LOUD AND prolonged cheers swept Cairos Tahrir Square as the emotional crowds, many of whom have been there for two long weeks, were told by a senior army officer that the country’s hated President Mubarak was about to step down. Or so it appeared. For days it has been clear that the Egyptian revolution, so close to tipping point, had passed a point of no return.
The masses, the impoverished, unemployed youth and middle-class students, professionals and workers, had lost their fear of the brutal secret police and the thuggish Mubarak loyalists whom they fought heroically at the price of some 300 lives. They would no longer be cowed, there was no going back.
An increasingly paralysed Mubarak had no answer. Fearful that army discipline would crumble and it would join the ranks of the opposition, the regime stayed the hand of the once-loyal officer class whose proxies have ruled for six decades and which is so deeply implicated in the corrupt Mubarak regime over 30 years. Concessions were offered, constitutional reforms promised, wages raised, tentative talks engaged – all welcome, but all signs of weakness, evidence in the eyes of the still-growing crowds that the day would soon be theirs.
For a while last night, it was beginning to look that way. The army appeared to have come off the fence and demonstrators were promised that “all” of their demands would be met. The army said it would protect them. The demonstrators clearly understood that what all that meant was that Mubarak would go, and go last night, and there was huge disappointment and anger when he made clear it was his intention simply to pass minimal powers to vice-president Omar Suleiman. No question of abandoning emergency laws. No question of standing aside.
“Tomorrow we go to the palace,” the crowds chanted in response. The protests will go on, almost certainly escalating again in scale today, again a day of prayers and mass mobilisation.
Mubarak, who has long lost the confidence of his own people, appears to be in serious denial. His support base in the army is clearly evaporating, and he is surrounded only by a dwindling band of sycophants. Last night all he did was postpone the inevitable, perhaps a few days.
Egypt’s prevaricating friends internationally, notably the US, whose ambivalence until now over the removal of the dictator has been noted by the Egyptian people, will now have to make clear to the army that it has no option but to embrace a new dispensation and tell Mubarak to go. President Obama’s preoccupation with an “orderly transition” will be seen as a euphemism for support for continued military rule unless he explicitly conditions continued US aid to the military, running at $1.3 billion a year, on army support for change.
US concern that a new Egypt might no longer be the dependable ally in the Middle East peace process has for too long inhibited its support for democracy. But the cat is now out of the bag. Egypt’s policy can no longer be guaranteed by a lame-duck dictator. Obama’s only hope lies in placing the US firmly on the side of history.