Pedro Ugarte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An Egyptian man embraced an army commander in Cairo’s Tahrir Square Saturday morning
CAIRO — A new era dawned in Egypt on Saturday as this nation of 80 million — and hundreds of millions beyond its borders — began to absorb the fact that an 18-day mass movement of largely nonviolent protest brought down a nearly 30-year military dictatorship and renewed the country’s lease on life.
Within hours of the news that Hosni Mubarak had resigned as president, Egypt’s new army leadership quickly sought to project its control and assuage fears about military rule, at home and abroad.
In an announcement broadcast on state television on Saturday, an army spokesman said that Egypt would continue to abide by all of its international and regional treaties — which include its peace treaty with Israel — and that the current civilian leadership would manage the country’s affairs until the formation of a new government, without giving a timetable.
The Associated Press, quoting an official at the Cairo airport, said that some current members of the government had been barred from traveling abroad.
The army spokesman urged citizens to cooperate with the police, after weeks of civil strife, and urged a force stained by accusations of abuse and torture to be mindful of the department’s new slogan: “The police in the service of the people.”
As the impact of the revolution settled in, some members of the movement that toppled Mr. Mubarak vowed to continue their protest, saying that all their demands had not yet been met. In Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the new Egypt, protesters met in small clusters, arguing about the path forward, as thousands of volunteers cleaned the square.
Some said their sit-in should continue.
As soldiers removed some barricades on the square’s periphery, volunteers with brooms swept streets and scrubbed graffiti from a statue in a nearby square.
The tone of the state media quickly reflected Egypt’s altered reality.
“The People Overthrew the Regime,” read the headline in Al Ahram, the flagship state-owned national newspaper and former government mouthpiece, borrowing a line from the protest movement. Another article noted that Switzerland had frozen the assets of Mr. Mubarak, and those of his aides. On state television an announcer referred to the “Youth Revolution.”
People across the Arab world celebrated the end of the dictatorship in the largest Arab country after a similar uprising in Tunisia last month, but it was less clear if they would be able to follow their examples.
In Yemen, police officers with clubs beat antigovernment protesters as they marched on the Egyptian Embassy, demanding the resignation of the president, Reuters reported.
In Algeria, where an antigovernment demonstration had been called, only several dozen protesters arrived in the center of the capital, Algiers, and they were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear, Reuters reported.
The protests elsewhere came the day after Mr. Mubarak, 82, left without comment for his home by the Red Sea in Sharm el Sheik. His departure overturned, after six decades, the Arab world’s original secular dictatorship. He was toppled by a radically new force in regional politics — a mainly secular, largely nonviolent, youth-led democracy movement that brought Egypt’s liberal and Islamist opposition groups together for the first time under its banner.
“One by one the protesters withstood each weapon in the arsenal of the Egyptian autocracy — first the heavily armed riot police, then a ruling party militia and finally the state’s powerful propaganda machine.
Mr. Mubarak’s fall removed a bulwark of American foreign policy in the region. The United States, its Arab allies and Israel are now pondering whether the Egyptian military, which has vowed to hold free elections, will give way to a new era of democratic dynamism or to a perilous lurch into instability or Islamist rule.