Egypt: How the wheel of history turned

By overcoming their fears and defying the man whose regime had terrorised them for 30 years, Cairo's protesters not only drove out Hosni Mubarak, they have changed the Arab world


-Taken from the Observer (with David Sharrock and Paul Harris)
-Cairo - February 2011

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, says Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as he urges his comrades to seize the moment to overthrow the ruler they see as a tyrant. It has taken decades for the storm surge to break over Egypt, but when it finally did the forces of change proved irresistible, sweeping away Hosni Mubarak in just 18 days of popular and peaceful street protests.

A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.

Known locally as Basboosa, Mohamed, aged 26, was a street fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, where unemployment is conservatively estimated at 30%. He earned around £87 a month, the money going to support his six siblings, including one sister in university. He was regularly stopped by police, who expected him to pay them bribes to allow him to sell his wares from a wheelbarrow. On the morning of 17 December last year he had spent the equivalent of £125 on merchandise when it was seized.

What made the loss harder to take was the humiliation. A 45-year-old female officer slapped him across the face, spat at him, scattered his fruit on the ground and confiscated his electronic scales. Two of her colleagues joined in, beating him. As a coup de grace, the woman insulted Mohamed's dead father, a labourer who died of a heart attack when his eldest son was just three years old.

Mohamed finally snapped. For decades millions of young men like him right across the North African coastal plain have watched television images beamed from the other side of the Mediterranean from a European continent of prosperity, freedom and opportunity. They have watched the cronies of their own regimes growing older and, in their decadence, more arrogant and corrupt. They have watched hope for a better future leaking away.

Seeking justice, Mohamed went to the local governor's office to complain about his treatment. He issued a warning when told that the governor was unavailable: "If you don't see me, I'll burn myself." At 11.30am, less than an hour after he had been robbed and humiliated by the state's forces, he doused himself in petrol in front of the governor's office and set himself alight.

"What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?" said his sister Samia when her brother finally died of horrific injuries on 4 January. "A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live."

The young man's desperate action was a rallying call long awaited in his country and its neighbours. Mohamed Bouazizi's death became the spark which lit the bonfire on which the corrupt regime of Tunisia's President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali would also perish. And, like a bushfire out of control, there was soon fears that the "contagion" would spread.

In an eerie coincidence with subsequent events in Egypt, it took 18 days for Mohamed to die, during which time Ben Ali was sufficiently shaken by the growing voices of anger and protest that he visited the dying young man in hospital.

At his funeral 5,000 mourners chanted: "Farewell, Mohamed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep." He was buried at Garaat Bennour cemetery, 10 miles from Sidi Bouzid.

By then there was no turning back for the old guard as riots in Sidi Bouzid spread to the capital, Tunis. It seemed miraculous to Tunisians how quickly the iron fist of Ben Ali, president for 24 years, was loosened. The internet played a vital role, subverting the state-controlled communications channels by allowing ordinary citizens to bypass them and organise democratically.

"Game Over!" taunted the placards and cheers of the jubilant crowds in a deliberate reference to the age of online computer gaming – a world beyond the reach of ageing tyrants, where the sans culottes of the Arab world come together in cyberspace.

For decades Tunisia had been characterised by the west as a "model" Arab nation, but the WikiLeaks saga, months earlier, revealed the ugly truth of what its key sponsor, the United States, really thought of this "mafia state", run as a virtual private enterprise by Ben Ali and his hated, avaricious wife Leila Trabelsi, who plundered 1.5 tonnes of gold from the central bank when they fled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

Ben Ali's removal from power suddenly seemed to be creating a potential domino-effect around the region. First he tried to quell the protests by addressing the nation on state television and promising reforms. But when this failed to stem the tide of opposition, and with confidence among the armed forces ebbing from him, he chose to run. An international arrest warrant has been issued by Tunisia and his assets in Swiss banks have been frozen.

While opposition figures, including a leading internet activist, have joined an interim government in preparation for elections within two months, the situation in Tunisia remains highly fluid and volatile, with most ordinary citizens unhappy that so many leading lights of the old regime remain in power.

The results of Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation swiftly prompted protests across the region. Inspired by Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution, large protests began in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, with lesser incidents in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco. Many were characterised by a playful, party atmosphere. In Amman, the Jordanian security forces handed out soft drinks to protesters, who laughed as they chanted "Mubarak you are next!"

The Jordanians could not have known they were right. But to fully comprehend the swirling fury of the Egyptian street one must look back nine months. It was near midnight on Sunday 6 June when two Egyptian police officers walked into the Space Net internet cafe on Boubaset Street, a short stroll from Alexandria's crumbling corniche, and demanded to speak to Khaled Said.

According to his mother and sister, Said, 28, was devoted to his pet cats and enjoyed pacing the seafront, flying kites on his own. His room was a jumble of wires and old car batteries, part of a homemade music system Said used to practise rapping; the thumping bass from behind his door could often be heard well into the early hours.

"He was ordinary, like any one of us," remembers his sister, Zahraa. "He never seemed interested in politics at all."

That night Khaled Said was beaten to death by the two officers who came looking for him. They smashed his head against a marble ledge in the lobby of the building next door before throwing his body into the back of a van, driving around, then dumping it by the roadside. It later emerged that Said had taped a secret video depicting what appeared to be corrupt local security chiefs dividing up the spoils of a drugs bust. His family also discovered self-penned anti-government songs stored on his computer.

Three months ago, in the run-up to Egypt's blatantly rigged parliamentary elections, Zahraa told the Observer that the suffering of her brother and others like him could end up shaking the country to its very foundations: "Change will not come from this regime's version of democracy, it will come in the shape of a tidal wave from below. Maybe the torture and murders carried out by our policemen will set that tidal wave in motion." Her words were prescient.

Khaled Said was not the first Egyptian killed at the hands of Mubarak's police force, nor would he be the last. In Said's Sidi Gabr neighbourhood alone, dozens of police torture cases have been logged by local activists over the past eight months, some of them fatal.

But the brazen manner of this particular murder – on a public street and not behind the blacked-out windows of the Sidi Gabr police headquarters – and the fact that the victim was middle-class, with relatives able to resist pressure from the security services to keep quiet, ensured that the name of Khaled Said quickly become synonymous with the staggering brutality and corruption of Mubarak's vast security apparatus, a brutality and corruption to which almost all Egyptians, to a lesser degree, were exposed on a daily basis.

