Secretary of State John Kerry will stress the importance Egypt achieves political consensus for painful economic reforms needed to secure an IMF loan, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday.

Kerry arrived in Egypt on his first visit to the Arab world since taking office for talks with the leaders of a country mired in political and economic crisis two years after the overthrow of autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

With Egypt's pound and foreign currency reserves sliding, the official said that if Cairo could agree on a $4.8 billion loan from the IMF, this would bring in other funds from the United States, European Union and Arab countries.

However, the official said the United States believed Egypt needed to increase tax revenues and reduce energy subsidies - measures likely to prove highly unpopular.

"His basic message is it's very important to the new Egypt for there to be a firm economic foundation," the official told reporters as Kerry flew to Cairo.

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"In order for there to be agreement on doing the kinds of economic reforms that would be required under an IMF deal there has to be a basic political ... agreement among all of the various players in Egypt," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Egypt said on Thursday it would invite a team from the International Monetary Fund to reopen talks on the loan and the investment minister expressed hope that a deal could be done by the end of April.

The loan was agreed in principle last November but put on hold at Cairo's request during street violence the following month that flared in protest at a planned rise in taxes.

While the tax rise was withdrawn, Islamist President Mohamed Mursi is likely to face violent protests as any cuts in subsidies demanded by the IMF will push up living costs in a country where poverty is rife.

Energy subsidies soak up about 20 percent of the government budget, bloating a deficit set to soar to 12.3 percent of annual economic output this financial year.

Clashes in Mansoura, Port Said
Early on Saturday, young protesters fought interior ministry police in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, where one protester was killed and dozens injured. In the Suez Canal city of Port Said, protesters torched a police station, security sources said.

While the protests were unrelated to Kerry's visit, they were examples of the frequent outbreaks of unrest faced by Egypt's government.

Clashes are commonplace, with young people and Egyptians demanding Mursi reform the interior ministry's police force. The president is accused of not taking police reform, a key demand of the uprising that toppled Mubarak, seriously.

Kerry will stress the need for agreement across the political spectrum on reforms and winning approval in the Shura Council, Egypt's upper house of parliament.

"What they need to do is ... things like increasing tax revenues, reducing energy subsidies, making clear what the approval process will be to the Shura Council for an IMF agreement, that kind of thing," said the official.

Hopes for consensus between the ruling Islamists and opposition parties seem slim. Liberal and leftist opposition parties have announced a boycott of parliamentary elections, scheduled for April to June, over a new constitution produced by an Islamist-dominated assembly and other grievances.

Kerry meets opposition leaders on Saturday but many senior figures were not on the list of expected participants, including Hamdeen Sabahy, who came a close third in presidential elections last year and former U.N. nuclear agency head Mohamed ElBaradei.

Kerry does not wish to be seen as lecturing Egyptians and will not explicitly tell opposition parties to renounce their boycott of the lower house polls, the U.S. official said.

However, he will make the case for them to take part.

"If they want to ensure that their views are taken account, the only way to do that is to participate. That they can't sit aside and just assume that somehow by magic that all of this is going to happen," the official said. "They've got to participate."

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In an emotional speech as she nears the end of her term of office, Hillary Clinton warned there would be "many sacrifices and losses" before daughters were "valued as sons" across the world, according to reporters traveling with the secretary of state.

Clinton, speaking Thursday at Dublin City University in Ireland, was given a humanitarian award by the non-governmental organization Concern Worldwide, whose chief executive Tom Arnold hailed her as "one of the greatest" secretaries of state "in the history of the Republic."

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Clinton spoke about what human rights meant to her personally, describing what it was like to be a female official visiting male-dominated countries.

"As the mother of a daughter, and as someone who believes strongly in the right of every person, male and female, to have the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential," Clinton said, "it pains me so greatly when I travel to places around the world and am received almost as an exception to the rule, where the male leaders meet with me because I am the secretary of state of the United States, overlooking the fact that I also happen to be a woman."

"We are on the right side of history in this struggle, but there will be many sacrifices and losses until we finally reach a point where daughters are valued as sons, where girls as educated as boys, where women are encouraged and permitted to make their contributions to their families, to their societies just as the men are," she added.

