parts of the country have also joined the strikes. At least two people were killed and several wounded in clashes between thousands of protesters and the police in New Province, about 300 miles from Cairo. This takes the estimated number of deaths at the hands of government forces above 300. Rashwan said that the lack of progress in talks and the rise in protests have shifted the initiative back to the street. On Tuesday Suleiman told Egyptian newspaper editors that an escalation of the protests could unleash further repression. “We can’t bear this for a long time,” he said. “We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.” Suleiman warned of “the dark bats of the night emerging to terrorise the people” and said the alternative to negotiations on the government’s terms was that “a coup happens”. This would mean “uncalculated and hasty steps, including lots of irrationalities”. Suleiman went on to his definition of a coup. “I mean a coup of the regime against itself, or a military coup or an absence of the system. Some force, whether it’s the army or police or the intelligence agency or the [opposition Muslim] Brotherhood or the youth themselves could carry out ‘creative chaos’ to end the regime and take power,” he said. Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, reiterated the threat on Wednesday by saying that the army could step in “to defend the constitution” if “adventurers” tried to take power. Suleiman also said Egypt was not ready for democracy. “The culture of democracy is still far away,” he said. Some opposition activists saw Suleiman’s warning as confirmation that the government was in retreat and may be starting to panic. Abdul-Rahman Samir, spokesman for the coalition of the main youth groups leading the protests, said a military takeover was a “disastrous scenario” that would not end the clamour for democracy. “He is threatening to impose martial law, which means everybody in [Tahrir Square] will be smashed. But what would he do with the rest of the 70 million Egyptians who will follow us afterward?” he said. “We are striking and we will protest and we will not negotiate until Mubarak steps down. Whoever wants to threaten us, then let them do so.” A western diplomat said Washington was concerned about the Egyptian leadership’s failure to deliver on promises of reform. On Tuesday the US vice-president, Joe Biden, phoned Suleiman to tell him immediate action must be taken towards political change, including the lifting of the 30-year state of emergency under which thousands of political prisoners have been detained. The diplomat said there is little confidence in the White House that the Egyptian leadership was prepared to take the necessary steps to defuse the crisis. Meanwhile, opposition activists are considering how to widen the protests. They have already begun a sit-down occupation of the street outside parliament and there is discussion of moving on to the heavily guarded state television building on Friday, the day of the next planned big demonstration, although such a move could set up a confrontation with the military. Egypt Protest Middle East Hosni Mubarak Obama administration United States Jack Shenker Chris McGreal guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …At last, GOP Senators Reveal Their Evil Plan to Kill Us and Social Security
February 9, 2011 No CommentThe light has finally gone on. I’ve figured out what the overall GOP plan is to eradicate the poor, the middle class, and leave the rest of the country to the elites. First they de-fund health care for anyone who can’t afford it, which is all of us who are not indentured servants or making a zillion bucks a year already. Eric Cantor promises those de-funding provisions will be in the GOP budget before it passes the House. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Tuesday the bill to fund the government for the rest of the year will have language to withhold funding from the health care law by the time it passes the House next week. It was a message to the party’s conservative base that, no, Republicans haven’t forgotten about defunding the health care law. But Cantor still didn’t promise that the defunding language would be in the bill from the beginning – as tea partiers and other opponents of the law want. Instead, Cantor referred to the likelihood that Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana will offer the defunding amendment on the House floor – noting Rehberg’s “insistence” that the bill should not have any money to implement the law. “I expect to see, one way or the other, the product coming out of the House to speak to that and to preclude any funding to be used for that,” Cantor said. As our overall health declines, reducing life expectancies from what they are today to what they will be in the future without access to affordable health care, they will raise the Social Security Retirement Age in some sort of arbitrary and capricious fashion every few years. [Alabama Senator Richard ]Shelby said he considers deficit reduction to be the top issue on the congressional agenda. “We’re on the road to financial destruction,” he warned. “Can we get our hand around this problem without bringing everything to the table? No.” And Shelby indicated that entitlements are very much on his budget-cutting agenda. He mocked the recommendation of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission, which he said would raise the Social Security retirement age in 2025 (actually, not until 2027). “America will be burned by then — and a lot of us will be dead,” he said. His preferred solution is to “up the age every several years,” he said — the net effect of which would be tantamount to one benefit cut after another. Who needs death panels, anyway? We can just muddle through until the cancer, diabetes or heart disease kills most of us and we die paupers. Well, now we know. Of course, here’s something Shelby and his ilk are forgetting: Disabled, sick people end up on Social Security early , and are also eligible for Medicare early. So in addition to killing and bankrupting us sooner they’ll drive up the deficit even more. Keep those ideas coming, GOP.
