← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Feb 12, 2010
00:28:01
Weeks of drama in Egypt reach a climax with the resignation of President Mubarak.
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You are listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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program broadcast on the BBC World Service by going from our own correspondent website, or indeed to that of the BBC World Service. But here's the edition which goes out on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today the people have spoken. An unforgettable day as the old order is overthrown in Egypt. The President's gone. So what happens now to his army of secret policemen, thugs and torturers? We find out how the international community was sidelined in this very Egyptian revolution and travel to the deserts of Oman to see if they too, look likely to embrace the change that's sweeping through the Arab world. Tens of thousands of demonstrators in Cairo spent the night celebrating the departure of Mr. Mubarak. This morning, the crowd in Tahrir Square have been thinning out, with many people returning to work. The army has kept its tanks and armoured cars on the streets, especially outside important buildings. The news that he was standing down was greeted with a massive outburst of joy and riotous celebration by hundreds of thousands of people in the square. Hugh Sykes was there, and not long after the historic announcement sent us this dispatch.
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Early on Friday evening, Cairo time, people who'd spent most of the day in Tahrir Square were pouring, pouring out into the side streets and the bridge over the River Nile on their way home. Men and women, young and old, families, children on their father's shoulders, waving Egyptian flags. A golden sun was setting behind some dusty skyscrapers. The temperature was dropping, but thousands still stayed behind in the square. Many of them had been there continuously, night and day, since the start of the protest more than a fortnight earlier. As dusk fell, men, some men, but well outnumbered by those who didn't, knelt down on mats to pray. I was thinking, what is going to happen next? The President seemed intent on sitting it out, handing over some of his powers to his deputy. But remaining president and the hard core of the protesters were equally determined to stay in the square until he'd gone. This could go on for weeks. I suggested to some of the people I met there. Yes, they said, and we are prepared to stay here for weeks, and he will go in the end. And the largest banner in Tahrir Square made it very clear in English that they wanted not just the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but of his entire entourage as well. We demand the fall of the regime, it read. The crowds flooding out of the square reminded me of football crowds at home on a Saturday afternoon, leaving early because they were pretty sure there weren't going to be any more goals and it would be good to get ahead of the rush. They were wrong. Just after 6pm local time, the deputy president, Omar Suleiman, appeared on the television screen at one end of Tahrir Square and made the announcement, which lasted only about 30 seconds, that President Mubarak was stepping down. There was a cheer worthy of a hundred goals, a wall of sound from the square feet, flags waving, hugs, happy faces, handshakes, grins of delight and of sheer disbelief. We are so happy. We don't believe it. We are so happy for Egypt, a woman and her teenage daughter told me, her head covered, but her daughter's not. Horrea. They shouted. Freedom. Allahu Akbar. God is great, chanted a group of men. Don't worry about Islam, one of them said to me, a man with an elegant, long gray beard. We are peaceful. We don't wish to control. You have nothing to fear. One man came up to me, almost weeping, clasped my arm and said, I am 47 years old. I've been dreaming of this all my life. I will never forget this day. I will never forget this day. But some of the rejoicing was qualified. One man said to me, this is wonderful. But the real test will be what the army does next. We don't want to be governed by the army. They must allow independent political parties and free and fair elections, which must be properly scrutinized. Another said that what he described as the billions of Egyptian pounds stolen by Mubarak and salted away in Swiss bank accounts must be returned to the people. Others are worried about what the Muhabarat will do, the secret police who were beating people up or abducting them and reportedly torturing them until only a day or two ago, will they melt away like the similar Stasi secret police Police when East Germany collapsed? Thinking about that, I suddenly remembered a significant moment of courage here at election time five years ago, when there was tangible Muhabarat intimidation. In the air above a clothes shop in a Cairo suburb, there was a large banner praising Hosni Mubarak and attacking his opponent at the time and possible successor now, Ayman Noor, leader of the Tomorrow Party. The Banner accused Mr. Noah of being against God. I asked the shopkeeper if he'd put the banner up. No, he said indignantly. It is a lie. It is a big lie. Then he took a deep breath and he said, our President Mubarak is a big lie. Five years on, the liar has gone. And as I Write this. Five hours after the announcement that he'd gone, the protesters in Tahrir Square are still cheering and setting off fireworks and waving their flags with smiles on their faces as wide as the River Nile.
