Egypt's perpetual emergency

Daniel Benaim - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News: "AS EGYPT grieves over Saturday's bombing at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egyptians worry that they will be victims twice over -- in lives lost, but also in livelihoods threatened as tourists leave the country. What remains to be seen, however, is the extent to which the vicious attacks will claim yet another victim: Egypt's nascent democracy reform movement.

As President Hosni Mubarak inspected the ruins at Sharm el-Sheikh, he found his hand unexpectedly strengthened when Egyptians and the world community stood in solidarity with his government. Mubarak has faced mounting pressure to relax his party's monopoly on power. Egypt is experiencing the first faint stirrings of a reform movement that, while undeniably still small, has shown unprecedented boldness in making its demands in the streets of Egypt's cities. Will it continue?

Saturday's attack creates the possibility that the threat of Islamist militancy in Egypt will serve as a pretext for preserving and even expanding repressive laws that extend far beyond the imperative of combatting terror.

To argue that this attack represents a new Egyptian emergency, however, is to ignore the fact that the government has claimed a continual state of emergency since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Constitution and the many freedoms it guarantees gather dust. While pro-regime intellectuals argue that the attack shows the continued need for political repression, it also shows that 25 years of emergency law have failed to stop religious extremist violence.

The regime uses terror as a pretext to act with impunity, cracking down on journalists and opposition parties in addition to its broad extra-constitutional assault on the nonviolent pro-democracy adherents of banned religious parties. This state of emergency, for example, led Egyptian police to stand by and watch in late May as pro-government thugs attacked female reformist demonstrators instead of protecting their constitutionally guaranteed right to free assembly.

On its best days, Egypt's democracy movement is a fractious hodge-podge of different factions, united more by discontent with the regime than by a particular alternative vision for Egypt. Kifaya's eponymous slogan -- meaning ''Enough!" -- sums up the limits of the groups' shared ideology.

Still, the barrier of fear that kept such groups from expressing themselves publicly -- particularly in street demonstrations -- has been broken. The Egyptian press, while far from free, now features frank criticism in some quarters. Opposition groups recently united to boycott September's presidential vote, slated to be the first multi-party presidential election in Egypt's history, which they consider a fraudulent half-measure to provide the regime with undeserved legitimacy.

It is no accident that Mubarak stands alone on the Egyptian political landscape to face the threat of Islamist militancy. He has systematically eviscerated any opposition, forcing a continued choice for Egyptians and the West alike between Mubarak's ruling NDP and Islamic extremists. The regime has refused to license opposition parties and their newspapers, systematically jettisoned potential rivals to political backwaters, jailed political opponents, and monopolized Egyptian broadcast media to ensure that no rival voices are heard.

Democracy in Egypt first requires achieving the measure of political liberty and breathing space necessary to create viable opposition parties that augment their cries of ''Enough!" with concrete plans and popular support.

This will take years. But it cannot be done without international pressure. Even as opposition politicians proclaim their independence from foreign intervention, they depend on American prodding to protect them from the Mubarak regime's worst excesses. The confluence of elections this fall, a discontented populace no longer afraid to demonstrate, the looming question of presidential succession, and newly vigorous foreign pressure create a unique opportunity for reform in Egyptian politics.

America will continue to cooperate with the current Mubarak regime to fight terror and provide stability in the region -- to do otherwise would be against its national interest. But it should not turn a tragedy into a blank check for a president and a party who stretched a 1981 murder into a quarter-century of nondemocratic, extraconstitutional rule.

Daniel Benaim is a summer fellow at the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo. "