中译：“伦敦书评”关于埃及的文章
孙捷、彭玉玲
穆巴拉克之后
人民起义是澄清事件，而在埃及，与之相伴的是反抗。穆巴拉克政权——或者延续它的后穆巴拉克政权，也许会在这次挑战中生存下来，但全面控制国家的幻想是破灭了。解放广场的抗议事件向穆巴拉克和自1952年自由军官政变而上台统治埃及的军事政权，传递了一个信息；向那些尤其依靠西方资助的政权独裁者，向资助多年后却一直感叹在穆斯林世界缺乏民主，如今对一个出现在阿拉伯世界最大国家的民主派运动却报以不安、怕和敌视的复杂回应的华盛顿、特拉维夫之流传递了一个信息。如果这是“新中东的分娩阵痛”，那么它们也完全不同于康多莉扎·赖斯在2006年夏天以色列对黎巴嫩的战争期间辩称的。
第一个破灭的幻想是关于埃及人只是被动接受的神话，它已经产生强大的力量控制埃及人。“我们所有人只是等待某人来为我们工作，”我去年去开罗做报道时，一个埃及记者如是说（LRB，2010年5月27日）。尽管自二十世纪70年代以来社会运动不断扩散，群众反抗政权的主张对埃及来说，还是不可思议的。贾拉尔·阿明，埃及著名的社会学家，在最近半岛电视台的纪录片中声称“埃及人并非革命的民族”，这一观点，很少有人会不认同。直到愤怒日（1月25日）那天，许多埃及人——包括一定数量的民主派改革者，只为了从总统的儿子贾迈勒·穆巴拉克手中拯救自己，听从于看守政权的情报长官奥马尔·苏莱曼。起义带来的第一个震惊是埃及人自己，在反抗的最初几天里，2月1日解放广场就汇聚了百万人游行，他们发现自己可以掌握自己的命运，克服对警察的恐惧，集体组织起来反抗这个政权。当他们品尝到权力的滋味时，他们要自己来解决政权的更替。
穆巴拉克政权并非是唯一被反抗运动动摇的阿拉伯政府：这一余震在也门、约旦、约旦河西岸地区也感受得到，在那里，马哈茂德阿巴斯的警察部队镇压了一个呼应埃及民主派的示威游行。我们在开罗正目睹的的现象是新旧共存。它不仅是一个伊斯兰起义，而且是一个基础广泛、架构在世俗宗教之上的社会运动，一个21世纪版本的阿拉伯民族主义，过去曾认为它已是强弩之末。尽管埃及的反抗者找来了一个临时的名义领袖穆罕默德·巴拉迪，该运动在很大程度上是群龙无首，与之形成鲜明对比的是阿拉伯民族主义的英雄时代，占主导地位的专制人物纳赛尔或布迈丁。
这始于突尼斯并蔓延至埃及的反抗运动是一场阿尔及利亚人称hogra（即“鄙视”）的反抗斗争，是一场对专制、酷刑、腐败、失业和不平，及尊重美国的战略议程——阿拉伯世界无处不在的避雷针，感到愤怒而引发的社会反抗运动。毫不奇怪，美国官员所担心的是这场斗争会在其他的友好国家爆发。当约翰·克里，这位曾坦率要求穆巴拉克下台的美国官员，被询问是否期望类似的动乱出现在约旦时，他驳回了这一想法，说“约旦的阿布杜拉国王是非常睿智、有思想、敏感、同他的人民有密切联系的人。在那里，君主制是非常受尊重，甚至崇敬”。
多年来，阿拉伯的统治者告知他们的西方观众，不用担心他们的人民，就好像他们是听话的、有时不守规矩的孩子，这些观众们很高兴地跟进这个建议。埃及人没有任何可担心的地方，自从法老时代起，埃及人就已经习惯了生活在专制下。希拉里·克林顿指出，穆巴拉克可能被埃及人所厌恶，但他仍然是我们在开罗这个家庭的人（克林顿和穆巴拉克家庭已彼此接近多年）。只要他向跨国公司开放经济，实现高增长率，兑现他的外交政策承诺——允许美国军舰迅速通过苏伊士运河，作为非常规引渡方案的一部分，允许中央情报局绑架、审问激进的伊斯兰主义者，维护与以色列的和平，围困加沙，反对由伊朗领导的抵抗，美国的军事援助将继续以一年130亿美元的速度流入埃及。
一个正面的委婉用语已经树立，掩盖了穆巴拉克政权的本质，而且新闻报道也加强这方面的内容。阅读一下西方尤其美国，在最近镇压前的报纸，人们几乎无法知晓埃及国内的不满程度。穆巴拉克通常被描述成一个“专制”但“温和”和“负责”的领导者，几乎从不认为是一个独裁主义者。大众对酷刑的愤怒——及以上政权的舒适与以色列的关系,很少有人讨论。但是，当警方袭击了整个埃及的和平示威者，特别是在穆巴拉克的暴徒——用手榴弹、刀和汽油炸弹武装后，穿着亲穆巴拉克T恤衫，似乎是为这个场合而设计的，骑着骆驼和马在2月2日冲过解放广场之后，政权的真面目露出来了：粗鲁、野蛮、一个不知情的东方的滑稽模仿。那些不以对埃及坦率著称的新闻报纸开始以一个新的、生硬的方式来描述这些事。
埃及的危机对奥巴马政府而言也是一场危机。不像中东欧的“颜色”革命，黎巴嫩反抗叙利亚军队，或者是伊朗的绿色运动那样，埃及的起义针对的是一个信任的老盟友,而不是一个敌人。支持突尼斯的抗议者，对奥巴马政府非常划算，因为不需任何付出。而埃及则不同。因为埃及是美国大中东战略的一个支柱，尤其是“中东和平进程’”的支柱，处理埃及问题就麻烦的多了。直到上月末,美国还毫不犹豫地称穆巴拉克为朋友,或极尽礼仪地拜访埃及军政权的所有成员。但是当埃及人公开反抗穆巴拉克政权时，美国政府突然对它在在开罗的老朋友变得守口如瓶起来。一个新的话题迅速出现。一些西方官员没有赶上的转变：美国副总统拜登被广泛嘲笑，他说穆巴拉克不是一个独裁者，因为他同以色列友好；托尼·布莱尔赞美他“非常有勇气，有力量”——昨天的消息。但当布莱尔说，埃及在过渡期内需要被“管理”—想必由西方来管理，以免伤害“和平进程”，他是想公开说华盛顿相信什么。
