Egyptian Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali on Wednesday said Egyptians setting themselves on fire would not spark a revolution, as happened in Tunisia.
“It’s an attempt to imitate things that won’t happen in Egypt,” he said. “Egyptians are different than Tunisians.”
“We have a free press and an open society, and our subsidies go to the needy,” he added, explaining that the subsidies account for 10 percent of the annual gross domestic product.
Analysts say that acts of self-immolation in Egypt, now numbering about half a dozen, seem to be driven by similar complaints to those that drove Tunisians to the streets and toppled their president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
Arabs in Egypt and other Arab countries complain of soaring prices, a lack of jobs, poverty, and repression by authoritarian regimes.
Analysts say there is no sign yet of momentum building toward a broader uprising that could overwhelm Egypt's vast security apparatus. But Tunisia's events have attracted broad attention and vigorous calls for political change.
Self-immolations have also been reported in Algeria and Mauritania.
Protests in Tunisia erupted after the suicide of vegetable trader Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, who set himself on fire on 17 December when police seized his grocery cart.
Egypt's state-backed al-Azhar has warned that suicide, for any reason, is banned in Islam.
Arab League chief Amr Moussa warned the region's leaders, who gathered at an Egyptian resort on Wednesday, to heed calls for finding solutions to economic and political problems that sparked Tunisia's upheaval. He said Arab citizens' anger had reached an "unprecedented" level.
Egyptian officials have sought to play down the possibility that Tunisia's uprising might spread.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
