EGYPT: Crowd attack Egypt’s opposition leader Mohamed El-Baradei at polling station

Record ID: 352858

  • Title: EGYPT: Crowd attack Egypt’s opposition leader Mohamed El-Baradei at polling station
  • Date: 20th March 2011
  • Summary: PEOPLE STANDING IN LINE TO VOTE
  • Embargoed: 4th April 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Egypt, Egypt
  • Country: Egypt
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA1S0UOEIEFVQ247UXUMN2P526B
  • Story Text: A crowd of people blocked Egyptian reform leader Mohamed El-Baradei from entering a polling station in Cairo on Saturday (March 19) where he had come to cast a vote in Egypt's constitutional referendum, shoving him and smashing his car window with rocks as he left.
    El-Baradei, a former head of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, returned to Egypt last year and became a vocal critic of former President Hosni Mubarak prior to the revolution that unseated him on February 11.
    He has since declared his intention to run for President when elections are held later this year.
    A large crowd of prospective voters had lined up in the Moqattam neighborhood in Cairo to cast their ballots in a landmark referendum on constitutional reforms, the first such vote in post-revolution Egypt.
    Egyptians used to vote-rigging in Mubarak's era stood in long queues at polling stations throughout the country to take part in the first ballot in living memory whose outcome was not known in advance.
    Observers said turnout appeared unprecedented in a vote in which Egyptians were being asked to vote yes or no to proposed reforms drafted by a judicial committee appointed by the country's military rulers, who have pledged to hold early elections.
    El-Baradei's arrival at the Moqattam polling station was unannounced, and while some people in the crowd greeted him warmly, a crowd of youths soon gathered around him, chanting 'We don't want him!"
    The Nobel Prize Lareaute has no connection to the neighborhood in which he wanted to vote, but apparently hoped to burnish his everyday man credentials by appearing in what is largely a working class area.
    But the atmosphere quickly turned hostile with people pushing and shoving El-Baradei and his entourage, who were forced to make a hasty retreat.
    They ducked into his waiting SUV for safety and the crowd began to hurl rocks and bottles at it sped away.
    Many people in the crowd accused El-Baradei of being an American agent, and said he had assisted America's invasion of Iraq when he was part of the IAEA.
    One man said that because El-Baradei had left Egypt during 1970's, when he was a diplomat, he was not fully Egyptian.
    "He's a dual American Egyptian citizen, that's what we heard about him, and he left and he went and became a nuclear inspector in America, and America is the country that appointed him, not Egypt. First of all, when he went to America he didn't come back to Egypt," the man said. "We have never seen an Egyptian Baradei...we want an Egyptian person to rule Egypt, someone who has lived in Egypt and knows Egypt," he added.
    Wael Sayyed Mahmoud said that regardless of his opinion of El-Baradei, Egypt's journey into democracy should not begin with incidents of this kind.
    "I reject El-Baradei. But today Egypt is transforming into a democracy. And so what should happen is that he, or anyone else who wants to run (for president) runs, and we all get to vote yes or no at the ballot box for the person we want. But this type of thing, what happened here, this barbarity and thuggery, I reject it," he said.
    While it is a commonly repeated rumour that El-Baradei is a dual American-Egyptian citizen, he doesn't hold an American passport, and would be barred from Egypt's next elections if he did.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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