Egypt Shuts Door on Dissent As U.S. Officials Back Away

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 19, 2007; A01

CAIRO -- On June 20, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped onto the arabesque campus of the American University in Cairo, built around a former pasha's palace, and delivered a call to action that overturned decades of American policy in the Arab world.

"For 60 years," she said, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." For five paragraphs of her speech, diplomatic niceties made way for a series of declarative "musts" directed at Egypt's government: It must give its citizens the freedom to choose, Egyptian elections must be free, opposition groups must be free to assemble and participate. The Egyptian government, Rice said, "must put its faith in its own people."

The language was black-and-white, but America's relationship with Egypt -- with President Hosni Mubarak and with the reform movement -- never is.

Nearly two years later, the legacy of Rice's words is intimately tied to the fate of Egypt's democracy movement, divided and withering under unrelenting repression by a government that remains one of America's key allies in the region. What began as a test of American mettle ended in failure to bring about far-reaching change in a country that has received more per capita U.S. aid than Europe did under the post-World War II Marshall Plan. In the eyes of activists and, at times, the government itself, that failure stands as a narrative of misperception about the people Americans sought to court, and of naivete about those the Americans wanted to reform.

In the end, they say, pragmatic priorities triumphed over promises.

"The Americans now prefer stability over democracy," said George Ishaq, a demoralized opposition leader.

He fell silent, then narrowed his eyes. "I will never trust them again."

Shaped by Contradictions

In the more optimistic weeks after Rice's speech in 2005, Abul-Ela Maadi, a founder of the opposition movement Kifaya, saw a flicker of hope in the secretary of state's words. "Most of it was good," he said. "Most of it." And the rest? He shook his head.

Contradictions mark almost every facet of America's relationship with Egypt. The country has served as a linchpin of U.S. policy in the Middle East since it signed a treaty with Israel in 1979. Generous aid followed that agreement, in part as a reward, although never matching the totals for Israel. The U.S. Agency for International Development has given $28 billion since 1975. Military aid over the past quarter-century has totaled $33 billion. Yet today, opinion surveys almost always rank anti-American sentiment higher in Egypt than in any other Arab country.

In a way, those contradictions shaped the sentiments of the activists who coalesced around Kifaya. In contrast to members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, they were largely secular (with the exception of figures such as Maadi), steeped in the language of human rights and typically socially liberal. Maadi admitted freely, as others did grudgingly, that the pressure the Bush administration exerted in 2004 and 2005 helped curb government repression, providing crucial space for their work. At the peak of the pressure, protesters gathered unmolested, as they did the day Rice spoke. As it receded, the brutishness of Egyptian police and state-supervised thugs mounted proportionately.

But a striking irony underlined America's relationship with the movement: The activism that flourished in 2005 was spurred less by the Bush administration's support and more by opposition to its politics -- in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and even Egypt. As activists negotiated government repression and tepid popular backing that year, they had to grapple as well with their stance toward avowed U.S. support. Maadi said he and his colleagues in Kifaya often felt an urgency to act before their agenda was tainted by association with U.S. aims.

"Any relationship with any foreign power, but especially the Americans, is the kiss of death," he said. "We don't need this kiss."

At almost every turn in the movement's evolution, U.S. policy was a story of unintended consequences. Rather than inspiring change, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq prompted people to pour into the streets in paroxysms of anti-American resentment. Rice's statements, while welcomed in some quarters, suggested to many a teacher scolding a pupil, another humiliating image for a country seized by perceptions of its own weakness and what many view as Egypt's slavish obedience to U.S. policy. "Give Mubarak a visa and take him with you, Condoleezza!" protesters shouted.

"The Arab spring is happening because of Bush's policies," Alaa Seif, a young blogger, said at the time, a cup of coffee next to his computer. "But it's not the way they think about it. It's the other way around. They did mobilize people, and they still are."

A Show of Raw Power

In the fall of 2005, as the novelty of Kifaya's anti-Mubarak protests faded, Egypt entered a season of elections that Rice had called a barometer of official intentions. Mohammed Kamal was one of the government's point men.

A tall, affable political science professor at Cairo University, Kamal always seemed a little out of place in the drab, politburo-style politics of the ruling National Democratic Party. Some party leaders were known to quip: "Why reform? We're already in power." Kamal, 41, lived for five years near Dupont Circle in Washington, earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and worked as a congressional fellow. And in a series of votes in Egypt -- for president in September, then for parliament -- he and younger officials grouped around Mubarak's son wanted to make their mark. They envisioned a face-lift for the party as it ran a modern campaign.