奥巴马无法很好的反对抗议者，他们所体现的价值观，在他的开罗讲话，他声称美国将一如既往地支持。但美国政府明确不希望穆巴拉克被驱逐出埃及政府，像阿卜杜拉·本在突尼斯被驱逐那样。相反，穆巴拉克应被免职，以避免民众革命取代这个对美、以色列友好的政权，从而失去埃及。尽管奥巴马向穆巴拉克施压，劝其退出,但他还拒绝支持抗议者,依然对埃及军方以赞誉,并坚持华盛顿将不干涉谁来统治埃及这一埃及内部事务。但在民主力量眼中，美国很难称之为中立，射击他们的催泪瓦斯罐上标“美国制造”，f-16在天空监测他们。在埃及的民主力量不是仅藐视穆巴拉克而是藐视美国，呼吁更多的内容而不是仅仅在军事统治下的“管理”过渡。穆巴拉克政权被奥巴马政府在2月1日“这个过渡期必须现在就开始”，但强调要“顺利交接” 的声明所激怒，暗示美国首选的是连续性，或是由军队的背叛者政变：毕竟，任何“人民力量”的表达都不被允许破坏岌岌可危的既得利益。被派去开罗传递华盛顿意见的人对穆巴拉克政权而言是为老朋友：Frank G. Wisner,弗兰克·威斯纳克，前驻埃及大使，并为埃及军队在华盛顿做说客。
穆巴拉克下台，并非是被埃及民众所赶下台的，他在他最后的执政时光里，是被华盛顿和特拉维夫赶下台的。穆巴拉克，和奥马尔·苏莱曼，现在过渡时期副总统，一直与以色列密切合作，从加沙封锁到情报收集。他们允许以色列军舰到苏伊士运河防止武器从苏丹走私到加沙，他们竭尽全力在法塔赫和哈马斯之间挑拨。埃及民众对这种亲密的合作非常清楚，并感到惭愧:民主化可能会结束这种合作。一个民主政府不可能废除与以色列签订的和平协议,甚至一些穆斯林兄弟会的领导人都明确表示,他们将会尊重它。然而埃及人外交政策将在开罗制定而非在华盛顿，特拉维夫了，和平将变得更冰冷。一个民主政府在开罗将不得不考虑公众舆论，就像在土耳其埃尔多安政府做的那样，一个前美国附庸国（与埃及形成鲜明对比）越过了美国的监管，在伊斯兰政府领导下，建立过渡民主时期，追求一个独立的、为穆斯林世界所广泛欣赏的外交政策。如果埃及成为了一个民主国家，它会努力实现巴勒斯坦的的统一，解除对加沙的封锁，改善同伊朗、真主党的关系：这对以色列来说，不蒂是一个梦魇。
差不多从示威活动开始时起,世界上大部分人对于解放广场的示威活动表示支持，本雅明·内塔尼亚胡及其他高级以色列官员则敦促西方政治家停止批评穆巴拉克,他们引发了对伊朗伊斯兰革命的恐惧。多年来，以色列曾表示它可能很难期望在这样一个危险的不民主的地区做出让步。但是作为对穆巴拉克政府出口增长作为要求，以色列的高官和评论员开始谈论阿拉伯世界的民主，仿佛它构成了对犹太国的另一个生存威胁。“如果，次日[埃及]选举，我们有一个极端宗教独裁，民主选举有什么好处？”佩雷斯说到，而卡察夫阿伦斯，前国防部长，在以色列国土报想知道是否以色列仅仅和像穆巴拉克那样的独裁者维持和平。正如一位评论家在Yediot Ahronot以色列说，以色列已经“超越恐惧：民主的恐惧。不在这里，在周边国家。”
以色列对埃及民主进程的担心立刻得到他在美国的支持者的回应。华盛顿近东政策研究所的David Makovsky担心：“1989年的柏林革命什么时候会变成1979年的伊朗革命。”以色列将会发现他就像北方的真主党，西方的哈马斯和南部的穆斯林兄弟党。为避免这种情况的发生，他说，在这个“由埃及民间社会建设性力量带来的”过渡时期，埃及最好在奥马尔·苏莱曼的军事政权率领下。这些“建设性力量”，对于Malcolm Hoenlein, 美国主要犹太人组织主席会议的执行副总裁，并不包括被他称为“伊朗走狗”的艾尔·巴拉迪。（艾尔·巴拉迪赢得了以色列游说者的敌意，因为他加沙的封锁是“每个阿拉伯人，每个埃及人，每个人前额的耻辱标志”，并且反对伊拉克和伊朗的军事对抗。）“中东的情况似乎从不好变得更加糟糕”，理查德·科恩，华盛顿邮报的专栏作家，警告说：
“一个民主的埃及的梦想一定会造就出一场梦魇…下一届埃及政府—很可能是由伊斯兰主义者组成。在这一情况下，同以色列缔结的和平将废除，暴民将在街头聚集，反对西式民主。…我在意的是民主价值观，他们甚至不如哪些没有民主传统或尊重少数民族权利的社会，我们希望埃及是我们与自己一致的埃及。但,目前存在着一种认同危机。我们不再是他们了。”
正如我写的那样，科恩没有多少担忧。一个不同的恶梦看来正在埃及展开了：一个残酷镇压群众民主运动的政权执意保留权力，并相信它的靠山将给予时间做这项工作。西方政府和阿拉伯威权体制之间隐藏的共谋完全显现出来了。抗议者被baltagiya 雇佣的暴徒所追打，反对派的领袖和外国记者被逮捕。我刚得知，艾哈迈德·塞夫,一个我去年在开罗采访的人权律师,和其他几位同事被当局指控从事服务于伊朗的间谍活动而受到监禁。
2月3日,星期四晚上,奥马尔·苏莱曼似乎仍然在负责。这位严酷、谈吐圆滑的人把自己作为这个国家的救主在接受国家电视台采访时说，政权要极力把埃及从“混乱”中拯救出来，把埃及从变为”伊朗、哈马斯代理人的险恶阴谋中拉出来。星期三在解放广场发生的暴民暴力事件将被调查，他说（他拒绝任何政府责任），并且改革将继续，但首先示威者必须回家，等待调查的结果。说完这些混合着承诺和威胁的话，苏莱曼成为那一刻最令人瞩目的人。据报道,那天晚上,奥巴马政府草拟了穆巴拉克立即下台和过渡政府在苏莱曼——他们的情报合作首脑控制下的的计划。
