Robert Fisk: 'We will never cease our struggle until we bring down Assad'

Something terrible happened in the small Syrian town of Tel Kalakh. At the most it was a massacre of 40 civilians; at the least a day of live-firing into unarmed protesters, torture, arrests and panic. Almost half the Sunni Muslim population fled over the river frontier into Lebanon, babes in arms, old people in wheelchairs, pushed through the shallow waters of the Nahr el-Kbir.

Perhaps 4,000 of the Syrian Sunnis made it to the safety of Lebanon to be given food, shelter and blankets by relatives and by strangers and they were there yesterday – 80 living in one house alone scarcely 20m from Syria, desperate to praise the kindness of the Lebanese, fearful of the things they had seen, ferocious in their anger against their president.

One man, having described detainees from the town who had returned home with their nails ripped out and their beards burned off, broke down in tears. "We will never cease our struggle until we bring Assad down," he cried. "For 40 years, we have not been able to breathe."

The men responsible for the killings in Tel Kalakh were members of the Syrian army's 4th Brigade – the same unit, commanded by President Bashar al-Assad's little brother Maher, that is besieging the southern city of Deraa - along with government snipers and "shabiha" thugs from the Alawi mountains. Dressed in black, the latter spent some time, according to Syrian refugee women, tearing the veils off girls and trying to kidnap them.

Tel Kalakh, which lies 20 miles due west of the rebellious city of Homs, had a population of 28,000 – 10,000 of them Muslims, the majority Alawi Shia, the same group to which the Assad family belongs. Even before the shooting started on Wednesday, the military and the plain-clothes gunmen spent some time separating Sunni Muslims from the Alawi inhabitants, telling the latter to stay in their houses – as good a way of starting a local civil war as you could find in Syria. Then they shot into the crowds, firing also with tank-mounted machine guns into homes on both sides of the main streets.

None of the Syrian adults would give their names or have their photographs taken but they spoke with fury of what had happened to them six days ago. Several claimed that their protests against the Assad government started two months ago – an intriguing assertion which suggests the first rural protests in Syria may have begun weeks before the world knew what was happening – but that the protesters, all Sunnis, had been protected because of the intercession of the respected Sheikh of the town's mosque, Osama Akeri.

But last Wednesday morning, armed men seized the sheikh from his home and the Sunni Muslims of the city poured on to the streets. "We were shouting 'independence – give us freedom and independence' and they came in tanks and opened fire, the shabiha shooting at the men at the front; everyone started running but they went on shooting at us from the tanks and people fell everywhere," one man said.

"The tanks completely surrounded the town. People were running away into the fields, the babies screaming, trying to get to Lebanon."

In sight of the village of Arida Sharquia – on the Lebanese side of the border and linked to Syria by a stone bridge – many women and children were stopped by a military checkpoint, but it appears that men from Tel Kalakh set the roadblock on fire.

For three days, the Sunni Muslims fled their town, many creeping from their homes at night as shooting continued across the streets – the entire military operation a miniature version of exactly the same siege that is crippling Deraa – and some men had the courage to return from Lebanon with food for their families. Others did not dare. Tel Kalakh – just like Deraa – is not only surrounded, but all electricity and water supplies have been cut.

So fearful were those who had avoided the killings that they hid in their homes for more than 24 hours, too frightened to attend the funerals of the dead. "We didn't want to risk being killed again," another man said, apologising for not being able to give me even his first name. "The close families of the dead went to the cemetery and some old people. That was all."

One of the 40 dead was Muntaser Akeri, he said, a cousin of the arrested sheikh. Villagers tell different stories of the events. Shooting apparently went on for more than 24 hours and it was only on Thursday that some of the men dragged away in buses and cars by the "mukhabarat" secret police came back.

"Some had had their fingernails torn out and the ones with beards had had them burnt off," another man said. "There were so many soldiers and plain-clothes police and thugs that we couldn't escape. The Alawis didn't join our protest. We were alone."

Arida lies on both sides of the border of Lebanon – Sharquia means "east" and the western side of the town – Arida Gharbia – stands scarcely 20m away across the river, inside Syria.

Along with the refugees, it is also a smuggling centre – indeed,children were bringing barrels of Syrian propane gas across the river yesterday – and it was possible to talk to Syrians on the other side of the water. So close to Syria are the refugees that while I was talking to them, my Lebanese mobile phone kept switching to the "Syriatel" mobile system in Damascus, the message "ping" constantly – and ominously – drawing my attention to the words "Welcome to Syria... for tourist guide, dial 1555. Enjoy your stay."

