Turmoil Spreads to U.S. Embassy in Yemen

Protesters sought to storm the United States embassy during a protest against an anti-Islamic film in Sana on Thursday.

Πηγή: New York Times
By NASSER ARRABYEE and ALAN COWELL
Sept 13 2012

SANA, Yemen — Turmoil in the Arab world linked to a contentious video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad spread on Thursday to Yemen, where hundreds of protesters stormed the United States Embassy, two days after assailants killed the American ambassador in Libya and crowds tried to overrun the embassy compound in Cairo.

News reports also spoke of a separate protest in Tehran, where around 500 Iranians chanting “Death to America” tried to converge on the Swiss Embassy, which handles United States interests in the absence of formal diplomatic relations with Washington. Hundreds of police officers held the crowds back from the diplomatic compound, which Swiss officials had evacuated as a precaution, Agence France-Presse said.

For a third straight day, protesters scuffled with police in Cairo, news reports said, while in Iraq, a militant Shiite group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, once known for its violent attacks on Americans and other Westerners, said the video “will put all American interests in danger.”

In Sana, witnesses said Yemeni security forces had tried to disperse a crowd at the fortified embassy compound in the east of Sana, the capital. But protesters broke through an outer perimeter protecting the embassy, clambering over a high wall and setting fire to a building.

They were forced to retreat after trying to plunder furniture and computers, the witnesses said.

Security forces guarding the embassy fired into the air as protesters set fire to two vehicles and burned tires. Protesters tore down and burned an American flag, replacing it with their own banner proclaiming the Islamic faith, witnesses said.

There were no immediate reports of American casualties or that the protesters had managed to breach the main diplomatic buildings within the compound. Yemeni officials said an unspecified number of protesters were wounded and some were arrested. Hours after the attack started, smoke still rose from the area.

By early afternoon, one witness, Yahya Yousef, who lives opposite the embassy, said: “Now almost everyone is out, and firing has ceased. We saw protesters getting out with some stuff from inside.”

The protests came hours after a Muslim cleric, Abdul Majid al- Zandani, urged followers to emulate the protests in Libya and Egypt, Sana residents said. Mr. Zandani, a onetime mentor to Osama bin Laden, was named a ”specially designated global terrorist” by the United States Treasury Department in 2004.

The crowd gathered a day after the embassy warned Americans in a posting on its Web site that “in the wake of recent events in Libya and Egypt, there is the possibility of protests in Yemen, and specifically in the vicinity of the U.S. Embassy, in the coming days.”

“The U.S. Embassy continues to recommend that U.S. citizens avoid large gatherings. Even demonstrations or events intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. U.S. citizens in Yemen are urged to monitor local news reports and to plan their activities accordingly,” the Web posting said.

An American official contacted by telephone declined to describe what had happened at the embassy.

With American Marines and naval vessels heading for Libya, where the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three of his staff were killed on Tuesday in an attack on the United States consulate, and new crowds reported gathering in Tunis and Cairo overnight, the reports from Yemen added to the already volatile mix of passions that have commingled with the initial exuberance of the so-called Arab Spring.

In an attempt to defuse the passions in his own country, President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, was quoted on Thursday as saying the attacks on American personnel were unacceptable. Speaking in a television address while visiting Brussels, the Egyptian leader said he supported peaceful demonstrations but rejected attacks on personnel and diplomatic missions.

“What happened is unacceptable, rejected. The Prophet Muhammad taught us to respect human life," Bloomberg News quoted Mr. Morsi as saying. But he also warned against maligning Islam’s founding prophet. “The Prophet Muhammad and Islamic sanctities are red lines for all of us.”

Little is known about the origin of the video that provoked the protests. It was made in obscurity somewhere in Southern California, and promoted by a network of right-wing Christians with a history of animosity directed toward Muslims. When a 14-minute trailer of it was posted on YouTube in June, it was barely noticed.

But when the amateurish video was translated into Arabic and reposted twice on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11, and promoted by leaders of the Coptic diaspora in the United States, it drew nearly one million views and set off bloody demonstrations.

The initial eruption of protests in Egypt and Libya came on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

Referring to the killings in Benghazi, American and European officials said on Wednesday that while many details about the attack remained unclear, the assailants seemed organized, well trained and heavily armed and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning. But the officials cautioned that it was too soon to tell whether the attack was related to the Sept. 11 commemoration.

On that same day in Yemen this week, a car bomb exploded on Tuesday alongside a convoy of vehicles used by Yemen’s defense minister, killing seven bodyguards and five civilians in the heart of the capital, while the minister escaped unharmed, government and hospital officials said. The attack came one day after a top operative of Al Qaeda in Yemen was killed in what Yemeni officials called an American drone strike.