That aspiration was on display in November and December, as Egyptians began voting in three rounds for the new parliament. Under a white tent the size of a soccer field, 350 youths worked dozens of phones atop 30 tables, each with a computer. Orders over loudspeakers and clocks on the wall paced their efforts. Kamal and other senior staff, in sharp suits and ties, sat at tables in front, monitoring 11 television screens. They spoke in consultants' language, deploying polling, focus groups, television advertising and slogans of reform, change and the promise of jobs.

On a blue banner behind them was the campaign's motto: "Crossing to the future."

But as results came in around midnight, in a din of ringing phones, they crossed into a different future than the one they had in mind. Candidates affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood were winning most of the races in which they had run. There was anger in the room, tinged with shock. Party officials didn't even recognize some of the names of Brotherhood candidates capturing their seats.

"I was just surprised," Kamal said, shaking his head in disbelief. "We were all surprised by these results."

In the second round, the government's security forces stepped in with a show of raw power so brazen that officials, speaking privately, don't even deny the tampering. Paramilitary men clad in black, with truncheons and helmets, blocked people from voting. Elsewhere, with method that suggested specific orders, hired thugs wielding machetes and knives chased voters away from polling stations as police idly watched.

When crowds grew angry, security forces responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. In video footage shot by election monitors, protesters clutched onions, hoping to fend off the searing fumes of the gas. "Give us our rights!" they are heard shouting.

"I haven't been to Gaza, but it looked like the intifada," said Ghada Shahbendar, 44, a mother of four who had founded one of the leading monitoring groups, Shayfeencom, or "We Are Watching You."

When the elections ended Dec. 7, the Brotherhood had won 88 seats, five times the 17 seats they won in the 2000 elections, but still just a fraction of the 454-member parliament. Independent monitors complained of "a systematic and planned campaign" to block opposition voters from casting ballots. Fourteen people were killed, and hundreds of Brotherhood supporters were arrested.

"No parliamentary seat justifies that kind of violence, that kind of brutality," Shahbendar said.

The United States later criticized the vote, but many in the opposition were struck by the comments Dec. 2 of Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman. He said that the United States had "not received, at this point, any indication that the Egyptian government isn't interested in having peaceful, free and fair elections." Less than three months later, with the Brotherhood forming the biggest opposition bloc and the Islamic group Hamas having scored a victory in Palestinian elections in January, Rice struck a far different tone than in her address at the American University of Cairo.

"We have to realize that this is a parliament that is fundamentally different than the parliament before the elections, a president who has sought the consent of the governed," she said. As she stood in Cairo next to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, there were no more musts. "We can't judge Egypt," she said. "We can't tell Egypt what its course can be or should be."

"It takes time," she added later. "We understand that."

To Shahbendar, who had helped train 200 election monitors for the parliamentary vote, the message was clear: Fearful of the Brotherhood's success and irritated by the tenor of Kifaya's protests, the government was closing the door on dissent, and the Americans were not going to stop it.

"The party is over," she said.

'They Were Turning Ugly'

On May 12, 2006, Gamal Mubarak paid what Egypt's ambassador called a private visit to Washington, where he joined Vice President Cheney at the White House. As those talks went on, Seif, the blogger, sat in prison. So did Wael Khalil, the activist who heard an anti-Mubarak slogan being shouted for the first time in 2001.

Before his arrest, Seif, always casually dressed, had helped design Kifaya's Web site, 20 blogs for opposition colleagues and home pages for Kifaya candidates. Soon, in what emerged as the last gasp of a retreating movement, he helped organize protests in solidarity with two Egyptian judges who faced expulsion from the bench after they had called for judicial independence and criticized the parliamentary balloting. The security forces arrested hundreds of people, particularly after the Brotherhood joined the demonstrations. Seif was detained May 7, when 300 police moved on a few dozen protesters outside a courthouse.

They blindfolded him tied his arms behind his back and took him to a police station. Among the charges: insulting the president, illegal assembly and obstructing traffic, the latter offense difficult to define in a city whose streets are snarled in distilled anarchy. From there he was taken to prison, where his hair was cut, a gesture used to humiliate prisoners. For a day, he was in solitary.

"I knew they were turning ugly," Khalil said. "It was clear they were holding us captive until the movement subsided."