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Hugh Sykes late last night in Cairo. So the question of how long Mr. Mubarak could hold out in the face of overwhelming public opposition has now been answered. But the role the country's powerful military will play in this still unfolding drama is far from clear. And as Hugh mentioned there, what of the massive security apparatus which kept the President in power for nearly three decades? In the days before the announcement of Mr. Mubarak's resignation, Rupert Wingfield Hayes had an unexpectedly close encounter with the state security system.
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In the last few days, I've been receiving a steady stream of messages from friends and even from people I've never met, expressing concern about my detention at the hands of Egypt's dreaded Muhabarat. My response to them, as it is now, is that it was nothing, a minor brush with some rather unpleasant men. Neither I nor my colleagues suffered any physical harm and after a few hours we were released. It was, though, a fascinating and somewhat terrifying glimpse inside the workings of what was, until Friday, Hosni Mubarak's police state. The day had started well, with an interview with one of President Mubarak's close advisors in the posh Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. It was as we drove back into the city centre that events took an unexpected turn. As we approached the Presidential palace, a red larder appeared alongside our car. Inside were four large, angry and thuggish looking men. They were screaming at us, demanding we pull over. When our driver refused, they drove us off the road, swerving wildly until we pulled up in front of a military base. Naively, I looked at the soldiers with their red shoulder patches with relief. At least they would protect us from the violent looking men in the larder. I'm still not sure whether the larder men were free lance vigilantes or paid for government bully boys. Either way, the soldiers appeared far more convinced by what they had to say than our protestations of innocence. The soldiers, who it now became clear were from the Presidential guard, ordered us out of the car. Our passports and mobile phones were taken. Next came the men in the brown leather jackets. A white Toyota van pulled up and out they climbed. They had the quiet insouciance of secret policemen the world over. We were ushered on board and driven to an unmarked compound. On the outside walls, large signs in Arabic and English proclaimed no photo. It was at this Point that that things started to become more menacing. As we stepped from the van, we were blindfolded, our arms forced behind our backs and the cold steel of handcuffs locked around our wrists. Stupidly, I suggested it was all a bit unnecessary. Immediately, a hand reached around my back and tightened the handcuffs two more notches until the metal cut into my skin. Now, in some pain, I was frog marched across the compound and into a small room where I was ordered to sit. Blindfolding and handcuffing is designed to disorientate and instil fear. And it works. Time seems to telescope. A few minutes can feel like 20. You realize that if someone wants to hit you, you have no way of defending yourself. If you fall, you have no way to break it. You suddenly feel incredibly vulnerable. I knew in the back of my mind it was extremely unlikely they would use violence against me. But it still took all my will to remain calm. After a few minutes, my handcuffs and blindfold were removed. They even apologized for what they called the necessity. Over the next three hours of interrogation, only one other significant thing happened. From a little hatch like window high up on one wall of the cell came what sounded like a scream. One of my interrogators immediately leapt up and slammed the hatch shut. I cannot say for sure that it was a scream, but they clearly didn't want me hearing whatever else was going on in that compound. In recent days, Egyptian human rights groups have reported scores of anti Mubarak protesters being rounded up and tortured. Other foreign journalists have written of overhearing torture sessions during their own detentions. I can't say that I saw or heard anything like this. What I can say is that if I had been an Egyptian standing blindfolded and handcuffed in that padded cell, I would have been absolutely terrified. The state of emergency that has existed in Egypt for three decades has given the Muhabarat sweeping powers to detain people for years without trial. That torture goes on inside that anonymous compound in Heliopolis. I have little doubt. The machinery of a police state is designed for one purpose and one purpose only, to protect the regime from its people. As one protester on Tahrir Square put it to me, if you cut off its head, the snake will die. According to that theory, now that Mubarak has gone, his hated Muhabarat should wither and die. But to use another animal metaphor, it is when cornered that a wild animal is at its most dangerous.