"That was the turning point," claims Heba Morayef, the Human Rights Watch advocate in Egypt. "Prior to that, demonstrations in favour of political reform struck many ordinary Egyptians as somewhat abstract, even if they had vague sympathy with the sentiments being expressed.

"Police cruelty, however, was something that touched people personally and it inspired a whole new, cross-class section of society to adopt a more combative stance towards the state."

After much dithering and buck-passing by the authorities, the two officers responsible (though not their seniors) were put on trial and mass protests in major cities began. The demonstrations were never more than a few thousand strong, and often smaller – not insignificant in a country where a 30-year-old emergency law effectively criminalises any sort of public expression of dissent, but not enough to panic Mubarak's entrenched political elite.

Online, however, it was a different story. Kolina Khaled Said, a Facebook group meaning "We are all Khaled Said", quickly gathered hundreds of thousands, of supporters, who swapped information on other examples of inhumane police treatment and helped organise small-scale acts of civil disobedience.

Along with a loose network of more explicitly political online activist groups, the anonymous administrators behind Kolina Khaled Said – one of whom turned out to be Google's regional marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, who attended to the web page from his home 1,500 miles away in Dubai – tried to find creative ways to get round Egypt's suffocating legal prohibitions on collective action in an effort to make their voices heard on the ground.

Sometimes small groups of youths would "spontaneously" gather in city centres and sing the national anthem; on other occasions individuals wearing black would walk to the Nile at an appointed hour across the country and stand separately by the river in silence, an innocent routine that still managed to provoke a violent response from the security services.

A critical role in the process was played by another online entity, the 6th April youth movement. Taking its name from the date of a 2008 textile workers’ strike in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla Al-Kubra that left three people dead after central security forces opened fire on the crowds, 6th April formed a new bridge between a predominantly young, well-educated generation of urban political campaigners and a rapidly-proliferating wave of labour activism that was already bringing hundreds of thousands of working-class Egyptians into conflict with an unresponsive state over rising unemployment, spiralling prices and an insultingly meagre minimum wage.

“The coordination between those groups had always been lacking before, even though at the root of it all we had the same complaints,” recalls Ahmed Salah, a veteran activist and co-founder of 6th April. “The challenge became to expose the relevance of our separate struggles to each other. We knew that if we could that, everything would be different.”

Although many of them used the internet as an organisational tool themselves, the struggle of Egyptian workers – who sought to obtain their economic rights from a government that had pushed almost half the population below the poverty line through an aggressive series of neoliberal reforms – had often appeared divorced from that of the ‘facebook activists’ so adored by a buzzword-hungry international media. The latter’s genealogy lay in the Kifaya (‘Enough’) pro-democracy movement that peaked in 2005 around the time of Mubarak’s stage-managed re-election, and focused on constitutional reform and an end to the Emergency Law.

Workers’ demands, which included the ability to establish their own trade unions, free from the control of state-backed labour syndicates, seemed more parochial by comparison. Yet taken together the movements offered a substantial challenge to the legitimacy of the Mubarak government, which in its final decade had become characterised by the tight nexus of Egypt’s business and political elite, members of whom were becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

The link-up between 6th April activists and aggrieved workers was not always a smooth one; on the first anniversary of Mahalla’s uprising an online call for a general strike went virtually unheeded. But a spark of collaboration was born, and, for the first time since the early 2000s – when the second Palestinian intifada and America’s invasion of Iraq brought mass protests to Tahrir Square – a loosely coordinated grassroots assault on Egypt’s political overlords appeared to be taking shape.

This vague but energetic new wave of dissent was leaving behind the moribund landscape of formal opposition politics in Egypt, where paper-democrats had long been scrabbling for crumbs of power tossed down by a regime keen to keep up the facade of a pluralist democracy. Now a new alternative avenue of resistance was on the cards and it was led from below, by those who had never known anything other than Mubarak's autocratic rule. With a demographic time-bomb ticking below the surface – two-thirds of Egypt's population is below the age of 30, and each year 700,000 new graduates chase 200,000 jobs – conditions were ripe for a social explosion.

Into this combustible mix entered Kolina Khaled Said, the creators of which took great pains to cast their movement as not party-political, not backed by shadowy foreign forces, and dedicated primarily to encouraging Egyptians not to be afraid. The ingredients for massive social unrest may have been falling into place, but still in the way stood the firmest obstacle of all: fear.

Through a prodigious web of overlapping security agencies ranging from armed riot police to plain-clothes informants to the baltagiyya – casually-employed ex-prisoners and local thugs – Mubarak's ruling clique had effectively instilled a sense of hopelessness in an overwhelming proportion of the population, whose instincts lay in avoiding the state, not defying it.

There was never any doubt that frustration at the status quo was deep and potent in every geographical and social corner of Egypt. If ever a critical mass of street protests were to develop and individuals thought the state's gendarmerie was no longer impregnable, it was likely that a full-scale uprising would quickly balloon. Yet something was needed to break down that initial aversion to open disobedience. Tunisia provided it. Arab neighbours had faced down their own security forces and won; perhaps now Egyptians could do the same.

A change of tactics was essential though if the omnipresent state security agencies were to be outwitted; 25 January, the date of a national holiday devoted to celebrating the achievements of the police force, was selected as the "day of rage" to exploit growing public resentment against Mubarak's security forces which had been fuelled so successfully by Kolina Khaled Said.

An umbrella coalition of youth activists formed small cells and spent the preceding weeks meeting in secret, plotting a series of devolved, localised protests designed to put maximum strain on the state security resources.

In Cairo, 20 protest sites in densely populated, largely working-class neighbourhoods were selected and publicised. One extra location, in the warren of back streets of the Giza neighbourhood of Bulaq Al-Duqrur, was never broadcast – and took police completely by surprise.

"Usually we rally in one place and immediately get kettled in by hundreds or thousands of riot police," said Ahmed Salah, who was involved in planning for 25 January.

"This time we were determined to do something different – be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the 'amin markazi [central security forces], giving us the chance to walk down hundreds of different roads and show normal passers-by that taking to the streets was actually possible."