But the men and women – and the hundreds of children – from Tel Kalakh have torn the lid off any such fantasy. Here at last were Syrians who had just fled their town, talking for the first time of their suffering, free of the mukhabarat, abusing the Assad family. A few had tried to return. One woman I spoke to walked back to Tel Kalakh yesterday morning and returned in the afternoon, shouting that it was a "hostile" town in which it was impossible for the Sunni Muslims to live. Many of the men said that all government jobs were given to Alawi citizens of Tel Kalakh, never to them.

There is, of course, room for exaggeration. No one could explain to me why so many soldiers were being killed in Syria although they said their own protests had been totally unarmed. Shooting is still heard at night on the Syrian side of the frontier, a phenomenon that has persuaded the Lebanese army to send night patrols through the orchards and olive groves on the Lebanese side. Just in case the Syrian military is tempted to chase in hot pursuit of their own refugees.

Robert Fisk hears the defiance of Syrian refugees

The Independent

Syrian families carry their belongings as they arrive by foot in Wadi Khaled area, northern Lebanon, near the border with Syria

Egypt crisis: protesters vow 'massive' demonstrations to dislodge defiant Hosni Mubarak

Furious Egyptian demonstrators have vowed to mount their biggest protests yet after President Hosni Mubarak dashed expectations by pledging once again to stay in office.

At the end of a dramatic day which saw the powerful army promise to give Egypt's protest movement all it wanted, raising hopes that the president would end his 30 year rule, Mr Mubarak instead said on television again that he would stay on till September.

The move enraged protesters and angered foreign powers, with the United States increasing international pressure on Mr Mubarak to quit.

After the president's speech, Barack Obama released a statement demanding an "unequivocal path toward genuine democracy" in Egypt, which has long been supported by massive US aid.

"The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient," he said.

"Too many Egyptians remain unconvinced that the government is serious about a genuine transition to democracy, and it is the responsibility of the government to speak clearly to the Egyptian people and the world."

By Adrian Blomfield, and Nick Meo in Cairo 8:07AM GMT 11 Feb 2011

The Telegraph

Robert Fisk: The man who dares to take on Egypt's brutal regime

Despite beatings and corruption, Ayman Nour still hopes for change. Ahead of new polls, our man meets him

yman Nour touches his sideburns, just a shade grey beneath his black hair: not bad for a 45-year old, but not up to the standard of the absolutely uncompromisingly jet black hair of 82-year-old Egyptian President Hosni Moubarak, whose job – in theory at least – Dr Nour would like.

Mind you, being Mr Moubarak's rival is not for amateurs. It's cost Dr Nour more than four years in prison and here he is, on the eve of Egyptian parliamentary elections, sitting in Beirut – rather than Cairo – to express his disdain for the 'moderate', 'pro-Western' regime of America's favourite Middle Eastern dictator (alongside King Abdullah of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Bouteflika of Algeria, Ben Ali of Tunis, King Hassan of Morocco and the rest). So long live President Hosni Moubarak.

But how long? Dr Nour's Ghad party – Ghad means 'tomorrow', which may never come – is not taking part in this weekend's parliamentary elections which will, he feels sure, be as rigged as every election in Egypt since the early years of President Anwar Sadat. "I believe that what you are about to witness at the weekend is part tragedy, part comedy, a black comedy," he says. "You want to go to Cairo on Saturday, Robert? You might just go there for fun."

Dr Nour is a lawyer by profession, and as a legal man, he must annoy Moubarak as much as the lawyers of Pakistan infuriated President-General Mousharraf before his fall; indeed, Nour's imprisonment before Egypt's 2005 presidential election – supposedly for forging powers of attorney to create his Ghad party – showed that Moubarak's anger could embrace a lawyer or two. After winning 7 per cent of the vote – 25 per cent might have been the true figure, according to him – in an election that was unmonitored by foreign observers, Nour was banged up again in the infamous Tora prison, this time with a five-year sentence.

It wasn't a pleasant stay. Dr Nour doesn't like to talk about this part of his life. "I don't want new generations in Egypt to be terrified or frightened to stand up for themselves," he says. "But unfortunately, there were pictures of me that circulated on the internet that showed bruises and parts of my body that were beaten. They stopped me from receiving food and medicine from outside" – Dr Nour is a diabetic – "and they stopped me from praying. The prison guards were following orders – given to them out of spite – to make my life miserable."

