[Leaders of the protest movement, including both its youthful members and Brotherhood officials, denounced Mr. Suleiman’s portrayal of the meeting as a political ploy intended to suggest that some in their ranks were collaborating.]
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Vice President Omar Suleiman of Egypt, center back, met with leaders of Egyptian parties and the Muslim brotherhood leadership in Cairo on Sunday. More Photos » |
The government announced that the transition had begun with a meeting between Vice President Omar Suleiman and two representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group the Egyptian government has sought to repress for many years as a threat to stability. They met as part of a group of about 50 prominent Egyptians and opposition figures, including officials of the small, recognized opposition parties, as well as a handful of young people who helped start the protest movement.
While both sides acknowledged the meeting as unprecedented, its significance quickly became another skirmish in the battle between the president and the protesters. Mr. Suleiman released a statement — widely reported on state television and instantly a focal point in Washington — declaring that the meeting had produced a “consensus” about a path to reform, including the promise to form a committee to recommend constitutional changes by early March. The other elements echoed pledges Mr. Mubarak had already made, including a limit on how many terms a president can serve.
Leaders of the protest movement, including both its youthful members and Brotherhood officials, denounced Mr. Suleiman’s portrayal of the meeting as a political ploy intended to suggest that some in their ranks were collaborating.
Though the movement has only a loose leadership, it has coalesced around a unified set of demands, centered on Mr. Mubarak’s resignation, but also including the dissolution of one-party rule and revamping the Constitution that protected it, and Mr. Suleiman gave no ground on any of those demands.
“We did not come out with results,” said Mohamed Morsy, a Brotherhood leader who attended, while others explained that the Brotherhood had attended only to reiterate its demands and show openness to dialogue.
The standoff over the meeting underscored the conflicting narratives about the next chapter of the revolt that has shaken Egypt and the wider Arab world.
Each side claimed that it had emerged from the last 12 days as a survivor — unarmed protesters repulsed assaults first by police officers in riot gear and then by pro-Mubarak gangs in plain clothes, but Mr. Mubarak still emerged from a week of demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets with his position and his Western support still intact. And while the government hailed what it called a return to normalcy, the protesters vowed that there was no turning back.
To rebut Mr. Suleiman’s claims of consensus, a group of young organizers whose Facebook page fomented the revolt — a half-dozen scruffy-looking doctors, lawyers and other professionals in their early 30s — stepped forward publicly for the first time. At least three had been released just the night before from three days of extra-legal detention at the hands of Mr. Mubarak’s police, and they vowed to escalate their movement. “The government played all the dirty games that they had, and the people persisted,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon. “We are betting on the people.”
More than 100,000 turned out again on Sunday in the capital’s central Tahrir Square — more than expected as the work week resumed here. And some of the movement’s young organizers, who were busy meeting to organize their many small groups into a unified structure, said they were considering more large-scale demonstrations in other cities, strikes or acts of civil disobedience like surrounding the state television headquarters.
Zyad Elelaiwy, 32, a lawyer who is one of the online organizers and a member of the umbrella opposition group founded by Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, acknowledged a generational divide in the movement. Some older leaders — especially from the recognized parties — were tempted to negotiate with Mr. Suleiman, he said, but the young organizers determined to hold out for sweeping change.
“They are more close to negotiating, but they don’t have access to the street,” Mr. Elelaiwy said. “The people know us. They don’t know them.”
Mr. ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest opposition group, have committed to follow the lead of the young organizers, he said.
Many of the protesters who gathered in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protests, vented anger at reports that the United States was supporting the idea of a negotiated transition undertaken by Mr. Suleiman while Mr. Mubarak remained in power. “The extremists aren’t here in Egypt, but they will be if the United States persists!” said Noha El Sharakawy, a 52-year-old pharmacist with dual citizenship in both countries.
But the young revolt’s initiators said they were unfazed because they had never relied on Western support. “If the United States supports the revolution, it is good for the United States,” said Islam Lofty, 32, a lawyer. “If they do not, it is an Egyptian issue.”
Some in Washington said they welcomed Mr. Suleiman’s statement, arguing that it echoed points that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pressed for: a clear road map and timetable of reforms, starting with the end of one-party rule and protections for political opponents and the media.
Though Mr. Mubarak’s government has often made similar pledges without delivering, American officials pursuing a strategy of slow and steady motion toward a few clear goals suggested they were gratified.
In an interview with National Public Radio on Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that she and Mr. Biden had held many conversations with Mr. Suleiman about steps toward democracy. “We hear that they are committed to this,” she said, “and when we press on concrete steps and timelines, we are given assurance that that will happen.”
To explain the apparent American shift from urgent demands for change to endorsing plans for Mr. Mubarak to remain in place during a transition, Mrs. Clinton alluded to “a debate within Egypt itself, and not just in the government, but among the people of Egypt” over how to manage the timing of the transition, since the existing Egyptian Constitution would set an unrealistic deadline of two months for an election if Mr. Mubarak stepped down. That “doesn’t give anybody enough time,” she said. She has not addressed the Egyptian opposition’s suggestion for how to solve that problem: suspension of the Constitution for up to a year until a transitional unity government can organize a free election.
In an appearance on ABC News, Mr. Suleiman said little to suggest that he was ready to move Egypt toward democracy or that he even took its youth-led democracy movement seriously.
Insisting that a transition had already begun with his meeting with members of the opposition, he reiterated that Mr. Mubarak would stay in power. If he left, Mr. Suleiman argued, “other people who have their own agenda will make instability in our country.”
Brushing aside the secular character of the youth revolt shaking Egypt and the Arab world, Mr. Suleiman suggested conspiratorially that unspecified “other people” and “an Islamic current” were in fact pushing the young people forward. “It’s not their idea,” he said. “It comes from abroad.”
And when asked about progress toward democracy, he asserted that Egypt was not ready, and would not be until “the people here will have the culture of democracy.”
Mr. ElBaradei, who has been delegated as a negotiator for the protest movement, rejected Mr. Suleiman’s arguments in his own Sunday talk show appearance.
“We need to abolish the present Constitution,” Mr. ElBaradei said in an interview on CNN. “We need to dissolve the current Parliament. These are all elements of the dictatorship regime, and we should not be — I don’t think we will go to democracy through the dictatorial Constitution.”
Rashid Mohammed Rashid, a former minister of trade and industry, said in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN that he believed it would be better for Mr. Mubarak to finish his term as president to ensure a smooth transition.
But he also dismissed the threat of a radical Islamist takeover that Mr. Mubarak has often used to justify his regime, in part because of the secular impulses of the new youth movement. “I generally believe that what we have seen in the last 10 days have been initiated by the young people of Egypt, that were probably, as I said, were restricted, despite the political reforms that have been happening, of having a voice and a share,” Mr. Rashid said.
“Egypt is a great country,” he said. “It has a great young population. It has a great future and I think it is time now to let the future happen by the young people, not by history,”
Protesters in the square, meanwhile, sought to dispel the notion that their ostensibly secular, liberal movement might contain seeds of extremism. Coptic Christians held a Mass there while Muslims stood guard, repaying a favor that Christian protesters did for Muslims on Friday.
Some in the square — where many have stayed for a week without going home — acknowledged some worries about Mr. Mubarak’s perseverance, especially after the Western powers appeared to back a political transition that left him in place. “There is a lot of pressure on us,” said Omar el Shamy. “We are kind of scared.”
He added: “But after the work week started and they tried to get everyone to hate us because they couldn’t get to work, the people keep coming!”
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