然而，穆巴拉克，极不友好地拒绝了他的雇主提出的合作要求。他想退休。他告诉 Christiane Amanpour，他已厌倦了，但他担心他的迅速退出会造成大的混乱。实际上，他待在办公室的时间越长,我们可能会看到的暴力更多。但即使苏莱曼代替他,那也并非是一个“顺利的权力交接”——或一个和平交接,因为埃及的民主力量想要的不是，没有穆巴拉克的穆巴拉克主义者政权，他们若是为了得到情报头子的统治，就完全不必牺牲数以百计人的生命了。
从奥巴马政府，我们所能得到的是，对镇压的批评，和平的祈祷，以及呼吁双方保持克制。仿佛在苏莱曼的军政权和广大手无寸铁的群众之间，双方的力量是平衡的。但实际上苏莱曼将从中获得不菲的收益。不像巴拉迪，华盛顿确信苏莱曼是一位能解决问题的主。在解放广场欢歌的民众们很不幸，他们生活在一个与以色列交界的国家，他们不得不与过去三十年来一直向美国提供必不可少服务的军政权展开斗争。他们已完全意识到这一点。他们知道，有可能西方会让埃及社会运动终止，部分原因是“我们不是他们”,并且,我们不能给他们，我们所拥有的，这一信念。但尽管面临如此不利，埃及民众正继续斗争。
附：原文：
After Mubarak
Popular uprisings are clarifying events, and so it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all the region”s autocrats, particularly those supported by the West, and to Washington and Tel Aviv, which, after spending years lamenting the lack of democracy in the Muslim world, have responded with a mixture of trepidation, fear and hostility to the emergence of a pro-democracy movement in the Arab world’s largest country. If these are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
The first illusion to crumble was the myth of Egyptian passivity, a myth that had exerted a powerful hold over Egyptians. ‘We’re all just waiting for someone to do the job for us,’ an Egyptian journalist said to me when I reported from Cairo last year (LRB, 27 May 2010); despite the proliferation of social movements since the 1970s, the notion of a mass revolt against the regime was inconceivable to her. When Galal Amin, a popular Egyptian sociologist, remarked that ‘Egyptians are not a revolutionary nation’ in a recent al-Jazeera documentary, few would have disagreed. And until the Day of Rage on 25 January many Egyptians – including a number of liberal reformers – would have resigned themselves to a caretaker regime led by the intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, if only to save themselves from the president’s son Gamal Mubarak. The first to be surprised by the uprising were the Egyptians themselves, who – in the lyrical early days of the revolt, culminating in the ‘million-man march’ on Tahrir Square on 1 February – discovered that they were capable of taking matters into their own hands, of overcoming their fear of the police and collectively organising against the regime. And as they acquired a thrilling sense of their own power, they would settle only for the regime’s removal.
