Cairo Airport in Chaos, Army Holds Fire

By Victoria Hazou and Menelaos Hadjicostis, Associated Press

31 January 11

There are two stories here. The first is an Associated Press report that looks primarily at the flight of foreign nationals from Cairo. The second is The New York Times' report on developments on the ground. The situation in Egypt remains unstable and volatile. -- MA/RSN

airo's international airport was a scene of chaos and confusion Monday as thousands of foreigners sought to flee the unrest in Egypt, and countries around the world scrambled to send in planes to fly their citizens out.

Nerves frayed and shouting and shoving matches erupted as thousands crammed into Cairo airport's new Terminal 3 seeking a flight home. The airport's departures board stopped announcing flight times in an attempt to reduce the tension - but the plan backfired, fueling passengers' anger.

Making matters worse, check-in counters were poorly staffed because many EgyptAir employees had been unable to get to work due to a 3 p.m.-to-8 a.m. curfew and traffic breakdowns across the Egyptian capital.

"It's an absolute zoo, what a mess," said Justine Khanzadian, 23, a graduate student from the American University of Cairo. "I decided to leave because of the protests. The government here is just not stable enough to stay."

Food was scarce at the airport, with people buying up chocolate in the duty free shop. Airport staff shouted at travelers to get in line, but many were in no mood to listen. The scheduling board listed flight numbers without destinations or times of departure.

Occasionally, an official emerged and shouted out the destination of a departing flight, triggering a rush of passengers with boarding passes. The process worked smoothly for nationals of countries that had sent planes - such as Denmark, Germany, China, Canada - but others had no such support.

By curfew time, some people who had apparently failed to get on a flight out of Egypt had boarded buses for the ride back into Cairo.

The U.S. State Department said Monday it has evacuated more than 1,200 Americans from Egypt aboard government-chartered planes and expects to fly out roughly 1,400 more in the coming days.

Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said that by the end of Monday six planes will have flown nine flights ferrying U.S. citizens from Cairo to Larnaca, Cyprus; Athens, Greece; and Istanbul, Turkey. He said that on Tuesday an additional destination, Frankfurt, Germany, will be added, and that the department plans to add evacuation flights from Aswan and Luxor, Egypt.

In addition to the chartered aircraft, Crowley said a small number of Americans left Egypt on a Canadian evacuation flight and about 70 left on Sunday aboard a U.S. military plane that was bringing in embassy staff.

EgyptAir resumed its flights Monday morning from Cairo after a roughly 14-hour break because of the curfew and its inability to field enough crew. Over 20 hours, only 26 of about 126 EgyptAir flights operated, airport officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Greek oil worker Markos Loukogiannakis, who arrived in Athens on a flight carrying 181 passengers including 65 U.S. citizens, said confusion reigned at Cairo airport and travelers had to negotiate a string of checkpoints just to get there.

"In a 22-kilometer (14-mile) route from our suburb to the airport we had to get through 19 checkpoints, including nine manned by civilians," he said. "There were lots of people gathering at the airport and it was very difficult to get in."

He said security had deteriorated sharply over the past three days in Cairo after police withdrew from the streets.

"There was a wave of attacks by criminal elements who engaged in burglaries and wrecked shops and banks. There was a lot of shooting and residents took up the burden of protecting their property," he said.

Jane Travis, an American tourist from Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, who was evacuated to Athens, said she and her husband heard shooting from their hotel.

"We are very concerned that there was no warning from our State Department before we came on this trip," she said. "From our hotel, which was well guarded, we heard the gunshots and it was very terrifying."

In a geopolitical shift, even Iraq decided it would evacuate its citizens, sending three planes to Egypt - including the prime minister's plane - to bring home for free those who wish to return. Thousands of Iraqis had once fled to Egypt to escape the violence in their own country.

About 800 Iraqis had left Cairo by Monday afternoon, said Capt. Mohammed al-Moussawi, a crew member for the prime minister's office. He said the flights would continue until all those who wished to return had done so.

Nearly 320 Indian nationals arrived in Mumbai on a special Air India flight and another 275 were expected later. An Azerbaijan flight carrying 103 people and the body of an Azeri Embassy accountant killed in the unrest arrived in Baku, and Turkey sent six planes to Cairo and Alexandria, evacuating 1,548 Turkish nationals.

Two Americans - Valerie Doescher and Nelson Clark - arrived in Istanbul on Monday aboard a regularly scheduled Turkish Airlines flight and were relieved to be out of Egypt.