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Rupert Wingfield Hayes, now back at his base in Jerusalem. President Obama has warned of difficult days ahead for the Egyptian people here The Foreign Secretary, William Haig, has said any attempt to turn back the clock would be deeply damaging to Egypt's stability and cohesion. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, said the voice of the Egyptian people had been heard. But will the voices of the international community carry any weight as the country moves into the post Mubarak era? Jonathan Marcus says that so far the outside world has had little influence on this very Egyptian revolution.
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Diplomats like to think they help to shape events, and sometimes they do. But as the dramatic upheaval in Egypt has unfolded, the diplomats in foreign ministries around the world have been left largely watching from the sidelines. Even the United States, the country that has one of the most important stakes in Egypt, has been struggling in the backdraft. Nobody knows how events there will unfold, nor how they may be echoed across the region. But there is an inescapable sense of the old order changing. Just how old was reflected by one columnist who noted a few days ago that when President Hosni Mubarak first came to power some 30 years ago, Simon and Garfunkel had just performed in their famous concert in New York's Central park, and the great Muhammad Ali had still to fight his last bout. Yes, it really was that long ago. That's pre the personal computer and the Internet, pre the ipod, and long before the new forms of mobile communications and the social networks that have figured so significantly in the Egyptian events. Last weekend I was in a surprisingly sunny Munich where the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was attending the annual security conference. This event is a monument to an old world bravely struggling to adjust to the new. It's one of the intellectual centrepieces of the transatlantic calendar. Put a different way, it's in large part a talking shop playing up the long standing links between the US and Europe. This year, inevitably, the conference was overshadowed by the drama in Egypt. But there was no clear statement from Mrs. Clinton as to whether the embattled Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak should stay or go. But former US diplomat Frank Wisner, the man dispatched by President Barack Obama to Egypt to get up close and personal with the leadership there, took a very different stance. Mr. Wisner proclaimed that in his view, Mr. Mubarak should stay and oversee the transition. But of course, the real story was how little Washington's view mattered. Not just that, but equally how few real levers the US had to influence events. Even the much vaunted relationship between the Pentagon and the Egyptian military hardly leaves US commanders on back slapping terms with their Egyptian opposite numbers. They're just not really that close. This is a thoroughly Egyptian drama with an Egyptian caste and an Egyptian denouement. Washington, like everyone else, was surprised by the outbreak of popular protest, first in Tunisia, then and then in Egypt. Surprise, of course, can mean many things. Everybody knew the think tank literature in Washington was full of it, that Egypt's authoritarian system could not last. Both President Bush and Mr. Obama, in their very different ways, have taken steps to try, as they see it, to foster Arab democracy. But a fundamental ambivalence has always been there. Immediate US interests meant supporting authoritarian regimes in the region with while at the same time running democracy workshops for aspiring future leaders. US policy, Western policy as a whole has been like setting out on a long journey in an old car with a faulty petrol gauge. You know the gas is going to run out, you just don't know when. Now, though, the outside world may have more to offer Egypt. If this transition is to be real, then the mechanics of democracy have to be established. The clockwork motor of authoritarianism has to be removed from the machine and a spanking new electric powered order instituted. Egypt's interim rulers are going to need help and advice if this revolution is really to lead to some kind of democracy. But some of the most important advice may be to limit expectations. Egypt is not going to become Switzerland within six months, nor should it. Back in Cairo at the start of his presidency in June 2009, Barack Obama made a significant speech and it would be useful to go back and read it again. Stressing his commitment to government that reflected the will of the people, Mr. Obama said that each nation would give life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. There was no straight line to realize this promise, he went on. Elections alone, he noted, do not make true democracy words. Perhaps that many Egyptians and all of us watching from the sidelines should remember, as Egypt perhaps sets about its own path to a democratic future.
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Jonathan Marcus here in London. Thousands of security personnel have been deployed in the centre of the Algerian capital, Algiers this morning. They are trying to prevent a pro democracy rally from taking place. Scuffles have been reported and some arrests. Demonstration is taking place in Yemen. Live TV pictures have been watched by leaders and their people throughout the Arab world. Distant Oman has been ruled by Sultan Qaboos for 40 years. He has introduced some elements of democracy to his country, where more than half the population is under the age of 20. Sarah Monaghan has been testing the appetite for change there. She says that unlike some of its Gulf neighbours, Oman doesn't have much oil, so it sought to diversify its economy by attracting foreign investment and developing an upmarket tourism industry.
