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The following are excerpts from an interview with former IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, which aired on Dream2 TV on February 18, 2010.
Mohamed ElBaradei: I had said that after finishing my job as an international official, I would like to play a role in the concerns of my Egyptian homeland, and do whatever I could to help Egypt make a leap towards democracy, and towards economic and social progress.
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As an Egyptian citizen, when I hear such a large number of Egyptians calling upon me to play a significant role, all I can say is that I will respond to the call, if I get the opportunity to work in Egypt in a way that would enable me to become a vessel of change.
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I will always stand by the Egyptian people. I am prepared to embark on the adventure of Egyptian politics, on the obvious condition that there will be free elections. This goes without saying. The door should be open for me and for others. Like I said before, this is not about a specific person.
If this happens, the first measure we should take is to change some of the articles in the constitution to allow Egyptians to present their candidacy, if they see themselves fit. The second, and more important measure, is to change the entire constitutional framework. As long as we lack a constitutional framework that is based on democracy, and on socialism, in the sense of social justice, we will continue to face a dead end.
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I am not interested in the position of president as much as I am interested in the process of change. The process of change must take place.
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42% of the Egyptians earn less than 5 Egyptian pounds per day. 30% of the Egyptian people cannot read or write. How can we possibly move forward, if we do not give 30% of the Egyptians the basic tools to enable them to think and move forward?
I was recently in Cuba, where they have lived under the sanctions and siege of the US for 40 years. The literacy rate there is 100%. This is not unheard of. We have been talking about education for more than 50 years, yet we are ranked 123rd in the world in our human development. I don't think a single Egyptian will disagree with me when I say that this level is inappropriate for Egypt, and that it is high time that we changed our ways to make Egypt, once again, a leading, economically advanced country, whose people feel free, enjoy social justice, and which plays an active and influential role in the Arab region.
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Unfortunately, we Arabs have become our own enemies. We see how many disputes and wars there are in the Arab world today. We have become a burden on the world. I see and I hear how the world views us. It views us as a burden, as a liability, because we contribute nothing to human civilization, whether in social science, in humanities, or in natural sciences.
We contribute nothing, and we have begun to talk in the language of the Middle Ages. We talk about Shiites, Sunnis, Copts, Muslims, and Kurds. The world – and we, in the Arab and Islamic world – moved on centuries ago. In my view, the Arab and Islamic civilization is undergoing a stage of degeneration.
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Israel and the Palestinian cause have led to instability in the security of the region. There is no doubt about it. Ever since 1948, we have dealt with Israel in the worst possible way. We have not managed to determine a specific goal, and we have not decided how to deal with Israel – whether through war or through peace. Today, we have reached the point where the Palestinian cause is being exterminated.
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We talk about something that I consider to be a joke: the peace process. We've been talking about this peace process for over twenty years, yet all we see is the erosion of the Palestinian cause.
I witnessed developments in the Palestinian cause during my days in the UN. The Palestinian state used to be 44% of the Arab territory, but today we are talking about 22% of the land of Palestine. The Right of Return was guaranteed regardless of a person's religion, but today they talk about the Jewishness of the Palestinian state [sic], in the sense that the Palestinians cannot return to this state, and there are questions regarding the fate of the one million Palestinians living in Israel.
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All this is happening, yet we continue to talk about the peace process. No one is taking us seriously. We are not even members of the so-called Quartet.
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No country can act on its own nowadays. Where is [the cooperation] between the Arab world and the large Islamic countries? Where are the close ties between Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Pakistan?
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The Muslim Brotherhood, the socialists, the Communists – each and every one of them owns part of the land of Egypt, and should play a role in [running] the country, with his thinking and his capabilities, so long as he accepts that this must be done in a democratic framework and through peaceful dialogue, and that ultimately, the Egyptian people will have its say.
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At the end of the day, it is the people that will decide, because the people is the sovereign and the source of authority. We have robbed our peoples of the ability to rule and to make decisions, and thus, we have ended up where we find ourselves today.
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Interviewer: There is concern in the Arab world that some ideological forces, from the right and from the left, will burn the ladder once they have climbed to power.
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Mohamed ElBaradei: Have the regimes ruling the Arab world accepted the principle that political power must be transient? They say that if the Islamists rise to power, the regime will never change hands again. They do not serve as a better role model, because in most cases, they never step down.
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We've said that the Egyptian constitution is based upon the French constitution, but the Egyptian constitution is merely a deformed and distorted replica of it. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the French constitution, except in its format.
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I haven't seen any Arab leader visit Darfur. All the world's leaders and international officials went to Darfur. We look at Darfur as if it were in Central America. I haven't seen a single Arab leader or official go to Somalia. I haven't seen a single Arab leader or official go to Iraq. Iraq has been destroyed and shattered to pieces, but I haven't seen the Arab world, or the arab League, embrace it.
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Following the terror attack of September 2001, President Bush and his administration made the decision, as we now know, to attack and humiliate an Arab country, in retaliation for the attack against the two towers in New York.
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In my view, President Ahmadinejad – just like all the other Iranian leaders – wants a comprehensive settlement of Iran's relations with the West.
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A large part of what is happening today stems from mistrust, and requires breaking the psychological barrier, which has existed between Iran and the US for the past 50 years. They are waiting to see who will blink first, as the saying goes.
In my view, these two countries are like two big elephants assuming the positions before they copulate, in order to achieve a better settlement.