The plan worked better than they could ever have imagined. Throughout the capital and across the country, pockets of protest sprung up and overpowered the thinly stretched riot police, who had no choice but to let the marches continue. Later, when the different strands rallied in city centres – including Cairo's symbolic Tahrir Square –the police used guns and tear gas to disperse them.

But it was already too late. By destroying the smokescreen of police invincibility, even for only a few hours, the youths had pierced Mubarak's last line of defence – the fear his subjects felt at the thought of confronting him – and a fatal blow was struck to a 30-year dictatorial regime.

Nevertheless, Mubarak would prove to be a mightier force than Tunisia's Ben Ali. He knew he could rely upon the support of the Americans, who had long granted him premier status in the region not just as guarantor of peace with Israel but also the bulwark against Islamist militancy. And, as a fabled military hero, he was not just the creature of the all-powerful armed forces but for decades their own guarantee of stability and continuity.

It was only as the demonstrators refused to desert Tahrir Square or accept Mubarak's concessions for as long as they fell short of his departure, and as Washington dithered and flip-flopped, that the army began to have its doubts about continuing to back him.

As the protests continued, their largely peaceful, non-sectarian nature also assuaged the concerns of those Egyptians who feared chaos or extremism lay at the heart of the largest anti-government uprising their country had ever seen. It was the all-embracing solidarity and strength of those in Tahrir and other major plazas in the country, and the restraint they showed in the face of violent state-backed provocation, that really saw the demonstrations mushroom into an broad-based, inclusive mass social movement.

Repeatedly over the past two weeks the Obama administration, the State Department, CIA and the Pentagon had been unsettled and confused by the situation in Egypt. Caught unawares at the prospect of the protests actually succeeding, they reacted too slowly, then too quickly and, finally, were rescued by events on the ground.

But few should be surprised; American strategy was caught between a rock and a hard place. There was an urgent need to respond to the pro-democracy movement, but at the same time that movement was aimed at unseating one of America's most trusted Arab allies, a man who had been a friend to five presidents over three decades.

At the start the crisis only rippled slowly through Washington. On 26 January, a day after protests began in Egypt, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called Egypt a "strong ally". The impression of support for a president whose army soaks up more than one billion dollars of US aid a year was strengthened a day later when vice-president Joe Biden said Mubarak was not a dictator.

American policy appeared in total disarray. Obama's envoy in the crisis, old school diplomat Frank Wisner, travelled to the country. On 5 February he expressed public support for Mubarak staying on, yet such was the confusion in US policymaking now that, mere hours later, both the White House and the State Department disavowed his comments.

As the protests refused to die down after Mubarak said that he would resign in September, US policy hardened again. It coalesced around the figure of new vice-president Omar Suleiman. For American – and Israeli – interests, Suleiman seemed ideal. He was known as a strong man and someone who wanted to preserve the strategic status quo, yet also a figure who had made the right noises, in public at least, about making the transition to democracy.

He was seen as someone who could avoid the nightmare American scenario of a popular anti-Israeli government taking power in Egypt or, worst of all, an Islamist-influenced one.

On 8 February, Biden spoke to Suleiman by phone and stressed the need for an orderly, and swift, transition of power. That convinced many in Washington that it was only a matter of time.

Yet the impact of the Egyptian unrest was spiralling out into the rest of American diplomacy. Last Wednesday Obama spoke to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in a reportedly testy exchange in which the ageing Saudi royal argued for Mubarak to not be humiliated. When news of the conversation leaked it created a flurry of speculation that the revolt in Egypt was exposing the weakness of American power.

On Thursday CIA chief Leon Panetta told Congress that he imminently expected Mubarak to announce that he was likely to stand down. As Mubarak took to the TV screens that evening, Obama watched the speech on Air Force One as he made his way back from an event in Michigan.

Yet Mubarak fell short of the expectations of those in Tahrir Square and of the army generals when he announced he was transferring his remaining powers to Suleiman but remaining as president, if in name only to save his pride.

It was a move that stunned many and seemed to threaten a complete unravelling and a blood bath, with the demonstrators noisily hatching plans to march on the presidential palace in the morning, a move which would force the Army, thus far maintaining a politically detached posture, into choosing sides.

And so it did, the military's supreme council shepherding the defeated Mubarak onto a plane to take him to a luxurious internal exile at his Red Sea palace. It was an extraordinary finale to 18 days of rage; the army had staged a coup with the backing of the people.

Like a swan looking graceful on the surface while kicking its legs furiously underneath, Obama was able to take to the airwaves and welcome in the changes. "The wheel of history turned at a blinding pace," Obama said.

The day Khaled Said died, his mother vowed to wear only black in recognition of his death and the system that produced it. Yesterday, following Mubarak's departure, she dressed in white.

Mohamed ElBaradei hits out at west's support for repressive regimes

Exclusive: Ex-nuclear chief says west must rethink Middle East policy as speculation grows he may run for office in Egypt


-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - March 2010

-Read the full interview transcript here

Western governments risk creating a new generation of Islamist extremists if they continue to support repressive regimes in the Middle East, the former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, has told the Guardian.

In his first English-language interview since returning to Cairo in February, the Nobel peace prize-winner said the strategy of supporting authoritarian rulers in an effort to combat the threat of Islamic extremism had been a failure, with potentially disastrous consequences.

"There is a need for re-evaluation … the idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is [Osama] Bin Laden and co is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true," he said. "I see increasing radicalisation in this area of the world, and I understand the reason. People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see – they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur."

ElBaradei said he felt vindicated in his cautious approach while head of the International Atomic Energy Authority. He revealed that all his reports in the runup to the Iraq war were designed to be "immune from being abused" by governments. "I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US, have started to sink in," he said.

"Sure, there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians? All the indications coming out of [the Chilcot inquiry] are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question – where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?"

ElBaradei, who has emerged as a potential challenger to the three-decade rule of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, said western governments must withdraw the unstinting support for autocrats who were seen to be a bulwark against extremism.

"Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view. It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it's been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping."

The 67-year-old added: "If you bet on individuals, instead of the people, you are going to fail. And western policy so far has been to bet on individuals, individuals who are not supported by their people and who are being discredited every day."

The popularity in the Middle East of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, he said, should be seen as message to the west that its "policy is not reaching out to the people. The policy should be: 'We care about you, we care about your welfare, we care about your human rights.'"