But hold on, I say. Is he saying that Hosni Moubarak of Egypt actually knew that inmates like him would be duffed up? "I was beaten up only once," he replies carefully, "on the 17th May, 2007, right after an article which I wrote in Al-Dastour newspaper which had the headline: 'What happens after Moubarak dies?' That day, prison officers escorted me to an area of the jail and I was beaten. I was thrown from a car, beaten on my back, knees, ankles. It was violent. They used their fists. Yes, I remember names. There was a general, not an important person. He was there on that day. As a result, I believe he was awarded a very strong provincial position for what he did to me."

Nour's imprisonment – he was held for 105 days before being jailed from 5th December, 2005, until 18th February, 2009 – annoyed the George W Bush administration which had just been trumpeting the joys of Egyptian democracy; Condoleeza Rice and her State Department spokesman huffed and puffed about how Nour's imprisonment "called into question Egypt's commitment to democracy, freedom and the rule of law." "I pay the price when Rice speaks of me," Nour said. "And I pay the price when she doesn't." Moubarak couldn't have cared less. Bush himself coupled Nour's name with that of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma a month after Nour's beating in a 2007 speech. Much good did it do. The attack, Nour said, was a message sent in response to his newspaper article. Exactly who it came from he cannot, or will not, say.

From Moubarak's businessman son Gamal, I ask, the ruling National Democratic Party factotum who would be king, the son who swears he does not wish to be president but whose supporters devoutly wish him to inherit the Pharaoh's throne? No, Nour says. It wasn't Gamal. He leaves me to fish through the rest of the Moubarak family for the culprit.

Ask about Gamal, and Dr Nour shakes his head. "I don't have much to say about a man who has no features, no charisma, a man who has not been in any election in his life, who is nevertheless a leader, the decision-maker in an unconstitutional way. He is a president under construction. He is like plastic. He is not human. You can talk about trees and flowers but not something that is made of plastic, it has no life."

Phew, I say. So what does Nour think of Moubarak the father – who, like Gamal, he has met several times – about the president who at 82 has said that he is thinking of standing for president yet again next year? "He is an inexperienced and uneducated man," he replies. "His mind is set in one way. He doesn't have sufficient knowledge. He is a small dictator who became a big dictator as his age increased. He looks very much down on the Egyptian people. But his barber is a nice guy."

But surely, I say, Moubarak can't be that bad. I saw the way he put his arm round old President Hafez Assad of Syria when his son Basil was killed in a car crash near Damascus airport. He seemed a most compassionate man. But Nour is unforgiving.

"I can tell you that a very important thing about his character is that he is very aggressive," he says. "He has no heart. During the 2005 elections, a very well-known member of the party, Talat Sadat (son of assassinated President Anwar Sadat's brother), came to support my campaign. He said one of the best features abut me was that I had a heart. And when I thought about this in prison, I realized that what Talat said was right. Egypt at this critical time needs a president with a heart.

"You know," he says, "I figured out President Moubarak at my very first meeting with him, when he had just taken power. I was 16 and head of the student union in Egypt. I was trying to talk to the president, to ask him to bring back a 1976 law about organising elections to the student union that was cancelled by a new law in 1979. And the president told me: 'We are moving forward – why should we go back three years?' I said I had the signatures of 40,000 students in my favour and he said: 'Are you sure it's 40,000? I will count them one by one.' I couldn't believe it. What kind of president has the time to count 40,000 signatures?"

Dr Nour believes the Muslim Brotherhood, the illegal but tolerated opposition party which lends a mirage of democracy to Egypt's polls, should not be participating in this weekend's parliamentary elections. "They will regret it," he says. "They have got into a fight which the regime wanted, when there will be an election that will be rigged. By participating, they are giving legitimacy to this. Once, when Moubarak was told he had gained 99 per cent in a presidential election, he told his minister: 'This is far too much – take it down a bit!' That's what Moubarak admitted in a newspaper interview."

In the 2005 presidential elections, Nour turned up an hour early to register his name. "I wanted my name on the first ticket," he recalls. "The head of the election committee offered me tea. I said no, I wanted to give in my papers first. So he put my name at the top and gave me a receipt. My people were outside and saw all the candidates but they never saw Moubarak. The Middle East News Agency put out a story, number 36 of the day, that I had submitted my papers first.