Khalil had been arrested earlier as he drank sugar-cane juice in front of the courthouse. He was released the same day as Seif, on June 22.

As his friends sat in prison, Wael Abbas, a 32-year-old goateed blogger, heard word that he was wanted, too.

He went home and removed hard disks from two desktop computers. He hurriedly stuffed them in a bag, along with his laptop and cameras, where he had saved two years of videotapes and photos. He went to a friend's house for two days, then caught a first-class train to Alexandria, on the Mediterranean. "On first class, they're not looking for suspects," he explained. Once there, he sneaked into Internet cafes to post entries on his blog.

A week later, lawyers told him it was safe to return.

"That's the life of a blogger in Egypt," he said.

As Abbas recounted the story in Groppi's, a storied cafe in downtown Cairo, a sonorous song by Abdel-Halim Hafez played, its wistful riffs bouncing off the worn marble floors. Waiters in smart but worn uniforms delivered small cups of bitter coffee.

"I'm nervous now," he said. "I feel like I'm standing alone. I feel like I'm facing the whole regime on my own."

What Kind of Alternative?

Six years after Khalil heard the anti-Mubarak slogan near the Mugamma in Cairo's Liberation Square, Egypt is a different place. Independent media have emerged -- newspapers such as al-Masri al-Yom and programs such as "10 in the Evening" and "Cairo Today." The leftist opposition newspaper el-Arabi respects few red lines anymore: "The secret wealth of Mubarak," one banner headline in red declared. Bloggers like Seif and Abbas write as they want, in their own war of attrition, as do others. In January 2005, there were about 30 or 40 blogs in Egypt; in just two years, Seif said, the number has grown to 4,000. And a rash of videos detailing brutal abuse by security forces have been made public on the Internet.

"Search for Egypt on YouTube," Seif joked, "and all you'll find is tourism and torture."

But a government that seemed to have lost its step in 2005 has its swagger back.

At word of a small protest in February near the Press Syndicate's headquarters, legions of black-clad security forces effectively shuttered downtown Cairo, barring even pedestrians from a perimeter around the colonnaded building, the banners now torn down. The state has launched its most serious crackdown in a decade on the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting hundreds, sending 40 of its members to military courts, with no right of appeal, and freezing the assets of wealthy patrons. In Alexandria, the government sentenced a blogger, Abdel-Karim Nabil Suleiman, to four years in prison for, among other things, defaming the president.

Residents speak about corruption in superlatives, and anecdotes swirl about the wealthy buying the services of police to intimidate rivals.

"We can't just go out and say the government is bad. Everyone agrees with that. We won that argument," said Khalil. "Now we have to start telling the people: 'Now what? What kind of alternative are we talking about?' "

So far, that alternative has yet to emerge. The Brotherhood is hunkered down, hoping to weather this crackdown as it has done so often over three generations. The movements for change that seemed to grip every profession in Egypt are moribund. Kifaya is in shambles. In November, leading figures resigned, angry over a statement by Ishaq skeptical of the veil; Ishaq himself stepped down, amid whispers of corruption and dictatorial style.

As episodes of unrest erupt -- a sit-in by parents at a school, a protest by drivers along the road to Ain Sukhna, strikes at sprawling industrial sites -- Ishaq and others wait on the sidelines, blunt in their self-criticism that most Egyptians are more worried about jobs, education and health care than slogans denouncing Mubarak.

Missed opportunities, Khalil said glumly, as he nibbled on a salad at a faded downtown restaurant called Estoril.

"The simple issue is that we have to make ourselves relevant to the issues, not the other way around," he said.

The ever-optimistic Maadi was even blunter: "We don't have a vision."

And across town, Ishaq sat in Kifaya's threadbare office, no longer leading a movement that he once, a little arrogantly, called his own. Pessimism is what the government wants, he insisted. He smiled. "The quiet has to precede the storm."

But he turned glummer when asked if he would see democracy in Egypt in his lifetime. He shook his head.

"No," he said, tentatively. Then he repeated the word, this time more conclusively. "No."

Opposition Campaign Embodying Bush Vision Now Lies in Pieces

Imagining Otherwise In Egypt
Opposition Campaign Embodying Bush Vision Now Lies in Pieces
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 18, 2007; A01

CAIRO -- For two decades, politics in Cairo, the Arab world's greatest capital, had emulated the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak: occasionally tedious and rarely inspired.