On his return to Egypt, ElBaradei was greeted at Cairo airport by more than 1,000 supporters, despite a ban on political gatherings. He has not yet announced whether he will stand in next year's elections against Mubarak, a key US ally who has ruled the Arab world's largest country for 28 years.

ElBaradei said western governments needed to open their eyes to the realities of Egypt's "sham" democracy, or risk losing all credibility in the battle against extremism.

"The west talks a lot about elections in Iran, for example, but at least there were elections – yet where are the elections in the Arab world? If the west doesn't talk about that, then how can it have any credibility?

"Only if you empower the liberals, if you empower the moderate socialists, if you empower all factions of society, only then will extremists be marginalised."

George Bush made the spread of democracy in the Middle East the centrepiece of US foreign policy, but the Iraq invasion largely discredited the initiative in the region. In a landmark speech in Cairo last June Barack Obama appeared to back away from his predecessor's aspirations.

"America does not presume to know what is best for everyone," Obama said. "No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other."

The speech was largely welcomed in the Arab world at the time as a retreat from the neoconservative agenda, but some democracy activists voiced concern that it heralded the US backing away from the cause of human rights in the region.

Current Egyptian law effectively prohibits independent candidates from getting their name on the ballot paper, which has fuelled ElBaradei's demands for a "constitutional revolution" to make the poll free and fair. Analysts believe Mubarak, who is 81 and currently recovering from a gall bladder operation, is planning to engineer a succession of power to his youngest son, Gamal.

ElBaradei said he was not afraid of intimidation by Egypt's vast security apparatus, but revealed that several foreign governments had expressed concern about his safety in the country, following recent reports of his followers being arrested and tortured by police.

Speaking at his home, he said: "I hear that from so many different governments, people coming to me and saying 'you should be careful'. But I don't want to go around with bodyguards … people who are extremely poor and deprived are coalescing around me in the streets saying 'we need change', and I want to listen."

ElBaradei: Unlikely champion for democracy in the Arab World

'My hope is to be a precursor for change … I'm not necessarily presenting myself as a presidential candidate'


-Taken from the Guardian
-Cairo - March 2010

-Read the full interview transcript here

A drive along the 26th July flyover, which sweeps westwards from the Nile out towards the Giza pyramids, offers a unique window on to the state of modern Egypt. With the fumes and chaos of central Cairo fading behind you, the landscape quickly becomes dotted with thousands of identikit redbrick buildings, most of them unfinished but inhabited, with half-built floors and steel rods sprouting precariously from the rooftops.

Constructed haphazardly on formerly agricultural land, these tightly-clustered conurbations are the hallmark of the ashwa’iyat, the ever-expanding informal neighbourhoods that ten million Cairo residents call home.

As the 4,500 year old pyramids loom into view though, the surroundings change again. Now the slums give way to a series of high fences manned by private security patrols; above them vast advertising billboards depict the latest lifestyle accessories for the Egyptian upper-class – from signature golf courses to baroque private villas. Behind one of these walls lives Mohamed ElBaradei, the unlikely figurehead for a movement seeking to get rid of one of the Middle East's most entrenched autocratic regimes.

"In Egypt the rich live in ghettoes," he said, waving his hand at the beautifully manicured garden, complete with pool. "The gap in social justice here is simply indescribable."

The gulf between Egypt's rich and poor is one of many social ills that persuaded ElBaradei to swap a comfortable retirement in western Europe for the mud-slinging world of Egyptian politics.

Reserved, diplomatic and restrained in his rhetoric, the bespectacled former head of the UN's nuclear weapons agency often appears awkwardly out of place in an arena dominated by bullish characters and highly personal attacks.

In recent weeks the state-controlled press has called the Nobel peace laureate a traitor, and described his campaign for political reform as "tantamount to a constitutional coup". Meanwhile his supporters have been arrested and allegedly tortured by security services.

"I was hoping for a slightly more quiet life," he admitted to the Guardian in his first international interview since returning to his native country in February. "But this is a place where I have friends, where I have family, where I have ties, and when I hear people telling me, 'you have to come and help fight for change' of course I have to weigh in and see what I can do.

"How successful I will be I don't know, but at least in the past couple of months alone I've managed to make people less afraid, I've managed to make people understand that the political system is the key to overcoming stagnation, and I've managed to make people understand that there are alternatives to Bin Laden on one side or autocracy on the other."

Sceptics would raise an eyebrow at that list of successes, especially as ElBaradei is coy about his exact intentions regarding next year's presidential election. So far he has insisted that he will not run unless a "constitutional revolution" takes place to establish a genuine system of democracy rather than the current "sham" system, but that has not stopped him intensifying his public appearances.

Last week ElBaradei's arrival at Friday prayers in Cairo's Hussein mosque sparked a media scrum. It also provided a rebuttal of sorts to critics who claim that he is too far detached from the hardships of the ordinary Egyptians he claims to be fighting for.

"I'm not trying to act presidential, I'm just want to go down and meet people and listen to their different views," he said. "It shows that it's not just the so-called intellectuals or educated that want change in this country, but rather everybody; even those that do not feel strongly about 'political freedom' still need to eat, they still need to have a home."

Since his triumphant return to Cairo, ElBaradei has clocked up a series of Egyptian and Arab TV appearances in an effort to spread his demand for domestic change. But he used his first English-language interview to draw parallels between Egypt's malaise and the wider framework of western foreign policy.

At the heart of the 67-year-old's message is a warning that unstinting western support for repressive Arab regimes to combat the perceived threat of Islamism is a dead-end strategy, with potentially diabolical consequences.

"I see increasing radicalisation in this area of the world, and I understand the reason. People feel depressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see – they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur," he said.

He rejected the idea of a "clash of civilisations", but warned that dialogue between Muslims and the west would be difficult without a just settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. "Unless you find a fair and equitable resolution to this issue the people here will always feel humiliated and also, it will continue to be used by Arab rulers as a pretext for their failure to deliver," he added.

Employing the type of language not usually associated with the mild-mannered diplomat, Elbaradei described western policy in Iraq and Afghanistan as "a total failure". He said: "It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it's been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping."

"If you bet on individuals, instead of people, you are going to fail – and the western policy so far has been to bet on individuals who are not supported by their people and who are being discredited every day. When you see that the most popular people in the Middle East are [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah [of Hezbollah], that should send you a message: that your policy is not reaching out to the people.