"But later on the same day they said President Moubarak had registered first and that I was number two on the ballot. I called the head of the election committee who agreed that he had given me a receipt and that my name should have topped the ballot list. I filed a complaint – there was no response. And I believe President Moubarak never actually applied. Until this day, we believe that Moubarak never filed his papers – and that he is therefore not the real president. We had lots of supporters beaten up outside polling stations. I was told I got 25 per cent of the vote. And they gave me 8 per cent."

Some members of Nour's Ghad party, including a civil engineer called Shadi Taha who is one of his closest advisers, insist that a knock-on-the-door poll in Alexandria indicated Nour had got 80 per cent of the local vote. Well, maybe, I think.

But things look bleak for the man who would be king in next year's presidential election. "There are a lot of obstacles to stop me running," he says. "There's an old 1937 law that [forbids] a civilian to stand for president within six years of serving his term for committing and being convicted of a felony. They don't want any competition in September, 2011. The regime is trying to take away the real opposition. They just want a soft opposition to be a part of that nice play and show the West that everything is normal. I am already forbidden to practice law. I am forbidden to speak in the media. I have no right to sell property or speak in universities or open a bank account. I have had many invitations to talk at American universities but the prosecutor general stopped me from travelling."

Yes, Dr Nour insists, there could be real democracy in Egypt. There was a kind of democracy in 1860, and between 1924 and 1952 there was a liberal constitution. There was a "partial democracy", he says, when the British ruled Egypt. This sounds like a whopper to me. But Dr Nour is unapologetic. "We believe we can see democracy in the future in Egypt because of the past. When we compare it to what we have in Egypt today – when we have no political life at all – we can believe in a real democratic force."

Robert Fisk

The INDEPENDENT

The Death of Egypt's Free Press

In the run-up to November's parliamentary elections, President Hosni Mubarak's allies are silencing what remains of the independent media.

For years, the newspaper al-Dostour has been one of the few independent voices in the Egyptian press. No longer: Its editor in chief, Ibrahim Eissa, was fired today for refusing to toe the government line.

he immediate reason for Eissa's firing appears to be his plan to publish an article written by opposition leader and would-be presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei commemorating Egypt's 1973 war with Israel. But in an exclusive interview withForeign Policy, Eissa said that his dismissal had been planned since the paper was purchased by Sayyid Badawi, a businessman and head of Egypt's Wafd Party, a liberal party that has nonetheless been co-opted by the regime. Eissa referred to Badawi as a member of Egypt's "soft opposition" -- someone publicly pushing for reforms, but who isn't willing to challenge the regime in any serious way.

"They bought the newspaper for $4 million, just to stop me from writing," Eissa said. "They had begun interfering within one week of taking over the paper, and the sale was only finalized 24 hours before I was fired."

Eissa said that the controversy over the ElBaradei article was simply the latest attempt by al-Dostour's board of directors, chaired by Badawi, to censor controversial and anti-government content from the newspaper. ElBaradei, in his article (since published on al-Dostour's website by its staff), argues that the spirit of self-criticism and rational planning, which allowed Egypt to come back from its defeat in the 1967 war with its victory in 1973, is absent from President Hosni Mubarak's regime. The board, Eissa said, was staunchly opposed to publishing the article: "They said that it would lead to revolution in Egypt."

With the 82-year-old Mubarak laying the groundwork for his son Gamal's succession to the presidency and Egyptian parliamentary elections scheduled for November, Eissa's dismissal appears to be part of a larger effort to mute Egypt's most vocal anti-government figures before this leadership transition. Some analysts, including other editors at al-Dostour, havesuggested that Eissa's firing might be an attempt by the Wafd to ingratiate itself with the government and thereby secure a larger number of seats in the parliamentary elections.

All signs suggest that the Egyptian government does not intend to loosen its grip on Eissa or allow the democratic process to run its course. A few weeks ago, a television show offering political commentary hosted by Eissa was canceled. Mubarak' sregime has also shown little inclination to allow international monitors to observe the parliamentary elections.

Being silenced by government censors is nothing new for Eissa who, according to Foreign Policy contributor Issandr Amrani's excellent profile, spent seven years as "persona non grata" in the Egyptian press after his first iteration of al-Dostour was shut down. However, he says that he will remain outspoken. "I will continue to be a part of the opposition and will continue to criticize the government," he said.

