Washington: US President Barack Obama recalled the non-violent methods of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr as he praised the people of Egypt for their peaceful protests and welcomed the end of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year-rule.
"While the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can't help but hear the echoes of history: echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice," Obama said in his speech hours after Hosni Mubarak resigned as President of Egypt.
As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana, while trying to perfect his own, "There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom", those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note, he said.
"Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence; for in Egypt it was the moral force of nonviolence - not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force - that bent the arc of history toward justice once more," he said.
Obama said Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years.
"But over the last few weeks, the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights. We saw mothers and fathers carrying their children on their shoulders to show them what true freedom might look like.
"We saw protesters chant "salmiya, salmiya" - we are peaceful - again and again. We saw a military that would not fire bullets at the people they were sworn to protect. And we saw doctors and nurses rushing into the streets to care for those who were wounded, volunteers checking protesters to ensure that they were unarmed," the US President said.
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