Mubarak Rules Out Talks With Militants

Opening an antiquity-filled new museum, President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday ruled out talks with Islamic militants blamed in a massacre that has scared tourists away from sites nationwide.

When the late President Anwar Sadat tried negotiations in the 1980s, militants only “got stronger and started using weapons,” Mubarak said.

“Then we said, ‘Since they resorted to weapons, we must answer by force,”’ Mubarak said.

He spoke at the inauguration of a museum on Egypt’s 6,000-year-old Nubian culture - a multimillion-dollar investment in tourism in the southern city of Aswan.

Almost all villages of the black African Nubian culture disappeared under the giant reservoir created with the 1970 opening of the Aswan High Dam. The culture’s artifacts date back to prehistoric rock drawings of wolves and tigers.

Egypt went ahead with the scheduled opening of the Nubia Museum despite the Nov. 18 massacre of 58 tourists at a Luxor temple, 100 miles to the south of Aswan.

It was the deadliest assault in a five-year campaign of violence by Egypt’s Islamic militants.

The effect on tourism, which earns Egypt more than $3 billion yearly, was immediate and devastating. Foreign travel agents canceled trips for thousands of tourists and many visitors left Egypt.

Representatives from hundreds of Egyptian hotels, restaurants and travel agencies met Sunday in Cairo to try to come up with ways to lure foreigners back.

“We are in a state of real depression,” said Amil Assad, the manager of Luxor’s American Express Travel office. “They wanted to kill tourists, but actually they are killing us.”

He told The Associated Press that more 50 percent of Americans booked for December have canceled their trips to the city. Other travel agents and hotel managers said the cancellation rate was much higher, and that some hotels had only 5 percent occupancy.