Exposing the flaws of the Arab world's political systems, and establishing the link between an open and pluralistic form of governance on the one hand and an improvement in living standards on the other is one of ElBaradei's biggest obstacles in a nation with little experience of democratic participation.

"It's something totally new for Egyptians, to make them feel responsible for their future. But this isn't instant coffee: it will take time, and it's very difficult to get people to shed their fear and feel confident."

By Egypt's standards, ElBaradei's growth in support since his return has been stratospheric: more than 200,000 fans have joined his Facebook group, and an effort to secure online signatures backing reform by the "National Association for Change", a grouping encompassing "Marxists to the Muslim Brotherhood", has had reasonable success.

But in a country where dissent is heavily policed and opposition forces have largely lain dormant for a generation, ElBaradei knows his options are restricted. And after elite corruption scandals, he must combat the suspicions of those who question his motives.

"People have become so cynical in Egypt because of the kind of system we have here, that they don't really believe someone can be acting for the common good, they think he must have an ulterior motive," he said. "I don't have an ulterior motive, my hope is to be a channel or precursor for change and then let the people decide. I'm not necessarily presenting myself as a presidential candidate."

With the election a long way off, and no constitutional amendments yet in the pipeline, ElBaradei is hedging his bets. But he remains set on fighting for deep-rooted change in a country where stagnation has become the status quo.

"The west talks a lot about elections in Iran, for example, but at least there were elections – yet where are the elections in the Arab world? If the west doesn't talk about that, then how can it have any credibility?" he said.

Amid the tasteful modern art and constantly chugging water-sprinklers, it will take a lot for ElBaradei to prove that he has what it takes to be one of those liberals, capable of providing a voice for the inhabitants of Cairo's slums and beyond.

Egypt – and the west – will be watching that struggle with interest.

ElBaradei: The full interview transcript

The following is a full transcript of the Guardian's exclusive interview with Mohamed ElBaradei at his home near the Giza pyramids in Cairo, Egypt. It took place on Tuesday 30th March, 2010.

Read the news stories:
Mohamed ElBaradei hits out at west's support for repressive regimes
Mohammed ElBaradei: unlikely champion of democracy in the Arab World
Cautious reports on Iran were 'framed to avoid war'

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Jack Shenker: How are things going with the National Association for Change [NAC] and your effort to collect signatures supporting the campaign?

Mohamed ElBaradei: Well this is something totally new to the Egyptians, to make them feel responsible for their future. They have been used to being told what to do and how to do it, being told to accept whatever lot comes their way in terms of governance – who is going to be their president, what kind of political system they will have, swinging between total alliance with the Soviet Union to very close cooperation with US. So they’ve been completely marginalised in terms of feeling that they own this place, and my goal for them to take charge, to be empowered, to understand that democracy is the way to go in the future is something totally new.

During Nasser’s period they were told, ‘give up your rights, and in return we’ll give you major projects like independence, nationalism, development’ – lots of which didn’t come through for a variety of reasons. But right now they’re being told to give up their rights, yet nothing else is materialising in terms of improving standards of life, in terms of improving and building the Arab community, in terms of R&D, there is really nothing for them to feel proud about in terms of major achievements. But at the same time they’ve been asked to give up all their rights, particularly under this Emergency Law. So to get them from where they are today, after some 50-odd years, to feeling that they are empowered and can change things is becoming very difficult.

I see people who are desperate and have totally lost hope that they can change things, and of course they’re afraid because of the Emergency Law – what you see here is that you can’t even have more than four or five people moving in the street without [the regime] saying ‘this is against the Emergency Law’. You can’t hold big meetings of people because they say ‘this could be agitation against the regime’. We can’t even have a headquarters for this informal association [the NAC] because it is not registered and we will not be able to register it because they tell me this is a political movement and if it’s a political movement you have to go through the party process which is cumbersome and ridiculous. We probably can’t raise funds because we are not a formal entity. So there are a lot of hurdles to overcome in terms of logistics.

But more important is getting people gradually to understand that they have to join the rest of the world and to understand that their economic and social progress is very much linked to the kind of political regime they have. That linkage is what I’m trying to hammer home.

However, having said all that, which sounds pessimistic, I see that there is a thirst for change. When you see that there are around a quarter of a million supporters on Facebook, mostly young guys, proportionally – in a country with a population of 80 million and with internet penetration of only about 16% - this is more than what Obama had. He had 2.2 million online supporters before the election, in a country of 300 million, so proportionally we have more than what Obama had in terms of internet support.

JS: Clearly your arrival back here has generated a lot of momentum, but how do you start converting that into concrete change? I noticed with your visit to Hussein mosque on Friday that you looked, if you don’t mind me saying, very presidential – meeting crowds in front of the cameras, etc. – and you’ve also been meeting delegations from the Coptic community, the arts world, and so on. It seems as if in contrast to your public demeanour a few weeks ago you’re starting to act more in a consciously statesmanlike manner – is that a deliberate campaign strategy?

MEB: It’s not... I have to clarify two things. Firstly, and I keep repeating this – and I have to because people have become so cynical in Egypt because of the kind of system we have here, that they don’t really believe someone can be acting for the common good, they think he must have an ulterior motive. I don’t have an ulterior motive, my hope is to be a channel or precursor for change and then let the people decide who they want to be president; it could be anybody, and I’m not necessarily presenting myself as a presidential candidate. I’ve said before that there are a whole lot of common-sense guarantees have to be in place first, including changing the constitution, and of course I need to see that a wide majority of people want me to be that agent of change. I said I will not let them down, but I’ll be very happy just to be a prompt for change.

So it’s not that I’m trying to act presidential, I’m just trying to go down and meet people and listen to their different views – and there are so many different views, I mean they haven’t had the practice of democracy in fifty years, they don’t know how to go about it or where to start. But the Hussein visit was great in the sense that the government media has described me as a ‘virtual figure’ who doesn’t exist in reality, and the picture coming from there was very different. I was quite surprised to see how many people who are extremely poor and deprived are coalescing around me in the streets saying ‘we need change’, and I want to listen – that, I think, sent a different message to the regime. It shows that it’s not just the so-called intellectuals or educated that want change in this country, but rather everybody; even those that do not feel strongly about ‘political freedom’, even for those who don’t have that as a priority, they still need to eat, they still need to have a home.

