Former U.N. nuke chief steps up Twitter campaign in Egypt

Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.N.’s former nuclear watchdog, has unleashed a barrage of  Twitter attacks against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government, accusing it in a series of barbed tweets of torturing inmates, stifling dissent, and shamefully beating peaceful demonstrators.

"Detentions and beatings during peaceful demonstration is an insult to the dignity of every Egyptian. Shame," read the Egyptian arms-control expert’s official Twitter feed in one of several postings this morning. Another tweet reads: "Proposed extension of emergency law that deprives Egyptians of basic human rights exposes a regime afraid of its own people. Shame."

The remarks follow a police crackdown on an Egyptian youth movement that was rallying outside the Egyptian parliament for reforms that would make country’s election laws fairer for challenges to the official party. The group, which was formed on Facebook in 2008 and is known as the April 6 movement, supports ElBaradei. Under Egypt’s emergency law, which was imposed after Mubarak took power in 1981, demonstrations are severely restricted.

ElBaradei’s tweets have become increasingly critical in the days following the arrest over the weekend of the publisher of a book about the former nuke chief. "The detention of a publisher of a book about me and my ideas of reform shows a repressive regime afraid of its own shadows," ElBaradei tweeted on Saturday.

ElBaradei recently returned to Egypt to promote political reform in his native country and he is weighing a possible run for the presidency in 2011 elections. Mubarak is widely believed to be grooming his son, Gamal Mubarak, to succeed him.

ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who challenged the Bush administration’s claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapon program, is immensely popular in his homeland. ElBaradei has used social networking sites, including FaceBook and Twitter, to advance his movement. (Though he told Joshua Hammer, who profiled ElBaradei in the April 5 New Yorker, "They never even consulted me about this Facebook thing. I had no clue.")

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, ElBaradei described his ambitions in returning to Egypt. "I would like to be, at this time, an agent to push Egypt toward a more democratic and transparent regime, with all of its implications for the rest of the Arab world. If I am able to do that, I will be very happy because we need to achieve democracy in the Arab world as fast as we can. Democracy meaning empowering people, democracy meaning a proper economic and social development, tolerance — it means building up modern societies."