The Mubarak regime was not the only Arab government to be shaken by the protests: the reverberations were soon felt in Yemen and Jordan, and in the West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas’s police cracked down on a march called in solidarity with Egypt’s pro-democracy forces. What we’re seeing in Cairo is both new and old: not an Islamist revolt but a broad-based social movement bridging the secular-religious divide, a 21st-century version of the Arab nationalism that had for many years seemed a spent force. And though the Egyptian protests have found a provisional figurehead in Mohammed ElBaradei, the movement is largely leaderless, in striking contrast to the heroic age of Arab nationalism, dominated by charismatic, authoritarian figures like Nasser and Boumedienne.
The revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt is a struggle against what Algerians call hogra, ‘contempt’, a struggle fed by anger over authoritarian rule, torture, corruption, unemployment and inequality, and – a lightning rod everywhere in the Arab world – deference to the US strategic agenda. Not surprisingly, US officials are nervous that revolts could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even revered.’
For years, Arab rulers told their Western patrons not to worry about their subjects, as though they were obedient, if sometimes unruly children, and these patrons were only too happy to follow this advice. There was nothing to fear from the Egyptians, accustomed as they were to despotism since the Pharaonic age. Mubarak might be hated by them, but he was our man in Cairo: ‘family’, as Hillary Clinton put it. (The Clinton and Mubarak families have been close for years.) So long as he opened the economy to multinationals, achieved high growth rates and honoured his foreign policy commitments – allowing swift passage for US warships through the Suez Canal, interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as part of the extraordinary rendition programme, maintaining the peace with Israel, tightening the siege of Gaza, opposing the ‘resistance’ front led by Iran – American military aid would continue to flow, at a rate of $1.3 billion a year.