JS: One of the key constituencies of people fighting for change in Egypt over recent years has been workers, and we’ve seen a lot of very powerful industrial action in that sphere. Are you coordinating with trade unions and workers groups, and do you think that people who are striking over issues like factory privatisation, etc. can be brought on board to your campaign?

MEB: Well we have this so-called National Front for Change [the NAC] and I’ve said that this is a coalition of every Egyptian who believes in change, all the way from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Marxists. Anybody who believes in that overarching goal should join us but we know that there are so many different ideological differences, and that’s fine – like in any country, you have the Labour and the Tories and everyone else, and you let the people decide whom they want to be in charge. So in order not to distract from the cause, I’m limiting myself to saying those who believe that we need change should sign this declaration and say yes, we agree with that. And then once we have that change let them all go their own different ways and let the people decide. So yes we’re open to workers, we’re open to farmers, we’re open to everybody.

But it will take time; people have to understand that change after so many decades of a total lack of democracy will take time. Even just to give people confidence and shed themselves of the fear, this will take time. What I think I’m doing is stirring things up, getting people to realise that there are different ways of going about things and that there are better ways which have been tried and tested in other countries – the majority of countries – and that they work much better, because if you don’t give people freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion, the basic freedoms that everybody takes for granted in a democracy then you’re at a dead-end street.

JS: In that effort to stir things up are you hampered by the state of the official opposition? I’m talking about parties like Al-Wafd, Al-Tagammu, and so on who are ostensibly opposed to the government but have in many ways been quite obstructionist towards your own campaign, and particularly the reports in Al-Masry Al-Yom that Al-Wafd had agreed a secret deal with the government to help isolate you...

MEB: Well I take frankly a very broad-picture and gracious view of all this; I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about policies. If people agree with what we’re doing they are welcome to join us. We are not a front for hidden entities or parties, we are front for individuals; anybody who belongs to any party is welcome and we have had meetings with many different people from different parties, attending as individuals and not as party representatives.

However, if the existing parties are sharing the same goal, I’m happy to coordinate with them. I don’t believe that I want to work within this superficial structure. If they think that this is the way to help things – and I do hear from them similar rhetoric – then fine, but they haven’t been able to effect any change for the past twenty years at least, and we need to try something new and something different. And my goal right now is that I should be able to get as many people as possible to sign and support our call for change because if we can do that it will definitely create a different dynamic. I’d like to see as many people in the next six months or so saying, ‘we would like to see free and fair elections, we would like to see amendments to the constitution and eventually a new constitution’. There is nothing risky about signing that, but it will take time for people to gradually feel like they can do that. I think we have forty or fifty thousand signatures at present which is not bad for a couple of weeks, and I hope there will be a snowball effect.

JS: The Mubarak regime has always been very effective at containing potentially mass mobilisations that threatened the government – you’ve had Kifaya, 6th April, Ayman Nour’s campaign – and every time they’ve proved very adept at neutralising these break-outs of public opinion. I’m thinking especially of Ayman Nour here, who was effectively delegitimized by the regime. How will you avoid that same trap?

MEB: Well, that’s a good question. It’s really up to the people, I continue to say and repeat that I can only help you to help yourself; I’m not able to do much alone and if you really want change everyone has an individual responsibility. Everyone is responsible, everyone has to participate and everyone must fulfil whatever they think they can do; this concept of individual responsibility – which has been completely lost in Egypt – had to come back, there is no one coming in on a white horse that is going to change things for you. What you see every day is people looking at you for change, and I keep telling them, ‘no, I look at you to help me in effecting change’. There are a lot of mental processes and states of mind which have to change, and as I said the change is not going to start or end by 2011 – this could be the beginning, but it is going to take a long time. It’s culture, it’s education, it’s the mindset.

JS: What do you think the government’s strategic response will be to your campaign? Your intervention in the domestic political sphere seemed to take them initially by surprise, but we both know they will fight back against attempts at reform. Do you think there is a danger to yourself personally? And what about your supporters, amongst whom we’ve seen arrests and allegations of police torture already?

MEB: Well of course there are a lot of people outside the country who are afraid for my own security, but I have been in the public domain for many years and have always had this security risk looming in the background. I should take as many precautions as possible, but I don’t want to go around with bodyguards – you saw me at Hussein, just walking along. It comes with the territory. But I see a lot of concern outside of Egypt about my own security, I hear that from so many different governments, people coming to me and saying ‘you should be careful’...

JS: Other governments specifically warning you about your security in Egypt?

MEB: Yes, I’ve had a lot of that. But, as I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about that, though of course I have to take as many precautions as I can.

JS: Well that brings me on to the western perception of Egypt. This is one of your first interviews to the international press since returning to Egypt, and your first interview with an English-language newspaper; it often seems that in Western media and political circles, the rhetoric of the NDP regime – the narrative of Mubarak presiding over great economic growth and containing the threat of Islamist revolution – that narrative is basically accepted verbatim, and that’s the narrative that gets played out in the West. So now that you’re speaking to the Western media, what’s your message to the West, both the media and the governments?

MEB: Well, I think they need to have a more in-depth understanding of what’s happening in Egypt, and the role of Egypt in the Arab World and beyond. We have been lagging behind – I think Tim Sebastian wrote an article a few weeks ago saying Egypt has been watching from the sidelines whilst people went to the moon and carried out great revolutions, and we’ve been just simple observers...

JS: It was a controversial article!

MEB: Yes, yes... But our contribution to human civilisation has been minimal at best. And in addition I see increasing radicalisation in this area of the world, and I understand the reason. People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see – they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.

So it’s easy, and you hear it all the time, to say that there is a conspiracy theory by the West against Islam, against the Arabs. And this is not a sustainable system; people talk about the ‘clash of civilisations’ and all this sort of thing, and there is no clash of civilisations – it’s just a question of being able to understand each other, and creating a dialogue and creating the conditions in the Arab World and the Muslim World whereby they can join the rest of the world in moving together as one family for scientific, technical, sociological, political developments.

That is not happening for two reasons. There is the Palestinian issue which is a red flag for every Arab. It’s just a sense of humiliation. There was an article in Foreign Affairs recently which said that there are three different groups of countries: the Arab World, who feel humiliated and angry, India and China, who feel confident, and the West who feel afraid, and I think that’s a good description. There’s a lot of anger and a lot of humiliation here, starting of course with the Palestinian issue, and you cannot hide your head in the sand over this. Unless you find a fair and equitable resolution to this issue the people here will always feel humiliated and also, it will continue to be used by Arab rulers as a pretext for their failure to deliver.

Then of course you have Iraq and Afghanistan. Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view. It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it’s been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.

JS: You say Western policy has been a total failure in Iraq and Afghanistan; do you think the Western policy of pretty much unstinting support for repressive autocrats like President Mubarak has also been a failure? And what will the consequences of that failure be?

MEB: Well I think if you bet on individuals, instead of people, you are going to fail – and the Western policy so far has been to bet on individuals, individuals who are not supported by their people and who are being discredited every day. When you see that the most popular people in the Middle East are [Mahmoud] Ahmedinijad and Hassan Nasrallah, that should send you a message: that your policy is not reaching out to the people. The policy should be, ‘we care about you, we care about your welfare, we care about your human rights’.

You cannot just talk about human rights. The West talks a lot about elections in Iran, for example, but at least there were elections – yet where are the elections in the Arab World? If the West doesn’t talk about that, then how can it have any credibility? I’ve said that to many of my friends in the West. There is a need for re-evaluation, and the idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is Bin Laden and co. is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophesy come true. Only if you empower the liberals, if you empower the moderate socialists, if you empower all factions of society, only then will extremists be marginalised.

JS: Let me read you a definition of dictatorship: “In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.” Is Egypt a dictatorship?

MEB: Well Egypt is not a democracy, that’s for sure. We like here in the Arab World and in Egypt to have stereotyping – this is Islamist, this is socialist, this is an extremist. But human beings are much more sophisticated than that, and political systems also have different characteristics. But we are not a democracy. And if I look at what we have right now in Egypt, it’s a sham. If rulers want to say yes, this is an authoritarian system but in return for you giving up your political rights we’ll take care of your economic welfare, then that’s a different story. But don’t present the system as something that it’s not.

JS: I guess one of the issues concerning me is that in autocratic regimes all around the world you find presidents falsely portraying themselves as benevolent patriarchs, above the fray of daily politics...

MEB: Yes, it’s a tribal system. Egypt for 7000 years really never really had civic society, never really had a democracy, so it goes well beyond the last fifty years or so. It’s a whole change of culture, and what we have now is an individual-based system of governance rather than an institutional system of governance...

JS: And yet I feel that in your public comments you’ve largely held back from criticising President Hosni Mubarak by name; is it not time to hold him accountable and say outright, ‘he is a repressive autocrat, some might even call him a dictator’?

MEB: What I want to do at this stage is call for a constitutional revolution. I’m trying to break every political rule of the game, and I think it’s much more effective not to focus on individuals. And wrongly or rightly, I think everyone is doing what they think is good for the country. That’s my message now: I do not want to reopen the past, we have too much on our hands for the future. So I’m discussing policies, not individuals; I can criticise policies, but I’m not questioning the intentions or actions of individuals. And I think at this stage, that’s the right way to do it. I said from day one that I want to coalesce the Egyptian people around one great idea, which is their salvation – a move from authoritarianism to democracy.

JS: Looking at some of your specific campaigning strategies, you’ve said in the past that as a member of the Egyptian elite you feel you have a duty to campaign for democratic renewal and political reform. Are you trying to mobilise other parts of the Egyptian elite? When you look around gated communities such as this one, there are many upper class and upper middle-class business people who have done very well out of the Mubarak regime financially. If they have a stake in the status quo, how will you get them on board your campaign?

MEB: Well first of all I’m not campaigning, I’m expressing my views in public, and I’ve been amazed by how much people are ready for change and ready to understand and adopt my ideas for change, and appreciating that without biting the bullet and going for a real democratic system we’ll continue in our current state of total stagnation. This is a popular movement; how many people will join, I really don’t know. In many ways it’s like a black hole, because all the rules of the game need to change and there is no level playing field. What I’m trying to do is hammer at this idea: if you really want to get out of stagnation, if you really want to feel that your freedoms and rights are protected, if you really want to see a better future, there are no two ways about it – you have to move to a democratic system.

And that of course is difficult to explain to the average Egyptian; the linkage between political freedom, which they have never experienced, and their ‘bread and butter’ isn’t clear to them. But I think it is starting to seep through; people are starting to talk about constitutions, whereas two months ago nobody even knew we had a constitution! So it will take time, and we have to take the long-term view of change; it isn’t instant coffee, and it won’t happen overnight. It’s very difficult to get people to shed their fear and feel confident. But the key is to make sure people are ready to join, ready to share their fear and despair, and get into their head that they can, like other people in the world, be in control of their own destinies.

There will be a lot of resistance. A lot of people have been benefiting from the current system, as you rightly said; in Egypt the rich live in ghettoes. The gap in social justice here is simply indescribable; when I go to a slum in central Cairo and then I return to my home, these are two different lives. There has been economic development but for some reason it hasn’t trickled down, and obviously that’s a major issue. And I need to focus on this, because economic development and the market economy is all very good but I have to keep my eyes on the 42% of Egyptians who live on less than $1 a day, and the 30% who cannot even read and write. There are so many ills in Egyptian society.

JS: The parliamentary elections are six months away; I know you’re taking a long-term view, but will the NAC get involved in the parliamentary election battle? Considering it is highly unlikely that there will have been any constitutional amendments by that stage?

MEB: I can only tell you what is going to happen next week. It all depends on how much support we can get, how much mobilisation we can achieve. We will see. This is a non-violent movement; if I get millions of Egyptians saying ‘we want change’ then the regime needs to change – there are no two ways about it. I say to the regime, ‘your authority comes from the people, and if those people have made their feelings about you loud and clear then you have to change’. But that depends on how long it takes the people to catch up, and in the meantime the parliamentary elections are not going to solve our problems; the whole constitution needs to change and we need political guarantees. So many things need to change, but what’s important is that we have a president who believes in a completely new constitution, that will move Egypt in a serious way towards democracy. Then we will probably have to go through an interim period, and if we do that everything else will fall into place.

