Despite Unrest, Egypt Won’t Limit Canal Access

Responding to critics who want Egypt to close the Suez Canal to U.S. and British warships, President Hosni Mubarak told his army commanders Monday that the 101-mile waterway would remain open to all vessels but expressed concerns that the war in Iraq could have catastrophic effects on the world.

On Sunday, 15,000 protesters demonstrated in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, demanding the canal be closed to allied forces. They burned American and British flags, and a few wore black outfits with the words “Suicide Attacker.”

Since the buildup for war began, more than 100 U.S. and British ships, including three Sunday, have used the French-designed, 133-year-old canal that links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The canal carries 14% of world trade and 26% of oil exports and cuts the transit time from Tokyo to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, by 23%, according to officials. Access is vital to the coalition’s war effort.

Trying to defuse what Mubarak considers worrisome public anger over his closeness to the United States, the Egyptian president told his commanders in the city of Suez that international law gave Egypt the right to restrict use of the canal only if Egypt were in a state of war and, then, only for ships from belligerent nations.

“International commitments cannot be trampled,” he said. The speech was broadcast on Egyptian television.

He told officers that a drawn-out war would lead to increased Islamic militancy and terrorism throughout the region. “If there is one [Osama] bin Laden today, there will be 100 Bin Ladens afterward,” he said, adding that the war would have a catastrophic effect on global economic, political and humanitarian conditions and on stability in the Middle East.

“The Americans told us it will be brief,” Mubarak said last week about the war, “but I am concerned that it will take a long time, which would cause many deaths. We hope these operations will end soon.”

As with more than half a dozen Arab leaders, Mubarak walks a fine line, trying to convince a population that is passionately antiwar and anti-American that he is not catering to the Americans while taking pains not to alienate friends in Washington. Egypt receives $2 billion annually in U.S. aid and, ever since then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979, has been an important political ally for Washington.

The U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq has put strains on those ties and turned the relationship with Washington into a liability for Mubarak, political analysts say. Demonstrators have called for the expulsion of U.S. Ambassador David Welch, and newspapers focus on Iraqi civilian casualties and criticism of the United States. Egypt’s Al Ahram weekly summed up its impression of the Anglo-American war plan with the four-column headline: “Imploding Strategy.”

Nabil Osman, Mubarak’s spokesman, said the strain is not permanent: “Our relationship has reached the level of maturity where there is space for different points of view. And at the top of our agenda is trying to impress upon the Americans the need to address the Palestinian-Israeli issue.”

Despite his opposition to the war, Mubarak has offered Washington what U.S. diplomats call “quiet cooperation.”

In addition to access to the Suez Canal, he has waived some restrictions on the passage of nuclear-powered ships through the waterway and granted U.S. warplanes overflight rights.

Egypt’s war role, however, stands in contrast to that in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Mubarak put 36,000 soldiers on the coalition battlefield and persuaded several Arab countries, including Syria, to join the U.S.-led forces to liberate Kuwait. In return, Egypt was handsomely rewarded: The United States canceled two-thirds of its debt, which helped boost the Egyptian economy and spark several years of healthy growth in the mid-1990s.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote an opinion piece in Sunday’s Al Ahram, one of the Arab world’s largest and most respected newspapers. He said the coalition was doing everything possible to minimize civilian casualties and to end the war soon.

“Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people but with Saddam, his sons and his barbarous regime, which has brought misery and terror to their country,” Blair wrote. “I recognize that the Iraqi people have been the biggest victims of Saddam’s rule. This is not a war of conquest, but of liberation.”

In a longer piece on the same page, Al Ahram editor Ibrahim Naife, who has direct access to Mubarak, replied: “Does he [Blair] also realize that this war destroys the fabric of the region, devastates the pillars of stability within it and causes deep scars in the people’s psyche that might never heal?”

Elsewhere in the region, about 100 prominent Jordanians, including former prime ministers, writers and intellectuals, delivered a petition to King Abdullah II, urging him to condemn the war. An unknown number of U.S. troops have used Jordan as a base to launch special operations in Iraq and for manning anti-missile batteries along the Iraqi border.

In Syria, 400 women marched through a district in Damascus housing embassies. They waved Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian flags and carried banners that said, “No to American terrorism.”

Police arrested a man in Larnaca, Cyprus, who threw a oil bomb at the U.S. Embassy. The bomb hit the wall of a garden surrounding the embassy but caused no damage. His motive was unknown.