Those episodes and the violence on Thursday spoke to the continued volatility in poverty-stricken Yemen, where the United States is seeking to eradicate militant cells held responsible for a number of conspiracies, including an attempt by an operative of Al Qaeda to detonate a bomb hidden in his clothes on a flight bound for Detroit in December 2009.

The blast on Tuesday in downtown Sana tore through a thoroughfare between the cabinet office and the state radio building, shattering buildings and wrecking a vehicle carrying the seven bodyguards, seconds after the minister himself, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, had passed by in another vehicle after a weekly cabinet meeting.

Egypt sets NGO trial date, escalating rift with US

An Egyptian woman walks by a mural at Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012. The mural reads in Arabic: "We bring them their rights or we die like them" 

Πηγή: Ktar

By BEN HUBBARD (AP)

Feb 18 2012

CAIRO - Egypt said Saturday the criminal trial of 16 Americans and 27 others will start Feb. 26 in a politically charged case against foreign-funded pro-democracy groups that has badly shaken Cairo's ties with Washington.

The trial represents an escalation in what has become the deepest crisis in U.S.-Egypt relations in decades. American officials have threatened to cut $1.5 billion in aid over the spat, and high-level officials have flown in to seek a solution. Egyptian authorities have responded by blasting what they call U.S. meddling in legal affairs.

The growing spat also shows the uncertain path Egypt's military rulers are charting more than one year after a popular uprising pushed President Hosni Mubarak from power. During his nearly 30-year rule, the U.S. tolerated Mubarak's antidemocratic policies and continued to fund his government, knowing he'd uphold Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

Now, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces regularly accuses "foreign hands" of backing continued protests against its rule, and the Islamist parties that control about two-thirds of the newly elected parliament have threatened to review the peace treaty with Israel.

The investigation into the pro-democracy and rights groups fits into the wider campaign against alleged foreign influence since Mubarak's ouster.

The probe began in December, when armed security forces raided the offices of 10 nonprofit groups, shuttering their offices after carting off files and computers.

Egypt's state news agency said Saturday the trial of 43 defendants in the case will begin Feb. 26. The report said 16 of the defendants are Egyptians and 19 are Americans, and the rest are Germans, Palestinians and Jordanians. The U.S. State Department, however, has said there are only 16 Americans facing trial.

The Americans work for four U.S.-based groups: the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, Freedom House and a group that trains journalists.

Only seven of the Americans are in Egypt, and all have been barred from travel. Some have sought refuge at the American Embassy in Cairo, including Sam LaHood, who heads IRI's Egypt office and is the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Neither IRI nor the U.S. Embassy responded to requests for comment.

The report said the defendants have been charged with founding and managing offices of international organizations without Egyptian licenses and with receiving foreign funding. The groups' operations "infringe on Egyptian sovereignty," it said.

On Saturday, the al-Ahram state-owned daily published a report it said was based on leaked investigation files. The report accused the organizations of operating outside of Egyptian law to "affect the political process and serve a limited number of political movements in a way that serves the interests of the funders."

It also said the organizations' budgets grew dramatically after the anti-Mubarak uprising- implying a link to the continued unrest.

NDI and IRI say they have been trying to register for years, but have never received official approval- a tactic Mubarak's regime used to maintain power over such organizations.

Les Campbell, Middle East and North Africa director for NDI, said the charges are bogus, but that NDI would cooperate with the legal process.

"It is primarily a political issue, so we still hope that it will be resolved at the political level," he said. "But as an organization, we're prepared to move along through the system."

Campbell also acknowledged that his group became more active after Mubarak's fall because of the unprecedented political activity in the country.

"Why wouldn't our activities have increased in the period after the revolution?" he asked. "That is completely normal. There is nothing even remotely sinister about it."

Egyptian officials are forging ahead in spite of intense U.S. efforts- and pressure- to end the crisis.

President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have urged top Egyptian officials to drop the investigation. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey did the same in a Cairo visit last week, and U.S. Sen. John McCain will lead a Congressional delegation to Egypt in the coming days.

U.S. officials have said the issue could block the delivery of Egypt's annual aid package of more than $1.5 billion- $1.3 million in military assistance and $250 million in economic assistance. That aid is linked to Egypt's adherence to its 1979 peace agreement with Israel, sparking fears that a failure to break the impasse could put the treaty in jeopardy, destabilizing the region.

That's why administration officials are hesitant to push too hard. Ending aid to Egypt would also look bad one year after Egyptians calling for greater democracy forced Mubarak from power.

But Egyptian legal expert Nasser Amin said that taking the case to trial could provide a way out, because a judge could throw the case out, requiring neither side to back down.