A facade of euphemism had to be erected to disguise the nature of Mubarak’s regime, and press accounts seemed to bolster it. Reading Western – particularly American – newspapers before the recent crackdown, one would hardly have known the degree of discontent in Egypt. Mubarak was typically described as an ‘authoritarian’ but ‘moderate’ and ‘responsible’ leader, almost never as a dictator. Popular anger over torture – and over the regime’s cosy relations with Israel – was rarely discussed. But when the police attacked peaceful protesters throughout Egypt, and especially after Mubarak’s thugs – armed with grenades, knives and petrol bombs, some wearing pro-Mubarak T-shirts that seemed to have been designed for the occasion – charged through Tahrir Square on 2 February on horses and camels, the regime’s face was revealed: coarse, brutal, an unwitting parody of Orientalist clichés. Newspapers not known for their candour about Egypt began to describe it with a new, hard clarity.
The crisis in Egypt has also been a crisis for the Obama administration. Unlike the ‘colour’ revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Lebanese protests against Syrian troops or the Green Movement in Iran, the uprising in Egypt targeted an old and trusted ally, not an enemy. Coming out in support of the Tunisian protesters made the Obama administration feel good, but it required no sacrifice. Egypt, a pillar of US strategy in the greater Middle East, particularly in the ‘peace process’, was a harder case. Until late January, the US did not hesitate to call Mubarak a friend, or to extend all courtesies to visiting members of the Egyptian military. But when Egyptians went into open revolt, the US was suddenly very tight-lipped about its old friend in Cairo. A new discourse was rapidly invented. Some Western officials failed to catch on to the shift: Joe Biden was widely ridiculed for saying that Mubarak couldn’t be a dictator because he was friendly with Israel; Tony Blair praised him as ‘immensely courageous and a force for good’ – yesterday’s message. But when Blair said that Egypt’s transition had to be ‘managed’ – presumably by the West – so as not to jeopardise the ‘peace process’, he was only saying openly what Washington believed.
Obama couldn’t very well come out against the protesters; they embodied the values which, in his Cairo speech, he claimed the United States would always support. But the administration clearly didn’t want Mubarak to be chased out of office, as Zine Abedine Ben-Ali of Tunisia had been. Instead, he had to be eased out so that a popular revolution could be averted, and a regime friendly to the US and Israel preserved: otherwise Egypt would be ‘lost’. And so, even as Obama increased the pressure on Mubarak to stand down, he refused to side with the demonstrators, reserved his highest praise for the military, and insisted that Washington would not interfere in the question of who rules Egypt. But in the eyes of the demonstrators, the US could hardly pretend to be neutral: the tear gas canisters fired at them were labelled ‘Made in America’, as were the F-16s monitoring them from the sky. In calling for something more than a ‘managed’ transition under military rule, the demonstrators in Egypt were defying not just Mubarak but the US. The Mubarak regime was infuriated by Obama’s statement on 1 February that the transition ‘must begin now’, but the emphasis on an ‘orderly transition’ was a hint that the US preferred continuity, or perhaps a soft coup by defectors in the army: there were, after all, shared interests at stake which no expression of ‘people power’ could be permitted to sabotage. The man who was sent to Cairo to deliver Washington’s message to Mubarak was an old friend: Frank G. Wisner, the former ambassador to Egypt and a lobbyist in DC for the Egyptian military.
Mubarak, when he stands down, is not likely to be missed by many people in Egypt, where he has pledged to spend his last days, but he will be missed in Washington and, above all, in Tel Aviv. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman, now the interim vice president, worked closely with Israel on everything from the Gaza blockade to intelligence-gathering; they allowed Israeli warships into the Suez Canal to prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza from Sudan, and did their best to stir up tensions between Fatah and Hamas. The Egyptian public is well aware of this intimate collaboration, and ashamed of it: democratisation could spell its end. A democratic government isn”t likely to abolish the peace treaty with Israel – even some of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have said they would respect it. But Egyptian foreign policy would be set in Cairo rather than in Washington and Tel Aviv, and the cold peace would grow colder. A democratic government in Cairo would have to take public opinion into account, much as Erdogan”s government does in Turkey: another former US client state but one that, in marked contrast to Egypt, has escaped American tutelage, made the transition to democracy under an Islamist government, and pursued an independent foreign policy that is widely admired in the Muslim world. If Egypt became a democracy, it might work to achieve Palestinian unity, open up the crossing from Gaza and improve relations with Iran and Hizbullah: shifts which would be anathema to Israel.
