After five decades of repression, younger, well-heeled Egyptians are fed up with having no control over their lives. The solution? Out with the old, rising opposition star Ayman Nour tells The Globe and Mail's MARK MACKINNON

CAIRO -- Ayman Nour's posh flat in central Cairo is an unlikely birthplace for an uprising. In a country where the impoverished masses are increasingly restless, the man who would be their leader is most definitely one of the bourgeoisie.
Old sabres and muskets adorn the walls of the penthouse apartment, mixed with an eclectic collection of antiques that include a hooded Russian camera on a tripod and a grand piano decked with a trio of tubas. Highlighting the elegant clutter are statuettes of Marilyn Monroe and Bozo the Clown.

Out on a spacious rooftop patio overlooking the satellite dishes and minarets of Cairo's jagged skyline are a basketball court, a billiards table and a swimming pool.

It's a long way from the Spartan life led by Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt's last successful revolutionary, while he plotted the 1952 overthrow of British-installed King Farouk. But then Mr. Nour has a very different kind of uprising in mind.
Military muscle plays no role in the bespectacled career politician's plot to unseat Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian President and political descendent of Mr. Nasser's revolt who has ruled for 24 years.

Instead, Mr. Nour dreams of shocking the nation by running intellectual circles around the 77-year-old Mr. Mubarak in a TV debate and then trouncing him in its first free election of modern times.

"If the elections were half-fair, I'd beat him," the 40-year-old Mr. Nour insists, letting a thin vanilla-flavoured cigar burn to within millimetres of his fingers before stubbing it out. "But we only hope for a quarter-free election this time."
Running a popular revolt from your home is an exhausting business. While Mr. Nour chats in the living room, his wife, Gamila Ismail -- a Newsweek magazine correspondent who has become a charismatic opposition figure in her own right -- is doing television interviews on the terrace. Their two sons, 14-year-old Noor and 13-year-old Sadi, come home from school, talking not about exams and soccer, but about the rallies they helped to organize that afternoon.

In a matter of months, their father has shot from almost nowhere to become the face of a broadly based opposition movement that has staged brash demonstrations across the country and knocked the once-secure regime off balance. His Tomorrow party, favoured by many of the country's liberal intellectuals, has entered into an informal alliance with a wide array of other anti-Mubarak groups in hopes of forcing the government to allow real competition in September's presidential elections.

It's increasingly unlikely, however, that they'll succeed. The regime seemed to bend to the street protests when it announced that the elections would be the first since 1952 to feature more than one candidate, but then it quickly added a caveat to ensure that all candidates had to be approved by the overwhelmingly pro-Mubarak Parliament before their names could appear on the ballot.

The changes were made law last week after a hotly disputed referendum that Mr. Nour and other opposition leaders boycotted, accusing the government of secretly planning either a seventh term for Mr. Mubarak or a smooth transition to his son, Gamal.

Qualifying as a presidential candidate will be difficult for any of Mr. Mubarak's genuine rivals but doubly tough for Mr. Nour. Weeks before the "quarter-free" reforms were announced, he was jailed on charges that he had falsified signatures on his party's official registration papers. He is now free on bail, but his trial begins on June 28 and he acknowledges that he may be behind bars come election day.
Whatever happens to him, Mr. Nour contends that the Mubarak regime will continue to face public pressure. Society is splitting, he says, between the "First and Second World War generation" (a jab at the aging President and his inner circle) and his followers, members of what he calls the "Gulf War generation."
After five decades of stagnation and repression, he says, younger Egyptians are fed up with chronically high unemployment (the official rate is 10.5 per cent, and the actual number perhaps twice that) and tired of everything simply being blamed on Israel, with whom Egypt has been at peace with since 1978.

Mr. Mubarak has long claimed his heavy-handed rule was required to keep Islamists from power, but Mr. Nour says he and Tomorrow prove that Egypt has yet another option: "Our party represents a very important trend on the Egyptian street -- the liberal, centrist trend." And the intellectuals are restless, he says. "The people are bored. They've been seeing the same leaders for 25 years, with no results."

Hours before the demonstrators begin to gather at their scheduled meeting point in front of the offices of the Journalists' Syndicate in central Cairo on Wednesday afternoon, the police state starts to get ready for them.

Dozens of green military trucks occupy all available curb space for blocks in every direction. They're stuffed with soldiers and police, already sweating in the early afternoon heat that peaks at a scorching 35 degrees Celsius, while hundreds more men surround the building itself, wearing bulletproof vests and riot helmets in a clear sign that they're prepared for trouble.

Most ominously, a nasty-looking gang of plainclothes thugs hangs around the perimeter, doing nothing in particular, but openly twirling black rubber truncheons. Last week, these men, whom the opposition says belong to the ruling National Democratic Party, charged into another demonstration here and began to beat protesters, who were then calling on voters to boycott the reform referendum.
As the riot police watched, the crowd was attacked with truncheons, and at least half a dozen women were beaten, fondled and had their clothing ripped. Such behaviour is shocking in a predominantly conservative Islamic society, and a week later, the anger is still palpable. Also, the ranks have been reinforced by many more women than usual, many of them wearing black clothing to protest against what they call a new low in government behaviour.

One woman in particular is seething. To loud applause, red-haired journalist Nawal Ali storms to the centre of the protest -- several hundred people now crowd the steps of the syndicate building -- and begins to shout at the uncomfortable-looking riot police.

She says she wasn't even among the demonstrators last week, just walking by to her English class, when she was surrounded by men who threw her to the ground and tore at her clothes. Two days later, she says, her anger and humiliation were rekindled when the state-controlled al-Ahram newspaper alleged that she had torn her own clothing in an effort to create publicity. "They attacked me twice -- once on the streets and a second time in the newspapers," she says, her face twitching with emotion.