But seven years ago, as a sweltering summer began to break along the Nile, Cairo's streets were jolted by the Palestinian uprising. Protests were organized, sometimes tolerated by the state. Activists collected aid for the Palestinians; peasant women, they recalled, were moved to donate gold bracelets, half-opened bags of rice, even squawking chickens. Then, on Sept. 10, 2001, at one of their demonstrations outside the downtown headquarters of Egyptian bureaucracy known as the Mugamma, a grim, Stalinist tribute to authority, a slogan was shouted. No one could recall ever hearing it at a protest.

"Down with Hosni Mubarak!" one activist, Wael Khalil, remembered someone yelling.

What followed was the emergence of the Arab world's most ambitious democracy movement, coalescing in opposition to the taciturn Mubarak, now 78, a former air force commander who has ruled Egypt longer than any leader since Mohammed Ali, the 19th-century founder of the modern state. With its protests, banners and slogans, the largely secular, technically savvy movement represented what the Bush administration asserted was its vision of an effervescent Middle East, set to be transformed by U.S. strategy in Iraq and the world after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ironically, at almost every turn it was deep-seated opposition to American policies that rallied the protesters.

Today, that movement is in shambles. Its most committed supporters admit to a lack of vision, an inability to capture the imagination of the Egyptian people. Its leadership is riven by disputes over everything from the veil to charges of corruption. The government has crushed its momentum with impunity, deploying the ubiquitous security forces to arrest scores of activists, intimidate others and signal to the rest that it will no longer tolerate unsanctioned protest. Across the divide, the government's supporters and foes are unanimous in their belief that U.S. pressure for change, occasionally effective in the past, has now decisively subsided.

"The sense of powerlessness is complete," said Mohammed el-Sayed Said, a secular activist and writer who is trying to win permission to publish a new newspaper, the Alternative. "We're back to the status quo we wanted to liberate the country from."

The arc of Egypt's democracy movement is a story of the unraveling of American policy and the contradictions that always shaped it. In the end, activists and officials say, the Bush administration chose realpolitik over promise, courting allies such as Egypt in a region beset by conflicts in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, war in Iraq and the specter of an ascendant Iran. The movement's ebb and flow is also a story of Egypt -- the fate of ideas in the face of power, and of change confronting the accumulated force of decades of authoritarianism and stagnation in a nation once the Arab world's unquestioned leader. In the autumn of Mubarak's rule, a generation of activists inherited a country that, simply put, was no longer political.

It is a story that began with the slogan that the wiry, bearded Khalil heard in 2001.

Spurs to Action

"I loved it," Aida Seif al-Dowla, a 51-year-old psychiatrist, said of the slogan as she sipped instant coffee in her cramped apartment near Cairo University.

"It was a bit annoying," she recalled. "People were ready to be outspoken on Palestine and not as outspoken about Egypt. How can you express solidarity with people who are struggling and you're not struggling yourself?"

From the heady days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's Arab nationalist president, through Mubarak's long reign, the country's often feeble opposition politics have revolved around two axes: leftist currents that joined Marxists, socialists and communists, and a more powerful Islamic movement often repressed by the state. Al-Dowla hailed from the left. Her communist uncle was imprisoned under Nasser. As a high school student, she watched police storm her apartment in 1972 to arrest her father, a socialist lawyer.

An activist life followed, focused on promoting women's issues, trying to ensure primary health care for the poor and, most prominently, assisting torture victims. "Their stories were endless," she said, a note of awe in her voice. "Endless."

Then came the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in September 2000, its images filtering across a landscape transformed by technology and energizing older activists such as al-Dowla. Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite television network, broadcast searing footage. A boycott of U.S. and Israeli goods was spread by the most modern of means: e-mail, the Internet and cellphones. The campaign gave rise to a student movement such as Cairo had not witnessed since the turbulent 1970s. What many saw as American aggressiveness in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks propelled it forward.

"We grew up under Nasser, so Palestine was part of our psyche, if you want," al-Dowla said. "But there was this new generation, our kids who did not live this. This was the amazing thing, the new generation."

"Those were the first protests we went to," said Alaa Seif, a stocky, bespectacled 25-year-old who did poorly in school but has a knack for computers, a testiness toward authority of any kind and the cockiness that comes with youth.

