(UK Daily Mail) — Hopes were growing in Cairo this evening that President Hosni Mubarak might be about to step down – with immediate effect.
Military and ruling party officials said the unpopular 82-year-old was about to speak to the nation. Sources indicated he would make an announcement that would satisfy the protesters’ demands. Since their main demand is that he leave office, speculation was high that he would declare his resignation.
The armed forces’ supreme council has been meeting all day long and said it would issue a communique ‘soon’.
Thousands once again thronged Tahrir Square today, the main seat of resistance for 16 days now, while in other areas of Cairo violence flared.
They were cheered further when they heard CIA chief Leon Panatta say there was a ‘strong likelihood’ Mubarak would walk tonight. There was undiluted joy as protesters mobbed soldiers and kissed and hugged each other.
The scenes were a marked contrast to those earlier in the day around the country, but particularly in Port Said, where state buildings and cars were ransacked and set alight in protest at continued corruption and incompetence.
Hossam Badrawi, secretary general of the National Democratic Party said he would be surprised if Mubarak was still leader when Egypt woke up tomorrow.
He revealed that he and his colleagues had been to visit the presidents and asked him to make the decision to satisfy the demands of the people, ie to step aside
He told BBC News 24 Mubarak had been ‘very accommodating’ and ‘showed respect for the people and young people
Events had moved quickly after Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah warned President Barack Obama earlier in the day the U.S. should ‘go easy’ on Egypt, or face a cooling of diplomatic relations.
The Saudi monarch said earlier in the day that his country would prop up Mubarak if America withdrew its aid programme.
Abdullah, 86, told Obama not to humiliate Mubarak, who is under pressure from protesters to quit immediately, in a fiery telephone conversation on January 29, according to the Times, who cited a senior source in Riyadh.
King Abdullah has his own problems in the Middle East, however, after 10 moderate Saudi scholars claimed they have formed the country’s first political party and are seeking his recognition.
Obama’s administration has wavered between support for Egypt in Washington’s conflict with militant Islam and backing for Egyptians who have been protesting for weeks to demand Mubarak and his government quit.
Meanwhile, a wave of strikes added to the chaos in Egypt today with thousands walking out of their state jobs in support of anti-government protests.
Activists called for bigger street demonstrations, defying a warning that the crowds calling for Mubarak’s removal would not be tolerated for much longer.
Efforts by vice president Omar Suleiman to open talks with protesters over reforms have broken down since the weekend, with the youth organizers of the movement suspicious that he plans only superficial changes far short of real democracy. They want Mr Mubarak to step down first.
Showing growing impatience with the rejection, Suleiman raised the prospect of a renewed crackdown. He told Egyptian newspaper editors that there could be a coup unless demonstrators agree to enter negotiations. He suggested Egypt was not ready for democracy and said a government-formed panel of judges, dominated by Mubarak loyalists, would push ahead with recommending its own constitutional amendments to be put to a referendum.
‘He is threatening to impose martial law, which means everybody in the square will be smashed,’ said Abdul-Rahman Samir, a spokesman for a coalition of the five main youth groups behind protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
‘But what would he do with the rest of the 70 million Egyptians who will follow us afterward.’
Mr Suleiman is creating ‘a disastrous scenario,’ 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.’
Mubarak to transfer power to vice-president
(BBC) — Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is to make an address on national television, amid suggestions that he is preparing to step down.
A senior member of Egypt’s governing party, Hossan Badrawi, has told the BBC he “hopes” Mr Mubarak will transfer power to Vice-President Omar Suleiman.
It comes on the 17th day of protests against his 30-year rule.
Earlier, Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq told BBC Arabic that the scenario of President Mubarak stepping down was being discussed.
The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, in Cairo, says the fact that President Mubarak’s departure is even being talked about is a huge development.
Our correspondent, who spoke to Mr Badrawi by telephone, says the 25 January movement – the day when the protests began – will see this as a great victory.
State television has carried footage of a meeting of the high council of the armed forces. State news agency Mena said the high council was in a state of continuous session “to protect the nation, its gains and the aspirations of the people”.
Thursday’s sudden developments came as thousands of Egyptians again took to the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian towns and cities, calling for President Mubarak to step down.
Doctors, bus drivers, lawyers and textile workers were on strike in Cairo on Thursday, with unions reporting walkouts and protests across the country.
