WATANI International
13 March 2011
Amr Moussa kicked off his attempt to become Egypt’s first president in a real election with a raucous town-hall-style meeting on Tuesday, taking a few potshots at the previous government while promising to be the caretaker leader needed to fix the country’s political and other ills.
“No president will say, ‘Oh, I will be here until the last beat of my heart,’ ” said Mr. Moussa, drawing laughs from several hundred of the mostly young people packed into a popular cultural center. The ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, used the line in one of his last speeches as he attempted to cling to power. “No!” Mr. Moussa said. “It will be: ‘Until the following date.’ ”
Mr. Moussa, 74, a former foreign minister and then longtime secretary general of the Arab League, is considered the front-runner in the presidential race. He has long been popular for his confrontational remarks about Israel and the United States — Mr. Mubarak removed him as foreign minister after a song called “I Hate Israel and I Love Amr Moussa” became a pop hit in 2001.
He took a fairly straightforward approach in answering often hostile questions for more than three hours, telling the audience that dealing with Israel was a reality, and that good relations with the United States were also important.
At one point, parts of the crowd responded by breaking into chants of “No normalization with Israel” and one questioner also demanded to know why the Arab League was so impotent. Mr. Moussa sidestepped questions about his own relationship with Mr. Mubarak during the decade that he served as foreign minister, saying he had served Egypt.
Although he has said that as caretaker president he would stay only one term, he left murky just how long that might be. At one point, he said that a president would serve just two four-year terms, as specified in proposed constitutional amendments. But at another point, he said the transition away from a presidential system to a parliamentary one would require 10 years.
Under the schedule announced by the military council ruling Egypt, parliamentary elections would be held in June, and the presidential vote would be held in August. But many political figures, including Mr. Moussa, support reversing that to give parties time to organize.
Meanwhile, in Cairo, the generally peaceful, cooperative, nonsectarian mood of the protests was broken when a group of women who were marching were physically harassed by a mob of men.
Elsewhere, thousands of Coptic Christians staged a string of rallies to protest the burning of a church, with security officials saying that one participant was killed and dozens were wounded.
The burning of the church was the result of anger over an affair between a man and a woman across Muslim-Christian lines. Such eruptions are not uncommon in Egypt. But the instability following the collapse of Mr. Mubarak’s government has heightened sectarian tensions and deepened concerns among Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, that they will not be sheltered from prejudice and violence.
Several thousand Christians protested in front of the state television headquarters in downtown Cairo, holding aloft giant crucifixes and calling for the government to secure their rights.
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The New York Times (abridged)