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As we drive over the Kara Mountains of Dhofar, Oman's southernmost province, we pass scrubby ghat trees, their undersides nibbled flat by camels. My travelling companion is Maha. He's a swarthy Omani who cuts a handsome figure in his turban like black headdress and slate grey tunic. He's wearing what they call here oud, an aromatic Arabic cologne. I catch spicy wafts of sandalwood as he moves. Beyond these rugged peaks are frankincense groves where Maha's father once worked harvesting the valuable gum resin. Further still are the dunes of the Empty Quarter, crossed by the British explorer and writer Sir Wilfrid TheSiger in the 1940s. Maha comes from a Jabali, or mountain dwelling tribe. His family still speak an ancient southern Arabic language. When we stop for a cup of strong sweet tea, I ask him his age. Since he's educated and speaks fluent English and French, I'm surprised when he says, I'm not sure. I could be 42, 43 or even 44. I was born on the floor of a mountain hut. There were no hospitals then. This is hard to believe. Seeing Oman today, living standards are high and there is excellent health care. But 40 years ago, it was a different story when Oman's leader, Sultan Qaboos took power. Then there was hardly any surfaced road, just three primary schools and one hospital. That morning we'd set off from Dhofar's capital, Salalah. It's there that Caboose has his summer palace and where, in 1970, with the help of British army officers, he overthrew his father, Sultan Said bin Taymur, and sent him into exile. Caboose took over, determined to modernize his country. And he did. Last year, the UN declared Oman the most improved nation of the last 40 years. Salalah is a lush green place that benefits from the monsoon winds of Africa. Coconut palms swing in the sea breeze and there are plantations of papaya, banana and mango. Maha and I had lunch at one of the city's hotels and I was shocked. I could have been in the Canary Islands. There were dozens of blond sun worshippers around the pool and waiters were taking orders for beer and club sandwiches. A tour company, Maha tells me, is flying in a weekly charter from Stockholm. The tourists are good business, he says. These planeloads of Swedes baking under the Omani sun are the result of the Tourism Ministry's current push to promote Oman as a resort destination. I learn later from Razan Daweesh, director of international marketing. Dressed in a figure hugging cream trouser suit, she's a glamorous advertisement for modern Oman. Oman was an ancient trading empire, she says. Think of Sinbad the Sailor and the Silk Route. Why not welcome tourists from Scandinavia today? It was in one of the Sultan's new schools in his mountain village that Maha learned to read, later graduating from university in Muscat. This year, almost one in five Omanis will attend university, and I realize now that given the speed of Oman's development, Maha's ignorance of his age is hardly strange. Today he lives in an air conditioned apartment and his children are doing well at school. It's a change of life for a jabali, he says. When I was a child, we lived from the meat and milk of our cattle and goats. We had to walk half a day with our camel to collect spring water. Hanging on a wall of his apartment is the portrait of the smiling, slightly foppish sultan that I've seen in homes and businesses everywhere. Now Caboose is in his 70th year, thoughts are inevitably turning to who will take his place, as he has no male heir. But the sultan seems to have thought of this. He recently amended the constitution to state that his family must choose his successor from among their members. If the family can't agree within three days, says Maha, then the sultan has left a letter with the Defence Council that names his preferred choice. Given the revolution that is engulfing the Arab world now, right on Oman's doorstep is Yemen, where there have been mass protests over the failure of democratic reform. I can't help wondering if young Omanis will accept this idiosyncratic name in an envelope plan, and if they will have the same loyalty to the Sultan as their parents. For the time being, however, Oman appears unaffected by the unrest elsewhere, and those who have lived through the years of change feel only gratitude. Before Caboose, we sweated for our lives, maha tells me. Maybe I don't know my age, but one thing I do know we sweat much less today.