The BBC’s Jon Leyne, in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the focal point of the anti-Mubarak protests, reports that the protesters there are starting to celebrate after hearing news of Mr Mubarak’s possible departure.
Egypt state-run media journalists state their own uprising
CAIRO (Washington Post) — Over the past few days, journalists working for Egyptian state media have orchestrated a remarkable uprising of their own: They have begun reporting news that casts the embattled government in a negative light.
Whether the change is a sign of a weakened regime that is losing control or the result of a decision by the government to loosen its grip on information remains unclear. But the shift has been hard to miss.
State-run television and newspapers such as the iconic al-Ahram initially dismissed the mass demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak as nonevents. As the crisis has unfolded since Jan. 25, most people have relied on Arabic satellite channels such as al-Jazeera and news accounts from independent Egyptian dailies and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to keep up with events.
As protests against Mubarak’s nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule intensified, state television reported on the first lady’s gardens and call-in shows featured hysterical women and men entreating people to stop demonstrating. Protesters began carrying banners in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square denouncing state-run media and calling the news organizations “liars.”
A day after pro-Mubarak forces were unleashed into Tahrir Square last week, inciting a bloody battle that left thousands wounded, al-Ahram reported on its front page that millions of government supporters had flooded the streets, grossly exaggerating their numbers. State television called the anti-Mubarak demonstrators “destabilizing” forces and accused foreign powers of instigating instability.
“During the first 10 days or so, the Egyptian media was shameful,” said Rasha Abdulla, chairwoman of the journalism and mass communication program at the American University in Cairo. “It was like they were living on another planet.”
But in recent days, state media organizations have started to shift their coverage.
At al-Ahram, after journalists signed a petition telling management that they were frustrated with the paper’s reporting, chief editor Omar Saraya changed his tune. Saraya, who is close to the government and is seen as a staunch regime loyalist, wrote a front-page column praising the “nobility” of the “revolution” and urging the government to carry out constitutional and legislative reforms.
At state-run Nile TV, after two of her colleagues quit, Reem Nour met with her boss and told him that she could not tolerate being censored. She said last week that she would not cover pro-Mubarak demonstrators unless she was permitted to cover anti-government demonstrators as well.
The 22-year-old reporter told her news director that people were laughing at the station’s coverage. He told her to go out and report, she said. On Monday, for the first time, she told her viewers that protesters were demanding that the regime resign.
“There has been a shift,” Nour said. “The shift is happening because there is going to be a change in Egypt after this revolution.”
Hisham Qasim, an independent newspaper publisher in Egypt, called the change in state media coverage a clear sign that “Mubarak is slowly losing control.”
“There’s a feeling that [Mubarak] is going down and nobody can help him so it’s time to save face,” Qasim said.
Pressure from journalists began to increase late last week, after two al-Ahram reporters were killed during demonstrations and the government rounded up dozens of journalists, including employees of state newspapers.
Some joined protesters in Tahrir Square, calling for freedom of expression. Some are turning on their bosses, calling them apologists for the regime.
But a revolt by journalists was probably not the only reason for the change in coverage, Abdulla said. Senior Egyptian officials must have signed off on editorial changes that have led to more straightforward reporting in recent days.
“Nothing in state television happens because journalists want it to happen,” she said. “They all wait for orders to come from above.”
Shahira Amin resigned Feb. 3 from Nile TV after she watched mobs attack anti-government demonstrators in Tahrir Square and saw vehicles run over unarmed civilians, all on Arabic satellite channels.
The anchorwoman said she had not been allowed to portray the protests honestly and could not tell her viewers that the demonstrators’ top demand was the resignation of Mubarak. Another reporter resigned from the channel a few days later in protest.
“We were dictated what to say and we were reading press releases from the Ministry of Interior,” Amin said. “I couldn’t be a mouthpiece for someone who slaughters his own people.”
Since her resignation, she has spent every day on the streets, demonstrating against the government. She said she has seen the coverage change. “This could be the start of a liberal media in Egypt,” Amin said. “I hope it’s not just a cosmetic change.”
10 thoughts on “Strong likelihood Mubarak would walk tonight – CIA chief”
Hollywood will be preparing to shoot its great movie about the life of North African dictator Hosni Mubarak. The main actor who is acting as Mubarak will be Robert De Niro.I am a fun of De Niro.
When the best minds in the world speak, when the movers and shakers give hint, I find myself harmoniously tuned to their beat-there is no if and but about this,I believe the source.