Almost from the moment the demonstrations began, while much of the world rejoiced at the scenes in Tahrir Square, Binyamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli officials were urging Western politicians to stop criticising Mubarak, and raising fears of an Iranian-style revolution. For years, Israel had said it could hardly be expected to make concessions in such a dangerously undemocratic region. But as calls for Mubarak”s exit grew, Israeli officials and commentators began to talk about Arab democracy as if it constituted another existential threat to the Jewish state. ‘If, the day after elections [in Egypt], we have an extremist religious dictatorship, what good are democratic elections?” Shimon Peres asked, while Moshe Arens, the former defence minister, wondered in Haaretz whether Israel could make peace only with dictators like Mubarak. As one Israeli commentator wrote in Yediot Ahronot, Israel has been ‘overtaken by fear: the fear of democracy. Not here, in neighbouring countries.”
Israel”s fears of Egyptian democracy were instantly echoed by its supporters in the US. David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy worried that ‘what starts as a Berlin revolution of 1989 morphs into a Tehran revolution of 1979.” Israel would then find itself with a Hizbullah-led government to the north, Hamas to the west and the Muslim Brothers to the south. To stave off such a scenario, he said, Egypt would be better off under a military regime led by Omar Suleiman during a transition that ‘brings in constructive forces of Egyptian civil society”. These ‘constructive forces”, according to Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, would not include ElBaradei, whom he attacked as a ‘stooge of Iran”. (ElBaradei earned the enmity of the Israel lobby for denouncing the Gaza blockade as a ‘brand of shame on the forehead of every Arab, every Egyptian and every human being”, and for opposing military confrontation with Iraq and Iran.) ‘Things are about to go from bad to worse in the Middle East,” Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, warned:
The dream of a democratic Egypt is sure to produce a nightmare … The next Egyptian government – or the one after – might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval … I care about democratic values, but they are worse than useless in societies that have no tradition or respect for minority rights. What we want for Egypt is what we have ourselves. This, though, is an identity crisis. We are not them.
As I write, Cohen has little to fear. A different kind of nightmare appears to be unfolding in Egypt: the brutal repression of a mass movement for democracy by a regime bent on staying in power, and confident that its backers will give it time to do the job. Seldom has the hidden complicity between Western governments and Arab authoritarianism been so starkly revealed. Protesters are being savagely beaten by the baltagiya – paid thugs – and opposition figures and foreign journalists have been arrested. I have just learned that Ahmed Seif, a human rights lawyer I interviewed last year in Cairo, has been jailed along with several other colleagues, accused of spying for Iran.
By 3 February, Thursday evening, Omar Suleiman seemed to be in charge. A hard, smooth-talking man, he cast himself as a national saviour in an interview on state television, defending Egypt from the ‘chaos” the regime has done its best to encourage, and from a sinister conspiracy to destabilise the country on the part of ‘Iranian and Hamas agents”, with help from al-Jazeera. Wednesday”s mob violence in Tahrir Square would be investigated, he said (he denied any government responsibility), and the ‘reform” process would go forward, but first demonstrators must go home – or face the consequences. With this grimly calibrated mix of promises and threats, Suleiman became the man of the hour: later that evening it was reported that the Obama administration was drafting plans for Mubarak”s immediate removal and a transitional government under his long-serving intelligence chief.
Mubarak, however, gracelessly refused to co-operate with the patrons who now find him such an embarrassment. He wanted to retire, he told Christiane Amanpour, he was ‘fed up”, but feared that his rapid departure would lead to ‘chaos”. The longer he remains in office, the more violence we”re likely to see. But even if Suleiman replaces him, it won”t be an ‘orderly transition” – or a peaceful one – because Egypt”s pro-democracy forces want something better than Mubarakism without Mubarak; they have not sacrificed hundreds of lives in order to be ruled by the head of intelligence.
From the Obama administration we can expect criticisms of the crackdown, prayers for peace, and more calls for ‘restraint” on ‘both sides” – as if there were symmetry between unarmed protesters and the military regime – but Suleiman will be given the benefit of the doubt. Unlike ElBaradei, he”s a man Washington knows it can deal with. The men and women congregating in Tahrir Square have the misfortune to live in a country that shares a border with Israel, and to be fighting a regime that for the last three decades has provided indispensable services to the US. They are well aware of this. They know that if the West allows the Egyptian movement to be crushed, it will be, in part, because of the conviction that ‘we are not them,” and that we can”t allow them to have what we have. Despite the enormous odds, they continue to fight.
4 February
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