Continue reading …Not 1989. Not 1789. But Egyptians can learn from other revolutions | Timothy Garton Ash
February 9, 2011 No CommentEcstatic crowds in Cairo prove there is no clash of civilisations – everyone wants freedom. The question is, how to get it? ‘No one predicted this, but everyone could explain it afterwards.” Said of another revolution, as true of this one. “To be honest, we thought we’d last about five minutes,”one of the organisers of the original 25 January protest which began this Egyptian revolution told the BBC. “We thought we’d get arrested straight away.” If they had been, if Hosni Mubarak’s security forces had once again murdered the foetus in the womb, the world wide web would now be filled with articles by experts explaining why “Egypt is not Tunisia”. Instead, the web is abuzz with instant, confident explanations of what nobody anticipated. Such are the illusions of retrospective determinism. So before we go any further, let us make two deep bows. First and deepest to those who started this, at great personal risk, with no support from the professedly freedom-loving west, and against a regime that habitually uses torture. Honour and respect to you. Second, hats off to Lady Luck, contingency, fortuna – which, as Machiavelli observed , accounts for half of everything that happens in human affairs. No revolution has ever got anywhere without brave individuals and good luck. One leathery old victim of this revolution, at whose death we should rejoice, is the fallacy of cultural determinism – and specifically the notion that Arabs and/or Muslims are not really up for freedom, dignity and human rights. Their “culture”, so we were assured by Samuel Huntington and others, programmed them otherwise. Tell that to the people dancing on Tahrir Square. This is not to deny that the religious-political patterns of both radical and conservative Islam, and specific legacies of modern Arab history, will make a transition to consolidated liberal democracy more difficult than it was in, say, the Czech Republic. They will. Maybe the whole thing will still go horribly wrong. But the profoundly condescending idea that “this could never happen there” has been refuted on the streets of Tunis and Cairo. While we are talking determinisms, let’s dispense with another one. In tags like “Facebook revolution”, “Twitter revolution” and “Al-Jazeera revolution”, we meet again the ghost of technological determinism. Talking to friends in Cairo, I am left in no doubt that these media did play a major role in organising and multiplying the popular protests that began on 25 January. As I have been writing this column, I have been watching the growth of the Facebook page set up by Egyptians to “authorise” Wael Ghonim , the Google executive recently released from prison and newly anointed hero of the revolution, to speak in their name. When I first visited it, at 08:51 on Wednesday morning, it had 213,376 people following it; as this article goes to press (and what a gloriously arcane phrase that is!) it has 236,305. Ghonim had been the pseudonymous organiser of an earlier Facebook page which contributed to the protests, and now has more than 600,000 followers. As in Tunisia, it is the interaction of online and mobile social networks with the older superpower of television that creates the catalytic effect. Al-Jazeera TV has produced a compelling narrative of liberation struggle, drawing on blogposts and blurry footage from mobile phone cameras. Ghonim became a popular hero because soon after his release from prison he appeared on an Egyptian television programme, thus reaching a wider mass audience for the first time. So these old and new technologies of communication matter enormously – but they did not prevent popular protest movements being crushed in Belarus and Iran, they do not determine the outcome, and the medium is not the message. Then we have the historical analogies. I have lost count of how many articles I have seen (including, I hasten to add, one by myself) asking whether or not this is the Arab 1989. “The Arab world’s Berlin Wall moment,” shouts one headline. “This is no 1989 moment,” cries another. The comparison may not, in the end, tell us all that much about what is happening in Egypt, Tunisia or Jordan – but it certainly tells us something about 1989. There is no longer any doubt that 1989 has become the early 21st century’s default model and metaphor for revolution. Forget 1917, 1848 or 1789. A close runner-up, in the analogy stakes, is Iran in 1979 – and the prospect of radical, violent Islamists coming out on top. Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who has produced some splendid reported columns from Tunisia and Egypt, follows the first law of journalism (“first simplify, then exaggerate”) when he writes that the “core issue” in Egypt is “are we witnessing Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989?” To which one answer is: what we are witnessing in Cairo in 2011 is Cairo 2011. I mean this not in the trivial sense that every event is unique, but in a deeper one. For what characterises a true revolution is the emergence of something genuinely new, on the one hand, and the return of a suppressed human universal on the other. New in Cairo 2011 is that it is now Arabs and Muslims standing up in large numbers, with courage and (for the most part) peaceful discipline, for basic human dignity, against corrupt, oppressive rulers. New in 2011 is the degree of decentered, networked animation of the demonstrations, so that even the best-informed observers there struggle to answer the question “who is organising this?”