Well, apparently the CIA chief doesn’t know everything. Mubarak just announced that he is going to stay in power for another seven months. Most probably the dictators around the world must have pleaded and begged dictator Mubarak not to step down for the sake of all of them.
Egypt’s Economic Apartheid
Feb 4 2011, 9:03 AM ET By Clive Crook
Hernando de Soto’s article on Egypt in the Wall Street Journal tells you a lot about what is really driving the Egyptian revolution–even if the protesters themselves don’t fully grasp the (economic) forces they are contending with. De Soto of course is the preeminent authority on property rights and development (The Mystery of Capital, The Other Path). Egypt perfectly illustrates his case that weakly protected property rights tend to create a vast extra-legal economy, in which growth is stifled for lack of capital. He and his institute reported to the Egyptian cabinet on the state of the economy in 2004. The country’s underground economy was the biggest employer, he explains. Less than 10 percent of the Eyptians who “owned” real estate had legal title to their property. The capital Egyptian enterprises control “cannot be leveraged as collateral for loans, to obtain investment capital, or as security for long-term contractual deals.” He calls it “dead capital”. The key question to be asked is why most Egyptians choose to remain outside the legal economy? The answer is that, as in most developing countries, Egypt’s legal institutions fail the majority of the people. Due to burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws, it is impossible for most people to legalize their property and businesses, no matter how well intentioned they might be. The examples are legion. To open a small bakery, our investigators found, would take more than 500 days. To get legal title to a vacant piece of land would take more than 10 years of dealing with red tape. To do business in Egypt, an aspiring poor entrepreneur would have to deal with 56 government agencies and repetitive government inspections. All this helps explain who so many ordinary Egyptians have been “smoldering” for decades. Despite hard work and savings, they can do little to improve their lives. Egypt needs a legal system that provides economic freedom in the sense de Soto describes. Let us hope that political reform delivers it.
Under Egypt\’s Volcano
Annals of Invention
Wrong intelligence. CIA goes wrong as usual.
I still believe this man has no any moral ground to stay in power, either he is too proud and unable to face the verdict of history, or psychologically incapable of fathoming the past two weeks popular uproar under his nose. If any thing the conflicting news coming from the president and his vice on the one hand stating his stay, and the military top brass on the other saying one moment we are with the people, at another affirming its backing of the regime is an indication some trouble ahead waiting for the dictator. The situation is un- clear and it may stay this way for a while .More likely though the dynamic between the supporters and the military might play to break the current impass, and open the road for reform. I will stand by my statement I believe the Source. This event is far from over; it doesn’t speak of Mubarak’s strength as we stand now. Above all it will be silly to utter
“wrong intelligence” at these phenomena. It may be the slow moving Mubarak might end up in the gallows!
Egypt’s Economic Apartheid
The Wall Street Journal – Opinion
February 3, 2011
More than 90% of Egyptians hold their property without legal title. No wonder they can’t build wealth and have lost hope. By HERNANDO DE SOTO
The headline that appeared on Al Jazeera on Jan. 14, a week before Egyptians took to the streets, affirmed that “[t]he real terror eating away at the Arab world is socio-economic marginalization.” The Egyptian government has long been concerned about the consequences of this marginalization. In 1997, with the financial support of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government hired my organization, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. It wanted to get the numbers on how many Egyptians were marginalized and how much of the economy operated “extralegally”—that is, without the protections of property rights or access to normal business tools, such as credit, that allow businesses to expand and prosper. The objective was to remove the legal impediments holding back people and their businesses. After years of fieldwork and analysis—involving over 120 Egyptian and Peruvian technicians with the participation of 300 local leaders and interviews with thousands of ordinary people—we presented a 1,000-page report and a 20-point action plan to the 11-member economic cabinet in 2004. The report was championed by Minister of Finance Muhammad Medhat Hassanein, and the cabinet approved its policy recommendations. Egypt’s major newspaper, Al Ahram, declared that the reforms “would open the doors of history for Egypt.” Then, as a result of a cabinet shakeup, Mr. Hassanein was ousted. Hidden forces of the status quo blocked crucial elements of the reforms. Today, when the streets are filled with so many Egyptians calling for change, it is worth noting some of the key facts uncovered by our investigation and reported in 2004: • Egypt’s underground economy was the nation’s biggest employer. The legal private sector employed 6.8 million people and the public sector employed 5.9 million, while 9.6 million people worked in the extralegal sector. • As far as real estate is concerned, 92% of