Mubarak meets army as Obama urges reform

CAIRO (Reuters) – Egyptian protesters turned to the army and to a retired diplomat to maintain momentum in efforts to unseat Hosni Mubarak, but as the president’s Western backers called for change he met the generals who can keep him in power.

The outcome of six days of unrest, which has killed more than 100 people, rocked the Middle East and rattled global investors, hung in the balance. Troops have let Egyptians bellow their rage at Mubarak’s 30 years of autocracy. But the generals have yet to show whether they will keep him on or ease him out.

Thousands gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to acclaim Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the U.N. nuclear agency, as the man to lead a transition to democracy — a reform Mubarak’s U.S. and European allies also demanded in ever clearer terms.

“Change is coming in the next few days,” Baradei told the crowd, who again defied a night-time curfew and mingled easily with soldiers in U.S.-built tanks who looked on patiently.

“You have taken back your rights and what we have begun, cannot go back,” he said. “We have one main demand — the end of the regime and the beginning of a new stage, a new Egypt.”

There was little of the violence seen in previous days.

Baradei, claiming endorsement from opposition groups which range from Twitter-savvy students to the mass Islamist movement the Muslim Brotherhood, said he had a mandate to speak to the army and organize a handover to a national unity coalition.

He called on U.S. President Barack Obama to “cut off life support to the dictator.” But he remained cautious of abandoning a key Middle Eastern ally. Obama urged only an shift in Egypt’s administration to take more account of popular opinion.

OBAMA CALLS

Describing Obama’s calls with world leaders, the White House said: “The president reiterated his focus on opposing violence and calling for restraint; supporting universal rights, including the right to peaceful assembly, association, and speech; and supporting an orderly transition to a government that is responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people.”

As Baradei, a soft-spoken 67-year-old, greeted the crowd in Cairo, thousands chanted: “The people want the regime to fall!”

But for many in the most populous Arab state, a more immediate concern is the looting and breakdown in order since police left the streets on Friday and the soldiers who took over largely stood by, protecting only key buildings. State media said police were back late on Sunday. The curfew was extended.

“We don’t care who is president,” said Mohamed Mostafa, a Cairo shopkeeper exhausted after a night fending off looters.

“We just want to have our security back.”

A desire for stability, both among Egypt’s 80 million people and among world powers, has helped keep Mubarak at the head of Egypt’s 59-year-old ruling military establishment for decades. It may yet allow him to stall the momentum of street protests.

“I think Mubarak is going but he is not going tomorrow,” said Middle East commentator Rami Khouri.

PROTESTERS’ RESOLVE

“Mubarak has to leave. We won’t leave until he falls,” said medical student Ahmed Fathi as he demonstrated in eastern Cairo.

But the military men whom the 82-year-old president met on Sunday may have other ideas. He spoke with his defense minister, chief of staff and Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief whom Mubarak named vice-president on Saturday in a move that, for the first time in public, gave a hint at an eventual successor.

Mubarak, who controls nearly half a million soldiers and as many again in reserve, is well aware that his fellow autocrat, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, was forced out on January 14 when his army refused to crush street protests to defend him.

“The army is in a tight spot and they are deciding what to do about the president,” said Exclusive Analysis’s Faysal Itani.

“The army may see Mubarak as a liability but they won’t want to see him flee with his tail between his legs like Ben Ali. I think they would like to see him go but in an orderly fashion.”

WESTERN APPEALS

As Western governments urged their citizens to get out of Egypt, ravaging the country’s vital tourist business, leaders from Washington to Berlin were calling Mubarak to insist that he must heed calls for democracy and resist turning to violence.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, interviewed on several television channels, avoided taking sides and calling for the resignation of Mubarak, a loyal ally of Washington in its conflicts with, first, Soviet communism and now al Qaeda.

But she made clear the White House wants major change: “We want to see an orderly transition so that no one fills a void, that there not be a void, that there be a well thought out plan that will bring about a democratic participatory government.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, another major aid donor to Egypt, called Mubarak: “She expressed expectations that the president and his new government take a committed approach to the announced reforms,” her office said, referring to the new prime minister named on Saturday and change Mubarak promised.

Protests have affected cities across Egypt. In Suez, on the canal, one senior local officer, Brigadier Atef Said said his troops would give protesters a free voice:

“We will allow protests in the coming days,” he told Reuters. “Everyone has the right to voice their opinion.”

In surreal scenes in Cairo, soldiers stood by tanks covered in anti-Mubarak graffiti: “Down with Mubarak. Down with the despot. Down with the traitor. Pharaoh out of Egypt.”

Asked how they could let people scrawl anti-Mubarak slogans on their mostly American-made vehicles, one soldier said: “These are written by the people. It’s the views of the people.”

Mutual goodwill with the army, though not Mubarak’s police, was widespread: “The army are good people. I feel they are part of the nation,” said Cairo law student Amira Hamdy, 20. “With the internal security forces, the feeling was awful.”

Arabs from the Atlantic to the Gulf are watching Egypt.

In Tunisia, the detonator of the regional movement, an exiled Islamist leader was welcomed home by thousands on Sunday. In Sudan, Egypt’s southern neighbor, police beat and arrested students taking part in anti-government protests in Khartoum.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was closely watching events in Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state, in 1979.

(Additional reporting by Dina Zayed, Marwa Awad, Shaimaa Fayed, Sherine El Madany, Yasmine Saleh, Alison Williams and Samia Nakhoul in Cairo, Alexander Dziadosz in Suez, Arshad Mohammed in Washington and Peter Apps, Angus MacSwan and William Maclean in London; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Jon Boyle)