'Moved' by Pakistan schoolgirl's story
Clinton, who opened the school's new conflict resolution institute, picked out the case of Malala Yousufzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl shot by a Taliban gunman over her outspoken belief that girls should receive an education. Her activism started in 2008, when she was about 11 years old, and she wrote a blog for BBC News about her experiences.

"All of us were moved by the story of the young Pakistani girl, Malala, who was targeted by the Taliban for the effrontery for going to school — more than that, speaking out for the rights of girls in Pakistan to go to school," Clinton said.

'We are strong': Malala's wounded friends back in Pakistan school

"She was miraculously spared from being literally shot in the face and is making what appears to be an excellent recovery," she added. "For every young woman whose name comes to our attention, there are countless others who suffer in silence, who face cultural and social and religious barriers to their human rights and dignity."

Clinton said she did not mind that she had been called an idealist and also a realist.

"In reality, I think we all need to be more of a hybrid, perhaps idealistic realists," she said. "Because leading effectively cannot be done without our values. And a great deal of what is happening today bears that out."

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Clinton, who is standing down as secretary of state, said she had traveled to more "far-flung places than I could have imagined as a young girl growing up in the middle of America in the decades that followed World War II."

"And I must say that among the most striking things that I have learned is how much we have in common," she said. "I've sat down with people everywhere, discussing what was in their hearts and on their minds. And it doesn't take long to find commonality which is often overlooked, ignored, dismissed, and rejected otherwise."

Clinton chokes up
Clinton choked up a little when speaking about "a great friend of mine," Inez McCormack, a labor leader in Northern Ireland who she said had worked to bring peace and reconciliation to an area blighted by sectarian conflict.

"Inez lives in Derry, where she's fighting cancer, and I called her before coming here to check in on her, and asked her how she was doing," she said. "She's very brave and putting up with all the treatments, knowing that it's a hard road for her. And she did not want to talk about herself; she wanted to talk about her daughter, who moved up the date of her wedding, which made her very happy."

Dozens of police hurt in Northern Ireland sectarian clashes

"But she wanted to talk about how we had to keep working to bring people together so that they would recognize the common humanity and experience in the other," Clinton added.

Clinton was due to travel to Northern Ireland Friday to lend support to a fragile peace that was one of the greatest successes of her husband's presidency.

Cops hurt as British unionist protesters try to storm Belfast City Hall in flag spat

She visits a province transformed by the 1998 peace agreement but still riven by sectarian loyalties, with a prison officer shot dead by nationalist militants last month and unionist protesters rioting over the removal of a British flag. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday she was not offended by protesters who threw shoes and tomatoes at her motorcade a day earlier in Alexandria, Egypt.

Speaking at a news conference in Israel, she called protests a "part of the fabric of a democracy" and the Alexandria outburst a "sign of that freer environment that Egypt now enjoys."

"I was relieved that nobody was hurt and felt bad that good tomatoes were wasted, but other than that it was not particularly bothersome," Clinton told reporters in Jerusalem.

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Egypt tops agenda during Clinton trip to Israel

In Alexandria, Clinton presided over a ceremony to reopen the U.S. consulate, which was closed in 1993 to save money.

The ceremony was moved inside as protesters grew vocal outside the consulate.

A tomato hit an Egyptian official in the face.

The protesters also chanted "Monica, Monica, Monica," a reference to Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who was the focus of a sex scandal with her husband, then-President Bill Clinton.

Related: Christians snub Cairo meeting; protesters toss tomatoes

The protests in the nation of nearly 84 million came amid accusations that the U.S. administration favors Egypt’s Islamist parties over secular and liberal forces at the expense of the largely Muslim nation’s 8 million Christians. Clinton on Saturday met with Egypt's new Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president in 60 years.

On Sunday, Clinton said at the consulate ceremony, "I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which, of course, we cannot."

On Monday, she said the protest also was a sign that “the Egyptian people are still concerned about the future; they are not yet sure what is the path forward.” With parliament confirmed and no constitution written yet after the 2011 downfall of 40-year ruler Hosni Mubarak, “I think it is understandable that there are many unanswered questions and lots of anxiety about what may or may not be happening,” Clinton said.

 

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