"The case isn't legally sound," he said. "There is no strong evidence, and any judge who looks at this case will see that it is more political than legal."

Egypt's poor cannot afford a revolution

A demonstrator is carried away by residents as they help the military to clear Tahrir Square of the remaining protesters as the month of Ramadan starts. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany, Reuters / August 2, 2011)

Πηγή: LATimes
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times
August 2, 2011

As disruptions continue and activists still gather in Tahrir Square to press demands for democratic reforms, the working class see their livelihood dwindle.

Reporting from Cairo— Sayed Hussein Sayed sits low in a broken truck. His wife is having their first child soon and no one is bringing him tires to fix. He's running out of money.

"The country," he says, "is falling apart."

The neighborhood plumber shakes his head

"I've got five kids to feed but work is down 30%," says Kamel Fouad, whose grandfather started the family business decades ago. "I could bear it during the first month of the revolution. I borrowed from neighbors. But nobody has any money left. The revolution's gone on too long."

Street sweepers whisk away the shattered glass from a recent protest. No one knows what to do with the burned car on the corner. An alley over from Fouad's shop, two men repair the windshield of Abdel Moussa's car, battered by stones during a clash between antigovernment demonstrators and thugs.

"Enough is enough," says Moussa, his hands gliding over dents. "These protests must stop. It's sabotage."

The solidarity around the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February is splintering amid deep differences between protesters and millions of struggling Egyptians exasperated by the unrest and its economic consequences. The split reveals how young activists plotting rebellion in cyberspace are disconnected from the anxieties of millworkers and laborers. The nation that inspired the Arab world's pro-democracy fervor has become a land of bitterness and divided hopes.

Protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square and demands on the interim ruling military council for political reform have won concessions and are considered by activists as the surest strategy to achieve the revolution's goals. For many, though, they have become dangerous distractions at a time of widening unemployment, dwindling tourism and a shaky stock market.

On Monday, army and police forces tore down tents and cleared Tahrir Square of about 200 die-hard protesters, ending a three week sit-in that had dwindled over the weekend, when most political parties and dissident groups left the square before the start of the holy month of Ramadan. Gunshots overhead and tanks moving toward the square as protesters scurried were the latest provocative images for those craving a degree of normalcy.

During Mubarak's nearly 30-year rule, the poor and working class were reluctant to rise up for fear that arrests and chaos would cost them the tenuous jobs that sustained their families. That sentiment prevails today as men like Sayed balance the aspirations of democracy and civil rights against the immediate concern of bringing home dinner.

"It doesn't seem to be about politics or justice anymore," Sayed says. "I don't know if the protesters have a hidden agenda or not. If they have a problem with the military, that's fine. But they should not damage other people's interests. We need to give the military time. The universe wasn't created in a day."

A university graduate who didn't have the connections to find a desk job while Mubarak was in power, Sayed started repairing tires. He supports a number of the protesters' causes. But he senses anger and recrimination jeopardize Egypt's transition to democracy. He and Fouad believe the military has good intentions yet also acknowledge that the generals must allow reform and punish the sins of the past.

"I trust the military. It has always protected the country," Fouad says. "But, yes, something has to be done about bringing former Mubarak officials to justice."

The revolution swept through their Abbasiya neighborhood last weekend. Men with rocks and clubs — some of them from the neighborhood — swarmed out of side streets and attacked thousands of protesters marching toward the Defense Ministry. Fouad and Sayed, who was cut by flying glass, hurried to protect their homes and shops amid flashes of gasoline bombs.

"The people in here are not thugs. We know the protesters didn't come here to cause trouble," says Fouad. "We don't know who started the violence, but some people on these streets weren't happy about what was going on and they saved what was theirs."

Fouad sits on a stone in the shade. Politics have little resonance here. The manifestoes of the activists sound good, but there are more pressing matters at hand. The building his shop is in has been condemned. He must move. He doesn't know where, but he's sure his 11-year-old son, Mustafa, will not inherit his hacksaws and wrenches.

There is no point in protesting about this; it is the way of things in a neighborhood that in the late 1800s was as posh as any in Cairo but has since given up many of its streets to the poor. Fouad's friend Rami Aladdin has already been evicted from the building. Aladdin's furniture was stacked on the street when the clashes erupted. His arms and chest are raw with the cuts and scrapes of fighting people off.

"This is not the way to make Egypt better," says Aladdin, standing against the cracked door of a borrowed room.

The workers in Abbasiya take home what they earn each day. It's afternoon and Fouad has no business. He answers the call to prayer, hurrying down the street to the mosque. His son perches on the stone. Sayed sits in the broken truck. He has the black hands of his trade but these days he wishes they were grimier. He waits for a tire or a crooked rim to fix.