Pharaoh is history

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A TV grab of Egypt’s vice-president Omar Sul-eiman announcing the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Friday.

Egypt’s “Pharoah” Hosni Mubarak resigned as President and handed control to the military on Friday after 29 years in power, bowing to a historic 18-day wave of pro-democracy demonstrations by hundreds of thousands. “The people ousted the President,” chanted a crowd of tens of thousands outside his presidential palace in Cairo.
Several hundred thousand protesters massed in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square exploded into joy, cheering and waving Egyptian flags. Fireworks,

car horns and celebratory shots in the air were heard around the city of 18 million in joy after vice-president Omar Suleiman made the announcement on national TV just after nightfall.
Earlier, the 82-year-old strongman had flown out of Cairo to his holiday retreat at Sharm el-Sheikh, on the Red Sea, his ruling party said.
Mr Mubarak had sought to cling to power, handing some of his authorities to Mr Suleiman while keeping his title. But an explosion of protests on Friday rejecting the move appeared to have pushed the military into forcing him out completely.
Hundreds of thousands marched throughout the day in cities across the country as soldiers stood by, besieging his palaces in Cairo and Alexandria and the state TV building. A governor of a southern province was forced to flee to safety in the face of protests there.
It was the biggest day of protests yet in the upheaval that began on January 25, growing from youth activists working on the Internet into a mass movement that tapped into widespread discontent with Mr Mubarak’s authoritarian lock on power, corruption, economic woes and widespread disparities between rich and poor.
“In these grave circumstances that the country is passing through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave his position as President of the republic,” a grim-looking Mr Suleiman said. “He has mandated the armed forces supreme council to run the state. God is our protector and succour.”
Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, whose young supporters were among the organisers of the protest movement, said: “This is the greatest day of my life. The country has been liberated after decades of repression,” he said, adding that he expects a “beautiful” transition of power.
Outside Mr Mubarak’s Oruba Palace in northern Cairo, women on balconies ululated with the joyous tongue-trilling used to mark weddings and births. “Finally we are free,” said Safwan Abo Stat, a 60-year-old in the crowd of protesters at the palace. “From now on anyone who is going to rule will know that these people are great.” Another, Mohammed el-Masry, weeping with joy, said he had spent the past two weeks in Tahrir before marching to the palace on Friday. He was now headed back to the square to join his ecstatic colleagues. “We made it,” he gasped.
The question now turned to how the military, Egypt’s most powerful
institution, will handle the transition in power. Earlier in the day, the armed forces supreme council — a body of top generals — vowed to guide the country to greater democracy. In a statement hours before Mr Suleiman’s announcement, it said it was committed “to sponsor the legitimate demands of the people and endeavour for their implementation within a defined timetable... until achieving a peaceful transition all through a democratic society aspired by the people.”
[Reuters quoted Al Arabiya TV reporting on Friday that the supreme military council will sack the Cabinet, suspend both Houses of Parliament and rule with the head of the supreme constitutional court. A fresh Army statement was expected to be delivered later on Friday.]
Abdel-Rahman Samir, one of the youth organisers of the protests, said the protest movement would now open negotiations with the military over democratic reform but vowed protests would continue to ensure that change is carried out.
“We still don’t have any guarantees yet — if we end the whole situation now the it’s like we haven’t done anything,” he said. “So we need to keep sitting in Tahrir until we get all our demands.”
But, he added, “I feel fantastic... I feel like we have worked so hard, we planted a seed for a year and a half and now we are now finally sowing the fruits.”
A report from Beirut adds that fireworks erupted in the Lebanese capital and on the streets of much of West Asia and the Arab world as it was announced that Mr Mubarak had stepped down. Celebratory gunfire was heard in Shia-dominated areas of south Lebanon and in southern Beirut. On al-Manar TV, run by the Shia Hezbollah faction, Egyptian anchor Amr Nassef cried emotionally on the air and said: “The Pharaoh is dead. Am I dreaming? I’m afraid to be dreaming.”
Iran said the Egyptian people had achieved a “great victory”. The Gaza Strip and the Palestinian territories erupted in joy, with its Hamas rulers declaring it the “start of the Egyptian revolution”, while Israelis reacted cautiously, apprehensive what direction the new rulers in Cairo might take relations between the two countries, which had signed a peace treaty in 1979, two years before Mr Mubarak became Egypt’s President.