Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate and Egyptian opposition leader, said this morning that the Egyptian military needs to reach out to the civilian opposition groups to begin planning a road map for a transition government -- and that if that doesn’t happen by Friday, street protests may begin anew.
ElBaradei is uncertain about what will come next for his country after Egypt’s Supreme Military Council suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, and announced in a communiqué that it will run a transitional government before overseeing the process of the next presidential and parliamentary election.
“I have frankly started to get worried, and people are becoming to be -- to be apprehensive.... I was told today that by Friday, if we do not see, you know, if we don't see a road map, that people will go back to the streets,” ElBaradei said on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. “I understand that the army might need some time, but they need to lay out what they are up to. We need clearly a transitional period. We need heavy participation by the civilians with the army. It could not be just the army running the show.”
ElBaradei said the army must reach out to the disparate civilian opposition groups to coordinate a transition government that can hold an election within a year’s time.
“I think the opposition... clearly is fragmented after 60 years of oppression, but I think the opposition is all of one mind. We need -- we need to co-manage the transition.... We need to -- to reach within a year a country that is ready for a free and fair election and to elect a president and a new parliament,” he said.
If that doesn’t happen soon, ElBaradei said, people are “already making preparations” to “go back into the streets by Friday. They need to come out of their headquarters and start talking to the people and tell us what is in store for us.”
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