. New in 2011 is the extraordinary underlying pressure of demography, with half the population in most of these countries being under 25. Old in Cairo 2011 – as old as the pyramids, as old as human civilisation – is the cry of oppressed men and women, overcoming the barrier of fear and feeling, however fleetingly, the sense of freedom and dignity. My heart jumped for joy as I watched the footage of the vast, celebrating crowds in central Cairo on Tuesday. But when we have finished humming the prisoners’ chorus from Beethoven’s Fidelio , we must remind ourselves that these moments are always transient. The hard grind of consolidating liberty is all ahead. This is where historical comparisons come into their own. They are no substitute for firsthand, informed analysis of the unique circumstances on the spot. What they do offer, however, is an extensive toolkit of experience, showing the many ways in which a revolution can go wrong and the rare combination needed for it to keep going right. Neither on the opposition nor on the official side do I yet see a vital ingredient for it going right: the organised, credible partners for a negotiated transition. Some proto-organisation has clearly emerged on Tahrir Square. In Ghonim, the protesters have a symbol who might yet become a leader. But we seem still to be a very long way from any alliance of opposition forces that could funnel popular pressure to the negotiating table. On the official side, Hosni Mubarak and his vice-president must give way to an interim government, headed by someone acceptable to all (or at least, most) sides – someone like the wily old Amr Moussa , secretary-general of the Arab League. Only when those two things happen may we begin to have confidence that the Egyptian revolution is on the right road. Egypt Middle East Protest Hosni Mubarak Tunisia Timothy Garton Ash guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …How hard would it be to back Egyptian democracy, Mr President? | Joshua Treviño
February 9, 2011 No Comment
This is a simple enough choice between liberty and tyranny, yet the White House has done nothing but equivocate and dodge The administration of Barack Obama has reacted to the uprising against Hosni Mubarak with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to consume a gallon of plain yoghurt. The president of the United States is not against Egyptian democracy, exactly – but neither is he especially for it. His administration’s pronouncements on events have reflected his dilatory approach: the day of the revolution’s inception saw his secretary of state affirming the “stability” of the regime; then there was the infamous Robert Gibbs presser in which confusion and uncertainty were clearly communicated; then, there was the White House’s efforts to leak to the press its masterful behind-the-scenes engagement with Egyptian power brokers; and then, there was this past weekend’s jaw-dropping declaration by its envoy Frank Wisner that Mubarak ought to stay . Following that was the secretary of state’s declaration that the American government’s own man in Egypt “does not speak for the American government”. Well. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton ran an ad asking whom voters trusted to receive the “3am phone call”. At this point, Egyptians and Americans both would be happy if President Obama handled a call at 3pm. The inability of the United States’s foreign policy apparatus to develop a coherent and public response to the Egyptian revolution is not simply a condemnation of the president’s management. Nor is it a stumble with limited consequences. As the UAE journalist Habiba Hamid quipped, “Imagine the tremendous outpouring of US support that 60 million Egyptians [sic] would have shown had the US actually supported democracy in Egypt.” Indeed, imagine that. Now, though, the post-Mubarak era is both imminent and inevitable – it was so on 25 January – and when it comes, over 80 million Egyptians will remember not that Obama was nuanced and deliberate, but that the United States of America stood against its advent. The real tragedy of the president’s epic mishandling of Egypt is not merely the sceptical-at-best Egypt that will emerge. It’s that Egypt is merely the latest episode in a pattern laid down by Barack Obama in the first two years of his presidency. In just two years, he has faced multiple crises of liberty, democracy and the American national interest abroad – and he has failed each test. Even rhetorical support for those seeking freedom, the bare minimum a president can do, is strikingly absent except under duress. The plain and pathetic reality is that Barack Obama chooses the existing regime over any alternative, and/or against the American ally, every time. Ask the Hondurans who ejected their Chavista president. Ask the Falkland islanders sold out by the Secretary of State Clinton intoning on the “Malvinas”. Ask the east European Nato members stripped of a full American deterrent in the name of a Russia “reset”. Ask the Tunisians who received not a word of endorsement as they ejected Ben Ali. Ask the Iranians who fought and died for their freedom in the hot summer of 2009. And now, ask the Egyptians who gather, once again, in Tahrir Square as you read this. None of this is to say that there is no legitimate apprehension over the Egyptian revolution. That apprehension is well-founded in a country where a “supermajority” polls in favour of the most brutal criminal sanctions in Islam’s name, and where the most organised opposition force, the Muslim Brotherhood, has ideological spinoffs including Hamas and al-Qaida to its credit. The rightful fear of the new Egypt cloaks itself in many justifications, ranging from appeals to Edmund Burke’s cautionary doctrine, to insane conspiracy theories of socialism and universal caliphates. President Obama’s lacklustre response to Egypt’s liberation reflects none of these concerns: only his profound apathy towards the aspiration for freedom, and his striking disconnect from America’s best historic role in the world. Even if the president did share those concerns, the conduct of the Egyptian revolutionaries to date has been generally exemplary in the face of attack, murder, deprivation and arduous struggle. America’s own Declaration of Independence asserts that Egyptians deserve liberty by their very nature as men. Their actions since 25 January only underscore that case. Perhaps they do not deserve American support – but they have earned it. The American people understand that, as shown in the latest Gallup poll revealing 82% public support for Egypt ‘s revolution. Americans who just celebrated the centenary of President Ronald Reagan may well recall his 1982 address to the British parliament, in which he famously declared that Marxism-Leninism would end up “on the ash-heap of history”. But he said something else there that bears repeating as we witness millions of Egyptians seizing their liberties: “[D]emocracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.” Reagan knew it then. The American people know it now. The Egyptian people know it now. Why doesn’t Barack Obama know it? Egypt Middle East Obama administration Barack Obama United States US foreign policy US politics Ronald Reagan Hosni Mubarak Joshua Treviño guardian.co.uk
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