Mubarak feels more under siege than ever before. His regime is tainted by increasingly conspicuous corruption. Having squeezed out any obvious alternative to his own rule, the president still refuses to name a potential successor, clouding the country’s political future. His long battle with the fundamentalists keeps getting worse, crippling a tourist industry that is vital to the flagging economy. Despite attempts to compromise with ‘moderate" fundamentalists and brief efforts at mediation with the radicals, the past year has seen a steady escalation of political violence. Amnesty International charges that the security forces “appear to have been given a license to kill.”
The government has arrest thousands of people, holding them in secrecy, denying them legal representation and beating “confessions” out of them, according to lawyers for the fundamentalists. Railroaded through military courts, 13 other defendants already await execution. The government says another 770 alleged terrorists will go on trial in military courts this week.
Many of the revolutionaries are followers of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and some are widely thought to be linked somehow to last February’s bombing of the World Trade Center and the alleged plot to blow up other targets in New York City. Last week the sheik was in a federal prison in upstate New York, and the Egyptians were going through the motions of trying to extradite him. “They don’t want to bring him back,” said Fahmy Howeidy, a writer on Islamic affairs who participated in the mediation effort earlier this year. “Imagine, if they are hanging people for minor things, then they would have to hang him too.” The last thing Mubarak’s government wants to do is make a martyr of the sheik; luckily, the effort to expel him from the United States is likely to be tie up in the courts for years.
In private, Mubarak has told Western visitors that he thinks his crackdown on the fundamentalists has been relatively restrained so far. The implied threat is that he may get even tougher with the revolutionaries. “The state thinks people will side against the blind violence of the extremists, while the extremists think the repression is so terrible that people will side with them and revolt,” says Gilles Kepel, a French author who is an expert on Egyptian fundamentalism. In Kepel’s opinion, “the government has no social legitimacy, and the extremists are not yet a mass movement.” The violence of each side feeds the other, and “neither side has a short-term interest in peace,” says Kepel. The French call this tactic la politique du pire–the policy of making things as bad as possible. In that, the Mubarak regime may yet succeed.
