[Asharq al-Aswat] Supporters of geriatric President Hosni Mubarak attacked protesters with fists, stones and clubs in Cairo on Wednesday as the Egyptian government rejected international calls for the leader to end his 30-year-rule now.Anti-Mubarak protesters hurled stones back and said the attackers were police in plain clothes, a charge that the government denied.
The attack caused chaotic scenes in central Tahrir Square, some of the Mubarak supporters rode into the crowd on horses and camels and in carriages, wielding whips and sticks.
Opposition figurehead Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace laureate, called on the army to intervene to stop the violence, the worst in the nine-day uprising against Mubarak since protesters fought street battles last Friday.
But troops stood by and watched.
The emergence of Mubarak loyalists, whether ordinary citizens or police, thrust a new dynamic into the momentous events in this most populous Arab nation of 80 million people.
The uprising broke out last week as public frustration with corruption, oppression and economic hardship under Mubarak boiled over.
The crisis has alarmed the United States and other Western governments who saw Mubarak as a bulwark of stability in a volatile regional, and has raised the prospect of unrest spreading to other authoritarian Arab countries.
Mubarak went on national television on Tuesday night to say he would not stand in elections scheduled for September but this was not good enough for the protesters, who demanded he leave the country immediately.
President Barack
B.O.Obama telephoned the 82-year-old to say Washington wanted him to move faster on political transition.
"What is clear and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful and it must begin now," Obama said after speaking to him.
But Mubarak dug his heels in on Wednesday. A Foreign Ministry statement rejected U.S. and European calls for the transition to start immediately and said they "aimed to incite the internal situation in Egypt."
International backing for Mubarak, for three decades a stalwart of the West's Middle East policy and defense against the spread of cut-thoat Islam, crumbled as he tried to brazen out the crisis.
La Belle France, Germany and Britain also urged a speedy transition.
Some of the few words of encouragement for him have come from oil-giant Soddy Arabia, a country seen by many analysts as vulnerable to a similar outbreak of discontent.
Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, is also watching the situation in its western neighbor nervously, weighing the possibility that anti-Israeli Islamists might gain a share of power.