It wasn't until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, that Seif and his wife, Manal Hassan, felt inspired. Crowds indignant at the attack and Egypt's alliance with the United States, including the passage of U.S. warships through the Suez Canal, surged into Cairo's Liberation Square, converged on the ruling party's headquarters and tried to move on the U.S. Embassy, where they were blocked by phalanxes of helmeted Central Security Forces conscripts. Seif remembered someone tearing down a banner for Mubarak. Khalil, the veteran activist, recalled the president's portrait being set on fire. As the hours passed, anti-U.S. chants melded into a chorus of protests against Mubarak's government.

"I felt if we could keep that spirit for a while, we could challenge the government," Khalil said. "The conclusions were unanimous in a sense: Let's talk about Egypt. Let's talk about dictatorship. Let's talk about Mubarak. They're part of the same story."

Birth of a Movement

For 11 years, Abul-Ela Maadi has tried to win government approval for Egypt's first Islamic, albeit moderate, political party. His shelves are cluttered with binders, packed with thousands of articles and interviews by him and his followers attempting to prove that his brand of politics has a place in the mainstream.

Fond of Pierre Cardin suits and quick to smile, Maadi is a garrulous man whose friends defy categorization: Coptic Christians, devout Muslims, leftists and followers of both Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood. For years, he invited them and others to his home, a first-floor apartment with a view of the Pyramids, to share iftar, the traditional meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast. In November 2003, 22 people from across the spectrum attended, Marxists mingling with Islamic activists. After a sumptuous meal of stuffed pigeon and a soupy dish known as mulukhiya, they sat for hours over tea, addressing the question Maadi put forward.

"What can we do?" he asked.

In the months that followed, a journalist, Abdel-Halim Qandil, and others joined the group. They came up with a name, the Egyptian Movement for Change. But the question lingered, even as protests gathered force. In time, variants of it would prove most vexing for the emerging circle of activists: What could they do to transform the talk of a salon into a politics of the street? What role would the United States play? And how would the nascent group confront a state that, in times of crisis and perceived threat, proved itself all too willing to deploy the unassailable power of its security forces?

A Brusque Warning

As early as the 1990s, Egypt's smattering of opposition newspapers had begun challenging the government. But by 2004, even as Maadi's group formed and mounting protests voiced unprecedented criticism of a figure some simply call "the big man," attacks on Mubarak were still a red line the news media had not crossed. That made the columns of Qandil, a fast-talking, ascetic-looking editor with glasses, even more striking. There was little metaphor in his writings, the usual tool of critical Arab media. Instead, in the months after the question posed at the Ramadan meeting, Qandil bluntly put to his readers the suspicions on everyone's mind: Would Mubarak do away with any pretense that he presided over a republic and pass power to his son Gamal?

In el-Arabi, a leftist opposition newspaper, Qandil suggested that father and son represented "a dual presidency."

Mubarak's powers are "God-like," he wrote, critically.

Less than a month later -- on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004 -- a colleague dropped Qandil off at 3 a.m. near his home on the bustling road to the Pyramids. It was Ramadan again, the Muslim month of fasting when Cairo seems to stay up round-the-clock. A few minutes later, a car with four men barreled toward him and stopped. The men jumped out, blindfolded him and stuffed him in the back seat. The car then careened into Cairo's warrens, passing checkpoints unhindered.

"I thought I was a dead man," Qandil recalled.

During the hour-long ride, he remembered being given a clear message: "No more words about the big people," he was told. Next time he would be killed. A few minutes later, one of the men answered his cellphone. "Yes, sir," Qandil recalled him barking, as if answering an order.

The car stopped on the outskirts of the city, on the road toward Suez. Qandil said the men stripped and beat him, stole his cellphone and the equivalent of about $100, then left him lying in the desert at the side of the road. He eventually caught a ride back and later filed a complaint against the Interior Ministry, which denied any role. "It will stay forever in the court," he said glumly.

In his sparse downtown office, at the top of stone stairs, each step worn into an arched bow, the editor became angry as he recalled the incident many now see as a turning point for those frustrated by increasingly brutish repression. The government is, of course, not a democracy, he said; that implies freedom. But it's not a dictatorship, either, he added; that requires strength. "It's more like the rubble, the debris left behind," he said, his voice tinged with disgust.

'Enough, We've Had It!'

The past, sometimes imagined, haunts Cairo. From taxis outside Qandil's office, the songs of the late Abdel-Halim Hafez, with their woeful violin, drift along streets buckling under their own chaos. They mingle sometimes with the melodies of Um Kalthoum, a name usually uttered with nostalgia for the bygone era when Egypt reigned almost unchallenged in the Arab world. "Give me my freedom, set free my hands!" she sings in one popular song.

