Interesting inside report on Egypt
Hannah Alam has a very interesting report at McClatchy. It begins:
“To the palace!” chanted the thousands of protesters who’d already besieged state television offices in Cairo and were beginning a perilous march on the presidential residence in the final hours of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Mohammed Abdellah, 64, one of the last living founders of the former president’s National Democratic Party, found himself just yards away from the seething crowds as he returned from an appointment downtown. He rushed home and swallowed a Xanax, terrified at the possibility that Mubarak could order his elite guard force to open fire on the protesters.
“When they moved to the presidential palace, he had two options: leave, or let the Republican Guards clash and have a real massacre. I don’t think he wanted to go down in history as a president with so much blood on his hands,” Abdellah said late Saturday in a three-hour interview that offered one of the first inside looks on the collapse of the regime.
Just after sunset Friday, Mubarak’s resignation was announced and Egyptian streets exploded in scenes of euphoria. Abdellah watched at home in an opulent apartment where a bookshelf is lined with black-and-white photos of himself with Mubarak and his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.
Through the years, Abdellah said, he’d watched with sadness as Mubarak — whom he first knew as an eager, details-oriented party leader — was transformed into a cocooned authoritarian whose reliance on a tiny group of self-serving advisers led to a deeply divided NDP and, ultimately, the regime’s collapse.
At least, Abdellah thought to himself that night, Mubarak didn’t go out with a massacre of his own people.
“For all his mistakes, Mubarak avoided this last catastrophe,” Abdellah said.
The weakened party structure was slow to react when anti-government protesters took to the streets Jan. 25, and Mubarak didn’t appear to have a crisis manager, Abdellah said.
Decisions such as blocking the Internet, cell phone networks and social media were made without thinking through the consequences. His own Interior Ministry kept on feeding him rosy reports and Mubarak offered concessions, but without a strategy.
Abdellah said the rifts in Mubarak’s regime deepened in 2005, when he surrounded himself with yes-men who reassured him the government was stable even as his closest aides dispatched security forces to crush growing signs of rebellion among Egypt’s impoverished population of more than 80 million.
Abdellah shared his account of the regime’s demise with a candor that would’ve been impossible just days ago. Now, with the NDP in shambles and its top leadership under criminal investigation and travel restrictions, Abdellah had little to lose by revealing the inner tumult of a party that kept a 30-year stranglehold on Egyptian political and economic life.
Abdellah was working as a reporter in Paris when he was recruited by Sadat, who wanted to build a Western-allied Egypt after the death of the charismatic, pan-Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