Doescher said she left after protests near the building where she was interning "grew in a completely exponential way." Clark said the airport where he arrived after a three-hour drive "was a nightmare."

Indonesia was sending a plane to Cairo to start evacuating some 6,150 Indonesians - mostly students and workers - and SAS Denmark was flying home some 60 Danes.

China sent four planes to help pick up an estimated 500 Chinese stranded in Cairo and warned citizens not travel to Egypt.

That echoed earlier warnings from Britain, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the Czech Republic, which all advised against all nonessential travel to Egypt. Many European tour companies canceled trips to Egypt until Feb. 23, while others left the cancellations open until further notice.

One big question was what to do with the tens of thousands of tourists in other parts of Egypt. Tour operators say they will fly home all their customers this week when their holidays end, or on extra flights, stressing there has not been any unrest in Red Sea resort cities like Hurghada or Sharm el-Sheik. Still, food shortages were starting to be felt at some Egyptian resorts and some restaurants were refusing to serve foreigners.

All major German tour operators - among them TUI AG and Thomas Cook's German subsidiary - canceled day trips to Cairo and Luxor.

Germany, which sends about 1.2 million tourists to Egypt a year, was not officially evacuating its citizens. But Deutsche Lufthansa AG on Monday sent an additional flight at the request of the foreign ministry to bring more German tourists home. When it arrived back in Frankfurt on Monday night, the evacuees told of the chaos in Cairo.

Gunnar Gerring of Nordhorn in northern Germany said he witnessed shooting and looting in the last few days before turning up to chaos at the airport.

"We have an apartment in Cairo were we sat, barricaded ourselves and didn't do anything," Gerring said. "Now we are back home and everything is good."

Germany foreign ministry spokesman Dirk Augustin said thousands more Germans currently live in Egypt, with up to 7,000 around Cairo.

Britain estimated there were 30,000 U.K. tourists and long-term residents in Egypt but said it had no plans to evacuate them. Foreign Secretary William Hague warned people against all but essential travel to Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor and Suez.

German tour operator Rewe Touristik advised clients booked on a holiday in Egypt through Feb. 7 to cancel their trip and allowed them to switch to another destination without surcharge. The company has 3,100 clients in the country.

Many companies organized their own evacuations for their workers. German utility company RWE said its oil and gas subsidiary RWE Dea repatriated some 90 people - employees and their families - with a chartered plane that arrived in Hamburg on Monday.

The Danish company shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S chartered a plane to pick up relatives of its Danish employees in Egypt. The company said there were no terminal operations in Egypt on Monday and the Maersk Line, Safmarine and Damco offices were closed.

Air France canceled its daily flight from Paris to Cairo on Monday and planned to increase its capacity Tuesday by an extra 200 seats.

Portugal sent a C-130 military transport plane to evacuate its citizens. Greece was sending three C-130 military transport planes to Alexandria on Tuesday and Polish airline LOT was flying to Cairo.

Hadjicostis reported from Larnaca, Cyprus. Staff in Associated Press bureaus around the world contributed to this report.

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Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei speaking to reporters in Cairo, 01/31/11.
(photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Government Offers Talks With Protesters
After Army Says It Will Not Fire

By David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times

31 January 11

 

he political forces aligned against President Hosni Mubarak seemed to strengthen on Monday, when the Army said for the first time that it would not fire on the protesters who have convulsed Egypt for the last week. The announcement was followed shortly by the government's first offer to talk to the protest leaders.

The offer of negotiations on constitutional and legislative reforms was made by the new vice president, Omar Suleiman, who did not offer further details. But it seemed to represent an attempt to blunt the devastating effect of the Army's statement, which came as the Egyptian economy reeled and on the eve of what organizers hope will be the largest demonstrations yet - a "march of millions" and a general strike - on Tuesday.

It was not immediately clear who Mr. Suleiman addressed his offer to, or whether the opposition would accept. While the protesters have consistently demanded Mr. Mubarak's resignation above all else, they have lately indicated a willingness to discuss a unity government leading to elections. On Sunday, Egypt's powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition said they had chosen a prominent government critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, to represent their side in possible negotiations with the Army over Mr. Mubarak's departure.

The Army's announcement - delivered on state TV with no elaboration by its official spokesman - declared that "freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody," and promised to recognize the "legitimate demands" of the protesters.

While the carefully worded statement was seen by some as a veiled threat to use force against those who do not use peaceful means, an associate of Mr. Mubarak's said it should be taken at face value.