Eissa will no doubt continue to be as vocal as Mubarak's regime will allow him -- but can al-Dostour, which he labored to transform into a legitimate news source over the past five years, maintain its reputation as a bastion of Egypt's independent press? Eissa spoke throughout the interview in Arabic, with his wife helping to translate his remarks -- but he answered this last question in English himself: "Absolutely not."

BY DAVID KENNER | OCTOBER 5, 2010 - Foreign Policy

EGYPT'S HOSNI MUBARAK BATTLES TO SCOTCH HEALTH FEARS

THE official line is clear: President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is not ill.

The 82-year-old elected autocrat, who has ruled with an iron fist since 1981, was determined to scotch fears he is suffering from cancer as he continued a series of unusually high-profile meetings yesterday.

For almost a month now, the nation has been gripped by persistent rumours that its president is suffering from complications following a gall bladder operation in March.

The Jerusalem Post suggested the real issue was cancer after he cancelled two meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, he symbolises the very pulse of his nation but Mubarak, the West’s staunchest and most dependable Arab ally, has refused to appoint a successor, widely expected to be his son Gamal.

With elections due next year, Mubarak must decide soon.

Every time a health rumour surfaces, it shakes Egypt to the core and affects its stock markets. The vibrations ripple across the Middle East and as far as Washington and Moscow.

Despite Mubarak’s best efforts, fears of a power vacuum in the future just won’t go away.

Marco Giannangell, defence corespondant- The Daily Express

Can Egypt change?

As reports of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's declining health continue, our authors weigh in on Egypt's political future in a post-Mubarak world. Can Egypt change? Has it already changed? What are the kinds of changes it will need most in the coming years?

Can Egypt change?: prospects for economic reform

The question of whether Egypt can change makes a fundamental, but typical, mistake about what's going on in today's Egypt. Reading the U.S. press, you would think that Egypt is so brittle it is about to break into thousands of shards, and that the country will be left in chaos and confusion after the departure of the incumbent president, Hosni Mubarak, from office -- whenever that may be. It's true that the Egyptian government is not particularly confident and assured right now, nor the general population particularly content and satisfied. But apprehensive and ill-at-ease is a fair description of the world right now -- so what's different in Egypt? In fact, there has already been quite a bit of change in Egypt in the last decade, and most Egyptians are simultaneously pleased, eager for more, and uneasy about it. The question is not whether to change but how fast and how well change can be managed.

One need only start with the basic dilemma, which is not the succession to Hosni Mubarak. There are, give or take, about 80 million Egyptians. About 40,000 babies were born in Egypt this week -- half as many as were born in the entire United States -- and there will more than 2 million new Egyptians by the end of the year. Most of these children face daunting challenges. Twenty percent of them will be brought up on less than a dollar a day; the vast majority will go to schools that are overcrowded, the teachers poorly trained and even more poorly paid. They will consume more of the Nile's water, and they will encounter a job market that requires skills they won't have.

The policy challenges in Egypt are obvious, and they are on the front pages of the local newspapers daily. Just this week, the simmering disputes with the riparian states of the Nile Basin jostled for the headlines with complaints about low scores on the annual school-leavers exams. Less apparent is the perennial search for foreign financing -- public and private -- that keeps the government coffers from emptying and that has fueled a respectable six to seven percent growth rate in GDP since 2007 (and even in the depths of the global financial crisis, Egypt sustained a 4.5 percent growth rate, thanks in ironic part to its still small and old-fashioned banking sector).

These are the conventional policy problems that confront the current Egyptian government, and will confront any other Egyptian government. But it is worth noting that the horizons of the growing population of Egypt are also changing. Fifteen years ago, there were no mobile phones in Egypt; 10 years ago there were a million. Today, there are 60 million mobile phones in Egypt -- many of them smart phones capable of accessing the Internet and communicating via SMS and MMS. There are now numerous Egyptian private satellite television stations, and a thriving, contentious press. It was the current government, committed as it is to taking advantage of the new information and communication technologies, that made this possible.

This technology may well have made a few Egyptians billionaires, but it has also made navigating Cairo's dreadful traffic easier. It makes organizing spontaneous demonstrations of affection for the Egyptian national football team, or support for Mohammed El-Baradei's calls for change, or protest against government labor policies, much easier. It facilitates the flow of information -- true and false -- and it changes the relationships within families, as women and children renegotiate their independence and autonomy while staying always a phone call away.