"This regime hasn't achieved anything in the last two or three decades, total stagnation in every aspect of life. You only need to walk a few minutes in the street," said Osama Ghazali al-Harb, an academic and editor who eventually resigned from the ruling National Democratic Party in protest. Frustration mounted in his voice. "Everything has deteriorated. Everything! Everything!"

In 2004, the anger of Harb, Qandil and others gave rise to a simple word: kifaya, enough. It was heard in taxis, drivers turning their engines off in the snarled and neglected streets. It was pronounced by activists enraged over the treatment of Qandil. It was whispered at the prospect of an unprecedented fifth term for Mubarak, who had once said he expected only to become head of Egypt Air or ambassador to Britain. And it was shouted at a protest that year that drew Seif, the young activist who began blogging about the demonstration, and al-Dowla, who recalled the word.

"It picked up like this," al-Dowla said, snapping her fingers. "Enough, we're fed up!" she said. "Enough, we've had it! Enough, leave us!"

The group formed during Maadi's Ramadan iftar soon became known as Kifaya. It issued its first declaration, a manifesto critical of the United States and Israel, as well as "the repressive despotism that pervades all aspects of the Egyptian political system." And on Dec. 12, 2004, the group held its first protest.

The demonstration was the first to be aimed solely at Mubarak. More than 500 men and women stood silently in front of the Supreme Court, many with yellow stickers over their mouths or on their chests. "Enough," the stickers declared in red.

"It was like I was dreaming," recalled George Ishaq, 68, a Christian high school principal who got his start as an activist during the 1956 Arab-Israeli war and soon became the group's leader. "It was the first time Egyptian people could listen to another vision."

Ishaq shared the almost delirious optimism of others at that moment, the sense that the inviolable red line underpinning the government's prestige had been erased. Lacking popular support and the legitimacy of past ideologies such as Arab or Egyptian nationalism, the government now depended for its survival, the activists believed, on the president's Pharaonic stature. As that fell apart, so would the state.

Qandil thought the government might begin to crumble if 100 people poured into the streets; others suggested it would take 1,000. Ishaq was similarly convinced of the state's frailty. "Give me the TV for 24 hours, and I will change Egypt completely," he said then. "The door of change is open, and no one can close it again. Never."

The Movement Flowers

The months that followed in 2005 represented a flowering of Egyptian dissidence unlike any in a generation. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's oldest Islamic movement and, by far, the largest if also quiescent opposition group, began organizing protests; in a rare move, the Brotherhood and the largely secular Kifaya began reaching out to each other, shattering a long-held taboo.

Ayman Nour, an opposition party leader who had been arrested in January, was released from prison in March (only to be convicted and, ailing, imprisoned again in December 2005). Egyptian judges pushed for judicial oversight of Egypt's notoriously rigged elections. Every few weeks, a new group seemed to emerge: Youth for Change, Lawyers for Change, Writers and Artists for Change and, at one point, Peasants for Change, all of them seizing ground from Egypt's coterie of ossified, co-opted and long ago legalized opposition parties. Banners cluttered the colonnaded marble facade of the Press Syndicate building. "No political reform without freedom of the press," one declared.

At demonstrations, some invoked Sheik Imam, a blind, beloved protest singer who died in 1995: "They live in the latest-style home, while we live 10 in a room!" Others spoke more dramatically: "My country, you need a revolution."

But even in those animated months of 2005, as U.S. officials pressured the Egyptian government to reform, activists began to worry. Why weren't the protests -- the 100 people Qandil hoped for -- drawing bigger crowds?

Some admitted that a paradox had begun to emerge in a country seemingly depoliticized by decades of slumbering civic life: The more freedom activists had, the more their lack of popular support was exposed.

The Brotherhood, with a far greater ability to bring out numbers, was almost condescending, even as it tentatively took part. "People think about their livelihood before they think about freedom," said Ali Abdel Fattah, a Brotherhood leader. "If there was hope protests would bring something, they would have been protesting a long time ago." Even Ishaq, the Kifaya leader, acknowledged the challenge. "Our people are naive," he said.

Said, the secular activist and writer, was more direct. "A crisis is looming," he said at the time. "We communicated the message, we expressed the mood, but that's far from saying people support Kifaya and engage in the struggle in any real numbers."

Tomorrow: The movement fades.