Egyptians hold their property without normal legal title. • We estimated the value of all these extralegal businesses and property, rural as well as urban, to be $248 billion—30 times greater than the market value of the companies registered on the Cairo Stock Exchange and 55 times greater than the value of foreign direct investment in Egypt since Napoleon invaded—including the financing of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. (Those same extralegal assets would be worth more than $400 billion in today’s dollars.) The entrepreneurs who operate outside the legal system are held back. They do not have access to the business organizational forms (partnerships, joint stock companies, corporations, etc.) that would enable them to grow the way legal enterprises do. Because such enterprises are not tied to standard contractual and enforcement rules, outsiders cannot trust that their owners can be held to their promises or contracts. This makes it difficult or impossible to employ the best technicians and professional managers—and the owners of these businesses cannot issue bonds or IOUs to obtain credit. Nor can such enterprises benefit from the economies of scale available to those who can operate in the entire Egyptian market. The owners of extralegal enterprises are limited to employing their kin to produce for confined circles of customers. Without clear legal title to their assets and real estate, in short, these entrepreneurs own what I have called “dead capital”—property that cannot be leveraged as collateral for loans, to obtain investment capital, or as security for long-term contractual deals. And so the majority of these Egyptian enterprises remain small and relatively poor. The only thing that can emancipate them is legal reform. And only the political leadership of Egypt can pull this off. Too many technocrats have been trained not to expand the rule of law, but to defend it as they find it. Emancipating people from bad law and devising strategies to overcome the inertia of the status quo is a political job. The key question to be asked is why most Egyptians choose to remain outside the legal economy? The answer is that, as in most developing countries, Egypt’s legal institutions fail the majority of the people. Due to burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws, it is impossible for most people to legalize their property and businesses, no matter how well intentioned they might be. The examples are legion. To open a small bakery, our investigators found, would take more than 500 days. To get legal title to a vacant piece of land would take more than 10 years of dealing with red tape. To do business in Egypt, an aspiring poor entrepreneur would have to deal with 56 government agencies and repetitive government inspections. All this helps explain who so many ordinary Egyptians have been “smoldering” for decades. Despite hard work and savings, they can do little to improve their lives. Bringing the majority of Egypt’s people into an open legal system is what will break Egypt’s economic apartheid. Empowering the poor begins with the legal system awarding clear property rights to the $400 billion-plus of assets that we found they had created. This would unlock an amount of capital hundreds of times greater than foreign direct investment and what Egypt receives in foreign aid. Leaders and governments may change and more democracy might come to Egypt. But unless its existing legal institutions are reformed to allow economic growth from the bottom up, the aspirations for a better life that are motivating so many demonstrating in the streets will remain unfulfilled. Mr. de Soto, author of “The Mystery of Capital” (Basic Books, 2000) and “The Other Path” (Harper and Row, 1989), is president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy based in Lima, Peru.
The Economic Crisis: When Irish Eyes Are Crying
One evening in Cairo, a few weeks ago, Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, landed at the airport. He was returning to the city, his birthplace, for the first time since retiring from the agency, last December, and he was met by a crowd of nearly a thousand people, including artists, writers, and citizens who had never before been involved in politics. Many carried placards urging ElBaradei, who has lived in Vienna for more than two decades, to declare himself a candidate for President and to lead a challenge to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. “All these people were saying, ‘You need to come home, you should not let us down,’ ” ElBaradei told me. “I felt that I should go and speak to them, and see how the system worked.” One part of the system that has sustained Mubarak in power is Egypt’s Emergency Law, which has been in effect since 1981, the year he became President. The law has been used to jail thousands of people without charges. Public gatherings of more than five people without prior official permission are illegal. Members of ElBaradei’s welcoming group believed that if they stuck together and gathered quickly they could evade the police; still, they had taken precautions in getting to the airport. “People were sending each other messages, saying ‘Don’t go more than three people at a time,’ so all of them went in groups of two, three, or alone,” ElBaradei told me. In the week prior to his visit, he said, at least two young people were arrested, under the Emergency Law, for writing anti-Mubarak graffiti on a wall, and spent a couple of days in prison…read more
Letter from Addis Ababa (1978)
Behind Mubarak
The Rebellion Within