In part, perhaps because of the quickening pace of life, and against the conventional stereotypes, Egyptians are getting impatient. They see change, both good and bad, all around them, and they are eager to see it sorted out, organized, channeled, and effectively managed. The complaint of the moment in Cairo, from cab drivers to ministers: "there is no system!" This may not auger well for democracy -- an unsystematic system if ever there was one -- but it does militate against high drama, not to say chaos. Egypt is not brittle; it is navigating though a flood of change, and no-one, not even the most ardent critic of the incumbent government, wants to see it capsize.

Lisa Anderson is the Provost of the American University in Cairo.

Can Egypt change?: political institutions need reform

Sometimes it seems that the only things that change in Egypt are the police uniforms. In November, when temperatures dip into the 60s, they don black woolen outfits. A few months later, generally March, when it starts getting quite warm again they switch back to their white cotton duds. Everything else seems to be just about the way it always was -- my one-eyed barber sitting in the same chair today as the day I met him a decade ago; the guys from the baqqel across the street from where I used to live doing just about the same things as they did when I bid them farewell all those years ago; my doorman is still lording over his corner of Mohamed Mazhar street, and Hosni Mubarak is still the president talking about "stability for the sake of development." Yet, the president, who has worked with five U.S. counterparts, three of whom served two terms, is sick. Official denials aside, the timeline for succession is more likely 12-18 months rather than the three-to-five years that had been the working assumption until the president's hospitalization in Germany last March. Mubarak's imminent demise has prompted analysts, policymakers, journalists and other observers to ask, "Can Egypt change?" While the question seems apt at the twilight of the Mubarak era, it nevertheless seems oddly ahistoric.

Of course, Egypt can change. It changed in July, 1952 when the Free Officers deposed King Farouk and a short time later disposed of their own initial efforts at reforming Egypt's parliamentary system in favor of building an entirely new political order. Egypt changed in 1970 when Anwar Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser. Out went the statism, the "non-aligned alignment" with the Soviets, the Arab nationalism, and war with Israel. Change came again in October, 1981 with Sadat's assassination. Mubarak split the difference between his two predecessors -- hanging onto Sadat's economic liberalization or infitah, moving Cairo back toward the Arab mainstream (while not repudiating Sadat's separate peace with Israel), and keeping Washington at arm's length while continuing to secure its largesse. Beyond the big issues of Egypt's foreign policy and ideological orientation, there have been less noticed social and socio-economic changes in Egypt. When Mubarak took the oath of office on October 14, 1981 the Egyptian population was 45.5 million, or slightly more than half of what it is today. Egypt's gross domestic product was approximately $40 billion; it now tops $145 billion. There were only 430,000 telephone lines in the entire country, now there are approximately 11 million. The life expectancy of the average Egyptian was 57 years old; it is now 70. The World Bank reports that in 1981 the literacy rate was less than 50 percent, now 66 percent of Egyptians can read. By a host of measures, life in Egypt has changed radically and for the better over the course of the three decades.

Yet in the category of "if everything seems so good, why do I feel so bad," even with all the important socio-economic changes that have occurred, the country's trajectory nevertheless seems flat. Indeed, in the abstract, Egypt today looks much like the country the Free Officers took over 58 years ago -- poor, dependent on a global power, and authoritarian. The central problem is the nature of Egypt's political institutions. Nasser and his associates developed a set of political institutions -- rules, regulations, and laws -- in response to the internal political challenges they confronted consolidating their power in the months following the July, 1952 coup. These rules, regulations, and laws were inherently anti-democratic, rigged to serve the interests of the officers along with their civilian allies, and formed the basis for subsequent institutional development. Those who benefitted from this political order -- the armed forces, regime intellectuals, bureaucracy, internal security services, and big business (after infitah in 1974) -- have become a powerful constituency for autocracy. As long as the collective welfare of these groups remain connected to the regime, the kind of institutional change necessary for a more open and democratic political system is unlikely. That's why the ruling-National Democratic Party's "New Thinking and Priorities" was never intended to do anything other than institutionalize the power of the ruling party under the guise of political change. Reform conflicts with the worldview and material interests of Egypt's leaders and their constituents.