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Sarah Monaghan in Oman finally today it's off to Washington, where Barack Obama hasn't only the fast shifting events in the Middle east to contend with exactly halfway towards the next presidential election, he has a crucial budget speech to deliver early next week. Observers correspondents will dissect his words with particular interest, will the president show signs of moving more towards the centre ground as polling day approaches? And what will that reveal about where America stands, what influence it now wields in the wider world, and what it believes in as the century rolls on. Justin Webb has been visiting Washington for the first time since he left the America editor's chair last year. The trip, he tells us, filled him with happy nostalgia, but a sense, too, of foreboding.
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I can't remember which year it was exactly, but I know where I experienced the happiest moment of my life. We'd been for a family day out on the coast of Delaware, 100 miles or so from Washington, and we were coming home tired and sand flecked. In our huge American car, the children were singing along to country music, Jolene by Dolly Parton, again and again and again. The traffic was heavy but unstressed, as American traffic often is, all the cars moving together at around 50 miles an hour, nobody trying to go faster. We'd just come over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which is one of the great sights of the nation, more than four miles long, with views up and down the water, at boats that bob hundreds of feet below you. I don't know why it suddenly hit me then, but it did. A sense of enormous gratitude is probably the best way to describe it, that my children were growing up in this benign, decent place. On my current visit, I didn't make it to the Bay Bridge, but I did go back to Our Old House, 3805 Wyndham Place, North West. Lots of us move home, but when the move is a move across continents as well, a move across cultures, the sense of loss can be profound. Our little blue painted wooden house is still there. The porch still has white chairs. Did we leave them behind? But it's in a parallel universe, a better universe. I must say, I thought so when I lived here. Being a foreign correspondent is an odd business. Sending reporters to live in far off places is deliberately an experimental exercise in which people bond, or don't bond with the country they're in, fight with the local bureaucracy, make friends or fail to make friends, have good days and bad, have children suffer bereavement. The mixture of all that and an effort to provide an impartial assessment of a place is what makes it worthwhile, worth the cost, and, it is, to be hoped, worth listening to. It's not, of course, that you impose your emotional state day to day on the story of the nation you're reporting. That would be a little wearing, wouldn't it? But it seeps in, as it should, to all that you say. Generally we loved America, and generally my coverage of it was sympathetic but to those who wrote and said you've gone native, I have a partial confession to make. I understand better now that a little separateness can also provide insight. A case in point is our house, or rather our neighbourhood. During my time here, I always felt that the British obsession with American gun crime was overblown. Guns are part of America and most gun owners are decent, peaceful people. But here is an uncomfortable 3805 Wyndham Place has the zip code 20016. And I discover now that since the Supreme Court relaxed gun ownership laws in Washington, one zip code above all others has accounted for a surge in gun buying. 20016 this feels to me like a kind of madness. When I called on the neighbours this week, I pushed open their front door. They would not have thought to have locked it. 20016 is one of the safest places to live in in the world. Sometimes someone parks a car facing the wrong way. You're meant to park facing the direction of traffic. But this is the limit of local criminality. Nobody who has bought a gun in 20016 can possibly have done it out of a rational belief that he or she was reducing the risk of being attacked. So why did they? The reason is deeper, and it seems to me, with my newfound detachment, I worrying. Americans have long convinced themselves that the more guns there are in the hands of individuals, the more difficult it would be for a dictator to take power. This is the freedom guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1791. They argue about the meaning of the wording, but not over whether this thinking still makes sense in the modern age. And yet this week they watched a dictator overthrown in Egypt with no recourse to guns. The link in American minds between guns and freedom is, you could argue, proved by the events of yesterday to be deeply irrational. So the debate about whether President Obama moves now to the centre ground is, at least in part irrelevant. This remains a nation unable to address sensibly the deepest questions, including guns, but including plenty else as well. Funny, I never worried much about that when I lived here. Too busy gazing out from the Bay Bridge, bathed in sunlight. Perhaps that's America's problem. Too many opportunities to avoid the hard questions. Can this last forever? When I lived here, I really thought it could. Now, just visiting, I wonder.
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And with Justin Webb musing on America's place in this changing world, we've come to the end of another edition. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence on Thursday and Saturday. Next week who knows what will have happened by then. Goodbye.