A commentator for British newspaper The Independent laments about the Obama Administration’s hypocritical stand on the Egypt popular uprising in his latest report from Cairo. We heard that some in the Obama administration, such as Vice President Joe Biden, saying that Mubarak should not step aside. Joe Biden went so far as saying that Mubarak is not a dictator (read here). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to be the only high level official in the U.S. who is having the moral fortitude to speak out in defense of the people of Egypt.

Death throes of a dictatorship in Egypt

The Independent newspaper writer Robert Fisk joins protesters atop a Cairo tank as the army shows signs of backing the people against Mubarak’s regime

By Robert Fisk

CAIRO — 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.

Ethiopia under the 20-year-old brutal dictatorship ranks at the bottom on every thing, including in the number of social media usage. A statistics by Socialbakers.com shows (see below) that Facebook penetration in Ethiopia is only 0.28 percent, which is one of the lowest in Africa. Poor African nations such as Rwanda, Malwi and Togo have more Facebook penetration than Ethiopia. Meles Zenawi’s vampire regime is restricting Internet growth in Ethiopia to deny the people access to information, which is a key ingredient for building a free and democratic society. EthiopianReview.com and all other Ethiopian independent news web sites and blogs have been blocked in Ethiopia by Meles. .

List of countries on Facebook

Al Arabiya News Channel is reporting that Syrians are getting organized to launch protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, in Egypt the army ruled out use of force against civilians as a million people march and general strike are called for tomorrow by opposition groups, according to the BBC.

DUBAI (Al Arabiya) — Thousands of Syrians have joined a Facebook group to call for a protest against their president on Friday, February 4, echoing Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and Egypt’s Day of Rage on January 25.

The group named “the Syria Revolution 2011,” is planning rallying young people in a march to protest against the Ba’thist regime led by Bashar al-Assad after Friday’s prayer.

The group described al-Assad’s rule as dictatorship and showed torture YouTube videos of political dissident in the country.

The group also called for civil disobedience, and encouraged “all of the brave Syrian youth, from all factions and social classes and from all provinces” to “not be silent about oppression.”
Against ‘revolution’

To counter the group and its plans, a another group was recently formed to support Assad and his regime.

“We love you” said a caption in bold red on the group’s profile which includes a picture of al-Assad.

The pro-Syrian president group called “The Syria Revolution 2011” group as “backward”.

The number of people joining both groups is constantly increasing and includes 6,586 people for “The Syria Revolution 2011” and 6,466 with pro-the Syrian president and his regime.

“One nation, one blood, one leader, one god,” said the pro al-Assad group.

Syria’s late President Hafiz al-Assad initially groomed his elder son Basil al-Assad to be the country’s future president, but Basil died in a car accident

Bashar al-Assad who had few political aspirations and was an ophthalmology graduate, inherited Syria’s presidency after his father’s death in 2000.

In 2007 Bashar was approved president for another seven-year term after he won a vote, in which had no challenger, by 97.6 of the votes, according to official figures.

A far cry from his father’s socialist rule, Bashar opened the country’s market but quashing political dissidents is still taking place.

The events in Tunisia and Egypt have unveiled Washington’s foreign policy flaws in Africa. In both cases, Washington tolerated despotic regimes because they served a particular purpose. However, in the wake of the upheavals in both countries, Washington is now scrambling to devise strategies to control events and to formulate policies to reflect the new political reality. But the crisis seems to be spreading through the region like a wildfire, since the people of Sudan also have joined the bandwagon.

Those of us in the Ethiopian Americans Council (EAC), believe that it is a matter of time before the simmering public anger also erupt in Ethiopia. As the case is always with repressive regimes, there are gross and persistent human rights violations, government corruption and a very shaky economy. The youth that comprise almost two-thirds of the population are unemployed, trapped in poverty, and isolated from the political process. This dismal political, economic and social conditions, is definitely a recipe for riot and violent uprising. Clandestine armed struggles abound in the country, and life for rural Ethiopia is a nightmare.

Washington is presented with a unique opportunity to revaluate its dealings with the Zenawi regime in Ethiopia. In response to the unrest in Egypt, President Obama eloquently said, “What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people; a meaningful dialogue between the government and citizens; and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.” The President should send similar message to Ethiopia since the situation mirrors that of Egypt.

Ethiopians are yearning for political and economic freedom. Because Washington controls the purse, it has the unfettered power to pressure the regime to implement specific political reforms to open up the political system to the opposition groups. The Ethiopian Americans Council hope the Obama administration will take proactive measures to facilitate the much needed political reforms in order to prevent similar social unrest in Ethiopia.

Ethiopian Americans Council (EAC)
www.eacouncil.org