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CHAPTER 2

EGYPT SPRING

Cairo’s Tahrir Square, 22 November 2011.

Friday, 28 January 2011

‘DAY OF WRATH’ AND DAYS OF RAGE

A day of prayer or a day of rage? All Egypt was waiting for the Muslim Sabbath today - not to mention Egypt's fearful allies - as the country's ageing President clings to power after nights of violence that have shaken America's faith in the stability of the Mubarak regime.

Five men have so far been killed and almost 1,000 others have been imprisoned, police have beaten women and for the first time an office of the ruling National Democratic Party was set on fire. Rumours are as dangerous as tear gas here. A Cairo daily has been claiming that one of President Hosni Mubarak's top advisers has fled to London with 97 suitcases of cash, but other reports speak of an enraged President shouting at senior police officers for not dealing more harshly with demonstrators.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel prize-winning former UN official, flew back to Egypt last night but no one believes - except perhaps the Americans - that he can become a focus for the protest movements that have sprung up across the country.

Already there have been signs that those tired of Mubarak's corrupt and undemocratic rule have been trying to persuade the ill-paid policemen patrolling Cairo to join them. "Brothers! Brothers! How much do they pay you?" one of the crowds began shouting at the cops in Cairo. But no one is negotiating - there is nothing to negotiate except the departure of Mubarak, and the Egyptian government says and does nothing, which is pretty much what it has been doing for the past three decades.

People talk of revolution but there is no one to replace Mubarak's men - he never appointed a vice-president - and one Egyptian journalist yesterday told me he had even found some friends who feel sorry for the isolated, lonely President. Mubarak is 82 and even hinted he would stand for president again - to the outrage of millions of Egyptians.

The barren, horrible truth, however, is that save for its brutal police force and its ominously docile army - which, by the way, does not look favourably upon Mubarak's son Gamal - the government is powerless. This is revolution by Twitter and revolution by Facebook, and technology long ago took away the dismal rules of censorship.

Mubarak's men seem to have lost all sense of initiative. Their party newspapers are filled with self-delusion, pushing the massive demonstrations to the foot of front pages as if this will keep the crowds from the streets - as if, indeed, that by belittling the story, the demonstrations never happened.

But you don't need to read the papers to see what has gone wrong. The filth and the slums, the open sewers and the corruption of every government official, the bulging prisons, the laughable elections, the whole vast, sclerotic edifice of power has at last brought Egyptians on to their streets.

Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, spotted something important at the recent summit of Arab leaders at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. "Tunisia is not far from us," he said. "The Arab men are broken." But are they? One old friend told me a frightening story about a poor Egyptian who said he had no interest in moving the corrupt leadership from their desert gated communities. "At least we now know where they live," he said. There are more than 80 million people in Egypt, 30 per cent of them under 20. And they are no longer afraid.

And a kind of Egyptian nationalism - rather than Islamism - is making itself felt at the demonstrations. January 25 is National Police Day - to honour the police force who died fighting British troops in Ishmaelia - and the government clucked its tongue at the crowds, telling them they were disgracing their martyrs. No, shouted the crowds, those policemen who died at Ishmaelia were brave men, not represented by their descendants in uniform today.

This is not an un-clever government, though. There is a kind of shrewdness in the gradual freeing of the press and television of this ramshackle pseudodemocracy. Egyptians had been given just enough air to breathe, to keep them quiet, to enjoy their docility in this vast farming land. Farmers are not revolutionaries, but when the millions thronged to the great cities, to the slums and collapsing houses and universities, which gave them degrees and no jobs, something must have happened.

"We are proud of the Tunisians - they have shown Egyptians how to have pride," another Egyptian colleague said yesterday. "They were inspiring but the regime here was smarter than Ben Ali in Tunisia. It provided a veneer of opposition by not arresting all the Muslim Brotherhood, then by telling the Americans that the great fear should be Islamism, that Mubarak was all that stood between them and 'terror' - a message the US has been in a mood to hear for the past 10 years."

There are various clues that the authorities in Cairo realised something was afoot. Several Egyptians have told me that on 24 January, security men were taking down pictures of Gamal Mubarak from the slums - lest they provoke the crowds. But the vast number of arrests, the police street beatings - of women as well as men - and the near-collapse of the Egyptian stock market bear the marks of panic rather than cunning.

And one of the problems has been created by the regime itself; it has systematically got rid of anyone with charisma, thrown them out of the country, politically emasculating any real opposition by imprisoning many of them. The Americans and the EU are telling the regime to listen to the people - but who are these people, who are their leaders? This is not an Islamic uprising - though it could become one - but, save for the usual talk of Muslim Brotherhood participation in the demonstrations, it is just one mass of Egyptians stifled by decades of failure and humiliation.

But all the Americans seem able to offer Mubarak is a suggestion of reforms - something Egyptians have heard many times before. It's not the first time that violence has come to Egypt's streets, of course. In 1977, there were mass food riots - I was in Cairo at the time and there were many angry, starving people - but the Sadat government managed to control the people by lowering food prices and by imprisonment and torture. There have been police mutinies before - one ruthlessly suppressed by Mubarak himself. But this is something new.

Interestingly, there seems no animosity towards foreigners. Many journalists have been protected by the crowds and - despite America's lamentable support for the Middle East's dictators - there has not so far been a single US flag burned. That shows you what's new. Perhaps a people have grown up - only to discover that their ageing government are all children.

Who Could Succeed Hosni Mubarak?

Gamal Mubarak ─ Protesters on the streets of Egypt aren't just rallying against the 30-year-reign of President Hosni Mubarak, they are also taking aim at his son Gamal Mubarak, 47, an urbane former investment banker who has scaled the political ladder, prompting speculation that he is being groomed for his father's post.

The youngest son of Mr Mubarak and his half-Welsh wife, Suzanne, Gamal was educated at the elite American University in Cairo, going on to work for the Bank of America.

He entered politics about a decade ago, quickly moving up to become head of the political secretariat of his father's National Democratic Party (NDP). He was heavily involved in the economic liberalisation of Egypt, which pleased investors but provoked the ire of protesters, who blame the policies for lining the pockets of the rich while the poor suffered.

Although he has always denied having an eye on his father's throne, a mysterious campaign sprung up last year, with posters plastered across Cairo calling for Gamal to stand for president in elections scheduled for later this year. His 82-year-old father has not yet declared his candidacy.

Certainly the protesters appeared unhappy with the chosen son, chanting "Gamal, tell your father Egyptians hate you" and tearing up his picture.

Mohamed ElBaradei ─ Protests in Egypt today will be different from the others that have swept the Middle East in recent weeks in one important way. Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), landed at Cairo airport last night to lead rallies against Hosni Mubarak's rule.

The 68-year-old was born in the Egyptian capital, from where he launched a legal career. He joined the IAEA in the 1980s, becoming head of the UN body in 1997.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq thrust Mr ElBaradei into the public consciousness. He demurred on the US rationale for attacking Saddam Hussein, describing the war as "a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it". The award, jointly with the IAEA, of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize further rankled with the Bush administration .

He has long been urged to challenge the 82-year-old President, but hitherto has bided his time, insisting first on electoral reform, but his participation in today's protests indicate he is ready. Recent speeches, including recently at Harvard, when he joked that he was "looking for a job" have done nothing to dissuade his supporters, but at 68 his presidency would surely be only a short-term fix to Egypt's problems.

Robert Fisk

Saturday, 29 January 2011

SHOWERS OF TEAR GAS

It might be the end. It is certainly the beginning of the end. Across Egypt, tens of thousands of Arabs braved tear gas, water cannons, stun grenades and live fire yesterday to demand the removal of Hosni Mubarak after more than 30 years of dictatorship.

And as Cairo lay drenched under clouds of tear gas from thousands of canisters fired into dense crowds by riot police, it looked as if his rule was nearing its finish. None of us on the streets of Cairo yesterday even knew where Mubarak - who would later appear on television to dismiss his cabinet - was. And I didn't find anyone who cared.

They were brave, largely peaceful, these tens of thousands, but the shocking behaviour of Mubarak's plainclothes battagi - the word does literally mean "thugs" in Arabic - who beat, bashed and assaulted demonstrators while the cops watched and did nothing, was a disgrace. These men, many of them expolicemen who are drug addicts, were last night the front line of the Egyptian state. The true representatives of Hosni Mubarak as uniformed cops showered gas on to the crowds.

At one point last night, gas canisters were streaming smoke across the waters of the Nile as riot police and protesters fought on the great river bridges. It was incredible, a risen people who would no longer take violence and brutality and prison as their lot in the largest Arab nation. And the police themselves might be cracking: "What can we do?" one of the riot cops asked us. "We have orders. Do you think we want to do this? This country is going downhill." The government imposed a curfew last night as protesters knelt in prayer in front of police.

How does one describe a day that may prove to be so giant a page in Egypt's history? Maybe reporters should abandon their analyses and just tell the tale of what happened from morning to night in one of the world's most ancient cities. So here it is, the story from my notes, scribbled amid a defiant people in the face of thousands of plainclothes and uniformed police.

It began at the Istikama mosque on Giza Square: a grim thoroughfare of gaunt concrete apartment blocks and a line of riot police that stretched as far as the Nile. We all knew that Mohamed ElBaradei would be there for midday prayers and, at first, the crowd seemed small. The cops smoked cigarettes. If this was the end of the reign of Mubarak, it was a pretty unimpressive start.

But then, no sooner had the last prayers been uttered than the crowd of worshippers, perched above the highway, turned towards the police. "Mubarak, Mubarak," they shouted. "Saudi Arabia is waiting for you." That's when the water cannons were turned on the crowd - the police had every intention of fighting them even though not a stone had been thrown. The water smashed into the crowd and then the hoses were pointed directly at ElBaradei, who reeled back, drenched.

He had returned from Vienna a few hours earlier and few Egyptians think he will run Egypt - he claims to want to be a negotiator - but this was a disgrace. Egypt's most honoured politician, a Nobel prize winner who had held the post of the UN's top nuclear inspector, was drenched like a street urchin. That's what Mubarak thought of him, I suppose: just another trouble maker with a "hidden agenda" - that really is the language the Egyptian government is using right now.

And then the tear gas burst over the crowds. Perhaps there were a few thousand now, but as I walked beside them, something remarkable happened. From apartment blocks and dingy alleyways, from neighbouring streets, hundreds and then thousands of Egyptians swarmed on to the highway leading to Tahrir Square. This is the one tactic the police had decided to prevent. To have Mubarak's detractors in the very centre of Cairo would suggest that his rule was already over. The government had already cut the internet - slicing off Egypt from the rest of the world - and killed all of the mobile phone signals. It made no difference.

"We want the regime to fall," the crowds screamed. Not perhaps the most memorable cry of revolution but they shouted it again and again until they drowned out the pop of tear gas grenades. From all over Cairo they surged into the city, middle-class youngsters from Gazira, the poor from the slums of Beaulak al-Daqrour, marching steadily across the Nile bridges like an army - which, I guess, was what they were.

Still the gas grenades showered over them. Coughing and retching, they marched on. Many held their coats over their mouths or queued at a lemon shop where the owner squeezed fresh fruit into their mouths. Lemon juice - an antidote to tear gas - poured across the pavement into the gutter.

This was Cairo, of course, but these protests were taking place all over Egypt, not least in Suez, where 13 Egyptians have so far been killed. The demonstrations began not just at mosques but at Coptic churches. "I am a Christian, but I am an Egyptian first," a man called Mina told me. "I want Mubarak to go." And that is when the first bataggi arrived, pushing to the front of the police ranks in order to attack the protesters. They had metal rods and police truncheons - from where? - and sharpened sticks, and could be prosecuted for serious crimes if Mubarak's regime falls. They were vicious. One man whipped a youth over the back with a long yellow cable. He howled with pain. Across the city, the cops stood in ranks, legions of them, the sun glinting on their visors. The crowd were supposed to be afraid, but the police looked ugly, like hooded birds. Then the protesters reached the east bank of the Nile.

A few tourists found themselves caught up in this spectacle - I saw three middle-aged ladies on one of the Nile bridges (Cairo's hotels had not, of course, told their guests what was happening) - but the police decided that they would hold the east end of the flyover. They opened their ranks again and sent the thugs in to beat the leading protesters. And this was the moment the tear-gassing began in earnest, hundreds upon hundreds of canisters raining on to the crowds who marched from all roads into the city. It stung our eyes and made us cough until we were gasping. Men were being sick beside sealed shop fronts.

Fires appear to have broken out last night near Mubarak's rubber-stamp NDP headquarters. A curfew was imposed and first reports spoke of troops in the city, an ominous sign that the police had lost control. We took refuge in the old Café Riche off Telaat Harb Square, a tiny restaurant and bar of blue-robed waiters; and there, sipping his coffee, was the great Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdul Meguid, right in front of us. It was like bumping into Tolstoy taking lunch amid the Russian revolution. "There has been no reaction from Mubarak!" he exalted. "It is as if nothing has happened! But they will do it - the people will do it!" The guests sat choking from the gas. It was one of those memorable scenes that occur in movies rather than real life.

And there was an old man on the pavement, one hand over his stinging eyes. Retired Colonel Weaam Salim of the Egyptian army, wearing his medal ribbons from the 1967 war with Israel - which Egypt lost - and the 1973 war, which the colonel thought Egypt had won. "I am leaving the ranks of veteran soldiers," he told me. "I am joining the protesters." And what of the army? Throughout the day we had not seen them. Their colonels and brigadiers and generals were silent. Were they waiting until Mubarak imposed martial law?

The crowds refused to abide by the curfew. In Suez, they set police trucks on fire. Opposite my own hotel, they tried to tip another truck into the Nile. I couldn't get back to Western Cairo over the bridges. The gas grenades were still soaring off the edges into the Nile. But a cop eventually took pity on us - not a quality, I have to say, that was much in evidence yesterday - and led us to the very bank of the Nile. And there was an old Egyptian motorboat, the tourist kind, with plastic flowers and a willing owner. So we sailed back in style, sipping Pepsi. And then a yellow speed boat swept past with two men making victory signs at the crowds on the bridges, a young girl standing in the back, holding a massive banner in her hands. It was the flag of Egypt.

Egypt's Day Of Crisis

President Mubarak's regime called in the army and imposed a curfew after tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets demanding an end to his rule.

Large numbers of protesters defied the curfew in Cairo to storm the state TV building and the Foreign Ministry.

The headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party were set alight.

Protesters chased riot police away from Cairo's main square. Some police are reported to have removed their uniforms to join the demonstrators. Tanks and troops were ordered to retake the square.

At least 20 people were killed in violent clashes in Egyptian cities.

Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was put under house arrest after being hosed by water cannon.

Mobile phone and internet services were disrupted to prevent social networking sites such as Facebook being used to orchestrate protests.

Mr Mubarak announced he will form a new government this morning. He has asked his cabinet to resign.

US President Barack Obama made a televised address in which he revealed that he told Mr Mubarak he must deliver on reforms.

Robert Fisk

Sunday, 30 Janurary 2011

MUHARAK, IT IS OVER!

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-yearold 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.

Robert Fisk

Monday, 31 January 2011

‘WE WILL NEVER BE AFRAID AGAIN’

The old lady in the red scarf was standing inches from the front of an American-made M1 Abrams tank of the Egyptian Third Army, right on the edge of Tahrir Square. Its soldiers were paratroops, some in red berets, others in helmets, gun barrels pointed across the square, heavy machine guns mounted on the turrets. "If they fire on the Egyptian people, Mubarak is finished," she said. "And if they don't fire on the Egyptian people, Mubarak is finished." Of such wisdom are Egyptians now possessed.

Shortly before dusk, four F-16 Falcons - again, of course, manufactured by President Barack Obama's country - came screaming over the square, echoes bouncing off the shabby grey buildings and the giant Nasserist block, as the eyes of the tens of thousands of people in the square stared upwards. "They are on our side," the cry went up from the crowds. Somehow, I didn't think so. And those tanks, new to the square, 14 in all that arrived with no slogans painted on them, their soldiers sullen and apprehensive, had not come - as the protesters fondly believed - to protect them.

But then, when I talked to an officer on one of the tanks, he burst out with a smile. "We will never fire on our people - even if we are ordered to do so," he shouted over the roar of his engine. Again, I was not so sure. President Hosni Mubarak - or perhaps we should now say "president" in quotation marks - was at the military headquarters, having appointed his new junta of former military and intelligence officers. The rumour went round the square: the old wolf would try to fight on to the end. Others said it didn't matter. "Can he kill 80 million Egyptians?"

Anti-American sentiment was growing after Mr Obama's continued if tepid support for the Mubarak regime. "No, Obama, not Mubarak," posters read. And Mr Mubarak's face appeared with a Star of David superimposed over his face. Many of the crowd produced stun-gun cartridge cases fired last week with "Made in the USA" stamped on the bottom. And I noticed the lead tank's hull bore markings beginning "MFR" - at this point a soldier with a rifle and bayonet fixed was ordered to arrest me so I ran into the crowd and he retreated - but could "MFR" stand for the US Mobile Force Reserve, which keeps its tanks in Egypt? Was this tank column on loan from the Americans? You don't need to work out what the Egyptians make of all this.

Yet there were extraordinary scenes earlier in the day between protesters and tank crews of another unit (this time, the machines were older American M-60 Pattons of Vietnam vintage), which appeared to be about to protect a unit of water cannons sent to clear the streets. Hundreds of young men overwhelmed one tank, and when a lieutenant in sun glasses began firing into the air, he was pushed back against his armoured vehicle and had to climb on top to avoid the men. Yet the crowd quickly became good natured, posed for pictures on the tank and handed the soldiers fruit and water.

When a long line of troops assembled across the road, a very old, hunch-backed man sought and gained permission to approach them. I followed him as he embraced the lieutenant and kissed him on both cheeks and said: "You are our sons. We are your people." And then he walked down the row of troops and kissed each one and embraced each one and told each one that he was his son. You need a heart of stone not to be moved by such scenes and yesterday was replete with them.

At one point, a group of protesters brought a man they said was a thief - of which Cairo seems full at the moment - and he was trussed up and handed to the soldiers. "You are here to protect us," they chanted. When one of the soldiers hit the man in the face, his officer slapped him. Then the soldier sat down, shaking his head in despair. All day, an Egyptian Mi-25 helicopter - this time a relic of Soviet ordnance - circled the crowds, six rockets in the pods, but did nothing. Later a French-built Gazelle of the Egyptian air force flew low over the crowds, and the people waved at the place and the pilot could be seen waving back.

And all the time Egyptians walked up to foreigners - and a grey-haired Englishman doesn't look very Egyptian - and insisted that a people who had lost their fear could never be reinjected with fear.

"We will never be afraid again," a young woman shouted at me as the jets screamed over again. And a former cop now claiming to be a liaison man between the demonstrators and the army said that "the army will be with us because they know Mubarak must go". Again, I am not so sure.

And the looting and burning go on. The former policeman - who should know - told me that many of the looters are members of a group which belonged to Mr Mubarak's National Democratic Party, whose previous role had been to bully Egyptians to go to polling stations and vote for their beloved leader. So why, we all wonder now, are these men trying to loot and burn, crimes which are being blamed on all those who demand that Mr Mubarak leave the country? Those demands, incidentally, now include the expulsion of Omar Suleiman, his former top spy, who is Vice-President.

Across Egypt, and on almost every street in Cairo, there are now vigilantes - not Mubarak men, but ordinary civilians who are tired of the semi-official gangs who are robbing their own people at night-time. To get back to my hotel last night, I had to pass through eight checkpoints of men, young and old - one was stooped, with a walking stick in one hand and an old British .303 Lee Enfield rifle in the other - who are now attacking thieves and handing them to the army. But this is no Dad's Army.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, a group of armed men turned up at the Children's Cancer Hospital near the old Roman aqueduct.

They wanted to take the medical equipment, but within minutes, local people ran down the road and threatened the men with knives. They retreated at once. Dr Khaled el-Noury, the chief operating officer at the hospital, told me that the armed visitors were disorganised and apparently frightened of being harmed.

They were right. The reception clerk at the children's hospital showed me the kitchen knife he kept on his desk for protection. Further proof of fighting power lay outside the gate where men appeared holding clubs and sticks and pokers. A boy - perhaps eight years old - appeared brandishing an 18-inch butcher's knife, slightly more than half his height. Other men holding knives of equal length came to shake hands with the foreign journalist.

They are no third force. And they believe in the army. Will the soldiers go into the square? And does it matter if Mr Mubarak goes anyway?

Robert Fisk

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

SPEEDING EVENTS

It was a victory parade - without the victory. They came in their hundreds of thousands, joyful, singing, praying, a great packed mass of Egypt, suburb by suburb, village by village, waiting patiently to pass through the "people's security" checkpoints, draped in the Egyptian flag of red, white and black, its governess eagle a bright gold in the sunlight. Were there a million? Perhaps. Across the country there certainly were. It was, we all agreed, the largest political demonstration in the history of Egypt, the latest heave to rid this country of its least-loved dictator. Its only flaw was that by dusk - and who knew what the night would bring - Hosni Mubarak was still calling himself "President" of Egypt.

Later, indeed, he was expected to tell us that he will hang on until the next election - a promise that will not be accepted by the people he claims to love. The people of Egypt were originally told this was to be "the march of the million" to the Kuba Palace, Mubarak's official state pile, or to the man's own residence in Heliopolis. But so vast was the crowd that the organisers, around 24 opposition groups, decided the danger of attacks from the state security police were too great. They claimed later they had discovered a truck load of armed men close to Tahrir Square. All I could find were 30 Mubarak supporters shouting their love of Egypt outside the state radio headquarters under the guard of more than 40 soldiers.

The cries of loathing for Mubarak are becoming familiar, the posters ever more intriguing. "Neither Mubarak, nor Suleiman, and we don't need you Obama - but we don't dislike USA," one of them announced generously. "Out - all of you, including your slaves," announced another. I did actually find a decaying courtyard covered in rectangular sheets of white cloth where political scribes could spray-paint their own slogans for 40 pence a time. The tea-houses behind Talat Harb's statue were crammed with drinkers, discussing Egypt's new politics with the passion of one of Delacroix's orientalist paintings. You could soak this stuff up all day, revolution in the making. Or was this an uprising? Or an "explosion", as one Egyptian journalist described the demonstration to me?

There were several elements about this unprecedented political event that stood out. First was the secularism of the whole affair. Women in chadors and niqabs and scarves walked happily beside girls with long hair flowing over their shoulders, students next to imams and men with beards that would have made Bin Laden jealous. The poor in torn sandals and the rich in business suits, squeezed into this shouting mass, an amalgam of the real Egypt hitherto divided by class and regime-encouraged envy. They had done the impossible - or so they thought - and, in a way, they had already won their social revolution.

And then there was the absence of the "Islamism" that haunts the darkest corners of the West, encouraged - as usual - by America and Israel. As my mobile phone vibrated again and again, it was the same old story. Every radio anchor, every announcer, every newsroom wanted to know if the Muslim Brotherhood was behind this epic demonstration. Would the Brotherhood take over Egypt? I told the truth. It was rubbish. Why, they might get only 20 per cent at an election, 145,000 members out of a population of 80 million.

A crowd of English-speaking Egyptians crowded round me during one of the imperishable interviews and collapsed in laughter so loud that I had to bring the broadcast to an end. It made no difference, of course, when I explained on air that Israel's kindly and human Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman - who once said that "Mubarak can go to hell" - might at last get his way, politically at least. The people were overwhelmed, giddy at the speed of events.

So was I. There I was, back on the intersection behind the Egyptian Museum where only five days ago - it feels like five months - I choked on tear gas as Mubarak's police thugs, the baltigi, the drug addict ex-prisoner cops, were slipped through the lines of state security policemen to beat, bludgeon and smash the heads and faces of the unarmed demonstrators, who eventually threw them all out of Tahrir Square and made it the Egyptian uprising. Back then, we heard no Western support for these brave men and women. Nor did we hear it yesterday.

Amazingly, there was little evidence of hostility towards America although, given the verbal antics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton these past eight days, there might have well been. One almost felt sorry for Obama. Had he rallied to the kind of democracy he preached here in Cairo six months after his investiture, had he called for the departure of this third-rate dictator a few days ago, the crowds would have been carrying US as well as Egyptian flags, and Washington would have done the impossible: it would have transformed the now familiar hatred of America (Afghanistan, Iraq, the "war on terror", etc) into the more benign relationship which the US enjoyed in the balmy 1920s and 1930s and, indeed, despite its support for the creation of Israel, into the warmth that existed between Arab and American into the 1960s.

But no. All this was squandered in just seven days of weakness and cowardice in Washington - a gutlessness so at odds with the courage of the millions of Egyptians who tried to do what we in the West always demanded of them: to turn their dust-bowl dictatorships into democracies. They supported democracy. We supported "stability", "moderation", "restraint", "firm" leadership (Saddam Hussein-lite) soft "reform" and obedient Muslims.

This failure of moral leadership in the West - under the false fear of "Islamisation" - may prove to be one of the greatest tragedies of the modern Middle East. Egypt is not anti-Western. It is not even particularly anti-Israeli, though this could change. But one of the blights of history will now involve a US president who held out his hand to the Islamic world and then clenched his fist when it fought a dictatorship and demanded democracy.

This tragedy may continue in the coming days as the US and Europe give their support to Mubarak's chosen successor, the chief spy and Israeli negotiator, Vice-President Omar Suleiman. He has called, as we all knew he would, for talks with "all factions" - he even contrived to sound a bit like Obama. But everyone in Egypt knows that his administration will be another military junta which Egyptians will again be invited to trust to ensure the free and fair elections which Mubarak never gave them. Is it possible - is it conceivable - that Israel's favourite Egyptian is going to give these millions the freedom and democracy they demand?

Or that the army which so loyally guarded them today will give such uncritical support to that democracy when it receives $1.3bn a year from Washington? This military machine, which has not fought a war for almost 38 years, is under-trained and over-armed, with largely obsolete equipment - though its new M1A1 tanks were on display yesterday - and deeply embedded in the corporation of big business, hotels and housing complexes, all rewards to favourite generals by the Mubarak regime.

And yesterday, what were the Americans doing? Rumour: US diplomats were on their way to Egypt to negotiate between a future President Suleiman and opposition groups. Rumour: extra Marines were being drafted into Egypt to defend the US embassy from attack. Fact: a further evacuation of US families from the Marriott Hotel in Cairo, escorted by Egyptian troops and cops, heading for the airport, fleeing from a people who could so easily be their friends.

Robert Fisk

Thursday, 3 February 2011

EGYPTIAN AGAINST EGYPTIAN

President" Hosni Mubarak's counter-revolution smashed into his opponents yesterday in a barrage of stones, cudgels, iron bars and clubs, an all-day battle in the very centre of the capital he claims to rule between tens of thousands of young men, both - and here lies the most dangerous of all weapons - brandishing in each other's faces the banner of Egypt. It was vicious and ruthless and bloody and well planned, a final vindication of all Mubarak's critics and a shameful indictment of the Obamas and Clintons who failed to denounce this faithful ally of America and Israel.

The fighting around me in the square called Tahrir was so terrible that we could smell the blood. The men and women who are demanding the end of Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship - and I saw young women in scarves and long skirts on their knees, breaking up the paving stones as rocks fell around them - fought back with an immense courage which later turned into a kind of terrible cruelty.

Some dragged Mubarak's security men across the square, beating them until blood broke from their heads and splashed down their clothes. The Egyptian Third Army, famous in legend and song for crossing the Suez Canal in 1973, couldn't - or wouldn't - even cross Tahrir Square to help the wounded.

As thousands of Egyptians shrieking abuse - and this was as close to civil war as Egypt has ever come - swarmed towards each other like Roman fighters, they simply overwhelmed the parachute units "guarding" the square, climbing over their tanks and armoured vehicles and then using them for cover.

One Abrams tank commander - and I was only 20 feet away - simply ducked the stones that were bouncing off his tank, jumped into the turret and battened down the hatch. Mubarak's protesters then climbed on top to throw more rocks at their young and crazed antagonists.

I guess it's the same in all battles, even though guns have not (yet) appeared; abuse by both sides provoked a shower of rocks from Mubarak's men - yes, they did start it - and then the protesters who seized the square to demand the old man's overthrow began breaking stones to hurl them back.

By the time I reached the "front" line - the quotation marks are essential, since the lines of men moved back and forth over half a mile - both sides were screaming and lunging at each other, blood streaming down their faces. At one point, before the shock of the attack wore off, Mubarak's supporters almost crossed the entire square in front of the monstrous Mugamma building - relic of Nasserite endeavour - before being driven out.

Indeed, now that Egyptians are fighting Egyptians, what are we supposed to call these dangerously furious people? The Mubarakites? The "protesters" or - more ominously - the "resistance"? For that is what the men and women struggling to unseat Mubarak are now calling themselves.

"This is Mubarak's work," one wounded stone-thrower said to me. "He has managed to turn Egyptian against Egyptian for just nine more months of power. He is mad. Are you in the West mad, too?"

I can't remember how I replied to this question. But how could I forget watching - just a few hours earlier - as the Middle East "expert" Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, was asked if Mubarak was a dictator. No, he said, he was "a monarchtype figure".

The face of this monarch was carried on giant posters, a printed provocation, to the barricades. Newly distributed by officers of the National Democratic Party - they must have taken a while to produce after the party's headquarters was reduced to a smouldering shell after Friday's battles - many were held in the air by men carrying cudgels and police batons. There is no doubt about this because I had driven into Cairo from the desert as they formed up outside the foreign ministry and the state radio building on the east bank of the Nile. There were loudspeaker songs and calls for Mubarak's eternal life (a very long presidency indeed) and many were sitting on brand-new motorcycles, as if they had been inspired by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's thugs after the 2009 Iranian elections. Come to think of it, Mubarak and Ahmadinejad do actually have the same respect for elections.

Only when I had passed the radio building did I see the thousands of other young men pouring in from the suburbs of Cairo. There were women, too, mostly in traditional black dress and white-and-black scarves, a few children among them, walking along the flyover behind the Egyptian Museum. They told me that they had as much right to Tahrir Square as the protesters - true, by the way - and that they intended to express their love of their President in the very place where he had been so desecrated.

And they had a point, I suppose. The democrats - or the "resistance", depending on your point of view - had driven out the security police thugs from this very square on Friday. The problem is that the Mubarak men included some of the very same thugs I saw then, when they were working with armed security police to baton and assault the demonstrators. One of them, a yellow-shirted youth with tousled hair and bright red eyes - I don't know what he was on - carried the very same wicked steel stick he had been using on Friday. Once more, the defenders of Mubarak were back. They even sang the same old refrain - constantly reworked to take account of the local dictator's name - "With our blood, with our soul, we dedicate ourselves to you."

As far away as Giza, the NDP had rounded up the men who controlled voting at elections and sent them hollering their support as they marched along a stinking drainage ditch. Not far away, even a camel-owner was enjoined to say that "if you don't know Mubarak, you don't know Allah" - which was, to put it mildly, a bit much.

In Cairo, I walked beside Mubarak's ranks and reached the front as they began another charge into Tahrir Square. The sky was filled with rocks - I am talking of stones six inches in diameter, which hit the ground like mortar shells. On this side of the "line", of course, they were coming from Mubarak's opponents. They cracked and split apart and spat against the walls around us. At which point, the NDP men turned and ran in panic as the President's opponents surged forward.

I just stood with my back against the window of a closed travel agency - I do remember a poster for a romantic weekend in Luxor and "the fabled valley of the tombs".

But the stones came in flocks, hundreds of them at a time, and then a new group of young men were beside me, the Egyptian demonstrators from the square. Only no longer in their fury were they shouting "Down with Mubarak" and "Black Mubarak" but Allahu Akbar - God is Great - and I would hear this again and again as the long day progressed. One side was shouting Mubarak, the other God. It hadn't been like that 24 hours ago.

I hared towards safe ground where the stones no longer hissed and splintered and suddenly I was among Mubarak's opponents .

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that the stones cloaked the sky, but at times there were a hundred rocks soaring through the sky. They wrecked an entire army truck, smashing its sides, crushing its windows. The stones came soaring out of side roads off Champollion Street and on Talaat Harb. The men were sweating, headbands in red, roaring their hatred. Many held white cloth to wounds. Some were carried past me, sloshing blood all over the road.

And an increasing number were wearing Islamist dress, short trousers, grey cloaks, long beards, white head caps. They shouted Allahu Akbar loudest and they bellowed their love of God, which was not supposed to be what this was all about. Yes, Mubarak had done it. He had brought the Salafists out against him, alongside his political enemies. From time to time, young men were grabbed, their faces fist-pulped, screaming and fearful of their lives, documentation found on their clothes to prove they worked for Mubarak's interior ministry.

Many of the protesters - secular young men, pushing their way through the attackers - tried to defend the prisoners. Others - and I noticed an awful lot of "Islamists" among them, complete with obligatory beards - would bang their fists on these poor men's heads, using big rings on their fingers to cut open their skin so that blood ran down their faces. One youth, red T-shirt torn open, face already bloated with pain, was rescued by two massive men, one of whom put the now halfnaked prisoner over his shoulder and pushed his way through the crowd.

Thus was saved the life of Mohamed Abdul Azim Mabrouk Eid, police security number 2101074 from the Giza governorate - his security pass was blue with three odd-looking pyramids stamped on the laminated cover. Thus was another man pulled from the mob, squealing and clutching his stomach. And behind him knelt a squadron of women, breaking stones .

There were moments of farce amid all this. In the middle of the afternoon, four horses were ridden into the square by Mubarak's supporters, along with a camel - yes, a real-life camel that must have been trucked in from the real dead pyramids - their apparently drugged riders hauled off their backs. I found the horses grazing gently beside a tree three hours later. Near the statue of Talaat Harb, a boy sold agwa - a peculiarly Egyptian date-bread delicacy - at 4 pence each - while on the other side of the road, two figures stood, a girl and a boy, holding identical cardboard trays in front of them. The girl's tray was filled with cigarette packets. The boy's tray was filled with stones.

And there were scenes that must have meant personal sorrow and anguish for those who experienced them. There was a tall, muscular man, wounded in the face by a slice of stone, whose legs simply buckled beside a telephone junction box, his face sliced open yet again on the metal. And there was the soldier on an armoured personnel carrier who let the stones of both sides fly past him until he jumped on to the road among Mubarak's enemies, putting his arms around them, tears coursing down his face.

And where, amid all this hatred and bloodshed, was the West? Reporting this shame every day, you suffer from insomnia. Sometime around 3am yesterday, I had watched Lord Blair of Isfahan as he struggled to explain to CNN the need to "partner the process of change" in the Middle East. We had to avoid the "anarchy" of the "most extreme elements". And - my favourite, this - Lord Blair spoke of "a government that is not elected according to the system of democracy that we would espouse". Well, we all know which old man's "democracy" he was referring to.

Street rumour had it that this man - Mitt Romney's "monarch-type figure" - might actually creep out of Egypt on Friday. I'm not so sure. Nor do I really know who won the Battle of Tahrir Square yesterday, though it will not remain long unresolved. At dusk, the stones were still cracking on to the roads, and on to the people. After a while, I started ducking when I saw passing birds.

Robert Fisk

Friday, 4 February 2011

TAHRIR SQUARE

From the House on the Corner, you could watch the arrogance and folly yesterday of those Egyptians who would rid themselves of their "President". It was painful - it always is when the "good guys" play into the hands of their enemies - but the young prodemocracy demonstrators on the Tahrir Square barricades carefully organised their Cairo battle, brought up their lorryloads of rocks in advance, telephoned for reinforcements and then drove the young men of Hosni Mubarak back from the flyovers behind the Egyptian Museum. Maybe it was the anticipation that the old man will go at last today. Maybe it was revenge for the fire-bombing and sniper attacks of the previous night. But as far as the "heroes" of Egypt are concerned, it was not their finest hour.

The House on the Corner was a referee's touchline, a house of late 18th century stucco with outer decorations of stone grapes and wreaths and, in the dank and derelict interior, a broken marble staircase, reeking cloth wallpaper and wooden floors, groaning under bag after bag of stones, all neatly broken into rectangles to hurl at the accursed Mubarakites. It was somehow typical that no one knew the history of this elegant, sad old house on the corner of Mahmoud Basounee Street and Martyr Abdul Menem Riad Square. It even had a missing step on the gloomy second floor with a 30ft drop that immediately brought to mind the staircase in Stevenson's Kidnapped, and its vertiginous drop illuminated by lightning. But from its crumbling balconies, I could watch the battle of stones yesterday and the brave, pathetic attempts of the Egyptian army to contain this miniature civil war, preceding, as it does, another Sabbath day of prayers and anger and - so the protesters happily believe yet again - the very final hours of their accursed dictator.

The soldiers manoeuvred through the field of rocks on the highway below, trying to position two Abrams tanks between the armies of stone throwers, four soldiers waving their hands above their heads - the Egyptian street sign for "cease fire".

It was pathetic. The army needed 4,000 troops here to stop this battle. They had only two tank crews, one officer and four soldiers. And the forces of democracy - yes, we have to introduce a little cynicism here - cared nothing for the forbearance of the soldiers they have been trying to woo. They formed in phalanxes across the road outside the Egyptian Museum, each holding a shield of corrugated iron, many of them shouting "God is Great", a mockery of every Hollywood Roman legion, T-shirts instead of breastplates, clubs and the police night-sticks of Mubarak's hated cops instead of swords. Outside the House on the Corner - cheerfully telling me it belonged to anyone - stood a man holding (believe me, reader) a 7ft steel trident. "I am the devil," he cheerfully roared at me. This was almost as bad as the horse and camel attack by the Mubarakites on Wednesday.

Five soldiers from another unit seized a tray of Molotov cocktails from the house next door - Pepsi bottles are clearly the container of choice - but that constituted the entire military operation to disarm this little freedom militia. "Mubarak will go tomorrow," they screeched; and then, between the two tanks, at their enemies 40ft away, "Your old man is leaving tomorrow." They had been encouraged by all the usual stories; that Barack Obama had at last called time on Mubarak, that the Egyptian army - recipients of an annual $1.3bn aid - was tired of being humiliated by the President, infuriated by the catastrophe that Mubarak had unleashed on his country for a mere nine more months of power.

This may be true. Egyptian friends with relatives among the officer corps tell me that they are desperate for Mubarak to leave, if only to prevent him issuing more orders to the military to open fire on the demonstrators.

But yesterday, it was Mubarak's opponents who opened "fire", and they did so with a now-familiar shock of stones and iron hub-caps. They crashed on to the Mubarak men (and a few women) on the flyover, ricocheted off the top of the tanks. I watched their enemies walk - just a few of them - into the road, the rocks crashing around them, waving their arms above their heads in a sign of peace. It was no use.

By the time I climbed down that dangerous staircase, a lone Muslim imam in a white turban and long red robe and an absolutely incredible - distinguished may be the correct word - neatly combed white beard appeared amid the stones. He held a kind of whip and used it to beat back the demonstrators. He, too, stood his ground as the stones of both sides broke around him. He was from those who would rid themselves of their meddlesome President but he, too, wanted to end the attack. A young protester was hit on the head and collapsed to the ground.

So I scampered over to the two tanks, hiding behind one of them as it traversed its massive gun-barrel 350 degrees, an interesting - if pointless - attempt to show both sides that the army was neutral. The great engines blasted sand and muck into the eyes of the stone throwers, the whining of the electrical turbine controlling the turret adding a state-of-the-art addition to the medieval crack of rocks. And then an officer did jump from the turret of one behemoth and stood with the imam and the lead Mubarakites and also waved his arms above his head. The stones still clanged off the highway signs on the flyover (turn left for Giza) but several middle-aged men held out their arms and touched each other's hands and offered each other cigarettes.

Not for long, of course. Behind them, in the square called Tahrir, men slept beneath the disused concrete Metro vents or on the mouldy grass or in the stairwells of shuttered shops. Many wore bandages round their heads and arms. These wounds would be their badges of heroism in the years to come, proof they fought in the "resistance", that they struggled against dictatorship. Yet not one could I find who knew why this square was so precious to them.

The truth is as symbolic as it is important. It was Haussmann, brought to Egypt by Ismail under notional Ottoman rule, who built the square as an Etoile modelled on its French equivalent, laid over the swamps of the regularly flooded Nile plain. Each road radiated like a star (much to the chagrin, of course, of the present-day Egyptian army). And it was on the Nile side of "Ismailia" square - where the old Hilton is currently under repair - that the British later built their vast military Qasr el-Nil barracks. Across the road still stands the pseudo-Baroque pile in which King Farouk maintained his foreign ministry - an institution which faithfully followed British orders.

And the entire square in front of them, from the garden of the Egyptian Museum to the Nile-side residence of the British ambassador, was banned to all Egyptians. This great space - the area of Tahrir Square today - constituted the forbidden zone, the land of the occupier, the centre of Cairo upon which its people could never set foot. And thus after independence, it became "Freedom" - "Tahrir" - Square; and that is why Mubarak tried to preserve it and that is why those who want to overthrow him must stay there - even if they do not know the reason.

I walked back last night, the people around me hopeful they could endure the next night of fire-bombs, that today will bring the elusive victory. I met a guy called Rami (yes, his real name) who brightly announced that "I think we need a general to take over!" He may get his wish.

As for the House on the Corner, well, Mahmoud Basounee Street is named after an Egyptian poet. And the stonebattered sign for the Martyr Abdul Menem Riad attached to the House on the Corner honours a man whose ghost must surely be watching those two tanks under the flyover. Riad commanded the Jordanian army in the 1967 Six Day War and was killed in an Israeli mortar attack two years later. He was chief of staff of the Egyptian Army.

Robert Fisk

Saturday, 5 February 2011

ENVISIONING A NEW GOVERNMENT

Caged yesterday inside a new army cordon of riot-visored troops and coils of barbed wire - the very protection which Washington had demanded for the protesters of Tahrir Square - the tens of thousands of young Egyptians demanding Hosni Mubarak's overthrow have taken the first concrete political steps to create a new nation to replace the corrupt government which has ruled them for 30 years.

Sitting on filthy pavements, amid the garbage and broken stones of a week of street fighting, they have drawn up a list of 25 political personalities to negotiate for a new political leadership and a new constitution to replace Mubarak's crumbling regime.

They include Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League - himself a trusted Egyptian; the Nobel prize-winner Ahmed Zuwail, an Egyptian-American who has advised President Barack Obama; Mohamed Selim Al-Awa, a professor and author of Islamic studies who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood; and the president of the Wafd party, Said al-Badawi.

Other nominees for the committee, which was supposed to meet the Egyptian Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, within 24 hours, are Nagib Suez, a prominent Cairo businessman (involved in the very mobile phone systems shut down by Mubarak last week); Nabil al-Arabi, an Egyptian UN delegate; and even the heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub, who now lives in Cairo.

The selection - and the makeshift committee of Tahrir Square demonstrators and Facebook and Twitter "electors" - has not been confirmed, but it marks the first serious attempt to turn the massive street protests of the past seven days into a political machine that provides for a future beyond the overthrow of the much-hated President.

The committee's first tasks would be to draw up a new Egyptian constitution and an electoral system that would prevent the president-for-life swindle which Mubarak's fraudulent elections have created. Instead, Egyptian presidents would be limited to two consecutive terms of office, and the presidential term itself would be reduced from six to four years.

But no one involved in this initiative has any doubts of the grim future that awaits them if their brave foray into practical politics fails. There was more sniping into Tahrir Square during the night - an engineer, a lawyer and another young man were killed - and plainclothes police were again discovered in the square. There were further minor stone-throwing battles during the day, despite the vastly increased military presence, and most of the protesters fear that if they leave the square they will immediately be arrested, along with their families, by Mubarak's cruel state security apparatus.

Already, there are dark reports of demonstrators who dared to return home and disappeared. The Egyptian writer Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who is involved in the committee discussions, is fearful for himself. "We're safe as long as we have the square," he said to me yesterday, urging me to publish his name as a symbol of the freedom he demands. "If we lose the square, Mubarak will arrest all the opposition groups - and there will be police rule as never before. That's why we are fighting for our lives."

The state security police now have long lists of names of protesters who have given television interviews or been quoted in newspapers, Facebook postings and tweets.

The protesters have identified growing divisions between the Egyptian army and the thugs of the interior ministry, whose guards exchanged fire with soldiers three days ago as they continued to occupy the building in which basement torture chambers remain undamaged by the street fighting. These were the same rooms of horror to which America's "renditioned" prisoners were sent for "special" treatment at the hands of Mubarak's more sadistic torturers - another favour which bound the Egyptian regime to the United States as a "trusted" ally.

Another young man involved in the committee selections admitted he didn't trust Omar Suleiman, the former spy boss and Israeli-Palestinian negotiator whom Mubarak appointed this week. Suleiman it is, by the way, who has been trying to shuffle responsibility for the entire crisis on to the foreign press - a vicious as well as dishonest way of exercising his first days of power. Yet he has cleverly outmanoeuvred the demonstrators in Tahrir Square by affording them army protection. Indeed, yesterday morning, to the shock of all of us standing on the western side of the square, a convoy of 4x4s with blackened windows suddenly emerged from the gardens of the neighbouring Egyptian Museum, slithered to a halt in front of us and was immediately surrounded by a praetorian guard of red-bereted soldiers and massive - truly gigantic - security guards in shades and holding rifles with telescopic sights. Then, from the middle vehicle emerged the diminutive, bespectacled figure of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the chief of staff of the Egyptian army and a lifelong friend of Mubarak, wearing a soft green military kepi and general's cross-swords insignia on his shoulders.

Here was a visitor to take the breath away, waving briefly to the protesters who crowded the military cordon to witness this extraordinary arrival. The crowd roared. "The Egyptian army is our army," they shouted in unison. "But Mubarak is not ours." It was a message for Tantawi to take back to his friend Mubarak, but his visit was itself a powerful political symbol. However much Mubarak may rave about "foreign hands" behind the demands for his overthrow, and however many lies Suleiman may tell about foreign journalists, Tantawi was showing that the army took its mission to protect the demonstrators seriously. The recent military statement that it would never fire on those who wish to dethrone Mubarak, since their grievances were "legitimate", was authorised by Tantawi.

Hence the demonstrators' belief - however naïve and dangerous - in the integrity of the military.

Crucially missing from the list of figures proposed for the committee are Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN arms inspectors and Nobel laureate, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the "Islamist" spectre which Mubarak and the Israelis always dangled in front of the Americans to persuade them to keep old Mubarak in power. The Brotherhood's insistence in not joining talks until Mubarak's departure - and their support for ElBaradei, whose own faint presidential ambitions (of the "transitional" kind) have not commended themselves to the protesters - effectively excluded them. Suleiman has archly invited the Brotherhood to meet him, knowing that they will not do so until Mubarak has gone.

But al-Awa's proposed presence on the committee - and that of the Islamist intellectual Ahmed Kamel Abu Magd - will ensure that their views are included in any discussions with Suleiman. These talks would also cover civil and constitutional rights and a special clause to allow Suleiman to rule Egypt temporarily because "the President is unable to perform his duties".

Mubarak would be allowed to live privately in Egypt providing he played no part - publicly or covertly - in the political life of the country. He is regarded as a still-fierce opponent who will not hesitate to decapitate the opposition should he hang on to power. "He is one of the old school, like Saddam and Arafat, who in the last two days has shown his true face," another committee supporter said yesterday.

"He is the man behind the attacks on us and the shooting deaths." Mohamed Fahmy knows what this means. His own father has been in exile from Egypt for seven years - after proposing identical protests to those witnessed today to get rid of the Mubarak empire.

Robert Fisk

Sunday, 6 February 2011

MUBARAK IS GOING

The old man is going. The resignation last night of the leadership of the ruling Egyptian National Democratic Party - including Hosni Mubarak's son Gamal - will not appease those who want to claw the President down. But they will get their blood. The whole vast edifice of power which the NDP represented in Egypt is now a mere shell, a propaganda poster with nothing behind it.

The sight of Mubarak's delusory new Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq telling Egyptians yesterday that things were "returning to normal" was enough to prove to the protesters in Tahrir Square - 12 days into their mass demand for the exile of the man who has ruled the country for 30 years - that the regime was made of cardboard. When the head of the army's central command personally pleaded with the tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in the square to go home, they simply howled him down.

In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez outlines the behaviour of a dictator under threat and his psychology of total denial. In his glory days, the autocrat believes he is a national hero. Faced with rebellion, he blames "foreign hands" and "hidden agendas" for this inexplicable revolt against his benevolent but absolute rule. Those fomenting the insurrection are "used and manipulated by foreign powers who hate our country". Then - and here I use a precis of Marquez by the great Egyptian author Alaa Al-Aswany - "the dictator tries to test the limits of the engine, by doing everything except what he should do. He becomes dangerous. After that, he agrees to do anything they want him to do. Then he goes away".

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt appears to be on the cusp of stage four - the final departure. For 30 years he was the "national hero" - participant in the 1973 war, former head of the Egyptian air force, natural successor to Gamal Abdel Nasser as well as Anwar Sadat - and then, faced with his people's increasing fury at his dictatorial rule, his police state and his torturers and the corruption of his regime, he blamed the dark shadow of the country's fictional enemies (al-Qa'ida, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera, CNN, America). We may just have passed the dangerous phase.

Twenty-two lawyers were arrested by Mubarak's state security police on Thursday - for assisting yet more civil rights lawyers who were investigating the arrest and imprisonment of more than 600 Egyptian protesters. The vicious anti-riot cops who were mercifully driven off the streets of Cairo nine days ago and the drugaddled gangs paid by them are part of the wounded and dangerous dictator's remaining weapons. These thugs - who work directly under ministry of interior orders - are the same men now shooting at night into Tahrir Square, killing three men and wounding another 40 early on Friday morning. Mubarak's weepy interview with Christiane Amanpour last week - in which he claimed he didn't want to be president but had to carry on for another seven months to save Egypt from "chaos" - was the first hint that stage four was on the way.

Al-Aswany has taken to romanticising the revolution (if that is what it truly is). He has fallen into the habit of holding literary mornings before joining the insurrectionists, and last week he suggested that a revolution makes a man more honourable - just as falling in love makes a person more dignified. I suggested to him that a lot of people who fall in love spend an inordinate amount of time eliminating their rivals and that I couldn't think of a revolution that hadn't done the same. But his reply, that Egypt had been a liberal society since the days of Muhammad Ali Pasha and was the first Arab country (in the 19th century) to enjoy party politics, did carry conviction.

