Mubarak threatens to make victims into heroes

Egyptian elections: Campaign against Muslim Brotherhood has outraged liberals and embarrassed American government

Is President Mubarak a frightened man? Given the mass arrests that have preceded today's Egyptian parliamentary elections, the police intimidation and the sentencing last week of 54 non-violent members of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who has ruled Egypt for almost a decade and a half no longer trusts his own electorate.

For what might have been a mundane election, won as usual by Mr Mubarak's acolytes in his National Democratic Party, has been transformed over the past few days into a battle between the government and those Egyptians who wish for a transition to a more Islamic state. By harassing the technically illegal but hitherto tolerated Muslim Brotherhood - which is fielding up to 150 candidates in the elections - the Mubarak government has outraged Egyptian liberals and deeply embarrassed an American government which has advocated human rights as the cornerstone of democracy in the Middle East.

Quite apart from last week's trials before Egyptian military courts in which 54 of 80 Muslim Brotherhood defendants - including doctors and lawyers, none of whom advocated violence - were sentenced to imprisonment and hard labour for "holding secret meetings and preparing anti-government meetings", Egyptian police have now arrested at least 400 Brotherhood supporters in Cairo. Many of them turn out to be Brotherhood "party agents", officially recognised witnesses who are allowed to observe the voting at polling stations to ensure that the election is fair.

All have to submit their names and addresses to the authorities in advance of the poll. No sooner had they done so at the weekend, however, than the police arrested many of them. The government's action came only hours after a Brotherhood election rally in Cairo led by Mahmoun Odeibi had been surrounded by the police - the organisers allegedly broke the law by using loudspeakers - who forced 400 supporters into trucks and took them away for temporary detention.

Officially, Egypt's parliamentary elections are not run on party lists. Candidates stand as independents and parties may endorse them as they see fit. Thus Mr Mubarak's NDP has endorsed 439 candidates in 444 constituencies - there are around 4,000 candidates in all - while the Brotherhood are thought to have 150 candidates. As the semi-official Al-Ahram has pointed out, Mr Mubarak's men are going to win at least two-thirds of seats. So why the near-paranoid assault on those who were bound to lose - and at such cost to Egypt's boast that it is a democratic state?

One theory making the rounds in Cairo suggests that the President has been deeply troubled by Algeria's experience; when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win parliamentary elections there in 1992, the military-backed regime suspended the poll to prevent what it claimed would be the creation of an Islamic Republic. The subsequent banning of the FIS led to a war in which 50,000 have died. Even if the Muslim Brotherhood may not be about to win the Egyptian elections, how much easier it might be for President Mubarak to avoid claims of anti- democratic arrests after the election by accusing the Brotherhood now of attempting to subvert government authority.

Clearly, Mr Mubarak has good reason to be a worried man. The bomb attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad last week, in which 15 diplomats and guards were killed, came only five months after an equally ruthless attempt to murder the President in Addis Ababa. In both cases, the armed Islamic Jihad group claimed responsibility - and last week, it specifically named Mr Mubarak and his senior ministers as targets for future assassination. The Egyptian government was infuriated, not least because it had been bragging for months that its campaign against the armed Islamists had almost wiped out their enemies inside Egypt.

Unfortunately for Mr Mubarak, the Islamic Jihad again threatened the lives of foreigners and attacked two tourist trains in the Nile valley in upper Egypt. Even more ominously, last Thursday, the Egyptian police claimed they had arrested four men with a white Renault containing 150 kilos of TNT in October Sixth City outside Cairo. According to the police, the men intended to set off a car bomb in the Khan al-Khalili bazaar, a popular tourist attraction in Cairo.

So is President Mubarak striking at the soft underbelly of "terrorism" by harassing the Muslim Brotherhood, as he would like the world to believe? Or is he stifling the only semi-legitimate mouthpiece of those who oppose him and the corruption which has become so endemic a part of the Egyptian administration and bureaucracy? The Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights - which is still demanding why 26 Islamists have died in government custody in less than six months - has appealed to Mr Mubarak not to endorse the verdicts and sentences on the 54 Muslim Brothers. "We call on President Mubarak to open rather than narrow the political space in Egypt," they said, "and to permit members of the Islamist political trend to participate fully in public life and to carry out peaceful political activities without harassment."

Mohamed Sid Ahmed, the most irritating and intellectual of Egypt's socialist gadflies, is sure the arrests have had a direct effect on the election. "The parties within the electoral debate are not enjoying a situation where a democratic debate is possible because precisely one trend has been kept out of this debate . . . When they are seen as victims, this makes them heroes, even if they don't deserve being considered as heroes."

Although at least one American human-rights group condemned last week's military court convictions, the US embassy in Cairo - always a weather vane of Washington's approval or disapproval in Arab states - has remained silent.