Egypt protests – Sunday 6 February

• Muslim Brotherhood to hold talks with government • US swings support behind vice president Omar Suleiman • Banks and business reopen today in key test for protests ترجم هذه الصفحة إلى العربية 10.05am: Graphic rooftop footage has emerged purporting to show a protester being gunned down in Alexandria [Warning: disturbing content] . Towards the end of the film the protester is seen gesturing with his arms out before he falls to the ground after gunshot is heard. It is unclear when the incident took place. 9.54am: More than 340 banks, including 152 in Cairo, have opened for business for the first time since the protests began. The Egypt Daily News has this report on queues for money : A steady stream of employees flowed into Cairo’s financial district and customers queued to access their accounts, on the first day for the country’s banks to open after a week-long closure due to political protests. Bankers are bracing for chaos in dealing rooms with foreign investors and local businessmen fleeing the Egyptian pound after the street protests paralysed much of the economy and dried up important sources of foreign exchange. Armoured personnel carriers stood guard at intersections where soldiers had erected sandbag barriers, as buses dropped employees off at large state banks. Outside the banks, dozens of customers were waiting to enter when they opened for public business at 10 am. “We have to have some order around here. People are anxious to get paid and pull money out. It has been almost two weeks and life is at a standstill,” said Metwali Sha’ban, a volunteer making a list of customers to organize who would enter first. 9.22am: If you’re an Arabic speaker you may find this blog easier to follow using this (automatic) translation button. ترجم هذه الصفحة إلى العربية 9.19am: The new Egyptian vice president, Omar Suleiman, is emerging as the key figure in what happens next. One of the key opposition parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, said it plans to hold talks with him. A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman told Reuters: “We decided to take the people’s demands to the negotiation table, ” Essam el-Erian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, told CNN. The party’s meeting with Suleiman is is due to take place later this morning. Only yesterday the Brotherhood were reported to be opposed to negotiation . The apparent change of tactics, came after the US swung its support behind Suleiman , to the dismay of many protesters. Banks and businesses reopened today in the first clear test of how far anti-government protesters can maintain momentum. “We want people to go back to work and to get paid, and life to get back to normal,” Egyptian army commander Hassan al-Roweny said. The other main developments overnight are: • Several leading figures, including Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal, resigned yesterday from the ruling National Democratic Party. A relative liberal, Hossam Badrawi, was appointed the party’s new secretary general. • Hillary Clinton signalled US support for vice presidnet Suleiman and stressed the importance of “the transition process” that he is heading. • The US State Department has distanced itself from remarks made by US envoy Frank Wisner in which he said Mubarak should remain in office throughout the transition period. • Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, a photographer with the newspaper Al-Ta’awun, has become the first journalist to die in the unrest . Two New York Times journalists, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish, give an account of their arrest last week . Our discomfort paled in comparison to the dull whacks and the screams of pain by Egyptian people that broke the stillness of the night. In one instance, between the cries of suffering, an officer said in Arabic, “You are talking to journalists? You are talking badly about your country?” Chris McGreal gauges the reactions among protesters on Tahrir square to the latest political and diplomatic manoeuvring: So many in the square take a sceptical view of Washington’s plan for Mubarak’s deputy and intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, to oversee the political transition. There is suspicion of Suleiman because of his past, but there is even greater concern that he will serve American interests which, among other things, are believed to be partly about containing the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. “When Obama said Mubarak must go, we were very happy,” said Amira Ismael. “If Obama gets rid of Mubarak, you will see that many people in Egypt will love America. If Obama leaves it to the Egyptian people, we will love him. But if Obama tries to force us to have a government we don’t want, it will be different. We will win and then we will judge Obama by what he does and take decisions according to how he behaves.” After covering both the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings Peter Beaumont says the mood change among people is the most significant development : A threshold of fear has been crossed. For what has happened in both countries is that the structures of a police state have been challenged and found, to the surprise of many, to be weaker than imagined… Even if Mubarak continues to hang on, what is clear is that a transition of power is already under way. It is not, however, one defined by negotiations between parties or the behind-the-scenes diplomacy at the behest of the US and the EU. Instead the shift taking place is a leaching of power from existing elites in both states’ authoritarian centres. They have been forced, in Tunis, into the effective purging of Ben Ali loyalists, and in Cairo Mubarak’s state has had to offer ever more concessions. And suddenly the small, brave worlds of activists in both countries have been embraced by a wider population no longer afraid to speak or to assemble. The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley castigates the response of western leaders : Officials and ministers frankly acknowledge – at least in private – that these convulsions have caught Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels with their pants around their ankles… We could put this down to simple incompetence, but I fear that would be a bit too charitable. It is also the result of an ingrained assumption among too many opinion-formers and policy-makers in the west that certain parts of the world “can’t do democracy”, that there are fellow citizens of planet Earth who are somehow less deserving of freedom or less capable of exercising it. What happens next? On Friday The Guardian’s Middle East East editor Ian Black outlined four possible scenarios which are still relevant: climbdown; protests subside; escalating violence and standoff . Egypt Hosni Mubarak Middle East Matthew Weaver guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry