Egypt’s talks with opposition are ‘extraordinary,’ a possible turning point, John Kerry says

The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sunday applauded the Egyptian vice president’s potentially breakthrough meetings with demonstration leaders. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said he was heartened by the dialogue and reports that the ruling Cairo government had agreed to a number of the protesters’ demands, including the lifting of a decades-old emergency law that had been used to repress opposition forces.

It’s “frankly quite extraordinary,” Kerry said as he described some of the unexpectedly rapid developments over the weekend. He and former American diplomats appearing on news programs Sunday suggested the talks could mark a significant turning point in the nearly 2-week-old street protests against President Hosni Mubarak that have rocked Egypt and reverberated in the Arab world.

In an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kerry singled out the removal of the 1981 emergency law as a “major, major opening of the door to the democratic process allowing people to organize, speak [and] meet at a cafe.”

After Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman’s meetings with opposition parties, including the outlawed Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian State Information Service said on its website that Suleiman “listened to the demands of the three leaders” and “pledged to implement part of these demands and consider the remaining part.” These are said to include press freedoms and steps toward amending the nation’s constitution.

Kerry said it was now important for the Egyptian government “to guarantee the process is in place where there are free and fair elections.” And the senator called on Mubarak, who has balked at pressures from protesters to step down, to address the country to make the process clear and give a timetable for the changes.

“I think if that happens, this could actually turn significantly to the good and to the promise of a better outcome,” he said. John D. Negroponte, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, echoed Kerry’s sense of optimism and hope.

“I think the key thing that has changed is that Vice President Suleiman has started meeting with the opposition leaders, and they issued this several-point plan this morning on a road map forward toward political transition,” Negroponte told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The plan doesn’t address the demand from many protesters for Mubarak to resign immediately, but Negroponte said it did deal with many of the problems that people have had with the Mubarak government.

“We may have just had an inflection point today,” he said.