Anti-government Demonstrations Erupt in Egypt

NEW YORK TIMES
CAIRO — Thousands of inmates poured out of four prisons and the United States said it was organizing flights to evacuate its citizens Sunday, as the Egyptian army struggled to hold a capital seized by growing fears of lawlessness and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

In a stunning collapse of authority, most police have withdrawn from major cities, and thousands of protesters, converging on what has become the center of the uprising in Liberation Square, defied yet again government orders of a nationwide curfew.

The American Embassy, which urged all Americans in Egypt to “consider leaving as soon as they can safely do so,” underlined a deep sense of pessimism among Egypt’s allies over Mubarak’s fate, as the uprising against his rule entered a sixth day.

The Egyptian army, the country’s most powerful institution and embedded deeply in all aspects of life here, deployed in greater numbers in the capital of 18 million. As many as 100 tanks and armored carriers gathered near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the very site where President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, bringing Mr. Mubarak to power. Military helicopters flew over Cairo, circling Liberation Square through the day, and jets roared every few minutes across a late afternoon sky.

But the army took no steps against the protesters, who cheered as the helicopters passed overhead. In an unprecedented scene, some of them lofted a captain in uniform on their shoulders, marching him through a square suffused with protesters that cut across Egypt’s entrenched lines of class and religious devotion. In contrast to the anxiety and apprehension elsewhere in Cairo, where looters have broken into some shops, burned a shopping center and stolen cars, a carnival atmosphere descended on the square, where vendors offered food at discount prices and protesters posed for pictures in front of tanks scrawled with slogans like, “30 years of humiliation and poverty.”

Several hours after nightfall, Mohammed El Baradei, the Egyptian opposition figure and Nobel prize winner, arrived the square. Earlier in the day, he had called for Mr. Mubarak to leave office immediately to make way for a national unity government.

“It is loud and clear from everybody in Egypt that Mubarak has to leave today,” he said in an interview on CNN. He said Mr. Mubarak’s departure should be followed by a transition to a national unity government and “all the measures set in place for a free and fair election.”

Driven by reports of looting, prison breaks and rumors that swirled across Cairo, fed by Egyptian television’s unrelenting coverage of lawlessness, it was clear that many feared the menace could grow worse, and might even undermine the protesters’ demands.

“I wish we could be like the United States with our own democracy, but we can’t,” said Sarah Elyashy, a 33-year-old woman in the neighborhood of Heliopolis, where men armed with broomsticks and kitchen knives took to the streets to defend their homes against the threat of looters. “We have to have a ruler with an iron hand.”