If Mubarak goes today or later this week, Egyptians will debate why it took so long to rid themselves of this tin-pot dictator. The problem was that under the autocrats - Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak and whomever Washington blesses next - the Egyptian people skipped two generations of maturity. For the first essential task of a dictator is to"infantilise" his people, to transform them into political six-year-olds, obedient to a patriarchal headmaster. They will be given fake newspapers, fake elections, fake ministers and lots of false promises. If they obey, they might even become one of the fake ministers; if they disobey, they will be beaten up in the local police station, or imprisoned in the Tora jail complex or, if persistently violent, hanged.

Only when the power of youth and technology forced this docile Egyptian population to grow up and stage its inevitable revolt did it become evident to all of these previously "infantilised" people that the government was itself composed of children, the eldest of them 83 years old. Yet, by a ghastly process of political osmosis, the dictator had for 30 years also "infantilised" his supposedly mature allies in the West. They bought the line that Mubarak alone remained the iron wall holding back the Islamic tide seeping across Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood - with genuine historical roots in Egypt and every right to enter parliament in a fair election - remains the bogeyman on the lips of every news presenter, although they have not the slightest idea what it is or was.

But now the infantilisation has gone further. Lord Blair of Isfahan popped up on CNN the other night, blustering badly when asked if he would compare Mubarak with Saddam Hussein. Absolutely not, he said. Saddam had impoverished a country that once had a higher standard of living than Belgium - while Mubarak had increased Egypt's GDP by 50 per cent in 10 years.

What Blair should have said was that Saddam killed tens of thousands of his own people while Mubarak has killed/hanged/tortured only a few thousand. But Blair's shirt is now almost as blood-spattered as Saddam's; so dictators, it seems, must now be judged only on their economic record. Obama went one further. Mubarak, he told us early yesterday, was "a proud man, but a great patriot".

This was extraordinary. To make such a claim, it was necessary to believe that the massive evidence of savagery by Egypt's state security police over 30 years, the torture and the vicious treatment of demonstrators over the past 13 days, was unknown to the dictator. Mubarak, in his elderly innocence, may have been aware of corruption and perhaps the odd "excess" - a word we are beginning to hear again in Cairo - but not of the systematic abuse of human rights, the falsity of every election.

This is the old Russian fairy tale. The tsar is a great father figure, a revered and perfect leader. It's just that he does not know what his underlings are doing. He doesn't realise how badly the serfs are treated. If only someone would tell him the truth, he would end injustice. The tsar's servants, of course, connived at this.

But Mubarak was not ignorant of the injustice of his regime. He survived by repression and threats and false elections. He always had. Like Sadat. Like Nasser who - according to the testimony of one of his victims who was a friend of mine - permitted his torturers to dangle prisoners over vats of boiling faeces and gently dunk them in it. Over 30 years, successive US ambassadors have informed Mubarak of the cruelties perpetrated in his name. Occasionally, Mubarak would express surprise and once promised to end police brutality, but nothing ever changed. The tsar fully approved of what his secret policemen were doing.

Thus, when David Cameron announced that "if" the authorities were behind the violence in Egypt, it would be "absolutely unacceptable" - a threat that naturally had them shaking in their shoes - the word "if" was a lie. Cameron, unless he doesn't bother to read the Foreign Office briefings on Mubarak, is well aware that the old man was a third-rate dictator who employed violence to stay in power.

The demonstrators in Cairo and Alexandria and Port Said, of course, are nonetheless entering a period of great fear. Their "Day of Departure" on Friday - predicated on the idea that if they really believed Mubarak would leave last week, he would somehow follow the will of the people - turned yesterday into the "Day of Disillusion".

They are now constructing a committee of economists, intellectuals, "honest" politicians to negotiate with Vice-President Omar Suleiman - without apparently realising that Suleiman is the next safepair-of-hands general to be approved by the Americans, that Suleiman is a ruthless man who will not hesitate to use the same state security police as Mubarak relied upon to eliminate the state's enemies in Tahrir Square.

Betrayal always follows a successful revolution. And this may yet come to pass. The dark cynicism of the regime remains. Many pro-democracy demonstrators have noticed a strange phenomenon. In the months before the protests broke out on 25 January, a series of attacks on Coptic Christians and their churches spread across Egypt. The Pope called for the protection of Egypt's 10 per cent Christians. The West was appalled. Mubarak blamed it all on the familiar "foreign hand". But then after 25 January, not a hair of a Coptic head has been harmed. Why? Because the perpetrators had other violent missions to perform?

When Mubarak goes, terrible truths will be revealed. The world, as they say, waits. But none wait more attentively, more bravely, more fearfully than the young men and women in Tahrir Square. If they are truly on the edge of victory, they are safe. If they are not, there will come the midnight knock on many a door.

Robert Fisk

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

HANGING ON TO POWER

Blood turns brown with age. Revolutions do not. Vile rags now hang in a corner of the square, the last clothes worn by the martyrs of Tahrir: a doctor, a lawyer among them, a young woman, their pictures strewn above the crowds, the fabric of the T-shirts and trousers stained the colour of mud. But yesterday, the people honoured their dead in their tens of thousands for the largest protest march ever against President Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, a sweating, pushing, shouting, weeping, joyful people, impatient, fearful that the world may forget their courage and their sacrifice.

It took three hours to force our way into the square, two hours to plunge through a sea of human bodies to leave. High above us, a ghastly photomontage flapped in the wind: Hosni Mubarak's head superimposed upon the terrible picture of Saddam Hussein with a noose round his neck. Uprisings don't follow timetables. And Mubarak will search for some revenge for yesterday's renewed explosion of anger and frustration at his 30-year rule. For two days, his new back-to-work government had tried to portray Egypt as a nation slipping back into its old, autocratic torpor. Gas stations open, a series of obligatory traffic jams, banks handing out money - albeit in suitably small amounts - shops gingerly doing business, ministers sitting to attention on state television as the man who would remain king for another five months lectured them on the need to bring order out of chaos - his only stated reason for hanging grimly to power. But Issam Etman proved him wrong.

Shoved and battered by the thousands around him, he carried his five-year- old daughter Hadiga on his shoulders. "I am here for my daughter," he shouted above the protest. "It is for her freedom that I want Mubarak to go. I am not poor. I run a transport company and a gas station. Everything is shut now and I'm suffering, but I don't care. I am paying my staff from my own pocket. This is about freedom. Anything is worth that."

And all the while, the little girl sat on Issam Etman's shoulders and stared at the epic crowds in wonderment; no Harry Potter extravaganza would match this. Many of the protesters - so many were flocking to the square yesterday evening that the protest site had overflowed onto the Nile river bridges and the other squares of central Cairo - had come for the first time. The soldiers of Egypt's Third Army must have been outnumbered 40,000 to one and they sat meekly on their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, smiling nervously as old men and youths and young women sat around their tank tracks, sleeping on the armour, heads on the great steel wheels; a military force turned to impotence by an army of dissent. Many said they had come because they were frightened; because they feared the world was losing interest in their struggle, because Mubarak had not yet left his palace, because the crowds had grown smaller in recent days, because some of the camera crews had left for other tragedies and other dictatorships, because the smell of betrayal was in the air. If the Republic of Tahrir dries up, then the national awakening is over. But yesterday proved that the revolution is alive.