Then she calls on the Interior Minister to resign, a brazen act in a country where the security services have much free rein. Egypt has been in an official state of emergency since 1981 (when the assassination of Anwar Sadat brought Mr. Mubarak to power) and thousands of protesters, mostly from the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the largest political organization in the country, are in prison for saying far less. But feeding off her anger, the crowd begins to chant: "Down with Mubarak. We're bored. Go away!"

The demonstrations, although often small, clearly have irked the government. It has even suggested that a foreign hand is manipulating people like Mr. Nour. "It's clear that the demonstrations are not justified," Mr. Mubarak said recently. "They are done to create an atmosphere of unrest" and to spark "rioting and destruction."

Most rallies are co-ordinated by the Egyptian Movement for Change, a loose umbrella organization formed last year and better known by its catchy slogan "Kifaya," Arabic for "enough." It has brought thousands of Egyptians into the streets, many for the first time ever.

Fares Zaki, a 33-year-old marketing manager watching the rally from the edge of the crowd, says he saw last week's attacks on the women and sympathized with the protesters, but can't quite bring himself to shout anti-Mubarak slogans.
"I'm not chanting because I don't have a voice. Since I was a child, I've been repressed. I've never been free to say what I think," he says softly. "But something inside me wants to scream: 'I am a citizen. I have feelings.' I'm very sad about the state of the country I'm in."

The wave of discontent is not limited to Egypt. It seems to have crashed into the entire Arab world, emboldening democrats and worrying the status quo.
The election of moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in January, the massive protests in Lebanon this spring, the first-ever municipal elections in Saudi Arabia (albeit only men could participate), and Kuwait's grudging decision to give women the vote this month have generated speculation that an "Arab Spring" is under way.

Even in Syria, there are whispers that the forthcoming Ba'ath Party congress could see Bashar Assad's regime open the door a bit to civil society and political plurality.

"What's happening today . . . is very historical," says Diaa Rashwan, a political scientist with the Cairo-based al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. "It can be compared to what was happening" back in the 1950s.

Back then, the Middle East was rocked by political turmoil after the creation of Israel, its defeat of the combined Arab armies and the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees. This time around, Mr. Rashwan says, the upheaval was set in motion by the U.S. decision to topple Saddam Hussein two years ago and is likely to continue for years.

In cheering on Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" and Egypt's tentative reforms, U.S. President George W. Bush took care to point to Iraq's election in January, when millions defied the threat of bloodshed, as the first domino to fall.

This argument infuriates many Arabs, who say they suffered for decades while Washington supported repressive regimes in the region. But others concede that, without Iraq, none of what followed would have happened so quickly.

"I'm not sure that the Arab leaders who are suddenly championing democratic change are doing it out of a profound belief in their hearts, or a desire to please the master of the world," says Adib Farha, a Beirut political commentator who advises Lebanon's surging political opposition. "Frankly, I don't care why they're doing it. I'm just delighted they're doing it."

Rather than thank Mr. Bush, others prefer to credit an organization the White House reviles, the al-Jazeera satellite television channel, for energizing the push for change.

Because of its pro-reform bent, the eight-year-old channel based in Qatar is hated by local governments as well as Washington, but every rooftop in the Arab world now seems to have a satellite dish-- usually tuned to al-Jazeera. Just by broadcasting the demonstrations in Beirut this spring to the rest of the region, the channel helped spread the idea that people power could work in the Middle East.
"People are waking up. Before there were protests, but you didn't have this kind of participation," says Amany Farag, a professor of literature at Cairo University who took part in Wednesday's demonstration wearing a traditional black abaya and hijab.

"Now that we've seen on TV how other reform movements have succeeded in Lebanon and the former Soviet Union . . . we won't be silent any more."
While Kifaya's street theatrics have grabbed most of the headlines, a much quieter upheaval has put a bigger scare into the government by threatening the National Democratic Party's grip on power.

Many of Egypt's journalists are now in open revolt. As the demonstrations went on outside their syndicate office, the country's most influential writers and reporters held a raucous meeting inside to denounce colleagues still taking orders from the government. While the government's message may still dominate state-run TV stations and newspapers, analysts say the mood of defiance among reporters is seeping into the stories they file.

One opposition paper recently asked a completely taboo question on its front page: "Wasn't King Farouk Better?" Even a year ago, no journalist would have dared to do so unless ready to go to jail.

But that kind of fear is gradually ebbing away. Two weeks ago, 4,500 judges gave the system another shock, pledging to grind the political process to a halt unless they were granted full professional independence. It's a real threat because, under Egyptian law, elections are not valid unless certified by judges, and the judges say they could have made it only in the current fluid political climate.

Hisham Bastawisi, the vice-president of Egypt's top appeals court, said the goal is to restore the dignity of the judiciary, which is now under the government's thumb. Judges are appointed by the justice minister, who also decides what they're paid, who is promoted and who's investigated for misconduct.

"What we really want, what we've always wanted, is to separate the judicial and executive powers," the 29-year legal veteran said over Turkish coffee in his Cairo apartment.

To make sure the signal they were sending was heard throughout the Arab world, the judges allowed their meeting to be broadcast live on al-Jazeera.
"The winds of change have affected everyone, judges and journalists first," says Mohammed Abdel Quddos, a journalist who belongs to both Kifaya and the Muslim Brotherhood. "Egypt's in a transition phase. If there isn't real change soon, there'll be a crisis."

The Globe and Mail; Saturday, June 4 2006