By AFP
VIENNA: A regime change in Egypt is “inevitable” following the popular uprising in Tunisia, Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday.
“It is inevitable. Change must come,” ElBaradei told the Austrian news agency APA in an interview.
Last week, veteran Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to flee the country after days of mass protests.
ElBaradei suggested Egypt’s long-standing president Hosni Mubarak will soon find himself in a similar position unless political reforms are made.
The diplomat, who headed the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency for 12 years and even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work there, called for a boycott of Egypt’s presidential elections in September, saying the regime in his home country should be brought to its knees via peaceful demonstrations.
“We’re trying with peaceful means,” he said in comments reproduced in German.
He and his supporters had already collected one million signatures for a petition calling for the democratization of Egypt.
If more people signed up “then we will have the legitimacy to speak for everyone who has signed,” ElBaradei said.
ElBaradei said he hoped the regime would change before this year’s presidential elections.
“If that isn’t the case, then I’ll call for a boycott so that the regime can be exposed for what it is: a one-party regime.”
ElBaradei has been calling for constitutional reforms to allow independents like himself to stand in this year’s election.
But the government has dismissed his demands.
ElBaradei said he was setting his hopes on the 60 percent of Egyptians who were younger than 30, “who have no hopes and no future, but above all no ulterior motives.”
Older Egyptians had either come to terms with the regime or were afraid of it, he said.
“People have every reason to live in fear, because they can be arrested and tortured,” he said, adding that he was prepared in principle to stand as a candidate in the presidential elections “as long as they are free and fair.”
In the same interview, ElBaradei accused the West of “hyping” the perceived nuclear threat from Iran.
“There’s a lot of a hype in this debate,” he said.
He pointed to a US intelligence report released in 2007 which suggested Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapons program but abandoned it in 2003.
“This assessment is still accurate today,” ElBaradei said in comments reproduced in German.
ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for this work at the IAEA in 2005, did not rule out that the Islamic republic had indeed thought about building a bomb in the 1980s.
At the time, Iran was engaged in a “terrible war” with Iraq, which had used chemical weapons, he argued.
“Every other country in this situation would have had to think about how to defend itself,” he said.
In the meantime, however, Iran’s atomic program was merely the means “to become a key player in the Middle East.”
Western powers accuse Iran of seeking to build a bomb under the guise of a civilian nuclear power program, a charge Tehran has steadfastly denied.
Despite multiple United Nations resolutions and four rounds of international sanctions, the Islamic republic is enriching uranium, a process which can be used to make the fuel for nuclear reactors as well as the fissile material for an atomic bomb.
“The Iranians are of the opinion that uranium enrichment is a means to an end,” ElBaradei said.
If a country has enrichment technology, “it can develop nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time. And (Tehran believes) that this sends a strong signal to its neighbors and the rest of the world,” he said.
Furthermore, it could force the United States back to the negotiating table after Tehran and Washington broke off diplomatic ties 30 years ago.
There was a lot of suspicion between the two capitals which must be dispelled, ElBaradei said.
During his three terms as IAEA director general, ElBaradei frequently came under fire, not least from Washington, for being too soft on Iran.
The atomic watchdog has been investigating Iran’s nuclear program for eight years and is still not in a position to say whether it is entirely peaceful as Tehran claims.