It is not just the formal institutions of the state, however, but a whole series of unwritten rules that shape the way Egyptians calculate what is in their best interests. To be sure, this is hardly unique to Egyptian society, but it nevertheless provides some insight into change and Egypt's apparent resistance to it. There is a curious tendency for some reform-minded young professionals to throw their lot in with the regime, despite a professed desire for a fundamental transformation of Egyptian politics and society. Protestations abound about the desire to effect change from working within the state apparatus, but reality is that the Egyptian regime manifests a powerful system of reward and punishment that encourages a measure of political conformity for those not willing to take their risks with Egypt's vaunted internal security services.

The inevitable question, "What can we do about this?" is the sine qua non of all Washington policy discussions. The answer is precious little. Institutional change is rare because it is hard and almost always associated with some sort of dramatic disequilibrium -- defeat in war, revolution, or economic collapse. Yet, there are some things that outsiders can do particularly in the context of Egypt's looming succession so that when Hosni Mubarak does take his last sail up the Nile, Washington has made it clear that it is on the side of transparency, free and fair elections, and non-violence. Still, these kinds of declarations of principle say more about the United States, which is a good thing, than the likelihood they will influence the thinking of Egypt's new leader who will be seeking to consolidate his hold on power and thus dependent on the very same groups who have an abiding interest in maintaining the status quo.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Can Egypt change?: reviewing a decade of changes

Egypt these days feels like a restless sea, pulling this way and that, without a clear direction. One can make a reasonable argument that all these shifting currents are really about economic and labor grievances, or human rights abuses, or the youth bulge, or the need for political reform, or presidential succession. One can argue that Egypt is on the cusp of profound change or that it will get a succession over with in the next year or two and go back to pretty much the status quo ante.

But rather than trying to puzzle out how change might come in Egypt, perhaps it is more useful to describe in broad terms what has already changed. Looking at political life, when I think of the Egypt of ten years ago (let alone 20 or 30), I can hardly believe how different it is today. As recently as 2000, Egyptians got their information primarily from government-controlled media and public discussion of controversial issues was tightly limited. Ask Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who landed in jail that year for making a joke about the possibilitythat Egypt would attempt a hereditary succession along the lines of Syria's. Now, while journalists and bloggers still face harassment, the train has left the station when it comes to media. The independent daily al-Masry al-Youm outsells the government papers, satellite talk shows probe into sensitive corners of political and social life, and young journalists and bloggers are as ubiquitous in Cairo as taxicabs. A few taboos remain, notably any direct criticism of the Egyptian military.

Similarly, ten years ago leaders or employees of non-governmental organizations treating sensitive issues such as human rights or political freedom were treated as enemies of the state, subject to frequent harassment and always in fear of arrest or intimidation. Parents would be concerned for the future of a son or daughter who went to work for such an NGO. Now, while NGO leaders are still not beloved by the government, they have the ear of the public. Their opinions appear prominently in the independent media, but also sometimes on the pages of government organs such as al-Ahram. Egyptian government officials give them a polite (if irritated) hearing in the U.N. Human Rights Council and are obligated to reply to their recommendations. And working for a human rights NGO no longer places a young Egyptian on the fringes of society; it has become legitimate in many social quarters.

This is where I see some of the big changes. There are spheres of public activity that once were off limits -- free media and civil society advocacy -- that now have become legitimate in the eyes of the government, and even more important, in the eyes of Egyptian citizens. While the regime will still occasionally make an example of a journalist or civil society activist, increasingly Egyptians view this as unacceptable, as injustice rather than as expected punishment for transgressing unwritten rules. Witness the surprisingly vigorous reaction to the beating death of Khaled Said in early June. Egyptian citizens increasingly act as though they believe they have certain rights and should not be subjected to the caprices of the regime.

There is another sphere of public activity that has not yet become legitimate in Egypt, but that might be getting there, and that is political contestation. So far, most Egyptians do not behave as though they have the right to choose their rulers and call them to account through the ballot box. Certainly the regime does not consider politics to be legitimate. But the surprisingly positive reaction of Egyptian citizens to the seven-point initiative of Mohammed ElBaradei --which would make real political contestation legitimate -- suggests that the idea is gaining ground among the public. Whether or not Dr. ElBaradei gets his million signatures (apparently he is about 20 percent along the way after a few months), if citizens on a large scale start acting as though they want and deserve open political contestation, we are looking at big change. And if that happens, the United States will have some tough choices to make about whether it values more its friendship with the regime or with the people of Egypt.

Michele Dunne is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin.

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