"The Army is not a puppet in the hands of anybody," including Mr. Mubarak, said Mahmoud Shokry, a retired diplomat and a friend of Mr. Suleiman. "The Army does not want to make any confrontation with the youth." He said the generals would "ask Mr. Mubarak to leave" before they would accept orders they think could lead to civil war or risk their credibility with the public.

Still, opposition leaders said they were not prepared to celebrate the announcement as the turning point it proved in Tunisia, where the government collapsed after the military refused to shoot at its own people.

The military's announcement followed a cabinet reshuffle by Mr. Mubarak that the opposition dismissed ahead of time as window dressing. The president appeared fatigued in a ceremony broadcast on state television in which he welcomed a new interior minister, Mahmoud Wagdy, a retired general, who replaces the widely-reviled Habib el-Adly. Mr. Mubarak left several longtime associates in place, including the foreign minister, the minister of information and the defense minister.

Since the demonstrations began last Tuesday, Mr. Mubarak has stayed mostly out of sight, apparently intent on waiting for the protesters' passions to cool. But as the tens of thousand of demonstrators gathered in Liberation Square on Monday shouted for his ouster, and as the Egyptian economy sagged and financial chaos loomed, that strategy was beginning to look threadbare.

With the Internet still broadly disrupted, Egyptians gathered at mosques around the city for noon prayers and then marched by the hundreds and thousands toward Liberation Square on Monday, passing groups of security police and soldiers.

"I brought my American passport today in case I die today," said Marwan Mossaad, 33, a graduate student of architecture with dual Egyptian-American citizenship. "I want the American people to know that they are supporting one of the most oppressive regimes in the world and Americans are also dying for it."

"Come down, Egyptians!" chanted one group heading to the square, drawing men into their march from the buildings they passed. The group, led by older men, linked hands and kept to one lane of traffic, allowing cars to pass.

At the square, they joined protesters who had stayed all night in defiance of a curfew that the authorities are now seeking to enforce at 5 p.m., an hour earlier. The numbers in the square appeared to exceed those of previous days, despite efforts by the military to corral the protesters into a narrower space.

Army troops checked the identity of people entering the square and began placing a cordon of concrete barriers and razor wire around its access routes, news reports said. But there were no immediate reports of clashes with the protesters, who have cast the military as their ally and protector. As military helicopters circled overhead, demonstrators jabbed their fists in the air, chanting, "The people and the army are one hand."

In contrast to previous days in the uprising, which were dominated by the young, the demonstrations Monday included a more obvious contingent of older, disciplined protesters and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist organization, outlawed under the Mubarak government, has been playing a steadily larger role in the demonstrations, after holding back at the outset.

Witnesses in Alexandria, Egypt's second city on the Mediterranean coast, said police had returned to the streets there, though only in small numbers and accompanied by soldiers.

At Cairo International Airport, a voluntary evacuation of Americans - including dependents of government officials in Egypt, some diplomats and private citizens - got under way on Monday with a flight to Cyprus and two to Athens, as passengers waited to board six more flights heading for other unspecified destinations described as safe havens, including Turkey, American Embassy officials said.

International oil companies are closing local offices, evacuating nonessential personnel and family dependents, and telling their Egyptian employees to stay home, but most companies said there had been little impact so far on exploration and production activities centered in the Gulf of Suez, the Western Desert and the Nile Delta. Nevertheless, the price of benchmark Brent crude rose to a two-year high of just over $100 a barrel on fears of disrupted flow from the region.

Israel, meanwhile, granted permission to Egypt to move two battalions of soldiers, about 800, into the Sinai Peninsula, which has been largely demilitarized since the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979. The area is populated by armed Bedouin tribes that have posed a challenged to the Egyptian authorities over the years.

In a collapse of authority, the police withdrew from major cities on Saturday, giving free rein to gangs that stole and burned cars, looted shops and ransacked a fashionable mall, where dismembered mannequins for conservative Islamic dress were strewn over broken glass and puddles of water. Thousands of inmates poured out of four prisons, including the country's most notorious, Abu Zaabal and Wadi Natroun. Checkpoints run by the military and neighborhood groups, sometimes spaced just a block apart, proliferated across Cairo and other cities.

Many have darkly suggested that the government was behind the collapse of authority as a way to justify a crackdown or discredit protesters' calls for change.

"Egypt challenges anarchy," a government-owned newspaper declared Sunday.

"A Conspiracy by Security to Support the Scenario of Chaos," replied an independent newspaper in a headline that shared space at a downtown kiosk.

Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and Dawlat Magdy contributed reporting from Cairo; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; and Clifford Krauss from Houston.