Surrounded
by news cameras, he began speaking. "Change is coming in the next few
days. You have taken back your rights and what we have begun cannot go
back," he said as crowds chanted "Down with Mubarak." But with
no stage to speak from and no public address system, El-Baradei was quickly
overwhelmed by the chaos around him. He quickly cut short his remarks and left.
As mass
protests across Egypt enter their second week, El-Baradei has been tapped by
Egyptian opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood to negotiate with
President Hosni Mubarak, casting him as much as anyone in the otherwise
disorganized opposition as leader. El-Baradei has made clear he welcomes the
role and sees bigger things ahead for himself if the Mubarak government is
brought down, as protestors are hoping.
"If (the
people) want me to lead the transition, I will not let them down," El-Baradei
said last week after he arrived in Cairo from Europe.
El-Baradei,
69, is favored by Western media as a voice of moderation, democracy and
secularism — a candidate acceptable even to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has
been playing an increasingly large role in the protests. But among ordinary
Egyptians, few see him as the person destined to lead the country.
"I
don't see El-Baradei as a leader at all. He wasn't there when the protests
began, and took no risk," Dalia Ziada, a social activist, blogger and head
of the North Africa bureau of the American Islamic Congress based in Cairo,
told The Media Line. "He never participated in politics; he was only a
United Nations employee."
The
protests in Egypt until now have been mostly a spontaneous affair, sparked the
by success of the Tunisian street in forcing President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali
into exile earlier this month. The absence of a single leader has done little
to deter demonstrators from defying the police and army, with Tahrir Square
drawing hundreds of thousands on Tuesday for the declared "million man
march."
But if
the opposition gets its wish and Mubarak opens negotiations or steps down,
someone will have to play leader. The monopoly Mubarak and his National
Democratic Party has had over political life in Egypt for three decades leaves
few people naturally positioned for the talks.
El-Baradei
comes with some excellent credentials. In his 12 years as director-general of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Vienna-based watchdog
monitoring nuclear proliferation, he publicly clashed with the U.S. over how
hard to come down on suspected Iranian violations and on the American-led
invasion of Iraq. He was also tough on Israel, publicly accusing the Jewish
state of violating international law in its alleged attack of a Syrian nuclear
facility. After stepping down from the IAEA in 2009, he positioned himself as a
stern opponent of the Mubarak regime.
"He
spent most of his life in UN organizations," Ephraim Asculai, who worked
at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and was in charge of external relations
during El-Baradei's term at IAEA, told Israel's Ynet news site on Monday.
"He's a very impressive person, no doubt about it. I wouldn't say he was a
great friend of Israel. He isn't extreme, but he certainly didn't relate to us
particularly warmly over the years."
But El-Baradei's
career works against him as well. He has been outside Egypt most of his adult
life, working as a diplomat and global bureaucrat whose life is far removed
from the experience of ordinary Egyptians.
Born in
Cairo in 1942 to a well-connected family, his father was president of the
Egyptian Bar Association. He began his career in the Egyptian foreign service
in 1964. In 1980, he left to join the UN, becoming a senior fellow in charge of
the international law program at the UN Institute for Training and Research and
later served as an adjunct professor of international law at the New York
University. He became director of the IAEA in 1997.
"He's
not particularly a unifying force among the opposition and protesters,"
Maye Kassem, associate professor of political science at American University of
Cairo, said. "He's very attractive to a small group of intellectuals, but
on the whole he’s certainly not a unifying force. There's really no leader who
is unifying force right now."
After his
return to Egypt in 2009, he came under criticism from many Egyptians for
spending more time outside the country on official visits and failed to exploit
the opportunity of last November's parliamentary elections to unite the
opposition parties. When El-Baradei arrived last week at Cairo airport from
Vienna, he was greeted by a crowd of journalists rather than throngs of
supporters.
Kassem
said more promising candidates to lead the opposition include Ayman Abd Al-Aziz
Nour, who served time in prison in 2005 after he was stripped of his
parliamentary immunity and charged with fraud. As head of the Tomorrow Party,
later that year he mounted a quixotic challenge to Mubarak in the rigged
presidential elections.
People
know he's been in prison and he competed in the presidential elections. He's a
self-made man who people can relate to," Kassem said. "The more
neutral an individual is the more stable the country will be — this will be
acceptable to everybody — not just to the Western-orientated, not to
Islam-orientated and not to the nationalist-orientated."
— David
Miller contributed to this article.