You know, people talk about progress in education and healthcare but all of that is very much linked to a system where the people can call the shots.

JS: You say you believe in non-violent campaigning. If the constitutional amendments don’t happen and the current regime attempts to engineer an undemocratic transfer of power, to Gamal Mubarak or to anyone else, and if millions of Egyptians who are desperate for change see that the regime is refusing to back down, will we see violence on the streets of Egypt?

MEB: I don’t know. The Egyptian people by their very nature are peaceful people, but it’s one of the inherent rights of every individual to have freedom of assembly and demonstration. All I know is that if we do not get all these changes, and if there is no level playing-field and no equal opportunity for people to run in the presidential elections, and no guarantees of the sort you get everywhere else, then I’m not going to be a part of that process. I’ll continue to speak on the ills of society, but I’m not going to legitimise the system by being part of it. What other people will do, I don’t know.

JS: You and your wife were probably looking forward to a quiet life after your retirement as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], so what was it that really prompted you as an individual to take on this challenge of stirring up one of the world’s most stagnant political landscapes?

MEB: Well I was looking for a slightly more quiet life, not a completely quiet life! I still have lots of commitments I have to act upon. I’m writing a book, for example, and I have a legal commitment to finishing that book, and at the end of this month I have a commitment to go to Harvard and Fletcher, and there are a number of boards which I have to go an sit on, so I did have a lot of plans regarding what I’d do next. I’ve been working throughout my life in a global setting, not really focusing on one country. Inequities, insecurities, disarmament, all that sort of thing. But what prompted me to act in Egypt was the increasing number of people who were saying to me, ‘you should come and help’.

And of course my perspective is always the big picture, I care about everyone else around the world. But this is my country of origin. This is a place where I have friends, where I have family, where I have ties, and when I hear people telling me, ‘you have to come and help fight for change’, of course I have to weigh in and see what I can do. How successful I will be I don’t know, but at least in the past couple of months alone I’ve managed to make people less afraid, I’ve managed to make people understand that the political system is the key to overcoming stagnation, and I’ve managed to make people understand that there are alternatives to Bin Laden on one side or autocracy on the other.”So things have happened, but not everything will change overnight, and in which direction things will move I do not know. I want to put the ball in the people’s court, because they are not used to that; they want a saviour, and I am not a saviour.

I want to go and spend some time with my granddaughter in London and have a life at this stage, but I will do as much as I can here. The ball is in the people’s court, and all I can do is give them a torch to light and tell them which direction to go. Whether they will go in that direction or not is the big question.

JS: Let me move on for a moment to some questions about the IAEA. There’s a sense that some of the reports about Iran coming out of the agency under your successor, Yukiya Amano, have got a rather different tone from the reports issued under your stewardship – would you agree with that assessment?

MEB: Well I think I’ll excuse myself from passing judgement on that. I can speak only for my reports; I’m sure he [Mr Amano] is trying to do what he thinks is the right thing to do. I haven’t seen a change of substance in the reports; there is maybe a change of tone, but that’s a function of personality.

I have been always of the view that, as a lawyer, I have to stick to the facts and I will not have anything in my reports that I cannot vouch for 100%, because these are issues that have to do with war and peace. And I also believe that we [the IAEA] have a role not only to do inspections and verification, but also to work with the different parties to find solutions. And I don’t think there’s any solution to any of these issues of insecurity except through meaningful dialogue. I left the agency a very happy man when I saw that this approach has been adopted by Barack Obama.

JS: It’s interesting because heading the IAEA is really a dual role: it’s a technical job but you also have to try and keep a lid on tensions...

MEB: Yes, of course we are technical but we are a technical organisation totally embedded in a political setting. Yes we are technical, we have to do technical work, but we are dealing with the politics of nuclear energy and we have to be aware of the background and political implications of our work. When I was working at the agency we would literally go through thirty drafts or so of each report before it’s ready, because I knew every word could be used politically and in a very subjective way...

JS: Were you very conscious when drafting the reports of wanting to avoid using the kind of language which could be exploited...

MEB: Yes of course, every word was weighed to make sure that it is immune from being abused, and I always wanted to make sure that we were not overstating or understating, but rather just stating the facts.

JS: There have been suggestions in some quarters that in some reports on Iran, though they were correct in substance, a deliberate tone may have been adopted in an effort to minimise tensions – do you think that’s fair?

MEB: I think the tone was set by me, that’s true. But all the facts were in every report, unvarnished. Yet the tone of course is very important, not to reduce tension but to put things in context. I never looked upon my role as simply that of technocrat or technician, but I also understood how I could make use of the political setting both to help us in our inspections and to help us find solutions. The inspections were not an end in themselves.

JS: You worked very hard to try and stop the rush to war that ended in the US-led invasion of Iraq; do you fear that history is repeating itself now with Iran?

MEB: I don’t think so, I hope not. For one thing there is a new administration in the US that hail from a different perspective, and I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US have started to sink in. Sure there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians?

There is a major issue, which has to do with our sense of humanity. What you can see now with this investigation in London [the Chilcot Inquiry] and all the indications coming out of it, which are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question – where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who’s accountable for that?

These are issues which are not going to go away. I just hope that some of these lessons are now being understood. For example in the case of Iran, there is no other solution other than sitting at the negotiating table and trying to reconcile your differences and work out where every party is coming from. Unless of course there is an imminent threat, in which case that needs to be addressed collectively by the international community. But that imminent threat is not there today; there is concern about Iran’s intentions, but nobody is claiming that Iran today is assembling a nuclear weapon. And when you talk about the tone of reports, that’s the kind of thing I always wanted to convey: we are concerned, but we’re not panicky.

JS: OK, I know we’re well past our time and have to leave it there. Let me just give you one closing question: Hosni Mubarak has been in power for almost three decades in Egypt, and you say he’s achieved nothing but stagnation. If you could speak to people like Barack Obama and Gordon Brown directly about their support for Mubarak, what would you tell them?

MEB: Change will have to come from within the country, from within Egypt. I don’t think change will come from outside. But as part of the human family, east and west, north and south, we have to be true to our human values. If we believe that democracy and respect for human rights is the way forward we have to speak about it and apply it systematically, otherwise none of us will have any credibility, as east or west, as individuals or institutions.